Follow-on:  When I was in the army, we had a strange practice of going to the rifle ranges at the end of each fiscal quarter to shoot up all the remaining ammunition inventories.  Not to train with it, or husband it as an expensive and important material (setting aside moral questions for the moment).  We went out and had a supervised rifle-range free-for-all where we had rare permission to really let loose with automatic fire in training.  The object was to waste the ammunition.  That was the goal.  Because if you had remaining inventories at the end of the quarter, that was read by the institutional feedback loops as you had more than you needed, therefore you will receive less the next quarter, and the next.

Understand, the exigencies of training calendars did not easily accommodate marksmanship and live-fire exercises to the quarters in the fiscal cycle.  You might not need a lot of ammunition this quarter, but the next quarter may require a great deal in a few days.  Nonetheless, the entire system was thrown out of whack if you didn’t consume ammo at a very regularized rate.  The rate of consumption trumped the details of actual need.  So the whole army had these quarterly ammo expenditure free-for-alls because we had to waste money to maintain access to more money.

I submit this as one actual example of dog-waggery – that institutional deformity that gets a lot of play here.  May I solicit others for real-world examples of an institutional tail wagging a practical dog?

Karl Polanyi, in his book The Great Transformation, said essentially that the so-called self-regulating market, far from being spontaneous or flexible, is only maintained by a despotic grid of money and politics – a Weberian colossus without which the entire social edifice of this so-called “free” system would fall into chaos.

Polanyi said that economics is submerged, or embedded – in all social forms – in social relationships; that people were not driven by and large by self-interest in the pure, “rational actor,” acquisitive sense, but that they strive to safeguard their social standing.

Traffic

You are driving in traffic. This is a near-perfect metaphor for an existence lived on the Mono-Grid. More than a metaphor, it is literally the experience of following lines along a grid, with every move directed and monitored by signs and signals and laws.

Everyone in that traffic is moving with some purpose in mind. In their lives, they are either accumulating to safeguard their social standing, or they are trying to keep up in the traffic of their lives – endebted, always behind, driven – again, to safeguard their social standing.

The thing is, on the Mono-Grid, these are the only choices. Accumulate or struggle to keep up. Either way you are on (or in?) the grid. In neither way are you off the grid.

George Zimmerman and Robert Bales have secured themselves a place in history the same way many men do, by taking the lives of other human beings in ways that force us to rationalize furiously.  Women do, too, infrequently, but not the same way men do.  We are socialized to seek out the opportunity to kill other humans as part of this culture’s probative masculinity.

That this desire to kill is inculcated into men as part of their socialization (much of which is now accomplished with television, movies, and games) is the first thing that has to be rationalized away, because before men actually learn to do it (kill), they see killing as a form of redemptive violence that is enfolded in masculine actualization – always done in the name of a higher good of some kind (with the added bonus of that ‘special’ status, the killer-male mystique).  We have all been trained by this story convention.  That is why we so valorize the military, the police, and the vigilante.

When the story goes awry, when villagers are massacred without an operations order, or a black teen-aged young man is stalked and shot through the heart by a suburban gunslinger (who is not the police), we seek any other explanation except the one that says, “men are encouraged to want to kill.”  We seek medical explanations for soldiers, with post-traumatic stress disorder as the first line of defense.  Zimmerman is a tougher proposition, but we will medicalize his acts soon enough; because the dominant white culture still does not want to recognize that if Trayvon Martin had been white, he would never have been considered “suspicious”; and he would be alive today.  Zimmerman is not allowed to do that; racial profiling is the purview of police.

On NPR, March 20th, there were two military medical men – one a psychiatrist, and one the former Surgeon General of the Army – who spent half an hour with a soft-balling host, discussing how difficult wars are.  Not how wrong they are, how morally bankrupt they are, how atrocity-producing they are, but how difficult.  For people who might do a Robert Bales.  Might it have been head injuries?  Might is have been post-traumatic stress disorder?  Might Bales have slipped through the military vetting process with a pre-existing psychiatric condition?

During bayonet training – which all recruits endure during basic training in the Army – trainees are directed to shout out the word, “KILL!”  It is a response to the question, put loudly to the whole training company by the principle instructor:  “What is the spirit of the bayonet?”  Trainees:  “KILL!”  With each thrust, parry, and butt-stroke of the bayonet and rifle, the trainees shout, “KILL!”  So if there is a combination (rather like a martial arts kata) of thrust, withdraw, butt stroke, slash, and back to the ready, each move is accompanied by the word, in sequence, “KILL!  KILL!  KILL!  KILL!  KILL!”

When I was running the Bayonet Assault Course for West Point plebes back in 1986, we added a bit of verbosity.

INSTRUCTOR:  What is the spirit of the bayonet?

CADETS:  To Kill!

INSTRUCTOR:  What do you want to see?

CADETS:  Blood!  Blood!  Blood makes the grass grow!”

The former medical Generals on NPR failed to take note of this training, or the hours spent on the range firing at human-shaped silhouettes, or the marching cadences that say things like, “Ambush is killing, and killing is fun!”

Nor did they bring up anything about dehumanization; about people becoming gooks, dinks, hooches, hajjis, japs, krauts, skinnies, and so on.  When I was in Grenada for the invasion there, the all-white SEAL teams that were trapped for 36 hours just chose the old stand-by for their enemies, calling the siege a “nigger shoot.”  Like “turkey shoot,” get it?

They didn’t bring this up, because this dehumanization (in order to make it okay to kill) is not part of that “higher good” story that is pumped like sunshine up our collective ass.  They were on the radio for damage control, which is what they did in the military.  That OTHER who is stripped of his or her essential humanity, allowing him or her to be killed with impunity, is not a member of the Wazir family (of whom Bales apparently killed eleven members) or Trayvon Martin.  They are simply “hajji” or “nigger.”

If the victim is female, she is simply “bitch.”

The retired military medical men mentioned nothing of this relation that can be drawn between the history of war and the history of lynching and the history of rape.

Head injuries.  PTSD.  Sleep deprivation.  Malaria pills.

The most common causes of PTSD in the US are catastrophic accidents and rape; but I seldom see anyone in the media reaching for these as explanations for why someone has suddenly decided to do murder… unless they are former military.  It is a special exception clause for them.

The other thing they didn’t mention was the myth of frontier masculinity.  The mythos of Davy Crocket, Daniel Boone – an ideological reflection of empire-building.  Cowboys and Indians.  The brave and civilized man who sets aside the day-to-day, and takes on the threatening, dark forces outside the gates.  This is re-enacted again and again in our cultural productions – especially the male war and revenge fantasies.  Imperial Male become synonymous with a special fetish – the gun.

One veteran called into the NPR program and almost queered their pitch.  He said that he knew a lot of guys who weren’t twisted by their war experience.  A lot of his buddies, he pointed out, stated before they ever deployed that their goal was to kill someone – anyone.  The suggestion was that they might be mentally ill, and they should have been screened out.  But my experience in the Army was exactly the same, and it wasn’t the minority that stated they wanted to kill people.  It was the majority.  Men, at any rate.  White men in particular.  Everyone wanted to be Davy Crockett.  Audie Murphy.  John Wayne.

It was agreed that better screening is needed.

George Zimmerman didn’t have a war, so he had to construct his probative act inside the mini-civilization of his gated community.  A black teenager was the dark “other” chosen for the trophy.

The problem with a lot of military men is they get a pass on their first murder(s), sometimes even awards.  When it is not the redemptive violence so favored by film makers, and they discover that the best way to kill is with the least resistance possible, they accept the fact that they are not expected to kill in self-defense… that the enemy is a whole people, then they accept that they might as well just kill them whenever they can get away with it.  This is far more common than most people who haven’t experienced so-called “combat” realize.  Bales just got drunk (as the story goes) and didn’t plan well enough to get away with it.

He had some liquor and decided to kill a few hajjis.  That’s what men do in war.  Big deal.  “What the fuck is everyone trippin’ about?”  (I have heard this in similar circumstances.  “We just went to the ville and ripped off a mamason.  Who gives a fuck?”)

The reason we can’t ignore these incidents, yet we can ignore the drone killings, Fallujah, cops killing unarmed black men, is because this society has become completely morally incoherent.  We are a rotten culture, a dominator-male culture, adrift in an ethical cesspool of deracinated self-centeredness, programmed superficiality, and gratuitous violence.

We don’t want to believe it.  That’s why these con artist Generals on NPR can get away with their prevarications.  They are reinforcing our denial.  They simply can’t say that their wars are moral abominations, that their wars are cause and effect in American gun culture embedded in our more general acquisitive and individualistic corruption, riding a stale narrative of frontier masculinity.

We are a Nietzchean nightmare.

February 2, 2012

“The Roles of Finance, Food, and Force in US Foreign Policy”

*

Before I begin, I’d like to thank Jan Burnett and Casey Hilland of the School of International Affairs Student Government Association, as well as Dr. Tiyanjana Maluwa, Dr. Tineke Cunning, and John G. Hodgson, all of whom I understand were instrumental in organizing this gathering tonight.

It seems important at the outset to make a few disclaimers. First of all, I am by no means qualified as an expert, in the usual sense of that word, on foreign policy. My personal experience of it was as an instrument of policy within the military special operations community. Even within that community, I was an enlisted man who had gone in and out of the service, graduating through five of my pay grades two times each because of breaks in service. I was not a commissioned officer, nor was I ever a member of anyone’s staff. In fact, I can say that I felt about staff positions about the same way most of us would feel about avian flu; and I earnestly and successfully avoided those positions.

Nor am I am academic. I hold a bachelors degree from an institution that I have never seen firsthand that specialized in awarding non-resident degrees for military people. My degree, moreover, was in liberal studies with an emphasis in English literature.  I have looked into foreign policy and a host of other subjects on my own since 1996 when I separated once and for all from military service.  But I have not been formally trained as a foreign policy intellectual.

My work since leaving the army has included non-profit organizing, policy research, security consulting, technical advice, writing, some public speaking, grocery bagging, pizza delivery, landscaping labor, stone masonry, and deconstruction. The latter was not in any way associated with post-modern studies, but was literally deconstructing houses – demolishing them by hand to recover building materials for re-use.

So if there is an appeal to authority raised against my remarks tonight, I have no defense that can be based on credentials.

My political genealogy may also raise a few questions, because I have at different times throughout my life counted myself a conservative, a libertarian, an anarchist, a nationalist pragmatist, a liberal, a Marxist, a pro-feminist; and now my political identity is Christian, though in a way more closely associated with Mennonites or Catholic Worker communities than evangelicals. I am neither conservative nor liberal, and I dislike the term “progressive.”

Again, if anyone objects to my remarks, they are welcome to infer that I have an agenda based on any portion of that political genealogy.  I probably have several agendas, but I hope by the time I am finished that you will allow that I am not hiding them.

In 1983, I was in Guatemala.  I was there when General Mejia-Victores led a coup d’etat against Efrian Rios-Montt’s regime.  In 1985, I was in El Salvador, at the same time that President Duarte’s daughter Inez Guadalupe was kidnapped by the FMLN and exchanged for a number of prisoners. In neither case was I involved directly with those most notable events, but in both cases I was working directly out of the United States Embassy.  While my actual role in these places is still classified, what I have to say about these experiences does not relate directly to the work but to my observations of the inner workings of a US Embassy, and those observations are general enough to avoid running afoul of the law.

Embassies, I discovered,  were not much different than the military staffs I’d avoided.   They were bureaucratic, simultaneously authoritarian and conformist, and there was great deal of superficial courtesy  that papered over a red-toothed and Hobbesian struggle for career advancement.  But more to the point of this talk, I was obliged to check the Ambassador’s itinerary each day.

As it turned out in both cases, Guatemala and El Salvador, where each of these governments was waging war against its own people, the Ambassador’s most frequent visits were not to the chief of state, or the chief of state’s staff, or even to the host nation’s military chief of staff.  The most regular and frequent meetings were with the national chambers of commerce.  This is when – for a soldier who hadn’t thought enough about it – I came to realize that politics is about business, and that the political class serves the interests of the business class.

It was around that time, in the early 80s, that macro-economic forces were shaping a new form of international economy and corresponding changes in US foreign policy.

In 1973, as a protest against the US rescue of Israel from an impending defeat by the Egyptians in the Yom Kippur War, Arab nations implemented an oil embargo against the US, creating day-long gas lines that broke up only when filling stations pumped out their last drop of gasoline.

Oil prices rose dramatically, creating a tremendous windfall profit for oil producing states.  Oil was denominated in US dollars, and those additional dollars were invested at Wall Street by the same oil producers who were withholding gasoline from the US.

Wall Street does not sit on money.  Wall Street firms are rentier capitalists, that is, they use money to make more money; and so the glut of petrodollars from the Arab oil states was converted into vast development loans for poorer countries, especially in Latin America.

These loans, not unlike the subprime mortgages we know and love today, had adjustable rates.  During the latter Carter years, the United States – for reasons we won’t elaborate here – suffered something the economists hadn’t anticipated: simultaneous lack of growth – stagnation – and rapid inflation, which came to be known as stagflation.

Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker responded to this    with something called the Volcker Shock, that is, since inflation was the greater danger to the rentier capitalists, he raised the interest rate from 7.5%    to 21.5%, doubling US unemployment rates, while making large creditors whole.  These elevated interest rates were passed along, via Wall Street institutions, to those Latin American countries that had received the aforementioned development loans, creating a crisis in Latin America.  This shock doctrine lasted from 1979 to 1982, and when Reagan was in office in 1982, Mexico announced that it was about to default on its Wall Street loans, stranding Wall Street with more than $100 billion in losses.

Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, the US government stepped in to bail out Wall Street’s finance capitalists.  This was a bailout loan to Mexico, but the intent and the urgency was to ensure that Wall Street didn’t take a bath on the Mexican default.  The vehicle for loans to cover the previous loans to Mexico was the International Monetary Fund, an international institution formed in the latter years of World War II, in which the US exercises a very dominant role.  But this time, the bailout loans had something attached to them in addition to interest, called “conditionalities.”

These conditions included several ultimatums – that Mexico’s internal markets be opened to US-based investors, including US multinational corporations, that labor and environmental standards be rolled back to increase the rate of profit in order to pay back the restructured loans, and that regressive tax structures be implemented – also to assist in the payback of the loans.  A structural imperative, though not one of the specified conditions, was also that Mexican enterprises – in particular agriculture – be converted from production for local consumption to export products to get more of the US dollars required to service the restructured but now vastly expanded external debt.

Using similar crises, the IMF proceeded over the next few years to impose these conditionalities – called structural adjustment programs – on the majority of nations of the global periphery, effectively undermining their national sovereignty inasmuch as the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, all US-dominated pre-market institutions that manage the so-called “free” market, came to dictate the economic policies of these structurally-adjusted nations.

While these were originally contingent measures used to take advantage of Mexico’s crisis,    the Reagan administration soon realized    that they had stumbled onto a model    that could be used around the world    to open home markets to US investment    under conditions that were very advantageous    to US investors.     Moreover,    it was a way to capture    the political leadership of debtor nations    in a dollar-dominated system,     which would come to be known as neoliberalism.

I realize that this is a fly-over at several thousand feet, and that I am overlooking many of the details of this process, but I only want to establish a kind of historical context wherein neoliberalism is intelligible, in order to explain subsequent claims about US foreign policy, which has been largely formed by the imperatives of neoliberal policy.

Neoliberalism itself is now in a bit of a crisis, because the same financial establishment that was turned loose on the world by the emergence of neoliberalism has both worn out its welcome around the world – creating great popular resistance to its diktat – but it has created tens of trillions of dollars of fictional value from runaway speculation, threatening the very currency around which the entire system is based.

The US-dominated financial system, called the “Dollar-Wall Street regime” by Peter Gowan and Susan Strange, also found a way to exercise managerial control over first world economies like Western Europe and emerging market economies like China and Brazil.  This power was exercised not in the US role as creditor, but in the US role as debtor.

This story actually begins at the end of World War II and continues to the present.  The Soviet Union – itself savagely wounded by the war – attempted to secure a post-war partnership with its capitalist war allies in order to regroup.  More than 27 million Soviet citizens had been killed, and cities were in ruins all the way to Stalingrad.  When the Truman administration opted for the National Security State as an industrial strategy that could capitalize on the ramp-up for the war, it needed an enemy to justify the expenditures of what Eisenhower would christen the “military-industrial complex.” The overtures from the USSR for a post-war peace were rejected in favor of official hostility by Truman. This provocative posture locked Western Europe into a military alliance with the US, and put an official stamp on the US foreign policy of “containment.”

This inaugurated a long period of proxy war, the first in Korea, later in Vietnam.  While the US was enjoying the fruit of post-war dollar dominance, Keynesian high employment, and a robust trade surplus, however, the militarization of US domestic and foreign policy created a mounting national debt. The US was indebting itself to other metropolitan nations.  The US was borrowing money from Europeans to finance its military adventures in Asia, then running printing presses to make up the difference.  Because the dollar’s value was fixed for redemption at 1/35^th of an ounce of gold, the US could print money without fear of draining the dollar of its value, which was being used for capital investment in Europe.

In the theoretical market, the value of a currency is determined by how it  balances against an aggregate of commodities. Too few units of currency and prices fall.  Too many units of currency and prices rise. The latter is inflation – the nemesis of loan sharks and bankers because it reduces the future purchasing power of collected principle and interest.  So the dollar was losing purchasing power on the market, even as it remained exchangeable    for European currencies at the same fixed rate.

The US was printing more money, but because the dollar was fixed to gold, the Europeans were watching their markets flooded with overvalued dollars, which they had to accept.  The market may have been saying that a dollar should be redeemable for francs or marks or pounds at one rate, but the post-war currency-control regime determined that Europeans had to continue to give away purchasing power with every currency exchange for devalued dollars.  The US was exporting its inflation to Europe by repaying its military expansion debts to Europeans in under-valued dollars.

So when the first Special Forces advisors went to Vietnam in 1957, the system that appeared so robust on the surface was already creating the conditions for its next crisis.

The Europeans, later buying gold elsewhere at well above the $35 per troy ounce, held onto their dollar denominated assets, hoping to redeem their dollars at something approaching their initial investment later.  But by 1967, with the Vietnam War driving the US deficit to record levels, France started cashing dollars out for US gold, draining the US gold stock.  The Keynesian system of tightly controlling finance capitalists, which included fixed currency exchange rates pegged to a gold-backed dollar, began to collapse in the face of the US decision to militarize its domestic and foreign policy.

On March 31, 1968, millions of Americans heard Lyndon Johnson announce on television  that he would not run again for the presidency, and that he would not substantially escalate the Vietnam War, despite the strategic setback of the Tet offensive nearly two months earlier.

Unperceived by the public at large, the point finally had been reached at which depletion of the U.S. gold holdings had abruptly altered the country’s military policy.  As financial historian Michael Hudson noted:

“The European financiers were forcing peace on us. For the first time in American history, our European creditors had forced the resignation of an American president.”

But when the 1968 elections arrived, we saw a scenario that is familiar to us again.  Democrats could not publicly argue for an end to the war, because withdrawal would mark the destruction of the myth of US military invincibility.  The options available in response  to the collapse of the US Gold Pool were (1) withdrawal from Vietnam, (2) continue the war and accept further losses of gold and with it the erosion of US global power, or (3) force the abandonment of the entire Bretton Woods regime beginning with the gold standard.  Because the Democrats alienated  a huge fraction of their base by refusing to oppose the war, Republican Richard Nixon was elected.  In 1971, he selected Option 3.  He abandoned the gold standard for the US dollar.

This was a staggering checkmate against the US’s alleged global allies.  They had to do something with their trainloads of dollars to prevent their uncontrolled devaluation.

Quoting Hudson,

“By going off the gold standard at the precise moment that it did, the United States obliged the world’s central banks to finance the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit by using their surplus dollars to buy US Treasury bonds, whose volume quickly exceeded America’s ability or intention to pay.

“Twenty-five years [after WWII], the United States [discovered] the inherent advantage of being a world debtor. Foreign holders of any nation’s promissory notes are obliged to become a market for its exports as the means of obtaining satisfaction of their debts.”

As the old saying goes, “if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem.  If you owe the bank a billion dollars, the bank has a problem.”

Nixon had not only erased US debt held by allies and forced perpetual European support for US military expenditures with the threat of tearing everyone’s financial house down, he had opened the way for rentier capitalists to escape the limitations put on it during the New Deal.  That is precisely why Peter Gowan referred to Nixon’s risky destruction of the Bretton Woods fixed currency exchange rates as the “global gamble.”

New system:  debtor imperialism.

Susan Strange referred to the new system as “casino capitalism.”  The rentier capitalists were free to speculate without constraints; but more importantly, the US government, in collusion with Wall Street, had a new weapon to use against recalcitrant nations.  Domestic currencies could be speculatively attacked; which is exactly what the US did  to several Asian countries in 1998, which unexpectedly almost crashed the world economy.  The threat of attack on currencies  obliged central banks abroad    to hold US dollars – in the form of US Treasury Bonds – in reserve, as a defense against speculative attacks on their currencies.  These nations then became US creditors; but they were the banks who – as in the banker’s joke – had the problem.

To this day, no one – including China, about which there is a great deal of financial fear-mongering – can afford to begin a run on the dollar.  Too many nations hold too many dollars to sell the dollar down without cutting off their noses to spite their faces.  And yet all these creditor nations know  that the US has neither the capacity nor the intention of paying back those loans.

China holds over a trillion dollars in US Treasury Bonds.  Japan holds almost a trillion.  The United Kingdom holds over 400 billion.  Brazil holds more than 200 billion.  The list goes on.  If China were to initiate – as some China-phobes suggest – a cash-out of its t-bills, and that cash-out caused a run on the dollar destroying half its value, China would lose more than half a trillion dollars in purchasing power.  This is a game of chicken that the US    has, so far, won every time.

The key to dominance in the world of the late 20^th and early 21^st Centuries has been dependency… interdependency, but of a very unequal nature.  We see this in really bad, really patriarchal marriages.  A husband depends on his wife for the management of the household, for a lot of unpaid labor, and for the care of children, and the wife depends on the husband for economic security; but in the event of a divorce, we find that the wife comes out much worse than the husband, giving the husband a threat to hold over the head of the wife.  They depend on one another, but that interdependence is not synonymous with equal status or parity of power.

This is how US foreign policy is constructed for the most part, as interdependencies in which the US is the dominant partner.  And there are few things that human beings depend on more urgently than food; which brings me to a subject that is imbricated with finance, but not the same as finance.

Money is not theoretically necessary for life.  Human life sustained itself before general purpose money.  Human life cannot be sustained, however, without its material basis in food.

If I might, I’d like to actually go deeper on the topic of food than we generally do, into the realms of chemistry and biology, for just a moment.  I want to say a few things about energy and nitrogen.

If you touch your neighbor in the seats there, appropriately, of course, you will find that they are heaters.  You are all warm.  That heat is thermal energy that is part of the overall energy system that constitutes your existence as an organism, as a mammal, as a primate, and as an omnivore.  You eat plants and animals that have energy stored in them.  The plant energy that animals eat comes from the sun, whose energy is stored in the plants by photosynthesis.

One of the chemical components of our world that is necessary for most plant growth, therefore necessary for food, and therefore necessary for our survival, is nitrogen.

Oddly enough, after Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal office building in Oklahoma City, everyone    – even non-farmers – came to know that fertilizer is made with nitrogen.

Yet nitrogen is the most abundant element in the atmosphere, so why should anyone have to “produce” it as a fertilizer?  We live our entire lives literally swimming in the stuff.

As it turns out, atmospheric nitrogen, like atmospheric oxygen, is a Siamese twin.  It consists of two, fused molecules:  N2, as it were.  Plants have to break this down into single molecules, then mix it with other stuff, in order to turn sunlight into food.  The process is called biological nitrogen fixation.  Prior to human intervention, this fixation process was accomplished by prokaryotes (or non-nucleated bacteria) and diazotrophs (or ammonia-making bacteria.)

During World War I, the introduction of new technology, i.e. the machinegun, and the adherence to pre-machinegun tactical doctrines, led to huge armies being first mowed down like grass, then trapped facing each other from pestilential trenches.  One of the bright ideas for taking advantage of this horror-film stalemate was the idea of killing the enemy with poisonous gas.

During the war, Fritz Haber, a German-Jewish chemist, was appointed director of the Berlin-based Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry.

One of his jobs became the development of chemical weapons.  He would eventually invent a gaseous chemical called Zyklon-B, a cyanide derivative, which would be used to wipe out millions of his own co-religionists; but during WWI he was preoccupied with chlorine and ammonia for the development of poisonous gases for the battlefield.

His other preoccupation was nitrogen fixation.  He learned how to do that, synthetically, by combining hydrogen and N2 under heat and pressure, along with an iron isotope and aluminum oxide as catalysts.  He had already patented this process before the war; but it would take Carl Bosch, the eventual co-founder of I. G. Farben (the company that marketed Zyklon-B) to commercialize the process… which laid the basis for a population explosion from 1.6 billion in 1900 to more than 7 billion today.  What he’d made was chemical fertilizer, and it meant that even land that was unfit for agricultural cultivation could be rendered “productive.”  The food that feeds that additional 5 billion people is largely produced with the assistance of chemical fertilizers and chemical poisons.

But “heat and pressure” are not some infinite essence like space, nor are they immediately available like atmospheric nitrogen. They are transient phenomena that must be created through some procedure; in this case, using fossil hydrocarbons… lots of them.  Haber was looking at a crisis created by the depletion of guano – bat and bird droppings used as fertilizer – mostly collected from the islands off the coast of Chile; so he fell on a system that depended on another exhaustible resource: fossil fuel.

After WWII, American farmers were using prodigious quantities of chemical fertilizer across prodigious expanses of arable land, along with a new chemical weapon itself, nerve gas… or organophosphates, as insecticides, expanding their harvests far beyond the American public’s capacity to consume.

The American manufacturing base had also expanded during the war, and given that the US    did not suffer the devastation that Europe and Asia did during the war, the US emerged from the war as a uniquely powerful actor.  The other variable    in the expansion of food production was the thoroughgoing mechanization of agriculture, another net consumer of fossil energy.  The US began to build farm machinery; and as part of its goal of maximizing profit for farm machinery industries,    as well as agricultural chemicals, it began to promote something called “developmentalism” for the so-called under-developed nations.

In 1943, the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Motor Company, and the Mexican government established a joint venture called – in English – the International Center to Improve Corn and Wheat.  Standard Oil – a Rockefeller company – was manufacturing fertilizer, and Ford   was building tractors. This was the beginning of the organized effort by first world corporations, with the active support of the US government, to push agricultural commodities into these so-called underdeveloped nations.  By 1959, they had opened rural development academies in Pakistan, and by 1963 in the Philippines.  These academies were performing research and development on high-yielding cultivars of wheat, corn, and rice. By the time of the Nixon administration, 120 of the largest agribusiness multinationals had established a joint program with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

The transformation in agriculture that followed was called the Green Revolution, a term coined in 1968 by US Agency for International Development Director William Gaud.

If ever there were a revolution from above, this was it.  And it did accomplish a great deal.  Caloric intake from cereal grains worldwide increased 30 percent per capita by 1990, and the prices of grains fell.  The availability of more staple grains also supported a doubling of world population between 1960 and 2000.

Yet these very general statistics don’t tell the whole story. There were a number of qualitative changes that accompanied these statistical quanta.  One early condition of World Bank development loans was that recipient nations industrialize their agriculture.

Smallholders were pushed off land to make way for large monoculture fields.  Mechanization cut the number of necessary field workers to a fraction, and a process began whereby millions of formerly rural people – who were monetarily poor, but capable of self-reliant subsistence agriculture – were pushed into cities, where they came to rely more directly on the mass-produced staple cereals, which they now had to buy, and where they provided a windfall to urban manufactories of desperately cheap labor.

Peripheral nation agricultural production was being exported, in order to get precious US dollars for use in international markets and to service external debts.  The agri-barons of the periphery were not feeding their own countries, but engaging in monoculture for export, like coffee, sugar, and bananas (ergo the term, “banana republic”).

Urban hunger is a specter that most leaders understand only too well.

I witnessed two food riots when I was in Haiti, and I can say they were among the most memorable experiences of my life.

Political leaders know very well that mass urban hunger is a recipe for political destabilization, and they avoid it at all costs.  Because many of these nations were exporting crops, they fell short in providing basic nutrition to their own growing urban populations.

The United States, however, was uniquely positioned to take advantage of this situation, because the agricultural subsidies of the New Deal, originally meant to rescue family farms, had been carried forward to the benefit of large agribusiness corporations that were pushing the American family farm into the dustbin of history.  Price supports for US grains meant that agribusiness could produce as much grain as possible, and for every bushel produced the government would pay them a subsidy.

This, along with the arable land mass of the American Midwest, quickly led to massive overproduction of US grain in the face of periodic grain shortages around the world, which gave US agribusiness unprecedented pricing power in grain markets.

In 1973,    Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said that the dominance of US grain production in the world was a foreign policy weapon that was more powerful than nuclear bombs.

Grain was on a lot of political minds those days. Hubert Humphrey, the 1968 Democratic challenger for the presidency, had received an illegal campaign contribution of $100,000 – a fact that would emerge during the Watergate hearings.  The same contributor would also give the Nixon administration $25,000 to assist in its cover-up of the Watergate break-in.  These were not insubstantial sums then, as they seem now.

Not many people had then heard of this fountain of largesse, whose name was Dwayne Andreas.  Andreas pushed through a historic grain sale to the Soviet Union  for the Nixon administration, worth $700 million, with his company as the middleman. That company was named Archer Daniels Midland.

It was the next year, however, when Green Revolution food production was exposed to another vulnerability, the aforementioned Arab oil embargo.

It is here that we can see how the history of the Green Revolution as an instrument of US foreign policy interweaves with the history of neoliberal finance – which we covered earlier – that began its gestation with the Nixon administration.

By 1973, the US was running not a trade surplus but a deficit of $6.4 billion. Even more momentously and permanently, US domestic production of crude oil had peaked and was now known to be in a permanent and irreversible decline that would increase US dependence on imports of this commodity into the foreseeable future.    Oil remained the principle feedstock of American domestic agriculture, and of the Green Revolution that was articulating the decolonizing periphery into a new, neo-colonial order.  At the same time, the US would become increasingly dependent on fossil energy imported from abroad, not merely to power its machines and transport, but to eat and to maintain the power of the US over food markets worldwide.

Even the Soviet Union had been pulled into the American grain-trade orbit by Nixon, proving Kissinger’s thesis that food was more powerful than nukes.

The increasing dependency of peripheral nations on American agricultural goods, as well as American support for the industrial capitalist model being adopted for peripheral nation export agriculture,  would lead to decreases in national per-capita food production  as well as financial and ecological bankruptcy.

Nixon broke up the old order; but the new order was not firmly established except serendipitously by the Reagan administration.    In the interim, after a period of three years stewardship of the White House by the immanently forgettable Gerald Ford, the next elected president would have a dual-resume: a Naval officer and an agribusiness CEO.

Jimmy Carter.

Under Jimmy Carter, a southern agribusiness plutocrat posing as a good ol’ boy (a peanut “farmer”), an interesting thing happened. Something we Southern folk used to call “white liquor” or “white lightning” became legal and began magnetizing massive cash flows from US taxpayers in the form of corn subsidies.

Corn liquor has been produced for many years by rural scofflaws. My own father did a short stretch in the hoosegow when he was discovered with a car trunk full of it in the 1930s.

When Nixon was taking money from Dwayne Andreas, the CEO of the sugar and corn conglomerate, Archer Daniels Midland, ADM was concocting a new scheme that would simultaneously justify more “farm” subsidies to agribusiness and claim to address the “energy crisis” of 1973, which was also such a windfall to Wall Street. The scheme was to make massive quantities of corn liquor, which is of course flammable, and re-christen it “ethanol.”  This was proposed as an “energy independence” measure for the US. It is made, naturally, with sugar and corn.

ADM found a friend in Jimmy Carter.

Carter called the energy crisis the “moral equivalent of war,” and his administration exempted ethanol-spiked gasoline from a federal fuel tax.

Carter began a loan program to build ethanol plants, which was halted by the Reagan administration… for a while, until farm lobbyists paid serial visits to Capitol Hill, whereupon the Reagan administration recanted.

To this very day, neither party will challenge agribusiness subsidies; and to this day, both parties are avid ethanol boosters.

It was this influence, in conjunction with neoliberal “free trade” policies, that allowed US grain producers to begin a process called agricultural dumping. Dumping is introducing a surplus into a foreign market below market value, which results in local producers’ inability to compete.  Taxpayer-subsidized US corn, for example, is still routinely dumped  into foreign markets at prices often as little as 30 percent of market value.  This leads to bankrupted local markets, and a growing and increasingly poor urban population that becomes hostage to an imperial food market.

A Mexican farmer who grows traditional corn is wiped out by genetically modified, chemical-industrial corn that is subsidized by a foreign power.  His family loses their land to debt, moves to the city, where they may or may not find work to get money to feed themselves, and barring that, they may take the risk of illegal migration to the north to find work in the United States.  One seldom hears about neoliberalism or agricultural dumping when the subject of illegal immigration comes up in the United States; but the connections are clear.  US policies have created the conditions that make mass migration inevitable.

After many NAFTA provisions went into effect that allowed US dumping in Mexico, between 1997 and 2004, taxpayer-subsidized US corn exports increased by 413%, while Mexican corn production fell by 50% based on a 66% devaluation of Mexican corn.  In the same period, US soybean production increased by 159%, and Mexican soybean production decreased by 83% based on a 67% devaluation.  Mexican pork production fell by 40%, corresponding to a 707% increase in US exports.  Pork itself is not directly subsidized, but the corn that feeds industrial pork is.  It is not a coincidence that NAFTA corresponds to the most massive wave of Mexican immigration to the United States in history.

So the combination of developmental imperatives to mechanize and enclose agriculture for monocrop production, as well as agricultural dumping by the United States has created a situation where most of the rapidly urbanizing world is now dependent on US grain or US seeds and chemicals in order to eat.  US foreign policy pertaining to food has become what the late Ivan Illich called “a war on subsistence.”  The androcentric cliché for holding power over others as “having them by the balls,” might better be replaced by “having them by the bellies.”

US international power politics combines the neoliberal debt traps with food monopolization as an effective mechanism of indirect control over a good deal of the globe.  This is not, however, sufficient to exercise the kind of total dominance the US would require to halt the very real decay of US power that results from various kinds of imperial over-reach.  The debt system is not sustainable.  The energy system upon which the current system depends is not sustainable.  The material resources upon which economic expansion is based are finite.  And the tolerance of others is reaching its limits.

The fallback position of any imperial power, when indirect controls are no longer effective, is direct control in the form of violence.  That is one of the reasons the United States – with some of the best naturally defensible borders in the world, and an impossibly large land mass for any would-be invader – maintains a military force that is more expensive than the combined military forces of the rest of the world.  Calling the War Department the Department of Defense is perhaps the most ironic example of PR-speak you might encounter.  The US military is almost exclusively dedicated to missions of aggression abroad.

Moreover, the force component of US foreign policy is not merely the uniformed services, it includes a shadowy and well-financed covert operations component that allows military actions by US-directed surrogates to provide an element of plausible deniability to US actions that might undermine ideological claims of commitment to principles like “freedom,” “human rights,” and “democracy.”

Neoliberal theology asserts the primacy of the private, the value of small government; but neoliberal practice has been massively underwritten by the state.  The assurance of the market economy – as Karl Polanyi pointed out almost 70 years ago – requires a network of regulatory institutions.  Without the state’s affirmative actions on behalf of the international business class, the system would collapse.  Begin by thinking about how six battle groups from the US Navy are required to ensure the flow of fossil hydrocarbons into the industrialized metropolis, and you can extrapolate from there.

The failed attempt to conquer Iraq in 2003, while it certainly involved oil, was also part of an effort to maintain a forward deployed US military capable of strategic intervention far from home.  The Cold War had ended, and the disposition of US military forces had become obsolete.  They needed to be redeployed from positions that were calculated to contain the USSR into positions that would give the United States more capacity to intervene in energy-rich Southwest Asia, to put the imperial hand – as it were – on the spigots of global energy.

The goal of the Iraq invasion was permanent bases; but instead the Bush administration managed to win the Iran-Iraq war on behalf of Iran.  The Obama administration has decided that the next best thing is to forward base near the Middle East and in the Asia-Pacific Theater to prepare to contain China; and the Obama administration has vastly expanded the role of the covert operations forces, as well as armed mercenaries, in its expansion of the Afghanistan War into Pakistan and increased covert operations against Iran.  For myself, I believe Obama’s military moves in Southwest and South Asia will prove as disastrous as those of his predecessor.

Obama’s administration was instrumental in the execution and consolidation of the coup against the democratically elected president of Honduras in 2009, just as the Bush administration was in the failed coup against the democratically elected president of Venezuela in 2002, and its successful coup against the democratically elected government of Haiti in 2004.  In two cases, the offending parties – President Chavez of Venezuela and President Zelaya of Honduras – were guilty of defying the Washington Consensus, that is, of opposing neoliberalism.  President Aristide had merely criticized neoliberalism.

More than strategic interests drive the reliance on military operations.  In the United States, the Department of Defense has become a substitute export market for US industries.  The reason the taxpayers are not bailing out Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, KBR, L3 Communications, SAIC, Dyncorp, Hewlett-Packard, and a host of other major American corporations, including General Electric, Motorola, Goodrich, and Westinghouse, is that the margin of earnings that ensure their continued viability as capitalist enterprises comes from DOD contracts.  If war spending were ended tomorrow, the US would experience a dramatic loss of jobs across a wide spectrum of Congressional districts that have hitched to the DOD pork wagon.

American foreign policy is amphibious.  It operates through both the wet depths of  public institutions and the dry lands of private institutions, and it has an integrated public-private perception management apparatus.

One of the key advantages of the public-private partnership is that foreign policy is insulated from accountability to those below those institutions on the social hierarchy.  The boundaries are blurred, via contracts and memoranda of understanding, between the US public sector – with its administrative apparatus, and its military and intelligence establishment with their vast budgets – and the private sector, composed of publicly funded “non-governmental organizations,” think tanks, foundations, and an army of horizontally-integrated perception managers.

Those perception managers use mass media as a conformity-producing web of influence that reaches right into the living rooms of a US culture that has 2.24 television sets per household,  running an average of six hours and 47 minutes a day, 2,476 hours a year.  To appreciate the latent power of television, realize that the average college class has a student in tow for three hours a week, approximately 45 hours for an entire course, excluding out-of-classroom study.

The limits of public discourse are established de facto by a media that operates on the same liberal market principles as the people who own them and exercise hegemony within the government and in those sectors sometimes called civil society.  The media, the governing apparatus, and civil society are in fact three faces of the same dominant interests     in the same epoch.

In saying this, I am obliged to clear up a common misunderstanding of what this means and what I mean to say.  It is easy to jump from the very general outline I have presented of three aspects of US foreign policy – finance, food, and force – to the conclusion that I mean to say, or that these facts tend to support the idea that, there is a conscious group of the conspiring powerful who direct the world.  On the contrary, I want to emphasize that this system has evolved     through a series of contingencies, and that its stability is maintained precisely because it is what some systems theorists call self-organized. It’s most powerful actors are in many ways as constrained, or more constrained, by neo-neo-liberalism – or whatever you choose to call this particular period – than most of us are.  President Obama is far less free, for example, to say the kinds of things I can say here as an unemployed grandfather.

I, on the other hand, do not have the legal power to send US troops to war, or to call them home.

We each play our parts, and while some conspiracies have always been part of the terrain of politics, they are generally reactive, and far less determinative of large-scale outcomes than, say, changes in the built environment, demographic shifts, or institutional inertia.  Many of the most pivotal events in history emerge unexpectedly  from long-standing trends that have gone unnoticed or ignored until they reach a breaking point – the 2008 housing bubble crash being a good recent example.

Remember, in our saga about the birth of neoliberalism, there was no straight line, but a confluence of events and contingent decisions:  French buying US gold, Nixon dropping the gold standard, the Egyptian war for the Sinai, the American decision to airlift TOW missiles to the Israelis, the decision of Arab oil producers to embargo oil to the US, the US balance of payments deficit, Nixon drops fixed currency exchange rates, rising oil prices creating petrodollars, the petrodollar tsunami being converted into opportunistic development loans, the Mexican threat of default, and so it goes.  These were not plots, but actions and reactions, each producing a number of unintended or unanticipated consequences, which stimulated new actions and reactions.

The belief in a conspiratorial view of history seems to me to be a psychological reaction to the fear of chaos.  If the world is not as one would like it, at least a conspiratorial view of history suggests that history as a process is still subject to human control, and that once we wrest control from the unjust conspirators, the world can be made right again.

This unpredictability, this sense of instability that compels some of us to reach for order in chaos with a history of conspiracy, ironically, has been produced by the current political milieu,  one wherein neoliberalism has disembedded economies from local control and re-embedded them in national and transnational institutions, and those institutions are themselves now experiencing a loss of control in the face of unanticipated changes.

Structural adjustment programs have become political lightning rods that are igniting mass unrest around the world.   Green Revolution agriculture has spawned megacities that are entropic black holes, teeming with desperation and crime.  The US military, long considered the guarantor of last instance for the world order, has proven to be both the least cost effective institution on the planet and a perennial source of new resistance and unintended outcomes.  In Iraq and Afghanistan, the myth of US military invincibility was shattered; and the costs of the Southwest Asia wars have bled the US Treasury white.  Offshoring of US industry and the political empowerment of rentier capitalists – Wall Street – that was accomplished through foreign policy, has transformed much of the US domestic population not merely into wage workers, but debt slaves.

There is a bumper sticker that sums it up: “I owe, I owe, so off to work I go.”

Consumer debt in the United States is above $2.4 trillion.  In 2010, consumer indebtedness amounted to $7,800 for every man, woman, and child in the United States.  33% of that debt is in revolving credit, that plastic you carry in your pockets.  The rest is in mortgages, student loans, automobile loans, and other non-revolving credit schemes.  You students collectively owe $556 billion dollars. Good luck with that.

US household leverage, the ratio of debt to disposable income, was 55% in 1960.  By 1985, that number was 65%.  Today, household debt is 133% of household disposable income.

Yet when the crisis of fictional value created by Wall Street came home to roost, trillions in bailout money were awarded to Wall Street, while Main Street was left holding its debts.  Wall Street, according to the experts who work the Wall Street-Washington nexus, was too big to fail.  Generations into the future are now saddled with paying for these bailouts.  We are being structurally adjusted, which has always been a euphemism for privatizing the gains and socializing the losses.

Meanwhile, far away, in response to US and EU attempts to form an economic blockade against Iranian oil, rumors have begun to circulate that China and India, both on steep industrialization gradients and thirsty for oil, are figuring out how to pay for Iranian oil with gold.  These two countries already constitute 40% of Tehran’s oil market; and they are not prepared to cut back consumption in support of an American belligerence in which neither of them have any vested interest.  India flatly refuses to abide by the sanctions, and is working with the Russians to act as middle-men for Tehran to New Delhi oil transactions;  and China knows that the efficacy of the sanctions depends completely on whether China participates or not.  The US has no capacity as a unilateral actor any longer, still smarting from its defeat in Iraq and its interminable and expensive entanglement in Afghanistan.  The threats against Iran’s oil exports, however, are likely to drive up the price of oil, which will drive up the price of grain, which will drive up the price of food.  And so we see, even today, the interaction of forces between finance, food, and military force in foreign affairs.

With that, I will say that I have held you hostage quite long enough, and I thank you for your kind attention.

Online Free Bibliography

Links that elaborate on various theses from the talk, “The Roles of Finance, Food, and Force in US Foreign Policy,” February 2, 2012.  All free stuff.

The Theory in Mad Money, Susan Strange

http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/2107/1/WRAP_Strange_wp1898.pdf

Globalization Gamble, Peter Gowan

http://marxsite.com/Gowan_DollarWallstreetRegime.pdf

The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi

http://uncharted.org/frownland/books/Polanyi/POLANYI%20KARL%20-%20The%20Great%20Transformation%20-%20v.1.0.html

The Subsistence Perspective, Maria Mies

http://republicart.net/disc/aeas/mies01_en.htm

Super Imperialism, Michael Hudson

http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/030317hudson/superimperialism.pdf

Cornucopia or Zero Sum Game?  Alf Hornborg

http://jwsr.ucr.edu/archive/vol9/number2/pdf/jwsr-v9n2-hornborg.pdf

Hillary’s Bones, Stan Goff

http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2010/09/30/hillarys-bones-a-coup-tutorial/

The Green Revolution in the Punjab, Vandana Shiva

http://livingheritage.org/green-revolution.htm

Energy War, Stan Goff

http://insurgentamerican.net/download/StanGoff/EnergyWar.pdf

The Socialization of Financial Risks in Neoliberal Mexico, Thomas Marois

http://researchonmoneyandfinance.org/media/papers/RMF-25-Marois.pdf

The Revolution Will Not be Televised, (film) Bartley and O’Brian

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5832390545689805144

Planet of Slums, Mike Davis

http://www.uninsubria.it/uninsubria/allegati/pagine/1438/SUMMER_SCHOOL4.pdf

Self Organization, University of Michigan

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/self-organization.html

In the 1980s, U.S. feminism fractured along political fault-lines defined by
conflicting views of prostitution and pornography and related conceptions of
power, agency, and sexuality.1 The “sex wars”—as they were unfortunately, popularly
labeled—were apparently settled by the end of the decade, with “pro-sex”
advocates declared the winners. The radical feminist anti-pornography and antiprostitution
position has been effectively marginalized—at least within the
academy. Interestingly, the same cannot be said for debates around similar issues
in a new transnational arena of feminist politics. Since the 1990s, numerous feminist
nongovernmental agencies and grass-root groups across the hemispheres
have been organizing to stop global trafficking in women and children.2 In this
context, old feminist debates about prostitution have reconfigured themselves
along familiar theoretical lines. The contours of the debate are largely defined by,
on one side, activists who align themselves with a radical feminist and abolitionist
approach that defines prostitution as an institution of male domination. On the
other side, activists who are “pro-sex-work” aim to distinguish prostitution as voluntary
“work” from “forced prostitution,” and to distinguish voluntary migration
from (sex) trafficking.3 The radical feminist camp has largely prevailed in terms
of how international protocol is currently formulated. The “UN Optional Protocol
of Trafficking in Human Beings,” known widely as the “Palermo Protocol”
was signed by 105 countries in 2002 and specifically does not construct a separate
category for “forced” prostitution but rather, classifies prostitution (unmodified)
as a major component of trafficking.4 Pro-sex-work advocates, however,
continue to press for the distinction between “free” and “forced” prostitution. The
feminist debate over trafficking offers a timely opportunity for feminists to revisit
central philosophical questions concerning agency and power. Given the magnitude
of the problem, namely, the vast numbers of women and children whose
lives have been devastated by sex-trafficking under globalization, such questions
reemerge with a new political urgency.

FULL

“Sexualisation” has become a much-debated issue in recent years, and a noticeable feature is the assumption that feminists who oppose sexual objectification are generating a “moral panic”. Ever since sociologist Stanley Cohen introduced the term in 1972 it has been used as a shorthand way of critiquing conservatives for inventing another “problem” in order to demonise a group that challenges traditional moral standards.

So apparently feminists are now the conservatives fomenting unnecessary panic about the proliferation of “sexualised” images while the corporate-controlled media industry that mass produces these images is the progressive force for change being unfairly demonised. What a strange turn of events.

To suggest feminists who oppose the pornification of society are stirring up a moral panic is to confuse a politically…

FULL

It is a great slogan that puts in bold relief the immense power of the one percent of humanity that exists parasitically on the rest.  “We are the 99%.”  It is a declaration that in some significant way, people are more awake to their circumstances than they were.  Around this slogan, we have seen courageous and principled people take to the streets in a great shout of “No!” at the powers and principalities of late neoliberalism; and we have seen that this outburst resonates with far more people than the ruling layer of society expected.  We have seen the protestors demonstrate with their bodies that under their façade of civility, this ruling layer relies in the last instance on truncheons, teargas, guns and jails.  This unmasking is more important in many ways than what will come afterward, because without it, we accommodate – and we all accommodate in one way or another, even those protesting – without any clarity.  Let these thousand flowers bloom.

Still, the 99% are not actually protesting.  99% of the 99% are just doing what they do to get by in the world the best they know how, far from the demonstrations.  We know this is true, and we know the reasons are as numerous as the people who do not protest in the street.  And so we are required to acknowledge that the movement, such as it is, is representative of its claim, not the number 99’s actualization.  And therein is one seed of mischief.

In Latin, it was once said, perversio optima quae est pessima.  The perversion of the best is the worst.  Some protesters will come to believe they are representative of those they do not know.  Some will try and formalize that representation as power.  Many are already spinning out programs (God, save us from parties and programs!) that purport to represent the 99%, though they are mostly utopian projections cobbled together by handfuls of people who still believe something called the “future” can be subordinated to human management schemes.  Some will begin to articulate what it means to be an “authentic” representative; and the divisions will begin.  Nothing stays the same, and this won’t either.  Lord, have mercy.

I am one of the 99% of the 99% this time around.  I had my day in the sun as a protestor; and if I’d have stayed a day longer, I would have taken up more room than one person should, because movements privilege clever talkers and angry writers more than they ought to.  Now I am one of the 99% of the 99% who is restricted in my movements by personal duties and obligations, the lack of money, and the lack of time.  I am far from any urban center, far from the big schools, far from the cohorts and committees, far from those places where people debate social theory and movement strategies.  And I love it out here in the sticks.

I love the Occupy movement, too.  I repost everything I see on Facebook that is not downright offensive (thickheaded sexism in this movement is alive and well, sorry to say).  I promoted the movement in my church with a supportive article in the bulletin, which generated a whiff of controversy that promises a dialogue about this thing we have named “economic inequality.”  I attended a rally in Lansing, though the mayor there agreed with the protest, so we didn’t generate any hostility from the police.  Sherry sports bumper stickers that say “OWS” and “99%.”  This is what we can do right now, so we are glad the demonstrators (I like the Spanish term “manifestantes” better) are out there keepin’ on.  In so may ways, you are speaking for us.  I get a little giddy at how long it has already lasted.

I love the movement’s sense of satire.  My favorite video was a bullfighting spoof around the Wall Street bull statue, with two capering clowns and a matador who mounted a police car and snapped his cape at the 7,100 pound bronze bovine.

I love the energy, and the courage, and the general understanding that the power of the movement is pacific.  Movements succeed when they inspire violence, but only when they inspire the violence of the oppressor that accomplishes this unmasking.

Whether the vandalism and violence of a few protestors is from fools or police provocateurs (probably a measure of both), it has been thankfully minimal.  Those youngsters who got pepper sprayed at UC Davis were more morally effective in their non-resistance than 10,000 macho-boys throwing rocks and setting fires.

I love the way OWS stays unpredictable.  That is absolutely this occupy-thing’s greatest strength.

I have questions, and ideas, however, about what happens next, about follow-up, about what the 99% of the 99% can do and, more importantly, should do.  I’m not proposing, as many leftists will, that the movement “get itself organized,” select leaders, develop a strategy, etc.  In fact, I vigorously oppose strategies on principle, because I believe most of them are simply designed to put a few people in charge of a lot of people who are then charged to carry out the strategy.  More on that further along.

Before I can explain myself, I need to at least describe the premise for these ideas.

Premise

The premise begins that all the changes that are implied in the demands – such as they are – of the movement are not applicable to all people in all places at all times.  The greatest value of this movement is not in its ability to expose certain sufferings and change certain policies, but in its ability to expose – with no unified intention to do so – all the reasons we need to abandon the entire system of which “policy” is only one essential working component.

This is an argument that is not won in this movement yet, because many people who are supportive of OWS et al still maintain the sincere and good-willing belief that governments and other policy-making institutions are somehow independent of their actual actions, like machines, and they can be taken over – like exchanging a bad driver for a good one in an automobile.

I respect that belief insofar as it is a belief people cleave to out of genuine good will.  These people are not collaborators or sheep; and those who characterize them that way are both wrong and mean.  I love the people who want to change the policies, because I am convinced that they want to do it out of a genuine sense of care about others.

My argument:  Even machines cannot be made independent of their makers and users.  The problem with the system is not the driver.  It is the car.

This is my premise.  If I am wrong, then ignore everything hereafter.

Failure of the Future

I think this car that is breaking down might be named “The Future.”

The deeply-parasitic infrastructure of society is coming apart, not temporarily, but in the face of some real trends that put real limits not only on the autocratic futurism of the right, but the “progressive” futurism of the left, too.  I ripped off Ivan Illich above with his reference to perversio optima quae est pessima.  I’m quoting him again when he said, “To hell with the future.  It is a man-eating idol.”

I agree with that.  A lot. This car is breaking down and there is going to be a wreck.

Illich wrote in 1973 about the energy infrastructure crisis.  What he said has proven prophetic in both senses of the word.  Prophets are wrongly believed to be people who simply foretell the future.  In fact, prophets are those who speak truth to power and who have visions, not predictions, that forewarn us of dangerous possibilities in the future.

Every generation has some.  Illich showed in 1973, in a pamphlet entitled “Energy and Equity,” that our faith in technology as redeemer of humanity is a terrible mistake.  Now we see the big secular trends that prefigure the collapse of many infrastructures.  Climate change.  Peak resource extractions.  The very economic crisis that spawned OWS.  War for the fuel to make war.  That’s next, and not far off either.

This crisis is not short-term, and it will force people to adopt new tactics for everyday life.  It represents both a trauma and an opportunity; but that opportunity, in my opinion, is not available through policy.  Policies may alter and change in response to material changes.  What has to change is not policy, but our entire built environment based on some more personal and less abstract narratives than Progress and The Future.

This is where the 99% of the 99% can do something, and they can begin doing it right now, without leaving their hometowns.  Let’s put this in another context before explaining why and how the 99% of the 99% can make some of those changes.

Devolution & Design

All social orders eventually devolve and are forced to reorganize, and the globalized world we live in is witnessing the devolution of the social order.  These periods of discontinuity never last forever, because society eventually self-organizes out of these devolutions, and a new order is established.  When an order collapses, there is an accompanying crisis of ideas.  More and more in our own period, we are seeing the de-legitimation of our ideas not only about capitalism and socialism, or their ugly merger into neoliberalism, but about what they held in common that have proven to be dangerous idols.  Progress.  The Future.  Technological Salvation.

When I was part of the organized activist left, I cooked up an alliterated recipe for resistance: de-legitimate, disobey, disrupt.  For the present, I will add a fourth D.  Design.

We are not going to force policy-makers to remake the world.  We have to do it ourselves.  We have to take our entire built environment, one piece at a time, and re-design it.  This will take everyone, because where you live is different than where I live; and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.  To hell with policies.  They are people-eating idols.

The Money Grid

One nub of the whole situation at the end of 2011 is a longstanding fact.  People have been captured by their dependency upon a vast, technocratic apparatus that has de-skilled them and rendered them 100% (not 99%) dependent on money.  The technocratic apparatus makes all our stuff, controls our climate, fixes our boo-boos, educates us, feeds us, moves us around, lights our homes, and puts us to work – all inside our most excellent technocratic life support system – and the only thing that makes the system respond… is money.  As it is in 2011.  As it was in 2010, 2000, 1990, 1980…  it just got worse with time.

Money is generated by banks and printed by the government.  It is designed to work a certain way to benefit governments and banks, which are run by the rich.  Governments and banks are never going to be the ally of any movement like OWS, so there is little likelihood that activism will change the nature of money any time soon.  Money is designed to transfer power; and it does it very well.  Money is not a morally-neutral sign any more than a gun is a morally-neutral tool.  Each is designed for a purpose.  Guns are designed to kill.  Money is designed to commodify, that is, to make everything into a thing for sale.  Including you.

The anthropologist Alf Hornborg said that money dissolves cultural and natural systems in an ecosemiotic process.  “Viewed from outer space,” says Hornborg, “money is an ecosemiotic phenomenon that has very tangible effects on ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole.  If it were not for money, nobody would be able to trade tracts of rain forest for Coca-Cola.”

That’s a lot to think about.  Think about it.

The Institutional Grid

Institutions are required to administer the technocracy upon which we all abjectly depend.  Institutions are always somehow imbricated within the system of money that benefits banks and government.  There is probably nothing controversial about saying that institutions can be corrupted by money.  What I am about to say is that institutions – all of them, even your favorites – are inherently and unavoidably corruptible.

If OWS develops “lists of demands” and programs and the like, there will be predictable appeals to target institutions for particular policy changes.  Money controls the institutions.  Money controls the policies.  Money will come to control the institutions that are created to fight the institutions.  As it ever has been and ever shall be.  The movement will become “focused,” it will deploy a strategy, and let the games begin.  The movement will be placed under management to oversee and coordinate the strategy.  The movement will come to depend on money.

Policy games controlled by money will be able to frustrate the original objectives of activists, either by crushing them or co-opting them.  Then the demoralization will start anew, amid more nihilism because the devolution will have advanced throughout the process.

If OWS itself begins to unravel over time, which it hasn’t so far but certainly may eventually, the follow-up options may appear to be (1) play by the rules for scraps or (2) to argue for more direct force against the system.  The latter will increase the probability of outright destruction, and the former might lead people to believe that nothing, in fact, can be done.

Welcome to the institutional grid.

Relations On and Off the Grid

I believe there is a way out of that impasse.  To explain it, I need to make reference to an anthropologist named Robin Dunbar.  He calculated that human beings have the cognitive capacity and the time to sustain a very finite number of caring relationships.  His guess was around 150.  I give this a lot of leeway, but I accept the general idea.  Finite brain.  Finite time.  Finite capacity.  Got it.

These primary relationships are built on trust and empathy, requiring no formal agreements, no contracts, no administration by a third party.  Most close family relations fall into this category, as do friends.  My own trick for categorizing these relations is to think of them as covenantal as opposed to casual or contractual.  Your relation to your boss is contractual.   Your relation to a grocery clerk you see once a week is casual.  Your relation to your friend, lover, child, mother, etc, is covenantal.  These covenantal relations are built on care, on trust and empathy.  They imply certain non-monetized, highly personal duties and obligations to one another that are accepted out of love.  These relations do not require formal rules; and in fact, formal rules would have a deleterious effect on these relations.

“A contract is an agreement made in suspicion. The parties do not trust each other, and they set “limits” to their own responsibility. A covenant is an agreement made in trust. The parties love each other and put no limits on their own responsibility.”

-Wambdi Wicasa

Once a group exceeds this fuzzy cognitive limit, this “Dunbar’s number,” it begins to require third parties to administer, manage and resolve conflicts.  This is the genesis of administration and management, and it becomes inevitable with greater scale, more people.  This new layer of relations is more impersonal, first by some small degree.  With more people and more administrators come greater degrees of impersonality.  The uprooted impersonality of administration is inevitable.  The tendency of these social formations is summed up in the way we can refer to administration as an “apparatus.”

A remarkable moral shift occurs with the emergence of this apparatus.  Doing the right thing because you care for someone is superseded by doing the correct or legal thing because of an impersonal rule.  The rules are necessary because the third parties of these apparati have to be seen as disinterested parties.  In this single moral shift, those who administer the rules gain a new kind of social power that makes them inherently corruptible.

This applies to a corporation, a club, a rifle platoon, a progressive non-profit, a church, a school, a hospital, a town, the water supply system, the food system, everything… because our technocratic society is administered by an apparatus that is approaching perfect impersonality.  Plain size can begin this pernicious process, so small “organizations” beware.  Simply calling yourself an organization carries this risk of impersonality.  The corruptibility of these institutions inheres in the enormous power they accumulate purely through the authority to administer and manage.

The Fetishism of Bureaucratic Competence

So while we are unmasking ideologies – those constellations of ideas that simultaneously conceal and reproduce power – let’s look at this ideology of “progress” and the “future.”  It is entirely built on force, and that power has accrued to the one percent, and we have not unmasked what Alasdair MacIntyre calls the “fetishism of bureaucratic skill,” part of the ideology of progress that both reproduces and conceals this administrative power.  Most of the left and the right have fallen prey to this fetishism.

“The modern American is culturally conditioned to think of nature as nothing more than matter-in-motion, as a standing reserve that through technological and entrepreneurial prowess is converted into a consumer’s cornucopia.”

-Max Oelschlaeger

To this adds MacIntyre:

“The fetishism of commodities has been supplemented by another just as important fetishism, that of bureaucratic skills… the realm of managerial expertise is one in which what purport to be objectively grounded claims [e.g., to the knowledge of the good society and how to achieve it] function in fact an expression of arbitrary, but disguised, will and preference.”

Power.  His qualification is at the heart of it, “to the knowledge of the good society and how to achieve it.”  This is a delusion of the ideology of progress, this notion that people can render the future predictable and manageable.  Experts, managers and administrators take full advantage of this ideology to exert will and preference behind a mask of special competence.

MacIntyre continues, in 1984, that “we know of no organized movement towards power which is not bureaucratic and managerial in mode, and we know of no justifications for authority that are not Weberian.”

As the power of administrators grows, an ethic of care becomes more and more antithetical to the rules-regime of administration.  Impersonality metastasizes, and we wake up to find ourselves not living in the world but moving plugs around on a switchboard to get what we need from the technocratic grid.

Management makes rules that help management.  Management is the administration of administrators.  Administration makes rules that benefit administration.  As Haitians say, ti tig se tig.  “The child of a tiger is a tiger.”

The original purpose of a rule – often created out of good will – is subverted by the administrative application of the rule.  In common parlance, “the tail starts to wag the dog.”  The letter of the law is administered against the spirit of the law.  This dog-waggery leads to the incomprehensibility of the rules and resentment of administration and management, which in turn becomes defensive, setting up a power struggle in which administration is already advantaged by the growing dependency of the administered on administration.  Remember that Stalin accrued his immense power through control of an administrative apparatus.

One of the reasons we have so little power to act creatively in the face of so many crises is not just that we are fragmented, but that we’re cut off in a much deeper way by the lack of social cohesion that can only happen in the small, intimate group.  Covenantal relations are strong bonds.  Contractual relations are weak bonds.

Every infantry squad leader knows that.  Every good mother knows it.  The rest of us ought to, too.

Management is the enemy of social cohesion, because it substitutes secondary (weak) bonds for primary (strong) ones. By re-strengthening primary bonds, we develop a greater capacity to resist power, but also to creatively adapt to (without direct resistance) rapidly changing circumstances.

Strategy and Tactics

Strategy and tactics as they are commonly understood are war terms, and they can’t escape their conflict implications.  Michel De Certeau, however, draws a distinction between them that leaps over some of the martial interpretations of these ideas.

In military parlance, strategy is the identification of key campaigns that are necessary to accomplish the main objective – in most cases, winning the war.  Operations is a level of planning that determines key battles necessary to win campaigns.  Tactics are those techniques that are required to win battles.  So the tactic is subordinate to the campaign, which is subordinate to the strategy.  In other words, “In the beginning, there was Strategy, and without it the world was shapeless and void.”

De Certeau wrote about people in their everyday lives, not conditions of extremity and conflict, in a book entitled oddly enough, The Practice of Everyday Life.

Strategy, notes De Certeau, is always the purview of power.  Strategy presumes control.  Strategy is self-segregating, in the same way administration and management is self-segregating, setting itself up as a barricaded insider.  The strategic leaders become the Subject; and the led become — along with any enemies — the Objects.  Strategy presumes an in-group that executes the Strategy.

“Strategy is the calculus of force-relationships; when a subject of will and power can be isolated from an environment.”

-De Certeau

The financial masters of the universe at Wall Street oversee the strategy.  They are the institutions.  In many ways, the rest of us cannot escape their Grid.  They are the subject, and the rest are the object. They are inside; and we are outside.  They live behind guarded walls.

De Certeau calls tactics, on the other hand, the purview of the non-powerful.  His version of “tactics” is not as a subset of Strategy, but adaptation to the environment (which has been structured by A Strategy).

The city planning commission may determine what streets there will be, but the local cabbie will figure out how to take best advantage of lived reality of those streets.  This making-do is what De Certeau calls bricolage, and it often implies cooperation with others as much as competition with others.

While the masters of the financial universe at Wall Street protect their guarded walls and ensure the system keeps paying the imperial tribute, we are making do.  We do things that they can’t control or fully account for.  We barter, clip coupons, work under the table, trade labor, share tasks and expenses with friends… all those little cheats to bypass the more disadvantageous routes along the Grid.  Making do.  Bricolage.

Bricolage is so detailed, so numerous in instance, so adaptable, that much of it escapes the notice of the Big Strategists; more importantly, it is beyond their power to control.

Agility

Strategy makes two presumptions:  control and an in-group.  The contradiction of strategy is that the control is never perfect and the situation upon which the strategy was constructed is always changing, making aspects of the strategy obsolescent.  The self-segregation of in-groups magnifies these myopic aspects of strategy, because the walls that keep others out also obscure their view of the outside.  Strategy becomes self-referential.

Tactics, on the other hand, or bricolage, is action in a constant state of reassessment and correction based directly on observations of the actual micro-environment.  Tactical theorist John Boyd rather schematically diagrammed this process as an OODA-loop, meaning people observe their surroundings (O), orient on the most important developments in the environment (O), decide on an immediate course of action (D), take that action (A), then revert immediately to observation (O) of the environment to see how their last action might have changed it (orienting again, deciding again, acting again…and again).  There is no presumption of how things will turn out, as there is in strategy.  There is, in fact, readiness to take advantage of unpredictable changes; this is called tactical agility.

Ignore that Boyd studied aerial combat for a moment, and we see that this is sense in many other scenarios.  It just requires recognizing the radical limits on our ability to control something called “the future.”  That future has always and always will remain unpredictable. As it should.

Strategies are undermined by unpredictability.  Tactics (bricolage, OODA-loops) can make an ally of unpredictability.

The intrepid street manifestantes of the Occupy movement can benefit from the OODA-Loop.  They are in a tactical contest with the authorities to perform their prophetic tasks.  For those among the other 99%, what kinds of bricolage can begin to directly and intentionally reduce our degree of dependence on the technocratic grid?

Strategic Without Strategy

Nero – both an emperor and a sadistic misanthrope – is said to have wished humanity had one throat so he could have the pleasure of cutting it.  This is the statement of a strategic principle.  The centralized structures of one’s enemy are considered strategic targets.

Sherman’s great arson campaign was principally aimed at Atlanta, where both the railroads and telegraphs of the Confederate forces converged.  His march to Atlanta prefigured what would later become strategic bombing.

As the United States Armed Forces, to their chagrin, discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan is that when there were no longer centralized political structures to attack in Iraq, there was a complete loss of tactical initiative.  The US forces were metaphorically reduced to fighting off a swarm of hornets.  Their strategy became incoherent.  The problem was further magnified in Afghanistan, because there even the material infrastructure lacked centralization.  Rumsfeld’s first complaint about Afghanistan, when the Bush administration was preparing its war, was that Afghanistan presented the US with “no good targets.”

One thing this might be telling us, if we are listening, is that we are safer from the strategies of ill-wishers in decentralized groups.  The more the merrier.

In nature, decentralized diversity generates resilience.  Centralized monoculture, on the other hand, is vulnerable precisely because it is centralized.  One electrical failure can plunge 50 million people into opaque helplessness. One new fungus can wipe out a monocropped food staple.

I bring this up, because I want to suggest a mode of strategic decentralism.  Being strategic without developing A Strategy.  The 99% of the 99% need to have some answer to the question, “What can we do?”  My answer is make new facts on the ground.  Start re-designing the built environment, especially in those spaces that are being ignored or abandoned during the process of devolution.

I want to propose a strategic goal without any general staff, without any hierarchy of any kind, part of which almost anyone can accomplish.  No requirement for management, and no implied requirement for conflict (some will always find you), and no one-size-fits-all instructions on how to get it done.

I want to propose that we begin a systematic effort to reduce our dependency on the technocratic grid, by a lot of people working at or near their homes.  One of the most powerful dependencies we have on the grid is food.  The power of the food institutions is already well known and well understood, from Monsanto, to ADM and Cargill, to the Food and Drug Administration.  Our very survival has been lashed to this grid by food-production monopolies.  The entire world is groaning under the depredations of the food giants.

I have witnessed food riots firsthand.  It is an unforgettable experience.  Our dependency on food is a terrible weapon in the hands of the one percent.

I want to propose we build a million food gardens.  Two million.  However many.  However many conditions.  However many designs.  There is the strategic direction:  make food, and not just for the same reasons Gandhi made salt.  Make food because it puts that much of our lives back into our own hands, and the hands of our communities.  Into the hands of our friends, our families, our covenantal relations.  We can meet one of our own needs without any bureaucratic apparatus.

Making Food

In the town where I live, with around 20,000 souls, we built a garden this year.  A group of people built the first of several food donation gardens on what the city has called “orphaned properties.”  The city owns them, but they have no particular use for them during this devolutionary contraction.  Next Spring, we want to make two more gardens.  A friend from church just offered the use of a portion of her country property for garden cultivation.  We have around a million maples worth of leaf mulch and compost, mountains of chipped wood (from ice storm damage last year), and those long Northern summer days of sun.  We have barely begun to learn how much food we can grow here… off the commercial food Grid.

I, for one, do not intend this to be some strategy to force new policies into the commercial food grid.  Speaking for me, I see this as a way of serving divorce papers on the commercial food grid.  And no one has figured out a way to call helmeted, militarized police out to stop anyone working in the gardens.  The cops I talked to this year said it was a good idea, the garden.

Multiply this by a million, then instead of a quarter acre of re-designed facts on the ground, you have 250,000 acres of re-designed facts on the ground.  These are easier to defend than a policy, and it presents no strategic targets.  Certainly there are threats and potential threats, but there is no one neck so Nero can have the pleasure of cutting it.  Instead there is an accumulation of intimate victories, accomplished by convenantal communities, communities made that much stronger by the reduction of their dependency on the technocratic grid and the recognition of their very personalized interdependency on each other.

Walking on Two Legs

Demonstrating in the street, this unmasking work that OWS has done so incredibly, inspiringly, lovingly well, is not done yet.  I am not by any means arguing that anyone ought to return from the street.  Those of us who can’t be there do need you to represent.  You are the allies of unpredictability, the agile OODA-artists of the street, the magicians who can abracadabra bits of stunning clarity out of your hats.  Your job is exhilarating, exhausting and crazy risky sometimes.  If you can do it, that is where you need to be.

There will never be more than a fraction who have the flexibility at a particular time to be manifestantes.  We love you, and we want you to go on, and we have been both instructed and entertained by your courage, creativity and endurance.

When you can no longer do it, there is something you can do, and so can the 99% of the 99% who can’t be those shock troop manifestantes, right now.

What can be done, and without any strategies involved, is a straightforward and strenuous effort by 99% of the 99% who are at home to make food. If there are 500,000 OWS protestors, then there need to be 1,000,000 more people who are making food in their yards, their neighborhoods, their churches, temples and synagogues, their workplaces, their schools, their land trust plots, their fallow fields, their empty lots, their apartment decks, their patios and their kitchen windows.

Even when the demonstrations end – and they will end – we are not left with nothing to do to continue dissolving that power.  Every square yard of land recovered for food is a material victory in the face of little resistance, and that same square yard is a square yard of independence from the Grid.

Do not pit your weakness against their strength.  Exercise your strengths where they are weakest, where you live.  The system is falling apart, and nothing will stop that.  More and more niches will appear.

Even more important to me personally:  gardens are peacemaking.  Peacemaking is still the most important form of resistance.

Let a million gardens bloom.

Swadeshi.

Shanti.

In historiography, the Idea of Progress is the theory that advances in technology, science, and social organization inevitably produce an improvement in the human condition. That is, people can become happier in terms of quality of life (social progress) through economic development and the application of science and technology (scientific progress). The assumption is that the process will happen once people apply their reason and skills, for it is not divinely foreordained. The role of the expert is to identify hindrances that slow or neutralize progress.

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Manifest(o)ing Feminism: Occupy Patriarchy!

The New Now-Moment of Occupy Wall Street

The whole world was erupting as we U.S Americans were watching.  Our noses pressed to the screen-monitors of history we watched as waves of mass rebellion rippled from Greece and Spain to Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria in the Arab Spring where dictatorship after dictatorship was toppled.  And then, who knew? I for one never expected that the waves of protest would find our own shores.  As we watched, only occasionally would a plaintive or angry question pop up: When will we get out on the streets? Yet when pushed to the brink and over of desperation at the beginnings of the economic onslaught on this country, people were still echoing the noxious nostrums of the new president who preached “no more excuses” and “individual responsibility” to a people suffering the brunt of a crisis put in motion by a financial system that–contrary to the delusions of the left–had put Obama in office.

When the nation began to crash in the first month of the new president’s first term, we did not rush to the streets when Obama appointed for fixing the crisis the same miscreants culpable for creating it. Nor did we riot upon word that while record numbers of people were plunged into joblessness, homelessness, and health crises, corporations were making record rates of profits. Yet Obama called for self-sacrifice and personal responsibility, instructing us that “everyone” had to pitch in in hard times. That we are all one family. Our uncles presumably are not then the thirty major corporations who paid no income tax in the last three years, while making 160 billion dollars?

And there was no revolt among people of color despite the fact that f…

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and the second article:

Branding Feminism

Branding Feminism: Brand-Slutwalk

By now everyone knows the comment that sparked the first Slutwalk (Toronto) and its wild-fire spread across the globe.  It began with a classic scene of mansplaining: A man  schooling women about how to avoid rape. To make things worse, the man was even more legitimized/authorized as a mansplainer due to his status as a police officer. In this instance the cop advised his audience that if women didn’t dress “like sluts” it might help with the rape-prevention. The feminist outrage spurred by the comment was fierce and a terrible thing to waste—which is precisely what happened when outrage against victim-blaming in a rape culture was (and is) redirected and de-fused into shallow and bubble-headed libertarian credo: If you’ve ever been called a slut, stand up now and say together – I am a slut. . . stand up and say it with me: I am a slut. I am a slut. I am a slut. This is Third-wave feminist celeb, Jaclyn Friedman working the crowd at Slutwalk Philadelphia. For those who don’t instantly visualize a Saturday Night Live style parody of feminism, that’s due to years of priming by the “sex-positive-empowerment-industrial-complex” which has hollowed out feminism from within to a one dimensional version of itself. One dimensional feminism means minimally a feminism that joins the pop up individualisms of a neoliberal era.

Thus rather than arousing sheer incredulity from the Left, the pageantry called Slutwalk earns points from the main bastion of liberal-left media, namely The Nation where…

FULL ARTICLE

This day began as a celebration of peace (Armistice Day); and now it is a celebration of military nationalism.

This 60th birthday coinciding with Veterans Day wouldn’t normally occur to me as somehow significant.  But it so happens that my country, to whom all honors are being given on Veterans Day, is sending soldiers — professional and mercenary — all over the world, and they are killing people.  This is not news, but a lot of people naively believed that this war business was somehow the exclusive purview of the Republican Party, and that Barack Obama was a new messiah that was going to put things right again… whatever that meant.  What we are seeing as clearly as possible yet again is that the Comander-in-Chief of the most powerful military force in history will always use that force, and that on this neither party stands out.  Democrats are every bit as enthusiastic about war as Republicans; they just argue about which wars are the most important.

I’m 60 now, and I have come to believe that we cannot invest hope in politicians.  Period.  This is up to us, up to a lot of different us’s.

Some people say that 60 makes you an “elder” (or an old fart).  I don’t know how I feel about that, but six decades, looking back on it, is a lot of time for a lot to happen, and sometimes learn from what happened.  And Veterans Day makes me very sad, though not in the sentimentalized way people feign sadness for an idealized and mainly nameless dead-soldiery every year during this annual ritual of “remembrance.”  It makes me sad that the shooting and bombing and beating and imprisoning that characterize war are just as horrific in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq or Libya or Somalia or Yemen or Iran (all these places are now being actively targeted by the United States Armed Forces)… as they were when I got my first dose of it in Vietnam in 1970.  Later I went to other places, where there was more war.  Veterans Day makes me sad because it is a day designed to paper over that same horror that my country continues to use so people can make a lot of money.  It makes me sad because my country cannot see itself honestly.

I’d like to do some remembering — for anyone who is interested — from the standpoint of a late Baby Boomer, North American white man, raised in public schools and suburban homes during the Cold War.  There were two fetishes, consciousness-altering fetishes, that defined us as boys (boys like us being the norm, of course).  One fetish was the gun.  The other was the television.

The Gun

What can you say about guns, eh?  Anyone who has handled a gun knows that the sight of it and the cool touch and the weight of it alters your consciousness with its terrible potential.  No matter what juridical and cultural structures do or do not inhibit the use of firearms, the possession of a firearm confers power whether it is welcome or not.  People who have a strong aversion to firearms are just as aware of that power as those who are obsessed with and attracted to firearms.  Both groups know from firsthand experience that a gun is not representative of power, it is power.  It is an instrument with which you can take life, in an instant, with the quarter-inch movement of a single finger.

Guns have come to mean something very special and sought after by boys: recognition, which they easily confuse with power.  And not just because most of us in my demographic categories are descended from armed settlers, though that has a good deal to do with this boy-gun thing.  I grew up with guns in the house.  My father born in 1906, was a very competent hunter; and my mother even had her own bird gun — a 16-guage Browning automatic shotgun.

Guns are male icons, however, not merely tools; and we see guns as icons every day on TV.

The Television

Our first television was a circular looking black and white, where I never missed an episode of Gunsmoke, the Lone Ranger, Bonanza, or Wagon Train.  Guns became instruments of justice and power in my mind, as I soaked up these powerful moving images of a mythical American frontier masculinity.  The one that really got me, though, was a character who was a soldier, a rebel, and a trickster – Swamp Fox, a Disney production where Leslie Nielson played the Revolutionary War guerrilla leader, Francis Marion.  That was the first impetus that led to my eventual entry into the non-televised world of Special Operations in the army; and it was seeded in my brain a decade before I even graduated from High School.

Television has been one of the most significant formative forces on the psyches of most Americans born in the last 60 years; and as society has evolved, television has co-evolved.  Representations of gun-masculinity have become more sophisticated, more technologically sexed-up, more graphically violent, bigger, and more callous.  Representations of men have become more smart-mouthed and cocky.  Guns have become more eroticized, as has the kind of destructive power that gun-masculinity represents.

The average kid now watches television around 28 hours a week, though now that is also mixed up with video games where the boys can simulate killing hundreds of times a day in ever more “realistic” settings.  Girls, unfortunately, also have plenty of girl-oriented programming that trains them into the superficial consumer-darwinism of patriarchally-defined femininity; but I am talking to and about boys now.  Even old boys like me.

War

I started studying war when I was 18 years old; but when I left the military in 1996, I began to study war differently.  After the attacks of September 2001 destroyed the World Trade Center, I was drafted into the service of an anti-war movement.  This compelled me to talk about militarism — about ideologies that glorify, foster, support, and prolong wars.  The more I talked about militarism, the more I was forced to answer questions about militarism; and so the more I was forced to think about militarism.  Gender was in my face at every turn, so by 2005, I was writing a book that attempted to show how gender is related to war.

Every time I looked deeply into the subjects of war and militarism, I found all sorts of gendered language, and all sorts of gendered activity, and all sorts of gender segregation; yet most critics of war insisted that war was an outgrowth of perversions in the public economy (which it certainly is) and that the gendered aspects of war were secondary considerations that were being taken care of elsewhere — perhaps in the gender study ghettos of the universities, or in white middle-class women’s fight against corporate “glass ceilings.”

But what I found – once I started looking for it – was that war has always been formative of masculinity, and masculinity has always been reproductive of war.  I also found that resistance to a criticism of something I call “conquest-masculinity” came from every direction, left and right and center; and that my thesis on the relationship between war and masculinity was most unwelcome.  People’s very identities were involved, all the way down to some subconscious level where disruption of the gender order presages a fearsome cosmic chaos.

Still, the evidence piled up.  Violence is eroticized. Violence is a male erotic ideal.

This is what I am thinking about this Veterans Day.

The Dangerous Erection

During the opening phases of the invasion of Iraq, we saw the introduction of a condom called “Shock and Awe.”  Everyone gets the joke, but few will attest to how this conflates male sexual “prerogative” with domination and violence.

Television is being displaced in the overdeveloped world by its younger cousin, the personal computer.  And what many, many, many boys and men do on those computers is twofold:  they play war games and they masturbate while they watch pornography.

We are all familiar with the various references to the phallus as a weapon,with aggression-as-sex and sex-as-aggression.  Here are samplings from the front pages of the first web sites that came up when I Googled “porn.”  “Asian bitch.  Black ass orgy.  Black cocks ruin white wife.  Watch her punishment.  (Name) gets pounded and face-fucked.  Little slit pussy fucked hard.  From ass to mouth.  Horny torturer at work.  Showing whose boss.  Gangbang brunette slut.”

A liberal acquaintance of mine once said he wanted to “hate-fuck Sarah Palin.”

Internet pornography is actually a venue where male ideas and attitudes about sex and power are distilled and concentrated.  The ideas of domination, destruction, control, and humiliation reoccur again and again.  The idea of the weaponized phallus is everywhere.  The re-inscription of racial stereotypes is everywhere in porn; and I will suggest that racial stereotypes are also an essential adjunct to war.

It must be a terrifying world for women where so many men take these attitudes for granted and even celebrate conquest-masculinity, where a considerable number of men are obviously turned on by images of a male phallus that is plunged first into a woman’s anus then into her mouth.  Men have been trained somehow in this culture to be aroused by the humiliation of women.  Women are to be slammed, hit, banged, pounded, shown who is boss; and these ideas are sexually arousing to many men.

Women, Nature, Colonies

So how does this relate to war, you may be asking.  And I’ll tell you.  Conquest-masculinity defines a man as someone who conquers, dominates, and humiliates.  When a man is trying to dominate another man verbally, he calls that other man a pussy, a bitch, a faggot (a male who acts like a female).  The ultimate insult is to call a man a woman; because a woman is someone who exists to be conquered and dominated.

Real men control their women.  Real men exercise control.  Real men control their environment.  Real men control lesser men.  And here is the stick with that carrot.  If you aren’t a real man, men, then you are fair game to be a lesser-man, now subject yourself to domination and humiliation.  That’s the man-trap.  I know.  I was in it for a very long time.  That is why I am writing this for Veterans Day.

The same idea of conquest and control that characterize this form of masculinity with regard to women, characterize a need for control over nature and colonies.  I borrowed this association from a writer named Maria Mies, because I believe she is onto something.  If you look at the propaganda for wars of conquest, and you look at the propaganda for the destruction of nature in the name of progress, and you look at the propaganda against women represented in some of those porn titles; these all relate themselves back to an idea of what it means to be a real man.

Here is a short video a friend and I made as a kind of crash course on this association.

The Dishonest Holiday

Veterans Day is a collective worship of soldiers; and the religion is American nationalism.  It is a dishonest holiday (a term from the phrase Holy Day).  Veterans Day tries to reduce war to platitudes – freedom and democracy and so forth.  Veterans Day is a day of selective remembrance, where soldiers are honored for their sacrifices for the nation-state.

On the one hand, we will hear that the soldiers are to be honored because they sacrificed for these ideals, that they ensure our “freedom.”  This presumes that the wars they participate in – in whatever roles – were actually conducted to protect freedom; yet few people can explain how the freedom of people in the United States was under threat in most of these wars.

When this objection is voiced, the premises are shifted.  We are honoring their willingness to sacrifice, even though leaders may occasionally send them on unholy missions.  Without them and their willingness to follow orders to kill and die, we would be under threat from various and changing dark forces from the outside.  So the sacrifice is not for freedom now, it is for our “security.”  Their virtue is in being there, willing to follow orders.  Like good Germans.  And so the obedient soldier is valorized, not the citizen-soldier fighting to protect “home and family and freedom.”

Women are now included in these shifting rationalizations, in a sense, because there are more women in the military now.  But I contend that the idealized soldier is still a man.

This obedient man-soldier is not cherished then for his good motives; the reasons for killing and dying are immaterial.  And so this idealized man is now valued simply for his necessity.  He is to be honored because he makes himself available to fight, whether he knows why he is fighting or not, and whether he agrees with the reasons or not.  And the overarching reason — the deity to which we can make some final reference to justify this soldier — is the nation-state.

Without belief in the civil religion – American nationalism – this soldier is merely a hired killer.

So let’s get this straight.  Veterans Day is not a celebration of actual veterans — who are too diverse to characterize; Veterans Day is a High Holy Day of our nationalist religion.  It is a proliferation of flags, a mass genuflection before the altar of the late modern Rome.

And our ideas about masculinity make us men particularly susceptible to this idolatry.

The soldier is the epitome of male — the guy who will visit death and destruction on the enemy, the guy who will take the risks, the guy who will put his hands in the gore (so we don’t have to).  The solider will die “for his country,” but just as importantly, he will kill for his country.  He will conquer the enemy, those dark, vaguely threatening outsiders whose names we need never know.

Veterans Day is a dishonest holiday, because in public we talk about sacrifice and dying for one’s country, but we go behind closed doors with the boys to celebrate the juicier stuff: the war stories with the body counts, the counting of kills, the trophies, the names we used to dehumanize them – Japs, krauts, gooks, slopes, hajjis.  And this more visceral remembrance, this remembrance of eroticized violence, this celebration of conquest-masculinity, are the wet, dark, moving entrails of nationalism.

The less sophisticated among us will express it more directly on a bumper sticker:  “God, Guns, and Guts Made America Free.”  God is a subset of nation, a weaponized Jesus that has the same auxiliary religious status as guns and guts.  But let’s be honest. The attraction of this message is not its content, but its domination machismo.  That is the grail for the individual male psyche that can be so readily mapped onto the nationalist project.

It will be traumatic when the ideology finally collapses.  For some, it already is.

The Toddler Age

The ideology that is dissolving into incoherence now, and the same ideology that brought us into the present age, is one that told us more and bigger is always better, that selfishness is some kind of civic virtue (which we ought to let run free in order to ensure the good order of society), and time is a commodity to be accumulated like other commodities – meaning we should go faster and faster, meaning the ideal is getting stuff done Now.

Now Marx described society as an overall form that develops not unlike a person, with developmental stages along the way:  infancy, early childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, and maturity.  I don’t agree with his formulation of these stages, or even with the presumption that there are some inevitable and predictable stages that society goes through that could be called “progress,” an idea that Marx shared with a lot of capitalist apologists. But I do believe that there is a childhood development metaphor that describes the actual, contingent and current form of social development, which should remind us of some of the obligations of actual maturity for actual human beings.

This ideology that is crumbling right now, even as it still holds sway over many imaginations, is what I call the ideology of the Toddler Age:  we live in period where virtue has been replaced by value, and what we value are the same as toddlers, that is, we say “Mine,” “More,” and “Now.”  This is the credo of consumer society, which also happens to be the society that fetishizes guns and television, and which also happens to revolve completely around the business of war.  Like everything else in consumer society, war can be commodified, too.

Now I am going to reminisce again about my own childhood.  When I was two, 58 years ago, my dad had been hunting birds in the desert Southwest (I was actually born in San Diego, a true native Californian) .  My dad took a break and leaned his shotgun against the outside of a little Airstream camper trailer (hitched to a Nash Rambler).  My mother was in the trailer, changing my baby sister’s diaper.  I waddled over to the shotgun leaning on the outside of the Airstream, fiddled with the pieces around the trigger housing — like most curious 2-year-olds do — and I managed to blow a hole in the silvery skin of that Airstream, missing my mother’s head inside by so narrow a margin that she felt the shot go through her hair.  She screamed.  My baby sister screamed.  I screamed and cried, backing away from the gun.  My dad ran over, grabbed the gun to keep me away from it, and checked on my mom and sister.  As I said earlier, I’ve been around guns all my life.

Accidents happen, and there are twenty ways in retrospect to keep what happened from happening; but the truth is, shit happens.  And we learn from it.  My dad learned a lesson that day,and it’s a lesson our whole society needs to learn.  Toddler Age society, I mean.  The Gun-Society.  War Society.  Here is the lesson for the Mine-More-Now society of the Toddler Age:  Two-year-olds should not be allowed to handle guns.

I won’t participate in any war, and I will oppose the participation of others.  But that doesn’t mean that what I am saying now is a principle of pacifism.  What I am saying is that — regardless of how anyone feels about war — a society that has a lot of guns and thinks like a two-year-old is a very dangerous thing.

Media Infantilization

Before the advent of television and its electronic audio-visual grandchildren, people had a mix in their lives of the real and the simulated.  You cook a meal; that is real.  You watch someone cook a meal on television: you are watching simulacra — representations that are not the real thing.

Back in the day, say prior to World War II, people could occasionally go to a movie.  That was a big deal, that kind of entertainment.  As a percentage of your total time, this kind of simulacra was very small compared to how much time you spent paying attention to something real, something you were actually doing instead of passively observing.

Now, everyone seems hooked up to an electrical entertainment grid every waking moment.  They carry their teeny televisions around in their hands.  TVs are mounted in automobiles.  We are attached to these electronic glow-boxes everywhere, as I am when I write this.

Going back to my observations about toddlers, one of the characteristics of a toddler is the inability to separate representation from reality.  For actual toddlers, this is an essential developmental stage; but again, thinking like a toddler is not compatible with handling guns and such.  I contend that the increased exposure to simulacra has retarded our capacity to separate representation from reality.  So again, the metaphor is apt.  The ideology of consumer society is irresponsible and dangerous because it is childlike in a period when human beings carry guns, some of them uber-guns (intercontinental ballistic missiles, for example), that could lead to big accidents.  Really big ones.

Media has infantilized us.  It has turned grown-ups into children mentally.  Entertainment media have cocooned us in a techno-fantasy that tells us, Peter Pan like, that we never need to grow up.  Even with all our guns.  In fact, most of our boy techno-fantasies involve guns and the most dangerous techno-fantasy of them all – control.

When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.  (1 Corinthians 13:11)

Would that it were so.

Revenge

If you want to trigger a celebration of conquest-masculinity, the best trigger is revenge.  If you want to see guns as instruments of redemptive violence, and if you want to see audiovisual media celebrating revenge with plenty of guns, check out all the films that can be categorized quite simply as “male revenge fantasies.”

Commando, Gladiator, Man on Fire, Ben Hur, Straw Dogs, Death Wish, Rolling Thunder, Collateral Damage, Braveheart, you name it.  The male revenge fantasy is always a hit.  Revenge is the license to return evil for evil and call it good.  The story line is, Man is affronted by other Man, who has done something terrible to a loved one.  Protagonist Man then wreaks deliciously cruel punishment on the Offender Man, and that violence leads to happiness.  Redemptive violence, this is called.  But is it sexual?

You bet your ass it is.  Think, for just one moment, about how often and easily people you have known have referred — with great schadenfreude — to a criminal getting what he deserves by being raped in prison.  People make jokes about it, because everyone in this culture is already in on the joke.  Rape is a crime when it is perpetrated on Us; but it is not a crime when it is perpetrated on Them.  It is payback.  Why?  Because it humiliates, and that humiliation is eroticized.  Rapists ejaculate into and on their victims.  I’m no medical doctor, but it is my understanding that before men can come, they have to be adequately aroused.

That criminal has it coming.  No pun intended.  We all get it.  We all understand that sex-is-aggression and aggression-is-sex.  No cop-outs with that stuff about rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power.  Rape is about power all right.  Rape is also about sex.  There is no real sex in the real world that is not inflected by power.  We talk about a victory of one person over another as the winner sodomizing the loser.  When we are cheated or betrayed, we say we have been “fucked.”  The word itself is used more often to express aggression than sex, and the sex it often expresses has nothing whatsoever to do with that romantic, friends-first, mutuality thing we associate with contented couples of all kinds.

Conservatives are in denial about men needing to lose some power.  Liberals are in denial that sex is about power at all.

I’m going to weigh in on this question, and weigh in as a Christian, but not in the way most might expect.  I’m not going to worry in the least about how and when people rub what parts together.  There’s not much about sexual couplings in the Gospels, taken as a whole.  There is a lot about power, though.  Everything in it is about a power struggle that involved this man (who we call the Christ), along with a lot of social rabble, challenging the power of both an empire and its native surrogate leaders.  Again, taken as a whole, the Gospels are tracts against the exercise of force and fraud against others.  They are consistent in the message that dying rich puts your soul at risk; and Jesus himself — who was sexually abstinent as far as we can tell (a very unmanly thing) — set out to undermine the very material foundation of domination, and the dominator masculinity that makes it possible.

News flash to Christians:  Jesus forbade retaliation.

If someone slaps you on the right cheek, offer the other cheek also. (Matthew 5:39)

Christians

Many of the most childish and reactionary people in the United States will insist that the United States is a Christian nation.  I beg to differ.  Most of the Christians I have encountered know little about their own scriptures, and much of what they are familiar with in the Gospel stories of the founder of our church they have torn out of context to get a different meaning.  They have learned to ignore the repeated warnings that being rich is an unfavorable state before God.  They have learned to ignore what Dorothy Day pointed out:  “The Gospel takes away our right, forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.”  They have learned to ignore that given the choice between violence and non-violence, Jesus chose the latter even as it resulted in his torture and execution.  They have forgotten that Jesus said, “Blessed are the  meek.”

Masculinity is not meek.

Most of all, they have forgotten what Christians proclaim as a political reality — that the risen Christ is sovereign.  Readers who are taken aback by that will understand now how serious I am when I say that the United States is not in fact a Christian nation. Readers who are taken aback by that may even agree with those who say we ought to be Americans first, and Christians second.  As Stanley Hauerwas has pointed out:  Even the churches in the United States are Americans first, and Christians second.  Being Christian means something different to me.  It means that I obey God before I obey the state; and if there is a conflict between obedience to God and obedience to the state, I will disobey the state.  My confession of faith is political.

Christ is sovereign.  War was abolished on the cross.  All the rest is disobedience.  Sovereign over each of us who make this proclamation.  Sovereign over the church — the community of believers.  Sovereign over nations, all nations, no exceptions.  Sovereign over and above the United States of America.

So if Jesus says not to kill, and the United States says to kill, we are obliged by this proclamation of Christ’s sovereignty to disobey the United States, because this nation is in a state of disobedience to God.  That is one Christian’s response to Veterans Day this year.

Are you listening, Christian brother Barack Obama?

He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart.

He hath put down the mighty from their seat,

and hath exalted the humble.

He hath filled the hungry with good things;

and the rich he hath sent empty away. (Luke 1:51-53)

Now this may not sit well with conservative believers and liberal non-believers, this idea that we might refuse the civil religion –patriotism — as an idol, that we might consider ourselves Christian before we are American, that we might choose to disobey laws written by both liberals and conservatives; but this is my conviction as a Christian.  Romans 13 told us not to disobey the law for the hell of it; but Romans 12 (always left out when 13 is used to justify blind obedience to the state) calls Caesar to repentance, too.  We are called to obey civil authority as long as civil authority is not being disobedient to God.

The Gospels are not equivocal.  They say love your neighbor, even when the neighbor is an outsider (the Samaritan); and they say love your enemy.  War is not an acceptable practice for a Christian; and in every instance when Christian churches have supported, participated in, or acquiesced to war, those institutions were themselves in a state of disobedience to God.  Institutions are human, and like humans, they are broken and subject to corruption and rationalization.

I want to make an argument on Veterans Day this year, at 60 years old, as a Christian, about one major source of all this brokenness.  Conquest-masculinity.

Anti-Masculinity Jesus

Within the ambit of Christian theology, there is a peculiar term: “the scandal of particularity.”  If Jesus is the incarnation of God, then why does God choose a teenaged peasant woman in a backwater of a colony of the Roman Empire to raise this incarnation as a Palestinian Jewish boy in  a town of around 200 people?

There is no final answer to that.  It is something we accept and try to understand a little at a time.  A good deal of how we understand it is that Jesus-the-person was an observant Jew, and his life and mission are seen as a fulfillment of Jewish prophetic hopes – a messiah.

In 1st Century Roman-occupied Palestine, there was already a long history, among Romans, Greeks, Babylonians, Jews, and all the other people in the region, of warfare.  I have said that war shapes masculinity, because was has traditionally been an exclusively male practice.

What are the characteristics of effective war-fighters and war-mongers?  A good warrior must – above all else – be able to harden his heart against the enemy in order to kill the enemy without hesitation.  A good war-monger must be able to speak about then enemy in ways that harden the hearts of many to accept the killing.

Warrior masculinity demands men who are capable of cruelty, even when that capacity for cruelty extends from the battlefield to the polis to the home.  War forges a conquest masculinity that Jesus, in his words and by his very example, rejects all the way to its root.

My own argument within the Christian community is about masculinity, at least by inference. What John Howard Yoder called the Constantinian temptation was really a temptation to power, and specifically it was a temptation of men to participate in power that was the exclusive province of men.

Nothing in this early Jewish cult could have been more scandalous than its deep gender subversion — man who would die before he would kill an enemy; and no temptation would have been more powerful that the temptation to re-seize male prerogative.

Jesus actions rebuked male power in the empire (Rome), male power in the satraps (the chief priests and Herod), male power in the cultural monopolies (scribes and Pharisees), and male power among the warlike resisters (the zealots).  We read that he rebuked powers, but we ought to remember that in every single case, this was exclusively male power. It was naturalized male power, and so it became invisible in the sense that people didn’t feel the need to differentiate it as “male” power.

As far as we know, Jesus never demanded equal rights for women, but then we know that “rights” are an artifact of modernity, that “rights” are an invention of a later time, and we also need to know that discipleship for the Christian is not about rights at all, but that it is a discipl(ine) of the suffering servant.   Our community is called to be a community of service to others, of selflessness, and of reconciliation… or that’s what the Gospels teach at any rate. This applies to men and women in the faith, which I suspect is exactly what pulled church “fathers” toward the Constantinian temptation, the misrepresentation of “the lordship of Christ by identifying God’s cause in some way with the powers of the political establishment.”  Ivan Illich calls it the “criminalization of sin,” the perverse attempt to legislate the radical freedom Jesus taught that allowed love to transcend every previous social boundary.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.  (Galatians 3:28)

Just as many men today are engaged in a backlash against the political assertions of women, especially against the ways women’s declarations and demands have undermined their sense of themselves as men, this Jewish cult that not only had men and women working as co-apostles and eating together (taking communion) with the opposite sex who were not family (an immensely scandalous activity). More importantly perhaps, the behavioral expectations of the men who followed Christ were extremely woman-like according to the mores of the day. The men were expected to be humble, deferent, self-abnegating, and quick to serve. These were the qualities that were most prized… in women. We might imagine how much of a role-conflict this discipline created for its male adherents. And, of course, there was the most difficult aspect of discipleship of all, especially for men, and that was not fighting back when they were abused.

Imagine someone today telling their sons, no matter what anyone does to you, you are not to fight back.

Yet this was the very example of Christ.  From the point of view of the gender order, how much more scandalous could you get.  Not only were you not to fight back against your social superiors, you were not to fight back against anyone.

It is not so surprising then to learn that many of the converts in Rome were women at first, since this discipline was one to which they were already more well-socialized than their male counterparts.

Jesus himself ate with prostitutes, engaged women as equals in debate, and touched menstruating women in violation of the prevailing purity codes.  He risked his own life to stop the execution of a woman for adultery, calling her male executioners to account for their deep hypocrisy.  Women attended his execution and witnessed the resurrection.

In the eyes of many Roman authorities, early Christians came to be considered a “mischievous superstition,” in part because they preached the spiritual equality of men and women, a notion that was scandalous to Romans.  Paul typically greeted the various churches in his epistles with the phrase, “Brothers and Sisters.”

Rumors about the new cult exaggerated the open commensality of the shared meal and easy contact between men and women into a popular rumor that the Christians were engaged in secret orgies. There was general alarm about the number of Roman women who joined the sect.

Little by little, masculinity was taken back into Christianity until men again subjugated women within the faith and men recovered their archetypical practice – war.  Even later, during the Reformation at the height of its iconoclasm, Protestants attacked the Roman Catholic Church for its continued veneration of Mary, Jesus’ mother, often on explicitly masculine grounds.  Even today, at one of the local Catholic churches, there stands a great, bold and colorful statue of Mary with her eyes full of determination and her foot pressed down firmly on a thick, writhing viper.  I can see how this image might disconcert a man who believed that physical courage is a gendered virtue.

Perhaps the most gender subversive aspect of the Gospels is what they leave us as a hierarchy of virtues. The valorization of courage in combat – venerated by the Romans, but also by the Hebrews with regard to King David and Maccabeus – was generally considered the epitome of virtue, the most arduous of virtues, and it was closed — by default — to women.

In the Gospels, virtue is embodied in suffering service, in courageous and confrontational nonviolence, and epitomized in martyrdom.  All these are as accessible to women as they are to men.

In this, the Gospels are a gender revolution, even if not self-consciously so. I believe that this revolution transcends the 1st through 3rd Centuries and that this – if the church is faithful – is still true today.  I believe this, because I believe that the most oppressive constructions of masculinity that correspond to the worst offenses of men against women (and against other men in the quest for conquest) have their deepest origins in war.

Irish former priest John Dominic Crossan said, “The church’s mission is to take the world back from the normalcy of civilization.”

Let me say something provocative but true about civilization.  Civilization has always been, always will be, and is now fundamentally predicated upon… war.  We tend to associate civilization – city-fication – with forms of high culture and manners, but the material reality of all civilizations is and has been the exploitation of weak people and their lands in the service of a powerful people.  True in Egypt.  True in Babylon.  True in Rome.  True in the British Empire.  True for America, now.

When Jesus began his mission, he first left civilization.  He turned around (what “repent” actually means), and headed to the wilderness.

I believe it took a man to tell men, show men, a different way to be men; and men were the most — are the most — broken of all people, because we are ripped away from our capacity to love by the obligations of masculinity.

Call to Repentance

On this Veterans Day, 2011, this deeply dishonest holiday, this day of turning the flag into an idol and the nation-state into a religion, as I am turning 60, and as a Christian, I need to confess and repent.  And I am making a call to repentance, not just to soldiers and former soldiers, but to many of my fellow men.

Do not thank me for my service.  You do not know what I did when I “served.”

I beat people.  I burned their houses.  I terrified children and old people.  I humiliated people.  I used racial epithets to dehumanize those I dominated.  I took human life.  And that was just as a soldier.  As a man, I have dominated, insulted, humiliated, and exploited women.  As a man, I have mocked the suffering of others.  I have policed masculinity in other men, including engaging in homophobia — perhaps the most powerful form of hatred as gender-policing.

This came at a cost, not to be measured against the costs of what I did to others, but at a cost.

In the accustomed comforts of consumer society, said Walter Brueggemann in The Prophetic Imagination, we have been numbed to the pain of others by a secular ideology that teaches us to harden our hearts.

Power depends on uncaring hearts to remain powerful.  “Compassion,” says Brueggemann, “constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural…”

He was moved with compassion.  (Matthew 9:36)

Hardening one’s heart is painful.  It takes an effort of will at first.  Learning it requires numbness.  Mab Segrest, in her book, Born to Belonging, calls this numbness “the anesthesia of power.”

When you see those besotted barfly veterans, bitter without knowing why, baleful against humanity in general, know that they are using their anesthetic.  There is pain under all that bitterness, the pain of loss, the loss of the capacity for love. The loss of love is the steep price of penultimate masculinity.

It was only grace that brought love back into my life.

Grace and forgiveness, two things you need every day.

On Veterans Day, 2011, this dishonest holiday when I am about to complete 60 years as a human, I have good news for men, for soldiers, for veterans.  We do not have to pay that price.  We can stop any time.  We can turn around.  We can repent.  We can learn to love again.  All we have to give up is power.

Some of that power is invisible, and we have to work on that, too.  Finding all the ways we exercise power over others, and surrendering that power.

It will take discipline and practice, because giving up the trappings of conquest-masculinity will feel unnatural to us. We won’t get it right, right away.  It will take humility and a daily re-dedication of willingness.  It will mean we have to drop our defenses and accept vulnerability.

Something I can say today about my own freedom, since that word gets a lot of Veterans Day play:  I know now that I never have to raise my voice or hand in anger again, no matter what.  If there is any redemption for men, it is in becoming peacemakers.

For me, this includes active opposition to war in all its forms; but we also need to make this a reality in our personal lives.  I want to suggest a simple starter program of peacemaking that you can use with everyone you meet.  Elders are supposed to confer simple wisdom if they have it, and I think this qualifies.

Don’t dominate.  Don’t retaliate.  Don’t humiliate.

With those three simple don’t's, you can make your little corner of the world a better place for yourself and everyone around you.  It isn’t everything we need to do, but it is a start on undoing what we never should have done.

To men who are Christians: I didn’t make up these rules.

Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God.  (Matthew 5:9)