An elderly friend of mine—a white southern liberal—once told me a tale that helped me grasp how far his kind traveled in the 60s. He came from a close-knit military family and he’s never doubted his father was one of the wisest—and bravest—of men. Yet one day, as my friend was reading a New York Times report on a firefight in Viet Nam, he was shocked to find he was siding with enemies of his country (and his daddy).

The closest I’ve come to such an experience occurred when I came on a story in a New York tabloid about 100 Iraqi pre-teens who’d been dressed as suicide bombers at Saddam’s official birthday party in 2002. That was when I realized I was leaning toward supporting an invasion of Iraq. I never felt as far from home as many dissenters did during the Viet Nam era, but my stance—and First’s openness to pro-war arguments—got under the skin of readers and contributors who hate American hegemony. Two representative figures, on this score, are the late Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynd, who both took time out to take me to task for my support of the Iraq war. Back in the day, Zinn sent a contribution to First along with a letter objecting to First’s pro-war polemics (which we published). His case hasn’t gotten any weaker: “It’s a matter of means and ends. The means of war are, with absolute certainty, horrible. The ends of war, however presented as beneficent, are always uncertain.” Zinn’s old comrade Staughton Lynd put me in the dock this spring: “[D]idn't you support the Iraq war, Ben? This might be a good moment for a mea culpa?”

I made arguments that came to look foolish after the invasion of Iraq and I’ve spelled out my errors in print. (See volume 1 of First of the Year if you need my bad.) But my Southern friend’s story—and the spectacle of those Iraqi kiddie bombers—hints there might be a path toward truth and reconciliation with certain 60s vets who protested against the Iraq war. It’s a path that takes in the distance from, say, Saigon to Fallujah.

Of course there were—and are—leftists who can’t see a difference between Viet Nam and our “entire military adventure in the Middle East…Welcome to Viet Nam-istan.”[1] They conflate Iraq’s head-choppers (and Afghanistan’s hand-choppers) with classic anti-colonialist militants. (I won’t soon forget Naomi Klein’s insane attempt to Guevaracize Islamo-fascist cleric Moqutar Sadr in the Nation. And I'm just now recalling secular academics who mooned over Falluja—“city of mosques”—as Marines were saving the place from brutes who’d set up a torture chamber on every block.)

Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t believe Lynd or Zinn ever felt in solidarity with “The Resistance” in Iraq. If they read reports on the final battle of Fallujah, I doubt they found themselves rooting against the Marines. It’s too late now for Zinn to repent in any case. But if Lynd leaned Jihadi, “this might be a good time for a mea culpa.”

“Something NEW in Arab Politics”

“So far everybody’s been wrong about something,” wrote Brit journalist David Aaronovitch soon after the fall of Baghdad. Kanan Makiya—Iraqi exile and author of Republic of Fear who made a compelling moral case for the invasion of Iraq—was no exception. But, unlike pro-war blowhards (such as Rumsfeld and Cheney), he’s admitted errors. A decade after the original Iraq war debates, his voice still cuts through muy macho Bushwa and “we-were-right” leftism.

Makiya recently wrote a Times op-ed on the 10th anniversary of the fall of Baghdad linking the removal of Saddam Hussein to “the toppling of a whole succession of Arab dictators in 2011.” He traces roots of the Arab Spring to the uprising against Saddam after the 1991 Gulf War, though “the Western and Arab armies that had come to liberate Kuwait simply stood by and watched as Shiites and Kurds who rose up were massacred.” What he won’t underscore—since he’s not one of the Rastignacs of humanitarian interventionism?—is his own foresight. Back in 2002 Makiya projected the possibility of an Arab Spring as he made Iraqi democrats’ case for overthrowing Saddam:

What the whole phenomenon of the Iraqi opposition represents—inchoate, confused, anarchic, fractured upon itself as it certainly is—what it represents is something NEW in Arab politics. We have here for the first time in modern Arab political discourse—or at least since 1967—a population that has emerged which is clear that the be-all and end-all of its political world is its own homemade dictatorship. It's not the national question, not armed struggle, not anti-imperialism, not anti-Zionism—all the usual shibboleths of Arab politics for the past 35 years. This can be encouraged. Or it can be crushed. But think about what it means if you do that. What you're killing is something that would have extraordinary transformative potential throughout the whole Middle Eastern region.

Makiya knows “few of the brave young men and women behind the Arab Spring” have been willing to publicly admit the possibility of a link between their revolutions and the end of Iraq’s Baathist dictatorship: “These activists have for the most part vigorously denied that their own demands for freedom and democracy, which were organic and homegrown, had anything to do with a war they saw as illegitimate and imperialistic.”

But elections have consequences. When Iraqis defied terror to vote in 2005 for the first time in the post-Saddam era, their courage burnished the concept of democracy in the Middle East and all over the world. Glance at Makiya’s election commentary back in that day and you’ll see he was intent on sowing seeds that would blossom in the Arab Spring:

Millions of people actually made choices, and placed claims on those who will lead them in the future. To act upon one’s own world like this, and on such a scale, is what politics in the purest sense is all about. It is why we all, once upon a time, became activists. And it is infectious. The taste of freedom is a hard memory to rub out.

Makiya stressed then there were no guarantees: “the nature of great historical turning points, and the source of wonder and beauty they bring into the world, is that we can’t predict their outcome.”

History went mad bad in Iraq with the country devolving into civil war as the Bush administration and Iraq’s governing class dithered. Yet back in 2005, a range of pundits and pop lifers recognized the Middle East might be in the midst of a slow turning. I recall how Jon Stewart nearly blew his tongue as the Cedar Revolution jumped off in Lebanon a month after Iraq’s first election, asking only half-ironically—“You mean W. was right?” (Last week I came upon more evidence of a world turned upside down in a jokey line Bruce Springsteen got off during a 2005 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame speech—the Boss mocked the idea of democracy in a band but allowed it “might be a good thing in Iraq.”) Iraq’s hot second of popular sovereignty cooled as hacks and killer sectarians ruled. And history may be repeating itself now. Per Makiya: “The Arab Spring is turning into an Arab winter…Here, too, Iraq offers lessons.” Yet his long view isn’t doomy since the “Arab political psyche” has changed for good:

No Arab Spring protester, however much he or she might identify with the plight of the Palestinians or decry the cruel policies of Israeli occupation in the West Bank (as I do), would think today to attribute all the ills of Arab polities to empty abstractions like "imperialism" and “Zionism.” They understand in their bones that those phrases were tools of a language designed to prop up nasty regimes and distract people like them from the struggle for a better life.

No-one can be sure how those struggles will turn out, but Makiya’s millennial vision has proved to have traction.

Journalist George Packer is a useful weathervane on this score. Packer shaped his 2005 book about the Iraq War, The Assassins’ Gate, around set-pieces hyping his disillusionment with his “friend” Makiya whom he portrayed as being dreamy yet manipulative. Packer now says of Makiya: “I think his reputation will only grow in stature over time... In 30 years[?], Kanan Makiya will be seen as a visionary and champion of democracy.” Not that Packer has stopped selling out Makiya: “Kanan justifiably was criticized for thinking the liberalization and democratization of Iraq would come quickly and easily.” But it’s a shuck to say Makiya claimed establishing democracy in Iraq would be easy. In a now famous/notorious pre-war forum in NYC back in 2002, Makiya argued the American left was obliged to support Iraq’s democrats even if their “project” had only a 5% to 10% chance of success. His sense of dangers up ahead heightened as the war drew closer.

I’m reminded of a pre-invasion email Makiya sent from Kurdistan to “every Iraqi democrat in the world” and then published in The New Republic. He began by telling how a fellow member of the Iraqi opposition had threatened to “wipe him off the face of the earth” after fantasizing a slight. Makiya wasn’t out to make himself appear heroically embattled. He invoked the threat from this “deeply disturbed man” because it came from someone who was an ally—a person “who had suffered as much as any human being at the hands of the Baath party…at one point he weighed 30 kilos.” Makiya asked his readers to see this man feelingly—“try to imagine the worst and you will not come close to what this man has suffered in his life”—and then consider—“this is the human raw material that you want to build democracy for…”

Every day for the last five weeks, I have come across such damaged and wounded people, people who breathe nationalism, sectarianism, without knowing that they are doing so, and people who are deeply suspicious towards their fellow Iraqis. These are the facts of life for the next generation in this poor, unhappy, and ravaged land.

Makiya had developed the impression:

Some of you think you can lift your noses and ride into Iraq on American tanks, above the stink of it all, without having to wade knee-high in the shit that the Baath party has made of your country. You cannot. That is a pipe dream.

Makiya elaborated on his warning and as he came to the end of it he anticipated a future of disillusion.

The United States…is bound to let you down if you think you can ask her for too much. Actually, if you think about it hard enough, it is not the U.S. that is letting you down, nor is it President Bush or even his CIA and his State Department…it is you, who by coming face to face with your own illusions, will end up letting yourselves down the most, and it is you and all those Iraqis who have put their faith in you, who will end up paying the biggest price of all.

Does this sound like someone who thought “liberalization and democratization would come quickly and easily”?[2]

What counts now is not that Makiya was right on. (He wasn’t done being wrong yet.) What matters is he was thinking hard, offering Iraqis who had put their faith in him not certainties but a chance to join his search for moral precision.

Makiya’s quest put him at odds with those toeing left and right lines. Before the war Makiya commented on the "selfishness" of the debate "between those who are concerned with weapons of mass destruction on the one hand and those who are worrying about American hegemony in the world and unilateral action”: “I'm not saying those aren't two very important issues, but left out of the whole debate are the very people who have suffered the most from this regime and who, by the way, incidentally, overwhelmingly want this war.”

Makiya himself realized humane respondents might be put off by such martial talk. When he allowed on the day of Shock and Awe, “those bombs are music to my ears,” he made it clear he was speaking not as a neo-con (or neo-futurist) feverish for war but as a witness who heard U.S. thunder in this instance as the soundtrack for imminent (if not infinite) justice.

Makiya’s range of tones wasn’t mine. Partly because he was so much nearer suffering caused by Saddam but also because he could sound distant from the dailiness of life. I worried when he noted he could help the State Dept. cultivate a constitutional process in Iraq but wouldn’t have a clue about “how to pick up the trash after a big war.” What made me nervous was Makiya didn’t seem all that concerned about making sure somebody would handle Iraq’s garbage. And then there was his blind spot regarding Ahmad Chalabi. (I recall trying to reach Makiya in Iraq after American officials had arrested Chalabi whom they accused of cozying up to Iranian intelligence. I was relieved to find out Makiya had already broken with Chalabi but I also wondered to myself: “what took you so long?” Nobody should’ve needed more than a New York minute to tell that cat was a hustler.) I can’t emphasize enough, though, how Makiya sparked my own effort to imagine the real in the run-up to the invasion. I began by trying to figure out if Iraqis “want this war.” I remember reading a piece in NYRB by a journalist who came down against the invasion—along with every other author NYRB published on this subject? Yet this reporter allowed when he assembled a cross-section of Iraqis in a spot where they could be sure they were not being monitored by Saddam’s secret police, a majority favored an invasion.[3]

But I wasn’t with Makiya’s idea of a war for democracy in Iraq until it became clear this exile had heavy allies in Iraqi Kurdistan. Makiya may have willed himself into being a spokesman for “Iraqi Democrats” by way of the “Iraqi National Congress” which was clearly not an organization with a mass base. But Kurdish politicians who spoke up for democracy (and federalism!) in Iraq weren’t floaters. They were elected officials, representing a constituency on the ground in Iraq ready to fight for liberation. While Kurds were intent on securing independence, their politicians agreed to sublate their people’s urge for sovereignty. As the military campaign against Saddam unfolded, I still remember watching on CNN as Barham Salih—Prime Minister of Iraqi Kurdistan before the invasion and a major player in every post-Saddam Iraqi government (until he took up his old post in Kurdistan again in 2009)—pressed a Peshmerga column to get out of Kirkuk. He knew if those soldiers staked an immediate claim to that city, Arab Iraqis (and Turks) would think Kurds were ruled by tribal instincts.

Salih’s actions backed up words in an address he’d given to the Socialist International before the invasion. He told those Socialists he came before them “not only as a representative of the Kurdish people in Iraq, but also as a messenger for the oppressed peoples of Iraq…of all backgrounds and religions, Shi'a Arab, Sunni Arab, Turkomen or Assyrian, Muslims, Christians or Yezidis.”[4] He defined the coming war with Saddam and Baathism as a struggle “against an aggressive, racist ideology that brought the world nothing but suffering.” (The Socialists met in Rome and Salih noted in a powerful rhetorical move “there was no better place than this city” for socialists to reflect on “the imperative of freedom and liberation from fascism and dictatorship”…[Iraqis] are rather like the Italians, the overwhelming majority of whom cared little for Fascism, but who had to wait over 20 years and for a foreign force to liberate them.”)

Salih’s invocation of the anti-racist side of the struggle against Baathism wasn’t a one-off. Kurds shared Makiya’s will to break the Baathist State’s racist tie to the “Arab Nation” by establishing an Iraqi federation that would protect rights of minorities and individuals. I still grit my teeth when I recall the late Edward Said’s trashing of their universalist imperatives. Instead of acknowledging Makiya, along with his Kurdish allies, meant to end the Baath Party’s Arab supremacist legacy, Said claimed Makiya, in particular, was a self-hating loon who asserted Iraq “should be non-Arab.” Writing for an Arab audience in Al Ahram, Said spun Makiya’s anti-racist federalism into a brief for ethnic cleansing. (A photo of Said’s righteous mug hangs behind the register of my excellent neighborhood bookstore—proof bookishness may subsist with truthiness.)

Makiya's and the Kurds’ anti-racism hit me where I live since I’ve learned to see American history largely through African American lenses. But Iraqi democrats’ discourse went beyond my own bent. Makiya’s refusal to reduce governance in an Iraqi federation to majority rule helped enhance my appreciation of American Founders’ fears about tyrannies of winners. (Though Makiya was marginalized by Iraq’s political class after 2005, it’s important to note he helped write Iraq’s current Constitution, which has enabled Kurdistan to thrive.) As citizens of the world argued over the invasion of Iraq and prospects for democracy in the Middle East, I remember a kitchen debate with a wannabe Leninist Iranian-American still entranced with the revolution against the Shah. He had no sense democracy might entail preservation of individual rights and non-violent processes for resolving potentially deadly conflicts between majorities and minorities. Constitutions were just formalities to him. “Democracy” meant majority rule. Period. And though he knew he’d probably have been dead or in prison if he hadn’t emigrated to the U.S. 40 years ago, he couldn’t see why individuals (or minorities) shouldn’t be at the mercy of “masses.” As I heard him in the kitchen act out a Middle Eastern revival of Darkness at Noon, I felt like a young American finding April Morning.

While Makiya’s theories and practice made me more alive to virtues of American constitutionalism, I’ll allow my own choice to support the war strikes me now as less than patriotic. (You could say I put interests of Middle Easterners ahead of mid-Westerners.) Let’s go back to Makiya’s claim there was something “selfish” about narrowing the debate over the war to the issues of Saddam’s (non-existent) WMD or American hegemony and unilateralism. There was also something too…liberal about my willingness to let other Americans risk lives and limbs[5] to take out a dictator who was a menace to his own people but not (much of) a threat to this country.

I insert that parenthetical qualifier, not because I’m a hold-out when it comes to WMD. But back before the invasion in 2002, I picked up on Saddam’s announcement Iraq’s payments to families of Palestinian suicide bombers would go up from $10,000 to $25,000. In the wake of 9/11, that provocation involved more than “usual shibboleths of Arab politics.” Saddam’s new policy—which his bag men acted on—seemed likely to stoke the vogue for suicide-bombers in the Ummah and amp up Jihadist jive about a war between Islam and the West. Rumsfeld had a point when he zeroed in on Saddam’s exceptional barbarity: “Think of it. Here is an individual who is the head of a country, Iraq, who has proudly, publicly made a decision to go out and actively promote and finance human sacrifice for families that will have their youngsters kill innocent men, women and children.” (Though Rumsfeld undercut his own moral authority but avoiding mention of America’s allies, the Saudis, who also paid off families of Palestinian suicide bombers.) I recall reading about Saddam’s bonuses almost in tandem with tabloid reports on those 100 girls dressed up as suicide bombers who marched at his 2002 birthday celebration against the Great Satan. The day after Saddam’s born day I felt pretty sure (per Thomas Paine) “the cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”

So how did we end up going it (almost) alone? Take a bow W. (though Chirac deserves a kick too). Thanks in part to Bush’s incapacity to think through—or make comprehensive arguments for—the invasion of Iraq, it turned into the antithesis of our national interest. I believe the Iraq War was a just war. But on the real (vs. ideal) side, it was also a “dumb war.”

Movements of Mind

That may be the only subject on which young anarchist writer Malcolm Harris agrees with Obama: “It should be a baseline for the utility of someone's thought. Did you think invading Iraq was a terrible idea? No? Shut up about everything”...“It's estimated that 36 million people protested the Iraq war around the world. If you're not one of the top 36 million thinkers globally”... “Like if you and your policy shop couldn't pull together the foresight that me and my 14 year old friends managed...”

I wasn’t Ken “cakewalk” Adelman and my “shop” was moi, but I can’t pretend Harris’s witty tweets don’t sting. What really hurts my heart is trying to imagine what I might say to an American military family who lost a son or daughter in Iraq and now doubts all rationales for the war. (Makiya allowed early on he had nothing that could ease minds of such a family.) Maybe I deserve to feel caught out—stretched on a rack between Harris’s 14 year old realists and elder idealists like Staughton Lynd.

OTOH, since I can’t honestly recant my support for overthrowing Saddam, perhaps my job is to keep stretching them…

So forget my mistakes Mr. Lynd. Given your long history of identifying with labor activists you’d be better off tracking the movement of mind of Brit union official Dave Anderson who posted this reflection at “Labor Friends of Iraq” earlier this spring:

Ten years ago, I was utterly opposed to the invasion of Iraq. At the time I was President of Unison and sat on the TUC general council, so like a lot of others in the labour movement I did my bit to lobby against Western intervention, believing that the reasons given for invasion were not justified, that the argument about WMD was not proven and that inspections should have been given a chance to work.

But in the years since I have had to face new facts having been to Iraq to see things for myself. I now see that the international community should have toppled Saddam Hussein earlier, as my Kurdish comrades have told me in clear terms. One benefit—one very close to my heart—of Saddam’s removal, was the re-emergence of a trade union movement which had been brutally suppressed by his regime…

The re-emergence of the labor movement in Iraq is not unrelated to its resurgence in Egypt. Surprise may be your best teacher, but Lynd would probably feel more comfortable getting that story from his fellow radical labor historian Jeremy Brecher who touches on the subject in his new book, Save the Humans. For now let me lean on reporting in Christian Science Monitor:

Back in 2006 a wildcat strike broke out at Mahallah, sparking copycat efforts across the country and the biggest protest movement in Egypt since the 1950s. Those strikes, and the politicized labor organizing that went with them, were a key component in setting the stage for the Egyptian revolution…

I’m not suggesting the overthrow of Saddam or Mubarak were proletarian triumphs. But radical internationalists who assume solidarity with Middle Eastern working classes means saying no to Western interventions might think twice.

Makiya is still thinking straight about what’s going on in the region. He’s called for the West to intervene in Syria and his stance there distances him from certain neo-con supporters of the Iraq war. Take Daniel Pipes who’s proposed the U.S. back Bashir Aassad to promote stasis and ensure Arabs keep killing each other.

If young men and women behind the Arab Spring are on to horrific avatars of Old America-the-hegemon like Pipes, it’s no wonder they want to keep their distance from the U.S. Though members of Egypt’s April 6th Movement aren’t purists on this front. They talk up the example of Otpor!—the non-violent Serbian civic campaign that helped overthrow Milsosevic—even though American agencies had a big role in that insurgency. I learned about the influence of Otpor! on the anti-Mubarak movement from David Graeber’s new book on Occupy Wall Street, The Democracy Project. Graeber muses on the cunning of history as he explains how April 6th Movement reps helped spark OWS when they visited New York a few weeks before his comrades took over Zuccotti Park. While Graeber is ok with the CIA via Otport! being in the back story to OWS, he won’t cop to Iraqis’ role. Stuck on the 36,000,000 who said “No to War” before the invasion of Iraq, he ain't trying to see those Iraqi voters whose purple fingers pointed toward Tahrir Square. And since Graeber and OWSers took inspiration from the Arab Spring, Iraq-the-Model’s shoes probably fit them too (and I'm not talking about the one thrown at George Bush during that press conference with Maliki). Wherever you came down on the Iraq invasion, I believe every democrat should recall al-Zaqari's threat on the eve of Iraq's first vote—"We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy and those who follow this wrong ideology"—and the next “day of civic celebration.” That somewhat solemn phrase, which still hints at the felt quality of a rare moment of mass public happiness, comes from a headline on the New York Times' January 31, 2005 front page devoted to Iraq’s election. Cleaning out my desk a few weeks ago, I realized this Times front page was one of two I’d saved in the past 15 years. The other announced Obama’s election (“Racial Barrier Falls”).

Graeber’s new book hammers on the claim occupiers opened up “the possibility of democracy in America.” In some respects The Democracy Project reads like an answer record to Makiya’s op-ed linking Iraq’s moment of popular sovereignty to the Arab Spring, though Makiya’s projections are more profound. Graeber overplays the significance of OWS and his boy-genius anarchism seems a bit trivial compared to the sort of constitutionalism upheld by Makiya.

It’s not a shock The Democracy Project has no room for “the purple revolution.” But Graeber’s contempt for Obama’s electoral triumphs is mighty white. (Hard to see how anyone based in America could take up contemporary democratic projects in the spring of 2012 without addressing Obama’s ground games.) Kanan Makiya’s response to Obama is more nuanced, though it’s clear they’ll never agree on the Iraq war. Makiya might even allow Obama’s presence has helped his/our side Over There. When it comes to origins of the Arab Spring, Obama’s victory over McCain—a world-class, non-violent transfer of power with special import for formerly colonized peoples—belongs in any causal nexus (along with Julian Assange’s Wikileaks). While Obama hasn’t changed the calculus of power in Israel or Iran or Syria, his direct actions against dictators in Egypt and Libya have been vital. Without Obama’s push-back inside the Establishment, America would’ve stuck with Mubarak longer and stayed out of the revolt against Gaddafi.

Obama refused to roll with proponents of “stability” in these instances. Yet his foreign policy is often marked by a realism that frustrates the younger generation out to liberalize Middle Eastern politics. Jacinthe Assaad speaks for them here when she protests against the Obama administration’s hands-off approach to Morsi’s domestic outrages. Her voice confirms her generation has broken barriers of fear and/or distraction that once defined “the Arab Political psyche.” Courage is the foundational virtue of the Arab Spring. But democracy also requires a certain capacity for impersonal clarity. A knack Assaad displayed in an email to me about Obama’s Egyptian policies when she noted: “Like every other president, there is more at play in foreign policy than we might even imagine. It's not his personal opinion!” Her refusal to reduce the political to the personal is a sign of progress made by Middle Eastern polities since Iraq’s 2005 elections. Assaad and her comrades are more than brave; they are modeling democratic sagacity. Let’s hope their example speaks to American radicals who wish to pressure Obama from the left and below.

That’s where I want to be. And so I should register one final caveat about Makiya’s politics. To the degree his internationalist interventionism carries an implication neo-liberal democracy in America is all good, it’s a bad religion too. While I like to think I’ve had Makiya’s back, I’ve never kept that faith. History hasn’t ended for American democrats. We just started to dance.

Notes

1 Not that there weren't lessons to be learned from Viet Nam. Before the invasion, that Southern liberal I mentioned up top allowed there wasn't much doubt the American military would smash up Saddam's. Soldiers on the move to Baghdad weren't headed for a middle eastern Stalingrad. But my Southern friend with the military background foresaw the crisis would come when Americans wanted out of Iraq. He anticipated Petraeus's famous plaint: "How does this end?"

2 In case you’re wondering, George Packer was aware in the moment of Makiya’s nose for coming disasters. He cited Makiya’s note from Kurdistan in The Assassins’ Gate, claiming to find in it the true voice the writer he “loved”—“the fearless voice of his books”—not the compromised sound of Makiya banging drums for war. But Packer left that last passage from Makiya’s pre-war message out of his book (and diminished Makiya’s prophetic “email” by failing to note it had been published in The New Republic). The timing of Makiya’s lines on what lay ahead for his side (and himself!) didn’t fit the arc of Packer’s fabulations. I’ve brought this subject up before and I should probably let it go because nobody seems to care. Maybe that’s a sign readers alive to what happened in Iraq are more focused on deceptions that cost blood and treasure. Still, Packer is a major journalist and he shouldn’t get away with sacrificing fact to flow. I only wish Janet Malcolm had gone through his Gate.

3 The NYRB man also reported the bulk of the Iraqis didn’t trust Americans’ motives. I doubt I picked up on the dangers to democracy promotion implicit in their suspicious minds.

4 Salih didn’t mention he’d survived an assassination attempt in 2002. Five of Salih’s bodyguards were killed in that attack before three would-be assassins associated with the Al Qaeda affiliated terrorist group Ansar al-Islam were themselves killed.

5 By 2008, there were reportedly over 1600 amputees among America’s Iraq War wounded.

*

There were three pages of instructions, which teachers
were required to read verbatim, including
Are there any questions
on how to darken the circles?

One of my third graders started hyperventilating,
coughing, and turned red. The TA walked him out. He stayed
with the nurse for 15 minutes before returning to finish the test.

The 6th and 8th grade tests are taken from text books sold by Pearson. What level of advantage does this give districts who choose/can afford to purchase these books?

*

The same questions occur in tests for grades 3,4, and 5.
This is not an error.
Vertical linking will help prepare for questions on next year’s tests.

*

Which paragraph best illustrates the theme in paragraph 2? Paragraph 4, paragraph 9, paragraph 3, or paragraph 11?

Two middle school boys wet their pants.
This is not an error.
Students need to be college-ready and able to compete in a global economy.
One child vomited on the test,
which was wiped off and collected for security reasons.

Studies show toxic stress interferes with brain functioning and can result in the formation of a smaller brain.

*

One ELA passage, which occurred in tests around the country, tells the story of the Pineapple and the Hare. The pineapple challenges the hare to a race; the winner will receive a ninja and a year’s supply of toothpaste. All the animals predict victory for the hare until the crow asserts that the pineapple, knowing he cannot move, must have a trick up his sleeve. The other animals vow to foil his plan. The race begins—the hare takes off, and the pineapple remains stationary. A few hours later the hare crosses the finish line. The animals eat the pineapple.
Underneath the story, in bold letters: Moral: Pineapples Don’t Have Sleeves

Why did the animals eat the pineapple—
a)They were annoyed
b)They were amused
c)They were hungry
d)They wanted to

This is not an error.
The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world.

*

If 100% of Commissioner King’s children attend a private Montessori school that rejects standardized testing and the Common Core, write a sample budget reallocating the 350 million dollars spent on developing new tests toward programs such as art, music, language immersion, and resources such as air conditioning, clean drinking water, and healthy low-cost lunch. Show your work.

Most of us in here I wd suppose are familiar with the low ways of this place. We know the American Dream mostly by its advertising. I was almost given an assignment recently by NPR to name a song that summed up The American Dream. Instead I sent three songs that demonstrated to me The American Dream vs. The American Nightmare.

Piri Thomas was one of us, one of the post-World War 2 children, grandsons and daughters of the slaves and earlier immigrants who tried to make a go in this American world, even though we were weighted down by slavery, colonialism, racism, discrimination, white supremacy, national oppression and the lies of a nation full of hypocrites and aggressive or passive oppressors. We are all a people whose minds and lives have been twisted by the desires of the powerful. They are sick but so are we. Part of the horror of America is that the oppressed too often side with their oppressors. They don’t want to slay them as Fanon reminded us, they want to be them.

I begin this way because what Piri has taught me. And we hung out for a couple of minutes a few times. I have some great flicks of us, overnighting in Newark, with the families, talking and drinking and laughing and cursing about America. This diseased thing.

I have spent much time and energy railing against the white out or bourgeoisification of our minds. Mainly the Afro American struggle to get past what DuBois described when he said, “Many people have suffered as much as we, but none of them was real estate.” The Double Consciousness! To see yourself through the eyes of people that hate you.

That before you can struggle against your enemies you must be able to distinguish yourself from them. To develop, to quote DuBois again, to develop a “true self consciousness.” To know who it is you are, and at the same time to know your enemy, with as much precision, the time, place and condition, as is possible.

And certainly education helps, that is why it so expensive. But not just book learning but the ground work of not only perceiving reality clearly but understanding it and being able to use it in a way that makes you grasp what you must do to move forward, to whatever degree of self determination, self respect and self defense. This world is alive with predators.

And what I learned from Piri is that it is the same struggle, but with perhaps slightly different “looks” as they say in football players’ jargon. Piri’s Down These Mean Streets came out in 1967, I myself had just been convicted of possession of two guns and a poem in the Newark Rebellion. The Judge said the poem, Black People, was a prescription for “Criminal Anarchy.” It was in Trenton State Prison that I met the author of Howard Street, Nathan Heard, who was serving a nine year sentence for armed robbery. Howard Street, published 1968 is a tale akin to Down These Mean Streets, it could be called Mean Streets of Newark.

It is that time, the middle sixties when all the dispossessed, in whatever fashion, took the lead from the Civil Rights Movement’s beginnings, the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the mi-50’s that ended up successfully eliminating the southern law that Black people ride in the back of the bus. That would have included Piri and all yall brown skin brothers and sisters whether you spoke Spanish or not.

But even earlier Puerto Rican nationalists had tried to waste Harry Truman and even attacked the US congress in 1954, led by Lolita Lebron to rain fire down on the legislators of the colonial power. In 1957 Kwame Nkrumah led the people of Ghana out of the shackles of British colonialism with the people singing “I’ll be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal you!” The next year the UN stopped stopped referring to Puerto Rico as a colony.

But in rapid fire, after they blew up Dr. King’s house in Montgomery, Alabama, there was another event that shook up the world, Jan. 1 1959, the Cuban Revolution. In 1960, Malcolm X appeared on television in Mike Wallace’s The Hate That Hate Produced, in July I went to Cuba and met Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

The world was in a torrent of change and this is the world Piri had struggled through the East Harlem barrio in. Tied to ignorance and poverty by colonialism, white supremacy and racism. These evils combined to throw him into jail for seven years. He mentions Claude Brown’s Manchild in The Promised Land, which came out in 1965 and Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, about the struggle against colonialism in Algeria and around the world which appeared in 1961. These are also texts of the time, descriptions of the struggle against slavery and colonialism as they reconfigured themselves in the 50’s and 60’s in the US against the post-slavery black slaves and the post-colonial colonial victims.

What made Down These Mean Streets and the others so heavy is that they appeared at the time of maximum rebellion against these evils of international oppression and greed, however they were called and no matter what euphemistic terms were used to disguise them.

But for me, what rings heaviest in Down These Mean Streets was the internal struggle that all these authors that Piri also cites, had to fight. The struggle between those who see the truth and those who are blind. Within our own ranks. The struggle within Piri’s family between those who would be white and those who must submit to their actual brownness. The fight with his brother and father are terrible records of that turmoil that still ravages our communities. The Double Consciousness—seeing ourselves through the eyes of people that hate us.

Piri’s commitment, after the confusing passage through el barrio, to find out what’s goin on, like Marvin Gaye said.

“I’m a Negro”, says Piri to his younger brother, Jose.
“You aint no nigger,” says Jose.
“I ain’t?”
“No, you’re a Puerto Rican.”
“I am, huh?” He looks at Jose and says, “…course you gotta say that Cause if I’m a Negro, then you and James is one too and that ain’t leaving out Sis and Poppa. Only Momma’s an exception. She don’t care what she is.”

This is followed by an actual fight, a rumble between brothers, but really a struggle between two ways of thinking. Piri leaves the house and declares he is going south with his Afro American roadie, Brew, to find out what’s really going on. To find out what the problem with being “negrito” is by journeying into the hell of the deep south. He finds out.

The funny aspect of what Piri is finding out, even as he is being beaten by the police and called a “nigger” is that as he explains “at least you could call me a Puerto Rican nigger.”

But most important is that Piri learns the truth of the Pan Africanist understanding. The truth of DuBois and Marti, that African slavery has made an African diaspora throughout the world that has spread the pain, destruction, poverty and oppression and with that, self hatred & hatred throughout the world. Where ever the Blackness of enslaved Africa has touched, whoever has been touched is so weighted with those evils. Not just in the United States, where many of the people, who would scream and be committed to suicide if they understood it, are certainly of mixed blood. Even the whitest of us.

But this is a bottom root, at the same time a cover for the real struggle between most people and their exploiters, the imperialists, the monopoly capitalists, whatever their color, though Europe and now the US can stick its foot up anybody’s behind with its Nay Toe.

Piri discovers this before he explodes out of his residence on the mean streets into seven years in the joint. And when he gets out he has become a sharp and burning voice as to what these mean streets are and who and what has made them this way and how they must be fought. I miss him today as I miss my comrade Louis Reyes Rivera, two voices of the actual in a world badly in need of the truth.

Down These Mean Streets opened the door for many into the world of the Puerto Rican Barrio. Just as Manchild and Howard Street let the intrepid check out the Black hoods of West Harlem and Newark. These were occasioned by the movement of the people in the real world, the large and small rebellions, the will to make revolution.

Those literary movements that issued out of the same mid century rumbling and explosions and actual revolutions—the Beats, The Black Arts Movement, The NuYorican—carried the legacy of the struggles in the real world. It is no coincidence that all these tales make reference to jail, the joint on the inside, the bigger one we move through daily. What Piri told us in Mean Streets I could confirm years later in Pedro Pietri’s Puerto Rican Obituary and Mikey Pinero’s The Book of Genesis According to St. Miguelito or to Miguel Algarin, Papaleto Melendez, Jose Angel Figueroa, Sandra Esteves, Louis Reyes Rivera…

Piri sd he didn’t want to be a cowboy or an athlete, that he was dreamer who wanted to think, make stories and find out things. El Diablo Grande has been trying to cover all our heroes and the great writings of those dreamers and thinkers and those who wanted to find out things. It is our work to resist, and not be cooled out and struggle once more to make revolution! Punto!

"I came gradually to want to prove nothing,” Gilbert Seldes writes in his introduction to The Stammering Century. This simple sentence is a key to this galvanic, awestruck chronicle of the revivals, cults, utopian communities, and radical reform movements that under Seldes’s gaze come together as a shadow history of the United States in the nineteenth century. His “original idea,” he said, was “a timid protest against the arrogance of reformers in general”—to strip “the persecuted reformers” of their claims to sainthood or martyrdom by pious comparison: I am persecuted, Christ was crucfied, therefore I am Christ. “It occurred to me,” Seldes wrote in perhaps the only really dull sentence of this book, “that a study of self-constituted saviors might serve as a check to this form of spiritual snobbery.” But Seldes found himself caught up in his story. He realized that to let his subjects speak in their own voices, to make their own kind of sense or nonsense, to give them the rope to hang themselves if that was where the story went, was a far greater thing.

The book was published in 1928; it was, Seldes wrote much later, an attempt to get to the “nature, the essential character of America”—and the nineteenth century was when America discovered itself. It was then that not only the likes of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence but people of all sorts began to talk to each other, making the great Jacksonian cacophony that Alexis de Tocqueville listened to with such wonder—though,finally, with less wonder than Seldes almost a century later.

Rolling carefully through forgotten testaments, manifestos, sermons, and prophecies—quoting at length, sometimes for pages at a time—Seldes emerged with drive, momentum, and in a hurry, leaving the reader in fright, dumfoundedness and most of all suspense. Seldes was certain that simply to get onto the page the stories of such avatars of absolute salvation as the revivalist Charles Finney, the killer prophet Matthias, or the “Perfect Communist” John Humphrey Noyes; of camp meetings where men and women seeking union with God delivered themselves into madness; or of communities where educated people cultivated a common insanity as philosophically impregnable as it was genteel, would be to leave his readers shaking heads in disbelief—until, suddenly, their own familiar world loomed up with strange faces uttering even stranger demands, perhaps speaking in the same messianic tones the reader might have just heard and dismissed, and every politician or minister, every public voice of any sort, sounded like a doomed and beckoning figure from the past.

“I came gradually to want to prove nothing.” In the cadence of the sentence you can hear a New England shopkeeper returning an overcharge, in its balance one of Shakespeare’s kings admitting guilt: in the way the strength and foreshadowing of “I came” yields to the slowly declining syllables of “gradually,” hear the words almost come to a halt with the hurdles of “to want to prove,” only to come back, with the listener now barely paying attention, with the hard, blunt no of “nothing.”

It is a cant-destroying voice—and it drives Seldes all across a country and a time so bent on the impossible that one can forget that the people one meets in his pages were true heirs of Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, walking in their footsteps, founding their own nations on a farm in Vermont, by the banks of a river in Kentucky, within the walls of a town house in New York. "There is now a certain opportunity,” wrote a founder of a new America in 1843—an America called Fruitlands, not far from Concord, Massachusetts, a new nation consisting of barely “a dozen adults and four or five children,” which lasted less than a year—“for planting a love colony which may be felt for many generations and more than felt; it may be the beginning of a state of things which shall far transcend itself.” That in a very few words catches the story told in The Stammering Century; like all of the book’s stories, it needs the anchor of Seldes’s eight words—his promise to the reader that the tale can tell itself—to keep it from floating right off into the sky.

Seldes turned thirty-five the year he published The Stammering Century. He had grown up in Alliance, New Jersey, where his father, a Russian Jewish immigrant who counted among his friends Emma Goldman and Big Bill Haywood, was a leader of an anarchist utopian community, founded in 1882, of some three hundred families. From 1921 to 1929 Seldes was the drama critic for The Dial; in 1924 he published The Seven Lively Arts, an affirmation of American popular culture that, whether people writing and talking and arguing today know it or not, has affected the American sense of self ever since. Written in Paris, “while on holiday some three thousand miles away from data, documents, and means of verification,” Seldes wrote, and “from memory,” today the book reads as a signal display of critical vision: most of those figures Seldes put forth as exemplars of the best America had to offer the world—D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, W. C. Handy, Ring Lardner, Fanny Brice and Al Jolson (sharing a chapter entitled “The Daemonic in American Theatre”), Florenz Ziegfeld, and George Herriman (his daily comic strip Krazy Kat, Seldes wrote, was the most "satisfying work of art produced in America”)—are still part of the American cultural conversation.

The book was an immediate success and celebrated on its own terms; its time-bound racism (“To anyone who inherits several thousand centuries of civilization,” Seldes wrote in a dismissal of black jazz in favor of Paul Whiteman, “none of the things the negro offers can matter unless they are apprehended by the mind as well as by the body and the spirit”) went unnoticed in respectable commentary. It was a feel-good book: it gave people permission to like what they actually liked, to be moved by what actually moved them. The Stammering Century was not a feel-good book. It was far more ambitious than The Seven Lively Arts, sprawling and crawling through the countryside and back alleys rather than striding confidently down Broadway. It shouted and whispered, and, like an invisible time-traveling journalist listening in as a century spilled its secrets, the book swiftly disappeared—“received,” as Seldes wrote in a note to a 1964 edition, “without enthusiasm except by a few reviewers who hated it.” It remains a bible, a grand genealogy, of American dreaming in action.

"This stammering century” was Horace Greeley’s pronouncement on his own era. Seldes hears two centuries at once. He hears a "fluent” mainstream composed of apostles of progress, Indian war cries, the loud talk of forty-niners, “the broad tongue of the immigrant,” anti-abolitionist mobs in Boston attacking fugitive slaves, the likes of Daniel Webster, William Cullen Bryant, and the celebrated orator Edward Everett—forgotten, as Lincoln predicted the speakers at Gettsyburg would be, for the eleven thousand words Everett offered there before Lincoln’s two hundred and seventy that followed. “Our government is in theory perfect,” Seldes quotes Everett, “and in its operation it is perfect also. Thus we have solved the great problem in human affairs.” But while the clear-tongued “were proclaiming the Gilded Age and the great promise of America,” Seldes writes, “other men were vehemently stammering out God’s curse on material progress and announcing Christ’s kingdom on earth, or the New Eden in Indiana.” They were monomaniacs, mystics, sexual reformers, death deniers, “eccentrics, fools, faddists, and madmen; but they were all concerned with the same thing: salvation,” either by a grace broughtdown from God or through their own actions to escape the material necessities of toil and suffering. "They looked for some end to earthly sorrows, to some perfection that could atone for our imperfect life on earth.”

Seldes sees the beginning of his story in the revival unleashed by Jonathan Edwards in Enfield, Massachusetts, in 1741, when Edwards—whom Seldes all but worships as a “merciless logician,” as subtle a prose stylist as America has ever produced, and a mystic capable of combining both logic and style into an apprehension of nature indistinguishable from sensual ecstasy—offered his congregants the sermon that has come down to us as “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Seldes’s rich and risky portrait of Edwards may go farther than Perry Miller’s complex and penetrating 1949 intellectual biography; sometimes, Seldes’s pages touch Edwards’s own “The Beauty of the World,” as indelible an American essay as any there is. It is so full of its own ecstasy that Seldes’s historical argument—that Edwards opened up a century of spiritual anarchy with “his doctrine of direct communication between man and God”—fades against his account of Edwards acting out his own play. “By making salvation the single end of man, by insisting that it was wholly God’s work, and at the same time accepting the physical signs of personal communication with the Holy Spirit, Edwards broke down the wall surrounding the ministry, and cleared the way for cults,” Seldes writes. But the drama! “Thinking of him in the dim dreary churches of colonial New England, engaged in disputation, driving grim men and starved women into frenzies of fear and hysteria, we find it hard to say the word but, in justice it must be said, he knew the essence of rapture,” Seldes writes, and then pushes on. “It is rapture without hysteria, without sham, and it never left him. When he saw Nature he recovered the emotion, because he knew that the world was the world of God...The golden edges of an evening cloud, the sun in his strength, the apparition of comets, the ragged rock, all exalted him.” And further: as Edwards apprehended the work of God, he saw what God must have seen as He worked.

He lowered himself infinitely, and the infinity of his lowness met, in the infinite, the Infinity of God; met, and became one with it. The two poles of man’s life, as Edwards knew them, were to be lower than the dust before God, and to know God: the ecstasy of abasement and the ecstasy of union. As he accomplished both it is possible that somewhere, in the obscure places of his heart, he felt himself God.

And that profound intoxication, Seldes goes on to show, is what Edwards really passed on. As a history, as a portrait of a phantom nation, The Stammering Century truly takes off with “Gasper River,” a composite account, drawn from the testimony of participants and observers, of an all-night camp meeting set in the Kentucky forest at the turn of the nineteenth century: Edwards’s ecstasy taken up and turned into a horror movie. As Seldes sets the scene, there is melodrama, high stakes, and most of all empathy; a sense of “You Are There” driven by Seldes willing himself into the event.

Men and women who had perhaps seen no strange face in half a year, or had been huddled together in a group of twenty or thirty for many months, suddenly found themselves in crowds of thousands. . . Before he began to speak, the preacher had already effected the release of his audience. He had set them free from loneliness and the burdensome companionship of their own troubles . . .The strange wind that had blown them together swayed the multitude like a field of grain. The preacher had only to put in the sickle and reap.

In a lust to touch God, to feel themselves released from sin, from the weight of their own identities, their own personalities, their own bodies, people descend into catatonic trances lasting sixteen hours or more. They tear their hair. “Others try to beat their way out of the encampment, but are paralyzed and some are torn with indecision, fearing the descent of the spirit and powerless to escape it.” Crowds are convulsed with spasmodic jerks—to the point that, according to one witness, a man snapped his neck and died. “Men and women are down on all fours growling and snapping their teeth and barking like dogs,” Seldes writes—and you can imagine that the storied description of the death, from poison, of the blues singer Robert Johnson, down on his hands and knees and barking like a dog, is less a literal account, or even a rumor, than a mandated cultural memory, a signifier, a way of saying that when one plays with the devil, as Johnson did in “Me and the Devil Blues” and “Hellhound on My Trail,” this is how that person’s fate must be described. Gospel shouters and speakers in tongues believe themselves to be vessels of the Holy Ghost, but the wall between the divine and the devil was sometimes as thin as paper: “underneath it all,” the guitarist and music historian John Fahey once said, “I hear pan pipes tooting and a cloven hoof beating time.”

In Seldes’s telling, utopian communities emerged out of the individual’s pursuit of salvation from sin—a pursuit that remains as powerful a force in American life today as it was two hundred years ago. Those communities pushed into their own wildernesses. They carried men and women farther than any could have gone on their own. The conviction that the saved were without sin moved, in a collectivity where all things, from property to children to spouses to beliefs, were to be held in common, to the doctrine that whoever was truly saved was incapable of sin—a heresy carried through Western Europe in the Middle Ages by the Brethren of the Free Spirit, revived among the Anabaptists in Münster in the sixteenth century and again by the Ranters in England a century after that. Seldes stays away from the Shakers and the Mormons—so many others had covered that ground. He takes a single cult, the Rappites of Harmony, Indiana (and then Economy, Pennsylvania—the names go by so fast), abjuring sexual intercourse, combining “a peculiar blend of communism” and "absolute despotic control" as a template, and then raises the curtain: “Over the background, the foreground, the middle-ground,” Seldes writes in a line that will echo through the nineteenth century, “lies the shadow of a single man,” who “held his position by direct order of God, and had received God’s promise.”

Two figures, playing out this role to its furthest extremes, are at the heart of The Stammering Century: Robert Matthias, born Robert Matthews in New York City in 1788, who ruled as God in Manhattan from 1830 to 1835 before disappearing in the early 1840s; and John Humphrey Noyes, born in Brattleboro, Vermont, in 1811, who founded the Oneida community in upstate New York in 1848, and died in Canada in 1886. Edwards hovers behind both prophets, but so do Jefferson and Madison. The Declaration of Independence pronounced people free, and as the words “the pursuit of Happiness” germinated in the American mind, they were less a right than a command. There were absolutely no limits as to who could carry its banner or what it could mean. In its less noisy way, the call “to form a more perfect Union” opened the same doors. With those words the Constitution not only legitimated but, to many, with the words floating in the American air,obligated free people to create new communities, new symbolic and completed Americas. Matthias and Noyes—the first a madman, the second, in Seldes’s hands, a kind of saint—were divines; they were also patriots.

“Matthias, ragged and penniless, stands at the outskirts of a Finney revival,” Seldes writes, the scene so vividly set you instantly see the man, and you want to know what happens next. There is “a suggestion of little cults and backwoods degeneracy” in Matthias’s early life in upstate New York; as an orphan he was blessed by—Seldes could not have made this up, though he might have wished to—a “minister of the Anti-Burgher branch of the Seceders.” As the reincarnation of the biblical Matthias, who replaced Judas among the apostles, he dove into religious insanity and embraced every answer—temperance, vegetarianism, beardedness—as an absolute. He prophesied the destruction of Albany, fled to the hills, traveled as a preacher through the Ozarks, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia: “He returned to New York where he could be seen daily promenading along the Battery, his beard unkempt, his nails filthy, his clothes torn, but walking with a majestic gait, shouting his exhortations to loafers and children.” Soon he would gather a few disciples—two rich white couples and two young black women—and then, with all they had now his, he returned to the Battery gate in a luxurious horse-drawn carriage: “His great height, his long wavy hair, his coarse curly beard and mustaches, and his green coat,figured vest and black pantaloons, with a sash of crimson silk around his waist, made him one of the most striking !gures in the New York of the early Thirties.”

In a single house, he built a new Jerusalem. Like Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Jim Jones, David Koresh, and countless more after him, he declared sexual suzerainty over his followers, took a wife from her husband, and married him to one of his own daughters; his rituals, Seldes recounts, included immersing himself in a barrel of water, “thereby sanctifying it, and from it sprinkling the naked women of his sect who stood by.” When his kingdom began to crumble—one of his followers received a message from God not to give Matthias more money—he turned almost certainly to murder, likely poisoning one man to death man and trying to poison another, though he was acquitted after a scandalous trial. In the end, there was only one disciple, the young Isabella Van Wagenen, born a slave, to whom Matthias would sometimes preach all day and all night, who never disavowed him. Matthias almost surely did not live to know, and Seldes did not know that, as Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz discovered while researching their 1994 study The Kingdom of Matthias, this was the woman who became Sojourner Truth—thus allowing Matthias to leave a mark on the American story that will never be erased.

When Seldes wrote in 1928, the shadow of the story he was telling hung over him. It was a time when, as he framed his history, the post–Civil War prohibitionist movements that represented a gruesome perversion and degradation of revivalism and utopianism, and which take up the last, by comparison, dispiriting chapters of The Stammering Century, ruled the land. The sale and consumption of alcohol had been banned since 1919 by the Eighteenth Amendment (in his 1930 The Future of Drinking, Seldes wrote that it “would be nullified in practice, but would never be repealed”); discussing John Humphrey Noyes’s “theory of Male Continence,” Seldes was obliged to note that, “as it describes a means of preventing unwanted children from being born, I am not permitted, under the laws of the United States and under the eye of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, to quote him.” Ads for Oneida silverware, one of the products that made Noyes’s communist utopia a vast financial success, could still be found “on the back cover of the Saturday Evening Post,” as they can be found online today. As Seldes looked back to his own childhood in Alliance, or perhaps remembered a letter he wrote to a cousin in 1910 (“My belief in myself transcends all beliefs in Divinity. I am a Divinity to myself. Were I not, then the world were not”), the tales that were already passing into oblivion were not really so far away—though not as close as they might remain in the spooky aura of Lauren Groff's Arcadia, a novel about the way the instinct to reenact the stories Seldes told is, precisely, in “the nature, the essential character of America.” Groff's novel was published in 2012, generations after Seldes published The Stammering Century.

This is the tale of a 1970s cult that, with a few names changed, is founded on the site of Noyes’s original Oneida colony, in the ruins of the great Oneida community hall. So spookily, as if she has transcended time, an old woman recounts the origin myth:

They called themselves Divinists, because they believed that people could become perfect, therefore divine. They believed that intercourse was a gift from God and had great quantities of it with everyone in the community. To avoid the consequences, namely babies and love, they had a rotational schedule: every night, a new woman with a new man, and the men had to release themselves into their handkerchiefs . . . But then their leader, John Noland, my great-grandfather, decided it was time to reproduce. He had gone to a Shaker community and saw that they were in danger of dying out, and didn’t wish that upon his people. And so they instituted a program called Egeniculture. The most spiritual men and the most spiritual young women were allowed to mate, after a very thorough matching. Of course because the most spiritual men were old men, and nobody was more spiritual than John Noland, out of forty-eight babies born, twenty-three were his.

Over many deeply complex, sometimes displacingly thrilling pages on John Humphry Noyes and Oneida, Seldes tells the same story in The Stammering Century, step by step, revelation by revelation: the story of a man who “built a community on the idea that the Second Coming of Christ had already taken place, and that, therefore, man can be perfect in this life,” as “free from law” as one was “from sin”; a man who “on the foundation of his religious and sexual innovations . . .built an industrial organization, abolishing private property and wages. Combining the three, he created the perfect communism which, he asks us to believe, abolishes Death.” In Seldes’s hands it is too complex and subtle, too much a work of art, to catch here; it is the wonder of the book, and thus best left to the reader to discover.

"The glory breaks upon us in diminished splendor,” Seldes says finally of Noyes’s Perfectionism. “What is hard to understand is not the doctrine itself, but the fact that anyone could believe it.” And yet, as with almost all of the men and women who appear in The Stammering Century, wandering through the years, Seldes tried to believe it. In the supreme act of skeptical empathy that marks his entire book, he tried to enter into the minds and hearts of the men and women who, to him, were the real American pioneers, the untrammeled American idealists, the ones who, more than he, put the American credo into practice, strange practice, blessed practice, cursed practice—those who found themselves in the adventure, and then were mostly lost to history, until a curious critic came along to march them forward.

Thanks to Robert Christgau and the late Peter C. Marzio.

My absolute crush at the time was the beautiful tall elegant African Lady who lived on the 4th Floor. She was always wrapped in heavy fabric with rich colours and stylized patterns that might be ancient symbols. She didn’t wear jeans or suits, only dresses that draped and tied and fitted her form perfectly. In the winter, she didn’t wear a coat but a long wool cape. I liked the way she took up space when she moved. She wore bold jewellery and high hair that was more a work of art than a political statement. Every time I saw her on the stairs I could see in her careful coiffure where our corn rows had come from, our box plaits, twists and even that very old time country style of wrapping braids in yarn had begun. I thought there was kinship here, an authenticity and grandeur that I could emulate.

Because I was a young person with energy and ideals I was asked by the tenants to approach the African Lady to join us. I could never catch her in, not even when I knew she was there in her apartment, would she answer the door for me. But when the white landlord came to her door just before Thanksgiving, she opened it and because I was sweeping and mopping the stairs on the landing below I heard their conversation when her voice rose and let out my nightmare. “You can’t talk to me like that. I am not one of these ex-slaves you are used to bullying about. I am a Nigerian!!” And our landlord said back to her. “I don’t care what kind of nigger you call yourself you pay your rent and you pay it on time.”

I felt bad for the African Lady but I also recognised that I too had been wounded in that encounter on the 4th floor.

Fast forward and it’s April 11th 2013 in the North of England and I have rushed into Sheffield with my friends to catch up with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who has decided to open the tour of her new novel Americanah here in Yorkshire. I have known, studied and indeed lived in Africa for a time so I am not the same girl desperate for approval that I once was. Still I recognise in the regal gait and elaborate grooming of Chimamanda something of the African Lady I loved as a girl.

This is a long awaited and much anticipated third novel. But unlike Purple Hibiscus and Half a Yellow Sun, this novel is not set in Nigeria and does not really add to outsiders’ knowledge of that part of the world. The continent, the family and parents of the protagonist, Ifemelu, are more like mountains off in the distance from the narrative. Perhaps because of this, there is a yearning in Americanah, a grinding homesickness and displacement which is offset only by the fact that her heroine has the option to return home.

Ifemelu is a fabulous character. She is coping with America – at least certain parts of it, and looking to understand the differences between a place like Princeton and a place like Trenton. She is trying to understand why she has to leave Princeton in order to get her hair done in a natural style. And she is also trying to help other people new to the country understand the ways of America’s complex and bewildering culture(s). The novel too is complex, multi-layered, multi-storied. One British critic called it “exhausting.” There is an attempt to get to grips with American obsessions about race and to compare the American experience with the British. But that’s like trying to mix oil and water. There’s a lot of furious shaking but beyond a certain level the comparisons she wants to make between the UK and the US around “race” simply do not work.

Americanah is Adichie’s sweet but often barbed commentary on the US. The title while sounding like Americana, is, in the mouth of anyone from West Africa, a rebuke, a denunciation. Of course there are many tones to accompany the insult. Gently mocking. Howling with derision. Among friends – a light reminder not to be so pompous.

Some readers in the US will choose to take the novel as a poke in the eye. Others will recognize the book as affectionate too. It is not an angry work, as she said in Sheffield. “You have not yet seen me do angry. I can do angry very well and this is not it.”

And it is not chiefly or, better, solely, about race. Adichie herself claims that it is about love. Particularly self-love. Subtly provocative and written with supreme deftness, Americanah helps us understand that identity is always partial and contingent and yes, exhausting. Certainly, Adichie shows us that to be African and then to endure the process of becoming Black is a massive journey, not just a plane ride.

I come out of the theatre into the cold and my mind harks back to the African Lady and the incident on the 4th Floor of that dilapidated building in Crown Heights. We got a new boiler in the end before Christmas in 1973 and much later I became a trade unionist, community worker and, after moving to the UK, what would be regarded in the US as an Associate Professor in the social sciences.

After so many years I know what it is to live in another country and my heart reaches out to Ifemelu and others like her. I have always wondered what happened to the African Lady. It was said that she sneaked out of the building late one night. No one really knew what happened. For myself always, I like to think that somehow or another she made it home.

“Knickerbocker basketball is on the air.” That old phrase kept recurring to me whenever I got home early to watch a playoff game at 4 or 5 PM (as needed) this year, for this Knick team, warts and flaws notwithstanding, was always worth the watch. The reason for the early start is that I now live in San Francisco, have for nearly thirty years, but the Knicks in the last two years have captivated me in a way that goes way beyond geographical boundaries.

Despite having loved Carmelo Anthony’s play at Syracuse - where he stayed only one year, but brought lifer Coach Jim Boeheim his only NCAA championship - I had written him off as a selfish one-dimensional player while he was with the Denver Nuggets. That impression was confirmed in his early days with the Knicks, when he seemed to tarnish - even ruin - Amar’e Stoudemire, along with the chemistry that had fuelled Linsanity.

Yet I have now come to love watching Anthony play nearly as much as I do LeBron James; maybe more, due to the added suspense of an uncertain outcome, which brings me to another wonder: what an incredible assortment of individuals comprised the Knick team that Coach Mike Woodson took such a long way before getting derailed by a formidable Indiana team that Charles Barkley was telling us early on would defeat New York, and prevent the long-anticipated matchup with LeBron’s defending champion Miami Heat.

With that match-up no longer possible, the playoffs - especially with Golden State also being eliminated (by San Antonio) - suddenly lost their interest for me. I was certain that soon, after I briefly mourned, LeBron would bring them alive again, but there would never emerge that classic confrontation of James and Anthony.

II. Artists in Different Keys: Carmelo and LeBron

LeBron James is universally known for his inhuman physical gifts, from size and strength equal to the league’s most athletic giants, to speed and agility characteristic of the best guards. All these traits enable him, uniquely, to guard any player at any position. Yet reporters routinely remark that it is his mental equipment - his ability to read, change, and react to the constant flow of a game - that distinguishes the mature James as much as his physical prowess. He is, simply put, a basketball genius.

Whereas Carmelo, his close friend, is the consummate scorer, reminiscent even of Bernard King. Unlike James, Anthony rarely takes in all aspects of a game, but rules it through his scoring. Yet this domination is only achieved when he is able to blend some judicious passing into his game. And that of course depends on team-mates being able to make shots, to take some of the load off his shoulders, thus allowing him to play within himself, and overcome his natural instinct to score at all times.

I think of Anthony as a prince of hard bop. Solid definition characterizes his game at every move. By contrast, LeBron’s fluidity and ability to morph himself into the very action that he is enveloping and encompassing echoes Monk and Mingus, with a supreme overriding Coltrane flavor. He can make any melody work; forces nothing. Not so for Melo, whose clarity and often-astonishing precision in movement harkens back to Oscar Robertson. I sometimes think of him as a spoiled, petulant Oscar; a bit of Earl Monroe too, it could be argued.

Watching tapes of Knick playoff games, you can see him making decisions, all of which a discerning viewer (no genius required) can fully viscerally understand. One can feel as if he/she were Carmelo for that moment, that play, that superb effort leading to a score. With Melo, the flow is not continuous, certainly never infinite; there are discrete options: two horns; he’s playing them both; only question is which one. Whereas for James, his acts and the game’s flow somehow merge and echo one another. Melo fashions his games, sculpts; James is too caught up in motion to sculpt. But both are true artists. I will miss Carmelo’s special exuberant moments. I have saved three of his best games on my DVR; he is a joy to watch.

But beyond Carmelo and his personal battles with James, this year’s Knick squad - in both in its joyous abandon and its periodic dysfunction - had captured my imagination. How and why would I so miss them? It isn’t about home-town chauvinism for me: growing up in New York as an adolescent, with the Knicks slipping into mediocrity (often comic mediocrity), I became a St. Louis Hawks fan. I took the struggling Knicks totally for granted, all the while giving thanks for the first games of Garden double-headers; many times, my friends and I left after only a half of the “second game.” Eschewing regional loyalties, once my hero Bob Pettit retired, I came to be a fan of teams that played the game beautifully well, as long as they didn’t wear Celtic green.

Walt Frazier’s Knicks, under Red Holzman, won two titles, and fit that bill perfectly. So did Bill Walton’s Portland Trail Blazers. Both teams became icons of perfectly played team basketball. Their smooth unselfishness was a joy to watch for fans of all stripes, from all locations. They came to define both chemistry and legitimacy. You didn’t have to be a Knick fan to embrace that Knick team, any more than you had to live in Portland to love those Trail Blazers.

But there have been many other, less aesthetically pleasing iterations of the Knicks, including Pat Riley’s Thug Squads of the Michael Jordan Era, extending through the years of mismanagement under Isaiah Thomas, and the reconstruction orchestrated by Donnie Walsh. Last year’s season had the dramatic structure of a five act farce, with plot reversals and climaxes galore. Perhaps it’s having to finesse change through obtuse owner James Dolan that makes it all seem so precarious.

What made this such a special group (even though they fell short of their high expectations)? Was it simply that they were representing the Knicks? Look, L.A. is still the transplanted Minneapolis Lakers, the Knicks’ tormentors when I was first starting out. And Phil Jackson came up as a gangly rhythm-disrupting Knick sub, a pub at Red Holzman’s tit, while Don Nelson was nursing at the other Red’s inflated one in Boston. Besides, Auerbach was from Brooklyn, you know. Jack Nicholson is a great actor and man about town, but Woody Allen and Spike Lee grew up in the cheap seats after a subway ride in from (where else?) Brooklyn.

The Knicks, who were the first team to sport a black-only roster, have had more than their share of bad black dudes: from Spencer Haywood, though the ultimate 1970’s backcourt of Micheal Ray Richardson and Ray Williams. So there is plenty of precedent for Carmelo Anthony, J.R. Smith, and Iman Shumpert! As there should be in New York. The most Jewish of cities, it led the basketball world in great Jewish players, who dominated the game for many years.

This year’s cast of characters, as assembled and blended by Coach Mike Woodson, suggested to me a kind of a re-working of Robert Downey’s classic film Putney Swope, in which the inmates run the asylum with perfect cover from the titular boss. It’s an admittedly loose analogy, but how else to categorize the colorful cast of Shumpert, Smith, Raymond Felton, Chris Copeland, joining the near-geriatric cohort of Rasheed Wallace, Jason Kidd, Marcus Camby, Kurt Thomas, and Kenyon Martin, and former European star Pablo Prigioni?

Tyson Chandler’s inability to make even the simplest shots (despite his ridiculously high shooting percentage) rendered him a sadly comic figure when things started to go wrong against Indiana. But what else went so awry in destroying the chemistry and flair that characterized the Knicks when all cylinders were clicking was the astonishing demise of J.R. Smith, who had become that second scorer that great stars need in order to release pressure. Though not exactly Dywane Wade, Smith had scoring sprees that were often prodigious. His ability to make long and difficult shots - and exciting ones - had given the Knicks a spark, and allowed Anthony moments of rest on the court, as well as vicarious excitement, as Smith’s scoring feats seemed so fashioned upon Anthony’s as to make him seem a perfect sidekick, at times almost a clone.

But with the Knicks up 3-0 against the Boston Celtic, Smith, who had gone from being a multi-talented head case to the deserving winner of the NBA Sixth Man Award, reverted to his old immature ways, threw an unnecessary and wildly self-indulgent elbow, and drew a one game suspension from which neither he nor the Knicks ever recovered. Adding the conflagration that would consume the Knicks, the insouciant Smith was seen out late “clubbing” with celebrities.

III. Dirge

Anthony had been brilliant against Boston for the first three games and much of the fourth, but thereafter was never consistently himself, only in spurts, and Smith, that unabashed great gunner, could no longer shoot. The pattern and the cohesion had been destroyed. The other saxophone in Melo's band had been muted; his solos alone had to supply the band’s energy.

They still got by Boston, but Indiana was too strong. It would take LeBron’s genius - and his buddies - to stop them.[1]

Melo’s lack of Jamesian comprehension and intelligence was evident in his oddly skewed pre-game conceptualization of “whatever it takes.” Note the confusion of “I” and “we”: “It’s do whatever it takes, even if that’s 60 points and 20 rebounds; whatever it takes, I have to do it, we have to do it, as a team.”[2]

In the final loss to the Pacers, Anthony’s twenty point first half was off-set by Brooklyn’s Abraham Lincoln High School product Lance Stephenson’s sixteen points and eight rebounds (on his way to 25 and ten). Stevenson brought a special intensity that was obvious from his wildly focused eyes to his pounding style, as befits a four year state champion in New York and the highest scorer in New York State history.

Anthony had been carrying the team by himself but could not keep pace; he labored mightily to try to ignite a sputtering offense. In Game Five, when he somehow led the Knick offense briefly back into a high enough gear to catch up, you could see him having to struggle extra hard.

In Game Six, the effort seemed to be all there again but it just wasn't happening. Then, in a sudden turnaround by his cold-shooting team-mates, four threes in 100 seconds (the first three by Shumpert) turned a budding 72-60 rout into a 72-72 tie. The Knicks led 92-90 when Anthony attacked the rim, but was met there by Indiana’s massive center Roy Hibbert, who spectacularly rejected the shot, and took the life out of New York’s comeback, igniting a 9-0 Pacer run. Carmelo, exhausted, was futile thereafter: frustration, an ankle turn, three fourth-quarter turnovers. Out: 106-99.[3]

Ironically, just a day before they were eliminated, in the process of clearing out miscellaneous papers over-crowding my desk, I came across a poem I had written in 2010 entitled “Death and the Knicks.” It was not about playoff elimination; it was a dirge prompted by the death of 1950’s Knick guard Dick McGuire. It brought back memories of the lovable but less than championship caliber Knicks that I grew up watching at the old Garden.

The 2013 Knicks have now died as well. They will not soon again be significant, despite their wildly exciting run. This was their best chance, in an increasingly powerful Eastern Conference, where several stars (Derrick Rose, Danny Granger, Rajon Rondo) of already contending teams are expected back from injuries. The Knicks can only contend if Shumpert, only 23 now, quickly blossoms into a star.[4] No-one else on the roster has much of what everyone now calls “upside.”

Though we come to praise Anthony, we must bury him as well. Going forward, as people like to say, it appears to be LeBron’s league now, but NBA eras overlap. Was there a Duncan era? If so, is it over? This is Tim’s seventeenth year, yielding four titles, though never two in a row.

LeBron’s first trip to the Finals, for Cleveland in 2007, was thwarted by the Spurs in just four games. They may meet again in June. Closure, along with poetic justice, would so demand. But were the decision to be made on the basis of poetry alone, Carmelo would be there too.

Notes

1 A perfect example of LeBron’s genius came in Game One against Indiana: down one point with 2.2 seconds remaining, the shot James got for himself was a point blank lay-up.

2 I’m reminded of Tim Hardaway’s misconception that unselfishness meant working to boost one’s assists per game average.

3 Anthony’s 35 in three quarters, with only four in the fourth quarter, recalled Roger Brown’s 1960 39 point game for Wingate against Boys High with Connie Hawkins.

4 Looking like he stepped out of the '50s to sing lead for The Platters, he certainly has the requisite bearing and charisma.

On behalf of First, I'd like to thank McKenzie Wark and Verso Books for allowing us to reprint "The Devil's Party" from The Spectacle of Disintegration. B.D.

Fortune against envy; fame against oblivion.
Baltasar Gracián

“Shipwreckers have their name writ only on water.”[1] Debord takes it to be Shelley’s epitaph, but it is also Debord’s. His last film, In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni (1978), perhaps his masterpiece, has an aquatic mood. The eddies and currents of the river as it flows into the sea are so many situations that form and disperse on its surface, to be replaced by others, and still others. In Girum has a slower rhythm, a more somber mood than Society of the Spectacle. The emphasis shifts toward a more fine-grained denunciation of the colonization of everyday life by spectacular images of the commodified world.

Against this, Debord can only posit the remembrance of lost friends and the implacable onrush of a historical time, which will return no matter how much the spectacle denies its existence. Martine Barraqué: “And oddly, while working on the last film (what I am telling you is quite harsh, right?) I had the impression of working with a veteran of war. That he could not write anything else that was new—that everything kept turning round and round in the usual ways because he had already said it all.”

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni. The palindrome of the title means something like: We go into the circle by night; we are consumed by fire. If water is a figure for a particular quality of time, fire is another. The momentary conflagration, the clash of forces, the cavalry charge, or the fatal bullet which, Debord once noted, killed an uncommon number of his friends.[2] Fire is the other elemental time, and if we all are borne along by a liquid current, there are those few, those happy few, who are the friends of fire; the devil’s party, orbiting the flame, like moths to enlightenment. By the time of In Girum, the party of fire is a diminished band, the everyday situation no longer seems quite so resonant with a wider historical current. In the disintegrating spectacle negation no longer works against it from without. All that remains is the spark of a memory, to be recalled, over and over, until it torches time again.

In Girum détourns scenes from movies as Spectacle does, and sometimes the same films, but to different effect. Shanghai Gesture appears again, but this time Debord chooses not Gene Tierney but Victor Mature playing Doctor Omar, who describes himself as “a doctor of nothing … it sounds important and hurts no one, unlike most doctors.” Doctor Omar even has the temerity to steal a line from the Roman playwright Terence: “I am a thoroughbred mongrel. I am related to all the earth and nothing human is foreign to me.”[3]

He is the first of a series of characters appearing in In Girum who might be described as being of the devil’s party, agents of deception and division. While Robin Hood and Zorro make appearances as rather more straightforward fantasies of redemption from within the spectacle, Debord is drawn to the more ambivalent and dangerous trickster figure. Robin Hood and Zorro uphold the true society against the false one. Like Censor’s tract, the devil’s party undermines the true and the false order alike by appearing to be in possession of the secret of the relation between them.

Most of the films détourned in Debord’s seventies films are from his youth. A certain veiled autobiographical quality resides in them. Two seem to have particular resonance in this regard. Director Marcel Carné (1906–96) and screen-writer Jacques Prévert (1900–77) collaborated on two great films during the occupation, Les Visiteurs du soir (1942) and Children of Paradise (1945). Carné and Prévert were leftists before the war. Drawing from Surrealism and popular cultural forms, they were leading exponents of a style sometimes called poetic realism.[4] Their wartime films were big productions, sanctioned by the pro-Nazi film apparatus, but were neither Nazi propaganda nor simply coded resistance allegories. These films and their makers fell rapidly out of favor with postwar audiences and taste-makers alike. It didn’t help that Arletty, who stars in both, was accused of collaboration. (Arletty: “My heart belongs to France, but my ass belongs to the world.”) These films later became a particular foil for new-wave filmmakers such as François Truffaut. That Debord would borrow scenes from them in 1978 comes with more than a few layers of significance.

Debord ignores the narratives and discards most of the major characters. He concentrates on the character of the Devil from Visiteurs and of Lacenaire from Paradise. “I come from far away. Forgotten in his own country, unknown elsewhere, such is the fate of the traveler,” says the Devil. He is the principle of division, the agent of historical time. Of the comrades of his youth, Debord will say they were “people quite sincerely ready to set the world on fire just to give it more brilliance.”[5] Or as the Devil says, “I dearly love fire! And it loves me.” In Visiteurs, the Devil sends his emissaries, Dominique and Gilles, into the world to create division through a little gender-queer sexual intrigue. As Gilles sings: “sad lost children, we wander in the night.” Or as Dominique explains the game: “Other people love us, and they suffer for us. We watch them and then we go away. A fine journey, with the Devil paying the expenses.”

“I declared war on society long ago.” From Paradise Debord takes mostly the character of Pierre François Lacenaire (1800–36), a real historical figure, the criminal-poet-philosopher, who was the model for Raskolnikov and fascinated many writers from Stendhal to André Breton. In his Memoirs, Lacenaire wrote, “I come to preach the religion of Fear to the rich, for the religion of Love has no power over them.”[6] The Lacenaire of Paradise says to some uncomprehending bourgeois: “It takes all kinds to make a world— or to unmake it.” Later he will pronounce his own panegyric: “I’ve become famous. I’ve pulled off a few little crimes and created quite a sensation.” Like the real-life Lacenaire, he would have preferred a literary success, but will settle for lasting infamy. “I have no vanity. I have only pride,” he says. If, as Adorno says, “every work of art is an uncommitted crime,” then to Lacenaire every crime is an act of commitment. Or as Vaneigem says of Lacenaire: “Intrinsic to the logic of an unlivable society, murder, thus conceived, can only appear as the concave form of the gift.”[7]

In Girum concerns itself with the world after a series of failed revolutions: France 1968, Italy 1969, Portugal 1974, Italy again in 1977. The flaming moment has passed. The camera holds steady on still pictures of everyday life invaded by the commodity. Debordian insolence is replaced by contempt. But if anything the pathos of the power of memory as the half-life of life itself, the distillate of lived time, is all the stronger. The small-mesh interpersonal aspect of such a project has its stand-ins, such as Doctor Omar, Lacenaire and the Devil.

The large-scale historical moment has its stand-ins as well. From the otherwise appalling Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), Debord selects the famous scenes director Michael Curtiz made of the charge itself. From They Died with Their Boots On (1941), Raoul Walsh’s truly fantastic version of the life of George Custer—another film much used in Spectacle—Debord takes the scene of Custer’s last stand at Little Big Horn. The cavalry charge is a particle of the combustible moment of historical action. The charge is to coarse-grained events what Omar, the Devil and Lacenaire are to finer ones.

“History advances with its bad side first,” as Debord détourns Marx and Engels from the Holy Family.[8] Representations—whether art or literature, cinema or song—are where the situation of lived time goes to die. They are the backwash of exhausted forces, which, in exhausting themselves, make the times otherwise. The seventies are a time in which all such forces appear spent. The charge is over, and it is not so much that the good guys lost, as that the fulcrum of conflict, the principle of division, disappears.

The eighties will be a time when the ruling class goes on the offensive again. But its victory is its undoing. Pursued to its limit, the spectacle undoes itself, and in so doing will create the conditions under which the party of fire might appear again, and the critique of the society of the spectacle in acts will reappear, dragging its theoretical understanding along, belatedly, behind it. It is as memory that failed moments of historical action have their other power. Cinema, and the spectacle in general, does a good job of subsuming and defusing the qualitative. It cannot abolish it. The spectacle is haunted by what negates it. Or so Debord seemed to think at the time. In the nineties his mood grew darker.

The police found his friend dead at the wheel of his car in an underground parking lot, with four bullet wounds in the back of his head. No money was taken, only his identification papers. In his pocket was a scrap of paper with the name ‘François.’ Gérard Lebovici was an agent and producer in the French movie business. The Nazis killed his mother in the camps. When his father died, he had to give up his ambition to be an actor. In 1960 he founded his own management agency. He was radicalized by 1968 and by his wife Floriana, née Valentin. In 1969 he founded the publishing house Champ Libre, which republished Debord’s Society of the Spectacle in 1971.

Debord denied having any editorial role at Champ Libre, but as his relationship to Lebovici became close, it did start to produce something like a Debordian canon, which grew to include editions of Carl von Clausewitz, Baltasar Gracián, George Orwell, Karl Korsch, and Debord’s own translations of the poetry of Jorge Manrique. The filmmaker Olivier Assayas, for whom Champ Libre was something of an education, best captures its qualities: “I remember, I was twenty when the Champ Libre reissue of the Internationale Situationiste bulletins came out in 1975. I was discovering Paris … In Champ Libre’s catalogue, even if Debord denies it—there resides something that emanates from his thought … The unique feature of Champ Libre’s editorial project was to have provided an extension of Debord’s ongoing dialogue with the works of the past, with the nebulous mass of intellectual and poetic affinities that he increasingly expanded, conjuring in his texts and in his films the shades of writers who, from across the centuries, were his intimates, on the same level as his brawling and drinking companions … At a time of fearsome ideological puritanism, Champ Libre published classics of political science, but also works that nobody had read for ages … I have never managed to consider Champ Libre as anything but an extension of Debord’s work, publishing as discourse, not only because of what was published there, but also for the juxtaposition of texts that produced another meaning, legible to those who could and wanted to read it.”[9]

Lebovici’s assassination—there is no other word for it—in March 1984 set off an extraordinary wave of speculation in the French media. Debord documented this with a small book, in which he writes: “We know now what a modern society can do with a parking lot.” Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici (1985) was in part a tribute to his friend: “This century does not like truth, generosity or greatness. Therefore it did not like Gérard Lebovici…”[10] But it had more to say about Debord himself and his curious relation to the spectacle. The occasion was the insinuation by more than one media mouthpiece that he was in some way connected to Lebovici’s death. Journalists identified themselves with the assassin, not the victim, and sought with considerable ingenuity to justify the killing. A recurring accusation, which Debord documents in his book, was that it was his friendship with Debord that somehow got Lebovici killed.

“Each epoch uses a particular vocabulary to exorcise the demons that plague it.”[11] The eighties were perhaps transitional in this regard. Where one paper accused Debord of accepting “Moscow Gold,” another connected him to his mother-in-law’s Chinese restaurant, an alleged haven for Moscow’s nemesis, the Chinese Communists. These were the old figures of the traitor, from a time when the diffuse and concentrated spectacles confronted each other, across the cold war divide, each internalizing the image of the other as its official enemy. Debord was also attacked variously as a guru, a mentor, a loner, a fanatic, an eccentric, an ideologue, a nihilist, an idealist, a demon, a pope and a terrorist.

Here a more recognizably contemporary figure of the traitor emerges. In the time of the disintegrating spectacle, the global commodity economy relies on Russian energy. The flow of cheap commodities is in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. New enemies of the people are required. Enemies like Julian Assange, the hacker-journalist-cypherpunk, publishing secret documents on the internet which reveal what those in the know already knew anyway. This was enough to get him labeled a terrorist and—worse—for the New York Times to question his personal hygiene.[12]

In the news stories he fulsomely quotes, Debord appears as a shadowy and clandestine figure. He points out that it has become a crime to withdraw from the spectacle when it seeks one out. To remain indeterminate, unnamable, this would be the essential move of those who belong, knowingly or not, to the devil’s party. The rumor that Debord disappeared after May ’68 is based on the illusion that he had previously appeared. As Debord insists, “I have never appeared anywhere.”[13] The spectacle equates the refusal of celebrity with terrorism. “The mere fact that I have not at all wanted to be around the dreary celebrities of the day would give me, if there were such a need, a sufficient prestige around those who have the unfortunate obligation of having to be around them.”[14] Not the least of Debord’s achievements was to appear in the spectacle only as its negation.

Two things in particular make Debord’s relation to Lebovici appear unacceptable. The first is the gift. Lebovici gave Debord the means to live well, to write, to make his films. In 1983 Lebovici even purchased the Studio Cujas cinema, where Debord’s films were the only ones screened, whether anyone showed up to watch them or not. As Martine Barraqué puts it, “people used to say that Guy Debord was Gérard Lebovici’s ballerina.”

One of the more extraordinary documents of Debordiana is the Contracts, which codify the agreements between Debord and Lebovici’s film company for Society of the Spectacle, In Girum and a film on Spain that was never made. While the first reads indeed like a contract, they become increasingly like a détournement of legal documents. In the last contract, for the Spain film, Lebovici gives and Debord agrees to nothing in return. It is if anything the negation of the contract. No consideration is offered in return for the gift.[15] Or rather, it is the very offering of nothing in return, except the explicit statement that nothing is owed, which permits Lebovici’s gift to approximate to the state of being a pure donation.[16]

Debord once claimed the virtue of having “invented some crimes of a new type.”[17] Principal among which was the refusal to appear within the spectacle on command. Where this tactic confers on most who try it nothing but obscurity, Debord succeeded in pulling off a uniquely anti-spectacular fame. This strategy was not without its dangers. To the state of a disintegrating spectacle, those who will neither stay in obscurity nor affirm the spectacle with their presence can only be categorized as traitors to the state. As the spectacle disintegrates, it grows far less tolerant of those who refuse it. As Gracián says, the state can counter almost any challenge to itself, but not mockery.

In November 2008 French anti-terrorist police arrested Julien Coupat (b. 1975) and held him for several months without trial. As a condition of his release Coupat had to surrender his passport and identity papers. He was the last to be released of a group that Interior Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie called anarcho-autonomous. The government failed to secure any convictions on terrorist charges. The arrests were triggered by the attempted sabotage of a highspeed train. A group protesting the transporting of radioactive waste in Germany had already claimed responsibility for the sabotage. Coupat described his imprisonment as “petty revenge” in the face of the complete failure of the police action that rounded up him and his friends. Giorgio Agamben: “The only possible conclusion to this shadowy affair is that those engaged in activism against the (in this case debatable) way social and economic problems are managed today are considered ipso facto as potential terrorists, even when not one act can justify this accusation.”[18]

Just as the spectacle took Debord’s refusal of its charms for a threat to its existence, so too with Coupat. “Anti-terrorism,” Coupat writes, “contrary to what the term insinuates, is not a means of fighting against terrorism, it is the means by which it positively produces the political enemy as terrorist.” This is not the least aspect that connects the Coupat affair to the Situationist legacy. Coupat wrote a paper on the Situationists while at university. He may have been a member of the Tiqqun group, which was not unfamiliar with certain figures who once moved in Debordian circles. He may or may not be one of the authors of a text called The Coming Insurrection, and which may be the real reason for his arrest. Coupat declares that “unfortunately, I am not the author of The Coming Insurrection, and the whole affair will end up convincing us of the essentially policing role of the author-function.” He also notes that “In France one can’t remember power becoming so fearful of a book in a long time.”

Whatever its provenance, The Coming Insurrection is surely the first notable political text to pick up where the Situationists left off.[19] Published in the name of the Invisible Committee, it revives the glamour of the spectral party, the devil’s party. It takes the refusal of existing power, and its attendant everyday life, as far as the rejection even of the so-called leftist versions within it. It takes it as given that even the ruling class has lost its way. It shows a keen interest in urban affairs, but sees this as a time in which the metropolis has all but engulfed its rural peripheries. The creation of a life in the cracks of the commodity form has to remove itself from its major achievement—the modern city. Hence the group that was arrested with Coupat were known as the Tarnac 9, after the small town of some three-hundred-odd inhabitants in the Limousin region where they ran a cooperative store. Like Debord, late in life, they had withdrawn from the space of the city, to contemplate it from without, to act upon it from without.

Notes

1 Debord, In Girum, p. 50; Oeuvres, p. 1377. Actually the “name writ on water” is from Keats’ epitaph for himself, détourned from Fletcher’s “Philaster,” but it is borrowed again by Shelley in “Adonais” and “Fragment on Keats,” as well as by Christina Rossetti and Oscar Wilde. Shelley was indeed shipwrecked, and the shipwrecked above all perhaps have their names written on water. ‘Shipwreckers’ both détourns and corrects the thought. See Richard Cronin, Romantic Victorians, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2002.

2 Debord, Panegyric, p. 15; Oeuvres, p. 1633.

3 Terence, “Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto,” Heauton Timoroumenos, line 77.

4 Will Baker, Jacques Prévert, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1967; Edward Baron Turk, Marcel Carné and the Golden Age of French Cinema, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1989. The female lead in both films is Arletty.

5 Debord, In Girum, p. 33; Oeuvres, p. 1362.

6 The Memoirs of Lacenaire, translated by Philip John Stead, Staple Press, London, 1952, pp. 157–9. Here sounding as if he is détourning the Gospel of Matthew: “I come not to bring peace but the sword.” Lacenaire is also mentioned in Panegyric, p.7. Foucault compares Lacenaire unfavorably to another criminal-writer of the time: “No, I think that one must compare Rivière with Lacenaire, who was his exact contemporary and who committed a whole heap of minor and shoddy crimes, mostly failures, hardly glorious at all, but who succeeded through his very intelligent discourse in making these crimes exist as real works of art, and in making the criminal, that is Lacenaire himself, the very artist of criminality. It’s another tour de force if you like: he managed to give an intense reality, for dozens of years, for more than a century, to acts that were finally very shoddy and ignoble. As a criminal he was a rather petty type, but the splendor and intelligence of his writing gave a consistency to it all.” Sylvère Lotringer (ed.), Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 1996, pp. 203–6.

7 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 111; Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, p. 31.

8 Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 4, International Publishers, New York, 1976, p. 82. Or as Lefebvre says, “man moves ‘wrong foot forward.’” Introduction à la modernité. Préludes, Les éditions de minuit, Paris, 1962, p. 146.

9 Olivier Assayas, A Post-May Adolescence: Letter to Alice Debord, translated by Adrian Martin and Rachel Zerner, Synema, Vienna, 2012, pp. 49–50, 77, 101. See also Debord, Considerations on the Assassination, pp. 5–6. Assayas produced the DVD edition of Debord’s films, and not much else of value in this context, except perhaps demonlover (2007). Of course, there were in actuality many “authors” of the Champ Libre editorial direction. See Éditions Champ Libre, Correspondance Tome 1, editions Ivrea, Paris, 1996.

10 Debord, Considerations on the Assassination, p. 3; Oeuvres, p. 1540.

11 Debord, Considerations on the Assassination, p. 9; Oeuvres, p. 1543.

12 “He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in days.” New York Times Magazine, January 26, 2011. For Assange in his own words: Hans Ulrich Obrist, “In Conversation with Julian Assange,” e-flux journal, No. 25, May 2011, e-flux.com, and Julian Assange et al., Cypherpunks, O/R Books, New York, 2012.

13 Debord, Considerations on the Assassination, p. 23; Oeuvres, p. 1550.

14 Debord, Considerations on the Assassination, p. 44; Oeuvres, p. 1560.

15 Guy Debord, Des Contrats, Le temps qu’il fait, Cognac, 1995; Oeuvres, p. 1843ff.

16 See Jacques Derrida, Given Time, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996. Derrida’s critique is of the Christian-bourgeois idea of the gift as an unmotivated, selfless charity. But for ethnographers, and Situationists, the gift is always a stake in a game among rivals. See Jean Baudrillard, Fragments, Verso, London, 1997, pp. 127–8.

17 Debord, Panegyric, p. 17; Oeuvres, 1664.

18 See the documents collected and translated at tarnac9.wordpress.com, including an interview with Coupat from Le Monde, June 4, 2009; Giorgio Agamben, “Terrorismeou tragic-comédie,” Libération, November 19, 2008; Alberto Toscano, “The War Against Preterrorism,” Radical Philosophy, No. 154, March–April 2009.

19 The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2009. See also Benjamin Noys (ed.), Communization and Its Discontents, minor compositions, London, 2011. Most of the contributors to the latter are highly critical of Tiqqun and its offspring, such as the Invisible Committee, and pursue more theoretically rigorous concepts of an immanent Communism. Both a certain quality of the prose, and certain practical commitments, make The Coming Insurrection more germane to our story here, but interested readers can pursue these more rigorous, not to say dogmatic, versions of a Post-Situationist practice according to taste.

1.

In May of 2013, Dominique Venner, the former OAS terrorist turned semi-respectable historian and paladin of the French New Right (although there's nothing new about it, really, it's the same old Action française Catholic-monarchist bullshit, the same pompous argot of bourgeois murderers, the same hybrid of decadent rationalism and plagiarized German Romanticism, a style some say was inaugurated by Charles Maurras but may actually extend back to Ernest Renan or even Descartes), walked up to the altar of the Notre-Dame Cathedral and shot himself. He left a suicide note, and, in case the note was lost to the depredations of chance or the iconoclasms of the police, he left a blog post. Venner's swan song is at turns sentimental, Heideggerian, and filled with an adolescent Sturm und Drang. That is, it's a fairly typical product of the mentality of the European Right, which has always been addicted to longwinded manifestos, manifestos that are like a pier of middle-class piety over an abyss of nihilism. Think of those puffed-up Adonises like Anders Breivik or the hero of Bresson's The Devil Probably. They talk until their hoarse and flensed glottises become testaments to their own impotence, and then they succumb to mass murder or are killed by a junkie friend who can't stand them any longer. What makes Venner different, and maybe even interesting (interesting as a zoological specimen), is that he was an old man. Like every good crusader, he'd fought his battles (the massacre of Algerians, attempted assassinations of de Gaulle and Sartre). He'd been persecuted (an 18 month prison sentence, the kind of luxurious discipline applied to right-wing terrorists, who are the overly fastidious and yet anal expulsive children of decent society). He'd renounced, for a time, the carnal glory of youth. He'd settled down and started a family, written a number of books on insipid topics like the history of French hunting and the heroic Vichyites, and become a dissident blogger. But at the end of his life he must have gone a little stir-crazy. He must have been reading and thinking about Yukio Mishima (at the time of his death, he was working on a book, A Samurai of the West: The Breviary of the Unsubdued). Clearly, though, he must have also realized the differences between him and Mishima. For instance, that Mishima had been working out for the last fifteen years of his life, lifting weights and practicing kendo. Or that Mishima had formed a milita, the Tatenokai, comprised of his students and disciples. Or that Mishima still had blood pumping through his veins (he never thought to give up his attendance at gay bars, although if we're to believe his novels, he was a voyeur, like all good Proustians). Or that his suppuku had the aura of religious tradition to back it up, while Venner's suicide is merely a vintage act, a throwback to Young Werther or to Austrian cafe society. Or that Mishima was an artist.

Venner's suicide was greeted as an act of protest against the legalization of gay marriage. An Algerian blogger had this to say about Venner's spectacle: In twenty years, when we've conquered France, we'll overturn that law anyway. The blogger was having a little fun at the expense of the Right, which sees itself as the last bulwark against the twin barbarisms of Islam and liberalism, and at the expense of liberals, who justify their wars by scapegoating the Right, as if to say, We're not racists, we also have white-skinned barbarians in our midst, barbarians wearing black masks (a fanonement, in case you missed it). But the European Right, which hasn't forgotten how to think historically and a fortiori hasn't forgotten how to strategize, has outflanked its liberal enemy. When necessary, it flaunts its friendliness towards gay rights and/or its philo-Semitism. The English Defense League, those brownshirts currently terrorizing Britain's Muslim population with relative impunity (the impunity takes the form of occasional police crackdowns and impartial debate in the media) have Jewish and gay divisions. Breivik recuperated the Israeli state for his Knights Templar political theology. Haider was gay, although he was stuck in his obsolete romantic affection for the Gaddafis and Saddam Husseins of the world, so Israel never warmed to him (don't think this has anything to do with moral squeamishness on the part of Israeli leaders, it didn't stop them from warming to Vorster, the Gemayels, Abbas, Sadat, the patently and unregenerately Nazi Adenauer government). Pim Fortuyn was gay and a Zionist before he was assassinated. On the other hand, Venner seems to have remained loyal to his roots in French anti-Semitism, while adopting a superficial anti-imperialism. This all may sound incoherent, like the chatter of schizophrenics, to contemporary ears, but that's only because we've oblivious to politics. The neoliberal state suffocates us with its spectacle of ideological silence, from which all Leninist Realpolitk or Situationist gypsyism, that is from which all slang and calculation and initiation, have been excluded. Ideologues of the neoliberal state don't have to learn a language in order to speak an ideology. They just have to be left alone, like those Egyptian babies who were isolated in a house for the first fifteen years of their lives so that the Pharaoh could prove that the Egyptian language was the language of the gods. Fifteen years later, they were discovered bleating like sheep. The authorities hadn't noticed that next to the house was a sheep pen.

2.

McKenzie Wark, whose name sounds made up, like a Joycean catachresis, but isn't as far as I know (he's a descendant of Paul Lafargue, he believes in the Right to Be Lazy, he doesn't find sufficient jouissance in the Oedipal father, Marx, he'd rather eschew revolution and stick to Fourier's queer interplanetary and algorithmic orgies) is a Professor of Media and Critical Studies at the New School in New York. He's known as a post-Marxist, which can mean a lot of things. It might mean that he simply never got around to reading Marx. It might mean that, being Australian (a nation without a revolutionary tradition), he sees Marxism as a matryoshka doll of progressively more terrifying bogeymen: I think Lenin or Mao terrifies him most, but maybe not, maybe it's Zizek or the French theorists, or maybe it's the white or black Jacobins, maybe it's St. Paul, I can't tell. He seems to like the following things: cypherpunks, GPSes, Occupy Wall Street, the Invisible Committee, the imago of Julian Assange, free love except when it's practiced by the wrong segment of the upper class, conspiracy theories about state terror as long as they're sufficiently uncommitted, anecdotes and non sequiturs, church history, and hermeticism for its own sake. He's written two or three books on the Situationist International, which have gotten him some attention in the respectable media but which have decidedly drawn the ire of the remnants of the Situationists themselves. His students and former students, or so they claim, have even started a website called the International Society for the Appreciation of Teacher Wark's Amazing Techniques (ISATWAT). The website features a photograph of Wark, his wife, and young child, naked but tastefully covered by celestial bed sheets, apparently a piece of publicity for his wife's play, Babylove. It dismisses Wark as a subrate postmodernist, a recuperator (a term of Debordian ignominy), an obfuscator of the SI's revolutionary politics, a pro-situ posturer, a curator of decay, a toady, a parasite, a usurper, etc. Basically, it accuses Wark of being the equivalent, for Situationism, of what the Situationists accused the western European communist parties of being for the proletariat: an arm of the police. They even have a fable or two for their grievances. McKenzie's publisher, Verso Books, offered UK readers a chance to win a 3D printed Guy Debord action figure. At a release event for The Beach Beneath the Streets, he bought Nerf guns and distributed them to students, enjoining them to disrupt his speech. He thought the disruption would mark the finale of the event, but no one left the room. The spectacle turned against the purveyor of anti-spectacularism, who had nothing to say. Someone in the back denounced the affair as boring, grabbed a few books, and left. Wark later facebooked about the incident.

The Situationists, who were notorious for their pseudo-ecclesiastical excommunications (eventually it was just Debord and Sanguinetti), would have excommunicated Wark on the spot. But to tell the truth, he never would have been considered for membership in the first place.

3.

American leftists should read Fanon. And I don't mean the way some former First polemicists must have read Fanon, in the heady millennial days of the intelligentsia's self-immolation, its abject toadying disguised as a kind of hysterical neo-imperialist pissing contest (you know the epoch I'm talking about, if you're old enough to remember, which means if you're old enough to take account of yourself). I don't mean invoking the FLN and the French communards and some effigy of Leon Trotsky as justifications for total warfare. I don't mean the peculiar phallic exhibitionism, born out of bourgeois insecurities, endemic to a certain segment of the left. And I don't mean the way Sartre read Fanon, as a fun-house mirror of our own debilities. I mean that leftists should read Fanon to understand the fact of our own colonization, in the same way we should read George Jackson, and maybe even St. Augustine, Pascal, Samuel Beckett, and all the other prophets of emesis. Because if you're a leftist today, you're probably sick, and not in the way you think you're sick. If you were alive and politically conscious in the 1980s and you cheered on Walęsa's celebrity tour in favor of the American Way while Reagan was brutally destroying the last vestiges of the unions, or if you remember nodding somnambulistically along to Václav Havel's endorsement of the Iraq war, or if you judiciously consulted Ezra Klein about the necessity of Rahm Emanuel's strongman policies against the Chicago teachers, or if you vainly looked for an argument from the French left against Hollande's IMF-sponsored adventurism in Mali, etc., then you're mired in the casuistry of the enemy, an enemy that's sophisticated enough to ventriloquize you, to give you the right words to support criminal policies. And who am I to say so? It doesn't matter. I don't work for the Council on Foreign Relations or a prominent human rights organization. It's almost certain that I've been disfigured in more subtle ways. But I'd rather be an underground fedayeen with major neuroses than an unwitting comprador of health and happiness.

Then I cried for how desolate and pitiful the airport looked.

Bombs and massacres hadn’t kept the tourists away over the years. But put some bearded men in power, and even the migratory birds might change their trajectory! I know the analogy is a not fair, but facial hair is what nowadays distinguishes the various (religious) factions in Egypt.

Tourism has plummeted since the revolution to the extent that the Finance Ministry proposed to rent out key monuments as a solution to the current deficit in state budget. Thankfully, this proposal was met with outrage. If the Ministry had gone forward, it would have provoked another uprising! The proposal demonstrates, though, the magnitude of the country’s current economic catastrophe. Around 17 million people working in the tourism industry have lost the means to earn a living.

Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood (MB) affiliates have been systematically trashing the country. My country. He has made a mockery of all that the revolution stands for. The prosecutor general, nicknamed the private prosecutor, freezes the assets of a prominent investor and, a couple of days later, a court reverses the decision. He orders the arrests of so and so. Another court lets them go. A pull and tug judiciary war, in which courts resist the unpopular prosecutor general’s decisions at every turn. This war started back in November 2012, when our democratically elected president announced a constitutional decree that put him above the law. Granting himself quasi-divine power and preventing all legal challenges to his forthcoming decisions, Morsi explained that his actions were temporary until the constitution was written and the People’s Assembly formed. Fast-forward a couple of months, the constitution was indeed ratified—an express constitution, for it was written in 24 hours!—but we still don’t have an assembly. Subverting the rule of law and blatantly disregarding the process that brought him to power, Morsi has in fact delegitimized his own presidency, as many Egyptian citizens are skeptical of letting another pharaoh rule. Morsi’s early decree clarified breaks in the political sphere, as well as divisions among the people. Egyptian politics and citizens are definitely polarized, and this polarization could lead to dangerous confrontations. It’s now Ikhwan (MB) against the people. The confrontation with judges continues, especially since the MB dominated Shura Council—the upper house of the Egyptian parliament—is now endowed with legislative power, and is out to undercut judicial authority. They have cut the retirement age of judges from 70 to 60 and mandated that judges participate in supervising elections (which judges have been boycotting).

Meanwhile, Morsi has been bypassing and disregarding the very constitution that he expedited. For instance, he appointed the prosecutor general instead of choosing from three names nominated by the Supreme Judges. The judiciary is proving to be an obstacle to (what oppositional voices term) the “brotherhoodization” of the country. Morsi’s government is made up solely by MB partisans, so much so that many Salafis (and their respective party, El Nour) feel betrayed. The president is managing to alienate even his biggest political ally.

The Ministry of Interior has been so busy “defending” the headquarters of the MB, which has been targeted by graffiti artists, that vigilantes have taken the law into their own hands to guarantee a semblance of security, while our wise president advocates citizen arrests. Plaints from the public have gone unheard, unless they involve upholding religious strictures or insults to the president. The prosecutor general is busy harassing and ordering arrests of media figures and comedians, instead of trying to reestablish order in the streets.

Since he became president, Morsi has proved himself incapable of ruling Egypt. Accused of furthering his party’s plans for an Islamic nation (beyond Egypt), he is condemned and ridiculed. I never imagined I’d hear this president proclaim himself a provisional dictator to safeguard the revolution until national safety and stability are established. As he systematically and threateningly waives his index finger at us, his speeches are surely farcical. They are filled with historical inaccuracies. Youssef Zeidan, a renowned Egyptian historian, enumerated all the errors the president made in a "big" speech in Pakistan, such as attributing the discovery of pulmonary circulation to Abu Rayhan Al-Biruni instead of Ibn Al-Nafis, and stating that Ibn Khaldun defined sociology, when it was Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim. Moreover, Morsi misquotes our famous poets. His Prime Minister, on the other hand, tweets about Smurfs (yes he did!).

Egyptians were ready to embrace a regime that would restore their sense of dignity and respect revolutionary demands for “bread, freedom, and social justice.” But they are now faced with one that perpetuates fear-mongering and oppression, adding on sexual terrorism (from harassment to mass public rapes) and hereticization. Instead of looking for solutions to Egypt's economic woes, the new government wants to silence voices of dissent, whether on the street or the TV screen.

Yet this silly regime is supported by the Obama administration, which occasionally shrugs to express its “disapproval.” And Time magazine asked whether Morsi should be Person of the Year! (Admittedly, candidates included Bashar Assad and Benjamin Netanyahu, so it might have been a joke!)

The rise of a formerly oppressed party to power hasn't diminished the pharoanic oppression that the revolution decried. The MB means to pave the road for an even more radical and tyrannical rule as it attempts to crush civil liberties by forcing legal restrictions on NGOs, especially human rights organizations. At the end of May, a bill called “Civil Society Organizations” was announced. It has been sharply criticized by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Hopes for a swift transition to a genuinely democratic Egypt are rapidly waning, as another police state seems on the horizon.

On the other hand, to counter the religious extremism that has increased since the MB has come to power, Al Azhar, the leading center of Islamic learning in the world, has decided to launch its own TV channel. Their rhetoric aims to promote religious moderation and resist the many channels that spew religious hate, publicizing extreme fatwas and defaming liberal figures in the opposition and in the media.

While Morsi is not looking for solutions to revive the Egyptian economy—the government is cutting power and water for hours a day to “solve” its deficiency in diesel fuel—and doesn't seem overly concerned with public opinion, Ethiopia has decided to divert water from the Nile and build a dam. This dam could prove detrimental to Egypt, as it might diminish the supply of water and electricity, affecting millions of people reliant on agriculture. In addition, there are reasons to be wary about Morsi's plans to revamp the Suez Canal. He is expediting the Suez Canal Corridor project, claiming that it will have positive effects on the economy. Critics of this project, however, worry Egypt will lose its sovereignty over the Canal, which would be damaging to an economy that relies heavily on Canal revenues. Morsi’s puny attempts to deliver on his promise of an Egyptian nahda (renaissance) are now met with skepticism and derision.

There is, though, a silver lining: Egyptians’ ingenuity at expressing dissent. Alongside the political devolution, we are witnessing a cultural and communication…renaissance. People are no longer afraid, and this surge of courage has given birth to various creative initiatives. Outside the opposition parties, Egyptian citizens are loudly expressing their discontent and dissent. Their protests are undeniable. They are heard and seen, and the ruling regime feels flustered by the unvanquished voices of the people. Not that the current government needs any help in looking like incompetent nincompoops (much like the Tea Party and the GOP!). Egypt's creative outpouring of dissent encompasses music groups, TV shows, films, and street art. The incompetency of the MB is being exposed inside the Egyptian popular imaginary!

Many Egyptians are unifying against Morsi’s regime. In April, a campaign entitled Tamrod (Rebellion) was launched to collect signatures to remove Morsi, calling for early presidential elections. So far, it has gathered over 7.5 million signatures, with the hope of reaching 15 million by June 30. This initiative is a media project created by activists from the Kefaya (Enough) movement. Ultimately, it aims at withdrawing confidence from the president because he has failed to uphold the demands of the revolution.

Egyptians will not stand idly by while Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood build another tyrannical police state masquerading as a democracy of façade. The MB stands accused of making a sham of Islam and popular sovereignty, and most importantly, of betraying the revolution. Accustomed to being the opposition, their rule is antagonizing, not solidarizing. You might not be aware of this season of Egyptian discontent, but silence is not a sign that all is well in the land of the pharaohs. Many fear that the Egyptian revolution has died, “Not with a bang but a whimper.” Maybe it needed to die, so as to be reborn with more creativity, a stronger core, and more potential to sustain its democratic ideals.

Of course, we don’t know if (or when) the army is plotting a coup! It’s been suspiciously silent. But the Egyptian people will cross that hurdle if (or when) the time comes.

Of course in the in the end they show themselves to be, like so many enlistees in violent jihad, pathetic, deluded, and lethal losers. Their inept antics are comic, up to and including the ghastly way each hoists himself on his own petard, disappearing in clouds of ash and shreds of clothing during the London Marathon, taking with them their quota of innocent bystanders, including the stunned patrons of a kebab shop.

Because, yes, the London Marathon becomes their final objective, so that since Boston there has been an uptick of interest, or at least some web chatter, although whether the queasy fascination of life imitating art will edge over into an appreciation of its satire remains to be seen.

They are all youngish men, these Lions, at once alienated from and enthusiastic sharers in the “Disneyland”; one of them, the stupidest and most childlike, has a deep fondness for an amusement park ride called “rubber dinghy rapids.” With the exception of their leader, who has both, they have neither jobs nor women. They live in rows of red brick semi-detached houses on quiet, hilly little streets, once inhabited by the working class of the burgeoning industrial centers. Not one of the world’s fleshpots, perhaps, but for a susceptible Lion, there are damnable temptations: the pharmacy chain Boots is one. “Let’s bomb Boots,” declares one in a meeting to discuss possible targets, “they sell condoms. They make you want to bang white girls.” Oh, reason not the cause!

They’re also, for the purpose of clandestine communications, Party Puffins, or rather they take on the avatars of party puffins in an interactive online game. But it’s time to strike through the mask and meet them face-to-face. The best way I can think to convey their qualities (and perhaps some of the film’s) is by introducing the reader to the Lions one by one.

So then, meet Omar, faute de mieux leader, a security guard at just the sort of installation—a shopping mall vast glittering and soulless—that he’d like to eradicate. Omar, played with delicacy and pluck by Riz Ahmed, is a slight man with gentle eyes, a worried face and a tendency to curse fluently and eloquently in Urdu. Omar has a pretty wife who works as a nurse, an appealing little boy, and a pious brother who keeps trying to get Omar to study and suspects that Omar may be “planning something.”

Next is Wodge, Omar’s Little John, best mate, and easily manipulated tool, played by the American actor Kayvan Novack, diving happily into a thick Northern accent. Wodge is as dumb or “thick” as his nickname, and barely an adult: he’s the rubber dinghy rapids man, and when he accompanies Omar on a trip to a training camp in Pakistan, Wodge takes along a stuffed toy, a “prayer camel” that gives the Call to Prayer at the pull of a cord. Wodge’s truly depthless stupidity proves to be a liability when he makes a cell phone video of himself firing a machine gun, attracting a drone, and setting in motion a chain of events that leads to the accidental death of Sheik Osama bin Laden himself. “Am I God’s accident?’ he asks Omar.

Another dim bulb is Faisal, played by Adeel Akhtar as benighted, superstitious, obscurely cringing, who insists on wearing a cardboard box over his head for his martyrdom videos because images are haram, and who has been training a crow—the one depicted, on a stone wall in the English rain, looks, before being turned into a swirl of black feathers and white smoke, every bit as melancholy as its master. Faisal is an early casualty of Jihad, Lion-style; running through a field of sheep while carrying volatile bomb components he accidentally blows himself up, disappearing into the white smoke of what, since Boston, one has learned is produced by this particular type of bomb.

Two more Lions: the convert Barry, played by Nigel Lindsay with superb, unhinged aggressiveness. The character of Barry was based on a BNP militant who took to reading the Koran to confute Pakistani opponents and ended up converting to Islam. Or say to Islamofascism, most conveniently. Thickly set, truculent, the kurta wearing, Allah invoking, stringed instrument denouncing Barry has such flights of fancies as an idea of himself as the Scarlett Pimpernel of international jihad. In a scene fully the equal of the “What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?” episode in Monty Python's Life of Brian Barry argues strenuously for “bombing the mosque.” “Radicalize the moderates, the Ummah rises up, it all kicks off!” Barry shouts. Not even the reasonable suggestion from Omar that this would be like a man in a fight who decides to punch his own face can dissuade Barry from his conviction—or from punching himself, painfully, on his nose. Vexed, he head butts Faisal, who hadn’t been in the room.

Last to join but hardly least is the university attending Hassan Alli, son of a most conveniently prosperous manufacturer of party costumes. Hassan is into rap and hip-hop, a taste that spreads among the Lions; Barry recruits him after witnessing his disruption of a panel discussion at a local college under the ineffably anodyne rubric ISLAM—MODERATION AND PROGRESS. Ali accomplishes this with shouted rap lyrics, “I’m the Mujahedeen/and I’m making the scene/Now you’re gonna feel/What the Boom-Boom means/It’s like Tupac said/When I die I’m not dead/We are the Martyrs/You’re just smashed tomatoes” and a fake suicide vest containing the kind of thing the English give as party favors on Boxing Day, poppers that go pop and produce parti-colored paper streamers. Played with subtlety by Arsher Ali, Hassam’s upper-middle class imitation of imagined lower depths makes him an outsider among outsiders, although that doesn’t stop him from associating with his new comrades, who distinctly favor the “weapons” portion of the good old Marxist formulation about exchanging the weapons of criticism for the criticism of weapons.

I think Chris Morris achieves his goals in The Four Lions, which include more than just managing to pull off a comedy about suicide bombers, and that it be really funny, really. In the special features, among glimpses of ordinary South Asians driving around aimlessly, flirting with girls, bored, horny, making up solid sounding futures involving wives and good jobs and babies to the where do you see yourself in 10 years question, Morris can be seen musing that “you start to realize that there is a potential for a comic character in the sort of people that hitherto you just literally felt were one dimensional.” Yes you do.

Satire and ridicule have rarely been deployed to such devastating effect as in this collective portrait of obscurantists and fanatics who are never less than, and always all-too, human. The Lions are a menace to themselves, assorted fauna and livestock, Osama Bin Laden himself and a variety of innocent bystanders (although as Barry reminds us that last category “doesn’t exist” telling us this as he grimly and lovingly arranges the steel bolts to be packed into a bomb designed for the flesh of “Sodomites” “Gynecologists” and—I think I heard this right—“Leonard Cohen”). They are triumphant comic creations, as beastly and absurd as anyone or anything in Swift or Fielding, and if we’re ever going to prevail against their real life counterparts and imitators, the very English laughter that Chris Morris inherits from the great satirists should be deployed as often as the war-like procedures that sometimes seem to constitute the only response to Islamist terror.

An unlikely outcome, I’m afraid and a little sad to have to say. Coupled with the extreme unlikelihood of a film like The Four Lions being made in the US—the reasons why would require a separate and perhaps lengthier assessment—the Morris mix of dry mock, moral alertness, allowing the enemy to condemn itself abundantly out of its own mouth, and shrewd understanding of the resentments, rivalries, fantasies and sheer bloody minded childishness beneath the heroic images of jihad is not likely to gain much ground, even in the aftermath of the attack on the Boston marathon, carried out by two young men who by all accounts appear to be as absurd and as deadly as their fictional British brethren.

In The Gatekeepers, Dror Moreh speaks with former directors of Israel’s secret service, the Shin Bet, about Israel’s war on terror, Rabin’s murder, targeted assassinations, and the Jewish Underground. The film has caused a furor because these men, who have devoted their lives to Israel’s security, all believe Israel should end the occupation. They favor a two-state solution.

DT: In 1967, a million Palestinians suddenly came under Israeli rule…In the film, Avraham Shalom said the Israelis responded with no strategy.

DM: No strategy, just tactics.

DT: Do you think that Israel just didn’t know how to handle the situation…that it found itself in completely new territory, so to speak?

DM: If you ask me to analyze what happened in 1967, the intelligent way is to go to the leaders at those times, not seeing it in hindsight now. I think that after many years of Israel being threatened by major forces—the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Jordanians—everybody knew that if Israel lost a war, it would be the last war that she would fight, because basically it would have meant the annihilation of all the Jews in the state of Israel. All of a sudden, in 1967, something miraculously happened: Israel triumphed, unbelievably, against those armies. Against Egypt we conquered all the Sinai. Against the Syrians we conquered the Golan Heights, against the Jordanians we conquered the West Bank and Gaza—there was no Palestinian state, by the way, it was from the Jordanians. Suddenly the leaders of Israel felt, OK. We have a strong army. Nobody can threaten us anymore. I think this was intoxicating in a way, because from a small country that was always threatened—you know, David against the Goliath that was all around him—they said, OK, if the Palestinians and the Arabs want to create peace…and these are the phrases that Golda Meir and Levi Eshkol used…let them come. They can come whenever they want. We’re not in any rush to solve the problem. I think that most Israelis felt the same in that era. You know, we were a country under siege, under attack all the time from both terrorists and the countries surrounding us, and all of a sudden, OK, we won. It’s your problem now. You have to play now. We don’t have to play. And this was what happened then. This was why in 1967 the leadership, especially towards the Palestinians, didn’t think strategically. And the problem is that the more time passes, the more complicated it is to solve it. What was much easier to achieve forty years ago was less easy to achieve thirty, twenty, ten, and now. As time passes it gets much harder, with much more human suffering, to reach the solution. You know, everybody knows what the solution will look like. Only the extreme right doesn’t accept that. It involves a lot of human suffering…especially from the Israelis, by the way. All those settlers were sent by a state—by a criminal, in my point of view, policy of the state—which yielded to those messianic feelings among the settlers. Yielded. Not wanting. Yielded to their messianic “It’s either or.” Either they will be evacuated and it will be a human catastrophe, or they will prevail and it will be a human catastrophe for all of Israel.

DT: Why do you say it will be a catastrophe if they’re evacuated?

DM: It will be a catastrophe for them.

DT: Oh, for them.

DM: For them it will be a catastrophe. I saw what happened in the disengagement plan when Ariel Sharon uprooted those settlements. Look, the governments of Israel sent those people to settle there in a way, sometimes by looking with a blind eye. They didn’t want to look at that. And those people felt ideologically, and they feel up until today, that they continue the Zionist movement, which was basically a settlement movement. Those settlers feel that they’re walking in the footsteps of those who settled in the 1930s, 1940s.

DT: That’s really, really interesting.

DM: Zionism is a settling movement. Herzl was not right: “A country with no people for a people with no country” is not the case. There were people, in Lod, and Ramlah, and Haifa, and Sfad, and Jaffah, where I live. There were Palestinians. I live in an Arabic house, which was a Palestinian house, let’s say seventy, sixty-five years ago. I’m not ashamed of that, but those settlers in the West Bank and Gaza: I think they’re wrong. The fact that Israel didn’t force them not to settle—or forced the law that says they’re not alllowed to settle in those territories—created this big mess, but at the end of the day there are 500,000 people there now.

DT: Right.

DM: This is why I say it’s a catastrophe. Imagine 500,000 people. It’s not what will happen, but let’s say 150,000, which is the smallest number. 100,000 people: You have to uproot them from their houses, from places they feel are homeland, whatever bullshit they’re fed with—the land of the prophet, the land of our ancestors, where our fathers walked, which we cannot give back, all this kind of horrible, stupid, unbelievable religious bullshit—and they have to go back. They have to leave that.

DT: In the film, Avraham Shalom [director of Shin Bet 1980-1986] said, “Luckily for us, terrorism increased, because now we had work. We stopped dealing with the Palestinian state.”

DM: Yes.

DT: To what extent do you think that terrorism has prevented the Palestinians from getting a state of their own?

DM: You’re asking me to speculate here. Basically Avraham Shalom meant that in the beginning there was no real resistance in the Occupied Territories after ’67. There was no Palestinian movement. Nobody knew how to eat this new thing. But the fact that Israel didn’t move very swiftly to say, OK, this is the Occupied Territories, we are going to try to create a Palestinian state—this is what Shalom says, “I thought that it’s a good idea to create a Palestinian state”—they didn’t move then, and then the terrorists started. Because nothing moved on the ground, terrorists started, and then we started to work against terrorism. The terrorism got more complicated and we got more complicated, and all of a sudden we find ourselves working 24/7 forgetting about those ideas of a Palestinian state we had in the beginning. Basically we lost track of what needed to be done because we were chasing after our tail all the time, like a cat who sees his tail and tries to bite it.

DT: Right, but it was a two-way street. I mean, it takes two to tango. If there had been no terrorism—

DM: If there had been no terrorism, Israel would not move an inch. Never. The first time the Israelis acknowledged that there is a Palestinian people was in 1987, the first intifada. Suddenly the Israelis woke up and said, “Wow, there are people there in the West Bank. There are not only the servants that come to clean the restaurants and build our houses. There are people there who don’t want to be ruled by us.” For me it happened, definitely. 1987. All of a sudden, Wow. There are Palestinians there, not those Palestinians who are working in the factories for us or who are doing all the dirty jobs that we don’t want to do. If there was no terror—and it’s hard to say that—Israel would not move an inch. An inch. I will give you an example, also from The Gatekeepers. 2000. Ehud Barak unilaterally withdraws from Lebanon. He withdraws from Lebanon, Hezbollah comes to the international border. Hezbollah fighters are on the border, tearing the flag of Israel and saying, “We pushed you out. By force. You were afriad, this is how we pushed you out.” In the meantime, the Palestinians are saying to Barak—or to the Israelis—“We gave you security in the last two years. We did everything we could in order to fight the Hamas terrorists. We put them in jail, in the prospect of getting a Palestinian state. What did you do? How much did you move? Nothing. You didn’t move towards us. Nothing. Hezbollah killed your soldiers, fired rockets on your northern cities, and what did you do? You moved to the international border.” What is the message that every Palestinian understands from that? What kind of a clear message does Israel send to anybody after that? You want to move forward? Let’s move forward two months ago, three months ago. For three, four years the Palestinian Authority has provided security for the state of Israel completely. Two days ago it was published that this year no Israelis were killed by terrorist attacks from the West Bank.

DT: I saw the article in Haaretz.

DM: First year. Why? Because the Palestinian Authority security forces and the Israeli security forces allowed that state of security to happen. What did Netanyahu do in the last four years? Zip. Nothing he did. Nothing. What did he do with Hamas? He released one thousand terrorists in order to get Gilad Shalit, and he negotiated. Although he likes to portray himself as the strong guy, the strong leader who doesn’t bow to terror, who negotiated with Hamas about the cease fire in Gaza just three, four weeks ago? Who was the one? Was it Barack Obama? Was it the left or the right wings in Israel? No, Bibi Netanyahu, the big fighter against terror, negotiated with Hamas and yielded to Hamas. The consequence of the last conflict in Gaza was that the terrorist leader of Hamas was allowed to come to Gaza and to row in the parade, where he says this is the only way that we will force Israel to submit—only by force. Who allowed that? Who allowed that? The prime minister of Israel.

DT: Well, that answers my question.

DM: The biggest fighter against terror. And what is he doing in the meantime with the people who are saying to him, We are willing to accept the state of Israel, we are willing to fight terror, we will fight terror, we don’t believe in terror, what is he doing to Abu Mazen and Salam Fayyad? Humiliating them. Making them not relevant. And showing to the whole world, and definitely to the Palestinian population, that only Hamas, by using force, is making Israel bow, is forcing Israel to do whatever he wants them to do.

DT: For me, one of the most heartbreaking moments came when Ami Ayalon, speaking about Rabin’s assassination, said, “I suddenly saw a different Israel. What do we have in common?” For me, that was heartbreaking, especially as an American Jew. We trotted up with our little quarters to put in the Keren Kayemet box, and all the propaganda that we get here…

DM: It is heartbreaking for me as well. What can I tell you? Do you want me to comment on that?

DT: Yes.

DM: The biggest threat to Israel’s security is those far right wing extremists. This is the biggest threat to Israel’s security. Who is the most renowned American president? I’m asking you now.

DT: Lincoln.

DM: Why?

DT: Because he brought the people together.

DM: And what did he do in order to do that?

DT: Compromise?

DM: Civil war. He made civil war because he felt that at one point in its history, a country cannot yield to something that is so brutally and honestly immoral. There are some things to which you cannot yield. After he assassinated Rabin, Yigal Amir said something at the end of his trial. The judge tells him, “Before I’m going to sentence you, I allow you to speak.” And what Yigal Amir said stayed with me; he said, “Nobody addressed the fact that there is a contradiction in terms between the democratic Israeli state and Jewish law. Unless it will be addressed, it will continue.”

DT: What’s the contradiction?

DM: Jewish law comes before the democracy, before the law of the land. Basically, the rabbis are above the law of the state, and this is the main problem: When there is a group of people inside Israeli society who do not accept the concept of democracy but when it comes to decision making they say the law of the Torah, the law of the Bible, these are the ones that prevail. You saw that in the movie, when this rabbi says, “No leader can oppose the Torah. No one can do that.” When it reaches that point, Israel will have to decide where it goes. Even if it will mean a civil war…

DT: Haaretz just reported that Riad Malki says that the Palestinians will go to the Hague if Israelis don’t stop the E1 plan. How important is international pressure at this point?

DM: Crucial. Essential. Unless Obama will put enormous pressure—on both sides, by the way, not only the Israelis—but mainly on the Israelis and the Palestinians, nothing will happen. They’re two entities that have now reached the pubic period. They’re two entities that are basically like small children who are fighting and nobody understands what they’re fighting about. As far as the leaders of Israel, Netanyahu is dealing with all the wrong reasons not to do anything. I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t believe that Netanyahu has it in him; he’s not a leader. He’s a good salesman…for furniture…I’m talking really honestly. This is what I feel. He’s the worst prime minister. He and [Ehud] Barak can compete for who’s the worst prime minister in the history of Israel. I don’t know who will win. Probably Netanyahu although Barak in his year and a half created so much damage that it’s taking many years to mend the damage he did. The kind of leadership that needs to move towards peace you don’t see even in the far horizon of Israeli politics. So though the gatekeepers are always trying to comfort me and tell me, “You are much too bleak, the leadership will arise,” I don’t see that kind of leadership on the horizon of Israeli politics now. And unless an enormous power will be forced on both sides to move ahead… America knows how to do that—Barack Obama, if he wants, knows how to do that—and I think that there are hints by appointing the defense minister…

DT: Chuck Hagel…

DM: And by appointing the foreign minister…

DT: John Kerry…

DM: He indicates very clearly where he wants to go. I hope that he really means that. There’s also concern about the conservative Jews here in America, who have a lot of power, I think. in my point of view, those Jews are making a mistake in what they do. I’m not the only one saying that. Believe me, six heads of the Israeli secret service are saying the same thing: By the way that they act, the way that they accept the wrong policy of the Israeli government, they are damaging the state of Israel. Not helping—damaging the sate of Israel. And unless they understand that, and unless they will help President Obama take this Titanic that is heading head-on towards the iceberg and help him change the wheel…. Basically this is what they are doing: They are helping the captain of the Titanic move head-on towards the iceberg. I don’t want to blame, but this is what I feel AIPAC is doing.

DT: Is there anything you want to add?

DM: I hope those people will come to The Gatekeepers keeping an open mind and heart and watch those six heads of Israeli secret service, the Shin Bet, whom you cannot call unpatriotic. They are the ones who sacrificed the most for the security of Israel. Most of their grown-up life since the day that they served in the army was in the service of the security of Israel. This is what they dedicated their lives to…six of them. All the heads of Shin Bet who are alive, coming and telling…. Listen to them. This is what I ask. Just listen to them. Don’t do anything. Just come with open minds to The Gatekeepers and listen to those people. What you decide after that is up to you. But listen to them. Don’t be racially prejudiced or mesmerized by the propaganda machine that’s working against that. Go to the movie and judge for yourself. You are old enough and capable enough intellectually to do that by yourself. This is what I’m hoping will happen.

But what game? The one James Naismith invented to bridge the football and baseball seasons and help restless adherents of “Muscular Christianity” endure frozen New England winters? The one that philosopher-king Bill Russell called a simple game played by grown men in short pants? The high-wire carnival circus on display at NBA’s All-Star Weekend, played on Michael Jordan’s fiftieth birthday? [1].

II. Changes

Since Russell’s simpler time, there have been tidal waves of extrinsic changes, with salaries escalating astronomically, and players ever-more-quickly achieving iconic status, marketing themselves as both comedic super heroes and arbiters of taste. The pants aren’t short any more either.

A quantum increase in marketing was ushered in by events of the mid-80’s, presided over by – and of course reflecting – a Ronald Reagan ethos: the corrupt – or at least suspect – 1985 lottery in which the faltering Knick franchise was rewarded with Patrick Ewing, ESPN’s meteoric rise, and Nike’s seemingly made-in-heaven marriage to the instantly iconic and insanely popular Michael Jordan. Ewing was introduced nationally as a player who could impact immediately markets. Never mind games! The desire to “Be Like Mike” became universal.

In the new deal, players were rated and judged as much by their salaries as their on-court efforts and achievements. Come 1992, the soil was fertilized for the outsize winning personality of man-child Shaquille O’Neal to ramp up marketing even more. So by the time Lebron James was drafted in 2003 – barely out of high school, yet entering the league with enough fanfare to command nearly an eight figure sneaker contract – he could, credibly, – and before ever stepping on an NBA floor – publically aspire to become the game’s first billionaire.

III. Lebron's Journey

While James was toiling seven years in Cleveland without a championship ring, on an individual level, the real issue became whether, or when, he would supplant Jordan as the game’s recognized greatest player.

Being one of the few that held out for Oscar Robertson’s right to retain that position, I saw James as offering a unique resume in his bid for that distinction. I based my opinion not only upon James’ overall greatness, but also upon his combining attributes of the best all-court players (Robertson, Jordan, Magic Johnson) with the physical strength and overpowering brute force of the most dominant centers: Wilt Chamberlain and Shaq.

Seeming to be ideally positioned to obliterate this time-honored Best Big Man-Best player distinction, James suddently detoured into public censure and virulent hatred with his nationally televised image-suicide gaffe known as “The Decision. ” Before that time, James had managed his image with the utmost care, making it doubly difficult to understand his opacity [2] in commanding a national audience to watch him callously announce that Ohio’s native son was deserting Cleveland for the glitter of Miami.

That was less than two years ago. Now playing his tenth year in the NBA at the age of twenty-eight, James has added an NBA title and an Olympic Gold Medal to his resume, and has come through the firestorm of negative sentiment that he generated with his decision to take his talents – and reputation – South, to the beach – and then worsened with a still- inexplicable confused disappearance in his first Finals with his new Miami team. King James has in effect become the game. He is now basketball’s public face.

We hardly stopped to ask the question that Jordan answered so
disappointingly: how will he spend his social capital?

Then, on All-Star weekend (which interrupted a Miami Heat win streak that was surging toward – and would eventually reach – double figures), after a succession of six unbelievable games in Oscar’s high triple-double mode (scoring over 30 points, and shooting over 60%), a sub-plot emerged that established a continuity between Oscar’s lineage and Lebron’s, as distinct from that of Jordan and Shaq. In a player’s meeting resulting in the firing of NBA players union executive director Billy Hunter (whose business practices are being investigated by several government agencies), James became a key participant. James’ role was reminiscent of Oscar’s before the 1964 All-Star game. Oscar forwarded the players struggle for union recognition and a retirement pension by organizing the game’s newly emergent brightest stars to threaten not to play in the 1964 All-Star game.

Unlike Jordan, who never leveraged his popularity into support for social and political justice issues, James the super-capitalist was doing his righteous duty, if at the same time enhancing his image. He was, it could be said, forging own unique integration of marketing, public relations, textbook high IQ basketball, and overwhelming physical talent. The contrast with Jordan’s post-retirement career could not be more glaring! [4]

IV. All-Star Weekend

All the game’s changes were on showcase review during All-Star Weekend, a meaningless but symbolic pageant, with multiple circus tents for a range of stars to showcase their talents, beginning with the newest iteration of the rookie-sophomore game, re-named the Rising Stars Challenge, which was a chance for me to get a look at the younger players on teams that I rarely watch; it’s a game in which the young bucks get to display the superb athletic skills that – unless coming in hyped as the next Lebron James – they must submerge, as young players, to get playing time. Undisturbed by defense, they ran up a 90-66 half-time score (on its way to 163-135), thereby underlining Weekend’s extreme orchestration – thrown into another gear a decade ago, when Turner TV took over, and rapidly escalated the already steadily increasing corporatization of the festivities.

The cozy bond between media and participant has progressively tightened. Chuck and Shaq themselves constitute the show. They chose up to form teams, changing the format from Rookie-Sophomore. The media completely surrounds, and seamlessly interpenetrates with, the experience of watching games, with announcers shilling “apps,” as if we had inadvertently clicked on a link.

Fully enveloped in a hip-hop sound production enterprise, with music that failed miserably to link the game with its historic past. In glaring contrast was Bill Russell’s interview before the game, in which Russ talked of his meeting with Nelson Mandela. It is a further irony that James forsook wearing #23 in stated deference to Michael Jordan, but, without even a nod, blithely switched to Russell’s #6.

For the occasion, a jovial Karl Malone was brought into the studio to join Shaq, Charles, and Kenny Smith, taking the raucous hip racially-tinged humor swirling around the unflappable Ernie Johnson to yet another level.

V. Then, Now, Always

How different a world the NBA now presents from the one in which I grew up: In 1954, I was at Madison Square Garden for the fourth All-Star Game (5)! A hand ballot in the fourth quarter gave the MVP to Jim Pollard, George Mikan’s Minneapolis Laker team-mate on the seemingly victorious West. But a combination of Bob Cousy’s last quarter heroics put the East ahead, until Mikan’s two free throws put the game into overtime. The East won, and a re-vote was taken, giving Cousy the MVP. Somehow, in the crowd, we (including me, at age ten) knew all this, by quickly-circulating rumor, as it was transpiring.

Perhaps the best way to think of the changes in those fifty-nine years is to look at the contrasting figures of James and Mikan, who was about Ryan Anderson’s size, and considerably less athletic. The 6’10” 240 pound Anderson’s participation in the Weekend was limited to the three-point shooting contest, which he had a real shot at winning. A similarly sized white giant – Kevin Love – won it last year. If only there were a YouTube clip of Mikan trying to launch a three-pointer!

What worlds remain to be conquered for the recognized (by all but Kobe Bryant, from his increased James-directed mano-mano competitiveness toward the game’s end, when he actually blocked one of the King’s shots, after playing him increasingly physically) King? He’s had All-Star game MVPs, and that’s the weekend to chill and be politic. He might try the dunk contest. Just once, Lebron. Please.

But the man is focused on titles, as well he should be. A string of rings is all some people will value, in making ultimate comparisons. He knows he needs to convince them too. Getting into Lebron’s mind, though, is something he will now allow only to those he wants in. Don’t forget the big reason he went South: to play with his friends. And we hated him for that!

Notes

1 As if to underline the marriage of showmanship and content, it was just the following day that the basketball world was saddened by the death of Jerry Buss, the Los Angeles Laker owner whose flamboyantly spent dollars were so closely associated with the Laker ascension to dominance, with its Showtime offense orchestrated by Magic Johnson, under Pat Riley. Buss assembled great teams by both spending money and by hiring the best basketball minds (Phil Jackson, Jerry West, in addition to Riley).

2The ungainly fashion in which Lebron presented himself reminded one of the bumbling presentations of pompous blacks in “Amos n’ Andy.” “The Recission” the Kingfish might have called it.

3 This Big Data generated “streak” was “broken” by an at least equivalently marvelous game in which James tallied 39 points, 12 rebounds, and seven assists, and only dipped under the requisite 60% from the floor by taking and missing a late 28 footer (after the game’s outcome was clearly settled).

4 See Dave Zirin’s “Citizen Mike.”

5 I had already been to an NBA Finals game, a completely unheralded event that took place not in Madison Square, but in the 69th Regiment Amory, a building into which the Knicks were shunted when playoff games turned out to conflict with the Circus, which had booked prime time in March, when the Finals arrived in those days. Getting booking time in the winter in the Garden was a coup of a kind not previously associated with the NBA of the leaner-than-David Stern years.

What if one side is in the right and the other in the wrong? This is a question that a (radical) relativist would simply dismiss as illegitimate (for him or her there is no objective right and wrong), but a believer in the possibility of objective truth must take the existence of right and wrong seriously. Wouldn’t compromise diminish what principled advocacy means to accomplish? The answer depends upon the kind and degree of right and wrong. Racism, slavery and genocide, to name the most blatant examples, are or should be non-negotiable issues. Which is not to say that we cannot negotiate with oppressors if they have the capacity to hold on to power, but such negotiation would be in the interest of reducing oppression. (It is a curious fact that there are those who in the interest of peace and avoiding war urge the government to seek diplomatic solutions with intransigent tyrannical adversaries in order to reduce violence or oppression, while intransigently refusing to engage less menacing opposition at home.) Wasn’t Lincoln a principled compromiser in the matter of slavery? He limited his resistance to the westward expansion of slavery before his election to the presidency to the displeasure of the abolitionists, because he viewed its complete elimination as politically not feasible until the Civil War was won. Lincoln never completely overcame his own racism, though he made considerable progress in moving away from it. Slavery now is universally anathema in civilized nations though it may continue to have an underground as well as an open existence in backward nations. Racism too is anathema though there continue to be differences of opinion about what constitutes racism in particular instances.

The rights and wrongs in our current politics are less momentous than those that produced the civil war, but they are serious enough with potentially grave social and economic consequences. Returning to the matter of the state of our national economy and the question of how our deficit and sovereign debt should be addressed, let us make the reasonable assumption that the Keynesians are right to argue that stimulating the economy and not austerity is the order of the day; should those of Keynesian persuasion compromise with advocates of austerity? (For Keynesians the problem is moral as well as economic, for what is at stake is the fate of millions of unemployed job seekers.) Though of great importance, the differences between the two sides do not have the moral gravity of slavery and racism. They do not constitute a struggle between radical good and radical evil. There is a case for beginning to address the problem of the high national debt in the long term by carefully cutting spending now and making deeper cuts later when the economy is stronger and unemployment is low. In an often dysfunctional, non-parliamentary democracy like our own, legislative action is slow and too often badly done. It may be wise to begin early in planning for the future. Those on the liberal side for the most part embrace such a view in principle, but are resistant in practice, because even small spending cuts may significantly reduce benefits in entitlements (in particular medicare and social security) necessary for those who earn little or are unemployed. If there are cuts to be made, the liberal view is that they should be made mostly in defense and corporate welfare to supplement increased taxes on the wealthy. In the meantime, liberals believe that a stimulus package to improve our infrastructure and education made possible by increasing taxes on the wealthy to be necessary; it would strengthen the economy and reduce unemployment. It is a position unacceptable to the conservative side, which draws the line on tax increases, while seeking spending cuts across the domestic front with little or no cuts in military expenditures. Republicans argue that they have already conceded on the tax front in agreeing to raise the marginal rate on the wealthy. A reasonable compromise would entail sacrifices on both sides: liberals would have to give on entitlements, particularly medicare and conservatives on higher taxes of the wealthy.

In an interview, House Speaker John Boehner rejects the idea of compromise and embraces the idea of common ground. While compromise involves sacrifice on both sides, common ground implies an overlapping of interests and convictions of opposing sides. When you find common ground presumably you have given up nothing. In effect, Boehner is declaring an unwillingness to concede anything to the opposition—at least beyond what he has already conceded. My own view, as I have already said, is that the case for the liberal view is economically and morally the stronger case, but its strength is diminished if it would refuse to consider cuts in entitlements in exchange for agreement from the conservative side to cut, for example, corporate welfare such as subsidies to oil companies. If there is any doubt that compromise is a necessary principle in the life of a nation, we need only contemplate the prospect of the disastrous consequences of “sequestration” (arbitrary draconian cuts in domestic and military spending): the evisceration of essential programs, the strong possibility of close to a million job losses and a return to recession. Those at the extremes are willing to see the sequestration go forward without worrying about the consequences. Their ambition is to successfully fix the blame on the other side. What is distressing is that for opportunistic political reasons the apparent non-extremists on one side (the Republican side) seem to have bought into the extreme of their base.

The extremists are empowered by the conviction that they are in exclusive possession of what is morally right. In their view, compromise is a dilution, a distortion, a diminishment of what is right. Compromise (i.e., being compromised) has as one of its meanings self-betrayal as well as the betrayal of others. But extreme principled views can also have tyrannical resonance as in Barry Goldwater’s affirmation of liberty: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” Yes it is a vice when it suppresses the question as to what is meant by liberty, by no means an easy question to answer. Consider Lincoln’s remarks in a speech he gave in which he acknowledged the contentions over the meaning of “liberty”:

The world has never had a good definition of the world liberty. We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself and the product of his labor; while with the others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor…

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the shepherd and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty, and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures…(Address at a Sanitary Fair in Baltimore, April 1864).

The liberty of an individual with money and power may in effect deprive those without power of their liberty. The fact is that liberty like equality has different meanings and applications, which hyperbolic rhetoric such as Goldwater’s represses.

If the task of government is to preserve liberty, then what is required is negotiation among those who embody its different meanings. Which means that mutual restraints on the liberties of the various parties may be necessary in order for each to party enjoy liberty. The wolf may have to be restrained from attacking the sheep. The human defender of the sheep may be limited in his power to kill wolves in order to preserve the herd. (Lincoln’s fable delivers a powerful message against the slave owners; it scants however the claim of the wolf.) We may think of compromise as the respect that each side has for the views of the other side or sides and the understanding it shows for the need to exercise self-limitation in serving the public good. Consider, for instance, the needs of the poor (the cause of the liberal left) and the aspirations of the entrepreneur (the cause of the libertarian right). To inhabit the imagination of the passionate left is to enter into the lives the poor, the disabled, and the deprived and to live the life of indignation and protest. We need a party that works to alleviate the suffering and improve the lives of the poor, but we also need to value the enterprising and the creative, who enjoy their strength, independence and productivity. The parties will be in conflict with each other, but it should be possible that particularly in times of crisis for them to form a partnership and at other times to coexist in parallel? The party of strength and wealth should also be willing to sacrifice more than the party of the poor, because they possess more and can afford the sacrifice.

“The uncompromising mindset,” as Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson point out in The Spirit of Compromise, has a role to play in the story of compromise; it may provide a check on premature compromise, a fault of Obama according to his liberal base. A problem arises when “the uncompromising mindset” becomes inflexible and turns into a simple refusal to compromise. A premature compromise, it should be pointed out, is often difficult to determine, especially for those on the outside of negotiations. Compromise like comedy depends on timing. One needs to be privy to what is going on inside the process to know when it is appropriate to make concessions. And even those inside the process can’t ever be sure that a concession or the failure to deliver one at the time was right or that the right concession was made. History is not a laboratory in which events can be replicated. Gutmann and Thompson distinguish between the mindsets of campaigning and governing. The mindset of the campaigner is uncompromising in setting forth ideas and policies in contrast to those of rivals, while governing necessarily requires compromise. However, when one or the other side proves to be intransigent in enacting legislation, those who govern may have to turn to the public and campaign for compromise, which is what Obama has been doing. The uncompromising mindset is not always a matter of personal or political temperament. It may have deep cultural roots that cannot be easily plucked out. Progressives in their impatient desire for improvement may fail to take into account conservative cultural resistances to the changes that they seek. For instance, laws to regulate guns will not succeed if a substantial portion of society is aggressively opposed to such regulation. The resistance to gun regulation is especially serious and dangerous because the resisters have the weapons to enforce their resistance. To say this is not to say that the effort should not be made to control the purchase and use of guns, but what needs to be respected is the call for discussion and debate. The acknowledgement of the difficulty of achieving such legislation is not a cop out—as some advocates of gun control believe. If advocates of gun control lose the battle on assault weapons but win the battle for background checks for gun purchasers, they will have gained a victory through compromise.

Compromise is a matter of manners as well as morals. Incivility in normal political discourse reflects something deeper than bad manners: an intolerance of views opposed to one’s own. Which is not to say that intolerance has no place even in civil discourse. We have a duty as civilized creatures not to tolerate murderous actions and words, totalitarian governments, racism, slavery etc. Should we then extend our intolerance to what we view as wrongheaded ideas that refuse to die (the economist Paul Krugman calls them zombie ideas), but are not murderous? In a free society, we allow them to be expressed, though we are also free to deride them. One reason to show restraint in attacking opposing views is that we may turn out to be precipitous in our judgments. A disreputable view may deserve a fresh, disinterested look, while a received view may merit a skeptical look. Compromise too often is thought of simply as sacrifice. It may prove to be a learning experience. In the process of negotiation, we may see flaws on our own side as well as virtues on the other side. What is most admirable is a critical openness to the views of others, a willingness and capacity to learn from others—the powerless from the powerful as well as the powerful from the powerless. Most troubling about the intransigent right is that one is forced into a posture of a defensive progressivism. One feels less free to be self-critical, that is, critical of the progressive position, since so much energy is diverted to combating the intransigence. Realizing this, one should make an effort not to be blind or indifferent to faults on one’s own side, despite every temptation presented by the other side.

In the early days of the republic, the party system was the subject of debate between party advocates, who believed that democracy required a space in which different and conflicting views could be expressed and anti-party advocates, who envisaged a politics of unanimity that transcended factional interests. The party advocates fortunately won the debate. We know what that oxymoron, a one party system, looks like. A no party (lack of) system would give us chaos rather than unanimity. But our party system has its liabilities, and they are fully on view at the present time. A minority party with the desire and the means to block necessary action simply refuses to compromise with the majority party. We are in a time when the spirit of compromise that has existed in the past has atrophied. It needs to be restored.

We are going on about how increasing someone’s pitiful dole allowance by 25 pence a week is woefully unfair since wages are going down. We are talking that tired crap of blaming single mothers and immigrants and the European Union for the lack of jobs, decent housing, a living wage, why Johnny can’t read and write.

Ignorant and hell–bound youth hurl abuse at Chinese students, who bring millions of dollars into the UK economy every year. No one stops them. Hoods rule public transport in many places.

Indian students, that other group traditionally counted on to prop up the higher education industry, are beginning to be less enamoured of the UK’s prestigious caps and gowns. Their applications are down by more than 10,000. They know they are not wanted no matter what Cameron said in India last week. Unlike him foreigners have to travel the busses and trains and walk the streets of racist and resentful English neighborhoods. In a globalized world, word spreads.

The official unemployment rate is high at 7.9% and forecast to get even higher. But we are told that there more people are employed than ever before but beneath the headlines its clear that the jobs are part time and temporary. In a population of 63.2 million, 13 million live below the poverty line and there is a growing number of hungry families. There are now 250 food banks in the UK and more coming. There is an unprecedented rise in heating costs, too. Some families are having to choose between heating and eating.

Caroline Flint, from Labour says, “People have to ask themselves what kind of Government can afford a £3 billion pound tax giveaway for the highest earners but chooses to cut support for people in fuel poverty and leave over a million children in the cold."

Much of the growing poverty is due to the cuts in job seekers allowance. In many ways though, it’s even worse if you are working. And if you are working full time – good for you – but your living standards are worse today than they were a decade ago. Just as in the American economy there is an enormous gap between the upper one-third of the country and everyone else. The more we toil, the more we produce, the greater the inequalities. And the ticket to social mobility – a university education – is now an eye-watering £9000 a year at the best universities. So what? In the US, we pay a lot more for college, no? That’s true and it has always been that way in the U.S.

But not long ago, just a decade or so, British students did not pay any tuition at all. But then you didn’t need a degree to get a job either.

Britain’s public sector is not only being drastically reduced but, more importantly, it’s being re–structured. Since so much of the population north of London and the home counties was dependent on public sector jobs and services, the private sector has collapsed as well. But the Right does not want recovery; it wants something different, and the economic crisis is an opportunity to create that something different at a profit.

Councils, local government, are at the mercy of tightwad ideologues. Cuts are to the bone. Thousands of poor people on state benefitS are being uprooted from pricey London boroughs and dumped in some of the poorest, most under–resourced and historically troubled cities in the North, like Liverpool and Bradford. I smell a riot. Up north there are now food–banks where community centres used to be. Whole town centres are boarded up – towns that used to boast of being too political and principled to allow a McDonalds are now too poor to support a McDonalds. Community work, family support, counseling centres, rehabilitation units, youth work, and the crown jewel of the welfare system the National Health Service have all been cut.

We’ve been told that we are in all this together. And we have been told that the cuts have not gone far enough.

Arts funding too has been cut dramatically in most places and as much as 100% in the cities of Newcastle and Somerset. But councils there have money for other things. "Everyone is making difficult decisions" government spokesmen intone. Except of course those who are having these decisions made for them. But do not get the idea that there is no money in Britain. There is plenty of money. The public sector gave £9.3 billion to the Olympics. Private groups put up a little over 2 billion. Lloyd’s bank says the UK taxpayer may benefit from this extraordinary outlay – but not until 2017. So you see there is money for the monied in the UK. Expensive philanthropic projects have glam openings. Millionaires have pavilions named after them. Billionaires buy football teams.

While the rest of us remain unorganised, still at one another’s throats.

If you read Shaw’s first novel carefully, you soon realized that his apparently old-fashioned page-turner was also a quiet but deadly satire: the only schoolbooks with any chance of engaging an intelligent child’s attention were the ones Merton’s school had recently purged from its classrooms and library as hopelessly obsolete, so that Merton encountered them purely by chance, on a rubbish heap in his school’s basement. Similarly, Merton’s social success derives in some part from his family’s occupational status, just as it might have in a school story written a century ago, but in Merton’s case his great chance comes from the fact that his mother’s newest boyfriend is a coke dealer, whose filched product provides the first step on the hazardous road to adolescent celebrity. While Shaw’s subtlety and tact can strategically obscure the fact, The Illumination of Merton Browne is not only a school story and a bildungsroman, but a political novel: it is a teacher who educates Merton. Although this man is paid with tax money to do such a job, in Merton’s case the job is necessarily done informally, irregularly and despite the best efforts of the school Merton attends, which to a grimly plausible degree barely remembers what it means to educate anyone. In our age, which often overtly and almost always tacitly deprecates the potency of governments, what the state does, or fails to do, matters infinitely to someone like Merton Browne.

Shaw has now published a second novel, Ten Weeks in Africa. It feels significantly bleaker and also more intricate than his first, but it is also an often-satirical novel of politics. Ten Weeks In Africa is set in an imagined and renamed version of Kenya with a bit of Uganda added to the mix, and its non-African characters are mostly British or Pakistani, but the kind of pseudo-politics Shaw is satirizing have an unhappy relevance for Americans. Professed and even sincere good intentions mean much less than we hope they do, a point Shaw makes repeatedly in Ten Weeks In Africa: his novel’s most effective hero is a businessman who, among his other enterprises, bribes police officials to allow his employees to steal tourists’ luggage from an international airport. This businessman’s newest employee, a small boy unhappily resolved to help notorious thieves in order to buy medicine for his dying mother, seems on first encounter to have fallen into an African Fagan’s hands, but we slowly realize that the boy is now working for a man who is in effect an unsentimental, wholly modernized and absolutely plausible version of one of the Cheerybles, the benevolent merchants from Nicholas Nickleby.

Shaw recounts the lives of his African characters with almost no comic effects, reserving his satirical energies for his British NGO workers, some of whom are as decent as they are deluded about the nature of logic of the system within which they work, while others recall the Jellybys and for that matter the Pardiggles of Bleak House. None of them are remotely as intelligent, or as sinister, as is an African cabinet minister, a woman who has published now-canonical feminist scholarship on the role of women in Africa while helping loot her country for herself, her tribe and her family, speaking (when she chooses) Western Left academic idiom with a fluency and rhetorical effectiveness that leaves my colleagues in the dust. This suggests that to have learned about contemporary Africa in a Western university may mean having been steeped in either irrelevancies or deadly absurdities about the places one aspires to improve, which is only one of Shaw’s points, but one that informs some brilliant and chilling scenes.

There are also plenty of non-Dickensian characters in Ten Weeks In Africa. At a crucial juncture the truly entrepreneurial businessman/thief/hero is motivated by the lowest of motives, lust provoked by pique over the standoffishness of a beautiful young woman of superior status, while the higher motives of Shaw’s European characters can be masks for the most deadly kind of self-seeking, the sort that disguises itself as selfless virtue to those caught hopelessly in its grasp. So far, so good, indeed so wise, bitterly funny and instructive, but why might Ten Weeks In Africa be peculiarly instructive for Americans, at least ones who work in universities?

In part because of what Shaw demolishes: the notion that the most virtuous among us work for NGOs seeking to salve the wounds of what used to be called the Third World, and that Development Studies is the science of virtue. As it happens, these notions take in a extraordinary number of my otherwise corrosively skeptical students, and for that matter my friends’ children. Something about the education they have received makes them oddly credulous about NGOs, and my guess is that this credulity has something to do with the intellectual trajectory of the generation that has educated them. A lot of American academics fell out of love with the state just around the time I began teaching, and while we still officially urged its expansion—most of us still called ourselves socialists—we didn’t write about it much, and to a remarkable degree we ceased to teach its histories. It bored us, and to our students the state also seems rather boring, in part because it was deemed wicked in an oddly dreary way. I have the impression that nowadays a person deemed “political” may well be someone almost perfectly inattentive to (and deeply bored by) politics as the word was once understood.

This has not improved our ability to comprehend or improve the politics of either our own societies or of any others. As Shaw’s novel dramatizes, while NGOs may be assumed to be free of self-interest, ugly compromises and almost all the amoral realities of power, they are of course steeped in such things. They necessarily have their own institutional and sectional interests, and they often pursue their interests in durable coalitions with those government to which they are so misleadingly (because so heroically) contrasted. This does not mean that NGOs are likely to be worse than governments, but since they are widely taken to be so much better than governments, they are surely fit subjects for satire, or in this case for tragicomedy. One point Mr. Shaw does not bother to make—he may think it too obvious—is that NGOs are in one striking respect very different from the Western governments to which their moral superiority is so persistently assumed: they lack the democratic legitimacy of the governments to which they so often condescend, for no-one has ever voted for an NGO. So Shaw has written a deeply affecting and instructive novel showing just how deranged an assumption my students have been encouraged to make about NGOs. Like the school teacher in The Illumination of Merton Browne, Mr. Shaw is attempting to teach something that is desperately important, and doing it very much against the odds. We should all wish him the best of luck.