Status:
Mostly in the garden today finishing the Big Read piece below, responding to a trenchant review of the book about the Weather Underground, the inspiration for that Leonardo DiCaprio movie you enjoyed recently. I think its length, and that I’ve been working on it for days, is a clear sign I need to get back to proper long-form writing on a dedicated blog. Hope you enjoy it. It could probably do with a couple more drafts and maybe I’ll come back to it once I’ve read the book it’s about, but these are supposed to be off-the-cuff notes, so here you go.
In other news I hung the shiny panel of hydroponic tent out of the front bedroom window and it kinda worked. Needs tweaking so it blocks more light, and I don’t have any way to secure it in the wind. Thankfully heatwaves days tend to be pretty still.
Big Read:
A Better World Is Not Possible — Did the Weather Underground have a point?
When I mentioned The Revolutionists on Sunday, the book I’m currently listening to about the men and women who did terrorism in the 1970s, I described them as “people who were best useful idiots […] and at worst evil fuckers” and after publishing felt a bit weird about it. As Emmett Rensin says in this review of Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young:
It is […] easier to sell a sympathetic book about the Weather Underground if you reassure your readers every 30 or 40 pages that of course political violence is wrong.
I’m not sure if political violence is right or wrong. I tend not to like violence just on principle and if pushed I’d struggle to define when it’s political or not. Isn’t all violence political? Whether you’re shooting an enemy combatant or pushing to the front of a queue you’re using force to reorganise the world and your place in it. That’s basically political.
What does seem fair to me is pushing back against violence with violence. Non-violent resistance has its place but sometimes you need to reply in the language of your oppressors, even as it erodes your humanity. Popular culture has a long traditional of celebrating the armed freedom fighter, from Suffragettes to the French Resistance, the Rebel Alliance to the French 75. But when we get them on our front door it’s all “oh, no, not like that. Not here.” In far off lands we can clearly see the goodies and the baddies. When it’s at home the lines are less clear. What if we’re actually the baddies? What if we deserve to get shot?
One man’s terrorist, and all that…
Rensin spends a long paragraph listing the heinous actions of the US government that convinced the Weather Underground they needed to fight back with explosives, then throws in a role reversal:
To ask whether or not it was morally justified to respond to all of this by making a spectacle of bombing empty buildings, one simply has to imagine the Iraqi government, suddenly possessed of the military power to avenge itself on the United States, flattening your neighborhood, setting fire to your city, poisoning your drinking water, sending armed men to execute your aging parents in their home—they voted for Bush after all, didn’t they? Then imagine that somewhere in Baghdad, some disaffected teenagers setting off a protest bomb in an empty office park. How strenuous your objection? How tightly might you clutch your pearls before some invading soldier ripped them from your neck as a trophy before setting fire to your home?
The political violence that is done in our names, with our tax revenue, that keeps us safe and comfortable, is uncomfortable to reckon with. The agencies that we entrust to protect us can also be turned against us should we drift too far from the status quo. Think of the Battle of Orgreave or the crackdown on New Age travellers, or the proscription of Palestine Action and arrest of anyone showing support.
Palestine Action feel spiritually close to the Weather Underground. Their aim is to do damage to the supply chain of war through criminal acts that, unless I’ve missed something, have not involved injury to humans. They have crossed a line by breaking laws that they see as immoral and so the state has declared war. Are they in the right? I don’t know. But I feel uncomfortable condemning them. Much easier to say they’re just doing it wrong, that they crossed a line, that they let their passions get the better of them.
And that’s really Emmett Rensin’s point, I think. That we who are so sure we would fight back against the Nazis in 1930s Germany, we who cheer at One Battle After Another and nod along to Luthen Rael, when push comes to shove we are remarkably slow to come around to the grim necessities of action. Partly that’s because those who do act first tend to be the annoying fringe extremists who’ve been ranting for years, but I suspect there’s a niggle of a reality check, that maybe it’s not actually worth it, that sense that maybe you benefit from the baddies being in charge.
To close the essay Rennin gives three choices in the face of state violence:
- To retreat into the psychic defense of unconscionable acceptance.
- The total and radical acceptance of these facts, of the impossibility of salvation in this life, of the inevitable passage through the veil of tears with eyes wide open.
- To try to blow up a police station. To run wild through the streets. To scream and not stop screaming. To do this knowing that you are very likely to lose, that you are certain to be mocked and feared, discredited and persecuted; to endure the relentless, reflexive, and stupid double standard of a cynical world, and die and be forgotten.
At some point over the last decade, once the reality of Brexit and Trump had slapped me around the face enough, it occurred to me that, if this all played out in the worst way, I might have to learn how to shoot a gun. I don’t want to shoot a gun. I will do everything I can not to shoot a gun. But I have to acknowledge that one day I might have to. I wonder if I’ll recognise the moment if/when it comes.
Reading:
- Book review: Heatwave — The Summer of 1976 – Britain at Boiling Point — On the 50th anniversary here’s an accounting of what it was actually like, not just the hazy childhood memories of climate-denying posh right-wing columnists. (The ebook is 99p on bookshop.org)
- Google’s exponential path to climate-wrecking digital bloat — A look at Google’s climate report on their energy usage. It’s through the roof, presumably due to all the inefficient AI they keep doing, which means they’re burning more fossil fuels because the grid hasn’t decarbonised fast enough. Here’s a thing — I have a memory that when Google needed more people to be on fast broadband internet they basically built it themselves. When they needed photos of every street they drove around and photographed them themselves. If they need all this energy why aren’t they building their own solar and wind farms? Oh yeah, they’re the bad guys now.
- The perpetual present-tense — Internet Princess, one of the really good young-folk-writing-about-culture people, takes the trend of handwringing about The Youth not horny fuckbeasts like we olds remember being back in the day, shows it to be nonsense by finding similar examples from the dark ages, and looks closely at the rhetorical “urgent-tense” where people are “increasingly” doing a wrong thing which has “become normalised”. We think we’re so special, us living in the now, but those of the way back when were no different. (It made me think of those cuneiform tablets from the Bronze Age that when translated contain curiously modern woes.)
- Olivia Wilde and Edward Norton on making The Invite — Big fan of Wilde’s directing and looking forward to this.
- Finder’s elite eliding — Text truncation of filenames in the MacOS Finder really is a masterclass in good computer interfaces.
- FIFA essentially forced American cities to run month-long experiments in public transit — Interesting piece by infrastructure guru Deb Chachra on Fifa’s requirement that all fans can get to stadiums without driving, something that is unthinkable in parts of the US, and how this can force a change in culture.
Would like to be reading:
- Dictionary of the Illegible — This sorely needs more than a paragraph of description as I really need to know more. Hopefully substantive reviews will emerge in time as “illegibility as a strategy for navigating a world increasingly governed by visibility, efficiency, and total surveillance” tickles a bunch of my interests. (If Fi’s also interested then we’ll probably buy a copy…)
Listening:
- In Our Time: Seashells — And so the first season without grumpy Marvin Baarg concludes. I think on balance Misha Glenny did a good job and I like his childlike enthusiasm. The topics under discussion started strong but the last few were a bit meh, to the point where I stopped listening. This one was pretty good, and tied into that piece about colours I posted the other day (namely structural colours that aren’t physically there but are produced by physically changing the reflected light frequencies), but I felt it could have gone deeper or weirder.