clumsy email to a perfectly multi-lingual friend from another culture

dear friend and comrade, sister and brother,

thanks for that clipping — yes, it’s distressing, alright — all the more so because this is so typical of us as a people — at most, we wring our hands over the crimes committed in our name, shed a tear or two and then go about life with our totally spurious feeling of entitlement left fully intact

i agree with what you wrote to X about us — you put it very succinctly

since you ask, let me try to explain, however clumsily, my current thoughts and feelings about my people and the state of our so-called avant-garde poetry

we’re individualists — i use the word in the most pejorative way — it’s not that i believe that people aren’t individuals, of course!

most of us have no real sense of ourselves as individuals, not in the sense that you or i and people like us would have, or try to have, or insist upon

gringos, but not only gringos, of course!, tend not to feel part of a community that we must support simply because we know it supports each one of us for the sake of the good of all — there is no such community in our country; capitalist ideology and the false democracy of our two-party government prevents us from engaging in a nationwide discussion of what such a community would look like

most of us feel no deep responsibility to any community outside our immediate families (the nuclear family, bastion of heterosexual supremacy!), on any level, never mind the whole planet and all the living and “unliving” things it shelters

instead of that feeling of deep responsibility, we allow ourselves to be submerged into our state and its cultural apparatus — in a very real way, yes, we are blind to the rest of the world

i firmly believe that humanity’s natural state is anarchism in it’s most rational form — autonomous interdependence is what we desire instinctively, but such a state of being isn’t conducive to the endless consumption that capitalism requires — if society were based not upon profit but serving the basic needs of all people — i repeat: all people — then things would be very different — we’d have a rationally planned economy and an anarcho-syndicalist society — that’s communism, or communalism, or socialism, or anarchism, or democracy, whatever you like to call it

we’d live in a state of permanent revolution, but it would be an intellectual, peaceful revolution rooted in the daily life of a self-aware body politic based on common ownership of the means of production and absolute respect for the planet we share with all other creatures and things — that body politic would include all and respect the needs of everyone as individuals and members of a collective made up of a plurality of interdependent collectives — our labor, our beautiful ingenuity would be turned toward keeping each other alive and happy and healthy; educating one another in the arts and sciences and the search for objective historical truths; ensuring that those who suffer from disease and our physically or mentally handicapped sisters and brothers can lead full, dignified lives as integral and fully-accepted and yes, beloved members of our plurality; and, in many ways most importantly, preventing any one person or group from grabbing social and economic dominance and creating a class structure all over again, thus once again preventing the majority of us from reaching our full potential... that’s my hope for the future in a nutshell

we need to feel part of a community, but this instinct, our deepest instinct, our creaturely social pulsion toward warmth and cooperation, has been repressed and smothered in the majority of us and even in some cases destroyed

it is capitalist white male heterosexuals who are the real perverts among us! what other word can you use to describe our president? and what does that say about tragic beings like colin powell and condoleeza rice?

we gringos are a very conformist, unthinking people who have been ruthlessly and successfully propagandized into believing that our indentities are supplied by what we consume, i.e., what kind of music we listen to, what kind of car we drive, our brand of sneakers, the television shows we watch, which celebrities we worship, what kind of poetry we write and consume, and all of this is regulated, maintained and enforced though television, cinema, corporate pop culture, “high culture” as controlled by our corporate university system, etc etc etc, all of which is interwoven in a very powerful form of systemic political coercion — basic components: triumphalism, exceptionalism, nationalism and patriarchal white heterosexual supremacy kept viable by constant denigration of interior enemies: women, non-heterosexuals, indigenous people, people of color and a dehumanized exterior enemy: currently islam and, increasingly, hugo chávez

all of it can be very subtle, even unnoticable to far too many of us — most of us think we’re the best people on earth and that we live in a nation whose ruling elite has never done anything bad except by wholly forgivable error! as if negroponte in honduras, as if abu ghraib (to name only two of the myriad ugly faces of capitalist imperialism) were forgivable, mistakes, or even unpremeditated...

we’re obsessed with personal appearance, youth, hipness, cool, all of which is ancillary bullshit; those obsessions, which are manufactured by the mass media, serve to keep us off-balance, always uncomfortable in our own bodies, our own beings — our extreme discomfort around issues of gender, sexuality and desire serves the same purpose

it’s not seamless — in fact it’s quite transparent, which is why you feel flummoxed by us! i mean, you can see right through it! your heart and mind work together and you have friends here, quite a few, who are like you — you think critically and feel generously, i know this about you — and i thank you for not telling me that you have it so much better in your country!

so few of us are taught or even encouraged to think critically — our educational system (which has given rise to the production line of MFAs in creative writing) doesn’t allow critical thinking for the majority of us and never has — even for the most privileged of us, critical thinking follows a prescribed set of boilerplate assumptions about human nature and politics

i can’t tell you why i keep searching for clarity, why i care so much about righteousness and solidarity — but i think it has something to do with having had to struggle in life, intellectually, economically, psychologically, above all, emotionally — you know all about that! — and at the same time realizing that i’m no better or worse than those around me, which realization does elude me sometimes, but it’s the struggle that counts, i know that very well and am committed — that’s what matters and that’s why you and i are friends — politics are important to both of us, just as important as the poetry we've helped each other make through our solidarity as people who are artists

all those who buck the educational system get attacked/ marginalized/ co-opted — this has been particularly obvious lately, if you’ve followed the news about ward churchill and other professors... ammiel alcalay was recently attacked on frontpagemag.com by a venomous right-wing zionist who calls herself a poet

well, the upshot of all this is that the ideology of the ruling class is always the regnant ideology — the ruling class the world over is euro-centric (in the broadest sense of the term), heterosexual white male supremacist, amoral, parasitical, totally aware of and totally unconcerned about the effect their actions have on the majority of their fellow humans

in a society based on profit and only profit, what else can most of us be but greedy place-seeking careerists? this is what we really mean by “individualism”!

some of us can see and, seeing, struggle — it’s specially difficult for most of us white folks, especially heterosexual white male folks, but it’s more or less difficult for everybody to see, not so much that they are oppressed, but that all oppressions are in place to keep us at odds with one another and to hide the brutal facts of exploitation by the ruling class and the power elites (abu ghraib, again)

can i suggest a couple of absolutely brilliant books?

silvia federici’s “caliban and the witch — women, the body and primitive accumulation”

sharon smith’s “women and socialism — essays on women’s liberation”

both should be required reading

you can find a bunch of stuff by smith online — she’s a feminist socialist with a real gift for clarity — combative, honest and righteous

smith and federici have helped me enormously

in an earlier email, i rejoiced that real marxists are beginning to think much more deeply about gender oppression and racism — lack of attention to these issues has hobbled the left for the better part of two centuries, so this is a real sign of hope for unification and further struggle

i’ve seen little or no hard political analysis from the LGBT community, to which you do and do not belong, dear sister and brother — but i look for it all the time — socialist and anarchist feminist critique has gone far in clarifying the issues of gender identity and gender oppression — i say that as a white heterosexual male, of course —, but if you know of any such marxist political analysis (not literary theory, i know a lot of that) coming from the LGBT community, in english, spanish or portuguese, please tell me about it!!!

i also suggest stan goff, an ex-special forces sergeant, who has become, in his words, “red as a baboon’s ass” — he’s an erudite, committed feminist, anti-racist, anti-war activist — i admire him tremendously — his new book is about gender and rape in the military — a unique figure on the left

this is all very hopeful because as a people we have a great, great history of class struggle — if it’s happened before, it can happen again, and it will, when things get bad enough for enough of us — right now, the left is fractured and still sectarian, but it’s changing

we’re edging toward a resurgence of fascism (which never really goes away, does it?), so these changes, these recent developments, are a sign of hope

you ask my opinion of the so-called language and so-called post-avant poets — as you know, this is a very contentious issue among us! — i’m afraid i’m going to have to break my own rules and allow myself the poisonous luxury of ad hominem attack

while i respect them all as artists and especially admire the women for their tough-minded refusal to allow men to dominate them, the poetry and theory of the so-called language poets is actually of lesser interest to me than their social function in the 70’s, 80’s and into the 90’s

as you have intuited, Ron Silliman’s interminable spouting about “community” is particularly galling to some of us because his definition of community has precious little to do with anything i’ve written above — as you’ve noticed, he sort of pretends it does, sometimes, but we see right through him — he is utterly transparent to us — we remember some of the things he’s done in the past — we’re not like most gringos, who are trained to have an historical memory that lasts about a week! among other things, he unambiguously supported the invasion of afghanistan

he also attempted to discredit one of the poets associated with langpo by spreading ignorant, malicious falsehoods about a member of her family — a typical Ron Silliman move

her response to him is a wonderful example of a strong and intelligent woman standing up and refusing to be silent — let me quote her as she quotes one of her friends at the end of a public email:

“Ron Silliman seems to be like a right-wing commentator on one of those right-wing talk shows. He says he is left-wing but he demonstrates no goals, beliefs, or actions that are left-wing.”

i’d say it somewhat differently (and even more condemningly, for those who understand): while ron silliman is a very talented poet with an impressive and influential body of work to his credit; and while i have no doubt that he loves and dotes upon his family and close friends, all the available evidence makes Ron Silliman the Poet, Critic and Public Intellectual seem to be a democratic leadership council worshipping, clintonite, neo-liberal, ex-radical gasbag with a terminal case of short man’s complex (here i impugn Silliman’s masculinity, a grotesque move worthy of a right wing commentator, wholly unworthy of me...) whose mostly eurocentric, mostly north american, wholly chauvinist, remarkably predictable erudition is matched only by his arrogance and his incredible capacity for falling into the most obvious logical fallacies when writing about poets who’ve got his number

i’ve allowed myself to commit the most obvious and inexcusable logical fallacy of all, but The Poet, Critic and Public Intellectual Ron Silliman deserves all the scorn we can heap upon him, because his recent actions and positions — his apostasy (and not only his) — have made it very difficult for many young poets and intellectuals to perceive the true, lasting and immense value of the langpo project (ron silliman was arguably their most prominent and consistent spokesperson, as you know), which was an highly organized utopian revolutionary social movement within our poetry — it fell apart due to it’s own contradictions, but so have all revolutionary social movements of the past — let us continue to hope for the present and the future!

yes, langpo was amazing in it’s time — from the outside, it looked to many like a bloc of arrogant little prigs, but their many detractors were wrong: within the group, there was an admirable ferment of research, self-critique and collective development and enablement — most importantly, after a while, women spoke up loudly and clearly, with great insight and intelligence — i don’t know if all of the men were fully comfortable with it, but i’ve always assumed they were

that some of the langpos seemed to have claimed in youthful arrogance that they were reconciling all the contradictions is no matter, for such foibles are excusable, given the historical context of severe attack and incomprehension

i was one of those who had no clue at the time, i admit it, but have come to see the truth of the matter: early langpo was a circumscribed revolutionary struggle which, like the avant-garde before it, was defanged by its entry into academia, which it had originally opposed

if there’s one logical fallacy i simply will not commit, it’s the one most favored by all right-wing hacks (after ad hominem itself): post hoc ergo propter hoc — maybe The Poet, Critic and Public Intellectual Ron Silliman, like so many ex-radicals, believes that marxism is bankrupt — maybe he was just faking it all along — i have no way of knowing

while there are a good number of exceptions that prove the rule, the way our society operates (see above) has made official Post-Avant Poetry USA, as promulgated by The Poet, Critic and Public Intellectual Ron Silliman and other literary demagogues like him, into a tangle of petty-bourgeois intellectual hedging and qualifying caused by political despair and ethical confusion; an orgy of careerism and endless public back-scratching; a crisis of literary overproduction; and the obscene spectacle of a gang of privately unscrupulous operators with righteous public faces engaged in a culturally-stunted circle jerk, while our ruling elites... but i don’t have to tell you about our ruling elites! you know what they’re up to!

dear friend and comrade, brother and sister, i hope this goes some way toward answering your questions and helping you to understand all of us sad, twisted gringos and the confused state of poesia da vanguarda in our country

remember that this is only me writing and that there are all too many among us who are completely incapable of understanding what i’ve written and will feel attacked, even though it’s obvious that i’ve attacked only one person, and in a very specific way (remember that i’ve insisted that there is an objectively measurable difference between the private and the public man!)

i’ve attacked The Poet, Critic and Public Intellectual Ron Silliman for a very good reason: i know i’m no angel, but this copyrighted public entity, who wasn’t always a commodity, has traded a noble attempt at moral clarity, however contradictory it may have been back in the heroic days of an avant-garde moment, for the promise of cultural hegemony held out to him by the petty-bourgeois intellectuals and bureaucrats of the MLA, who are the sworn enemies of our anarchic and pacific solidarity built upon the often fragile foundation of our mutual respect, cultural labor and hard-won hope

well, such is the way of it — the search for objective historical truth is still undervalued in these post-postmodern times, and some of these poor bastards will start red-baiting in a veritable frenzy, if they even have the courage to respond to me at all (i’ll ignore the worst of them and demand reasoned critique of my positions from the best) but someone has to speak clearly and angrily about these things, again and again, however clumsily, however ignored by the majority — if not, the smarmy fucks will have blathered each and every one of us into submission

enough!

today is saturday — laundry day, hurrah! why is it that i enjoy such dopey, simple, domestic things? well, i know the answer to that question, of course, as do you

tonight, like every saturday night, i’ll have dinner and watch a DVD with my brother-in-law, who is my exact opposite in so many ways — a well-off, harvard-educated capitalist, socially liberal — we talk about these things — he’s extremely intelligent — i suspect he humors me, at least some of the time, but that’s OK because he helped my little sister live a decent, creative life for about ten years before her final illness set in and she rejected him — he knew all along that she was HIV-positive, and yet he married her, was good to her, accepted her past as a junky prostitute, warmly supported and nurtured her talent and creativity — there’s a deep well of kindness in him and he’s also very creative — he’s an actor — you should see him in a noël coward play! — i love him very much — so, it’s gonna be a good day, despite, despite...

yours in friendship, solidarity and siblinghood,
chris