Once in a while, I am overcome with a conviction that occupies a lethal intersection: intellectually foolish, massively unpopular, and deeply felt. These are the most pernicious of convictions. It would be convenient, of course, to be at all times correct, popular, and genuine. But these three scalars of value aren’t always lined up, and, in the particular case I am about to describe, they all point crosswise. It should be no surprise that everything I ever write (everything that anybody writes, for that matter) is an artifact of conflicts and hedged bets; however, here, I suppose I should make it explicitly clear.

Right now, my email box has thirty messages containing the phrase “GOTV” received since 22 October. I have been reminded of my express civic duty incessantly and over every medium—by email not only on the Democrats mailing list but nearly every other one as well, by personal communiqué, by blog, by interminable posters, by conversation, by a sort of temporary collective unconscious in which everybody is going up to New Hampshire to shunt Barack Obama over the finish line. My avowed Democrat friends are there; my friends who have never before expressed political opinions to me are there. Even my parents have converted from mere New Hampshire voters into New Hampshire political operatives.

Let me be aboveboard about a few things. Having spent time in campaign offices, I understand the privileged position that field occupies, and the basic assumption of the necessity of canvassing efforts. I know that New Hampshire is pivotal not only to the Presidential election, but also for its contentious Senate and House elections. And, most importantly, I understand that the urge to participate in field efforts in these last days of the election extends out of a genuine good faith. It should furthermore be no secret that I desperately want Obama to win the election.

And yet I cannot help but feel—perhaps unjustifiably but nonetheless deeply—as though my home state is under imperial occupation by an army of misguided crusaders who have enlisted in a crusade that is not fully comprehensible to them.

When the French lost the Franco-Prussian war, they reconvened their national imagination and decided to locate ‘civilization’ as the heirloom jewel of the French people. Convinced of the enlightenment of their cultural convictions, they proceeded to occupy North Africa and the Levant under the banner of the now-famous mission civilisatrice. The French would offer rayonnement to the fanatic hordes living there—that is, an illumination of the modern and progressive way of living. The premises of the mission civilisatrice have often been labeled a pretense for the economic and political greed of the Third Republic, but I don’t think the French were entirely sinister. I think, at some level, they actually believed that they were the most civilized people on earth, and believed that it was their moral duty to proselytize their enlightenment to others.

It is certainly not the only time in history that people convinced of the superiority of their own value systems have shoved it down the throats of others. The introductory image of this post is the first seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, depicting a naked ‘savage’ begging “come over and help us.” Just like the French in North Africa, the Puritans genuinely felt they were doing what was right, as did the Mormon missionaries in Polynesia, the English bureaucrats in India, the Soviet apparatchiks in Eastern Europe—or, to make the parallel blunt, the liberal Ivy League students in New Hampshire and Virginia and the other battleground stakes.

I do not mean to draw a crude metonymy between these historical proselytizers and the many students who are in my state right now telling my countrymen how to vote. The two clearly have plenty of epiphenomenal differences. Still, has it never yet occurred to any of these well-meaning volunteers that fanning out across a state which they do not know in order to tell its residents how to vote is a bit presumptuous? I should hope never to be an instigator of crude regionalism, but it remains true that the different parts of the country have cultural peculiarities which are often inscrutable to those who are not participants in them. I would never go tell Virginians which Senate candidate makes the most sense for them, mostly because I have no idea exactly how Virginians’ hierarchy of values operates.

Perhaps I am too attached to a fiction of a political system in which people are engaged in it every day writing and discussing and thinking, rather than joining up for three days every four years in order to go civilize the yokels. Perhaps I am too fond of the principles of town-meeting style republican democracy. I am willing to admit that I offer these feelings as a practitioner of everyday life, not as an analyst of it. I truly hope that the troops currently converging on New Hampshire have at least thought well and good about this before leaving and that they have merely decided differently from me. One suspects, however, that they haven’t.

It is, instead, about being honest when it comes to what, exactly, people are going to have to sacrifice in order to build an environmentally responsible society. [...] At the heart of this is an epistemological reconfiguring of the current pyramid of economic values—namely, that we cannot always have what we want when we want it.

There was something extraordinarily eerie about sitting in the crowd at Al Gore’s speech last Wednesday, watching him give his quite aspirational speech, and seeing Harvard students happily clapping along in the audience. I couldn’t help but wonder—do they know what they’re clapping for? It was as if Lenin had visited Tercentenary Theater in 1918 to give a speech about smashing the international bourgoeise and Harvard students had clapped away in assent. The set economic assumptions which lead to global warming on one branch are the same economic forces that support our chubby lifestyles as comfortable liberal arts patrons. Gore said that the U.S. energy supply must be carbon-neutral within ten years. I happen to agree. But this isn’t the sort of thing that happens by wearing Patagonia vests. It’s the sort of thing that happens with major dislocating effects in our economic assumptions. We still think that we can buy new clothes every week and go out to dinner often and fly to California for cheap. If we’re going to go carbon-neutral in ten years—and, judging from the applause, people seem to think that is a good idea—we’re going to have to start living up to it.

Of course, while Gore was arguing this, in the audience students scrambled for steel water bottles and t-shirts, consumer goods which in many cases will be used for a week and thrown away. After the event, piles of litter had to be taken up from between the rows of seats. “Green is the new Crimson,” the banners and pamphlets proclaim, but whether anyone could give you a coherent definition of what exactly “green” is I am not so sure. The IOP hosted a “green” party following Sustainability Week. What was “green” about it? Only the fact that you were supposed to wear green clothes. Better proof that environmentalism is now no more instrumental a political program than Irish pride I cannot imagine.

When people suggest to me that environmentalism is going to be easy, I offer them this thought-experiment. What are the countries in the world with the lowest carbon footprints; i.e., the most ‘sustainable’ ones? They’re the extremely poor countries—Chad, Burundi, and Afghanistan having the lowest emissions as of 2004. Now think why this is. It’s not because they’re using CFLs and we’re using incandescent bulbs, or because they’re driving Priuses and we’re driving Hummers, or because they’re wearing organic cotton T-shirts and we’re wearing Fruit of the Loom. It’s because they’re dirt poor. Environmental catastrophe is, more or less, the consequence of being wealthy and comfortable.

Let me be clear: I don’t want to live in a mud-hut, and I don’t think the developed world should go paleolithic. What I do want is for people to realize that “green” is not merely an aesthetic category. That is, we don’t become “green” just by living a recognizably eco-conscious lifestyle; for the most part, these lifestyles mean next to nothing. We also don’t become “green” by tinkering with little administrative changes in the way our sociopolitics work. The imperative set forth here demands deep change, and it demands that our best thinkers consider not only how to implement a cap-and-trade program but how to implement an entirely refabricated economic system.

Are Harvard students ready to do that? I certainly hope that they are. For now, though, I think we live under the auspices of a lesser environmentalism, the equivalent of listening to Motown records in the 1960s and thus considering yourself a civil-rights advocate.

“Untitled”

Babar! King of the Elephants!
Babar! King of the Elephants!
(let me help you lord…I fall before you)

Grey skin and skein tacked to a weary frame
Tusk on tusk, eyes white with plague
and the infants scream when his trumpet sounds

A medieval archbishop, Thor reborn
A chalice of marrow, a baptism in gore

And his ebony brow beats on speckled steel eyes

“Mother Superior”

Celeste holds a baby against each teat
They’ve bitten past the nipple and made it to the meat
Salty milk, red milk, the youngest swallows tongue
Celeste only sighs and remembers being young

Sagging tits, hair, and lips, dirty ankle socks
And 8 tons of ass, oh what a fucking fox

[drum solo]

I’ll learn to love her
I’ll learn to love her

“Meatball Sub”

Dingy bedroom, hanging shutters, sheets stained and torn
Can’t hide the rhinoceros cutting wrists with his horn

Poor Rataxes, poor Rataxes
“oh it hurts us! oh it loves us!”
Deeper now!
Deeper now!
Deeper now!
[scream]

If you play bass, drums, or meathook, please contact me at xbabarianx AT gmail.com

Once, on Thursday (which I suppose was also a fairly different life) an umpty bajillion people decided to liveblog the Vice Presidential debate. Some laced their commentary with snark and cynicism. Some tried a hand at thoughtful analysis. Some were utterly, mind-bogglingly stupid.

But why? Why do we liveblog? At least in the Summers case I had the twin justifications of novelty and singularity on my side: blogging was still a shiny new bauble, and it was also the only way to get a live feed of the speech. You either read the liveblog or waited until the next morning to find out what had happened. I am not trying to claim that my liveblog was very good, but trying to show that contemporary liveblogs don’t even have those dubious excuses. In the case of the Vice Presidential debate, liveblogs had neither a monopoly on information nor a technofetishistic newness. I can’t think of many cases in which somebody would have access to a liveblog but not access to the actual stream of the debate. So why do we need somebody sitting in the underwear somewhere telling us what’s going on? It’s like going to a movie theater with a friend who, in addition to making bad commentary, also keeps you abreast with a running chronicle of the plot. “Look: now he’s getting into the car!” says your friend. (“Look: here is my fist going through your sternum,” you retort.)

What seems to unfold is an interface in which the liveblog is solely a device for the writer, where readers do not figure into the calculation and are not, in fact, presumed to exist at all. Liveblogging has become an occupational signifier for the professional blogging class, something that is done just because it is expected to be done. Salesmen go to trade shows. Manual workers wear old sweatshirts with holes in them. Bloggers liveblog. It is merely an attendant assumption of the job.

The content and cleverness of the actual items are thus of no consequence, since nobody reads them and nobody is expected to read them. To understand their particular style, it is important to understand the following premise: liveblogs are audienceless pieces of journalism. They are certainly not conveyors of information; this information can be obtained first-hand on your TV or by streaming video. They offer a better justification as pieces of humor, but this too is a dubious claim—why not wait to write better jokes just after the moment has concluded? Liveblogs take place on an inverted theater: thousands of opera-singers on stage with perhaps one person in the audience.

That, of course, is not of itself a reason not to liveblog. Lack of an audience certainly hasn’t stopped us from plugging away. But it is perhaps a reason not to read them.

¹ Now deceased. Dickens’s goblin asks me: “What man wanders among graves and churchyards on such a night as this?”

Update: The one debate liveblog worth reading.

It’s clear from the start that CNN wasn’t particularly concerned with conveying anything in the way of actual information in their reaction graph. Crammed into the bottom fifth of the screen, the graph was mostly illegible on a standard-resolution TV. The hyperactive graphic designers who rule the airwaves spattered it with gratuitous chartjunk and a color scheme which left data indistinguishable from decoration. No scale offered any sense of what measurements indicated what values besides a relative guess at positive and negative. Oftentimes the lines would overlap; at many others, the Republican and Democrat lines were so faint as to be indistinguishable. Even the default graphs in Excel do a better job at communicating information.

Worse than the graphic hemorrhaging, though, was the fact that nobody on CNN ever really bothered to say much about what exactly it was, even though they apparently considered it important enough to block out a fifth of the debate. Aside from a label helpfully stating “Audience Reaction,” the screen remained ominously mum about what exactly these excitable lines were hooked up to. Opinion dials provided to the actual audience members? Focus groups watching in a research lab? Heart rate monitors on the candidates’ dogs?

I stuck around after the debate was over, hoping that the bottom bar might offer some clue as to how exactly this gadget worked. Instead I got a series of inane ‘FACT’ boxes seemingly lifted from the bottom of Snapple bottles.

What resulted out of all this, then, was a sort of electoral electrocardiogram hooked up to an anonymous patient. In an environment where the punditry is already obsessed over arbitrating who ‘won’ the debate, we now had a running tally of who was in the lead, based not on actual scorekeeping but on how much the fans was cheering. The political clash, so long an inconvenient quarrel of ideas and principles, was here distilled into just what we have been asking of it: a meaningless announcement of victors and vanquished.

This sort of thing flatters all of our worst tendencies in the modern political circus. We are already used to holding off making an opinion until the end of the debate so that David Brooks or Donna Brazile can tell us what, exactly, our opinion was. Now we no longer even need to wait that long, as we can just follow the line for our constituency group and be reminded exactly how we are supposed to be feeling about a certain performance. The debates, once the Symphony Hall of the election season, have become Follow The Bouncing Ball.

Perhaps soon enough we will reach a point where the candidates themselves have a screen following the reactions on their podiums. That way, when John McCain sees in front of him just how much the voters love it when he says the word ‘troops,’ he will be reminded to say the word as often as possible. Maybe if he says this enough times in ten seconds the lines will shoot to the top and a sixteen-bit tune will come on announcing he has made it to the Boss Level.

We’re not supposed to feel politics from the gut, on the spot. Candidates are not applying a sensual massage (does it feel good here, or better over here?). As a voter, I reserve the right to spend plenty of time thinking about how the debate went, and I also retain the prerogative to change my mind. I don’t want to be told, ahead of time, that one team is going to the finals just because they got their cheerleaders were excited. All I ask is that I might watch a debate with two candidates in front of me, with only Jim Lehrer’s inky eyes as a distraction, and no facile opinion chart scrolling insidiously at the bottom of my screen.

E. B. White, One Man’s Meat (New York: Harper Colophon, 1982).

I have a saddest day of my life. It happens every year, almost like an inverted holiday, in the late twenties of August. It is the day I leave summer behind, the day that I take the last trip off of the island and get in the car not to make a run to the hardware store but to make the long run back to the city, to school, to pandemonium.

Usually when I talk about the island I soften the blow by adding that it was bought by immigrant grandparents in the 1940s when it was not all that difficult to buy land in northern New Hampshire. But politics are out of the way here. The engulfing sadness of this time of year would be no less significant if the island was granted to colonial statesmen and deeded down through generations of patrician families. The unforgiving reader will accuse me of the sort of crass sentimentality that is available only to the privileged. To this I have no good defense, and I confess that I am describing a feeling that strikes me hard enough that I do not bother to think much about its social consequence.

I do not think it has every been anything but sunny on these leaving days. If it has ever been, my mind has done a perfect job of bleaching the memories. These days are always torturously perfect, warm and clear, with the slightest cut of chill to remind of the season’s approaching execution. This year the sky was a desaturated blue, a blue lilted over with gray, lending the whole scene the perception of living inside a 1960s Kodachrome photo.

It isn’t that I hate the autumn; in fact, I usually call autumn my favorite season. It isn’t that I hate school, either—I was born and remain an academic asshat. There is nothing, really, about what September is that makes it so intolerable. Just what it is not. It is not-summer.

So on this inevitable late August morning, we get into the boat and load it with summer detritus, first in full bags, then in half-filled bags that slouch, then finally the remainder of things that were remembered at the last minute and have no bags to hold them. Back out of the boathouse, make the turn around the point, at which the camp drops out of view and we accelerate to Halfway Island. Since it is always morningtime on these crossings, the sun is behind right shoulders, and the water in front undisturbed.

It is usually at this point that I would inevitably tear up as a child, and here still I always feel the sharpest pains of sadness that I know. I sometimes wonder whether it is bad of me that these prominent feelings are reserved for a place-in-time rather than a person. Oh well: we take what comes our way.

Back on the mainland, the last books go back to the Moultonborough Library, where they will be scanned back into the system by the librarians who have been frozen in age ever since I remember them. They will wait through the bibliographically skinny months of the winter to be checked out next year. E. B. White’s The Points of My Compass, which was my last book of the season this year, still remembers its entire loan history on its front page. After a bonanza of popularity in the late 60s, including a checkout (and renewal!) by Patron Number 2 (who must have been a prominent citizen), it languished through the 70s, was taken out once each in each decade following that, and then arrived to me in 2008.

And so the years grind forward. I think this is what makes the whole spectacle particularly sad. While for most people the intolerable melancholy of the march of the years is distributed out across 365 days, for me it all happens in about twenty minutes. That last boat ride is a boat ride from an island to the mainland, but more accurately a boat ride through a year. One more year closer to new dreams, horizons, empires. And also one year stashed into mouldering shoeboxes, one year of childhood crossed off.

Since Downfall is a film whose prominence is due to its ‘humanization’ of the most iconographically evil man of the twentieth century, this particular solo viewing didn’t just make the experience uncanny. It made it profoundly disturbing. Here we have a film wherein Hitler’s last desperate days are played out inside the Führerbunker—not as a robotic arch-villain, but as a complex, maniacal man whose world and vision are torn apart at the seams. The film makes no attempt to pussyfoot around the fact that that man, his world, and his vision were all nightmarish. And yet by the end of the film, stirred in amongst the horror of the decimation of Berlin, the honest viewer must recognize in himself a bit of a feeling we are not used to when discussing Naziism: sympathy.

Part of this is to the credit of Bruno Ganz’s performance, which is an over-and-beyond response to a difficult assignment. Part of it is the fact that the narrative is framed not by Hitler but by his secretary, Traudl Junge. And part of it is because there is an innate human sympathy for anyone powerless—and, in his last few hours, the man who intended to rule Europe was, in fact, utterly denuded of any power.

But anyone who doesn’t go around getting refused by a lot of tattoo parlors is bound to feel a serious degree of shock and self-reprobation at feeling even the tiniest amount of sympathy for a man who has rightly come to signify all the most horrible things that modern society and warfare are capable of. David Denby, reviewing the film in the New Yorker, asked:

Considered as biography, the achievement (if that’s the right word) of “Downfall” is to insist that the monster was not invariably monstrous—that he was kind to his cook and his young female secretaries, loved his German shepherd, Blondi, and was surrounded by loyal subordinates. We get the point: Hitler was not a supernatural being; he was common clay raised to power by the desire of his followers. But is this observation a sufficient response to what Hitler actually did?

[...]

Candor is admirable, but it’s not heroism, and it’s not art.

Is that really so? Denby frets that admitting the slightest bit of air into the historical hothouse of evil in which we’ve placed the Nazi regime will suddenly collapse the whole structure, and we’ll end up remembering the Nazi episode as just another tragic but understandable political misstep. Certainly there’s a good reason to guard against ‘creeping apologism.’ After all, that’s what makes the original feeling of sympathy so revolting—the fact that we know we ought not be treating this villain as a man.

But oughtn’t we? If we are really to guard our society and future against the sort of virile infection that produced the Nazi episode in Germany, shouldn’t it be important for us to confront, face-on, the difficult fact that Hitler did have the power to appeal, that he was, in fact, a real man—and that these things do nothing to dilute the fact that he instituted the largest genocide in history?

The real danger to me seems to be simply condensing Hitler down to historical images: militaristic banners waving over mechanized-looking Teutonic faces, grainy black-and-white photos of concentration camps, the sounds of air-raid sirens over Coventry. Those things tend to totalize Hitler and Naziism into something beyond-human, something impersonally evil, something which we would surely recognize. And that’s where the danger comes in: if we keep an eye out for this kind of evil, we’ll never recognize it when it comes. The real evil of Hitler isn’t defined by red armbands or a mustache or any one historical event. It’s defined by the ability for an entire nation, captivated by a galvanic leader and runaway sentimentality, to rationalize and systematize murder and destruction.

A few weeks after I saw Downfall, Newsweek ran a story called “Presidents and the Mythology of Munich,” warning against the tendency of modern politicians to divide every single situation into Hitlers, Chamberlains, and Churchills. Evan Thomas wrote:

For starters, it is important to understand why the Munich analogy is almost necessarily flawed. In the 1990s, George H.W. Bush compared Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to Hitler, and Bill Clinton’s secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, argued that allowing Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic to commit genocide in the Balkans was to invite “another Munich.” But the only real Hitler was Hitler.

The problem with this is: not even the real Hitler was “Hitler”—that is, not the history-book, mythologized Hitler which we have come to understand. Hitler was a man who alloyed together an enormous personal appeal with unmitigated malice and a fair degree of insanity. If we forget that first half, we’re liable to let the next Hitler slip through without us noticing.

If Camus could claim with some literary flair in 1942 that suicide is the one truly serious philosophical problem, I would like to suggest that, for me at least, Hitler is the only truly serious historical problem. It is almost impossible for me to believe that the images in documentaries and textbooks were the works of real mean, many of whom are still alive to me. It strikes me as utterly bizarre that my grandparents were alive while all this happened, since it has become located somewhere outside the course of human events. I can believe it only in the sort of abstract way that I believe in Einsteinian physics. The events of Naziism have been so parsed over by historians, so strictly encoded into moral quantities and calcified narratives, that they seem much more the elements of a novel than the product of very real passions and fears. Remembering that, though, seems to me an important thing to do—especially if we are to recognize when and where the elements of fascism are returning, insidiously, into our lives today.

Bloggers often do the same. Especially the ones here. Legion is unique and valuable precisely because of the force and confidence of its authors.

I take the opposite approach in life, and will do so here too. Instead of declaring and declaiming, I ask. The commitment to an interrogative and deliberative form of criticism is important to me for several reasons. The most basic one is this: modernity is messy. For me, one of the defining conditions of modernity is the plurality of worldviews and perspectives one finds. They are all up for grabs and they all compete with each other. The orientation that everyone starts out with, at least the orientation of people who are reflective, is an orientation of trying to sort through everything. Eventually, each of us develops a set of beliefs and ethical commitments that mean more to us than other values. But more importantly, the process teaches us that meaning, and perhaps truth, is really pluralistic.

This is all to say that people must be given the benefit of the doubt. This is why I object to the literary form of the manifesto. While it serves as a catalyst to dialogue, a manifesto is by definition opposed to dialogue. It simply states what its authors hold to be true. This method of approach not only conceals the process of reflection and internal dialogue necessary to form substantive beliefs, it also tacitly (or not so tacitly) rejects the possibility of alternative ideas.

Approaching issues of politics, culture, aesthetics, identity (yes, identity) should at minimum strike a balance between a manifesto and a dialogue. Because ultimately, I don’t know if I’m right! And the extent to which I do know I’m right will depend upon the conclusions I can draw from conversing with someone else.

So my voice here will not be one modelled after Demosthenes, but instead Socrates. I flatter myself by supposing I could fulfill such a role, but I’ll at least try. On the other hand, being a Socrates doesn’t actually mean much, because he didn’t really know anything. Yes, he wisely recognized his own ignorance and therefore the importance of the “search” for wisdom, but it still doesn’t seem admirable that this man simply spent all his time questioning people in order to poke holes in their arguments. I hope not to imitate the destructive and sophistic side of Socrates too much. But I feel strongly about the need for an open approach, one that emphasizes discovery and explicitly reveals the process of formulating and refomulating ideas. I remain suspicious of anyone who puports to offer certainity.

Forthcoming:
Theses of modernity reconsidered (a series!)
Trees
Ambition and Integrity
Culture = Education(?)

I once stumbled upon a thought that appealed to me very much. It is this: life is a great swath of ugliness patched at the seams by chinks of unlimited beauty. Like a pack-rat, I took this one away to a den and became very attached to it, entranced by its luster.

I have since disposed of it.

There is a great effort underway by all people everywhere to order their experiences from best to worst, to adorn their life with an apex of nice things to mute out the base of unpleasant things on which it is built. The insufferable nature of routine is tolerable only with the promise—even the fictitious promise—of some chance occurrence of enchantment. The glom of life, interminable and exhausting, must be consistently opposed by its self-made interruptions. By ‘precious specks of time’.

This seems to me to be a desperate attempt at quarantine where dilution is the more appropriate mitigation. I have spent the last few hours of my life in a suburban basement, taking laundry out of the washing-machine and putting it in the dryer, listening to idiocies dribble out of the television set, and feeling generally claustrophobic. The dullness of the operation is considerable, and I would much rather be down some untraversed back road. But I hesitate to discount the value of monotony. I do not look away from it as I wait for the next ‘moment of depth’. Instead, the quality of life which I am after is distilled into every possible moment, even those which are decidedly unpleasant. Rather than hold my breath for a quick inhalation sometime later, I am constantly breathing. Sometimes the air is foul, sometimes fresh. But it is all valuable in the same measure.

If I were to nominate the most unfairly-maligned character in literature, it would be Pangloss. What evidence against this world as the best of all possible ones? Many artists would include sharp pain as high-class an emotion as sharp love. I would extend the category to include even the dull senses. There is no need to forcibly hitch on to only the ‘pleasant and disturbing noises’. The ‘mundane and orderly’ are just as crucial to what makes the world at-large.

It is this at-large sense which is crucial to interpreting this integrated sense of the world. I find it best to treat all of experience as one indestructible whole. It does not consist of subunits but of a constant, uninterrupted stream of things to take in. In merging together experience like this (merging is not the correct word, as it was only falsely broken up to begin with), it so happens that the better ‘parts’ expand to fill the entire thing. The average of experience is nonzero.

A final thought: when I choose to wear my safety-belt, and the inveterate yahoo chooses not to wear his, who is it that gives the greater assault to his network of social control?

We are comfortably wrapped in one layer of silence over another layer of cacophony.

And so we have constructed rules to preserve the cocoon. Americans must remain freedom-loving and God-fearing. With nimble non-partisan fingers we cast ballots for ourselves in reflection. Memory of the stillnesses of churches material and spectral compels us to keep the volume down at all times. We have found too that it is much quieter when only a few people are speaking, and so we demand our types kept limited even when our talkers explode into many. In our houses at night we keep a neat clamor, one channel at a time. As the agreement of voices, no matter how voluminous, is still quiet, we have sent troops and performers and middle managers abroad to choreograph the world for this end.

We have exchanged the freedom to know, to blunder, to reform, to chafe, to understand, and to love for the freedom to shout in silent unison. We have expunged our consciences and defaulted our assertions. We have retained the freedom only not to exist, or, in other terms, no freedom at all.

Should it be that we set out now for the future by way of a distantly-remembered port of call. Upon approaching port we find not only that the wharves and landings have been abandoned but also that the buoys have rusted and the channels have gone undredged. All at once, as we realize that our responsibility lies not only to the future but to reproducing the annihilated progress of the past, intimations of the enormity of the task begin to appear.

May we have company in this.

May we have company in holding sacred human existence and holding sovereign individual existence.

May we have company in championing a vicious allegiance to the largest sphere of society—humankind—and to the smallest sphere of society—the self—and in disassembling all others.

May we have company in asserting the state as the collectively agreed upon means of maintaining human existence and preserving the sovereignty of individual existence.

May we have company in the secular piety found in the sacrifice of power.

May we have company in reconvening truth against the dictatorship of expediency.

May we have company in refusing a mere fictionalization of beauty and understanding, the two aims of art.

May we have company in the bullheaded optimism of modernity, an uncompleted and uncompletable task.

May we have company in unabashedly partaking of the twin tonics of revolution and restraint.

May we have company in all of our labors, and in our leisures more laborious still.