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Ah, Waferinos! Here we are again, starting yet another post. Hope you're all staying warm.

Trolls and buffoons seem to have (temporarily) crawled back under their rocks, for some reason. They tend to attack in waves, so sooner or later I expect more flak from the poopy-heads. I've also been musing on a way to combine them, conceptually: trolfoons? Wafers are invited to suggest names for these pathetic creatures, folks who have made America the great nation that it truly is.

Other than that, my mind is once again the proverbial wind tunnel, so I leave it to you guys to lead the way in terms of sterling conversation.

-mb

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Dear Wafers (and Waferettes):

Time to move on to a new post. Only 8 days into the new year, and we are blessed by a few contributions from trolls and buffoons. Ya gotta love 'em; or at least, *I* do. They are what makes this country great.

Of course, I'd love to post something intelligent here, but as in the past, my mind is a wind tunnel; it resembles that of G.W.Bush. What a thought. But I'm up to my eyeballs these days, muchachos: trying to get the pb edn of WAF finished and online on Amazon, and then there's the last chapter of the Japan book...don't ask. Other events you Wafers might be interested in:

-A publisher in Athens wants to translate SSIG into Greek. Greek, I say. Next thing you know, I'll be giving lectures at the Parthenon, between large platters of dolmades. Just call me Zorba.

-The Spanish trans of SSIG, "De paja a oro," should be out by spring. More lectures, but this time punctuated by chiles en nogada.

-Moving rt along: I'll be doing a phone interview (again, on SSIG) on the Judith Regan Show (based in NY; pastrami this time?) the morning of Jan. 25. For those of you who can't hear it live, not to worry, I'll post the link.

-Departure date for Tokyo: April 9. I was also invited down to Vietnam, so I'll spend a few days in Hanoi. I keep wondering if the Jane Fonda Institute of American Studies is still functioning, after all these years.

Sayonara, Chicos; try to stay warm.

-mb

Foot Fetishism

Merry Xmas, Wafers-

With New Year's just around the corner, it's time to take stock of how blessed we Wafers really are. If you didn't see that post of the link to videos of the frenzy and fist-fights over the release of a new pair of sneakers, now would be a good time to view and contemplate them. These are your neighbors! Can you imagine living like that? And what future does a nation have in which personal identity hangs on footwear? Can you imagine the scenario that will ensue--and it will, mes enfants, don't doubt it for a moment--when the system breaks down, and there's no food or water? During the Fukushima disaster in Japan 2.5 years ago, 40 workers were trapped in a freezing basement overnight with only a single cup of ramen to go around, and they quietly sat there, each person taking only a spoonful for him- or herself, no muss/no fuss. Can you imagine Americans behaving that way? What portends for a nation whose citizens have no sense of individual dignity? It ain't gonna be pretty, amigos; of that you can be sure.

When I was in New York last month, I had breakfast one day with a colleague in the publishing industry, a very successful and respected guy, and we were talking about the "progressives" and their insistence that positive radical change, or even revolution, was possible in America. My friend just laughed. "All the government would have to do to take the steam out of it is provide everyone with a few more cable channels," he said. Or expensive sneakers, I might add. The truth is that no political program can give the citizenry a sense of personal worth; and if the latter depends on sneakers, then the program can only wind up in a strange and unhappy place. As NMI's, Wafers do what they can; but they are also a bit philosophical about it all: historically speaking, it's America's turn to decline, and foot fetishism is just a symptom of this process. That civilizations rise and fall is the way of the world, end of story.

But amidst the ruins, there is only this, for those who are interested: love and truth. I wish all Wafers a large dose of both in 2014. Merry Xmas!

mb

The Dregs of Humanity

Every once in a while something happens to remind me of why I left the US. I have a US mail drop in a town that is an ex-pat haven, about 1.5 hours from here, and drive over there to get my mail about 2-3 times a month. I try to go in and out very quickly, because I don’t like the place: it’s overrun with gringos, and the ambience is similar to Los Angeles. The other day, as I was leaving to go back home, I came to an intersection and drove through it (no lights; it was just my turn), but because of the car ahead of me I couldn’t get all the way across. Which thus blocked a woman (gringa) of about 30 years of age who was trying to go across at a right angle to me. Frustrated, she yelled “Stupid!,” at which point I didn’t miss a beat and yelled back “You are!” (There wasn’t enough time to add, “Douche bag!”)

On the ride back home, I reflected on how awful Americans are as people--really, a disgusting collection of human beings. Whereas I literally never have interactions like that with Mexicans, this sort of thing is coin of the realm in the US; I probably had 2-3 exchanges like that per week when I lived in DC. I tried to recall the last time someone was this rude to me down here, and then I remembered that it was about 6 months ago, in the same town, and also in an incident involving a gringa. I realized that in the more than 7 years I’ve lived here, no Mexican ever cussed me out--not once; and the only such behavior I witnessed between Mexicans themselves was when I was in a taxi in Mexico City and someone cut my driver off. He leaned out the window and yelled “pendejo!,” or something like that. That was it: one time in 7 years.

Back home, I went to a supermarket to get some groceries, and as I walked by a 20-year-old Mexican woman coming from the opposite direction, I unexpectedly sneezed. “Salud!” she cried. And it was such a wake-up moment, for me: Yes, this is how people in a decent society treat strangers—not like strangers. We’re all in this together, is the feeling; your health is my concern. You can say that this is "pro forma," but man--it counts. This is precisely what Robert Putnam, in his famous book on the collapse of community in America (Bowling Alone), referred to as “social capital,” and he argued that it made a huge difference for the health of a society.

In any case, I happened to be carrying a copy of the New Yorker for December 9, so I sat down at a café within the market to eat something before I started shopping. There was an article on what is known by the police as the Reid Technique for obtaining confessions. It includes bullying, lying, and manipulating until the suspect breaks down and “confesses.” Recent research has turned up the fact (what a shock) that a large percentage of these confessions obtained under duress are false. The Brits, in the 1990s, began to worry about these sorts of heavy-handed techniques as making criminals out of innocents, and instituted a more “journalistic” approach in which the cops just gather information, then point out inconsistencies. It’s working a whole lot better, according to the essay; and when Saul Kassin, who teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in NY, was asked about the possibility of replacing the Reid Technique with something like what England had instituted over here, in the US, he replied that it was unlikely: The culture of confrontation is too embedded in our society, was his reply.

I do understand how strung out Americans are, even down here in Mexico. The culture of confrontation is all they know, all they’ve known all their lives. Also the culture of anger, the culture of entitlement, and (Lasch) the culture of narcissism. They are hurting; their lives are meaningless, for reasons I’ve written about at great length; and they walk around with a short fuse. So if someone inconveniences you for a moment at an intersection, God forbid, you lash out, because this is what Americans do. That it might not be such a big deal, and that you can choose—as Mexicans typically do in that situation—just to lean back for a moment and wait—why, that never even enters your mind.

Sitting in that café, and reading about the “culture of confrontation,” I couldn’t help thinking: What was God up to, when he made the US? Did he decide to gather up all of the trash, all the human garbage from the planet, the dregs of humanity, and plunk them down in one particular country? Was this His idea of a joke, or was he trying to create an object lesson for the rest of the world: Don’t be like this!? It makes you wonder.

I also couldn’t help thinking about the intangibles that make up such a large part of our lives. They don’t tell you about the courtesy and graciousness of various nations in travel guidebooks, nor about the rudeness and boorishness (and sheer stupidity) of Americans, in guides to the US. And in making assessments like “We’re No. 1!,” Americans never factor in the intangibles such as lack of elementary courtesy or lack of basic decency, because all they know in terms of criteria is material wealth. But you can’t eat your stock portfolio; and having people yell at you (or act friendly toward you) on a daily basis makes a big difference in the quality of your life. I finished the New Yorker article, and felt so happy that I was not living in the US, or in that pathetic mini-gringolandia where I have my mail drop. I have no interest at all in the culture of confrontation, in a society described by the biologist David Ehrenfeld as "a collection of angry scorpions in a bottle.” Let them attack each other all they want; I'm not part of that sad, destructive way of death anymore.

Salud!

©Morris Berman, 2013

Home of the Brave

One of the more famous quotes made by Nelson Mandela during his lifetime has been curiously omitted by the mainstream American media in the gushing obituaries that have recently appeared. It goes like this: "If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don't care for human beings." I had occasion to remember this remark upon recently reading a review of Stephen Kinzer’s book The Brothers, recently published in the NYTBR (issue of November 10). Kinzer used to work for the NYT, then switched over to The Guardian, and in between wrote two important books on American interventionism: All the Shah’s Men and Overthrow—both of them powerful indictments of U.S. foreign policy. He now returns to the scene with a biography of the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen. The opening paragraph of the Times review is worth quoting in full:

“Anyone wanting to know why the United States is hated across much of the world need look no farther than this book. The Brothers is a riveting chronicle of government-sanctioned murder, casual elimination of ‘inconvenient’ regimes, relentless prioritization of American corporate interests and cynical arrogance on the part of two men who were once among the most powerful in the world.”

Both brothers, Kinzer tells us, were law partners in the New York firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, a firm that, in the 1930s, worked for I.G. Farben, the chemicals conglomerate that eventually manufactured Zyklon B (the gas used to murder the Jews). Allen Dulles, at least, finally began to have qualms about doing business in Nazi Germany, and pushed through the closure of the S&C office there, over John Foster’s objections. The latter, as Secretary of State under Eisenhower, worked with his brother (by now head of the CIA) to destroy Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, and Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, among others. The two of them pursued a Manichaean world view that was endemic to American ideology and government, which included the notion that threats to corporate interests were identical to support for communism. As John Foster once explained it: “For us there are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who are Christians and support free enterprise, and there are the others.” It was not for nothing that President Johnson, much to his credit, privately complained that the CIA had been running “a goddamn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean,” the beneficiaries of which were American corporate interests.

The destructiveness of the Dulles brothers in foreign policy was mirrored by what went on in their personal lives. They were distant, uncomfortable fathers, not wanting their children to “intrude” on their parents’ world, and they refused to attend the wedding of their sister, Eleanor, when she married a Jew. At home and abroad, the two of them were truly awful human beings. But the most trenchant comment made by Kinzer reflects an argument I have repeatedly made, namely the relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm. “They are us. We are them,” says Kinzer, and this is the God-awful truth: that it is a rotten culture that produces rotten representatives. Americans benefited, materially speaking, from the corporate profits generated by the violence fostered by the CIA and the State Department, and didn’t say boo. They mindlessly got on the anti-Communist bandwagon, never questioning what we were doing around the world in the name of it. Their focus was on the tail fins of their new cars, and the new, exciting world of refrigerators and frozen foods, not on the torture regime we installed in Iran, or the genocide we made possible in Guatemala. By the latest count, 86% of them can’t locate Iran on a world map, and it’s a good bet that less than 0.5% can say who John Foster Dulles even was. When Mandela says that “they don’t care for human beings,” we have to remember that the “they” is not just the U.S. government; it also consists of millions of individual Americans whose idea of life is little more than “what’s in it for me?”—the national mantra, when you get right down to it. The protesters who marched in the streets against our involvement in Vietnam, after all, amounted to only a tiny fraction of the overall American population, and it’s not clear that things have changed all that much: 62% of Americans are in favor of the predator drone strikes in the Middle East that murder civilians on a weekly basis. You don’t get the Dulleses rising to the top without Mr. John Q. Public, and he is as appalling as they. Like the Dulleses, he typically believes in a Christian world of free enterprise vs. the evil others who do not, “thinks” in terms of Manichaean slogans, and is not terribly concerned about anyone outside his immediate family—if that. America didn’t get to be what it is by accident; this much should be clear.

“They are us. We are them.”

©Morris Berman, 2013

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Hola Wafers! Time to start another post. My answers below are to comments on previous one. Thank you for your patience.

mb