The Serpent's Wisdom

So lately my interest has been piqued in the Cthulhu mythos. With its emphasis on bizarre geometry, nameless unspeakable horrors lurking just outside the edges of one's line of sight, and the concept of cosmic secrets known to ancient civilizations and since forgotten, it seems almost tailor-made for a nerd like me.

But as I re-read the seminal story "The Call of Cthulhu" over the past few days, I began to perceive a rather different set of unspeakable horrors lurking just outside of sight.

I've reached a point where everything I listen to, everything I read, everything I watch, gets filtered through a certain perceptual bias. It's impossible for me to not notice references to social power or imbalance. By the time I was done reading the story I was forced to conclude that it was about the "evil danger" of people of color.

"About" is a funny thing. I've written previously that I believe that the meaning of an utterance or artistic work is "primarily that reaction which is intended to be provoked by the work's creator". But I think that I have to include in that any agenda of which the author is only subconsciously aware. IOW, whether it was Lovecraft's intention or not to produce a work intended to provoke fear of people of color, this is what he produced, and it is not accidental, it is not something one "reads into the text now 91 years later."

As an aside to illustrate the point of "about", and just because it's on my mind today, and just to prove that I wasn't kidding when I said I am always viewing the world through this lens, consider the 1985 video to "Some Like it Hot" by the Power Station. The model featured prominently in the video is Caroline Cossey, also known as Tula; the video contains so many Terrible Tranny Tropes that it's practically "about" the fact that she is transsexual, though the 'obviousness' of this is only obvious to me in hindsight.

Anyway, back to Lovecraft and his story. It's not enough to say that the story draws a contrast between civilized, rational, yet unsuspecting white people, vs. violent and savage, yet knowing of the hideous horrors lying at the ocean floor, people of color. It's not enough that several times he refers to people of color as "mongrels," or suggests that the cultists are barely human, or avers at one point that to kill them would be an act of mercy. The story hangs its entire bid for effectiveness on the notion that voodoo and other "primitive" religions are evil and dark. Lovecraft presumes the reader is white and expects him or her to be complicit in his view that wherever we find people of color we might find the violent members of an ancient, savage, global cult. The cult and its secrets live "out of sight" in dark jungle type places until the beacon of white anthropology shines on it and reveals the terrible secret.

Furthermore, what of the "unspeakable horrors" this cult may usher in? What of the bizarre, otherworldly geometry in which they dwell? The popular interpretation is that Lovecraft was an anti-modernist concerned about what terrors might be ushered in by Twentieth Century science. In the post-atomic age this does not seem an unreasonable interpretation; indeed it almost seems to cast Lovecraft as a prophet. I'm inclined to suspect, though, that what Lovecraft feared was the thought of a populist uprising in the non-white or even the Eastern European nations. Perhaps the "otherworldly geometry" he feared was the upheaval of the Newtonian clockwork universe and the safe hegemony of the European colonial world order that proclaimed it.

If you haven't seen the Yahoo!/60 Minutes video segments on the ship breaking industry in Bangladesh, i recommend you do.

At one point in the series of segments, a commentator says something like, this is capitalism at its most raw and gritty. A beach drenched with dumped oil, chemicals, asbestos, debris, and who knows what else. A wealthy Bangladeshi buys the ships as-is from Western companies, who would otherwise have to pay expensive disposal costs in their own countries, and sails them right up onto the beach where laborers, many of them children, tear them down rivet by rivet. They have no training or protective gear and about 50 die every year in accidents; and goddess only knows how many more die from inhaling smoke and other chemical exposures.

But you know? It's too easy to blame capitalism. Yes, this particular instance is the result of a capitalist mechanism. But it's not as if we haven't seen environmental disasters and poor working conditions in socialist countries, either. No, the underlying mechanism here is racism, classism, and neo-colonialism, and the way to fix it lies in deeply re-examining our ethics of taking -- and in this case, our ethics of dumping.

The Bush administration envisions a decades-long U.S. presence in Iraq.

One Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, said, "We aren't talking about staying forever." But he said a long-term training and advisory presence is possible.

"The fact is that if we can withdraw to bases and then eventually close those bases and Iraq will run out of oil and then we can come home, that's the plan," the Arizona senator said.

from Richardson seeks total Iraq withdrawal

Fixed.

Cindy Sheehan: "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Soldiers"

In war correspondent Christopher Hedges' book, War Is the Force That Gives Us Meaning, he writes:

The disillusionment comes later. Each generation again responds to war as innocents. Each generation discovers its own disillusionment - often at a terrible price.

The terrible price is that, once again, we forget that the war machine loves to greedily consume our children for the terrible profits that they so willingly and cheerfully reap. Hence the phrase: "Laughing all the way to the bank." How does it feel that the vultures are laughing at how gullible we are to so naively cough up our young? Previous generations of mothers have watched presidents and other cheerleaders for war and mayhem drag us into war after war and we mothers are unwilling and unknowing accomplices in our children's murders. War will finally have to stop when we mothers (and fathers and spouses, etc.) stop allowing our leaders to march our children off to wars that are to feed the ravenous war monster: This hideous war monster counts on us families forgetting that the last war for revenue was fought against phantom enemies that can't be confined within borders. Whether the wars are covert or overt they are always being waged with our babies' blood.

Tragically, I don't know anyone, war supporter or not, who raised his or her children to be a war criminal. I would hope that there are few people in our country who have hoped against hope that one day that their son would grow up to rape Iraqi girls and kill innocent Iraqis in cold blood. The Mahmoudiya and Haditha incidents are horrible atrocities but, unfortunately, are not isolated incidents in the Iraq war crime. War breeds atrocities. I wish to God, and everything that anybody holds holy, that Mahmoudiya and Haditha were isolated incidents, but we know that they are not. When the neo-cons despicably spit out the blather that we need to "stay the course," I wonder what that means? Rape and murder? That is a horrible course. I think we should change it now.

Ruth Rosen and Tom Engelhardt: "Sexual Terrorism in Iraq" (i've only gotten halfway through this so far, in places it is graphic and triggery)

This specific rape of one Iraqi girl, however, is now becoming symbolic of the way the Bush administration has violated Iraq's honor.... In a fierce condemnation, the Muslim Scholars Association in Iraq denounced the crime: "This act, committed by the occupying soldiers, from raping the girl to mutilating her body and killing her family, should make all humanity feel ashamed."

Shame, yes, but that is hardly sufficient. After all, rape is now considered a war crime by the International Criminal Court.

.... [T]he invasion and occupation of Iraq has had the effect of humiliating, endangering, and repressing Iraqi women in ways that have not been widely publicized in the mainstream media: As detainees in prisons run by Americans, they have been sexually abused and raped; as civilians, they have been kidnapped, raped, and then sometimes sold for prostitution; and as women – and, in particular, as among the more liberated women in the Arab world – they have increasingly disappeared from public life, many becoming shut-ins in their own homes.

the late Smedley Darlington Butler: "War is a Racket" (written between WWI and WWII, linked in Sheehan's piece above)

In the World War a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few – the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

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How dare these countries refuse our exports! Amurrkan companies are entitled to sell their products wherever they want! This is the New American Century, dammit! Back in the good ol' days, we just sent a gunboat to your harbor and made you sign a trade deal.

The Bush administration on Friday cited 62 trading partners for erecting unfair barriers to American exports, with China coming in for criticism in such areas as failure to crack down on copyright piracy.

The survey of the worst trade barriers faced by U.S. companies was included in the "National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers," a report the administration is required to produce annually to highlight areas for special attention by American trade negotiators.

"We have an aggressive and proactive agenda to open markets and reduce trade barriers," said Jim Mendenhall, the general counsel for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. "Our job is to break down these barriers."

from U.S. Cites 62 Countries for Unfair Trade (emphasis added)

The dollar fell and Treasury yields rose yesterday after the Japanese prime minister made remarks that suggested the country's central bank could be shifting some of its huge reserves out of dollars and Treasury securities.

... "There is a heightened sensitivity to anything that smacks of reserve reallocation," said Robert Sinche, global head of currency strategy at Bank of America.

Indeed, the comments from the prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, came less than a month after reports, later denied, that the central bank of South Korea was planning to move some of its reserve holdings out of dollars and into other currencies. Even after the denial, those reports roiled the currency markets, and the dollar fell 1.5 percent against the euro and 1.4 percent against the yen on Feb. 22.

Yesterday, the dollar slipped as much as 0.4 percent against the euro and 0.1 percent against the yen.

from Talk in Japan Shakes Dollar and Treasuries

So what does this mean for you and me? It means that foreign countries are no longer willing to subsidize America's deficit spending. A year or so ago economist Paul Krugman compared the US to a "banana republic," printing dollars willy-nilly in hopes that devaluation will make the real worth of the nation's debt go down.

The US has been spending a lot of money on debt, essentially charging the costs of its wars in the Middle East on a huge credit card, while cutting taxes at home. A lot of that debt is to Asian banks, particularly in Japan and China. At the same time, the US has been hoping it can continue to whittle down the real worth of its debts by allowing the dollar to lose value against other currencies -- for example, if $1 is worth less in yen or euros now than it was a year ago, then a trillion dollar debt is worth less than it was a year ago.

Right now, the US can get away with this because the dollar is the international currency standard and other countries have been willing to keep it propped up. Soon, the international community will look for another standard, and find it in the euro or the yen.

What will happen then will be just desserts for the US, which has been practicing economic colonialism for decades via the IMF, World Bank and similar organizations. We'll find ourselves in the same situation we've put many other countries in -- straddled with staggering debt and nothing to show for it.

( Read more... )

This stuff about currencies and finance might sound irrelevant and easy to ignore, but what it amounts to is a pattern whereby real economic substance has been sucked slowly into the United States over the years -- making Americans tangibly wealthier while people in other parts of the world become more poor. Currencies and finance translate into real starvation and war, a very real kind of imperialism which the US has been practicing -- and which explains why wars overseas are billed as "US defense" or "in our interests." Our wars have not been about altruism, they have been about finding ways to perpetuate economic imperialism.