Well amigos, y'all need to have a look at Chris Hedges' column at truthdig.com today, on America yearning for Fascism. The disintegration of America continues apace, and the real dummies are not especially the Palin-Beck crowd, but the Democratic establishment and those who support it. As Hedges points out, the forces that are now lining up, and the way they are expressing themselves (gun imagery, targeting of minority groups), follow the classic fascist pattern. How intelligent is Mr. Obama, really? In the wake of the crash of 2008, did he move to rescue the (by now nearly 20%, in real figures) unemployed? Or the millions who were/are losing their homes to bank foreclosures? Nah...start with an $800-billion bank bailout, quickly up it to $12 trillion, and now, apparently (figure estimated by Nomi Prins in It Takes a Pillage), $17.5 trillion. What will that do for the angry Americans who are now searching for scapegoats? Will they target the Bernankes, the Geithners, and the Summerses, who are (stupidly) seeing to it that the cash goes to the rich? Will they go down to Wall Street and rage against Goldman Sachs or AIG? Will they rail against Mr. Obama in the right way--i.e., not as a 'socialist' (what a joke that is), but as the man who delivered 32 million uninsured Americans into the hands of corporate health care? Will they be angry at the president for scuttling the 'public option', which would have by-passed obligatory corporate control of the health-care system? I'm guessing not. And all of this is working together with the Tea Party crowd, really; they and the 'power elite' are doing a synergistic, downward dance, reinforcing each other as they go.
Of course, a lot of our continued spinning out of control is due to the absence of any moral center in this country--as the Right has argued all along. The problem (or one, anyway) with the right-wing argument is that you cannot simultaneously decry the lack of a moral center and exalt corporate market (or even true laissez-faire) capitalism, whose only philosophy is 'more!'. Money is necessary, but it's not a value system; and 'more' certainly isn't. An article by George Packer in the March 15th New Yorker ("Obama's Lost Year") argues that Obama is failing because he has no narrative of where the country ought to go. Nobody knows what he wants, writes Packer; we don't know who he really is. But I would add that Mr. Obama himself doesn't know what he wants, or who he really is. True, he is not the creepy, eerie, near-psychotic hologram that was George W. Bush; but is he all that different? It seems to me he's just a chic version of Nowhere Man. In that sense, however, democracy does work: he is us. We have no values, we have no goals (beyond 'more'), and we certainly don't think a whole lot. I used to point to the .00001% 'Kucinich vote' as the only hope we had, but as you all know, Mr. K has sold out as well.
How could this scenario possibly have a positive outcome? This is precisely how civilizations collapse; this is exactly, Dark Ages America.
March 29, 2010
March 16, 2010
C-SPAN BookTV Video, 2006
Dear Friends,
I did this talk (with Q&A) at the New Dominion Bookshop in Charlottesville, VA in May 2006. Apparently, C-SPAN just made its BookTV video archives available online, and the bookstore folks were kind enough to send me the link. As follows:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/189406-1
Enjoy!
-mb
I did this talk (with Q&A) at the New Dominion Bookshop in Charlottesville, VA in May 2006. Apparently, C-SPAN just made its BookTV video archives available online, and the bookstore folks were kind enough to send me the link. As follows:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/189406-1
Enjoy!
-mb
March 14, 2010
A Month in Xela
After having lived in Mexico for nearly three years, and still speaking bad Spanish, I decided it was time to do something about this sorry state of affairs. The problem, I realized, was that it was difficult for me to get an "immersion experience" in Mexico: I simply had too many bilingual friends here. I would have to go to a place where there was no escaping the Spanish language, twenty-four hours a day; a place like Guatemala.
I had been to Guatemala two years before, mainly following the tourist route: Antigua, Lago Atitlán, and the villages that surround the lake. Antigua was soaking in language schools, I remembered; but when I consulted the guidebooks on the subject, they all said the same thing: you won't learn Spanish in Antigua. The place is crawling with gringos; you'll just wind up socializing with them and speaking your native tongue. Quetzaltenango--or Xela, as it is popularly known--is where you want to go. Americans don't know about it; it's off the beaten track. So, encouraged by this "tip," I got on the Internet and enrolled in a language school in Xela for four weeks. I flew into Guatemala City two weeks later, and arrived in Xela the next day. (As it turned out, everybody else had apparently read the same guidebooks and had taken the same advice. There were more Americans in Xela than in all of Houston; or so it seemed.)
I don't know what I had expected of the physical environment--something like Antigua, perhaps--but Xela was not it. It soon became clear to me that Antigua was a "showcase" city, the exception rather than the rule. With a population of 200,000, Xela claims to be the second-largest city in Guatemala; yet its infrastructure is completely shot. The streets are riddled with cracks and potholes; sidewalks, when they exist, are typically broken. More often than not, you are walking on dirt or trekking through mud. Riding the buses is not to be undertaken on a full stomach, as they are old and decrepit, and jerk you up and down as though you were in a milkshake machine. The cause of all this is not hard to ascertain: Guatemala is, in effect, ruled by an oligarchy, and a large fraction of the national budget is earmarked for the military (which the country needs like a hole in the head). There is very little left over for roads, bridges, transportation, education, and public health. Truth be told, Guatemala is a lot like the United States, only a bit more strung out.
Of course, the United States has no excuse, whereas after thirty-six years of civil war (1960-96) Guatemala had the stuffing kicked out of it. Nearly half the population is illiterate, and half the country's children suffer from malnutrition. With heavy American support, the Guatemalan military undertook a scorched-earth campaign, complete with U.S.-trained torture and death squads, that destroyed any possibility of social justice. The result? After 626 massacres there were something like 150,000 dead, 100,000 desaparecidos, 1 million persons who had gone into hiding, and 1 million refugees (most of them fleeing to Mexico and the United States). More than 440 indígena pueblos were wiped out, 200,000 children were orphaned, and 40,000 women became widows. The urban population is understandably demoralized and cynical, living in a strange kind of spiritual vacuum. What Gertrude Stein once remarked about Oakland, California, applies to Xela a hundred times over: There is no "there" there.
The odd thing is that this huge void at the center has been filled by a purely consumer culture, one very much based on the U.S. model of the "good life." In fact, Xela comes across as a bad version of a bad American city--Sacramento, Dallas, Little Rock, Indianapolis, etc. "Culture" consists of cell phones and Internet cafés, which are always crowded; there doesn't seem to be much else. Whatever happened to the Maya?, I thought to myself. To an outsider, the whole thing made for a strange sight: elderly indígena women on broken-down buses clutching cell phones, and nine-year-old Mayan girls tottering around on high-heeled shoes. And as in the majority of U.S. cities, the people are basically unfriendly. The staff in stores consists mostly of adolescents, who won't make eye contact and can barely grunt out "para servirle." It is as though what the United States was not able to destroy by means of "hard power," it was now finishing off by means of "soft power"--electronic toys, blockbuster films, Coca-Cola, and neoliberal economics.*
These impressions were largely confirmed by conversations I had with people born and raised in the town. One woman, a social worker in her early forties, agreed with me about American electronic gadgetry being the focus of Xela culture. "It's quite amazing," she told me; "I work with families who go to bed hungry, who literally go without food, so that they can buy and maintain a cell phone. It enables them to say, 'yo soy alguien' (I am somebody), because in truth, they have no other identity or source of self-esteem. It's pretty pathetic, but that’s what Guatemala has come to." (I subsequently learned that Guatemala is No. 1 in Central America in cell phone consumption, and No. 3 in all of Latin America.)
"When did all this start?", I asked her, "and how?"
"I think in the sixties," she replied, "around the time that I was born. The greatest single influence was American television. Those images of the wealthy consumer life had a big impact on the Guatemalan population. Most of us still believe the images are real."
"But what did Guatemalan culture consist of before the CIA overthrew the Arbenz government in 1954, and before the invasion of American TV?", I continued.
She shrugged her shoulders. "I honestly don't know. What you see in Xela today–McDonald’s, Wendy's, shopping malls and all the rest–is all I've ever known. It's who we are now. I don't know who we were before that."
I confess, I found this really chilling. It reminded me of that town in One Hundred Years of Solitude that lost its identity because the inhabitants forgot the names of things.
The language instruction I received in Xela, in any case, was first-rate: one-on-one classes, four to five hours per day, until I felt my head was going to explode. That aspect of my time in Xela was very positive, and in fact I became good friends with the director of the school, who was also a professor of economics at the local university. All of this made the trip very worthwhile. But I couldn't--can't--shake the image of a city without purpose, without meaning, and of a country which, having been largely destroyed by U.S. politics, now seeks to emulate the American economy and American culture, both of which are dying. If the sources of vitality can no longer be found in traditional Mayan culture, then it's not clear where they can be found, or what the future holds for a nation that became a pawn in the Cold War through no fault of its own and was subsequently hung out to dry.
My four weeks in Xela having come to an end, I decided to clear my head by spending a couple of days in Antigua before returning to Mexico. Yes, I thought, it's a tourist trap and a showcase town, but two days of sitting in the central square drinking that exquisite Guatemalan coffee and reading newspapers may be good for the soul. Which proved to be the case. And then, during one of those days, I ran across something that caught me completely off guard: a gallery crammed with Guatemalan art, art that was absolutely dazzling. Oils, acrylics, ceramics, you name it--the colors were truly vibrant.
"Where is all this from?", I asked the curator. "Who did all this?"
"It's all Guatemalan," he told me, "artists from 25 to 80 years of age. From all over the country," he added. A few of them, it turned out, actually lived in Xela.
I stood there and gaped. After four weeks of living in a spiritless environment, I was now confronted by this marvelous concentration of spirit, of art as fine as I had seen in galleries in Mexico City or New York. "Your country wasn't able to destroy us completely," the paintings seemed to be saying. "Not with guns, and not with gadgets. There are still a few of us who know what life is about."
Of course, I wound up buying a small painting and hanging it on the wall of my study back home, along with some photos I took of the Guatemalan countryside. I look at it every day. And if I listen closely, I can still hear it whispering, from time to time, telling me about a life that refuses to be extinguished. It reminds me of a graffito I once saw on a wall in Chiapas, addressed to the ruling class: "Nuestros sueños no caben en sus urnas"–Our dreams do not fit into your ballot boxes. Would that that were true of all of Latin America.
©Morris Berman, 2010
*What I am describing here, however, may not apply to rural Mayan culture, and there is some literature pointing to native resistance to Americanization and consumerism. Anthropologist Robert Hinshaw, who lives in the Mayan village of Tzununá, says that his neighbors are proud of their traditional culture and not interested in having it altered in any significant way--although they all seem to own cell phones(!). Edward Fischer, who lived in Patzún and Tecpán for twenty-eight months during the 1990s, claims that globalization has galvanized a resurgence of Mayan identity politics. His work, however, has been questioned by other anthropologists. The jury, in short, is still out on this matter. See Jack Houston, "Robert Hinshaw," Revue (Guatemala City), Vol. 18 No. 6(August 2009), pp. 18-19 and 106; Edward F. Fischer, Cultural Logics and Global Economics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); and the review of the latter by Charles R. Hale in the Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 59 No. 2 (Summer 2003), pp. 296-98.
I had been to Guatemala two years before, mainly following the tourist route: Antigua, Lago Atitlán, and the villages that surround the lake. Antigua was soaking in language schools, I remembered; but when I consulted the guidebooks on the subject, they all said the same thing: you won't learn Spanish in Antigua. The place is crawling with gringos; you'll just wind up socializing with them and speaking your native tongue. Quetzaltenango--or Xela, as it is popularly known--is where you want to go. Americans don't know about it; it's off the beaten track. So, encouraged by this "tip," I got on the Internet and enrolled in a language school in Xela for four weeks. I flew into Guatemala City two weeks later, and arrived in Xela the next day. (As it turned out, everybody else had apparently read the same guidebooks and had taken the same advice. There were more Americans in Xela than in all of Houston; or so it seemed.)
I don't know what I had expected of the physical environment--something like Antigua, perhaps--but Xela was not it. It soon became clear to me that Antigua was a "showcase" city, the exception rather than the rule. With a population of 200,000, Xela claims to be the second-largest city in Guatemala; yet its infrastructure is completely shot. The streets are riddled with cracks and potholes; sidewalks, when they exist, are typically broken. More often than not, you are walking on dirt or trekking through mud. Riding the buses is not to be undertaken on a full stomach, as they are old and decrepit, and jerk you up and down as though you were in a milkshake machine. The cause of all this is not hard to ascertain: Guatemala is, in effect, ruled by an oligarchy, and a large fraction of the national budget is earmarked for the military (which the country needs like a hole in the head). There is very little left over for roads, bridges, transportation, education, and public health. Truth be told, Guatemala is a lot like the United States, only a bit more strung out.
Of course, the United States has no excuse, whereas after thirty-six years of civil war (1960-96) Guatemala had the stuffing kicked out of it. Nearly half the population is illiterate, and half the country's children suffer from malnutrition. With heavy American support, the Guatemalan military undertook a scorched-earth campaign, complete with U.S.-trained torture and death squads, that destroyed any possibility of social justice. The result? After 626 massacres there were something like 150,000 dead, 100,000 desaparecidos, 1 million persons who had gone into hiding, and 1 million refugees (most of them fleeing to Mexico and the United States). More than 440 indígena pueblos were wiped out, 200,000 children were orphaned, and 40,000 women became widows. The urban population is understandably demoralized and cynical, living in a strange kind of spiritual vacuum. What Gertrude Stein once remarked about Oakland, California, applies to Xela a hundred times over: There is no "there" there.
The odd thing is that this huge void at the center has been filled by a purely consumer culture, one very much based on the U.S. model of the "good life." In fact, Xela comes across as a bad version of a bad American city--Sacramento, Dallas, Little Rock, Indianapolis, etc. "Culture" consists of cell phones and Internet cafés, which are always crowded; there doesn't seem to be much else. Whatever happened to the Maya?, I thought to myself. To an outsider, the whole thing made for a strange sight: elderly indígena women on broken-down buses clutching cell phones, and nine-year-old Mayan girls tottering around on high-heeled shoes. And as in the majority of U.S. cities, the people are basically unfriendly. The staff in stores consists mostly of adolescents, who won't make eye contact and can barely grunt out "para servirle." It is as though what the United States was not able to destroy by means of "hard power," it was now finishing off by means of "soft power"--electronic toys, blockbuster films, Coca-Cola, and neoliberal economics.*
These impressions were largely confirmed by conversations I had with people born and raised in the town. One woman, a social worker in her early forties, agreed with me about American electronic gadgetry being the focus of Xela culture. "It's quite amazing," she told me; "I work with families who go to bed hungry, who literally go without food, so that they can buy and maintain a cell phone. It enables them to say, 'yo soy alguien' (I am somebody), because in truth, they have no other identity or source of self-esteem. It's pretty pathetic, but that’s what Guatemala has come to." (I subsequently learned that Guatemala is No. 1 in Central America in cell phone consumption, and No. 3 in all of Latin America.)
"When did all this start?", I asked her, "and how?"
"I think in the sixties," she replied, "around the time that I was born. The greatest single influence was American television. Those images of the wealthy consumer life had a big impact on the Guatemalan population. Most of us still believe the images are real."
"But what did Guatemalan culture consist of before the CIA overthrew the Arbenz government in 1954, and before the invasion of American TV?", I continued.
She shrugged her shoulders. "I honestly don't know. What you see in Xela today–McDonald’s, Wendy's, shopping malls and all the rest–is all I've ever known. It's who we are now. I don't know who we were before that."
I confess, I found this really chilling. It reminded me of that town in One Hundred Years of Solitude that lost its identity because the inhabitants forgot the names of things.
The language instruction I received in Xela, in any case, was first-rate: one-on-one classes, four to five hours per day, until I felt my head was going to explode. That aspect of my time in Xela was very positive, and in fact I became good friends with the director of the school, who was also a professor of economics at the local university. All of this made the trip very worthwhile. But I couldn't--can't--shake the image of a city without purpose, without meaning, and of a country which, having been largely destroyed by U.S. politics, now seeks to emulate the American economy and American culture, both of which are dying. If the sources of vitality can no longer be found in traditional Mayan culture, then it's not clear where they can be found, or what the future holds for a nation that became a pawn in the Cold War through no fault of its own and was subsequently hung out to dry.
My four weeks in Xela having come to an end, I decided to clear my head by spending a couple of days in Antigua before returning to Mexico. Yes, I thought, it's a tourist trap and a showcase town, but two days of sitting in the central square drinking that exquisite Guatemalan coffee and reading newspapers may be good for the soul. Which proved to be the case. And then, during one of those days, I ran across something that caught me completely off guard: a gallery crammed with Guatemalan art, art that was absolutely dazzling. Oils, acrylics, ceramics, you name it--the colors were truly vibrant.
"Where is all this from?", I asked the curator. "Who did all this?"
"It's all Guatemalan," he told me, "artists from 25 to 80 years of age. From all over the country," he added. A few of them, it turned out, actually lived in Xela.
I stood there and gaped. After four weeks of living in a spiritless environment, I was now confronted by this marvelous concentration of spirit, of art as fine as I had seen in galleries in Mexico City or New York. "Your country wasn't able to destroy us completely," the paintings seemed to be saying. "Not with guns, and not with gadgets. There are still a few of us who know what life is about."
Of course, I wound up buying a small painting and hanging it on the wall of my study back home, along with some photos I took of the Guatemalan countryside. I look at it every day. And if I listen closely, I can still hear it whispering, from time to time, telling me about a life that refuses to be extinguished. It reminds me of a graffito I once saw on a wall in Chiapas, addressed to the ruling class: "Nuestros sueños no caben en sus urnas"–Our dreams do not fit into your ballot boxes. Would that that were true of all of Latin America.
©Morris Berman, 2010
*What I am describing here, however, may not apply to rural Mayan culture, and there is some literature pointing to native resistance to Americanization and consumerism. Anthropologist Robert Hinshaw, who lives in the Mayan village of Tzununá, says that his neighbors are proud of their traditional culture and not interested in having it altered in any significant way--although they all seem to own cell phones(!). Edward Fischer, who lived in Patzún and Tecpán for twenty-eight months during the 1990s, claims that globalization has galvanized a resurgence of Mayan identity politics. His work, however, has been questioned by other anthropologists. The jury, in short, is still out on this matter. See Jack Houston, "Robert Hinshaw," Revue (Guatemala City), Vol. 18 No. 6(August 2009), pp. 18-19 and 106; Edward F. Fischer, Cultural Logics and Global Economics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); and the review of the latter by Charles R. Hale in the Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 59 No. 2 (Summer 2003), pp. 296-98.
March 07, 2010
UWM, May 1st
Dear Friends,
Sometimes I get letters from you guys asking where and when I'm next going to be giving a lecture. As you can imagine, that doesn't happen very often. First, I'm terribly shy; and second, I'm about as popular in the US as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (remember him?). But once in a while, I do emerge from my cave. So here's the info: I'm speaking at a conference on "debt," being held at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, on May 1st. Actually, it's two days, April 30 and May 1, but I'm speaking there the afternoon of May
1, something like 2 p.m. So if you live in the Midwest, and want to stop by, feel free. (There may be a large contingent with baskets of rotten fruit in attendance, so I probably need all the support I can get. Well, perhaps not.) The title of my talk is "Is Debt the New Karma? Why America Finally Fell Apart." Cheery and upbeat, as with most of my stuff. By the way, there is a lot of good material on the program, judging by the various titles, so there's more reason to attend than just hearing from moi.
Hasta la vista etc...
Sometimes I get letters from you guys asking where and when I'm next going to be giving a lecture. As you can imagine, that doesn't happen very often. First, I'm terribly shy; and second, I'm about as popular in the US as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (remember him?). But once in a while, I do emerge from my cave. So here's the info: I'm speaking at a conference on "debt," being held at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, on May 1st. Actually, it's two days, April 30 and May 1, but I'm speaking there the afternoon of May
1, something like 2 p.m. So if you live in the Midwest, and want to stop by, feel free. (There may be a large contingent with baskets of rotten fruit in attendance, so I probably need all the support I can get. Well, perhaps not.) The title of my talk is "Is Debt the New Karma? Why America Finally Fell Apart." Cheery and upbeat, as with most of my stuff. By the way, there is a lot of good material on the program, judging by the various titles, so there's more reason to attend than just hearing from moi.
Hasta la vista etc...
February 21, 2010
When Decline Is Staring You Right in the Face
Dear Friends,
Sometimes the ongoing collapse of the US is so obvious, you almost have to laugh. The very newspaper that (4 years ago) dismissed my analysis of the end-of-empire as a "tirade" is now substantiating the analysis. The stories on the front page of today's NY Times (Feb. 21), when taken together, form an interesting picture. One article says that millions are unemployed, and that they can forget about finding work for years to come. (The official figure is 10%, but these figures are always doctored, because typically the US Labor Dept. doesn't put folks whose unemployment compensation ran out back on the unemployment rolls. Actual figure is 1 in 5, or about 20%.) The middle class lost its retirement savings and is now lining up at soup kitchens. However, you'll be glad to hear, the stock market is making a modest recovery.
Then there's an article on how the Afghan Army isn't doing squat, and how the US armed forces are actually the ones waging the (oh-so-necessary-to-our-freedom) war over there. Yes, we really need to send 30,000 more troops into that black hole, without a doubt.
Problems with a deadlocked, do-nothing legislature? How's this for a muscular solution: Evan Bayh, who is leaving the Senate in disgust, thinks that a monthly bipartisan Senate luncheon might create a warm, fuzzy feeling among the bitter ideologues and get things rolling once more. Why he hasn't also come up with a plan to reverse the earth's gravitational field is not quite clear.
And as a lovely ps, an article about Amy Bishop, the biology prof. at the U of Alabama who recently (Feb. 12) responded to not getting tenure by gunning down six of her colleagues, killing three. I can't help wondering if she had been on a steady diet of best-selling management books, such as Winning Through Intimidation and The Brand Called You.
America, America!
Sometimes the ongoing collapse of the US is so obvious, you almost have to laugh. The very newspaper that (4 years ago) dismissed my analysis of the end-of-empire as a "tirade" is now substantiating the analysis. The stories on the front page of today's NY Times (Feb. 21), when taken together, form an interesting picture. One article says that millions are unemployed, and that they can forget about finding work for years to come. (The official figure is 10%, but these figures are always doctored, because typically the US Labor Dept. doesn't put folks whose unemployment compensation ran out back on the unemployment rolls. Actual figure is 1 in 5, or about 20%.) The middle class lost its retirement savings and is now lining up at soup kitchens. However, you'll be glad to hear, the stock market is making a modest recovery.
Then there's an article on how the Afghan Army isn't doing squat, and how the US armed forces are actually the ones waging the (oh-so-necessary-to-our-freedom) war over there. Yes, we really need to send 30,000 more troops into that black hole, without a doubt.
Problems with a deadlocked, do-nothing legislature? How's this for a muscular solution: Evan Bayh, who is leaving the Senate in disgust, thinks that a monthly bipartisan Senate luncheon might create a warm, fuzzy feeling among the bitter ideologues and get things rolling once more. Why he hasn't also come up with a plan to reverse the earth's gravitational field is not quite clear.
And as a lovely ps, an article about Amy Bishop, the biology prof. at the U of Alabama who recently (Feb. 12) responded to not getting tenure by gunning down six of her colleagues, killing three. I can't help wondering if she had been on a steady diet of best-selling management books, such as Winning Through Intimidation and The Brand Called You.
America, America!
February 17, 2010
What if...?
We are too impressed with the pattern revealed to us...
to remember that for the participants history is a
haphazard affair, apparently aimless, produced by
human beings whose concern is essentially with the
trivial and irrelevant. The historian is always conscious
of destiny. The participants rarely–or mistakenly.
–Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee
There was a time, not too long ago, when historians became interested in what was known as “alternative history.” The idea was to pose a speculative, counterfactual scenario and ask, “What if...?” What if John Kennedy had not gone to Dallas in November of 1963, or had survived the attack? What if the Confederacy had won the Civil War, or Germany had been the victor in World War II? What if the USSR had emerged reenergized from the period of “Perestroika,” in a new and partially capitalist form? And so on.
Alternative history had a rather short life span within the history profession (to my knowledge), but it has always been a staple of science fiction. The British novelist Kingsley Amis tried his hand at it in The Alteration (1976), in which he conceived of a world where the Protestant Reformation failed to catch on, and Europe remained Catholic. In this world, as one might imagine, there were severe limits placed on freedom of expression, as well as on scientific research; but the up side was a society not beset by endless technological innovation, an ever-expanding economy, and a hectic pace of life. It was a civilization that moved at a human pace, one that did not confuse “progress” with a fourteen-hour work day and a surfeit of ultimately pointless electronic toys. Such a window onto the past enables us to view the present–the culture that did come to pass–with a much more objective eye. For it may be the case that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, and that the “parallel universe” that got discarded (or rather, that never came to pass) would have been a much better option for those involved, or for their descendants.
One of my favorites in the “alt. history” genre is Bring the Jubilee, by Ward Moore, written in 1955 and by now an underground cult classic. The action takes place in a United States–a northern United States–that lost the Civil War. Instead of being an industrial powerhouse, it became a kind of backwater, drab and impoverished, while it is the South that is vibrant and culturally alive. This is reality in a mirror, as it were; and it reminds me of the comment made to me some years ago by a German friend. “Many Europeans,” he told me, “don’t regard the Northern victory as necessarily a good thing. The preservation of the Union led to a dramatic economic expansion and eventually, to the American Empire, with its destructive ambition of dominating the world. A Southern victory would probably have prevented that.” Of course, the Fascist attempt to dominate the world was much more pernicious, but my friend’s point is nevertheless a valid one, as a host of nations, from Guatemala to Vietnam, can attest to. American history may, in other words, be a positive thing only from an American viewpoint. And in any case, what would have been the ambition of a victorious Confederacy? Probably not imperial, although in Bring the Jubilee the author has it invading Mexico and renaming Mexico City “Leesburg,” after Robert E. Lee(!).
The point is that we tend to take reality as a given. True, there is a certain historical momentum to events that cannot be overlooked. I don’t believe, for example, that the United States would have ultimately been deterred from its imperial trajectory had John Kennedy lived or the Supreme Court not stolen the election for George W. Bush in 2000. In both cases, things were too far gone for any serious changes to have occurred, it seems to me (though granted, Vietnam and Iraq may conceivably been spared the horror we put them through, which would have been no small thing). In a similar vein, the hopes many people (both within and outside of the United States) once placed in Barack Obama have proven to be illusory, as he reveals himself to be little more than Bush with a human face. But continuity is not always the rule; and in his essay “History and Imagination,” the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper makes a good case for alternative history, history “on the cusp”:
At any given moment in history there are real alternatives....
How can we “explain what happened and why” if we only
look at what happened and never consider the alternatives....
It is only if we place ourselves before the alternatives of the
past...only if we live for a moment, as the men of the time
lived, in its still fluid context and among its still unresolved
problems...that we can draw useful lessons from history.
It is not that we can arbitrarily choose a different future; history doesn’t work that way (and who would the “we” be, in any case?). But what alternative history can do is dispel the notion that there is only one right way to live, namely the way we are living now. Not that, for example, a Confederate victory in what some Southerners call “The War for Southern Independence” (or even, “The War of Northern Aggression”) would have necessarily given us a better world–slavery having been the obvious dark aspect of the Southern way of life–but that the destruction of a gracious, slow-moving, community-oriented society in favor of a frantic, commercial one is nothing to crow about. Awareness of this (i.e., beyond the geographical boundaries of the South) could be a departure point for political organizing; and at the very least, it opens the door to a different set of behaviors on the individual level, for what that might be worth.
I trust the reader understands that I am not making some declaration here of “The South Will Rise Again!” I’m just selecting one possible example among many, and one could just as easily discuss the Amish of Pennsylvania as a kind of living alternative history in this vein, or perhaps the Shakers, had they survived. As I said in previous essays, I suspect “choice” will be forced upon us, rather than be something we voluntarily undertake. But the value of alternative history is not merely, as Trevor-Roper says, to explain what happened, but more important, to explain what could have happened. For we are not living in the best of all possible worlds; this much is obvious. But how much more impoverished would our existence be, if we had no concrete images of worlds that might be significantly better?
©Morris Berman, 2010
to remember that for the participants history is a
haphazard affair, apparently aimless, produced by
human beings whose concern is essentially with the
trivial and irrelevant. The historian is always conscious
of destiny. The participants rarely–or mistakenly.
–Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee
There was a time, not too long ago, when historians became interested in what was known as “alternative history.” The idea was to pose a speculative, counterfactual scenario and ask, “What if...?” What if John Kennedy had not gone to Dallas in November of 1963, or had survived the attack? What if the Confederacy had won the Civil War, or Germany had been the victor in World War II? What if the USSR had emerged reenergized from the period of “Perestroika,” in a new and partially capitalist form? And so on.
Alternative history had a rather short life span within the history profession (to my knowledge), but it has always been a staple of science fiction. The British novelist Kingsley Amis tried his hand at it in The Alteration (1976), in which he conceived of a world where the Protestant Reformation failed to catch on, and Europe remained Catholic. In this world, as one might imagine, there were severe limits placed on freedom of expression, as well as on scientific research; but the up side was a society not beset by endless technological innovation, an ever-expanding economy, and a hectic pace of life. It was a civilization that moved at a human pace, one that did not confuse “progress” with a fourteen-hour work day and a surfeit of ultimately pointless electronic toys. Such a window onto the past enables us to view the present–the culture that did come to pass–with a much more objective eye. For it may be the case that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, and that the “parallel universe” that got discarded (or rather, that never came to pass) would have been a much better option for those involved, or for their descendants.
One of my favorites in the “alt. history” genre is Bring the Jubilee, by Ward Moore, written in 1955 and by now an underground cult classic. The action takes place in a United States–a northern United States–that lost the Civil War. Instead of being an industrial powerhouse, it became a kind of backwater, drab and impoverished, while it is the South that is vibrant and culturally alive. This is reality in a mirror, as it were; and it reminds me of the comment made to me some years ago by a German friend. “Many Europeans,” he told me, “don’t regard the Northern victory as necessarily a good thing. The preservation of the Union led to a dramatic economic expansion and eventually, to the American Empire, with its destructive ambition of dominating the world. A Southern victory would probably have prevented that.” Of course, the Fascist attempt to dominate the world was much more pernicious, but my friend’s point is nevertheless a valid one, as a host of nations, from Guatemala to Vietnam, can attest to. American history may, in other words, be a positive thing only from an American viewpoint. And in any case, what would have been the ambition of a victorious Confederacy? Probably not imperial, although in Bring the Jubilee the author has it invading Mexico and renaming Mexico City “Leesburg,” after Robert E. Lee(!).
The point is that we tend to take reality as a given. True, there is a certain historical momentum to events that cannot be overlooked. I don’t believe, for example, that the United States would have ultimately been deterred from its imperial trajectory had John Kennedy lived or the Supreme Court not stolen the election for George W. Bush in 2000. In both cases, things were too far gone for any serious changes to have occurred, it seems to me (though granted, Vietnam and Iraq may conceivably been spared the horror we put them through, which would have been no small thing). In a similar vein, the hopes many people (both within and outside of the United States) once placed in Barack Obama have proven to be illusory, as he reveals himself to be little more than Bush with a human face. But continuity is not always the rule; and in his essay “History and Imagination,” the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper makes a good case for alternative history, history “on the cusp”:
At any given moment in history there are real alternatives....
How can we “explain what happened and why” if we only
look at what happened and never consider the alternatives....
It is only if we place ourselves before the alternatives of the
past...only if we live for a moment, as the men of the time
lived, in its still fluid context and among its still unresolved
problems...that we can draw useful lessons from history.
It is not that we can arbitrarily choose a different future; history doesn’t work that way (and who would the “we” be, in any case?). But what alternative history can do is dispel the notion that there is only one right way to live, namely the way we are living now. Not that, for example, a Confederate victory in what some Southerners call “The War for Southern Independence” (or even, “The War of Northern Aggression”) would have necessarily given us a better world–slavery having been the obvious dark aspect of the Southern way of life–but that the destruction of a gracious, slow-moving, community-oriented society in favor of a frantic, commercial one is nothing to crow about. Awareness of this (i.e., beyond the geographical boundaries of the South) could be a departure point for political organizing; and at the very least, it opens the door to a different set of behaviors on the individual level, for what that might be worth.
I trust the reader understands that I am not making some declaration here of “The South Will Rise Again!” I’m just selecting one possible example among many, and one could just as easily discuss the Amish of Pennsylvania as a kind of living alternative history in this vein, or perhaps the Shakers, had they survived. As I said in previous essays, I suspect “choice” will be forced upon us, rather than be something we voluntarily undertake. But the value of alternative history is not merely, as Trevor-Roper says, to explain what happened, but more important, to explain what could have happened. For we are not living in the best of all possible worlds; this much is obvious. But how much more impoverished would our existence be, if we had no concrete images of worlds that might be significantly better?
©Morris Berman, 2010
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