Archive for April, 2008

What’s a Metaphor, or Politics As Unusual Part III

Published at April 30, 2008 in Uncategorized. 6 Comments

I wrote the above under contention one: that some of our political language is learned, that it can be reformed. Journalists do not have to write criminally constricted essays or prop up a thousand bad assumptions. They could—and some of them do—begin to see their job as that of the responsible interpreter rather than the reporter, a job that demands the journalist to engage with his story: to offer context, history and ethical analysis so that readers can have enough information and indignation to respond to the events that need them.

But I also spoke of people in my office—informed, indignant people—who believe that politics is the solution to these problems. These people aren’t bad readers in the literal sense; they have read volumes, they see patterns in political history and they are committed to change. They represent something less immediately infuriating than constricted prose but ultimately more dangerous: unquestioning faith in a system—politics—that is (in my opinion) fundamentally constricted in its scope and moral power. These people are good readers inside the system but cannot read outside it—have no idea, even, that there are words outside their system that their system cannot say.

I hear these people answer their phones; I hear them explain why the Democrats this and the Republicans that and our candidate will this, that, and the other. (Be careful: I am not saying that I have become disillusioned with my job or the candidate I work for. I am saying, rather, that I am leery of politics as a form of secular salvation because I believe, most of the time, that we are using the wrong words to have the wrong conversations.) I see that politics, as a system, can flatten itself in an instant and become propaganda: taking beliefs that are based in common desires and problems and choosing one interpretation over another, arguing one side so tenaciously that all other sides become mysterious and completely Other, trying so hard to convince others of the supremacy of one opinion that the opinion loses all fallibility and subtlety whatsoever.

I spent time in my last post talking about people who call in about immigration. I could have picked any topic. The point is that every time I have tried to talk to these people in the language of politics I have been convinced that top-down politics is not enough: that it is not subtle enough, not historical enough, not personal enough, and certainly not ready enough to have conversations about its own methods and shortcomings. I have realized that Politics as a system, which I will forever distinguish from politics as a human activity (hereafter, big P and little p politics respectively), cannot speak in the language of human experience. Politics takes experiences and reduces them to things that can be quantified and made into policy. I have also realized that Politics, by virtue of having to win, convince, and speak to thousands of bad readers via bureaucracy, will constrict until it speaks in a stunted language of “professionalism”, “literalism” or “fundamentalism” that cannot possibly capture its own point. Top-down politics, in its frenzied attempts to galvanize people and get votes, will start speaking in the language of propaganda. By propaganda, I mean that it will speak with a practical urgency (the urgency of passing this or that bill) that ironically forgets the human urgency that it is addressing (poverty, inequality, hate, genocide). It will become so fixated on practical urgency that it will forget ambiguity and the unknown in every situation. It will speak the language of formula instead of the language of metaphor, and it will find only differences and create only chump change. It will be reduced to the myopia of incremental policy change, and it will forget the sacred and the unsayable and the humane in favor of cold law. In the end (which is obvious when looking at the Democratic Party) Politics will forget its principles (principles that are inherently pre-Political) and talk itself into a contradiction. In the name of slow policy change, it will defy its own platforms and, in the name of someday achieving its platforms, it will try to suppress the political—those who are still talking about the underlying principles—from using the language of equality and ethics to frustrate the slow march of policy. In other words, the ultimate expression of Politics is that the people can get what they want as long as they agree to not speak about it as an ethical issue. Slavery can be abolished, peace can be declared, and the environment can be saved as long as this is done in the language of utility and never in the language of fairness and worth.

It is precisely these people who believe that politics is complete and who deride poets and prophets and other word-users as impractical or entirely superfluous dreamers. These people are bad readers, not because they don’t read but because they believe that words are the servants of systems and not the other way around. They are not capable of seeing the ways in which the system collapses in on and fails itself, and they are not capable of looking for the words outside the system—words that the system cannot say. They do not read with the love of a narrator, looking for inconsistencies, subtleties, things beyond expression. They read and speak to coerce and convince, to get people to take on more step down a tunnel.
Since arriving in DC, I have been haunted by a quote from Adrienne Rich’s small book, Poetry and Commitment. I first had this book pressed into my hands by Elizabeth Pinborough, and then later by Chris Nielsen, both people who should know. They both wanted me to read it because they know my thoughts and they felt like it could be one answer to my very crucial question: how do you use words (or any art) to engage and confront injustice without falling into propaganda? Or, more precisely, what is the role of the poet in a world of pain and suffering? On a more subtle level, the question is whether there is something about reading the world poetically (or, I will add, prophetically) that allows us to do things that politicians cannot—that allows us, quite literally, to realize our small-p political visions?
My answer is yes, and I will explain it below. For now, I will say that I am convinced that poetry and religion are capable of affecting revolutions that politics cannot. I believe they are capable of this precisely because they do not revolt or reform but restore—restore people to their goodness, words to their power, and emotions to the sacred. I want to be very clear: I recognize emphatically that religion and poetry are equally if not more prone to propaganda as politics. I am not deluding myself into thinking of religion and poetry as pure forms of thought that people practice purely. Religion particularly is one of the most abused, flattened, and ill-treated concepts imaginable, and it is obvious that millions of people misuse it. When I use the words ‘religion’ and ‘poetry’ then, I am using those words to signify a possible way of seeing the world. I am using those words for the possibilities they contain, not the realities they frequently produce.

What’s a Meta-Phor? Or, Politics as Unusual: Part II

Published at April 24, 2008 in Uncategorized. 10 Comments

Here’s to an insanely long continuation of the metaphor blog, in to-be-continued sections. Just had to get it out my head, you know…

About a month ago, I wrote a blog post about how the gospel needs good readers. I was making the argument that good reading—of scriptures, of people, and of the world—is vital to living, rather than collapsing, the gospel. I accidentally used the word “intellect” (and its formidable derivative, “intellectualism”) to stand in for the concept of good reading. Many people skewered me for that, claiming that I shouldn’t sic my mental hobbies on others and that being a Mormon did not require the intellect—that I was arrogant to suggest it.

Either I misrepresented myself or, ironically, I was misread. I think it was a bit of both. Whatever it was, I have been thinking of this post every day for the past month, this time in a new light. I have been thinking of it in the light of politics and good reading. (Before anyone misinterprets the phrase, I will say that “good reading” cannot be reduced to literacy skills; by it, I mean the ability to see the world feelingly, to be attentive and to accept ambiguity, to notice and to see connections between things.) I should have been thinking about this because I field calls all day long from people whose bad reading has caused them to interpret the world in woefully contradictory ways, and to do great harm with their thinking. When we are in the middle of an economic crisis, for instance, and people can think of nothing more than to throw $500 at every human they see—when they say nothing of how we got into this problem in the first place, or examine our misbegotten premises or our sacred ‘right’ to consume more goods—I am living the direct consequence of politicians who use too few and too poor words. 

But it is, as I said in my last post, not just a problem of individuals but a problem with the limits of language in politics. It isn’t just that I sit all day and field calls from bad readers—people who haven’t read enough, or observed carefully, or imagined themselves in different situations—but also that I spend all day with people who believe that politics alone is the solution to the problem.

Once again, my disagreement occurs at two levels.

1.       On the first level, I believe that our constricted political language can be reformed. It isn’t inherent, in other words; it is learned. I am confronted with this kind of learned constricted language—this kind of cramped reading and speaking—every time I pick up a Time or a Newsweek.  For instance: I read Time’s account of the protests against Musharraf several months ago and felt nauseated. Here was one of America’s lead journalists, waxing on about Musharraf without saying a single thing of importance. Instead of questioning the assumptions of power politics and accurately portraying the motives of the protesting lawyers, the writer reported the news like a tired, small-town waitress rattling off specials and ended with banal prescriptions for U.S. foreign policy: In order to maintain its power, the US should accept Musharraf as a strong-man ruler and get everything they could out of him.

 

      No matter that people were dying in the streets. No matter that Pakistan was exploding. No matter that we were at war in the supposed name of democracy while foiling another country’s fight to preserve it. No matter that economic interest had become a completely legitimate reason for allowing immense suffering and injustice. No matter that there were a thousand stories underneath the official one—a thousand lawyers who could say exactly why they were on the streets and exactly what was being taken from them—who could not get an audience. No matter that there were a thousand longer stories that outstretched the news moment—important information about U.S. interventions into foreign countries, information about its mercurial allegiances to democracies and dictatorships, information about the ways in which leaders have undermined their own judicial systems and for what reasons and with what consequence, information that could have contextualized the story and allowed a reader to make an educated judgment. No matter that the whole account was crying out for ethical analysis, for a journalist’s informed and rigorous interpretation.

 

No matter, precisely because we see news-reporting and politics as siblings and overlook their family defects. No matter, because we now see it as biased or superfluous to do anything but report in the most deficient sense: to say merely what happened without saying why or what for, disregarding history and common themes. No matter, because politics and news-reporting are designed to perpetuate the myths that keep our news from morally affecting us: the myth of realpolitik, the myth of America’s “original sinlessness,” the myth that we do things for a million reasons but that the rest of the world does things for no real reason at all. No matter, because the official story is the only one we consider news-worthy, while the real stories of the real people involved—people who could speak candidly and with heart—are noise. No matter, because the entire point of being a mainstream journalist seems merely to shuffle around old ideas on an industry-approved checkerboard. No matter, because we’ve decided that whatever basic logic holds in personal interactions—understanding why someone did something, how we might be at fault, what the right thing is to do—is irrelevant in politics or political writing, with the consequence that the basic emotions motivating Iraqi insurgents or Pakistani lawyers become shrouded in artificial mystery. No matter that these basic emotions are the real news, the things that could get us to understand each other’s motives and resolve our differences; no matter that the real bias in news is to so woefully under-report reality that people doing exactly what we would do in their situations become mysterious and absurd to us. No matter that all of this leads to the most frightening consequence of all: propaganda—a world of news that is forever proving its own interpretations, a world of news without history or empathy, a world that flattens every world but its rhetorically inflated one, a world that can never be wrong, a world whose supposed wrongness only confirms the miscalculations or wrongness of others, a world in which bad reading and constricted interpretation are rewarded as objectivity, a world in which words have no power but to manipulate others into fortifying the borders of that world, a a world in which all words are formulas and real stories are reduced to allegories with over-obvious symbols and a misbegotten moral. A world in which stories are so flat and calculated that they have no moral power. In other words, a world in which metaphor has been reduced to propaganda, a world in which the differences between us no longer remind us that we are the same—the fundamental task of the metaphor.

 

And is it any wonder, given words like this, that people call my office to decry the immigrant, so uninformed about the history of corporate power and globalization that they blame the wrong people, so seduced by bordered ideas that they believe in the idea of a border, so convinced of their own history-less American-ness that they assume nativity, and so ravaged by so-called news that the honestly believe that they would not, if their children were starving, cross any border and take any job to get them food? So convinced by amnesiac, constricted, bland propaganda that they can no longer measure the differences between themselves and the immigrant in similarities?

 

People tell me that words are just words, and that they don’t really matter. Action is what matters, and politics is action. The above is my first counter-argument, my avowal that words have power to create the reality that action labors under. And my argument is, by extension, that it is imperative to get those words right so that our actions aren’t misdirected.

To be continued….

What’s a Meta-Phor? Or, Politics as Unusual

Published at April 12, 2008 in Uncategorized. 12 Comments

By now, most of you know that I have moved to Washington, DC to work as the office manager on Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign. Now that we’ve gotten that mouthful of bureaucratery out of the way, I can use it as an excuse for not writing for so long. It is a hardship: I have never had more thoughts but also never less time. But today the thoughts are screaming and they must fly out.

I am tempted to explain everything I have felt since I moved out here, and then I am tempted to go into great detail about my job and what I do there and exactly what I think of those things I do. I am forcing myself not to do that, however. I will say, merely, that since I have been out here I have been thinking hourly about the poverty of politics—what it can but mostly what it cannot do. I have been thinking about religion as the real and poetry as restoration. I hope I can explain.

Three things:

1.      I ride the bus to work. I bring books to read. One is Mills’ On Liberty, which we can talk about tomorrow. The second is Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, which we’ll need to talk about right now. Maybe you haven’t read Klein. And maybe—if you are prone to despairing on buses—you shouldn’t. It is a complicated book, but it spends most of its pages chronicling the tandem relationship between free market fundamentalism and torture—between economic and physical trauma. That’s the thesis, but not my point. My point is the artist the Argentine junta locked in a coffin for so long that he forgot about color. My point is the man dropped from a government plane with his belly cut: desaparecido. My point is the writing on the walls of a torture chamber discovered in the corner of a glitzy mall in Buenos Aires: words like ‘help,’ or perhaps a name, compelled to scrawl itself to no one.  My point is that I have spent the last fourteen mornings reading about people being brutalized in the name of a certain political and economic ideology. I have, in other words, spent my mornings learning how real human beings suffer in the name of something imagined, how humans—somewhere-somethings—suffer in the name of ideas—nowhere-somethings.

2.      When I get off the bus, I am at work. This is where I answer phones all day, from people who find the campaign number and call. They call to tell me they are poor and don’t know when they’ll eat again. They call to tell me they are losing a mountain or a stream that no one can bring back, yes-ma’am-amen-Jesus. They call to say ‘Iran’ out loud, to send me Rumi quotes. They call because they are voiceless. They call to say words like ‘help,’ compelled to scrawl their names to someone.

3.      But some people do not call for this reason. About thirty-five people call about immigration. They start out nice enough: “What is your policy?” I talk about NAFTA and corporate welfare; I repeat the phrase ‘root of the problem’ until it is ash in my mouth. But they are not satisfied. They are labor leftists who see the world through the backward telescope of wages. They are for solidarity bound on all sides by the idea of a nation. Immigrants aren’t from that nation, and so it follows that no solidarity is left for them. They tell me: “Tell your man to send them all back. Tell them to send those job-robbers packing.” I sit in my chair, nearly crying. I want to stand up, un-chaired, and say all the words I have, to break through the language of wages in a fury of sprinting. To be a human. But as surely as I sit in my chair, the protocol demon sits on my shoulder, telling me I work for someone else, telling me I am not free to use words, telling me to say ‘NAFTA’ and ‘root of the problem’ until there is no blood left in the room. And then no one is satisfied: the leftist hangs up and I sit, rebuking myself in my chair. But last Tuesday? I couldn’t please the demon. Somewhere after the third NAFTA, I lost it. “Because they are human beings.” I said, this time beginning to sprint. “Because your nation is fake and your wages are even faker and your proposed wall is the realest consequence of believing in all that fake!” All that fake, I should have said, over real flesh. But I didn’t, and it was just as well, because the man had some words for me—words about insolence and never voting for Nader again.

I have learned that a nation, simply defined, is a collection of tragedies that cannot be told in the language they happened in—in a language that is above and beyond the nation itself. A nation is the cork in the narrowing neck of language, a backward telescope with the lens stopped up. I have learned that true politics cannot speak in the language of government without silencing tragedy and joy. I have learned that true politics must speak a language both smaller and bigger than the nation to keep the nation from being bigger than its people. And since the only thing that is truly bigger than the nation is the human, I have learned that true politics must be radically humane. This is because humans, unlike nations, can speak in the voice that things happen in. Unlike politicians (and even less like people who answer phones for politicians), humans are radically free to set the limits of the language, and this language, if spoken fervently, can reframe the acceptable territory of institutional politics. The ongoing confrontation between humans and the limits of politics is radical in the truest sense: it forever acknowledges and challenges the limits of the political language, and it does so full-throated, in the language of a sacred happening.

Soon, I will take a two-month leave from my political job to do two months of intensive writing in the bluffs of Utah and Santa Fe. The bosses know this, and they have to let me go because I told them about it from the beginning. But they are confused: “Why do creative writing when the action is here?” Because for them, the action is here and words are just words, dull things for convincing people. I tell them I have to go because I promised, but that isn’t the truth. The truth is that I must go. The truth, at least my portion of it, is that words are the strongest things in the world. No, stronger than that: The truth is that words create worlds, that they are great fictions that become realer than the fictitious systems that threaten them.  Words are covenants that humans make with the real; politics is a contract that governments make with ideas.  Politics cannot speak; politics can only repeat. It is a fundamentally constricted language. Quite literally economic, it is as small as its public can afford and as systematic as a formula. Even if it would rather not, it speaks in the accent of money.

The truth is that politics desperately needs our best speaking so that it can do its best doing. Some people will deride the speaking, wanting to skip straight to what they call the action. Anything that is not practical is, for them, a superfluous hobby. But no one knows better than the pragmatist the prison-house of wordless doing—the house that is as small as the doing and can go no further. The practical politician must sit in chairs and listen while someone reduces immigration to economics, and the most he can do is talk about NAFTA. He will be forced to speak about the problem at whatever level the real-throated have demanded; he is a slave to their ceiling and the boundary of their words. He will be forced, even against his will, to talk about the problems in terms of systems rather than individual humans—in terms of logic rather than in terms of sacred worth. Ironically, he will become as bounded by his boundaries (national, ideological, rhetorical) as the immigrant; he will suffer the boundaries that bind him to bind people who are bound for something better; in so doing, he too will be bound.

It is not that the politician is bad. It is precisely that he is only as good as his people. These people, speaking freely, can give each new topic the subtlety, carefulness, and sacredness it deserves. The politician, as part of a system, is free only to practice politics as usual—the politics of formulas, common denominators, averages. It isn’t evil that gives rise to politics as usual. Politics, as a system, can only speak of the usual—what can be mapped, charted, ensured. Radical politics—the politics of individuals speaking bravely—is precisely the opposite. In its very nature it is politics as unusual, not just because it questions Politics but because it can see human beings as sacred individuals who are themselves unusual. This is powerful, since the unusual is the language of both tragedy and joy, and ethics is the language of unusual response. To Greek it up a little: Big P Politics is classically limited so that little p politics can be romantically unlimited—so that little p politicians can use the noble fiction of words as a faith against the fictions that threaten the natural hope of words. 

Clearly I am not finished yet. I said I wanted to talk about religion and poetry as political saviors (quite literally, forces that save us not in but from our politics). I have not done that, nor have I really connected the last part of this essay with the parts about torture at the beginning. That will happen in part two, which is a more direct collection of ideas on the shortcoming s of politics.