's wha' deez a'n't

Since I otherwise and largely agree with my august compeer Rob Payne regarding America's general blood boner, I hope he won't mind if I argue one point, namely that this

Nothing as cynical as the US federal government would embark upon a journey to bring so-called democracy – that sacred cow of the enlightened progressive West— to nations most Americans never heard of and know even less about.

is wrong.

If you were to step into my time machine and head back to the eighties, you would probably not find yourself so skeptical of the Soviet desire to bring Soviet communism to Afghanistan.  They too wanted central Asian oil, a shake in the opium trade, a foothold in the subcontinent, and a satisfying outlet for their decaying empire's last bloodhumpery, but, sure, they also wanted to recreate a society in their own image.  Because we understand Soviet communism as a brutal, unjust, inequitable, etc. system, we have no problem lumping its expansion in with all the other inhuman end goals of that invading state.

Yet we--we skeptics--persist in scoffing at the idea that America has any serious interest in "promoting democracy" because, though I suspect most of us have long had trouble admitting it, even to ourselves, we still hold some notion of democracy in positive regard.  Rob's phrasing admits as much: "so-called democracy."  Suggesting, obviously, that it is in some manner not really the real thing.

But our democracy is the real thing; this is what democracy looks like.  That it is corrupt, violent, satanic, terrible, horrible, no good, very bad . . . this is not some glitch, not some tumor metastasizing into the body politic; this is the flesh-and-bone itself; this is democracy.  You look at the corrupt, violent, money-choked gangster regimes in our occupied states and say, Well, clearly we weren't serious about bringing democracy to these poor people, because look at the governments we gave them.  Well, those governments look exactly like our own, only a little less refined, a little less skilled--they are not so good at the use of the subtler threats of violence, and so a little more prone, domestically at least, to actual violence.

The point I am making is that our democratic missionaries are exporting democracy as surely as Catholic Europe really did want to convert the natives.  Only if you believe that that wasn't really Christianity, or that ours isn't really democracy, do you claim that our governments are too cynical, that they would never really engage in a civilizing mission.  No, indeed, they are more cynical than you think.  They are so cynical that they would.

Mo' Be Dicks

I agree with B Psycho's note on The Last Man to Believe This Motorcycle Jacket Is Cool's WSJ bit on bullying: the inevitable outcome of every attempt at critical thought by anyone ever associated with Reason magazine is to determine that but for a few nosy schoolmasters and regulatchiks, everything is fine; eliminate a few administrative agencies, flatten the income tax, and ceteris paribus, it's all good, bro.  The fact that more zero tolerance policies and hamhanded legislative brickbats lobbed aimlessly in the direction of bullying are worthless or undesirable or, to use a liberal coinage, counterproductive, does not necessarily imply the absence of a problem for the kids at the wrong end of the jungle gym.

There is one particular Gillespian sentence that could stand a little bullying itself:

None of this is to be celebrated, of course, but it hardly paints a picture of contemporary American childhood as an unrestrained Hobbesian nightmare.

Of course, from an anarchist rather than libertarian perspective, that is to say, from a perspective interested in something other than crafting a state apparatus friendlier to the lifestyle preferences of a minor cadre of collegucated white dudes, American childhood is a Hobbesian nightmare--for whatever reason, poor old Hobbes got adjectized into the opposite of what he advocated; properly speaking, Hobbesian ought to refer, admiringly, to something very much like totalitarianism; and that is the experience of childhood in America, an endless skein of muy loco parentis dictators-manqués with interludes of self-policing straight out of the even nuttier adult world--children enacting the depravity of their governors upon and amidst themselves.

To look at childhood today and say that it is gentler, positively improved from the past because fewer kids worry about getting black eyes in the sandlot after school is to look at, oh, let's say race in America today and conclude that shit's just fine for black people because look, ma, no Jim Crow.  Of course Jim Crow was replaced by an even more pernicious and pervasive drug-war/prison-complex--replaced deliberately, I might add; likewise, children today are ever more hemmed in by much subtler but altogether more ubiquitous schemes of coercive and compulsory normalization.  The direct linkage to suicide and the know-nothing pathology of "epidemics" notwithstanding, the idea that children today have it great because you heard this story about helicopter moms living in the dorm with their college-aged daughters is plainly ignorant, and the mechanisms and institutions of childhood development all conspire to do what society does: to instill deference to authority, suspicion of dissent, intolerance of idiosyncrasy, and an attitude of uniform compliance to accepted norms with the instinct to segregate and deride anyone who deviates from them.

Klatuu Mirabile Nikto

Well the Spanish general strike was great fun; I participated only as a spectator, of course; we were in Seville at the time, a city redolent of the great global south, dirty and rundown and sweaty, full of fruit trees and trashy boys with too much gel in their hair--unlike Madrid and Barcelona, where the cops broke out the riot gear, even the police seemed in on the action, and since everyone assumed my boyfriend and I were Spanish (until we spoke, that is), we got to share lots of amused looks with locals as American tourist-grotesques wandered through the stricken commercial corridors wondering what all those Cerrado por HUELGA signs meant anyway.  But I do not want to talk about society stopping, for once, but rather, about society going the fuck on.  It is easy, even when you are a confirmed old skeptic and cynic, to get taken in by the dire warnings of Europe's imminent collapse.  Americans are all Devines, possibly; we all adore the hoofbeats of the End of Days.  Alas, strike aside, the streets are full; the bars are full; the restaurants are open; the gift shops are still selling tchotchkies; the bacalao is still braised in tomato; the criminally unemployed youth, or whatever, seem, well, fine, if maybe a bit bored.  

Now I know we are supposed to imagine that Society and Civilization and Capitalism and all the rest are so infinitely vast and complex and necessary to life as we know it that messing with any of it will plunge us back into a dark age, but you know, I suspect that the fishermen will still hop on their boats in the morning and the breweries will still make their beer and people in general will just get along with their lives.  What I am saying to you is that you have been brainwashed into believing that a more decent world, a world with fewer Antonin Scalias eager to nudge their arthritic knuckles ever nearer each individual's anus, will require a rupture so titanic that it will resemble a meteor strike or a nearby supernova.  Even those of us adhering to the view that this would be a welcome and desirable end tend to wax modestly apocalyptic about the period of transition.  And yet, one wonders: would it actually be so?  What if all the congresscritters in the world, the generals and general secretaries and unpaid unofficial advisers and MPs and CEOs and chiefs of police got ganked up in some kind of reverse rapture tomorrow?  How long would it take the rest of humanity to notice that it was supposed to be helpless without the offices they all occupy?