TRP and enemies as mirrors

[J Tracy]

TRP and enemies as mirrors

Oh the glory of advanced technology. Humans now have the power to erase themselves and much of life with nuclear weapons, or turn our planet into a burning hell with global warming.  It would be as though everything we as individuals and societies had ever done had never happened.  The missiles are poised and the wars escalating. I40 degrees F in Doha. Arctic and antarctic ice melting, fires and floods around the globe .  If a nuclear war starts will a few seconds of blaming someone be our last consoling thought before incineration.  Or will the final thought just be  “No!” A ‘no’ that should have sounded through every sane person and society, but was stifled, a “no” that might have been, might have prevailed, and was clearly needed but wasn’t sounded loud enough, long enough, insistently enough.

 One of the powers of art is to mirror the conflicts that threaten us, expose the tragic flaw, the healing that can come when the heart turns toward humility, love, peace, painful truth, or the destruction that emerges from lies, violence, theft.  The artist plucks every string that vibrates the soul of an audience, to draw their full attention: laughter, wonder, abuse, kindness, adventure, sex, wildness, terror, desire, edge of the seat curiosity. One of the forms this drama takes in the human psyche is the conflict aroused by the monster, the cruel enemy, the evil spirit or conspiracy attacking the given order: Goliath, Beowulf, Satan, Loki. Aggressors are just as likely to embrace this mythos as those literally attacked. It’s a story with primal human appeal. It is also just as likely to be a self serving lie as an accurate picture of what is happening, because it so effectively masks less noble motives, allowing the cruelest and basest of actions to be seen as the needed defense of the righteous.

Pynchon delves into this phenomena of mirrored enemies as a consistent theme. One of my favorite versions of this occurs in Against The Day in the characters of professional political thinkers Werfner of Germany and Renfrew of England.  Each, like political pundits of today imagining every degree and nuance of sinister destructive plans in the other and the enemy society.  The mirroring is so complete even their names are the same letters spelled from back to front.  In  Gravity’s Rainbow nuclear armed rockets mirror each other across time, authoritarians on each side of WW2 engage in cruel “medical experiments”, pursuing machine like control of human behavior, driven by personal ambition and debauchery, driven by market forces and the pursuit of more perfect technologies. The central character is one of these experiments gone wrong but in a way potentially exploitable by the war effort. He has an erection as a chemical response to imipolex G used in the V2 rocket and allied spies hope he can be used to predict rocket strikes. Probably not the first writer to note a connection between the pecker and war. But Slothrop has had enough authoritarian control already in his Calvinist background and he flees, moving through many visions and variations of the complex relations of sex, killing, exploitation, paranoia, addiction, resistance. Over time  the earth pulls him to her bosom and he is absorbed into a rainbow.  For those Slothrop has left behind, the only rainbow is the sheen of oil and the arc of missiles; the psychology  of imperial colonialism and war for dominance  continues on. Nazi scientists and secret police  are recruited into new roles in the west, and speeding ahead through time nuclear destruction becomes immanent.  

By the time the imaginary herero missile was about to hit Los Angeles in GR, over  in the non-fiction world, Russians, who were most effective in defeating the Nazis, had become the new enemy and grabbed their own colonial empire called the Soviet Union, taking advantage of the fact that most anti fascist resistance had been led by communists.  

The cold war was never cold in the colonized world and US colonial wars in Africa, the middle east, SE asia and South and Central America gave leaders who sided with the US the all purpose excuse or ‘communism' for crushing movements for justice , whether socialist or nationalist.  Along with the bloodshed, lots of US bribery and “aid” ended up in the Swiss bank accounts of our favored dictators. Corruption and repression was also rampant in the Soviet empire and Stalin went completely mad with paranoia, power, prisons and killing . This burgeoning of corruption and violence  is the history of every empire, and  the question of who caused the most suffering  in the cold war will be shaped by which victims you are looking at and maybe how much hypocrisy is involved.  The problem for the west is that we have, until China changed the picture, been the most effective at retaining imperial global dominance and that requires constant fear propaganda about the evil other while we indebt future generations to pay for weapons, wars, and surveillance. In the case of Russia, even after they ended the Soviet union, had a devastating fling with US economic criminality, and slowly rebuilt their country under the popular strong man Putin, who reined in oligarchic corruption and vastly improved the life of citizens, we continued to demonize Russia. First allowing the Clintons and Obama to corrupt national intelligence to foster Russiagate,  and then fostered a coup in Ukraine followed by a proxy war.  The truth is this has been more beneficial for american billionaires and politicians than for Ukrainians, Europeans or anyone else. Meanwhile our years of demonizing Arabs who don’t support Israel and our denial that Jews and Israel can commit crimes like humans everywhere has paid off in open genocide, supported by both parties.  The truth is that social norms and systems of government are in constant flux while the habit of demonizing others has a kind of reliable religious durability. Our political debates and elections are no longer about what we stand for, but who we hate the most. Our mainstream media is a swamp of propaganda that ignores real issues and crimes and feeds self righteousness and hate.  These addictions are manifesting as oligarchic fascism of the most blatant kind. What Werfner and Renfrew,  and the US  fear and project on their enemy  is what they are becoming.  Dorian Gray comes to mind.