Cannon Fodder 1
Missions Statement
I will still publish a reaction to the Sumerian stories this week (probably Friday) but I wanted to say a bit more about my interest in literature and particularly the beginning of written narrative. It is not just that I feel there are gaps in my knowledge of the Western cannon, but more like my whole picture of the world is fake or inadequate in some way related to lack of understanding of the past.
In a recent post I discussed the general skepticism of government and history that is common in minority communities in the United States and in populations around the world. What that post didn’t address was how this skepticism manifests in art. In black American art in particular, there is a sense that history as generally explained leaves out the facts or perspectives most relevant to black people. These works of art will not always present a clear counter-history, they will simply make clear that mainstream depictions of history are not really for black people. In other words, black artists do not always claim they have access to a true set of facts, they just know the public record is bullshit. In the final third of Scorsese’s film The Irishman, reference is made to the fact that the mob played a role in assassinating JFK. I don’t think Scorsese is trying to tell us that this is the true story of the JFK assassination. He is trying to show that one of the characteristics of his subjects (ethnic Irish and Italian whites) is that they don’t accept the mainstream history of America as taught in school or seen on the news.
Even without any racial or ethnic grievance to alienate me from the mainstream, I have always felt drawn to minority rejection of the central narratives of American discourse. Perhaps this is in part born of my time in the Middle East, where one is constantly confronted with paranoid seeming versions of history (say the story of the USS Liberty) that you later learn may well be true. On another recent podcast about history (that I won’t name), two hosts discussed their view that FDR knew in advance about the attack on Pearl Harbor and in some sense even provoked it. They concede this view is not verifiable (no one wrote it down), but discussed various forms of contextual evidence suggesting its true. What is incontrovertible is that the United States did not enter World War II to save the Jews.
In the case of both the civil war and world war II, serious students of history and certainly most academics will concede that they were not pursued as moral causes. It used to be more popular among Marxists to argue that the central cause for the civil war was the North’s insistence that the South industrialize, and the slave system was a threat to the North only in so far as human-driven agriculture was a threat to the North. I don’t embrace any particular revisionist version of American history, but not because I find them revolting, simply because I don’t know enough. But while I don’t know if these alternate histories are true, I do believe that the generally-believed-in-fairytales are fake and poisonous.
Even when people concede that America did not enter World War II to save the Jews, they will add a qualifier like “I’m sure glad we did though, I’m glad I don’t speak German.” This attitude implies that even without a moral purpose, the wars achieved righteous ends. I think this is true, but it also encourages a sort of fairytale version of the conflict that still haunts popular discourse. The fairytale version of World War II is probably responsible for Vietnam and certainly Iraq. In the necon mind, history is a story of a brave few with the foresight to confront great evils, and they have been ravenously searching for such evil, their greatest fear that their generation might not find any. All neocons love Churchill, which is fine. What’s more troubling is their belief that they are Churchill.
But where did they get this idea? Where did they get the idea that the role of a western statesmen is to identify barbarians in the periphery and strangle them in the crib before the world is plunged into darkness? They got this idea from the sort of childish hagiography of America we are discussing. And this looms large in everything. Why is there a group of teenagers who don black and smash bank windows who call themselves “antifa”?
I think the main problem with America’s World War II narrative is that it is disconnected from any earlier history. The state of pre-war Europe is not understood and neither is World War I. What was happening on the continent that led to repeated global conflagrations? Again, I don’t really have an answer for that, I just know that even a pretty good American education doesn’t even try to answer the question. As the Norm Mcdonald joke goes, “the Germans are so crazy they went to war with the world…twice.” Part of the joke is that the Germans are indeed crazy (fair enough), but the joke also gestures at true confusion over how these two world wars took place.
I have always had a sense in American political and social discourse that I know nothing about how we got where we are. Every model an adult gives you - well you know conservatives like small government and states rights, but liberals believe in strong centralized authority – breaks down or self contradicts the moment the political conflict takes a slightly different form.
This is so true in American history that the colloquial meanings of “liberal” and “conservative” have flipped, inverted and stood in for one another at various times. Obviously, the people deploying the term, either to describe themselves or others, were not embedding their analysis in a longer history. A recent example of this might be who is liberal or conservative about Covid? A liberal is someone who supports lockdown and a conservative wants to get back to regular life even if its costs lives. How interesting.
And so when we have an argument about the debt ceiling and I am told that liberals are basically communists who always want to centrally plan and spend money and conservatives are uncaring monsters, all I know is that I don’t know anything. The discourse is fake. It is meant to generate attention and or political support, not to provide insight into political and social history.
And so I always feel sort of lost. I think for many people, the post-war world and its political constellations are the only period of history they even have a mental model for, and so the world is really just either World War II or the Cold War playing out over and over again.
So am I saying that you need to start at the beginning of American history in order to understand any narrow contemporary policy debate? I fear it’s much worse than that. What could be more psyopped and biased than our impression of the founding? No, I fear that knowledge and wisdom are a sort of binary, and you either understand literally everything or literally nothing with God as the 1 and man the zero.
But even if ignorance is our fate, we can put up a better effort to connect the dots than we have done. One thing I care about immensely is narrative and story, but again I realize I don’t understand it. I don’t have a sense of the role the story played throughout human history. I have much more exposure to books like “save the cat” explaining modern narrative tropes that make a good screenplay than I do to say, how prevalent Aesop’s fables were in various periods of the past, how many people knew them, how central were they to the moral instruction of new generations?
And so this newsletter will become my attempt to trace written narrative to the beginning, to see what stories meant to those people and how they were told. I want to be able to write great stories one day, and I think this is probably impossible without starting somewhere near the beginning. Again, I suspect disconnection from this longer human narrative is why so much contemporary literature is crap. How impoverished must a soul be to read the sexual neurosis of a writer like Roth and think it is close to the best mankind can offer? Dostoyevsky wept.
One of my heroes in trying to explore the past is this Twitter account Kantbot. He does many inane things on the internet, but the best thing he does is recommend books. He is a genius at understanding where the mainstream western education has left conceptual gaps, and guiding you to works that can fill those holes. In a recent podcast appearance, the host read a passage from Kantbot’s writing describing the true nature of the world we think we occupy, this world of fairytale, where noble America stares down the bad guys:
“There is no world only a model of the world. Dictators and oligarchs and technocrats don’t rule you they rule simulations of the world, models of it. The rules were perfected by a RAND company game theorist. The figuring of you they push around the board is your identity.”
On the same podcast, a discussion of musicology referenced a hypothesis that human beings sang and possibly created music before they ever knew how to speak. The hosts concede there is no way we could ever prove that humans sang before they spoke, but we know it makes sense as a learning exercise. Without speech, one might show someone how to construct a primitive tool to a beat as a way to help them remember the process. Imagine a caveman, pounding a rock or the ground at regular intervals as he goes through the steps of lashing a sharp stone to a stick and constructing a weapon. The viewer learns the process as a sort of choreography.
We will never know if humans sang first, but in my heart I know they did, and that in certain senses the move from song to speech was a regression in spiritual and cultural terms even as it represented a dramatic breakthrough in efficiency. We no longer carry that tune sang by early humans. If we want to pick up the melody again, we have to start at the beginning.