10:36 am - History is the Present in the Age of Broken Hearts

I'm rewatching the X-Files . On VHS tapes, which means that instead of a complete season, have a set of selected episodes "chosen by fans" most of which have to do with the larger story arc- government collaboration with aliens to create a hybrid species (or, later, humans immune to the black oil) that can survive colonization. The house only has the first three seasons, which while foundational, don't get particularly far into the mythology. There are more meaningful silences- or, since the series was always stagey, Meaningful Silences with scare caps- than explanations, more ominous coincidence than closure.



I'm also reading Marge Piercy's Gone to Soldiers which I know seems like the kind of non-sequitur, but bear with me. Sci-fi ages faster than war stories, and a decade-old series is usually enjoyable as much for the technological and predictive absurdities as for the plots. Plus, look at their hair! Look at the funny cars! When did you last check your email on an 80-column amber-screen monitor? Both the series and the novel occupy similarly dated, but similarly familiar locations in my historical imagination, and can be enjoyed as a commentary on the American view of American history.



More importantly, they represent the up-slope and down-slope of the Great American Master Narrative of the 20th century. Gone To Soldiers is the story of several Americans, French Jews, and refugees, during the prodrome of WWII and continuing into and through the war. Some become soldiers or partisans, others work in merchant marine or other war industries, but a significant cluster are involved in the formation of the OSS and the development of the modern government-technology interconnection later dubbed the military industrial complex. Soldiers captures well the story of the forties (and later the fifties) as an exciting time in which American engineering and science could, with government direction, recreate the world for better.



This narrative seems to have been appealing after the depression and war for two reasons. First, ridiculously, for the utopia it promised, but secondly, because it gave smart kids a master narrative- an idea that there was a larger project, in with which they could throw their lot, which would give their lives meaning and their future a taste of the security their parents had never seen. Technocracy, which I use to include not just electricity too cheap to meter and crops from fencerow to fencerow, but also the foreign aid idea (that experts could fix the rest of the world too) and the end-of-history triumphalism about democratic political systems, mirrored the twentieth century's other master narrative, communism, which also gave individuals a way to contextualize the aches and pains of the day to day as part of a multi-generational project for a better world.



By 1994 and the X-files, though, while the gantries and pylons of the technocratic narrative still loom at the corners of Americans' peripheral vision, the gossamer edifice of a better world no longer hangs compelling between them. We believe the government could coordinate massive resources, keep incredible secrets, and develops world-changing technologies- we just don't like them very much. The X-files and similar late-twentieth-century science fiction succeeded because they told, over and over again, the darkest version of the Manhattan Project. What remained of the master narrative was hostile, paranoid, and unrelentingly pessimistic.



Its worth remembering that Gone To Soldiers was written in 1987, seven years before the X-Files went on the air. They don't actually record two ends of a historical arc, they record how people at one moment in time saw two ends of a historical arc, both of which must be percieved simultaneously to understand the sense of betrayal. The X-Files mythos doesn't grab us unless we also believe in the naive optimism of Gone To Soldiers , and the cautious exuberance of the characters of Soldiers isn't poignant unless we also recognize Mulder screaming at his father for collaborating with former-nazi scientists. My point is, the technocratic arc isn't actually the narrative of the middle of the century as much as historiography of the collapse of the technocratic arc is the narrative of the turn of the century.



---



In another non-sequitur-like jump, I'm going to move to a new story for a moment. The guy who shot up the Pentagon had something in common with the guy who flew an airplane into the IRS building in Austin. Does anybody know what it is? [pause for response] No, it wasn't politics- both were failed high-tech small business owners. The pentagon shooter, John Patrick Bedell, was CEO of a biotech startup. The IRS crasher, Joseph Stack, had founded and lost a software company. In this, they have most in common with Amy Bishop or Malik Nadal Hassan- both of whom were also batshit crazy, by the way, and set off scads of alarm bells throughout their careers, and there's an interesting essay on the difference between the public interpretation of Hassan (radicalized muslim; investigate his mosque!) and Bishop (crazy lady; investigate her husband)- in that all were highly educated and groomed for successful professional careers, and went violently over the edge at the point where those careers became untenable. All saw themselves acting against a coordinated, secretive and insidious enemy that had stifled them: Bedell felt the military was covering up all manner of conspiratorial bad behavior against Americans, Stack felt the IRS was undermining America and the American idea, Bishop felt her tenure committee was working against her, Hassan felt he was being asked to participate in a religious war against his own religion. Stack and Bishop had first acted against their own families. Hassan, Bedell and Stack had all tried to argue their points in public and felt that only apocalyptic violence would make anyone listen. All had been significantly alienated for a period prior to their explosions. All were wildly self-destructive.



Ran Prieur, who I will continue to quote and correspond with even as the message board he founded lists (without him) into free-floating paranoia and casual anti-semitism, suggested this is the age of broken hearts. The trajectory from hard work to education to success is illusory, and a certain kind of person raised to believe in it is becoming the violent casualty. Those of us who were raised in a fundamentally stable world, have been asked since childhood to prepare for when we grow up, have carried around in our heads the stories of our own futures. We cannot live easily without them. For every paranoid person who shoots up their former factory line or office, there are a hundred news stories correlating a certain size uptick in the foreclosure rate with an increase in family violence. The fact is that people who are hungry will not burn down their own house in frustration, but people who have lost the narrative thread of their lives will- despair is more violent than starvation, and stories are more dear than bread.



In a sense, the eschatological mood in public discourse and politics, which is deemed partisanship but is perhaps more complex than that, is the same phenomenon write large. Unemployment, foreclosure, and a waning prominence in international politics are facts, but the stories we tell ourselves about them are neither disprovable nor fixed. Right now, the most common story seems to go like this: in our collective imagination, we the nation believed, in the forties and fifties, that our engineers and science and democracy would make the world a better place, but our best efforts were betrayed by the intrigues of shadowy cabals. In our collective imagination, we have been robbed of our future, and there is no clear future story of America. Beyond this point we will embrace anything- the rapture, the fraudulent election of a socialist muslim nazi to throw us into UN camps, an unusual number of zeros in an odd, local and otherwise poorly-understood Central American calendrical system- to return to our lives a narrative context of insight, struggle, and future triumph. There are variations, differences in the apportioning of blame, arguments about the permanence of the present economy, but pessimism seems uniformly predominant. In a sense, a national abruption is the master narrative into which foreclosed, fired, or frustrated individuals can contextualize their personal misfortunes.



We've seen what this sort of abruption can do to a paranoid individual. We've seen (yes, we have) what it can do to a nation in certain circumstances. Stack, Bedell, Bishop and Hassan all had selected a single enemy; the US has not yet decided which shadowy cabal should bear the blame for its troubles. We are losing our inhibitions around vengeance- today the US captured the first American charged with death-penalty treason since the Rosenbergs- and around class-aggregate punitive restraints, but we have shown no signs of either impending civil war (despite the Huffpost comment crowd) or military conflict with China (the other side.)



But, we do seem to like our dystopian sci-fi.



A

From: sophiism Date: Март 8, 2010 04:00 pm (Link) So nice to read your words again!



". . . this is the age of broken hearts:" When I suggested something like this a year ago, you said that, in fact, all of these murder/suicide rampages were indistinguishable from any other time in history. Do I have that right? Am I misreading what you had said? I bring it up because it gave me great pause. Ответить ) ( Thread From: tagonist Date: Март 8, 2010 04:12 pm (Link) Huh.



Crap. Well I don't know. I feel busted here. Murder-suicide rampages are not new, not by a long stretch, nor is their sensational reception (penny-dreadfuls and murder ballads make that clear) but... there's a sort of weird, isolated paranoiac theme here? Maybe this is just the human narrative tendency, the need to see everything in terms of agents and actors, and any time personal misfortune overtakes an individual, or national misfortune overtakes a country, there's a certain proportion who seek violent revenge? Definitely the story is that this is a new surge in the phenomenon, but perhaps that's always the story?



Maybe my point in this article is that one consequence of self-exculpatory persecution fantasies is redemptive violence?



Do you have a link to the other conversation? I may have changed my mind. I'm just worried that I had some insight then that I've lost now. Ответить ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: sophiism Date: Март 8, 2010 05:47 pm (Link) Before I find the link, I have to preface it by saying that "the age of broken hearts" is a much more elegant interpretation than mine. :-D Ответить ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: tagonist Date: Март 8, 2010 05:54 pm (Link) Blame Ran. He's choosy about his archives, though, so I can't give you a link to his first usage. I may even be able to claim this one... Ответить ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: greyhoundliz Date: Март 8, 2010 06:39 pm (Link)



For instance, in 1949, a WWII vet named Howard Unruh developed paranoid fantasies about his neighbors which, combined with his probable PTSD and possible closeted-ness, prompted him to kill thirteen people in Camden, NJ. In his own neighborhood. Whom he knew.



The immediate reaction was what you'd expect: lots of news coverage, exploration of Unruh's past, sensational descriptions of the killings, interviews with survivors, etc. It was thrilling.



The longer-term consequences are more interesting. By some accounts, this triggered, or certainly accelerated, the decline of that particular neighborhood of Camden. There were other factors, of course, including suburbanization and the arrival of the post-industrial age, but Unruh's actions, anti-social in the most basic sense of the word, are significant.



I don't know if there is more redemptive violence now than there used to be. We have fewer legitimate outlets for our violent tendencies, access to more, and more deadly, weapons than we used to, and greater access to information about individual people and events that happen far from home. I don't know if this means that we now perceive a pattern of violence that was not apparent before, or if we're now seeing a pattern in random actions, because we can see more action than once upon a time.



Another interesting question is, of course, whether there has been a rise in self-exculpatory worldviews. Are we less responsible than we used to be? Are we differently irresponsible?



Applying this question to the government is also very interesting...is the government less, or differently, (ir)responsible?



Applying it to our society writ large is also interesting. At least, I think so.





(There is also a somewhat disturbing outcropping of Wikipedia's tendency to organize things into lists: One consequence of self-exculpatory persecution fantasies (or, perhaps, narratives -- I think that for many of the actors in these situations, the persecution is reality, whether or not anyone else is plugged into that reality) is definitely redemptive violence. I think, though, that the consequences of that redemptive violence are more interesting than either the violence itself or the immediate reaction to it.For instance, in 1949, a WWII vet named Howard Unruh developed paranoid fantasies about his neighbors which, combined with his probable PTSD and possible closeted-ness, prompted him to kill thirteen people in Camden, NJ. In his own neighborhood. Whom he knew.The immediate reaction was what you'd expect: lots of news coverage, exploration of Unruh's past, sensational descriptions of the killings, interviews with survivors, etc. It was thrilling.The longer-term consequences are more interesting. By some accounts, this triggered, or certainly accelerated, the decline of that particular neighborhood of Camden. There were other factors, of course, including suburbanization and the arrival of the post-industrial age, but Unruh's actions, anti-social in the most basic sense of the word, are significant.I don't know if there is more redemptive violence now than there used to be. We have fewer legitimate outlets for our violent tendencies, access to more, and more deadly, weapons than we used to, and greater access to information about individual people and events that happen far from home. I don't know if this means that we now perceive a pattern of violence that was not apparent before, or if we're now seeing a pattern in random actions, because we can see more action than once upon a time.Another interesting question is, of course, whether there has been a rise in self-exculpatory worldviews. Are we less responsible than we used to be? Are we differently irresponsible?Applying this question to the government is also very interesting...is the government less, or differently, (ir)responsible?Applying it to our society writ large is also interesting. At least, I think so.(There is also a somewhat disturbing outcropping of Wikipedia's tendency to organize things into lists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_murderers_and_spree_killers_by_number_of_victims. Ответить ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: sophiism Date: Март 8, 2010 07:56 pm (Link) I can't find it! And the "advanced search function" doesn't work, and I was suppose to have my writing group essay done 2 days ago, and tonight we do the reading.



Maybe it was an exchange that came about through your journal and not mine? Ответить ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: velvet_tipping Date: Март 8, 2010 04:40 pm (Link) yay! you're back. Ответить ) ( Thread From: tagonist Date: Март 8, 2010 05:44 pm (Link) Yeah well, shall we just say more of this post is personal navel gazing than I would like? If I've disappeared here, its to spare you all the whining. Ответить ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: (Anonymous) Date: Март 9, 2010 04:37 am Aaron (Link) I hope this post works, most of the instructions appear to be in Russian (at least I think it's Russian)



A lot of the Crash Advice we've heard over the last few years has centered around the basic idea that we will need to find a way to defend ourselves from the great unwashed masses when they go hungry - but what you're saying is that it's the alienated professionals that we're going to have to look out for, people in expensive clothes with a crazed look in their eye.



I never totally bought into crash-paranoia anyway but this post makes me realise that aside from the general hysteria the advice also carries with it a fair amount of class, um, bias. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised.



Ответить ) ( Thread From: tagonist Date: Март 9, 2010 02:15 pm Re: Aaron (Link) Russian, yes. There's also a self-fulfilling prophecy at work in the LATOC vision of the future- if people become so convinced that the mutant zombie bikers are coming for them that they stash buttloads of food and start shooting at strangers they will, indeed, become the kind of dangerous and unwelcome individual that the rest of the world doesn't want around.



I'm not actually worried about a wave of heavily armed ex-engineers storming the neighborhood. Each of the individuals I wrote about had checked out of reality a long time ago. What they were acting out, though, was violent resentment and despair which, even if it doesn't reach the point of a shooting rampage, certainly impedes the functioning of a community. Every day I depend on dozens, maybe hundreds of people making tiny, unnoticeable sacrifices to get along- from someone asking the bus driver to wait on the person running down the block waving, to picking up dog poop in baggies, to smiling and telling jokes at the free book shelf. We live as if other people matter. There are a lot of ways to lose touch with that besides shooting up your employers.



I worry- and certain "crash advice" websites don't reassure me- that prosocial behavior is an obligation certain crashbloggers can't wait for an excuse to escape. In this way, they are the internet reflection of Bedell, Stack, Bishop and Hassan- well trained people who feel pulled down by... the rest of us? Is that what "anti-civilization" writing is? A conspiracy theory that blames it all on the existence of other people?



A Ответить ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: sophiism Date: Март 9, 2010 04:38 pm Re: Aaron (Link) 1.) Violence has a language. It matters how it is performed, and in what context. (This is why I tend to take notice of political assassinations.)



2.) "We live as if other people matter. There are a lot of ways to lose touch with that besides shooting up your employers."



Sometimes I wonder if some of this has to do with the souring of the myth of the self-made man. It's an impossible standard in which to live.



3.) Just in general, whether or not we choose to act out our disappointment, there is a malaise in our country. 9/11 did seem to set it off. But I think the potential had been there all along. Part of it does seem to be economic in origin. We work too much. We spend too much time in valueless escapism. And we console ourselves with gadgets and cheap goods. Our profound sense of individualism doesn't seem to have made us very happy.



4.) I think you are correct. We have lost our narrative. The stories we tell about ourselves matter. And nobody is prepared to hear that bad things sometimes happen to good people. No, because we are told just the opposite, that we get what we deserve. And it allows us to accept what we've done to the rest of the world, but not what we've done to ourselves. Ответить ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: tagonist Date: Март 9, 2010 05:04 pm Re: Aaron (Link) In re #4 (the rest will have to wait for chores)- Part of why this entry is so obtusely written is that I couldn't actually decide where I fell on this question. One possibility is what you say. The other, though, is that we have a strong, potent, and possibly explosive narrative, which is this: "we have no narrative; we lost it through diffidence, and our own weakness in the face of active subversion." That there is an internal contradiction in this story makes it all the more dangerous. What you say- cheap goods and escapism- are the scourges with which the penitent have flogged themselves since anyone started writing things down, certainly the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mara>Mara</a> fits this description. This ambivalence in my thinking is why the fact that <u>Gone To Soldiers</u> was written comparatively recently matters- along with our sense of cataclysm, we need to construct a peak from which we have slipped. Was it real? Are we more aimless now than in the forties? Or is "aimlessness" merely a self-reproach we use to expiate what we now believe are our sins? Collective self-reproach for percieved failure goes terrible places, historically, just as individual self-reproach went to a terrible place in the minds of Bishop, Stack, Bishop and Hassan. I am worried that what we are seeing in Sen. Bunning's shutdown of the highway department, or Sarah Palin's rejection of scientific authority, are the beginnings of an apocalyptic atonement that will become the struggle our culture feels it needs to justify its sense of meaningfulness. A metaphorical shooting rampage, if you will. Because, to bastardize Chekhov, if there are scourges in the first act, in the third act someone will bleed... Ответить ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: tagonist Date: Март 9, 2010 05:07 pm Re: Aaron (Link)



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara_(demon) This Mara, by the way (I had no idea there were so many): Ответить ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: (Anonymous) Date: Март 9, 2010 02:13 pm forge (Link) o/t but fyi (re the pics of your forge on the bio page)



"rocket stove" link (1 of many)



http://www.richsoil.com/rocket-stove-mass-heater.jsp



Lara's Dad Ответить ) ( Thread From: tagonist Date: Март 9, 2010 02:16 pm Re: forge (Link) Ah yes, rocket stoves. Always seemed neither fish nor fowl- neither good cookstoves (which are inefficient but make food) nor good mass heaters (which keep your house toasty but not your bread, so to speak) but so damned clever in their construction... Ответить ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: (Anonymous) Date: Март 9, 2010 03:27 pm Name (Link) (Her name was Amy Bishop, not Elizabeth -- thinking of the poet?) Ответить ) ( Thread From: tagonist Date: Март 9, 2010 04:50 pm Re: Name (Link) Ha ha! Damn! Whoops! Ответить ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: carnivalchic Date: Март 11, 2010 04:55 am (Link) remind me to re-watch and then write about the x-files. or better yet, write about and then re-watch and then write about the x-files. massively influential in my younger years; i was a hardcore x-phile all through puberty. i would really like to explore just the impact it had on me. Ответить ) ( Thread From: tagonist Date: Март 11, 2010 03:03 pm (Link) Hey, I still haven't called you. Do I have your number anywhere? Ответить ) ( Parent ) ( Thread From: joanhello Date: Март 11, 2010 02:55 pm (Link) Hi. I got to this LJ from Ran Prieur's site. Very impressed. Okay if I friend you?



Speaking of broken hearts: Last fall there was a longish essay in the Washington Post about the development of a formula in American post-apocalyptic movies. It's down now, as usual with WashPost content more than a couple of weeks old, but I'll try to summarize. The formula goes like this: civilization is brought down by some sort of McGuffin and an ordinary man has to cope, alone at first. Most of those around him are violent, crazy or both, but he meets an ordinary woman and rescued a lost child and the three fall directly into traditional family roles. Whatever happens in the movie after that, the family unit stands strong and is still together when the movie ends. The author saw the formula as wish-fulfillment for the kind of materially competent but interpersonally inept men who long for traditional family life, where all they would have to be is protectors and providers, without the stress-inducing modern requirement that they concern themselves with their wives' emotional needs.



Something similar has been projected as the underlying emotional rationale for LATOC predictions. I have noticed myself that the kind of society the Transition Towners and their allies are advocating, characterized by less competition and consumption, more cooperation and neighborliness, is the same one that's been advocated by followers of E. F. Schumacher and Christopher Lasch ever since this country urbanized in the 1950s on the grounds that humans are happier in the latter sort of society. I'm sure the advocates really would be happier in that sort of society, that they do find corporate jobs and shopping for manufactured goods at malls empty and meaningless. They are frustrated that the general public doesn't share their assessment and rise up to demand the small-is-beautiful society. However, since the majority seems disinclined to do so (being supposedly brainwashed into acquiescence) they look forward to a change in circumstances beyond human control that will finally force the world to conform to their fantasies. The TTers and permaculturalists and anti-civilization people (not the misanthropists but the anarcho-primitivists who don't think the neo-agrarians go far enough and want to return to tribal life) are the only ones I am aware of these days who seem to have some hope. Ответить ) ( Thread From: tagonist Date: Март 11, 2010 03:28 pm (Link) I agree- actually, that's one of my favorite ways to read Aliens - there's a lot of chaos and death and then suddenly look! Its Ripley, Bishop and Newt, a postmodern nuclear family. Oddly enough there's a similar strain in women's fiction; I read, in a row, Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation , Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees , and Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer all of which focus on women whose narrative arcs begin with frustrated solitude and end with unexpected fatherless children (though there may be a male partner somewhere in the picture.)



I'm not sure that women's emotional needs are a modern requirement for relationships! I think the story of male selfhood as unconcerned with same is fairly recent, but I also think we do a terrible job raising boys to anticipate and respond to anybody's emotions, even their own.



However, I wonder if the LATOC narrative isn't more concerned with professional and materialist failure than loneliness and the search for family. LATOC seems quite male, and grepping the word "wife" suggests... well, its ugly. Users seem confident that surviving a collapse will increase their appeal (the "provider/protector" role, as you describe) but there's nothing like the fire that burns against people who "have things" now but don't realize how their comfort is based on "lies." Women, and relationships with women, seem to be in the apocalyptic imagination one more spoil of war, one more reward tomorrow for detachment and correct belief today. The primary drive seems to be "freedom" from comparison to people who have done more, or better, in the current society, by the current culture's methods of accounting.



The transition town thing? Love it, actually. Has a bit of the airdrop-utopia problem, in common with permaculture, but that's a very fine grain of criticism. I was involved with an Ohio TT group when I was out there, and in fact wrote a series of essays for them that I've lost track of and wish I could import here. I feel like seeking a way for groups people to be happier is a much better goal than seeking a way for individuals to be the last one left alive. I've always used the evaluative criterion "would it be good to live that way now?" which falls heavily in favor of TT ideas, heavily against doomers, but perhaps another would be "if you could bring about this way of living at the cost of your own life, would you?"



By the way, of course you can friend. Ответить ) ( Parent ) ( Thread