'Deskundigen' 99

Well if you ever plan to motor west

Just take my way that's the highway that's the best

Get your kicks on Route 66

Bobby Troup. Get Your Kicks on Route 66. 1946

We must regard the land as a commanding and increasing power on the citizen, the sanative and Americanizing influence, which promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come.

Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Young American. 1844

When, half a century after Emerson’s lecture, Frederick Jackson Turner gave an even more influential address announcing that the frontier was closed, that America had run out of ‘free land,’ there was a crisis of identity in the country. Without frontiers, we were a place without freedom. If, as Emerson said, ‘the land is the appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantastic in our culture,’ then we were left with no cure for our falsehood. We would become all City, after being all Frontier.

The city in the American imagination has played roughly the role of hell in Christian theology. America will cease to be virtuous, Thomas Jefferson said, when its citizens ‘get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe and we are as corrupt as Europeans.’ When François Marbois inquired after the state of Virginia, Jefferson noted proudly, ‘We have no townships, only villages  or hamlets.’ This anti-city note sounds throughout our history. A really human life is impossible in our cities,’ said Henry Demarest Lloyd in 19894 (one year after Turner’s address).

Garry Wills. John Wayne’s America. 1997

De profetische vervloekingen van de stad zijn niet in de laatste plaats ingegeven door de bekrompenheid van een inferieure dorpscultuur. Er is namelijk geen scherpere tegenstelling denkbaar dan tussen het platteland met zijn archaïsche zelfvoldaanheid, en de stad, die het verstrooide samenvoegde, blootstelde aan de druk achter knellende muren en daardoor leidde tot een onvoorstelbare verruiming van de menselijke krachten en mogelijkheden. De stad is niets anders dan begin en doorgeefster van alle hogere beschaving… de grote hoer Babylon, die zit aan vele wateren en in vele bedden slaapt... Van haar typische dubbele gezicht, dat altijd vrijheid èn reglementatie betekende, gemeenschapvormende èn isolerende energieën, grootsheid èn verdorvenheid, mocht alleen nog de ideale kant benadrukt worden.

Joachim Fest. Tegenlicht. Een Italiaanse Reis. 1988

Amerikanen, vergeleken met ons fatalistische Europeanen, [blijven]  op een bepaalde manier hele optimistische mensen. Echt, dat vind ik ook fantastisch van ze! Ze blijven de moed erin houden.

Geert Mak bij Pauw en Witteman. 3 oktober 2012

Wie zich verdiept in de VS realiseert zich op den duur dat het in wezen een provinciale cultuur is met een universalistische pretentie. Aan de Europese geschiedenis hebben we kunnen zien dat een dergelijk systeem geen toekomst heeft. Wil de VS de hegemonie bewaren dan zal het zijn provincialisme moeten laten vallen, maar daar ziet het niet naar uit. Niet op individueel niveau en ook niet op collecrtief niveau.  Garry Wills:

There  is no more defining note to our history than the total absence of a sacred city in our myths. We never had a central cultic place. Remnants of such a tradition exist only in names like ‘St. Francis’ (San Francisco) or ‘The Angels’ (Los Angeles) in Mexican territory we conquered… Religious sects in America have typically  avoided building large, ornate churches. Congregationalist and Quaker meeting houses – not cathedrals, not shrines – have been our most authentic style… For most Americans, a church was not a structure but a body of believers, and this was so wherever they met – in a town hall, a revivalist tent, or out West in a commandeered saloon. The church as a building was not sacred of itself.

In fact, even the body of believers mattered less than the individual soul’s lonely encounter with God… Just as one had to go off alone to be saved, Americans have always felt that reality will be encountered and spiritual growth will occur when we go out from society’s constrictions toward cleansing solitude, toward nature – toward Walden: ‘I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself… I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars.’ America’s religious art runs from the Hudson River painters, through Ansel Adam’s treatment of Yosemite, to John Ford’s celebration of Monument Valley. The great urge of the American imagination is to light out for the territory.

Ondanks het feit dat tegenwoordig 250 miljoen van de 315 miljoen Amerikanen, bijna driekwart, in en rond ge-urbaniseerde gebieden leeft, blijft Henry David Thoreau’s adagium van kracht: ‘Eastward I go by force; but westward I go free... I should not lay so much stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe.’

Het Westen vertegenwoordigt de mythe van de cowboy en de outlaw, de vrijheid ongestraft de eigen driften te kunnen volgen. Deze mythe ging ook op voor de eerste Amerikaanse generatie schrijvers uit en over de stad die bijvoorbeeld Chicago zagen als ‘unholy. The place was a whirlpool of wheat, a cesspool of hog intestines, a soulless cash market,’ aldus Wills. En wanneer naderhand Woody Allen zijn film Manhattan introduceert, meldt hij in een voice-over: ‘I adore New York. For me it is a metaphor for civilization in decline.’ De stad is verval. Volgens Wills is ‘That the American dogma reasserting itself,’ en merkt tevens op dat ‘When a city is treated in our art, it is often unpeopled. In architectural photography, or in Lyonel Feininger’s crisscrossing girders of light and steel, the forms are pure. When people are shown, they are often anonymous: the blur of marchers in a Childe Hassam parade; the fleshy overlap of Reginald Marsh’s whores sluicing along the street; the eerie hightlighting of Edward Hopper’s patron in a diner, creating an atmosphere more desolate than the darkness around.

De Amerikaanse hoogleraar Kunstgeschiedenis, Gail Levin, schreef in haar 678 pagina’s tellende Edward Hopper. An Intimate Biography dat ook Hopper als een van de belangrijkste twintigste eeuwse Amerikaanse kunstschilders ‘is one of the disaffected. His lonely and uneasy figures in everyday situation and common settings suggest “Spiritual crisis within the framework of realistic characters, real places” in the manner typical of modernism.’ Over zijn meesterwerk Nighthawks uit 1942 verklaarde hij ‘I was painting the loneliness of a large city.’ Hopper probeerde de ontzielde werkelijkheid van de VS vast te leggen en had groot respect voor dit streven bij andere kunstenaars. Nadat in 1927 het Amerikaanse maandblad Scribner’s Ernest Hemmingway’s verhaal The Killers had gepubliceerd schreef Edward Hopper aan de redactie:

It is refreshing to come upon such an honest piece of work in an American magazine, after wading through the vast sea of sugar coated mush that makes up the most of our fiction. Of the concessions to popular prejudices, the side stepping of truth, and of the ingenious mechanism of the trick ending there is no taint in this story.

Nighthawks is een typerende titel voor dit schilderij, omdat hawk ‘a slang name’ is ‘for one that preys on others,’ het parasiterende aspect van de vervreemdende Amerikaanse cultuur. In tegenstelling tot de tekeningen van de bij de massa populaire illustrator Norman Rockwell maakte Hopper geen visioen van de Amerikaanse droom, maar een visioen van de Amerikaanse werkelijkheid. Voor Hopper was illustreren de deprimerende activiteit van een conformist, terwijl de kunstschilder zich identificeert met de gemarginaliseerde buitenstaander, de gek, de clown. Elke door Hopper geschilderde ruimte zowel binnen als buiten is beklemmend, de natuur is er bedreigend, de mens staat er verloren, hij/zij ontvlucht de ruimte door te lezen of uit het raam te kijken, of in gedachten elders te zijn, verzonken in zichzelf. Ze zijn ontheemd in een ongeving die hen niet toebehoort, onderworpen aan ‘de overdaad aan vreemde prikkels en de overbelasting van het gevoel,’ aldus Hopper zelf. De Duitse kunsthistoricus Ivo Kranzfelder schreef in zijn boek Hopper dat de deze ooit eens zei dat

hij had geprobeerd zijn gewaarwordingen (‘sensations’) zo gepast en indrukwekkend mogelijk weer te geven… Hij doelde hiermee natuurlijk niet op ‘sensaties’ van rampen of mediaspektakels . Hopper verwijst naar andere sensaties die te maken hebben met het moderne leven en met aspecten van zijn persoonlijkheid – het gevoel van geisoleerdheid, eenzaamheid of zinloosheid.

Met zeer conventionele middelen laat Hopper ons de keerzijde van het moderne leven zien. De hotelkamer is het symbool van mobiliteit, reizen, snelheid, modern verkeer; thema’s waar Hoppert zich intensief mee bezig hield. […] Het bevreemdende, mysterieuze aspect kwam steeds meer tot uitdrukking in zijn werk… Wat overblijft is een leegte, een vacuüm… De figuren van Hopper zijn altijd in zichzelf gekeerd; er is geen communicatie.

Er zijn wel individuen te zien, maar er is geen samenleving. Edward Hopper geloofde niet in de vooruitgangsideologie van de Amerikaanse Droom. Voor hem was de fundamentele vraag: hoe ziet de werkelijkheid eruit en wat is die? Ivo Kranzfelder:

Hoppers schilderijen bevinden zich in een overgangsgebied. Ze beschrijven niet de wereld van de mens die in staat van onschuld verkeert, maar ook nog niet de menselijke zelfvernietigtiging. De schilderijen beschrijven een zwevende toestand, maar geen evenwicht. Ze laten geen pre-industriële idylle zien, noch verheerlijken ze de mechanisatie… de mens, de minuscule figuur, staat klein en machteloos tegenover zowel de natuur als tegenover zijn eigen maaksels, die tegelijkertijd ingreep en uitbreiding zijn.

In zijn schilderijen verbeeldt Hopper de ‘ennui’ van de moderne massamens. l’ennui,’ er is geen goed Nederlands woord daar voor, het dichtst bij komt het begrip verveling. In 1974 schreef de Amerikanse filosoof George Steiner met betrekking tot dit begrip: ‘To me the most haunting, prophetic outcry of the nineteenth century is Théophile Gautier's ‘plutôt la barbarie que l'ennui!’" Liever barbaars dan verveeld. In zijn cultuurstudie In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture schreef hij over de westerse cultuur:

Wat moest een begaafd mens in de jaren na Napoleon nog beginnen? Hoe konden organismen die waren geteeld voor de electrische lucht van de revolutie en de keizerlijke epiek, ademen onder de loden hemel van het bewind van de burgerij? Hoe kon een jongeman zijn vaders verhalen over de Terreur en Austerlitz aanhoren om vervolgens over de door gas verlichte boulevards naar kantoor te kuieren? Het verleden drukte rattetanden in de grijze pulp van het heden; het zaaide vertwijfeling en wilde dromen… Doordat na 1815 de hoop op een revolutie in rook was vervlogen en de vaart der tijd en radicale verwachtigen bruut waren verstoord, restte er een reservoir van ongebruikte, onstuimige energie... Bovendien was de stad zelf, die eens in een feestroes verkeerde door het alarmgelui van de revolutie, een gevangenis geworden.’

Wat overbleef was een beklemmende leegte, een verstikkende inertie, die het bestaan van de generaties na de Franse revolutie en de Napoleontische oorlogen in toenemende mate in hun greep hielden. Was de tijdsbeleving in de 'radicale' jaren in een stroomversnelling geraakt, voortaan leek het alsof de tijd trager verstreek. Dat stille, knagende bewustzijn van leegte en inertie leidde bijna als vanzelf tot een perverse hunkering naar de romantiek en het extreme en banale. Het 'moderne levensgevoel' werd getypeerd door het het verlangen naar kicks, zoals de Amerikanen het noemen, spektakel, het gevoel dat men elk moment optimaal leeft, in een vergeefse poging het saaie bestaan, waarin bijna alles een herhaling van zetten is, de schijn van dynamiek te geven.

Het gaat daarbij om de versnelling van de tijd, zoals die bijvoorbeeld eind jaren zestig, begin jaren zeventig plaatsvond en ongeveer vier jaar heeft geduurd om vervolgens onvermijdelijk weer te stagneren. Enkele jaren had de macht geen greep op de gebeurtenissen en was even de verbeelding aan de macht, zonder overigens macht te hebben zoals al snel bleek toen het verpletterende conformisme weer de lakens begon uit te delen. In die werkelijkheid bestaat geen initiatief, geen vindingrijkheid, geen vrijheid van handelen, er bestaan alleen bevelen en regels: het is de wereld van de gehoorzaamheid. Iedereen voert er een klein onderdeel uit van de grotere beheersingsmoloch, terwijl niemand doel en horizon kan zien. Nut en efficiency zijn de voornaamste drijfveren. Het is de wereld van mechanische gebaren en geconditioneerde reflexen waarin mensen de betekenis van wat ze doen niet echt kennen. Ook in deze technisch hoog ontwikkelde buraucratie zijn de verveling, de saaiheid en de braafheid verpletterend. Met dezelfde kracht waarmee het initiatief van de moderne mens verdwijnt, groeit het krampachtige verlangen naar handeling, naar actie, naar kicks om het bestaan een schijn van zin en betekenis te geven. De Amerikanen hebben er uitdrukkingen voor zoals ‘killing time.’ In de woorden van Amerikanen zelf betekent het:

Basically if you're killing time, you're doing something unpurposeful to waste time in order to pass the time until another event. Doing something that has no meaning while waiting for something important to happen. Just doing something to have something to do. You are waiting for something say to happen. Just passing the time away. You are bored and trying to waste time until you find something to do. It means that you're just wasting time. Doing anything to bear the time.

Deze omschrijvingen zijn illustrerend voor de westerse cultuur en tonen aan dat we te maken hebben met een fundamenteel cultureel probleem. Daarom besteed ik er hier meer aandacht aan. De vraag is: wat te doen met de tijd, zodat het tijdsbesef niet onverdragelijk wordt? Hoe zin en betekenis te geven aan de tijd op aarde? De in New York gestorven dichter en Nobelprijswinnaar Joseph Brodsky wees erop dat verveling inherent aan het bestaan is toen hij in 1989 tijdens een lezing Amerikaanse studenten van het prestigieuze Dartmouth College waarschuwde dat

A substantial part of what lies ahead of you is going to be claimed by boredom… The worst monotonous drone coming from a lectern or the eye-splitting textbook in turgid English is nothing in comparison to the psychological Sahara that starts right in your bedroom and spurns the horizon.

Known under several aliases – anguish, ennui, tedium, doldrums, humdrum, the blahs, apathy, listlessness, stolidity, lethargy, languor, accidie, etc. -- boredom is a complex phenomenon and by and large a product of repitition. It would seem, then, that the best remedy against it would be constant inventiveness and originality. That is what you, young and newfangled, would hope for. Alas, life won’t supply you with that option, for life’s main medium is precisely repetition… The very notion of originality or innovation spells out the monotony of standard reality, of life, whose main medium – nay, idiom – is tedium.

In that, it  -- life – differs from art, whose worst enemy, as you probably know, is cliché.

Het zal duidelijk zijn dat het hier een existentieel vraagstuk betreft, dat door elke cultuur op haar eigen manier wordt beantwoord. Joseph Brodsky zei in zijn lezing voor rijke studenten, een lezing die vlak voor zijn dood in 1996 werd afgedrukt in de essaybundel On Grief And Reason:

most of you know firsthand that nobody is as bored as the rich, for money buys time, and time is repetitive. Assuming that you are not heading for poverty – for otherwise you wouldn’t have entered college – one expects you to be hit by boredom as soon as the first tolls of self-gratification become available to you.

Thanks to modern technology, those tolls are as numerous as boredom’s synonyms. In light of their function – to render you oblivious to the redundancy of time – their abundance is revealing… Everything that displays a pattern is pregnant with boredom. That applies to money in more ways than one, both to the banknotes as such and to possessing them… All one can suggest is to be a bit more apprehensive of money, for the zeros in your accounts may usher in their mental equivalents.

Wat verveling betreft is er geen verschil tussen arm en rijk. De rijke golfspeler is net zo verveeld als de drugsverslaafde gevangene. Beiden zijn permanent op zoek naar kicks ‘canned ecstasy claiming raw flesh.’  Brodsky:

In general, a man shooting heroin into his vein does so largely for the same reason you buy a video: to dodge the redundancy of time. The difference, though, is that he spends more than he’s got, and that his means of escape become as redundant as what he is escaping from faster than yours. On the whole, the difference in tactility between a syringe’s needle and a stereo’s push button roughly corresponds to that between the acuteness and dullness of time’s impact upon the have-nots and the haves. In short, whether rich or poor, sooner or later you will be afflicted by this redundancy of time… Accordingly, you’ll try to devise ways to escape.

De behoefte de leegte en de inertie te ontsnappen verklaart de barbarij van de daad, de esthetiek van het geweld. Als de mens maar het gevoel heeft dat er iets gebeurt, dat er beweging is. Hoe saaier het bestaan, des te groter de behoefte aan kicks, aan sex and drugs and rock and roll. Tot de mens na zijn veertigste geconfronteerd wordt met de onafwendbare midlife crisis, geheel volgens een ontwikkeling die totalitaire trekken in zich draagt, niemand kan namelijk de verveling ontsnappen. Brodsky:

you may take up promiscuity, alcohol, travel, cooking lessons, drugs, psychoanalysis.

In fact, you may lump all these together; and for a while that may work. Until the day, of course, when you wake up in your bedroom amid a new family and a different wallpaper, in a different state and climate, with a heap of bills from your travel agent and your shrink, yet with the same stale feeling toward the light of day pouring through your window. You’ll put on your loafers only to discover they’re lacking bootstraps to lift yourself out of what you recognize. Depending on your tempermament or the age you are at, you will either panic or resign yourself to the familiarity of the sensation; or else you’ll go through the rigmarole of change once more.

Neurosis and depression will enter your lexicon; pills, your medical cabinet. Basically, there is nothing wrong about turning life into the constant quest for alternatives, into leap-frogging jobs, spouses, surroundings, etc., provided you can afford the alimony and jumbled memories. This predicament, after all, has been sufficiently glamorized on screen and in Romantic poetry. The rub, however, is that before long this quest turns into a full-time occupation, with your need for an alternative coming to match a drug addict’s daily fix.

En omdat de tijd niet voortdurende gedood kan worden, blijft er maar één ding over, te weten: de tijd accepteren, er doorheen gaan. Maar dat zou een geweldige revolutie zijn en het einde betekenen van het huidige neoliberale systeem. Daarover morgen meer.

Noam Chomsky 67

Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, Why It's "Legal" When the U.S. Does It

Posted by Noam Chomsky at 5:30pm, February 3, 2013.
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Credit the Arab Spring and what’s followed in the Greater Middle East to many things, but don’t overlook American “unilateralism.” After all, if you want to see destabilization at work, there’s nothing like having a heavily armed crew dreaming about eternal global empires stomp through your neighborhood, and it’s clear enough now that whatever was let loose early in the twenty-first century won’t end soon.

If, from Tunisia and Egypt to Syria and Libya, the Arab Spring was a series of popular uprisings, it was also a series of unravelings.  Two decades late, the Cold War system of great power control in the Middle East, in which the U.S. was the dominant partner and the Soviet Union the lesser one, is finally disintegrating. The abattoir that is now Syria could be considered the Russian contribution to the present chaos; Egypt, with its besieged fundamentalist president, its irate soccer fans in the streets of its Suez-Canal-bordering cities, and its army chief talking about a possible “collapse” of the state, should be considered part of the far greater and more devastating American contribution. (Along with Israel, Egypt was one of the three pillars of the American system in the region; the other, still standing in all its fundamentalist glory, its vast oil reserves pumping away, remains Saudi Arabia.)

In any case, when you see what’s happening these days, first thank the American unilateralists of the 1990s, our own financial jihadis. They dreamed of organizing a planet subservient to American financial power and ended up, in 2008, blowing a hole in it instead. A decade later came George W. Bush and his neocon followers, dreaming of doing the same thing in military terms, with similarly disastrous results.  If the neoliberals helped create the 1% world of Middle Eastern oppression that a young Tunisian with a lighter set afire, Bush’s visionary militarists, with their catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq, did even greater damage.  They punched a hole directly in the oil heartlands of the planet and set what they already liked to call “the arc of instability” -- little did they know -- aflame. Between them, they drove us through what, in 2004, Amr Moussa, then head of the Arab League, called “the gates of hell,” imagining they were the gates to an imperial paradise.

Now, from Pakistan and Yemen to Mali and Niger, Washington's drones, special ops, andcyber warriors are now blindly pushing that process of destabilization forward, even as they further undermine American power in the region. This post-Arab Spring world and the state of U.S. power are the subjects that TomDispatch regular Noam Chomsky takes up in the following excerpt adapted from his wide-ranging new interview book with David Barsamian,Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire. (It’s another Chomsky must-read.) Tom

The Paranoia of the Superrich and Superpowerful 
Washington’s Dilemma on a “Lost” Planet 
By Noam Chomsky

[This piece is adapted from “Uprisings,” a chapter in Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire, Noam Chomsky’s new interview book with David Barsamian (with thanks to the publisher, Metropolitan Books).  The questions are Barsamian’s, the answers Chomsky’s.]

Does the United States still have the same level of control over the energy resources of the Middle East as it once had?

The major energy-producing countries are still firmly under the control of the Western-backed dictatorships. So, actually, the progress made by the Arab Spring is limited, but it’s not insignificant. The Western-controlled dictatorial system is eroding. In fact, it’s been eroding for some time. So, for example, if you go back 50 years, the energy resources -- the main concern of U.S. planners -- have been mostly nationalized. There are constantly attempts to reverse that, but they have not succeeded.

Take the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example. To everyone except a dedicated ideologue, it was pretty obvious that we invaded Iraq not because of our love of democracy but because it’s maybe the second- or third-largest source of oil in the world, and is right in the middle of the major energy-producing region. You’re not supposed to say this. It’s considered a conspiracy theory.

The United States was seriously defeated in Iraq by Iraqi nationalism -- mostly by nonviolent resistance. The United States could kill the insurgents, but they couldn’t deal with half a million people demonstrating in the streets. Step by step, Iraq was able to dismantle the controls put in place by the occupying forces. By November 2007, it was becoming pretty clear that it was going to be very hard to reach U.S. goals. And at that point, interestingly, those goals were explicitly stated. So in November 2007 the Bush II administration came out with an official declaration about what any future arrangement with Iraq would have to be. It had two major requirements: one, that the United States must be free to carry out combat operations from its military bases, which it will retain; and two, “encouraging the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments.” In January 2008, Bush made this clear in one of his signing statements. A couple of months later, in the face of Iraqi resistance, the United States had to give that up. Control of Iraq is now disappearing before their eyes.

Iraq was an attempt to reinstitute by force something like the old system of control, but it was beaten back. In general, I think, U.S. policies remain constant, going back to the Second World War. But the capacity to implement them is declining.

Declining because of economic weakness?

Partly because the world is just becoming more diverse. It has more diverse power centers. At the end of the Second World War, the United States was absolutely at the peak of its power. It had half the world’s wealth and every one of its competitors was seriously damaged or destroyed. It had a position of unimaginable security and developed plans to essentially run the world -- not unrealistically at the time.

This was called “Grand Area” planning?

Yes. Right after the Second World War, George Kennan, head of the U.S. State Department policy planning staff, and others sketched out the details, and then they were implemented. What’s happening now in the Middle East and North Africa, to an extent, and in South America substantially goes all the way back to the late 1940s. The first major successful resistance to U.S. hegemony was in 1949. That’s when an event took place, which, interestingly, is called “the loss of China.” It’s a very interesting phrase, never challenged. There was a lot of discussion about who is responsible for the loss of China. It became a huge domestic issue. But it’s a very interesting phrase. You can only lose something if you own it. It was just taken for granted: we possess China -- and if they move toward independence, we’ve lost China. Later came concerns about “the loss of Latin America,” “the loss of the Middle East,” “the loss of” certain countries, all based on the premise that we own the world and anything that weakens our control is a loss to us and we wonder how to recover it.

Today, if you read, say, foreign policy journals or, in a farcical form, listen to the Republican debates, they’re asking, “How do we prevent further losses?”

On the other hand, the capacity to preserve control has sharply declined. By 1970, the world was already what was called tripolar economically, with a U.S.-based North American industrial center, a German-based European center, roughly comparable in size, and a Japan-based East Asian center, which was then the most dynamic growth region in the world. Since then, the global economic order has become much more diverse. So it’s harder to carry out our policies, but the underlying principles have not changed much.

Take the Clinton doctrine. The Clinton doctrine was that the United States is entitled to resort to unilateral force to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.” That goes beyond anything that George W. Bush said. But it was quiet and it wasn’t arrogant and abrasive, so it didn’t cause much of an uproar. The belief in that entitlement continues right to the present. It’s also part of the intellectual culture.

Right after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, amid all the cheers and applause, there were a few critical comments questioning the legality of the act. Centuries ago, there used to be something called presumption of innocence. If you apprehend a suspect, he’s a suspect until proven guilty. He should be brought to trial. It’s a core part of American law. You can trace it back to Magna Carta. So there were a couple of voices saying maybe we shouldn’t throw out the whole basis of Anglo-American law. That led to a lot of very angry and infuriated reactions, but the most interesting ones were, as usual, on the left liberal end of the spectrum. Matthew Yglesias, a well-known and highly respected left liberal commentator, wrote an article in which he ridiculed these views. He said they’re “amazingly naive,” silly. Then he expressed the reason. He said that “one of the main functions of the international institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use of deadly military force by western powers.” Of course, he didn’t mean Norway. He meant the United States. So the principle on which the international system is based is that the United States is entitled to use force at will. To talk about the United States violating international law or something like that is amazingly naive, completely silly. Incidentally, I was the target of those remarks, and I’m happy to confess my guilt. I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.

I merely mention that to illustrate that in the intellectual culture, even at what’s called the left liberal end of the political spectrum, the core principles haven’t changed very much. But the capacity to implement them has been sharply reduced. That’s why you get all this talk about American decline. Take a look at the year-end issue of Foreign Affairs, the main establishment journal. Its big front-page cover asks, in bold face, “Is America Over?” It’s a standard complaint of those who believe they should have everything. If you believe you should have everything and anything gets away from you, it’s a tragedy, the world is collapsing. So is America over? A long time ago we “lost” China, we’ve lost Southeast Asia, we’ve lost South America. Maybe we’ll lose the Middle East and North African countries. Is America over? It’s a kind of paranoia, but it’s the paranoia of the superrich and the superpowerful. If you don’t have everything, it’s a disaster.

The New York Times describes the “defining policy quandary of the Arab Spring: how to square contradictory American impulses that include support for democratic change, a desire for stability, and wariness of Islamists who have become a potent political force.” The Times identifies three U.S. goals. What do you make of them?

Two of them are accurate. The United States is in favor of stability. But you have to remember what stability means. Stability means conformity to U.S. orders. So, for example, one of the charges against Iran, the big foreign policy threat, is that it is destabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan. How? By trying to expand its influence into neighboring countries. On the other hand, we “stabilize” countries when we invade them and destroy them.

I’ve occasionally quoted one of my favorite illustrations of this, which is from a well-known, very good liberal foreign policy analyst, James Chace, a former editor of Foreign Affairs. Writing about the overthrow of the Salvador Allende regime and the imposition of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1973, he said that we had to “destabilize” Chile in the interests of “stability.” That’s not perceived to be a contradiction -- and it isn’t. We had to destroy the parliamentary system in order to gain stability, meaning that they do what we say. So yes, we are in favor of stability in this technical sense.

Concern about political Islam is just like concern about any independent development. Anything that’s independent you have to have concern about because it might undermine you. In fact, it’s a little ironic, because traditionally the United States and Britain have by and large strongly supported radical Islamic fundamentalism, not political Islam, as a force to block secular nationalism, the real concern. So, for example, Saudi Arabia is the most extreme fundamentalist state in the world, a radical Islamic state. It has a missionary zeal, is spreading radical Islam to Pakistan, funding terror. But it’s the bastion of U.S. and British policy. They’ve consistently supported it against the threat of secular nationalism from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and Abd al-Karim Qasim’s Iraq, among many others. But they don’t like political Islam because it might become independent.

The first of the three points, our yearning for democracy, that’s about on the level of Joseph Stalin talking about the Russian commitment to freedom, democracy, and liberty for the world. It’s the kind of statement you laugh about when you hear it from commissars or Iranian clerics, but you nod politely and maybe even with awe when you hear it from their Western counterparts.

If you look at the record, the yearning for democracy is a bad joke. That’s even recognized by leading scholars, though they don’t put it this way. One of the major scholars on so-called democracy promotion is Thomas Carothers, who is pretty conservative and highly regarded -- a neo-Reaganite, not a flaming liberal. He worked in Reagan’s State Department and has several books reviewing the course of democracy promotion, which he takes very seriously. He says, yes, this is a deep-seated American ideal, but it has a funny history. The history is that every U.S. administration is “schizophrenic.” They support democracy only if it conforms to certain strategic and economic interests. He describes this as a strange pathology, as if the United States needed psychiatric treatment or something. Of course, there’s another interpretation, but one that can’t come to mind if you’re a well-educated, properly behaved intellectual.

Within several months of the toppling of [President Hosni] Mubarak in Egypt, he was in the dock facing criminal charges and prosecution. It’s inconceivable that U.S. leaders will ever be held to account for their crimes in Iraq or beyond. Is that going to change anytime soon?

That’s basically the Yglesias principle: the very foundation of the international order is that the United States has the right to use violence at will. So how can you charge anybody?

And no one else has that right.

Of course not. Well, maybe our clients do. If Israel invades Lebanon and kills a thousand people and destroys half the country, okay, that’s all right. It’s interesting. Barack Obama was a senator before he was president. He didn’t do much as a senator, but he did a couple of things, including one he was particularly proud of. In fact, if you looked at his website before the primaries, he highlighted the fact that, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, he cosponsored a Senate resolution demanding that the United States do nothing to impede Israel’s military actions until they had achieved their objectives and censuring Iran and Syria because they were supporting resistance to Israel’s destruction of southern Lebanon, incidentally, for the fifth time in 25 years. So they inherit the right. Other clients do, too. 

But the rights really reside in Washington. That’s what it means to own the world. It’s like the air you breathe. You can’t question it. The main founder of contemporary IR [international relations] theory, Hans Morgenthau, was really quite a decent person, one of the very few political scientists and international affairs specialists to criticize the Vietnam War on moral, not tactical, grounds. Very rare. He wrote a book called The Purpose of American Politics. You already know what’s coming. Other countries don’t have purposes. The purpose of America, on the other hand, is “transcendent”: to bring freedom and justice to the rest of the world. But he’s a good scholar, like Carothers. So he went through the record. He said, when you study the record, it looks as if the United States hasn’t lived up to its transcendent purpose. But then he says, to criticize our transcendent purpose “is to fall into the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds” -- which is a good comparison. It’s a deeply entrenched religious belief. It’s so deep that it’s going to be hard to disentangle it. And if anyone questions that, it leads to near hysteria and often to charges of anti-Americanism or “hating America” -- interesting concepts that don’t exist in democratic societies, only in totalitarian societies and here, where they’re just taken for granted.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.  A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of numerous best-selling political works, including recently Hopes and Prospectsand Making the Future.  This piece is adapted from the chapter “Uprisings” in his newest book (with interviewer David Barsamian), Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books). 

Excerpted from Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire, published this month by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright (c) 2013 by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian. All rights reserved.

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The Neoliberal Religion 64

The Endgame of Capitalism

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

03 February 13

Reader Supported News | Perspective

he board game "Monopoly" was originally invented in the early 20th century to warn players of the dangers of free market capitalism. The original title was "The Landlord Game," made to show how property owners exploit their tenants with exorbitant rent. The game eventually evolved to include rules that let players charge higher rent if they owned all the railroads or the utility companies. But the endgame scenario of Monopoly is a lot like the endgame of capitalism that we're witnessing today - no matter how the game starts, the wealth will eventually accumulate in the hands of one player, while the other players have to sell off their property to pay their debt to the owner and, eventually, lose everything they have.

The Dow recently closed above 14,000, the highest it's ever been since October of 2007. While the financial pundits on CNBC would use this figure to have us believe the economy is bouncing back better than ever, the only ones sharing in the benefit of a healthy market are the wealthy investor class and corporations that have been insulated from the effects of the recession that still continues for the rest of us. The influx of high-frequency trading that now makes up half of all trading signifies the change of using the market as a vehicle for making long-term investments to manipulating it for short-term profit.

The market's latest high numbers are due to corporations turning out record profits quarter after quarter, having grown profits by 171 percent under Obama's watch. Most of those profits have come about by companies cutting costs by shifting jobs overseas, where they can pay a Chinese worker a fraction of what they would pay an American worker to do the same job. News has also broken about Fortune 500 companies like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T and IBM using inmate labor at private prisons, meaning they can slap a "Made in the USA" sticker on a product made by someone working for slave wages. The influx of immigrants looking for work thanks to free trade agreements likeNAFTA, has led to the inevitable exploitation of immigrant labor which will continue as long as US immigration policy punishes the exploited rather than the companies exploiting them. And these record corporate profits also have right-wing governors and state legislatures to thank for union-busting right-to-work laws that really only exist as a vehicle for businesses to pay workers less money for the same work, and for Republicans to erode a major fundraising base for their opposition.

The rest of the uptick in corporate profits can be attributed to a lax tax code that allows companies to book profits made in the United States in overseas tax havens. There's an estimated $2.3 trillion in US corporate profits booked in overseas accounts. Apple alone stashes $1 billion a week in overseas accounts to dodge corporate taxes. That's equivalent to over 4 million full-time minimum-wage jobs, every week. The share of US tax revenue from corporations has gone from 6% of GDP in the 1950s to just 1% today.

The executives of these companies make out like bandits, as they use their increased profits to buy their own company's stock, which makes the stock price go up, making the stock options owned by the executives more valuable. And with dividends taxed at a much lower rate than actual work (20% vs. 35%), the tax revenue needed to keep society functioning continues to dwindle as the investor class accumulates greater wealth than ever before. The six Waltons who own Wal-Mart ownas much wealth as the bottom 40% of Americans.

Some financial analysts say this market surge is just a rally, destined to drop as Congress expects to wrangle with the deficit in May, including a possible downgrade of our credit rating. But the fact is, our deficit would disappear if we had a small sales tax on all Wall Street financial transactions, taxed capital gains at the same rate as by-God-hard-work and overhauled our tax code in favor of one that would do away with the loopholes that allow big corporations to offshore their billions in American profits. However, even that could get worse, as Obama has shown willingness to talk about a territorial tax code that would effectively allow corporations to pay a 0% tax rate on their profits all over the world, including the US.

In a recent Daily Show appearance, Al Gore made a half-hearted attempt at explaining the idea of "sustainable capitalism" to Jon Stewart. But even Gore's description of capitalism as the only economic system that works sounded incredibly outdated to those of us who weren't millionaire media moguls or TV personalities. We're witnessing the endgame of capitalism, where a few wealthy individuals and corporations have accumulated most of the wealth while the rest of us are left to fight for the scraps. And it looks a lot like the endgame of Monopoly, where every player is selling off their house and foreclosing their property to pay the one player who already has everything. And when the Monopoly game has gone that far, the only thing left to do is flip the board over, scatter all of the winner's winnings, and try playing something else that everyone can enjoy.

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Carl Gibson, 25, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Old Lyme, Connecticut. You can contact Carl at carl@rsnorg.org.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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