"No one cares if the boots exist..." by Catte Black

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Source: Catte's Corner

No one cares if the boots exist…

1984 is MUCH more relevant than the more simplified versions we see in movies.

Catte Black

What struck me last time I read 1984 was how much I had missed in it. It’s much much more than the images of brutal repression we tend to remember.

I was struck by how familiar the Party’s mind control methodology now seems – with the emphasis on invented, irrational narrative and willing suspension of critical faculties.

The war doesn’t need to actually happen…

It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.”

Emanuel Goldstein, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (George Orwell’s 1984)

No one cares if the boots exist…

…The Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at a hundred and forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than a hundred and forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all….”

Reality is whatever the Party says it is, as O’Brien tells Winston…

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation—anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wished to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of nature. We make the laws of nature.“

You see, the Party has divined that events don’t need to have any physical reality in order to be effective as propaganda, they just need to exist in the minds of the people as a believed consensus reality.

In fact, O’Brien is aware that manipulating people into accepting a fictional ‘reality’ gives the Party even more control, since it divorces them from any possible check or balance. In this world O’Brien can float off the floor like a soap bubble, victories can happen and un-happen again, chocolate rations can get bigger while decreasing, boots can be created – just by saying so.

And even the subversives are lost in the matrix.

O’Brien is the real author of Goldstein’s book. Winston was ‘permitted’ to read it, while being watched all the while. His ‘rebellion’ carefully managed, monitored and eventually extinguished.

So, even the anti-establishment narratives are based solely on the fictions generated by the Party and can therefore only take the people reading them ever deeper into helpless delusion. They live and die without ever contacting veridical reality. They are all lost, even those who think they aren’t.

How close are we to living in this world? How many of our rebellions are already managed and cultivated?

Simpleminded binary narratives are now the currency of so much debate, a lot of them contrived so that both “sides” end up promoting the same establishment agendas. It’s increasingly hard to navigate them and more and more people seem not to even try, succumbing to the lure of that pre-packaged outrage and the easy sense of virtue and comradeship acquired by adopting the flavour of your choice.

Will there be a point of no return, where objective truth is finally snuffed out of everyone’s awareness and all we have is O’Brien’s curated “alternative news”, served up to us as a harmless little virtual reality entertainment for contrarians?

What must we do to hang on to those precious threads of real, organic resistance and real, unpolluted independent thought?

The narrative managers probably don’t intend to make that easy for us that’s for sure.

I think a small first step might be to go read Orwell’s book again.

If you’re like me you might find it surprises you and resonates more with you now, post-2020, than it ever did.

"David Foster Wallace on the Devouring Double-Headed Snake of Consumerism/Individualism" by Ben Bartee

 

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Source: Armageddon Prose

	EH here. The main reason, actually two, is that the DF Wallace essay linked to is amazing. I'd forgotten how good he was/is. The second is the Hicks video.That's two humans whose lives I miss. Oh, and Bartee's post is worth it too.  David Foster Wallace on the Devouring Double-Headed Snake of Consumerism/Individualism BEN BARTEE SEP 23   READ IN APP   “Camped outside laissez faire People understand me there Don't talk to me we'll get along just fine Blowin' out your mores Herny Ford tradition plays on Idle minds left the emergency brake on too long Underneath the city lies the ruin of mankind The excavation was a financial success With artifacts of gold The arrowheads went straight to the Smithsonian The rest was melted down and sold Substantial gains Minimal losses are tolerable As long as the machine keeps running fine” -NOFX, ‘Dig’ Comedian Bill Hicks dispensed some life advice for marketers and advertisers back in the day that I can’t necessarily disagree with: “If anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself…. Seriously, though if you are, do… There’s no rationalization for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers, okay?.... Planting seeds… Suck a tail pipe, fuckin’ hang yourself, borrow a gun from a Yank friend, I don’t care how you do it.” (All apologies to any marketers in my audience; I don’t really mean it. Each of us is a special unique snowflake of special unique specialness.) The problem society has on its hands is that God is dead – not in the literal sense of the phrase, or as a commentary on atheism defeating religion, but in the sense of a loss of belief in transcendent meaning that I have written about elsewhere. Just before David Foster Wallace -- author of “Shipping Out”, arguably the best dissection of modern American culture I have ever read set in the context of an existential crisis aboard a cruise ship -- succumbed to his despair and hung himself in his basement, he had these prescient, and increasingly so, observations to offer on the dead God phenomenon and the desperate effort to replace Him with something, anything as an object of worship: “We all worship, and we all have a religious impulse. We can choose to an extent what we worship, but the myth that we worship nothing and give ourselves away to nothing is simply… sets us up to give ourselves away to something different – for instance, pleasure, or drugs, or the idea of having a lot of money and being able to buy nice stuff. Or, in the tennis academy, um, it’s somewhat different. It’s devotion to an athletic pursuit that requires a certain amount of sacrifice and discipline that is nevertheless an individual sport and one that’s trying to get ahead as an individual… Whatever the conditions of hopelessness… have to do with an American idea and not a universal one but one that I think kids get exposed to very early that you are the most important and what you want is the most important… and your job in life is to gratify your own desires… Of course, nobody tells you. I mean, mom and dad don’t sit you down and say things. This is something very subtle as delivered by a great many messages... this is one enormous engine and temple of self-gratification and self-advancement and in some ways it works very, very well. In other ways, it doesn’t work all that well… It seems as if there are whole other parts of me that need to worry about things larger than me that don’t get nourished in that system.” The self is not God. Nike shoes are not God. Fiat currency is not God. Woe unto we who go looking for transcendence in these false idols. I do my best to explore this truth in my own meandering way, perhaps not as articulately as Wallace, in the context of ironically ultra-capitalist Vietnam, in my expat memoir/novel-length existential diatribe “Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile” “Where once healthy, vibrant mountain ecosystems flourished on the vast rolling borderlands between Vietnam and China, their replacements are enormous, carved-out pits of mountains mined for graphite, smoldering trash piles of burned plastic, and casinos for miles to entertain gambling Chinese tourists slipping over the border on day-trips. Vomitus neon-green fluorescent lights have replaced the subtle greens of jungleland forests. Year by year, the last frontiers of wilderness recede. In Vietnam, every resource that can be extracted for the sake of economic growth will be. The economy is the new God the now largely Godless, post-Communist Vietnamese have been conditioned to worship. It has come to fill the religious vacuum the communists manufactured when they cleansed the ideological landscape during the mid-20th century, to nurture the spiritual holes left in the upheaval. Atheism can't last forever; people will worship something, one thing or another. Otherwise, absent meaning, the crippling nihilism would be unbearable. Cultural suicide would be the inevitable result for a society that didn't revere something – it almost doesn't matter what…  Thanksgiving came and went that year in Lao Cai, as unremarked upon then as it was the previous year, and each year of the previous century. There were no festivities. Turkeys don't live in Southeast Asia, and no one outside of Irish pubs catering to expats in Bangkok eats mashed potatoes in Indochina. However, the Vietnamese do curiously import one winter holiday festivity from the West: Black Friday. Black Friday minus the Christmas season is something akin to yoga sans the spirituality. Out of context, Black Friday becomes just another excuse to buy and sell, free of the giving/sharing intent that initially underpinned it. Storefront after storefront on the main artery through Lao Cai advertised Black Friday clearance sales on consumer goods, and the Vietnamese revel in communal bliss over their purchases.” Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

"Marveling, Again, At Paul Bowles' 'A Distant Episode'" by Linh Dinh

  

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Source: Postcards from the End

Marveling, Again, At Paul Bowles' "A Distant Episode"

Linh Dinh

Feb 10

23

9

[most briefly uncanceled in Bengaluru, India on 11/28/22, with Vanessa Barrington, Joe Milan Jr., Ravi Shankar, Sally Breen and Hélder Beja]

If there’s any culture left in the US, it’s buried under an unprecedented mudslide of Satanism, woke idiocy, snarky loutishness, academic cowardice and just bad English, as in confusing “migrant” with “immigrant,” or calling an “illegal immigrant” an “undocumented worker.” What do you expect, though, from a society that rewards Howard Stern, Jerry Springer, Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump and Joe Biden?

On YouTube, there’s a video of a sneering Biden mocking weapon inspector Scott Ritter in 1998, “I respectfully suggest they [Ritter’s superiors] have a responsibility slightly above your pay grade, slightly above your pay grade, to decide or not to take the nation to war, alone, or to take the nation to war part way, or to take the nation to war half as… half way. That’s a real tough decision. That’s why they get paid the big bucks, and that’s why they get the limos and you don’t. I mean this sincerely, I’m not trying to be flip.”

On and on this petty, classless man spewed in a performance he obviously thought very witty, for there was a constant smirk on his face. Biden the US senator even called Ritter “Scotty boy.” If you don’t understand the language, or just turn off the audio, Biden’s facial expressions alone convey enough about a nation that didn’t just produce such a weasel, but eventually crowned him as its leader and face. With all its contortions, Biden’s mouth fittingly reminds one of Donald Trump’s.

When I was a columnist at Unz, I would encounter strikingly asinine comments whenever I discussed any serious artist. When I praised John Cassavetes, for example, there were remarks about how this dark Greek couldn’t wait to pounce on Gena Rowlands, a blonde who happened to be his wife! When I examined Flannery O’ Connor’s consistently nasty depictions of poor whites, some bright bulb jumped in to blather that I, Linh Dinh, could never be white, as if that had anything to do with my article.

Since reading while taking a shit has long been an American tradition, we’re reaching its natural conclusion, perhaps, with literacy, very loosely defined, engulfed, if not dunk, in a faecal miasma?

With that preamble, let’s revisit Paul Bowles’ 1945 short story, “A Distant Episode.” As with any great work, it doesn’t just yield deeper meanings but pleasures with each rereading. Revisiting a Moroccan village after ten years, a rather smug American linguist loses his tongue, language and thought process, so that’s the horrific plot, but let’s slow down to marvel at how beautifully it’s executed.

The story begins with “the Professor” on a bus. Never named, our protagonist is always “the Professor,” with P capitalized, as if it’s a proper title and not merely a profession. Already, Bowles mocks, but most subtly.

As will become all too evident, each character also treats the Professor with disdain, if not worse, but they’re all created by Bowles, after all.

When the Professor tells the bus driver he’s a linguist who’s “making a survey of variations on Moghrebi,” the latter becomes “scornful,” but why? Bowles gives us a clue by having Moroccans respond to the Professor in bad French or Arabic whenever he addresses them in Moghrebi. His presumptuous cluelessness annoys them.

Perhaps the Professor is just innocent?

Bowles, “Ten years ago he had been in the village for three days; long enough, however, to establish a fairly firm friendship with a café-keeper, who had written him several times during the first year after his visit, if never since.”

No fairly firm friendship can be established over three days via a third language in an alien culture. Plus, a decade is too long to sustain such a weak bond. Again, Bowles subtly mocks.

Comic details abound. Though traveling light, the Professor carries sun lotions and medicines, items he won’t get any chance to use.

At the café, the Professor discovers his firm friend has died, so he tells the waiter he doesn’t understand, a ridiculous response.

Suddenly friendless, the Professor reasserts his familiarity with this alien environment by asking about “little boxes made from camel udders.” This doesn’t impress the waiter, however:

The man looked angry. “Sometimes the Reguiba bring in those things. We do not buy them here.” Then insolently, in Arabic: “And why a camel-udder box?”

“Because I like them,” retorted the Professor. And then because he was feeling a little exalted, he added, “I like them so much I want to make a collection of them, and I will pay you ten francs for every one you can get me.”

Challenged, the Professor “retorted,” and feeling he had gotten the better of this exchange, he was “exalted.” To seal his victory, he would pay his adversary ten francs per udder box, an irresistible offer.

Though the waiter never delivers anything, he’s paid 50 francs for leading the Professor towards the Reguiba, a fearful tribe even the Professor has been warned about:

“The Reguiba is a cloud across the face of the sun.” “When the Reguiba appears the righteous man turns away.” In how many shops and market-places he had heard these maxims uttered banteringly among friends.

Why, then, does the Professor walk alone into the quarry or abyss in the dark, towards the dreaded Reguiba? He does it simply because he has decided to do so. As an American, he’s in charge of his destiny. With plenty of francs in his wallet, the Professor will buy many camel-udder boxes, to show off to friends and colleagues back home.

From the Reguiba’s perspective, there’s no reason to sell anything to this stranger, when they can take all his money, and him, too, a most valuable freak.

Even after he’s been attacked by the Reguiba’s dogs, and has a gun pressed against his spine, the Professor still fails to understand he’s in the deepest shit:

He did not doubt for a moment that the adventure would prove to be a kind of warning against such foolishness on his part—a warning which in retrospect would be half sinister, half farcical.

Many Americans feel entitled to their extreme adventures overseas, so they can relate, in retrospect, their experience in Laos, Iraq or Afghanistan, say, that’s half sinister, half farcical, except there’s no looking back for the Professor, for he won’t even be able to think at all, soon enough.

Appropriate for a culture where “cool” is used to mean anything positive, Americans excel at the coolest depictions of horror. This passage by Bowles is a masterpiece:

The man looked at him dispassionately in the gray morning light. With one hand he pinched together the Professor’s nostrils. When the Professor opened his mouth to breathe, the man swiftly seized his tongue and pulled on it with all his might. The Professor was gagging and catching his breath; he did not see what was happening. He could not distinguish the pain of the brutal yanking from that of the sharp knife. Then there was an endless choking and spitting that went on automatically, as though he were scarcely a part of it. The word “operation” kept going through his mind; it calmed his terror somewhat as he sank back into darkness.

Subjected to even more outrages, the Professor is reduced to the least sensate being:

Even when all his wounds had healed and he felt no more pain, the Professor did not begin to think again; he ate and defecated, and he danced when he was bidden, a senseless hopping up and down that delighted the children, principally because of the wonderful jangling racket it made. And he generally slept through the heat of the day, in among the camels.

After a year of this, the Professor has become used to his new normal:

He easily fell in with their sense of ritual, and evolved an elementary sort of “program” to present when he was called for: dancing, rolling on the ground, imitating certain animals, and finally rushing toward the group in feigned anger, to see the resultant confusion and hilarity.

At the end, the Professor is dismissed as “a holy maniac” by a French soldier as he runs into the desert. Amused, this fellow white even takes “a potshot at him for good luck”:

The bullet whistled dangerously near the Professor’s head, and his yelling rose into an indignant lament as he waved his arms more wildly, and hopped high into the air at every few steps, in an access of terror.

For voluntarily marching to his doom, the Professor is a maniac, though not so holy. Just before descending into the abyss, he thinks, “These people are not primitives.”

An ambivalent word, it denotes both savagery and innocence, head hunters and childlike, brown bodies to be fucked, saved or robbed blind, perhaps all at once, by the same people.

So he thought Moroccans were primitives, but with intimations of being tricked or sent into a trap, the Professor changes his mind.

The waiter’s last words to him are also thought-provoking:

“Good,” said the qaouaji, rising slowly. “Keep your money. Fifty francs is enough. It is an honor.” Then he went back into French: “Ti n’as qu’à discendre, to’ droit.” He spat, chuckled (or was the Professor hysterical?), and strode away quickly.

An honor to do what? Deliver a fool to his death? And what does he mean by “You just have to go down, you’re right,” in bad French?

From the depths of the abyss come faint, intermitten sounds of a flute, that is, of civilization, but music doesn’t negate violence or barbarity.

On the way to the abyss, they have walked on a path between mud walls, with the “odor of human excrement” nearly constant. That, too, is a sure sign of civilization. We make much more shit than music.

Though one must pay for any misreading, the penalty is usually trivial, so there’s no lesson learnt, really, but isn’t that how it is for everyone, until that fatal misreading?

Subjective, we can’t help but misread constantly, but that’s our individuality and free will, damn it! Right at the beginning, Bowles has the Professor thinking even shit is sweet:

Now facing the flaming sky in the west, and now facing the sharp mountains, the car followed the dusty trail down the canyons into air which began to smell of other things besides the endless ozone of the heights: orange blossoms, pepper, sun-baked excrement, burning olive oil, rotten fruit. He closed his eyes happily and lived for an instant in a purely olfactory world. The distant past returned—what part of it, he could not decide.

Wading into the primitive, the Professor seeks a distant past, without knowing it’s never that distant. The most primitive is always around. Discovering it most starkly, the Professor also loses his tongue, and with it, his mind, so there’s no articulation of this hard-earned wisdom.

Violence always outteaches.