The Brothers Karamzov

I first read TBK in my late twenties (1980's) and must confess that I found it a bewildering jumble of stuff. I re-read it in my early thirties when Pevear and Volkhonsky published their translation (around 1990). I got more out of it the second time through but still found it a puzzle. I watched the old film adaptation of the novel from 1958 with Yul Brenner and Lee J. Cobb only to conclude that, as is most often the case, literary genius does not translate well to film.

At present, I am reading the novel for the third time and, this time, the pieces seem to fit better. In fact, they fit together only too well. Page after page, I cannot escape the feeling that (1) I am fifty years old, (2) this is only the third time I have read this novel and, consequently, (3) I have squandered much of my life.

Faulkner claimed to have re-read Don Quixote once a year. If Cervantes's masterpiece merits devotional reading (which, undoubtedly, it does), TBK merits it even more. The unfathomable depths of Dostoevsky's characterizations...All of us, every one, we are all mysteries to ourselves, and Dostoevsky's characters are mysteries dwelling in mysteries. There are books as true to the human condition as TBK, but there are none truer...

Holiday Advice

Drop what you are doing and pick up the following four books: (1) Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear (10th Anniversary edition, Basic Books 2009); (2) Garry Wills, Bomb Power (Penguin 2010); (3) Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class (Nation Books, 2010); (4) F. M. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (Pevear and Volkhonsky trans., Vintage Classics, 1991).

A word of explanation:

The books are to be read in the above order as a set.

The first three volumes detail how (and why), over the course of the last century, successive generations of Americans delivered their birthright of freedom into the custodianship of a militarized corporatocracy. The 4th book will disabuse the reader of any illusions s/he may still harbor that things could have turned out any other way.

At which point you will be ready for Sartre...

Mazeppist Musings

1. In the late 1980's, when the Soviet union collapsed and the Chinese government traded Mao's Marxian vision for State Capitalism, the National Security State that had emerged from the United States's Cold War corporativism found itself freed from any rivals to keep it in check. Now nothing stands in the way of American greed and hubris--nothing but the people of the planet to oppose the spreading shadow of McWorld. All that's left of the "Left" is one hundred thousand little "jihads" (see Benjamin Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995!). Is it enough?

2. Trahison des Clercs: Also in the '80's: when intellectuals in Europe and North America traded Camus and Sartre for Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida, they signaled their capitulation to the U. S. National Security State and the war machine. They were now fully complicit.

Heidegger, for all of his radical gestures vis a vis the traditions of "Western" philosophical discourse, was deeply conservative when it came to politics and culture. Foucault and Derrida were never able to muster consistent political commitment.

Deconstruction is as disruptive to Leftism as it is to the Right. It is best understood as a tool--a Cynical gesture in the classical sense: think Diogenes' motto, "Deface the currency!" It is not an end in itself.

3. The pyrotechnics of 9/11, whether the work of Bin Laden or Dick Cheney, have had but a singular effect upon the American consciousness: to ennervate the national character by re-invigorating the Culture of Fear (see Barry Glassner's brilliant study of that title). No matter who the true perpetrators [perpe-traitors?] of 9/11 turn out to be, the enduring result has been the Reichstag Fire Effect. The Bush Administration took full advantage of this effect and Obama, the Right's Manchurian Candidate, has dutifully followed suit.

4. But such is not the revolution. The revolution will not be televised. Pfc. Bradley Manning, whether or not he is Wikileaks's "mole," has been assigned the tragic role of the revolution's first martyr.

Julian Assange's courage, like Manning's conscience, is considerable. And his service to the non-violent people's revolution against American Empire, as a foreign national, is most conspicuous. But the real contours of the revolution did not begin to manifest themselves clearly until the "Hacktivists" came forward in defense of Assange and, after his arrest, flexed their IT muscle by effectively shutting down significant elements of the Machine. In so doing, they demonstrated that, at will, they could throw a wrench into the gears. They appear to be the vanguard for which we've been waiting.

Proceeding slowly, cautiously, but with supreme confidence, they have exposed McWorld's Achilles' heel. McWorld will fall to one hundred thousand little "jihads"--aided and abetted, of course, by its own blind arrogance, greed, paranoia, and bureaucratic stupidity.

5. The moral? Resist. Refuse. Renounce.