Adam O'Neil

1/25/09

Thanks to a friend's urging, I feel a need to re-evaluate whether I can or should be totally neutral about the Arab-Israeli conflict. I also need to re-evaluate my endorsement of Jim Kunstler (see his Clusterfuck Nation blog). Kunstler is very solidly pro-Israel--and this really stuns his liberal readership--considering that Kunstler has been such an eloquent critic of the American status quo under Bush. Through silence, however, I seem to have agreed with Kunstler's position on Israel, however, and I'm not totally comfortable with that.

Kunstler and many people say that Israel "has a right to defend itself." I can't argue with that. But while we're passing out rights, we might as well say that an oppressed people have a right to resist their oppressors, and for that matter, that the region as a whole has a right to endless war.

I do think there's some serious confusion about the ethics of "offense" versus "defense." A lot of people have the understanding that defending yourself is morally acceptable, but attacking someone first is not. On the most superficial level, this is true. But the truth is that offense is the best defense. The ethical distinction between offense and defense is illusory, therefore, a philosophical pacifier for people who never face violence. The real purpose of self-defense is to break your opponent's will to fight. Self-defense is not achieved by blocking your opponent's blows one at a time but rather by making your opponent not want to punch you at all--that is, by breaking his arm.

Therefore, the argument for Israel's "right to self-defense" is not so morally clear or defendable when you finally accept that there's no difference between offense and defense. The "right to self-defense" argument is really a tacit apology for aggression, and not a credible claim to moral high ground.

I think the moral high ground here--which I've said already--is an abandonment of religion as we know it--both Judaism and Islam. Short of that, I think that a fair fight between the Israelis and Palestinians is the only option left. Like "self-defense," the concept of a "fair fight" is another one of those bourgeois intellectual nuisances. But we as a nation can do our part it by ceasing to fund and arm Israel. Imagine the jaws that would drop if Hilary Clinton had said something like, "In the interest of peace in the Middle-east, we will stop favoring Israel over everyone else and will, from now on match, dollar-for-dollar, donations to Israel with donations to Hamas." That's a fair more credible peace initiative than the current policy of quietly stacking the deck for Israel militarily, financially--lending nothing but wilted rhetorical support to the idea of real peace on the ground.

1/17/09

I read two Haruki Murakami novels recently: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Sputnik Sweetheart. Chronicle was pretty staggering and I needed a couple days to catch my breath. It's kind of a detective story fairy tale set in modern Japan. It also kind of reminded me of the whole Joseph Campbell Hero's Journey motif, although this book doesn't really follow that model closely at all because the protagonist is the least inspiring hero you'll ever meet. Murakami dwells in moonlit weirdness, unexplained psychic phenomena, tentative and understated eroticism, and faintly surrealist dreamy, boredoms. Lastly and most striking, Murakami has a vision of horror that's like a wall stud, hidden, but load-bearing, and very there.

In particular, there were two riveting parts of the book I want to alert you to. One is a flashback, in which a character recounts an experience in the war with Russia. I forget the year. I think it was before WWII. I won't give you the details, but there is a torture scene that's truly awful. Japan's war(s) with Russia provide a source of haunting for Murakami's Japan, much the way Vietnam used to haunt us before our consciousness about that and much else was papered over by the era of overly-beautiful female news anchors.

The other striking part of the book was a series of letters written by one character, a young girl, to the protagonist. After a lot of plot I won't go into, the girl goes to work at a wig factory. The wig factory turns out to have a mythic sheen about it, and it's an image Murakami uses in his short story collection The Elephant Vanishes that I read a long time ago. Factories fascinate this author. To Murakami, these large, impersonal places of boring work are deeply enchanting--not boring at all! Anyway, these letters written by the young girl really captivated me. They seemed to describe a place or state of being that I feel some sort of magnetism toward. Very strange!

Sputnik Sweetheart is very short compared with Chronicle. I knew nothing about it when I opened it up. I was pleasantly surprised that it dealt with a theme that's more or less an obsession of mine: the problem of "mixed-orientation" relationships: the book is about a guy who loves a woman who loves a woman. I read it looking for the cure for my own obsession, but didn't find it. Amazingly, Murakami seemed to warn me personally early on that I wouldn't find what I am looking for in this book.

The most powerful moment in the book happened when the guy wakes up and hears distant music. He walks towards it, not knowing if he's dreaming or not. (I was reading so fast I may have missed whether that was clarified.) He walks by moonlight up a mountain trail. I don't even remember what happened, and I just read this fucking book. All I know is that the next time I hear distant music in the middle of the night, I should walk towards it. Nothing will be there. Just more mountain, more moonlight.

1/12/09

Around the dinner table last night at a friend's house, the conversation turned toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. A friend of mine said, "I wish those guys could talk it out..." I seized on that. What would that conversation sound like? Ask yourself. I'm pretty sure it would not be a conversation about where to draw the border. I'm pretty sure also it wouldn't be a call for more religious devotion--on either side. When I imagine a realistic conversation towards peace, I imagine a mutual agreement to bid farewell to the "higher powers" Yahweh and Allah.

I don't underestimate the difficulty of that. Saying good-bye to one's religion is almost like saying good-bye to the beauty of naked women.

And by the way, this optimistic patter about a "two-state solution" is bullshit--roughly equivalent to the bullshit of a two-god monotheism. I'm sorry people, but the "separate but equal" notion does not apply to deities--much less to national borders drawn on their behalf.

This brings me to another bullshit specimen I must call your attention to: these "Coexist" bumper stickers:

I'm sorry to sound so ornery about this, but the time for polite tolerance of this sentimental naiveté is past. The only way religions--particularly the big three: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism--can "coexist" is in one of two ways:

if they completely and willingly gut their theological positions and reduce themselves to coffee-table iconography in an NPR cosmological living room. This kind of greeting card kum-bi-ya theology gets no traction in the real world because it wants to be everybody's friend while understanding nobody.
an authoritarian dystopia with a flair for Terry Gilliam-style surrealism takes over and assigns different religious truths to different geographical regions. (...The main advantage of this system being that all theological questions could be resolved with a handheld GPS device.)

The best way forward for humanity is not the search for that magic, unifying symbol, slogan or decal--a 4 by 12 inch sticker on your 2.5 ton car. The best way forward is to treasure intellectual honesty, kindness, compassion, justice. We don't need a special word, icon, or slogan for that. We certainly don't need competing theological positions that pretend to be friends through "coexistence."

If you don't grasp how insulting and shallow this kind of "coexistence" is, let me try to break it down further. Look at the "e" in "coexist." It stands for Einstein's famous formula "E=MC²"--"science"--or as I like to say, "the discipline of rationality." (Since that is what science really is.) In the very same "word"--the very same breath, as it were, we see that the last letter is a Christian crucifix. I guess I need to remind everyone that a cross like this is a torture and execution device. The victim's arms are stretched out and nails are driven through both wrists and the ankles. The victim hangs there for several hours and eventually asphyxiates. Christians believe that their spiritual well-being hinges upon this terrible way to kill someone--a very special someone in their case: Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus' crucifixion turns out to trigger a bizarre web of emotional crosscurrents that have reverberated through time: the foundations of anti-Semitism (since it is the Jews "who killed Christ"), a guilt complex (look what Christ did for me, I owe Him big time), and not least--a primitivist lynch mob lust for redemption through violence that no amount of somber Latin and abstruse rituals can hide.

How is the bloodlust behind Christian theology supposed to "coexist" with rationality?

Short answer: It does not. And it certainly does not by the cuteness of bumper stickers.

1/2/09

Found a news story on MSNBC about nine Muslims who were removed an airplane flight before it took off. It seems one of them made an offhand remark about the "safety" of the airplane that was misunderstood by a paranoid eavesdropper--who apparently thought that the Muslim passengers were terrorists. I have some conflicted feelings about this.

I regret the traumatic embarrassment and inconvenience of being kicked off an airplane for what is ultimately a bogus reason.
However, I am not exactly gushing with sympathy for Muslims who are naive about why they might be profiled as terrorists. I am also disappointed that Muslims feel a need to dress differently for religious reasons.
I'm disappointed that we're trapped in a political oxymoron of "religious freedom." How free are Muslim women to remove their head scarves? They aren't. How free are Muslim men to shave their beards? They aren't. "Religious freedom" is really a freaky and pointless kind of freedom--in which people are free to enslave themselves to stupid ideals--and free to cling to those ideals with enraged and destructive conviction.
The airline's response was vexingly confused, but symptomatic of larger confusions in our culture. White Christian Americans are probably ashamed of their paranoia about Islam to a certain extent. But the truth is there's a reason for that paranoia that my most liberal brethren--who roundly decry the evil of "profiling"--do not want to grasp. 9/11 woke us up to the reality of faith-based evil. This was a profound loss of innocence that my most liberal brethren--again--just cannot seem to grasp.