Faulknerian Criticism

In his late novel Intruders in the Dust, William Faulkner characterized the United States as "a mass of people who no longer have anything in common save a frantic greed for money and a basic fear of a failure of national character which they hide from one another behind a loud lip-service to a flag."

On July 4th, 2013, declare your independence from all of that.

Faulkner on Mob Rule vs. Man

"...there is a simple numerical point at which a mob cancels and abolishes itself, maybe because it has finally got too big for darkness, the cave it was spawned in is no longer big enough to conceal it from light and so at last whether it will or no it has to look at itself...Or maybe it's because man having passed into mob passes then into mass which abolishes mob by absorption, metabolism, then having got too large even for mass becomes man again conceptible of pity and justice and conscience even if only in the recollection of his long painful aspiration toward them, toward that something anyway of one serene universal light."

"So man is always right," he said.

"No," his uncle said. "He tries to be if they who use him for their own power and aggrandisement let him alone. Pity and justice and conscience too--that belief in more than the divinity of individual man (which we in America have debased into a national religion of the entrails in which man owes no duty to his soul because he has been absolved of soul to owe duty to and instead is static heir at birth to an inevictible quit-claim on a wife a car a radio and an old-age pension) but in the divinity of his continuity as Man..."

[William Faulkner, Intruder In The Dust, LOA edition, 436].

We Could All Use A Little More...

Faulknerian integrity:

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just to refuse to bear them.

[William Faulkner, Intruder In The Dust, LOA edition, 439].

The Two Faces of the Democratic Party

On the left: craven capitulation. On the right: moral and ideological bankruptcy. If you continue to stand for this, it is because you have given yourself no choice.

Shame on you.

Believe In People, Not States

Why China won't be a better superpower: Believe in people, not states - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Signs of the End...

The post-9/11 mood of hyper-patriotism is beginning, finally, to run its course.

A whole generation was bamboozled, but it is beginning to see the folly of its youthful enthusiasms.

I predict that the government and allied right-wing groups will continue to find and/or create new opportunities to try to keep the mood of hyper-patriotism alive (i.e., we will continue to be subject to manufactured terror scares, to witness police entrapment of hapless immigrants and misguided nobodies, to endure more non-issues like "shari'a in our courts" bruited as the latest threat to the American way of life), but I sense exhaustion setting in.

One sign of where we might be in the curve of this arc is the increasing shrillness of the patriotic displays to be found at sporting events, in advertisements, in shopping malls and airports, in Hollywood films (Hollywood--that old reliable ally of the Pentagon's propaganda machine), on the Action McNews Network...

But the party's over. The pendulum is swinging back. The Invisible Whitmanian Republic is due to show signs of life, like mischievous green blades (Leaves of Grass) protruding, unannounced, from the cracks of a city sidewalk.

I am not predicting a full-scale people's revolution--the American Spring that we so desperately need. Not at this point. The National Security State has time, money, and momentum on its side. Things will get worse, much worse, before we can hope for better. But I do think that Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, ordinary guys, intelligent, principled heroes, true patriots, are just the beginning of the end of the nightmare orgy of mindless hyper-patriotism that has afflicted this country with disastrous results--for us and for much of the rest of the world.

God bless them.

Read It And Weep

A "must read" LRB diary entry by Yale literature Professor David Bromwich. Read it and weep.