The Clash of Civilizations

What if you woke up to find that the pieces on the chess board had changed and there were no more pawns which moved one or two spaces ahead, no castles moving perpendicular to each other or knights with their L-shaped choreography. “The only constant is change,” goes the old saw, but the politics of the Middle East and by proxy the rest of the world is going through a cataclysmic shift equivalent to those periods of history like the fall of the Roman Empire and the Rise of the Ottomans or the fall of Czarist Russia and the rise of the Communist bloc. Of course at the end of the Hegelian dialectical day, the geography of Europe and the Middle East is the beneficiary of these earlier historical watersheds. Nothing is what it seems to be. Isis was once an Egyptian God. British archeological thrillers of the 30’s are filled with neocolonialists whose excavations ignite her rage. You remember the OxBridgian explorers in their safari hats prospecting among the tombs of Egyptian royalty with their pipes and copies of The Golden Bough and uttering “I say there old chap,” as sarcophagi come to life. Now ISIS represents an Islamic State that threatens to swallow up Syria and Iraq, not to speak of Libya and those parts of Yemen, the Sudan and Nigeria which are its potential clients. By employing the example of the Crusades, President Obama attempted to show that the current generation of Jihadists have no monopoly on terror and violence. Tomas de Torquemada was the model for Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. But how will the world look when the dust has finally settled? Will Iranian Shiites attempt to wrest the torch from the hands of their Sunni counterparts, as Netanyahu prophesied in his recent speech before congress? Will the Muslim world continue to be divided or will the vision of pan-Islamism put forth by millenarian thinkers like Sayyid Qutb produce an even more frightening juggernaut. In The Man in the High Castle Philip K. Dick imagined the axis powers in control of the United States. Perhaps only a science fiction writer like Dick could foresee the realignments that will result from our current geopolitics. Democracy and liberty were products of the mercantilism of 17^th Europe. But we now seem to be living in age of extremism, in which technology itself doesn’t provide the leveling anodyne to ideology (that proto-capitalism did in earlier age). The late Samuel P. Huntington wrote a book entitled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order which might turn out to be prescient. Visions of utopia whose pay off may occur in the after life are a tough nut to crack.

The Ballad of Bobby Shmurda

When rappers become too established and successful they run the risk of losing their outlaw credibility. Queen Latifah is an obvious example of that phenomenon. When they go too far in trying to uphold a legend, they end up dead like Tupac or in jail. Snoop Doggy Dog has managed the fine art of maintaining his image as a bad boy while staying out of jail, while others in the in the field like the rap promoter and former Death Row records honcho Suge Knight, who now faces a murder charge for running over two people in a parking lot in Compton, aren’t so lucky. There’s a bit of the James Dean supernova syndrome in all of this, the idea of the star that burns super bright before exploding. A recent front page Times piece “Street Image Helps a Young Rapper, Until It Doesn’t,” NYT, 2/23/15) recounts a similar tale. The Times article concerns Ackquille Pollard aka Bobby Shmurda whose bubble was burst and now sits waiting for help from his label, Epic records—in the form of $2 million in bail money—which doesn’t appear to be coming. Pollard is being held on “gang conspiracy and gun charges.” The story has echoes of Brecht Brecht, who loved to deal with underworld characters like Macheath, who is only  rescued from the gallows by his creator’s sleigh of hand, i.e. by art masking as fate. Doesn’t Pollard's alias sound like a name Brecht would have invented? According to the Times piece Shmurda’s good fortune was based on the success of one song “Hot N*gga,”which according to the Times “went on to reach No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100.” The Times quotes Shmurda as saying in a hauntingly Brechtian refrain, “When I got locked up, I thought they were going to come for me, but they never came.” You can almost hear Kurt Weil’s plaintive song, accompanying Brecht’s mordant epitaph, “Just a jack-knife has Macheath dear/And he keeps it out of sight.”

Knausgaard or Kierkegaard?

Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Norwegian novelist and provocateur. The six volumes of his autobiographical novel are titled Min Kamp. It’s a no holds barred reference to Hitler. In his Letter from Osterlen (The Paris Review, Winter 2014), he remarks “In the essay De vulgari eloquentia, Dante wrote that the individual variations in human reason are so great that each person appears almost to constitute a species for himself. He wrote that nobody could understand another human by reference to his own actions and emotions, the way animals can. God, therefore, endowed mankind with language, because we were the only creatures who needed it.” Though it may be the booby prize, Knausgaard is obviously in love with language. He’s high priest of art, an Ibsen exploring the realms of imagination and memory with a touch of William Vollmann's relentless pursuit of the fringes of human behavior thrown in. He also exudes the romanticism of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel in his pursuit of the past. Nothing that is human, including say feces, is sacrosanct. High and low cohabit his work. Here for instance are two quotes from a recent article in The New York Times Magazine (“My Saga, Part 1, Karl Ove Knausgaard Travels Through North America," 2/25/15). The first reflects the writer's fearless preoccupation with bodily functions, “I searched every drawer and closet but found nothing I could use to try to  remove the plug of feces and toilet paper that must be clogging the drain.” The second exemplifies his bias towards the higher functions of the brain, “Being so close to chaos all the time, I feared nothing more than the things that could unleash it.” It’s nice to think that language can be likened to the equations and algorithms of math, like say Descartes “Cogito Ergo Sum.” But Knausgaard’s world, as replete as it is with poetry, is lacking in reason and enlightenment.  It’s as explosive and unpredictable as the adolescent lust he so vividly describes. The author paints himself in his autobiographical screeds as a little animal of consciousness. Knausgaard’s quote from Dante brings to mind the thinking of another famed Scandinavian writer, the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who famously said “truth is subjectivity.”And Knausgaard like Kierkegaard never seems to have abandoned God despite all his doubt. He was consulted on the publication of a new Norwegian version of the bible. 

Is the Enemy of Your Enemy Necessarily Your Friend?

Molotov and von Ribbentrop 

During his speech to congress Benjamin Netanyahu said, “When it comes to Iran and ISIS, the enemy of your enemy is your enemy.” His notion is that ISIS and Iran have similar millenarian goals. They’re merely rivalrous siblings, with the same murderous objectives--the control not only of Islam but of the world in general. But Netanyahu’s idea is interesting in an almost Halachic way, to the extent that it turns over obvious assumptions. Perhaps we have been lulled to sleep by the Sunni and Shiite conflict. The Nazis and Russians were enemies until they signed Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of l939. Of course they would become enemies again. It’s comforting to think of Iran as our silent and strategic partner in the Mideast due to the conflict with the Sunnis. Netanyahu’s point is that the US and Iran are strange bedfellows, maybe like Norman and Marion in Psycho. Will the animosity between Sunnis and Shiites take precedence over the conflicts with the West? Amidst all the threat of terrorism there has been a comfort in imagining a strong Iran as a bulwark against what has seemed like the far more threatening extremism of both al-Qaeda and ISIS. And Netanyahu’s speech gives little credit to the huge divide between Iran and other countries in the Middle East. Iran’s relatively cosmopolitan society and culture is a far cry from Syria, Iraq and it’s certainly Egypt. Still two negatives don’t necessarily makes a positive. How many times have we armed insurgent forces only to find our own weapons eventually being used against us?

Call My Friends at InventHelp!

photo of Thomas Edison by Louis Bachrach

Have you seen George Foreman’s commercial for InventHelp? “People ask me all time, George, how do I get my idea in front of companies…call my friends at InventHelp.” It would be fun to find out how much George Foreman earns for these outbursts. But what's even more interesting is the question of how many people there are out there to justify the existence of a company like Invent Help? Hundreds, thousands, millions? How many undiscovered Thomas Edisons are there? How many Alexander Graham Bells are iterating the latter day equivalent of “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.” OK not everyone is going to invent the light bulb or the telephone. Not everyone is going to experiment with electricity like Ben Franklin did in his famous kite experiment. Many of the big discoveries--for example, quanta and the Higgs boson--either have been or are in the process of being made. NASA is already planning for a journey to Mars. What type of ideas is George talking about and what are the kinds of things that his friends at InventHelp ending up having to vet. For instance has anyone come up with a gadget that will enable you to unravel a new roll of toilet paper in the middle of the night? You know how irritating it is when your hand circles round and round and can’t find that first piece and finally how badly you feel when you decide to simply rip through several layers to start the ball rolling, as it were? How about an alarm which goes off when you don’t put your keys where they belong--so you don’t have to be late for work when you’re trying to find them? How about a “restaurant mediator” that takes the decision making out of restaurant going? Does your Saturday night on the town become a test of wills between you and your wife, with someone always getting the bottom end of the stick? This new patent will improve your marriage and enable you to blame a bad meal on a device rather than a person. OK and digging down deep what about some modern inventions that have the global implications of electricity or the telephone? How about a pocket nuclear Armageddon detector? Or a peace monger, an innocuous little antenna like device that’s already brought about peace between seemingly intractable adversaries. What about the polar ice cap capper? Or the 3-D crapper? If you have any ideas like this, call George Foreman’s friends at InventHelp.

Kingsman: The Secret Service

Michael Vaughn’s Kingsman:The Secret Service is like The Shining meets Pygmalion. The movie which lies firmly in the tradition of Tarantino’s meta cinema features a millenarian mogul, Richmond Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson). who frequently threatens that the outcome of what we’re watching is “not going to be that kind of movie.” Jackson’s persona references Pulp Fiction in that the character he played in both films has an inclination for Big Macs. Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is the movie’s Galethea who will be transformed from a tough growing up in council housing into a slick and impregnable secret agent by a Bond rip off (Colin Firth). In terms of the theme of transformation, La Femme Nikita, Pretty Woman and Trading Places are all referenced in the movie, which could also be subtitled Film History 101. The crazed Jack Nicholson character of The Shining hatcheting through a door is played by a mother trying to murder her 4 year old. All the agents in the super secret society of the film’s title whose offices occupy the backrooms of a Saville Road tailor shop are named after the Knights of the Round Table, Galahad (Firth), Arthur (Michael Caine), Merlin  (Mark Strong) and Launcelot (Jack Davenport). Eggsy is given a shoe with a spike like the one Colonel Rosa Klebb (Lotte Lenya) sported in From Russia With Love, though that’s nothing compared to the murderous Oscar Pistorius blades sported by Valentino’s side kick Gazelle, (Sofia Boutella). Without giving away the plot we can reveal that the Queen of Sweden will allow Eggy to fuck her in the ass if he saves the world. To take offense at either the film’s violence or silliness simply misses the wonderful pointlessness of it all.