Anarchy X: An Occasional Series on Politics and American Life

Posted: July 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Anarchy X, Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I decided it was time I got my thoughts on paper (yes, I’m old enough that I still think of typing as writing and my computer screen as paper) about politics, specifically the intersection of politics and American life, mostly because I’m American and that’s what I know. So the first place to start is with “what is politics?” Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” I happen to disagree; I think he got it completely backwards.

What is war? War is the wholesale application of violence to achieve specific material ends. Politics (at least one definition of politics and the one most applicable to von Clausewitz) is the wholesale threat of violence to achieve specific material ends. Dress it up as nicely as you want, at the end of the day that’s the difference between the two. If you don’t believe me, try to disregard the law of your choice and see if the nice policeman simply asks you politely to cease and desist, or if he may very well at some point consider utilizing some form of force to compel you.

That being the case, it’s all about which came first, the chicken or the egg, in this case the chicken being war and the egg being politics. Another way of considering it is to take it down from the wholesale level to the retail level: personal violence used to achieve specific material ends and personal threats of violence used to achieve specific material ends. This makes things much clearer: we have archaeological evidence of hominids doing violence to each other that predates our evidence of language. Ipso facto, politics is the continuation of war by another means.

Does this mean I abhor politics and everything it accomplishes? Not at all. I believe in self-defense, I believe in just war theory, and I believe it is preferable for us to talk out our problems than for us to fight out our problems. But I also believe that when we lose sight of what the tools we are using really are, then we tend to overuse them. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks very easy to solve. The greatness of politics is also its weakness; it removes and distances us from the immediate pains and burdens of the violence of forcing our collective will on others, which makes it so much easier to use that force. Here’s another famous aphorism from Lord Acton, and this one I agree with completely: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

So what does this have to do with American life, and why “Anarchy X”? By now you may have realized I have certain anarchist tendencies at heart, although many hard-core anarchists would thoroughly disagree with my stated opinions regarding the value of politics and war. The X is a reference to both the Ten Commandments and the original Bill of Rights, both of which have had a major effect on the shape of politics and culture in America and will be the launching point for future posts in this series. Hopefully I’ll cover other topics as well, but if I manage to cover all twenty of those, that’s enough ground to keep me busy for quite a while. It should be a fun ride.

Let’s Hear It for the Freaking FCC

Posted: June 25, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Culture, Politics | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment

Recently the FCC got slapped, although not spanked (and certainly not tied up and paddled on primetime television) by the Supreme Court. Well, yippee. I know I should be more excited by this, especially considering my vast love for the First Amendment in all its forms, but the truth is this ruling was about as mamby-pamby as any I’ve ever heard out of the Supreme Court, which considering it was a unanimous ruling in a strongly divided court isn’t much of a surprise. Still, at least we got a little something, which is to say a small shred of common sense in government: hey look, you can’t just decide post facto that something is indecent and levy fines here but not there for the same activity.

But why shouldn’t we be grateful for the FCC? I mean, after all, won’t somebody please think of the children? If it weren’t for the FCC, public television might look more like cable, what with the sex, violence, and bad language. And we all know nobody actually wants to watch shows like The Sopranos, Sex in the City, True Blood, or anything like that. And even if there were a few sick bastards out there who did, the rest of us would be helpless in the face of their Vast Media Empire. It’s not like we could, I dunno:

  • change the channel
  • turn the TV off
  • go read a book
  • play outside
  • go for a walk
  • build a model
  • play a board game
  • call a friend
  • go to the theater
  • look at lolcatz on the interwebs
  • read a blog

So yeah, we’re pretty much stuck looking at the same handful of channels, making sure we all have the same culture. One might even call it “popular culture.” Not because it’s all that popular, but just because everyone is familiar with it, and because it appeals to the lowest common denominator, and it never challenges us. If we didn’t have that, if our entertainment somehow became fractured, we might not all have the same basic outlook on things, and what would that do to our society? Our politics? Our country?

We might all start finding things that appeal to our deepest beliefs rather than the muddy middle, and then we’d have to go one of two ways. The one would be a cultural and political revolution, but in a good way: we would have to honestly start to engage with one another, and stop pretending that father knows best, admit eight isn’t enough, and we just can’t leave it to beaver. We would need to go to a place where everybody doesn’t know your name, and start to lean each other’s’ names, as well as each other’s hopes and dreams and deepest beliefs. Then we would need to work out our conflicts in a meaningful way, and not just try to force our own ideas of what’s right and wrong on each other, either through blatantly through the political machine or subtly through the mass media.

The other would be a disaster: some sort of bipolar system in which we become horribly polarized, swinging back and forth politically and socially until the entire system cracks apart from the stress because we keep talking past each other instead of talking to each other. But that could never happen, right?

Right?

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