Amer-al Qaeda

With apologies for my absence, I offer this forthright observation by Paul Krugman from this morning's NYTimes on the culture wars. As is abundantly clear to anyone in our United States, when cultural conservatives are out of power, the culture war becomes a shooting war. This has, quite naturally, got me thinking about my own little sub-corner of the larger culture.

At its most expressive, SM is a peak experience of self-responsibility, something grievance-minded individuals abhor, notwithstanding their contradictory rhetorical posturing. The having of grievances or the blaming of others for unhappiness is definitionally a repudiation of responsibility. The taking of action, the assumption of risks that attend such actions, and the constitutional strength to abide the outcomes of having taken the risk, without deflecting any part of it, is the operant principle of SM, morally and practically. It is also the definition of responsibility. SM is a context within which grievance does not function, for causality is unmediated and apparent to its participants. Thus the top who does not check and test the reliability of a club's suspension points cannot blame the club if they fail. Anyone for whom a scene fails is implicate in its failure for having freely consented to it; both top and bottom share responsibility.

When we feel upset and assign blame outside ourselves this I call personal irresponsibility. That right-wing fanatics should emerge now to terrorize their fellow citizens is indicative of not only their lack of common cause with the basic tenets of democracy which brought progressive voices to the executive and legislative branches of government and legitimized them, but it also betrays an understanding of the nature of action that begins and ends somewhere other than within. The "terrorist" is not a self-responsible actor; he or she nominates some conveniently external factor (political view, lifestyle, race, God-name, etc.) to inform their grievance, and then appeals to external authorities to legitimize prejudicial action, with the actions thereafter generally focused against an objectified form of the grievance, i.e., the target to be terrorized and/or purged. The pointedly amoral version of such terrorism calculatedly appropriates the mantle of free speech (or "common sense" or "spin-free") as the Trojan Horse by which it breeches the wall of personal responsibility.

The traditional fulminate to such action is religion, which advances its claims and power on the supposition of exteriority, individuation and otherness. Its value system is essentially negative in that some seminal lapse is its ontological starting point, and often the capricious enmity of non-immanent forces require appeasement (if it's God) or defeat (if it's the heathen infidel). Lapsarianism is a principle of resistance and victimization; cowardice articulated as salvation to a fevered, often homicidal, degree. In this regard, the supposition of exteriority in the context of religious belief may be viewed as a conventionalized form of insanity.

What little harm the principle of SM may be said to visit upon the world is mostly self-contained, meaning practitioners and believers hurt themselves (but take responsibility for doing it). As extreme as their proclivities might be they do not show up in public places and indiscriminately seek to harm others. Anyone who does is something other than a sado-masochist, and is doing something other than SM. Sado-masochists are, in other words, functional members of society, making their lives, enjoying their liberty, providing for their happiness.

People who do show up at churches to kill doctors, invade museums to slaughter Jews, erase hundreds by detonating truck bombs near government installations, or who use torture to gain an advantage over their presumed enemies, are not unlike an infection for which our body politic has yet to evolve antibodies, a social pathogen, with about as much regard for their fellow man as swine flu.

Religion pimps righteousness, while taking life, trampling liberty, and indulging grievance. Faith believes in one's fellow as one believes in oneself, and responsibly abides the entailments of so doing.

The American Menegele

In a chilling amplification of my previous post comes this article in today's New York Times.

It strikes me in the first place as pretty disturbing that American culture can foster the begetting of soulless functionaries capable of administering torture under the sponsorship of the state. But then we also have such a punitive cultural calibration that to suggest there's anything amiss in having the "free" world's largest prison population (5% of the world's population, 25% of the world's prisoners) is political suicide. As an aid to job creation for its security-industrial complex the same culture endorses inexpensive and unencumbered access to high-powered weaponry, paid for in part by rationing the medical necessities that often ensue from the proper and intended uses of this same weaponry.

Now we learn that there is a branch of our illustrious medical profession capable of repurposing the Hippocratic oath to finesse the maximum of suffering obtainable short of death (usually) in the name of... security. Now, I'm the first to point out the salutary uses of a little well-intended, soulful suffering - it's a tonic and the grist in the mill that gives creative impulses traction. But what kind of world view brooks the commodification of suffering? What kind of society rallies its wealth and genius to expand pain gratuitously, along with the anxiety that attends its anticipation? What kind of cultural spirit seeks to abjure the most basic of human virtues, such as robust health, educated senses and refinement of feeling, learning, the miracle of sex and its importance to the race?

Ours, it would appear. Punish, punish, punish... that's our big idea, our big contribution, pretty much since Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather.

We're good at it in the worst possible ways, and we're only getting better.

Angelic Bitchslap

I write a lot here about the spiritual and practical effects of embracing uncertainty, doubt, displacement and, ultimately, change. I like to think that often enough I remember to link my ruminations through the ungentle art of bondage and its related practices. This one is going to be a stretch.

I look out my living room window as I write this entry and see a decrepit oil tanker loudly blurting diesel fumes into the air as it delivers another 40,000 gallons of soon-to-be greenhouse gases into the bunker beneath my building in Brooklyn. It will lumber around the corner onto the main commercial drag in my neighborhood and crumble a few more centimeters of salt-crusted tarmac from the hundreds of potholes it hits as it coughs its way back to the oil terminal along Gowanus Canal.

However it arrives, the day is coming when this little transaction will cease. Even so, with the snow on the ground and the wind chill approaching zero, I'm glad for a warm apartment and that the toddler running around over my head can at least do so in stocking feet. As I watch the delivery conclude, the hose is coiled back to its ready position and a few obsidian drops mark the snow and the event... and the need. The truck lurches away in crescendo of ground gears and a cloud of blue smoke.

Made of fungible stuff, these carbon traces - the oil on the snow, the blue fumes - may come from Saudi Arabia, from the North Sea, from Texas, from Venezuela or from any several of the thousands of corners of earth being ruined by the habit of consumption, war and resistance to change.

Today, around noon, we will watch as our last, desperate, generations-long bitchiness about progress sings its nunc dimittis, having delivered fully on the pestilential promise of its creed. The revelation of our folly was so sudden and catastrophic, in our freshly home-made straits we have already begun to sigh with relief at the mere promise of remedy, of a shift. The long captivity to which we consented began in a spasm of self-loathing following the banishing of institutional prejudice with the triumph of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and was tempered by the schism of Vietnam. We have been having something like Robert Frost's "lover's quarrel" ever since.

No one ever tells you that the "better angels" of which Lincoln and now Barack Obama have spoken so eloquently can reveal to a culture and a people just how hateful and venal they have been. In the venal acts of 9/11/01 we had an opportunity to heed the angels' call - the manner of our better angels is not necessarily kind, but it encourages us to be more so, and their point is that we not make war upon ourselves. That devastatingly obvious opportunity was squandered and the acid bath of the last eight years was, in a way, just the last swing of the pendulum before it finally lost its moorings. We totally ran the clock down, broke it, maybe because it needed breaking, but also maybe because our collective soul needed just this much uncoiling, just this much and nothing less.

The utter loss of institutional and personal certainty, of anything like "homeland security," and the certainty of the change that will ensue is the same opportunity, only more obvious, less dispensable. It still boggles my mind that we dispensed the call of 9/11 with comic bromides like shopping is patriotic, but if, in the the end, we were engineering a shovel-ready shit-storm such as we're now experiencing, all for the sake of a fresh appreciation of the excellence of our Constitutional principles, then leveraging pliant national moods during national tragedies is just one abuse among a multitude we consented to.

Today we close the old book, the book of reaction and victimization, right to left and left to right, and we step up upon its terrible lessons to our prosperity and our posterity, to look homeward to where we grew up before, and to where we are to grow up yet again. It's the way we do it here.

Congratulations to Barack Obama and to our United States.

Red is the New Black

I read a scathing indictment of stalking-horse Sarah Palin by Naomi Wolf, whom I respect but whose writing I often find perversely reactionary within the feminist canon. In this recent essay, Wolf makes a good case for the Rove/Cheney Axis having picked pliable Palin (chummy in that hillbilly Bush way and, based on her flirtatious body language, an equally adept liar) as the perfect tool and the solution to an overly principled John McCain. While I agree with and find interesting Wolf's central thesis concerning affable, weak figureheads and creeping fascism (although she goes a little histrionic toward the end of her essay) her blundering use of "S and M" as a kind of reactionary adjective for the embrace of threatening (capital B) Black accoutrement by modern police forces demonizes not only SM but fails (since no one has ever been stomped to death under an SMer's jack-booted heel) to draw a sufficiently grave image in the reader's mind of the potential threat of a full fascistic bloom.

As agents of the state go the great historical exponents of aggressive black paraphernalia are, of course, the Gestapo (Geheimestaatspolitzi or Secret State Police) and their superiors in the Schutzstaffel, the SS, who did indeed fetishize their costume. "Costume" is a fair characterization of high-ranking Nazi regalia owing to its operatic presentments, fussy personalization and lack of uniformity, but the black ensemble of the SS was originally designed as a uniform by SS officer Lars Bonne Rasmußen, introduced by Heinrich Himmler and manufactured by Hugo Boss. Although the Waffen SS (the "armed" combat corps, frontline ideological police and, later in the war, the field extermination squads for the "Final Solution") persisted in black colors throughout the Nazi era, domestic SS enforcers began moving toward Herr (army) feldgrau (gray-green) as the black uniform became increasingly identified among the German Volk with capricious, even gratuitous, bullying and corruption (see the excellent BBC documentary series War of the Century for the Nazi view of art as political legitimizer, and also Peter Cohen's brilliant Architektur des Untergangs ("Architecture of Doom") for a penetrating overview of the totality of the Nazi aesthetic, blackened and otherwise. Finally, Albert Speer's memoir, Inside the Third Reich, illuminates the dark power of perception management and the depth of public docility martial bombast can engender).

Ignoring Nazism, Wolf's one nod in the direction of meaningful Fascism/black associations is toward Mussolini's "Blackshirts", but even that's wide of the mark as the Blackshirts were the voluntary militia arm of the inchoate Italian Fascist movement - not state-sponsored, certainly not when they were founded, and then only tenuously once Mussolini came to power. Before the Nazis claimed legitimacy in '33 the SS were Hitler's personal bodyguard - the Brownshirts, however, did most of the stomping. With respect to state-sponsored thuggery Wolf has missed the SS/Gestapo connection utterly in favor of prosecuting a parochial antipathy against SM - a stateless social group, a culture if you like, and at best (giving Wolf the benefit of the doubt) an NGO - that advocates consent as among its first principles and has never had any material effect on anyone not in its own ranks.

Naturally I'm sensitive to such misappropriations, especially from the political camp to which I claim some allegiance, but it's I think instructive to note Wolf's use of the the stalking horse metaphor ("FrankenBarbie") for Palin, a device Wolf (like Rove) seems quite content to use when it advances her own demagoguery against "the other", in this case SM. It's no less mendacious, in my opinion, than the kind of rabble-rousing currently deployed by the Republicans desperately flogging a insubstantial connection between Barack Obama and one William Ayers, neighbor and one time party host to Obama, and a former member of the Weather Underground (known as "subversive" when they were active, but now conveniently called terrorists (in the present tense) by McCain, Palin and their acolytes).

Of the independently verified vacuity of a Obama / Ayers cabal McCain says "We need to know that's not true." Sure they do. For a generation, arguably since Nixon (who birthed the culture wars), conservatives in this country have needed to know that the truth is whatever the pathocracy tells them is required to control and banish "the other". What a pity that Wolf should stoop to the same ponerological tactic in her Palin/Black/"S and M" conflations.

Wolf could have set her "FrankenBarbie" arguments to right by simply stating that Palin and McCain have a lot to gain by steering attention away from Palin's hardwired associations with the Alaskan Independence Party, which advocates violent secession of Alaska from the Union and at whose conventions Palin has spoken more than once, as recently as this year. Better still, such red herrings distract from Palin's active membership in certain radical congregations of the Assembly of God church, which makes no secret of its lust for Armageddon and its aim in the meantime to install a theocracy in the US. Then there's McCain's memorable turn with as Number 1 of the cast of The Keating 5 at the outset of the last major bank failure, forgotten only to those now voting for the first time.

Regrettably, Naomi Wolf sees intellectual honesty in likely the same way Karl Rove and Dick Cheney understand it, as a trap that confounds the efficacy of spurious associations made to fan righteous fear among true believers, such as the Obama / Ayers canard, or, as in Wolf's case, the fusion of "S and M" and Fascism.

The Tolerance Fallacy

I was talking with a Dutch acquaintance, Sabine, the other night and she summoned to our conversation several of the topics to which I've paid disproportionately much attention in this journal. She is in NYC looking into the BDSM and burlesque subcultures to develop material for a series she hopes to do over the next year on these and related topics for Het Parool, a daily in her native Amsterdam. She also produces for several television news/cultural outlets and will perhaps be returning next spring for a longer stay and some filming. She would like to do a segment on shibari rigging, so I gave her particulars for friends Bob and Chantal at Ropemarks, an Amsterdam-based site of very high quality. I spent a lazy, hot afternoon shortly thereafter perusing some of the Dutch sites and articles she'd rooted out regarding BDSM, seeing how much Dutch I could make out with my German and leaving the rest to Google.

In chatting with Sabine I was once again taken with the extraordinary tolerance of Europeans, and of the Dutch in particular, although much of our conversation went in the direction of assimilation problems among the Muslim population in Holland, the murder of Theo Van Gogh, and how much tolerance counts as enough ("Genoeg is genoeg" to quote Sabine). The very notion of tolerance itself provoked some insightful dialogue, as we determined that it is predicated on objection, and thus implies stratification or a moral hierarchy. Tolerance is very precisely not acceptance (which assumes a equality and perhaps even incorporation), and certainly there is something unacceptable (in the West, at least) about religious vendettas and homicidal rampages, such as the events prompting our consideration of the subject.

Apparently the Dutch (like the rest of the EU) are talking a great deal about the requirement (nearly codified by the scuttled EU Constitution and most recently in the ill-fated Lisbon Treaty) that the European polis practice tolerance while their immigrant populations suffer no obligation to accept the communities and structures that welcome them. It is an interesting historical moment for the founding members of the EU, especially the political classes, who are suddenly beset by their own double standards, and it is a difficult time for the left (my tribe), having discovered their presumed standard bearers to be more than a little interested in conserving the segregated status quo.

Happy-faced shibboleths, much less legislation about tolerance never settled any issue (e.g., kink, homosexuality, religion, race, etc.) that high minds (e.g., governments, political organs, social movements, etc.) would have them do in a high-minded way. Tolerance is a very dangerous thing to teach, for embedded in its curriculum is the concentration of a moral objection to the tolerated, one that in the granting of the tolerance serves merely to dignify antipathy and open the divide that much wider. As a pervert I can much more readily abide open enmity than sniffing tolerance, meaning: accept me or don't, but be clear. As Europe is learning, tolerance only exacerbates existing frictions.

Living as I do in the priciest third-world country on the planet (Brooklyn) I have a somewhat refracted view of cultures mingling, and tolerance here is in short supply. What happens in Flatbush does not stay in Flatbush, it moves out onto the land and is finally and fully assimilated (flattened) into the level playing field that is still (at least in some measure more than most of the rest of the world) America. Remember when no one in Dubuque had yet heard of hip-hop? Disco? Bay Ridge? And that's just cultcha (such as it is). New Yorkers are anything but tolerant; we're impatient, dismissive, entitled and self-important, but no more so than we think you are.

This city is an arcade of freaks (of which your correspondent is happily one), oddities, revolutionaries, capital concentration and preposterous creative energy because New York does not condescend to tolerate, it does not care about your identity or the terms under which you insist upon your segregation. Quite predictably it gets attacked a lot by moralists; some with bibles, others with laws, still others with the occasional spectacular slaughter. As this lively pool of seething intolerance continues to accept and incorporate humankind's best creative energy alongside the worst body blows the high-minded can heave at it, all without skipping a beat, the high-minded will uselessly persist in legislating and imposing its agenda for my behavior. I personally don't have a lot of tolerance for that.

Outrageous.

About an hour ago a judge in Queens County, City of New York, issued findings of not guilty of all charges against the three NYPD officers indicted in the shooting of Sean Bell in November 2006, during which the officers emptied nearly 50 rounds into the unarmed man and two of his unarmed friends. Bell died, the two friends survived and testified at the bench trial. Neither Bell nor his friends were suspected of any crime other than, incorrectly as it turns out, to be in possession of a weapon. Sean Bell was not the target of any investigation, nor was he of any prior interest to the police. He merely was in the right place at the right time for the incompetence that periodically manifests among New York’s “Finest” to end up played out on his person.

The particulars of the case are available elsewhere. Judge Arthur Cooperman’s verdict acquits Detectives Oliver and Isnora of manslaughter, assault and reckless endangerment. Detective Cooper was acquitted of reckless endangerment. The judge tellingly wrote that “incompetence is not the same thing as criminality”. The take-away here is manifold, but most saliently I understand the verdict to mean that NYPD officers are no more competent to deal with life-and-death situations than any citizen - life-and-death situations which often they, by dint of carrying death-dealing weapons, engender. As a point of law, at least in New York State, police officers are held to no higher standard than any other citizen in matters of lethal force.

Here’s an NYPD-approved competency test. Take your preferred index finger and rest it on the edge of a table. Flex your finger, say, 16 times and rest, taking a moment to use either hand to reach into any pocket quickly and remove it. Now put your finger on the table edge again and flex another 15 times. Take note of how long that took. That’s about how long it took Detective Oliver to determine he was firing on an unarmed man, despite his sufficiency of competence in reloading his semi-automatic weapon in the middle of the fray and finally loosening 31 of the 46 fatal shots, despite his sufficiency of instinct to preserve his own life and step aside from the car piloted by mortally injured Bell which Oliver testified went from a parked position to somehow bearing down on him and his colleagues at speed in the same span of time, such that, according to their testimony, the detectives were in fear for their lives.

Detective Oliver and his codefendants are able to offer as an affirmative defense to the charges that they were not heard when they identified themselves, that they were in fear for their lives, that they misjudged the presence of a weapon (although they testified that they could not see very well into the car). Their defense, in other words, amounts to a proclamation of gross lethal incompetence, endorsed by police department procedure (which permits the use of lethal force in indeterminate situations). Judge Cooperman affirmed this as a legitimate defense and acquitted, doing damage in my estimation to both the ideas of justice and the social contract.

Let’s not overlook in all of this that the prosecution, agents of the state just like police officers, presented their case ineptly, perhaps even incompetently. In no part of this fracas has any officer or agent of the state delegated with the responsibility and paid by the citizenry to do so protected from, or taken responsibility for, the danger they themselves present to lives of the citizenry.

And justice? While it’s clear who effected Sean Bell’s slaughter and the suffering of his compatriots, in Bush’s America persons sworn to uphold the law consider themselves neither responsible to it, nor subject to its adjudication. Makes sense, doesn’t it, in a trickle-down kind of way…

At this point you’ve doubtless wondered what all my high dudgeon has to do with BDSM, rope, etc. As horrified as I am by the facts and the entailments of this verdict, I’m reflecting on the matter of competence as it pertains to non-state actors such as myself, and I’m recalling a case in Seattle where an appellate court ruled that a defendant is not allowed to plead the competence of a partner to consent to a “forcible” rape scenario, the evidence for force having been rope and duct tape found at the scene. The State of Washington, in other words, says that you are not competent to consent to whatever you’re forced to do, and being tied up is enough to constitute force.

I’m obviously not all that familiar with case law on these issues, and I frankly don’t know how case rulings in New York State generally go (I suspect the constitutional scholar John Wirenius will have something to say about the Bell verdict, and it will be worth reading when he blogs it). I am familiar with a friend who suffered for years in court over what was essentially his incompetence at recognizing the forged ID of a 17-year-and-9-month-old model with whom he made nude pictures; the state in this case was tacitly requiring my friend to act as its agent in the interpretation and processing of state papers, the disposition of which being solely of interest to the state itself. My friend had made a good faith effort to indemnify himself, as he always does. The charges were reduced repeatedly from felonies to misdemeanors to a single misdemeanor, on which he accepted the bench ruling of guilty in order to have it removed from his record once the verdict had been entered (purely so the prosecution could get the conviction). In this instance there was competence demanded of someone who professed none and of whom no reasonable competence could be expected.

So, consider the fact that citizens who are ipso facto incompetent to take responsibility in loco parentis for big brother can, should it suit the state, be forced to have done so after the fact. Meanwhile, competence for determining one's own consent to certain behaviors can be conveniently excluded from admission in a court of law. In either instance no actual harm or coercion need be demonstrated by the state.

On the other hand, in an instance of actual and irreversible harm, namely a completely blameless man was wrongly killed by agents of the state, incompetence is conveniently claimed as an affirmative defense, goes unassailed by the prosecution, and is affirmed by the presiding magistrate as legitimate. Police officers can irresponsibly gun down citizens, and this is not a crime because legally the police are as free as you or me to be incompetent, i.e., at the pleasure of the state.

What, apparently, we are not free to be is competent in any intelligible sense of that idea. A competent citizenry would not consent to legitimized police incompetence.