Great quotes from Q

I am close to completing my article on the novel Q. Not only does it breathe the spirit of Engels, Kaustky and Bloch on the revolutionary decades of the Reformation (as well as expressing Gramsci’s longing that the Reformation had happened in Italy too), but the authors obviously enjoyed writing the thing. So a few select morsels:

On memory:

The road through memories is hazardous and bumpy: they’re always ready to betray you (105).

April just makes me scratch my scars: the geographical map of lost battles (114).

A bag full of trinkets rolling out by chance and finally amazing you, as though you weren’t the one who picked them up and turned them into precious objects (251).

On prophets:

But during these past ten years I’ve known so many of them, on every street corner, in every brothel, in the remotest churches. My peregrinations have been so studded with those encounters that I could write a treatise about them. Some of them were merely charlatans and actors, others believed in their own sincere terror, but only a very few had the stuff of prophets, the brilliance, the ardour, the courage to repaint John’s great fresco in the souls of men. They were capable of choosing the right words, seizing situations, taking the gravity of the moment and filling it with the imminent event, bringing it into the present moment (138).

A beggar among beggars, with a load of unbearable letters, memories and suspicions (119).

I haven’t done too badly as an exterminating angel (149).

On theology:

A silent fart in the divine plan (172).

They arrived in a black rage, they went home pissed as farts (208).

On travel:

You just feel that things can’t go on like this, that the walls, inside and out, are getting too close for you, and that your mind needs some fresh air, your body needs to feel the miles passing beneath you (235).

 

How to request a couple of boat parts – ancient Egyptian fashion

The scribes of ancient Egypt certainly had their hands full with even the most simple of letters. For instance:

It is the servant of the estate Sekhsekh’s son Inetsu who addresses the lord (may he live, be prosperous and healthy), Sekhsekh’s son Penhensu: It is in order to learn about every favourable circumstance of the lord (may he live, be prosperous and healthy), that the servant of the estate has sent this letter. In the favour of Montu, lord of the Theban nome, of Amon, lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands, of Sobek, of Horus, of Hathor and of all the gods! It is as the servant of the estate desires that they shall let the lord (may he live, be prosperous and healthy), spend millions of years in life, properity and health, starting from today.

The servant of the estate has said: this is a communication to the lord (may he live, be prosperous and healthy), about sending me a rudder post of pine wood, a steering-oar of juniper, and a rudder-rest of ebony for the poop of your humble servant’s sea-going galley. Moreover, it is your humble servant’s poop. It is good if the lord (may he live, be prosperous and healthy) takes note.

If only we wrote memos or emails like that today. The astute reader may have noticed the egalitarian thread running through this note. Another example this Egyptian virtue, along with a dash of altruism, may be found in the letter of a landlord writing home (from another location) to the servants and others concerning some food shortages that have come to his notice:

Lest you be angry about this, look here … I’m responsible for everything so that it should be said: ‘To be half alive is better than dying outright’. Now it is only real hunger that should be termed hunger since they have started eating people here. and none are given such generous rations as I give you. Until I come back home to you, you should comport yourselves with stout hearts.

 

Theology: a compromise between the gospels and power

As I work through the proofs of In the Vale of Tears, I am reminded of Max Horkheimer’s finely dialectical  definition of theology:

Theology has always tried to reconcile the demands of the Gospels and of power. In view of the clear utterances of the founder, enormous ingenuity was required. Theology drew its strength from the fact that whatever is to be permanent on earth must conform to the laws of nature: the right of the stronger. Its indispensable task was to reconcile Christianity and power, to give a satisfactory self-awareness to both high and low with which they could do their work in a corrupt world. Like the founder who paid the price for refusing to show any concern for his own life and was murdered for it, and like all who really followed him and shared his fate or at least were left to perish helplessly, his later followers would have perished like fools if they had not concluded a pact or at least found a modus vivendi with the blood-thirsty Merovingians and Carolingians, with the demagogues of crusades and with the holy inquisition. Civilization with its tall cathedrals, the madonnas of Raphael and even the poetry of Baudelaire owes its existence to the terror once perpetrated by such tyrants and their accomplices. There is blood sticking to all good things. (Critique of Instrumental Reason, p. 36)

 

What was the Marseillaise of the Reformation?

Ein feste burg ist unser Gott:

Karl Kautsky, Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation, p. 277.

Or, if you want a version that’s been taken off the streets and institutionalised:

 

How to be truly radical: Karl Kautsky on theology

I have been thoroughly enjoying a careful reread of Karl Kautsky’s much neglected Vorläufer des neueren Sozialismus, especially the second volume. The translation is known as Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation. Not a bad title, since Kautsky has no problem speaking about Christian and heretical communism. More soon, but for now an insight that goes well beyond both Marx and Engels:

The more radical a social movement, the more theological are its party words (p.221).

His immediate reference is the Reformation. Immediate political and economic terms were expressed as such – bread riots, protests against landlords, etc. But when a movement gained in breadth and strength, it sought deeper and more radical expression. This is where it became thoroughly theological.

 

The ‘long leash’ of the CIA

So it’s official: the CIA fostered even communist sympathisers – artists and the rest of that desultory bunch of alcoholics – in its culture war with the USSR and global communism. At one point,

Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations.

Agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, even as travel writers for the celebrated Fodor guides. And, we now know, it promoted America’s anarchic avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism.

This was the “long leash”. The centrepiece of the CIA campaign became the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a vast jamboree of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists which was set up with CIA funds in 1950 and run by a CIA agent. It was the beach-head from which culture could be defended against the attacks of Moscow and its “fellow travellers” in the West. At its height, it had offices in 35 countries and published more than two dozen magazines, including Encounter.

Pity it didn’t seem to alleviate the cultural desert of American capitalism. (ht sk)

 

Why are things so expensive in Australia?

Not so long ago, most of the necessities of life were pretty cheap in these parts. A trip overseas meant haemorrhaging money and then returning with a debt to make your grandchildren’s embryos blanch. Now all that’s reversed, for visitors here, returnees from long voyages on the seven seas, and home dwellers all know that we pay among the highest prices on the planet – even surpassing Norway for many things.

Why? Many theories have been put forth:

1. Transport costs. This is crap, since transport covers about 7% of costs, as I am told by a recently retired head honcho in the world’s largest shipping firm.

2. Taxes. Nope. The goods and services tax is a measly 10%. This hardly explains the 100% markup (and more) on many goods from overseas. For instance, I can buy my favourite (and only) pair of shoes at less than half the price on the internet than in the local shoe shop.

3. High wages. True enough to some extent, since Australia has one of the highest average wages in the world, and a decent minimum wage. Hence the high cost of coffee, restaurant meals and so forth. But it still doesn’t explain everything, like those shoes.

4. High dollar. We’ve slaughtered the US dollar, the Euro, the pound. Great when you are on the road, but now it supposedly pushes up prices here. Not sure I can see how that obtuse argument works, for does it not push down the price of anything you buy overseas?

5. What transnational company executives think Australians will pay. There seems to be a bit more in this one. Music, software, computers, mobile phones … the list is long indeed. They all cost more here relative to prices overseas. Why? Because people keep paying for the damn things at the prices listed. Infamously, there is some software that costs more here than the airfare overseas and its purchase price somewhere else combined. Since some idiot will pay for it, the companies charge it.

That said, being a somewhat stingy bastard, I can say it is possible to live very cheaply indeed in the land of Oz. Less than $50 per week is no problem at all.

 

Two questions regarding the Boston bombers

As an outside observer to the intense discussion under way concerning the Boston bombers, two questions keep coming up.

1. In searching for a reason, the genuine puzzlement seems to conceal a massive blind spot. I have seen radical Islam, the dreadful Russian government, the fierce independence of Chechens, dislocation in the USA … Studiously avoided is any self-examination: how are we to blame?

2. To follow on: now that the brothers seem to have been Muslim, they can be slotted into a convenient string of successful and foiled ‘terrorist’ attacks. But why are they not part of the sickening pattern of ‘domestic’ massacres that happen with banal regularity? Sandy Hook is the name of only the most well known recent one. After all, were not the Boston bombers long-time residents of the USA? Enough time to notice how one expresses a grievance.

 

From separatists to terrorists: the Boston bombers

A couple of years ago I was at a conference in Yalta, in the Crimea. Those attending were from the various states of the former USSR, so the language of the conference was Russian. One participant from Rostov pointed out at length that when an attack is made on the USA, the UK or somewhere like that, the perpetrators are called – by the respective politicians and media outlets – ‘terrorists’. But when an attack is made in Russia by, say, the Chechens, they are called ‘separatists’ or ‘independence fighters’ – seeking independence of course from the evil Russian state.

Scroll forward: of Chechen origin too is the last surviving suspect of the Boston bombings, although he and his dead brother have been resident and studied in the USA for some time. Now of course they are called ‘Chechen terrorists’, and Muslim to boot. No one seems to call them ‘separatists’ and ‘independence fighters’ now.

 

Trawling the trash: the ‘economics of religion’

One of the disadvantages of any project is that you need – as the Americans say – to trawl for trash, or at least know what is not worth using. As I set my mind to the Idols of Nations project, I have come across yet more of the innocuously named ‘economics of religion’ crap. To wit, an anthology edited by Rachel McCleary in the Oxford handbook series, and a journo book by Larry Witham. This stuff used to be called – and still is in some circles – ‘rational choice’ theory. All of that is a cover for neoclassical economics applied to religion. You know the drill: models of the ‘market’, supply and demand, self-interest, comparative advantage, all the while kowtowing to Adam Smith and his great myth. Sheer depravity if you ask me, removing the epithet ‘neoclassical’ or indeed ‘neoliberal’ and thereby absolutising it as ‘economics’. Nor have they noticed that in most situations, we don’t rationally choose the best option, but usually the worst.