I'm taking a break from Outside the Asylum this week, but it'll be back next week with an essay on what currently stops us from creating a new politics. It's good to figure out what's in your way before you drive through it:

Something/Someone Old

I was looking for a comment from Joe McCarthy on how we needed to be protected from evil ideas. I didn't find one, but while I was looking I became aware that an effort had been made, over years, to repair McCarthy's reputation and assert that he was right.

So, since Uncle Joe is getting a makeover, along with his inheritors George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby and so many others, I thought my Something Old today could be this:

We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we...remember that we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.

The following quotation is not in the video. But I've been looking for it for ages, and had almost given it up as a figment of my imagination. The values underlying this statement lie also at the foundation of my own ethics:

I believed 20 years ago and I believe today that mature Americans can engage in conversation and controversy, the clash of ideas, with Communists anywhere in the world without becoming contaminated or converted. I believe that our faith, our conviction, our determination are stronger than theirs, and that we can compete -- and successfully, not only in the area of bombs but in the area of ideas.

I no longer believe that Americans have a philosophy in which we can have faith, for which we can muster conviction; our culture no longer exists sufficiently for me to be able to assert that we can compete in the clash of ideas. The powerful in this land, comprising every different political affiliation and none, have succeeded in their demolition of our founding ideas: ideas to which we never lived up, ideas which were always in conflict with the rank opportunism, clannish insularity, authoritarian schemes, and outright violence which also existed as a fundamental part of America from the beginning, but ideas whose value remains undiminished by the actions of hypocrites and sociopaths over the years, just as the ideas of Marx remain undiminished by the actions of Stalin and Mao. Agree or disagree with an idea as you please; you cannot, however, diminish an idea by showing me that humans clumsily or mendaciously fail to put it into practice.

What matters to me in this Murrow quotation is his dismissal of the notion of intellectual or moral contamination, the idea that if we are exposed to bad thoughts or bad words, our minds will fall like Troy: if we let the big horse in, we will be conquered by hidden enemies. Therefore we must protect ourselves from bad thoughts and bad words and bad opinions and create an intellectual and moral quarantine to protect our apparently feeble minds.

I wonder sometimes if Russiagate proponents even notice that they are passionately endorsing a quarantine.

There's a Murrow quotation that reminded me of C99:

The Senator charged that Professor Harold Laski, a British scholar and politician, dedicated the book to me. That's true. He is dead. He was a socialist -- I am not. He was one of those civilized individuals who did not insist upon agreement with his political principles as a pre-condition for conversation or friendship.

Something New

We are going to have another Trek series with Picard.

Like many, I am more than a bit scared.

I have been afraid to watch Star Trek: Discovery; the trailer looked warded as hell:

Some Bridge Officer: "The Federation doesn't shoot first!"
Obviously Main Character, Of Course Black and Female: "This time we have to!"

Yay, they're making Star Trek into a shoot-and-cry!

For those of you who don't know what that is, here's an excerpt from an excellent article on the Deep State and its media meddlings:

As I’ve outlined in previous blog posts, and in greater depth for my upcoming book, the shoot-and-cry, cloaked in faux “moral ambiguity,” is the dominant narrative framework for middle- and high-brow films dealing with the military and the homeland today. It’s necessary to specify that these are films about “the military and the homeland,” rather than just “war,” since these films engage in a conscious blurring of the lines between wartime and peace. This new kind of American film is the result of an endless war, prosecuted by someone liberals like, who has both escalated it overseas and made countering an enemy within a cornerstone of his policies. Sicario in particular is a new escalation, reflecting the state’s creation of homeland security as a nebulous category of militarized, lawless, endless force.

People watching Sicario, and there’ll be plenty of them, will be sold “a gritty, dystopian glance at the horrors of the drug trade,” but it’s obviously more than that. As far as dystopias go, the film is almost a fever-dream for the ruling class’s ideal order: one where spooks, commandos, and cops all blend together, with the rest of us too shocked, broken, and resigned to terror to do anything about it. It is, like the rest of the American shoot-and-cry genre, the sort of thing that could only exist today, not only post-9/11 but post-Bush. In the 1990s, as the liberal interventionists of the Clinton administration created an age of “humanitarian interventions,” a new, sensitive military hero evolved from the Reagan-era hard-body. Today, as President Obama expands foreign killing and domestic policing and reactionary forces are ascendant worldwide, heroes are as anguished as the liberals who support him. Sicario is fixated on the enemy within, and the focus on the “insider threat” has been one of Obama’s key national security initiatives. In a way, what Kate goes through is the experience of any liberal paying attention to American foreign and policing policy. She’s a stand-in for anyone who’s anguished by the news they hear about the US drone-bombing a wedding here, or cops shooting a black teen there. What Kate does is model the desired response. For someone with a more irenic worldview, the last 6 years have involved a lot of this sort of thing: that closet peacenik I voted for is sending more troops to Afghanistan? Now the president’s going to drone American citizens? Wait, now we’re allied with al Qaeda, what happened to the freedom-loving rebels? Kate’s brief journey into the dark world of homeland security black operations reconciles the audience to the ugliness of what the US police state does.

Given the target audience, it doesn’t do this through a flag-waving celebration, but by leaving the audience stunned, disoriented, and with a feeling of dread and resignation. It takes very little for reactionaries to applaud state murder—the only exceptions are when the victims are undoubtedly creatures of the right. Liberals respond to an entirely different vocabulary, reliant on moral suasion and flattery of their sophisticated self-conceptions. The reality of keeping you safe is ugly, the film says, and it may even look immoral. But the alternative is too horrible to comprehend. And Alejandro is ultimately right: in the end, Kate has witnessed horrible, criminal things, but she finally understands why. What these films are trying to do is get everyone else to understand, too.

(This is from an excellent blog called Popaganda; I heartily recommend it, particularly the article I just quoted.)

https://lorenzoae.wordpress.com/2015/10/16/sicario-americas-dark-new-fro...

Anyway, I hope they don't turn Star Trek into a shoot-and-cry, and if they do, I may finally sever ties with mainstream film and tv for good. To turn Roddenberry's vision into an apology for a metastasized police state would be too much for me. I really, really hope that this new project remains true to Roddenberry's original vision, which is not authoritarian and stands firmly in opposition to such police-state nonsense, as well as standing against the jingoistic fear of foreigners and foreign thoughts that generally forms the excuse for war.

When describing his decision to play Picard again after twenty years, Stewart cites a fan, a police sergeant, who wrote to him "There are days when I go home, that what I have seen, what I have experienced, the cruelty, the barbarity, the viciousness, the nastiness of what I have experienced, makes me despair for the future of our society and the world. But when I feel like that, I go to my video shelf, and I take down Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I know that we're gonna have a future!" Stewart said that that lies at the very center of his determination to play Picard once more.

This could mean all sorts of things. I could take it at its best and believe that the things the policeman is horrified to have seen include things done by the police. I could believe that his despair comes not simply from demonization of the other--the criminal, the immigrant, the poor--but from an honest assessment of where our institutions and customs now reside: immediately over an abyss. I could take Stewart's words as a brave and defiant refusal to simply collapse before a wave of authoritarian darkness, a desire to push back, or even punch back, at the organized demoralization and despair that threatens to swamp us all.

I hope this is what it means. It could, instead, mean making Star Trek a prop for the police state, including humanizing the police as an institution (rather than simply acknowledging the humanity of individual policemen), and asserting a bright future because, after all, don't we currently live in the best of all possible worlds? C'mon, audience--all that darkness you see in your life can be blamed on the other: bigots, criminals, immigrants, deplorables, depending on your political leanings. There are scapegoats enough for everyone, as long as you don't turn your gaze on those who actually have power to determine the conditions of our lives. Meanwhile, Star Trek will assure you that everything will be fine.

Like a lot of other fans, I'm also a bit wary when Patrick Stewart says that Picard may not exactly be the guy as we last saw him. It sounds reasonable, but I can't help but remember what was recently done to Luke Skywalker:

It's one thing to invent a new Star Trek series that is a shoot-and-cry; that's a horrible offense to Roddenberry and everyone who's loved Star Trek over the years, but Trek can survive an awful chapter of its story. It's already done so more than once. It's quite something else to take a beloved lead character from a series that was always firmly against authoritarianism, jingoism, and bigotry--as well as strongly preferring peace to war--and remake him to serve our current propaganda needs. May it not be so.

Something Borrowed

Dear god, the word "pundit" comes from the mid-17th-century Sanskrit word pandit and means priest, or learned man.

Well, that word has fallen a long way. Phew.

From this:

To this:

Something Blue

Apparently, Georgia O'Keefe did some non-representation monochromatic paintings in blue before she moved to Texas and started doing her more famous paintings of flowers.

I've been pretty hard on non-representational art in this thread, but I like O'Keefe's work better than the fairly flat squares of color I was talking about before.

Some people think this series is about music--O'Keefe trying to show in color what playing music felt like. She was playing violin at the time, and you could interpret the scroll-like shape in this series as part of a violin.

I didn't know O'Keefe did a blue series. Still not my favorite kind of art, but I feel I wouldn't mind spending some time in the presence of the whole series to see how I felt when viewing it in person (which always seems different than seeing things on a screen).

How are you all today?