Reading Mr. Brooks’ call for an uprising

 

We The People

By this time, you will probably have already read, or read about,  David Brooks’ op-ed in the New York Times,  What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal. It is genuinely an important piece in that it was written by a conservative who was in opposition to us lefty loonies for decades, but who would now stand with us.

Why? It seems he has discovered that Trump and his regime are, indeed, illegitimate and a threat to everything America stands for…at least, everything good that America stands for.

I’m glad to see this. And I’m heartened that the call is coming from the Right. (At last someone over there is hearing something other than Fox News or the Heritage Foundation.) And I hope, very much, that Mr. Brooks is heeded and we do manage to cobble together a united front that will be able to bring down our Trump and his emerging dictatorship..

Yet, I fear this will be hard to do. Mr. Brooks is hardly a MAGA, and the GOP remains beholden to that curious movement. I see very little to indicate that Republicans, in general, and Trumpsters, in particular, will feel any sympathy for his positions. Meanwhile, the Left can’t seem to stay united long enough to support AOC and Bernie, much less coalesce around some future leader or leaders who could provide common direction. 

Still, better small things than nothing. Let us hope that this op-ed piece will resonate with enough people…right, left, and center…that something will come of it. After all, a single drop of rain can presage a mighty storm. 

Note To The 1%: The Alternative

Note to the rich and powerful, here are your options...

Choose carefully.

Ten Days That Shook The World

I am writing this very early in the morning. I've gotten up, leaving Martha in bed, and gone to read in the front room. It's something I do fairly often. My current book is John Reed's Ten Days That Shook The World—which, I am embarrassed to confess, I've never read before, and which (I think) I'll never read again.

It is a difficult book to read today, with all its hero worship and its enthusiasm. Reed, you see, was an American intellectual and an early visitor to Revolutionary Russia. And he was an eyewitness to the Bolshevik coup that put Lenin and his friends in power. (He'd die in the Soviet Union, eventually, and be buried in the Kremlin's Necropolis.)

But what is difficult about the book is that you know what he did not, i.e., that the great Soviet experiment would end horribly in the Gulag, in the artificial famine of Ukraine, in terror and war…with Stalin. Thus, to skim its pages is to become embarrassed for its author. Is it possible, one asks, that he could have so completely misinterpreted what he saw? That he could have been so willfully blind? Alas, of course, the answer is yes. He does not seem to notice the growing repression, the judicial murders, the suppression of other parties and other points of view…the slow drift toward first, dictatorship, and then, genuine totalitarianism.

Still, judge not lest, etc. There is evidence that Reed realized his error and, towards the end of his life, regretted the excesses of the Revolution he'd chronicled.

Second, if Reed misunderstood the nature of the Revolution around him, then he was not alone in that. Much of the world's intellectual class (if not its workers, who tend to be a hardheaded lot) bought into the Revolution, and defended it in print … occasionally in the streets…even as Stalin sent poets and filmmakers and tens of millions of others to die in Siberian winters.

Which is what disturbs me. I am, by some measures, myself an intellectual...in a small way, at least. And even if I weren't, I am a follower of greater intellectuals, a reader of their prose and a viewer of their independent productions. I listen to their wisdom and sign their petitions.

But what if…?

What if among their causes and their calls for action there are other hells? Unobserved? Awaiting birth? Midwived by those who most of all should stand guard against him?

That horned god, that hoofed fiend, that rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem.

Gadhafi...and Frantz Fanon

Right now, I’m reading Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. If you don’t know who he was, don’t worry. A lot of people don’t anymore. I’m not sure that’s a good thing or a bad.

Anyway, Fanon was a French psychiatrist, philosopher, and revolutionary. He was of mixed race (he was born on Martinique) and had experienced racism at its worst. He then worked for a time in Algeria while France was fighting its war there. He became radically anti-colonialist, joined the Algerian nationalists, and, wrote a series of books advocating the violent overthrow of European imperialism. He died young (1961, still in his 30s), but his books lived after him. He was read all through Africa and the Arab world, and young radicals quoted him as often as they did Mao or Lenin.

When I was a boy, even we read him…Americans, I mean…partly because Sartre promoted him, and partly because the Viet Cong also read him.

But, now, all these years later, I look at his works and I wonder what he would have thought about what’s going on today in the Arab world. I wonder if it would have confused him. It certainly doesn’t fall into his neat models of revolutions. The Egyptians, the Tunisians, the Libyans are not his “wretched of the earth,” i.e, the oppressed “natives” exploited by imperialism and white settlers, but rather local militants at war with local tyrants.

I suspect that, in the end, the present age would have proved beyond him. He was, in spite of his antagonism toward West, very much part of the Western tradition. He was a romantic, far more at home with Goethe or the European revolutionaries of the 19th century than he was with the Third World peoples he idealized.

And I suspect, too, that his Romantic’s soul would have found today’s revolutions incomprehensible, perhaps even repellent, for there is little place within them for his cult of violence, his loathing of the West which had humiliated him, and his love of the “People”—always with that upper case “P,” always an abstraction, never quite subject to analysis.

Most of all, I think, he would have been pained by the fact that this revolution contains no utopia. The People Power activists hope for better things, but I believe they lack the illusion that their actions will create heaven on earth.

Which would have hurt him. Quite a lot. For, surely, nothing is more agonizing than to be reminded, once more, that the gates of paradise remain firmly shut, and cannot be forced…

Not even with National Consciousness and high explosives.

People Power in the Middle East...and the world

So, like everyone else in the known universe, I’ve been watching with real fascination while the peoples of the Middle East suddenly began turning out their dictators. First, it was Tunisia, then Egypt, and now half the nations of the Arab world (plus Iran!) are in the midst of People Power-style rebellions. Some will succeed, others will doubtlessly fail, but that the rebellions are happening at all is amazing.

Also, like everyone else, I’ve wondered what it all means. I’ve come up with a few random thoughts, which (out of the goodness of my heart) I’ll share with you…

1) People Power rocks. We’ve seen it, now, in the Philippines in '86, Eastern Europe '89, and Russia after that....now the Arab world. (Of course, Russia is now fairly authoritarian, but it is still a far cry from Stalin's USSR.)

So, could this be the beginning of an age of People Power? An age when states the world over will be shaped, re-shaped, and then re-re-shaped by exactly such manifestations of the popular will? If so, is it a new form of democracy? One in which the population really does "vote with its feet"?

So far, these have been genuine revolutions. Most revolutions aren't. Most of the time they are disguised coups in which one segment of the elite seizes power from another segment of the elite (even Lenin's revolution was just exactly that. A group of middle class and upper class intellectuals moved into a power vacuum).

But not so here. In Tunisia, in Egypt, and now in Libya, this really is the people in the streets. That suggests we are entering an age when ordinary folk the world over will increasingly be the significant political actors, at least in moments of crisis. Yes, the elites and their administrators will always run things, but they will have to do so with at least one eye on the public. In other words, a lot of places will be less like Greece under the colonels, and more like France after '68.

2) Our own elites need to be paying attention. That's not because I expect a People Power revolution here (although, if we don't get our jobless rate down below 10%, and soon, there may be one). But, even so, the Middle Eastern revolutions are important because they are going to reshape the way our "allies" and dependents will behave. We, or, rather our elites will have to learn to treat them with respect rather than as banana republics.

3) Also, sort of on the same note, there are potentially three big losers here. The first two are obvious, the US and Israel. The US will never have quite the same sort of leverage in the Middle East again. Israel is losing important (if usually covert) connections. But, in the long run, I don't think it will hurt the average American much. It might even improve relations with the Arab world once we're no longer backing tyrants. (Israel...I'm not so sure about.)

The third big loser might be unexpected: Iran. I am convinced that this is going to wound the dominant parties there rather badly.

Egypt's was a secular revolution, just as was the one in Tunisia. Which means that it is no longer just the Islamists who are fighting the system. In fact, the Islamists have failed time and time again to topple even one Arab government. Now, the secularists have brought down the biggest of all.

This is not to say that the Islamists couldn't seize power in Egypt. However, they have lost forever the image of being the only effective popular force in the Arab world.

5) When I say that the US could suffer because of the Revolution, I mean it. This might spell the end of the age of cheap (or, at least, less expensive) oil.

On the other hand, that might also mean that we finally have to sit down and come up with alternatives to the oil-economy. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

6) And finally…

Another reason our elites should be watching closely: the rich and powerful have acted in recent years as though they didn’t need to bother their pretty little heads about old fashioned things like nations. They were the new Global people who went wherever profits were highest and the hotels were most luxurious. If America got difficult, no problem, they'd just head for somewhere else -- which is why expats pack the beaches of Dubai, and companies like Halliburton fill its office towers.

But, guess what? Dubai is now shaking in its Guccis. Increasingly, there is no high ground, no favored place where the rich and powerful can go when things get hot elsewhere. Trouble will follow them. They can neither run nor hide.

If we're lucky, they'll be bright enough to see that.