What if in the shaky super power in decline, the United States of America, tottering on the brink of disaster, the next turn of events was a popular mutiny against the gradual, little-charted American Counter-Revolution that has been going on for decades?
In these times in which America’s leaders threaten the planet with Armageddon, the future of man seems precarious. The violence marking American civilization -- the terrorism of the state directed against its own people, its citizenry armed to the teeth and taser-armed police out of control and the government promising nuclear wars to come -- threatens the rest of the world.
The perception of the hopelessness and desperation in the American air today recalls the mood in post-World War II Europe expressed by the Existentialist movement. After the massacres of civilians in Iraq and repeated American declarations of preemptive war, I feel something similar to that of European writers then who wondered what poets could write about after the Holocaust and 40 million dead. In the aftermath of the destruction of whole civilizations, the Existentialists held that individual men, not governments, have to create the meanings of their own lives. Many Americans should feel something analogous today.
The writers Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre depicted people as free and, therefore, responsible for what they make of themselves. In their view, that responsibility was too heavy a burden for man to bear and caused in him desperation. The human condition, which the Existentialists described, marked by fear, boredom, alienation, the absurd and the sense of nothingness, calls to mind the prevalent mood in the USA and parts of Western Europe today.
The atmosphere of desperation
In Camus’ poetical essay based on Greek mythology,
The Myth of Sisyphus, Sisyphus is condemned to push a heavy stone up a hill for all eternity. Each time he reaches the summit, the rock rolls back downhill, and each time he stoically begins his task again. For Camus, Sisyphus’ commitment to such a senseless task reflects both man’s nobility and his desperation.
Likewise for the Italian Existentialist, Alberto Moravia, desperation was man’s natural state. In
his novel, The Time of Indifference, Moravia was absorbed by the theme of desperation. His characters are unable to communicate with each other or express themselves. To the degree that they are aware of their condition, they become incapable of action, desperate and superfluous like the intellectuals of 19th century Russian literature.
Camus and Moravia’s protagonists are relatives: indifferent and incapable of a relationship with the world, marked by skepticism, despair, escapism and panic.
How modern they ring today! How 21st century America!
Hopelessness
You watch the TV news and you wonder why things are the way they are. Why are millions of America’s Mexican neighbors compelled to sneak into the United States and live a dog’s life just to eat? Though it is true that because of the missing social idea, America’s poor are poorer than Europe’s poor, Mexico’s poor are much poorer.
Contrary to the opinions of some pseudo-sociologists and smug capitalists, Mexicans illegals do not work on the skyscrapers of Dallas or wash dishes in cafeterias in Atlanta or pick fruit in California because they are enamored with Yankee life. They grovel for existence for the simple reason that man must eat to live. It is evident that something is startlingly and tragically out of whack in America.
A flashback: History, brutal and reductive, tells the story of the Etruscan civilization in a few words: they appeared from somewhere, flourished for nine centuries, their kings ruled Rome for hundreds of years, and then they declined and vanished. One might judge that the Etruscans deserved to disappear. For though they were mystics, they became the world’s first international arms dealers after developing the iron weapons that changed the nature of warfare. A money-minded people they sold their powerful arms to the rest of the world. They were capitalists who had slaves to do the work, man their ships, fight their wars and finally even govern them. They, too, depended on the brain drain from abroad to enrich and develop their civilization. In reality, the mysterious Etruscans had two things in mind: fun in the here and now in a life of comfort and ease and preparation for the same in the hereafter.
The corollary between the Etruscan civilization and the Beelzebub atmosphere in contemporary America is clear as day: indifference to the real world, a search for diversion at all costs, the widespread contentment with cheapened life-style, and the devil take the hindmost.
Is hope enough?
If man’s desperation over his condition of helplessness to change things prevailed in every moment, man would be unable to resist suicide. That relatively few people kill themselves testifies to the role of hope as in the Sisyphus myth. In the day-to-day desperation of our lives, hope in something indefinite is a source of our salvation.
So what is hope? And is it enough? In my Rizzoli encyclopedia the first definition offered for
speranza, that is hope, is “a feeling of trust in the future.” Or, secondly, hope “is the person or the thing in which one places one’s trust.”
For the religious, hope is faith in God’s saving grace; others however count on the redeeming force of ideas and ideology.
The realist is justified in asking if it is reasonable to have hope in this insecure world. Reason whispers in our ear that, no! the world condition does not justify hope. In that sense, hope is deceptive, a masquerade, and leads us down twisting paths toward cynicism, and eventually carries us back again to our original desperation.
And the process starts over again.
Maintain a sense of measure, reasonable people advise. Reform is the route. Keep things within due proportions! As if anything has ever really changed without exceeding ordinary limits, without exaggeration. Man is not so reasonable. For how much stupidity is repeated over and over in the name of reason?
The repetitive mutation from desperation to hope and back to desperation, over and over again, demonstrates that we are not creatures of reason, no more than was poor Sisyphus pushing his rock up the hill again and again. Because of man’s unreason his hope like his desperation returns over and over.
A vicious circle! What else but folly is the repetitive destruction of civilizations and their rebirth each time? Europe has built and rebuilt its magnificent cities of cathedrals and palaces and fountains and parliaments only to destroy it all time after time. Then, immediately after each devastation, irrational humans join forces, relentless like ants, and rebuild everything. Then, just as irrationally, they organize another war and destroy it.
The process has gone on and on throughout history. The first Rome was destroyed by Etruscans 2,500 years ago, and then rebuilt. Then another Rome, the magnificent city of stone, of Empire marble from Spain and Gaul, from Tripolitania, Numidia, Egypt, and Greece and Asia -- violet marbles, serpentine greens and pearly-grays and blues, obelisk granite, porphyry and Africano and imperial reds -- was destroyed again and again by Vandals and other invaders, before in an act of hope people rebuilt it. The horizontal layers of earth and stones and remains of former civilizations under the surface of the eternal city today are emblematic of mankind’s madness.
Also the World Trade Center is emblematic of human folly. Men built, then in a moment of lucid folly, destroyed the WTC. Then, a new idea for its rebirth emerged like a shaft of light from the filth and the deception and the desperation that had brought down its towers.
Philosophers conclude that it is not reason or ideas or intelligence that save the world. Some believe it is man’s senseless hope, his insistence on survival, his necessity of breathing to the last breath, his stupid, stubborn resistance . . . and his heroism. His resistance is proof that hope has thus far been stronger than his desperation because hope has won out in each phase of the struggle for survival.
Yet hope is not enough
Hope! The verb and noun come down to us from Middle English in the present meaning of “to hope that things will turn out all right.” Hope is the opposite of the rare word,
wanhope that is hopelessness and despair. The word includes the German cognate
Wahn, madness. Wanhope is thus a “crazy” brand of despair, and by extension, desperation.
Wanhope recalls the nightmares of those dark and deformed figures lurking in your subconscious, in ambush, waiting to waylay you, threatening you with unidentified dangers and you try to run away but your legs are leaden and refuse to carry you and desperation inhabits you and you can only hope for magic salvation.
Hope as revolt
For Camus, hope is based on revolt against the desperation of life that would propel man to collective suicide. Perhaps revolt is even a derivative of hope, for fortunately hope is also collective. It is a collective revolt that each individual shares with others in the name of a better future.
In that sense hope mutates into solidarity -- solidarity in collective revolt. When man revolts he joins others in an act of hope. Hope and solidarity and resistance and revolt are paradoxically a desire to restore order after the destruction.
We resist a purely linear existence of birth to death because we realize that circular and reversible existence is merely hopeful illusion. Thus to avert the morphing of hope into illusion, in the long run hope has to rely on revolt.
Yet the brutal reality is that hope and revolt are not enough for salvation this time. Hope and solidarity and revolt can lead the way but more will be required this time around.
An interlude for a look at what we have over us
It sometimes seems foolish to dispute what form of government is best. Historically, people have often found better forms of government among foreigners. At the time of the French Revolution enlightened persons of the world looked to Republican Paris, others favored Napoleonic modernizers. Warlike Prussia had its admirers, as did Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Mussolini’s Italy was applauded because for a time the dictator made Italy work. Using such historical yardsticks, some believe that the time of the United States of America as a model for the world has run out.
In the West today two fundamental views of the role of government stand in opposition: that of America and that of continental Europe. For the last three decades America has been under the spell of a conservative ideology concerning the unlimited rights -- as a rule referred to by themselves as
freedom -- of the wealthy classes, the magnates and the oligarchs, the rich upper 5 percent of the population.
Parts of continental Europe see this instead as an ideological challenge to their more humane values in matters of social justice as for example universal health care and welfare.
Freedom in capitalist USA has come to mean freedom for the rich to become richer while political power has rejected the already meager social instincts in the nation, such as the feeble attempt of the Clinton administration to introduce the basic concepts of universal health care.
It smacks too much of socialism.
[I would SO argue that this was NOT TRUE; it was set up to be a red herring . it was never intended to succeed!]
Any economist knows that steeply graduated taxation is the most direct route to finance universal health care and education and the redistribution of national wealth.
But that is precisely what conservatives reject.
European progressives, though each day ceding ground to free-market globalization, are cognizant of the social responsibility of the state to care for its citizens. European leaders know they must at least
seem to act in the general interests of their electors, of the have and have-nots alike.
Anyone with eyes to see has been able to follow the effect of savage American capitalism on the traditional European social model. The American model threatens the social state Europe constructed over a century of struggle. The Great Britain of Tony Blair -- once the darling of European Reformist Socialism and the welfare state -- succumbed, and has been a Trojan horse within the European community for a decade.
The effects are highly visible today, as the British government in the bear hug of conservative America has drifted further and further from its original European values. As in the USA, the gap between rich and poor has widened dramatically -- first in Great Britain and now in much of Europe. Today, the preference for market freedoms to the state’s role as the re-distributor of wealth is increasingly visible.
Conservatives charge that when progressives refer to the rights of society they are in reality speaking of greater roles for the state. That is true. That is the point. The failure of last year’s referendum in favor of the European Union Constitution in France and The Netherlands reflects the anti-globalization instincts reigning in the “social” part of Europe, which sees the European Union as a conglomerate of multi-nationals based on the American model.
The image of a “bad America” -- with its 737 military bases in over 100 world countries, its CIA night flights carrying terrorist suspects to mysterious destinations for torture, and its last-man-alive philosophy -- is common and spreading in West Europe today.
Yet America and Europe are not two separate civilizations, but branches of the same West, which dialogue and influence each other.
Perhaps it is true that Europe cannot economically afford to return to socialist models of a century ago. Nonetheless it stands at a crossroads. It can favor socially responsible government and search for more equitable redistribution of wealth. Or it can abandon its social heritage and choose the American route of a state that does little for its citizens.
On the other hand, the United States most certainly cannot afford to continue in the savage anti-social direction of the last three decades without facing an unstoppable social upheaval at home and more and more ostracism abroad. Instead of dictating its anti-social values to the rest of the world, it would do well to listen to foreign voices.
The future that hope hopes for
Searching for the proper word for what might happen in America on the heels of popular resistance to its burgeoning police state, I came on the old concept of
mutiny.
At first mutiny might sound like much too little considering the present desperate state. The 1954 film
The Caine Mutiny with Humphrey Bogart depicts the mutiny against a paranoid naval Captain whose madness has nearly caused the destruction of the warship USS Caine. The theme of mutiny runs through American history and literature -- ship revolts as in Jack London’s
Mutiny of the Elsinore and Melville’s slave revolts, and for that matter, the mutiny in the execution of the American Revolution itself.
Rebellion against unjust power remains a leitmotiv in the American imagination. With that tradition in mind Americans and their present rulers must wonder when the next explosion will arrive and what form it will take. For today the gap between rulers and people is unbridgeable and some people are re-learning the sense of social solidarity.
Widespread resistance has set in.
So what comes next? In a mature people, the passage from one step to the next in the dialectical chain above appears historically ineluctable. Once underway, such a process doesn’t just stop.
What if in the United States of America -- shaky super power, today in decline and tottering on the brink of disaster -- what if the next step were mutiny against the gradual, little-charted Counter-Revolution in America in motion for decades.
The problem is that the masses of America appear surprisingly nonchalant about their lost freedoms. Many snicker at suggestions of any kind of revolt or rebellion. Many even still see America as the cradle of democracy and freedom.
But is the idea of mutiny far-fetched? Is it science fiction, the image of people in revolt? In a situation in which the rulers crush the people under an avalanche of police state laws and the people exercise their constitutional right to bear arms, what if the same people wake up and metaphorically turn their guns on their oppressors?
The Argentine writer, Ernesto Sabato, says that the very worst social situation is that in which fear reigns and man becomes an automaton, no longer responsible or free. The most hopeless situation is that of a humanity that ignores its own interests and continues to think childish thoughts and to play children’s games.
Out of unawareness or complacency, out of acceptance or passivity, and as a result of the pervasive cradle-to-grave brainwash, the masses of American society seem placated by Power’s assurances that theirs is the best way of life.
While Power has gone about creating its police state it has kept the people asleep and apathetic, obese and content, and holding many millions of less fortunate in ignorance. While complacency is based on the illusion of freedom, the passive people are inoculated against external influences by an ignorance of history and flag-waving patriotism.
Meanwhile as the educated, aware, upper middle classes become poorer and more dissatisfied, the use of fear to keep them in line is necessary. In the home of the brave, fear continues to intensify as seen in the new laws of the controlled society.
The fear of fear is a new American reality.
And the fear is justified.
Naomi Wolf in her “10 easy steps to Fascism” recalls that a government can stop dissent quickly with just a little torture of the dissidents. The 10 easy steps to American Fascism have already been made: creation of an external threat, ready secret prisons, formation of paramilitary forces, surveillance of citizens, infiltration of civilian organizations, arbitrary arrests, targeting key individuals, press controls, labeling criticism as sedition and dissent as treason and subversion of the rule of law.
Everything -- laws and the means of enforcing them -- is already in place.
Revolution
The romantic word revolution is terrifying. There is just reason to mistrust it. Even the Beatles did in their famous song,
Revolution. Since the heroic times of the American and French revolutions and the Great Russian Revolution the word has degenerated and been misused. The student revolution of the 1960s, though leaving behind many lasting effects, petered out after the Vietnam War. China’s Cultural Revolution has not yet been digested. The so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine comes to mind as an example of a political class abusing the very word.
Let’s don’t confuse
revolution with either mere reform on one hand or with armed insurrection on the other. Insurrection is a local, usually spontaneous and one-issue matter. Reform is adjustment made by the rulers in order to maintain power as happened in Tsarist Russia. As a rule, reforms are too little and too late.
Since drastic and radical social-political change
should be the goal of thinking Americans today, everything that inhibits social solidarity, the blossoming of resistance and the creation of a rebellious mindset against a negative myth are obstacles to be overcome.
Wait a minute! A myth? What myth? In this case -- the myth is America itself.
For how can you battle a myth, the Greeks wondered? In the aftermath of the fall of Troy, Menelaus stood before Helen with his sword raised: he, the victor, stared at her, the traitor, and let his sword fall. He couldn’t kill her. Like a reflection in the water, Helen was a myth. Menelaus had to wonder how you can kill a myth without killing the water, too.
Born out of solidarity and resistance, the United States of America has always harbored violence in its soul. A parallel violent world lives within American society, one world atop the other, each independent of the other. In America, violence and war are so much a part of life that sometimes non-violent opposition to this inbred violence seems to be hopeless folly.
In comparison to America’s own terrorism and violence, al-Qaeda is stuff for babies and schoolgirls: homegrown violence is always just a heartbeat away from mainline life. In comparison to today’s institutional violence and terrorism, past student protest with its slogans of non-violence or pistol-armed Black Panthers and Weather Underground insurrections appear as innocent as breaking plate-glass windows.
But mutiny? Is mutiny ever outmoded in situations of oppression and madness, of rupture between rulers and the ruled?
It is comforting to keep in mind that though protest movements have been broken and scattered by Power, many of those people and like-minded others are still out there in American society. The number of mature adults with eyes to see and ears to hear is growing. Their answer to people who wonder what the resistance wants is simple: they want a just society.
But what are they to do?
That is the question.
Studies show that the class of Power in the USA is surprisingly small, numbering in the tens of thousands. The potential opposition on the other hand is enormous, including above all those whom Che Guevara had in mind when he quipped, “If you tremble in indignation at injustice then you are my comrade.”
Though much of that ruling class is stashed away in corner offices on top floors behind batteries of secretaries, apparently in hiding, out of its vanity it still wants to be seen.
For what is Power if no one knows YOU hold it?
Members of the Power class are visible each day, on TV, in Congress, in the military hierarchy, in diplomacy, multinationals, religions and the universities. The higher they ascend the ladder of Power, the more reactionary they become, and the more entrenched in the Power system.
However, those at the very summit
are in hiding, the rulers who really rule, and they are the most dangerous. They are the ones we do not know. But we can suspect who they are.
Since it often seems that the
people standing on the other side of the abyss have abdicated, we tend to underestimate their potential power. Yet, they too have a stake in the land.
One forgets that organized workers can bring a small city like Asheville in North Carolina or a metropolis like New York or a company like General Motors to a standstill in a matter of hours. The reason that seldom happens is because people have forgotten their own strength.
That people don’t think about their strength is, as we said, due to Power’s astute use of myth and illusion: the myth of freedom and the illusion of happiness. And in these times more and more out of fear!
Though most people
seem to prefer ignorance, they need to be made aware of the truth and of their strength. Some people are learning to distinguish between myth and reality. For those with eyes to see, the issues are evident: the Iraq War, globalization, US imperialism, legalized torture and genocide and the new American police state at home.
Solidarity with those who suffer is growing. Resistance spreads. For organized resistance the great lie about the superiority of “the American way of life” is a natural target. The end result of extended and prolonged resistance is usually state violence against dissent. State violence itself has a multiplier effect: when Power steps in to target and Taser dissenters and crush violence it intensifies resistance.
An explosion becomes inevitable. First comes collective action, civil disobedience follows. Now police state laws have caused a change in thinking about legitimacy. This time around the explosion can become something much different than Power imagines. For the people can shut down the nation without firing a shot.
The people! Today the American people seem broken, fragmented and bewildered, devoid of unity of purpose as existed, let’s say, during the Vietnam War. According to recent studies the vast majority of American people are unaffected by America’s ongoing permanent war. The discussion about whether 70,000 or one million Iraqis have been massacred has a certain theoretical academic air about it. Not even the mothers of the American dead in Iraq can get organized.
At the same time more and more people have lost faith in the electoral system and have taken on the job of breaking down the natural passivity of the dissatisfied and fragmented people who, though in potential agreement with revolutionary analyses, are unused to resistance because of the illusionist spin conducted by Power. Not voting is a suggested antidote.
Again, there are the wars to be ended. If the people can’t share the government’s war effort, it
can share in anti-war objectives. There is vast poverty and social injustice to be resolved. There is a dramatic need for universal health care. There is a corrupt and mean political class to be removed. All of it. Both parties. There is every need to give power back to the
people.
Grassroots organizer Abigail Singer, co-founder of Rising Tide North America and of a recent Southeast Climate Convergence conference in Asheville, North Carolina, said in an interview that voting is not enough because the electoral process has been sold to the highest bidder and that people who get into positions of power have to sacrifice whatever principles they started out with to the point that systemic change is impossible. The idea is that real change comes from the grassroots.
At the same time a growing number of people are losing faith in nonviolence. Singer points out that capitalism itself is extremely violent.
“If you’re not nice and polite, some people consider that violence. But most violence is in business as usual and capitalism grinding on, killing workers, forests and oceans. We’re surrounded by normalized violence and don’t recognize it for what it is. Confronting this normalized violence in a direct way is not violent; it’s necessary.”
Though most people still argue that you have to work within the system, the modern activist is mutating because the political climate has changed. The violence of government repression creates violent reaction in the same way war against Iraq creates new
shahids. Actually violent resistance is nothing new: Black Power backed up the Civil Rights movement. The US government didn’t grant more workers rights back in history because it became good but because people rose up and demanded their rights. People organizing to defend themselves reaches back through the history of man.
Today in America some people are coming together and developing new ideas of resistance -- and their number is destined to grow to the degree that government repression grows. Still, there are not yet enough dissatisfied people willing to work to bring about drastic social change.
After my youth in America I have lived my adult abroad. Traveling to the USA today is to go abroad. Therefore I have acquired a double sensibility about my former homeland. When I arrive there, abroad, but also at home, I feel double tensions in the air: the tension connected with the fear of losing “the American way of life” and the tension of a minority of dissatisfied people also fearful because it knows it is living a fantasy and that mutiny -- so nebulous as to appear a chimera -- will be necessary to change things.
In America I do not sense that undercurrent of change that one has felt in recent years in Spain, for example. I sense both a fear of action and a fear of non-action. Perhaps it is also a fear of change, fear that things can only get worse. A fear like that of a people inhabiting the wrong house, or the haunting fear that the real house it once inhabited is today occupied by usurpers and has lost its soul.
One senses also a disturbing atmosphere of pragmatism and a depoliticalization coupled with widespread contentment with just analyzing the current situation rather than challenging it.
Radical change presupposes an end to blind acceptance of Power’s fictionalized version of reality. It is comforting that across the land grassroots activists are working to break down the phenomenon of indifference. Activists no longer have to feel alone. Each person arrested in anti-war demonstrations acquires new faith in resistance and each of them creates new converts.
Acceptance of the legitimacy of Power, indifference to Power’s deviations and passivity in the face of Power’s threats against external enemies seem to have peaked. Polls show that more and more people believe that Power gone mad has to be put aside. The eventual end of acceptance and passivity could result in a kind of explosion the world has never seen. Clash between people and a corrupt system appears inevitable.
Today that clash is still more hope than reality. Hope that a new strategy of liberation from the oppression of illegal fascism will mushroom. In other times, in an older language, that strategy would be called revolutionary theory. The old Leninist concept is apt here: there can be no revolutionary movement without a revolutionary theory. The theory here, the strategy, must explain that it is not just George W. Bush, the system’s current representative, who must go, but the system itself run by that tiny minority at the top.
As a rule people don’t rebel easily. People count on reforms. People do everything possible to avoid real social convulsion and upheaval, even compromising with a fascist police state.
On the other hand, today’s illegal government is aware that the spirit of mutiny is brewing. That is why it has armed itself with a set of illegal and anti-constitutional laws to crush it.
Observers from afar cannot offer a solution. The American people will have to decide that. However this is the most extreme problem of this century for mankind: the powerful but confused and violent United States of America. At this point the alternative to ousting today’s corrupt American system is a permanent police state, which if it becomes any more fixed than it is now, just might last a thousand years.
Meanwhile the alternative media has an important role. Its role is to be intolerant of liars and to tell the truth. And it has to expand and replace reticent mainline media. The aim of the alternative media is to prompt people to open their eyes and to inculcate in them a new way of thinking honestly and free of Power’s newspeak.
Thus the real future belongs to those who resist, to the rebels who say ‘No!’ and to the mutineers at the grassroots who will bring about the drastic change a growing number of Americans know is necessary. Let’s leave ideology apart. Let’s simplify matters. Let’s drop the rhetoric. Let’s avoid the set phrases of the radical chic.
Finally, see what Henry David Thoreau (1817-78), great American author and philosopher, wrote in his “On the Duty of Civil Obedience”:
“All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support, are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform.
“If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go . . . if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong, which I condemn.
"But what shall I do? You ask. My answer is, If you really wish to do anything, resign your office. When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned from office, then the revolution is accomplished.”
Gaither Stewart is originally from Asheville, NC. After studies at the University of California at Berkeley and other American universities, he has lived his adult life abroad, in Germany and Italy, alternated with residences in The Netherlands, France, Mexico, Argentina and Russia. After a career in journalism as Italian correspondent for the Rotterdam newspaper, Algemeen Dagblad, and contributor to media in various European countries, he writes fiction full-time. His books, "Icy Current Compulsive Course, To Be A Stranger" and "Once In Berlin" are published by Wind River Press. His new novel, "Asheville," is published by www.Wastelandrunes.com He lives with his wife, Milena, in Rome, Italy. E-mail: gaither.stewart@yahoo.it. 
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