Choose Your Violence

I have never worried about violence in Mexico. Of course, I know it exists. Like everyone else, I read the newspapers, and the evidence for widespread, drug-related violence is clear enough. True, the guns for this violence are largely supplied by American arms dealers just north of the border, as President Obama himself omitted when he visited Mexico early in 2009. But leaving that inconvenient fact aside, there is no doubt that there is a lot of crime-related violence in Mexico, not only from drugs but from extortion and kidnapping and sex trafficking as well, and that it casts a long, dark shadow over Mexican life.

And yet, I never feel nervous walking the streets of, say, Mexico City. I have walked around the city at night, many times, by myself, and (call me naïve) I have never felt the need to keep looking over my shoulder. On the other hand, I find that I am typically edgy when I visit the United States, and over the last few months I began to think about why this is the case. Finally, it came to me: yes, Mexican violence is quite real, but it doesn’t seem to extend much beyond the boundaries of gang wars and criminal activity. American violence, on the other hand, is a different kind of creature. It doesn’t have the dramatic flavor of the Al Capone-style violence of the 1920s anymore. Rather, it seems to be woven into the fabric of everyday life. It often feels to me as though the entire society is violent; that random incidents could turn very ugly very fast. Which they often do, in the U.S. (a casual put-down remark leads to someone getting blown away in a drive-by shooting the next day, for example—events that are by now so common they get reported online, but not in the newspapers), and I suspect it is this that makes me nervous, because you never know what’s going to happen. The question is, which of the two types—Mexican or American—is worse?

I had occasion to confront this dilemma in the form of two incidents that occurred in the closing months of last year. In September, I was staying for a week in a part of Mexico City that has always seemed to me to be relatively safe. One evening during that time I had dinner with a friend of mine, and she subsequently dropped me off about a block from my apartment building (the street was temporarily closed to traffic, for some reason). As I walked home, I passed a young man of about twenty-two years of age, who seemed to want something. I stopped for a moment; he looked at me with rather glazed eyes and said, “Que pasó?” (what’s happening?), slurring his speech. He was obviously drunk. I turned away and kept on walking, whereupon he attacked me from behind, striking me in the head and knocking my hat off. My reaction was one I would not have anticipated: I was filled with rage. I wheeled around and advanced on him, inexplicably yelling “déjalo!” (let it go!). Of course, I should have shouted “lárgate!” (get lost!), but “déjalo!” was what came out. However, the words didn’t really matter; it was the body language that stopped him in his tracks. He was aware, as was I, that if he made one false move he was going to have a fight on his hands. We stood there for about twenty seconds, staring at each other. Finally, I felt he got the message. I turned and left; he didn’t follow me.

In the ensuing days, I puzzled over my surprising reaction to this strange encounter. For one thing, I was aware that if it had taken place in the United States, I would have reacted quite differently. Specifically, I would have been very cautious, because I expect Americans to be unpredictable and potentially volatile. (In fact, in a confrontation of this sort, the American assailant could easily have been carrying a gun.) My experience of Mexico, however, is that daily life is not permeated by the kind of free-floating anger and incipient aggression that I find characteristic of American life. Indeed, Mexican behavior in public spaces tends to be polite, if not actually gracious. Hence, when this drunken kid unexpectedly jumped me from behind, my feeling was one of outrage. If I could have put my thought process into words at that moment, it would have been something along the lines of, “How dare you attack me in my adopted country?” For clearly, he had violated my standards of expectation of public behavior in Mexico, and I wasn’t about to let him off lightly.

The second incident occurred on a flight from Mexico to Houston just after Christmas. Once again, the “attack” (not quite the right word) came from behind, but the guy in question was an American. As we took our seats on the plane, I adjusted mine so that it reclined a bit. The man in the seat behind me—white-haired, my age or a bit older (he looked a lot like Colonel Sanders of KFC)—asked me to keep my seat upright, as his legs (he told me) were right up against the back of it. I noticed, however, that he had a briefcase tucked under his calves, which were pushing his legs forward, and I was aware that this violated flight regulations (carry-ons have to be stowed in the overhead bins or under the seat in front of you). However, I decided to give “the Colonel” the benefit of the doubt. He did have rather long legs, and the seat didn’t recline that much anyway. I figured I could live without the luxury of a reclinable seat for what was a relatively short flight.

At some point toward the end of the flight, I must have fallen asleep; and my seat, for some unknown reason, slid back on its own. I was rudely awakened by the guy behind me shoving my seat forward, quite violently, and pitching me into the back of the seat in front of me. “I asked you to keep your seat upright!”, he exclaimed quite vehemently, nearly shouting. I was absolutely stunned by this behavior; I hardly knew what to say. All I could think of was, “If you stored your briefcase where it belonged, there would be enough room for both of us.” Which I told him, and left it at that.

Nevertheless, I was quite angry at being treated so rudely. Is this enough?, I thought to myself. Should I report him to the flight attendant? I mean, he could have just tapped me on the shoulder, or at least checked out what had happened, before going a bit loco. Reacting violently when things don’t go your way is, after all, the behavior of a spoiled child. But in the end, I decided not to pursue it. We were almost in Houston, and I didn’t want to make a scene. It was very different from the confrontation with the drunk in Mexico City, who actually struck me. This was a tantrum, not a physical attack, and I just couldn’t see the wisdom of making a federal case out of it. I decided to write the airlines about it, and leave it at that.

As in the case of the Mexico City event, however, I was subsequently led to think about the implications of what had happened. What occurred to me was the following:

1. There appears to be a level of rage in American society simmering just below the surface, a rage that most other societies—crime and political conflict excepted—don’t seem to possess. For example, some years ago a U.S.-Canadian research team conducted a poll that asked the question, “Do you believe that the use of violence is acceptable in the pursuit of your goals?” While 12% of the Canadians surveyed answered in the affirmative, exactly twice as many, i.e. 24%, of the Americans did.

2. This level of incipient violence is probably inseparable from the ideology of “American exceptionalism,” whereby Americans believe that they are the “chosen people,” entitled to whatever they want whenever they want it. One can call it narcissism or extreme individualism, but it does seem to boil down to a kind of infantilism. This is a people who never grew up, and who will throw a tantrum if they think their “rights” are being violated. The result is aggressiveness and endless competition as a norm; they are raised in a Top Dog/Bottom Dog philosophy, one that says, “I come first and other people don’t count.” I doubt whether many Americans are free of this unconscious programming.

3. I regret that the U.S.-Canada study was not extended to Mexico, because after visiting Mexico off and on since 1979, and living here since 2006, I cannot imagine a Mexican individual behaving the way the guy on the plane did. As already noted, I experience Mexicans as being courteous or even gracious in public spaces. I can only imagine that most Mexicans would find “Colonel Sanders’” behavior grotesque. In the U.S., on the other hand, it merely falls at the far end of the social-behavioral spectrum. If nearly a quarter of the population thinks violence is acceptable in the pursuit of one’s goals, and if establishing oneself as “Top Dog” is a something of a norm, then “Colonel Sanders’” behavior may not be all that aberrant. For me, a rather unhappy conclusion to come to, and one, as I said, that makes me nervous when I am in the U.S.

So there you have it: two types of violence. South of the border, largely restricted to criminal activity. North of the border, literally part of the air that Americans breathe. Which would you choose?


©Morris Berman, 2010

The Nonentity in the White House

From Kevin Baker's essay in the April issue of Harper's Magazine, "The Vanishing Liberal":

Baker comments on Obama's West Point speech of 1 December 2009, in which he first said that we have to limit our troop commitment in Afghanistan, because our own priorities come first, and then announced that he was sending 30,000 more troops there. He continues:

"How could this be? It was the question that Obama's most fervent supporters had been asking themselves for months, as their candidate discarded almost every vision of a new America, a new world, that he had described during his campaign. By the time of his West Point speech, health-care 'reform' had already been transformed into yet another scheme to transfer wealth to the richest corporate interests in the country. The stimulus program had been botched, the promised money delayed and diverted from badly needed public projects into unhelpful tax cuts. The banks had been bailed out but not the people, and any significant proposals for repairing our infrastructure, addressing climate change, re-regulating the financial markets, or rebuilding New Orleans were generally acknowledged to be dead letters.

"Now, with the president's decision on Afghanistan, our foreign policy settled back into its familiar pattern of endless war for unknown purposes. To people who had been clamoring for real change in how we work and consume, how we live in the world and with one another, this retreat to the failed policies of the recent past was stunning. No other president in our history had so thoroughly spurned his political base in so short a time....

"The party that claims to represent all progressive interests in this country proceeds with its impervious, self-interested agenda. The administration's stated priorities for the near future are to balance the budget before a deep recession has abated and to commit the nation to a long-running war in a dysfunctional Asian country that we neither understand nor care about--thereby promising to repeat, simultaneously, the two worst mistakes made by liberal presidents in the past seventy-five years. As for the long term, the White House will form a commission bent on cutting 'entitlements,' such as Social Security and Medicare, that are the bedrock of retired Americans' prosperity...

"It is increasingly clear that [Obama] never intended to challenge the power structure he had so skillfully penetrated....There is no longer any meaningful reformist impulse left in our politics. The idea of modern American liberalism has vanished among our elite, and simply voting for one man or supporting one of the two major parties will not restore it."

Translation: Game over, folks!

We're Just Not Very Bright

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.

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

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.

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...