Politics in Culture

“Mayans M.C.”, “Rebellion” and “Official Secrets”- 2 Political TV Series and a Political Movie

“Mayans M.C.” is about a mostly Latino motorcycle gang in the made-up town of Santo Padre, California near the Mexican border.  It is a spin-off from the simple blood and guts series, “Sons of Anarchy,” though the Sons occasionally still appear.  What is different is that the Mayans eventually form an alliance with Mexican social revolutionaries trying to change the corrupt capitalist Mexican system.  Their main enemy is the U.S. government in the form of creepy U.S. Assistant Attorney Potter, whose mission is to squelch any rebellion in Mexico.  Potter uses every means at his disposal, including violent mercenaries to try to get his way.  Whether a criminal M.C. would actually unite with left-wing rebels is debatable of course.  The great Edward James Olmos gets a role as the father of two key Mayan gang members.  Also, motorcycles! (FX-TVonline.cc)

''Mayans' on Motorcycles

“Rebellion” (and Resistance) is the story of 2 phases of the Irish national revolution – the 1916 Easter Rising and the later 1920 successful fight for partial independence against the British.  It is possible there will be a 3^rd phase, based on the Irish civil war over leaving the northern 6 counties to Britain. The key character is Jimmy Mahon, who is with James Connolly at the GPO; then a shooter and eventual head of intelligence for the IRA in its battle with ruthless British General Winter in the national fight; then a key ally of Michael Collins in the coming civil war.  The series weaves personal and political together, highlighting the murky world of loyalties and betrayals, of secrets and lies.  As such an overall view of the rebellion is not very clear.  It chooses to highlight the large role of women in the struggle, which is usually ignored. (RTE – Netflix)

“Offical Secrets:  (Spoiler) An accurate docu-drama film based on events in Britain prior to the U.S./U.K. invasion of Iraq in 2003.  It features whistle-blower Katherine Gun, who worked at GCHQ listening in on surveillance Chinese conversations for the British government.  The spies at GCHQ get an e-mail from a U.S. NSA officer asking them to eavesdrop and spy on members of the U.N. security council to find information that might make these countries vote for war.  Gun is young and against the war, though she cannot admit it to her bosses.  She spirits the memo to a friend in the massive anti-war movement, who get it to a reporter at the Observer newspaper. The Observer waffles over whether it is a real memo, but investigation shows it is probably real.  They publish and Gun admits her role.  Ultimately the British government refuses to prosecute her based on the official ‘Secrets Act’ because the trial would expose the illegality of Blair and Bush’s criminal war.  Gun is played by Kiera Knightley.  (Riverview Theater)

Other reviews on these topics below, use blog search box, upper left with these terms:  

Ireland:  "Abortion Referendum in Ireland," "The Immortal Irishman," "Plough and the Stars," "James Connolly," "Jimmy's Hall," "1916 Rebellion Walking Tour," "The Irish Literary Trail," 

Mexico:  "Drug War Capitalism," "NAFTA 2," "Frida Kahlo," "Viva Zapata," "The Lacuna," "Sicario," "Pancho Villa Underground Railroad." 

Iraq War:  "The Yellow Birds," "Armed Madhouse," "The Management of Savagery," "What is the War on Terror," "Blow Back to Iraq," "Libertarian Atheism," "The Left and Islamic Literalism,"   

The Cultural Marxist

October 31, 2019

All Hallows Eve

Fighting Fascism

“Panzer Destroyer: Memoirs of a Red Army Tank Commander” By Vasiliy Krysov, 2010

I don’t usually review books like this, but as a personal tale of the WWII tank battles from Stalingrad to Kursk to Kiev and into Poland and Germany, it is unequalled.  Krysov was wounded four times, had a number of T-34s or SU-85 motorized guns destroyed under him and had so many narrow escapes it is hard to believe he survived.  He used his excellent tactical skills to beat the odds, sensing the best plans of attack or defense.   His small SU-85 mobile gun group at one point destroyed 8 Tiger tanks, the most formidable Nazi tank.  Leading only two motorized guns he wrecked a whole German regiment and their vehicles on a road, laying waste over many kilometers.   At one point his self-propelled gun rampaged through the German rear for a few days.  He details the difficult attacks on heavily-fortified hill 197.2 near Kovel, Poland. His aggressiveness and skills led him to overrun German positions and trenches time and time again.

 

The Russian Army at its base was highly-competent, with young and skilled tankers being able to repair tanks quickly, sight targets on the run, help their comrades, dig pits for the tanks and endure cold, hunger and sleeplessness, staying steady in the heat of dangerous combat.  Krysov attempts to refrain from comments about the headquarters’ officers who drank too much, had ‘campaign wives,’ luxurious conditions and never saw real combat - but sometimes he can’t help himself.  Some half-assed Communist Party ‘political’ officers shared these characteristics.  Krysov was decorated three times and supposedly drafted into the CP for a particularly heroic action, but he never received a party card.  Decorations were related to politics and friendliness with key officers, so he received far fewer than he should have.

The book details a war of villages, where small-scale tank battles tell the tale.  It starts in July 1941 at the Chelyabinsk Tank School east of Stalingrad, where Krysov learned to work T-34s and KV1 tanks, sometimes learning on a tractor.  It lasts until May 1945, when the destruction of the 3^rd Reich found Krysov’s unit in Konigsberg, now Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea, after its difficult seizure.  Krysov could not keep notes on pain of arrest, so he put the stories together through his memories, research in military archives, repeated unit reunions with his surviving comrades and trips to the actual battlefields.  He recalls the warm support for the Red Army from peasants in Russian and Ukrainian villages - and even in Poland.  He notes limited combat with Vlasovites (Russians who joined the Wehrmacht) and Banderists (allies of Hitler in Ukraine.)  He also comments on regrettable rapes in Germany, one of which he investigated for the prosecutors. 

Tactically Krysov used zig-zag driving tactics at full speed to approach German emplacements and occupied villages before firing his guns.  The Red Army engaged in surprise night attacks on a semi-regular basis with much success.  He had frequent duals with ‘Fritz’s’ Leopard Mark IV, Panther and Tiger tanks using his low-slung SU-85 tank destroyer, even though his SU-85 was outgunned by the Tigers and outclassed by the thick armor of the Panthers.  There are a number of difficult river crossings mentioned, including one where the tankers stopped-up holes in the vehicles so water could not get in while fording a river.  During combat, many Soviet soldiers died, and Krysov details the brutal losses among his comrades, a few of which were due to command mistakes.

The WWII tank battles in Russia and eastern Europe were probably the greatest the world will ever see – certainly larger than Al Alamein or Tobruk or anything Patton was ever involved in, like the Battle of the Bulge. After all, the main focus of WWII in the European theater was the Soviet Union. But this memoir is more than that.  It is the human side in the field, of a tank commander who wanted to defeat the fascists and repeatedly returned to the Eastern Front to do just that. 

Some day we might have to follow his example.

Other reviews on the subject of WWII below, use blog search box, upper left:  “Life and Fate” (Grossman); “The Unwomanly Face of War” (Alexievich); “Enemy at the Gates.”

Thanks to Bro Rod,

Red Frog

October 28, 2019

Nothing to Lose But Their Value Chains

“Value Chains – the New Economic Imperialism” by Intan Suwandi, 2019

This book promises more than it delivers, while repeating itself constantly.  Nevertheless I’ll highlight its main points.  Suwandi, an Indonesian Marxist, attempts to give an empirical basis to the Marxist view that imperialism still exists and is going strong.  He counters political geographer David Harvey on this question, as Harvey thinks the ‘global south’ has reversed the process, so imperialism is no longer a viable concept for him.  By doing that Harvey fails the most widespread geography test of all.

Suwandi does not really deal with the military, debt, financial (currency), political (SAP), monetary (dollar), environmental, raw material, infrastructure or ‘legal’ (local and WTO) aspects of imperialism.  He keys in on the labor exploitation question.  Suwandi’s main points, some of which are obvious:

    1.     Oligopolies and multi-nationals use two methods of expropriating labor value from the global south:  global value/supply/commodity chains and subcontractor-based ‘arm’s length contracting.’ (Nike and Apple for instance.) 80% of world trade in 2012 was connected to these types.  57% was ‘arms length’ alone.

     2.     The key metric to look at is ‘average unit labor cost’ when estimating super-exploitation, unequal exchange or uneven development.

     3.     The two main aspects of average unit labor costs are productivity and wages.

     4.     The ‘southern’ countries with the top employment in global value chains originating in the global north are China, India and Indonesia.    In 2013 39.2% of labor employment in China and 16.8% in India were for exports to the U.S.  85% of China’s ‘high tech’ exports are ‘links’ in global supply chains.  U.S. firm GM itself has 20,000 suppliers world-wide.

     5.     Firms in the global south supplying multi-nationals headquartered in the global north are subservient to and dependent on those larger and more powerful firms.  They are not really independent and must rely on ‘flexibility’ and ‘leanness’ to obey whatever requests are made.  In Suwandi’s investigation of two Indonesian contract firms, the multi-nationals they work with can dictate sub-contractors, costs, technology, quality, sales issues and even wages, as these companies demand full ‘transparency’ on the part of their suppliers.  ‘Problems’ are the responsibility of the supplier, not the core multi-national. 

6.     As a result of international control, local workers are dealing with a far-away headquarters in Silicon Valley or Hamburg, not just their local bosses.  Strikes, unions, minimum wage and unjust limits to overtime (due to low pay) were issues in Indonesia.

7.     Technology, especially information technology, has made world-wide control more possible by multi-national oligopolies.

8.     ‘Global labor arbitrage’ references the method by which multi-nationals look for the cheapest and most productive labor possible, mostly found in the global south.  For instance, garment companies pay 1-3% of the final clothing price back to southern labor.

9.     Foreign direct investment (FDI) by core multi-nationals in the global south has increased dramatically.  In Indonesia it went from $83M in 1970 to $30.54B in 2017.  In 2018 core FDI investment in the global south was 58% of all investment.

10.  The greatest concentration of productive workers are now in the global south – 541 million to 145 million in the core countries in 2010. 

11.   Core multi-nationals use peripheral global production for export back to the core, but also as a way to penetrate large local markets.

12.   Taylorism is alive and well in the global south.  Deskilling is part of the effort to lower labor costs.  However, Suwandi does not add that computerization has modernized ‘Taylorism’ to be even more precise.  It could be called ‘Gatesism’ now!

13.   While capital has ultimate flexibility to move about the world, human labor is restricted by immigration laws.

14.    International ‘monopolies’ (really oligopolies) have made price-cutting and price competition mostly obsolete.  On this level, competition is a figment of free market ideology, not fact.

15.    Average hourly compensation differences between the US/ UK/ Germany/ Japan on the one hand and Mexico/ Indonesia/ China/ India are huge, with India having the cheapest labor.  This accounts for vast differences in average unit labor costs.  For instance, the average profit rate for the iPhone 4 was 59% in 2010.  1.8% of the final cost went to assembly costs in China.  And you wonder why Apple executives and stockholders are rich?
 

Suwandi does not address the issues of computerization, robots or AI directly, so the inference is that all jobs lost in the global north are due to the transfer of labor to the global south. Kim Moody and others have noted that local technology is actually one of the other main drivers for unemployment and low pay in the global north.  Suwandi doesn't deal with super-exploitation issues within the global north – i.e. ethnic or regional super-exploitation.  He treats China as an exception to the rule while assuming China is capitalist, and not a mixed economy dominated by certain levels of planning and a dominant deformed workers' state.  That might explain his ‘exception.’

2014 Strike in Indonesia - 1 Million Go Out

This is generally a helpful book, especially for those not familiar with this topic.  However, Suwandi does not have enough economic statistics to ‘prove’ the level of profit coming from cheap labor in the global south, though the inferences are direct.  As he points out, corporate GDP figures hide profits and labor by allocating all gains to the country where the corporation is legally located, its ‘home’ - though some authors have been able to reveal them.  “Arms Length Contracting” profit flows are entirely invisible in standard economic statistics.  So in a way, international capital attempts to statistically launder their profitability by hiding the true value of value chains.  This is why Marx called labor exploitation “the hidden abode of production.”

Other reviews on this topic below, (some referenced in the book), use blog search box upper left:  “The City” (Norfield); “The Endless Crisis”(McChesney); “Can the Working Class Change the World?(Yates); “American Theocracy”(Phillips); “Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism,””The Law of WorldWide Value”  and “The Long Revolution of the Global South”(all by Amin); “The Open Veins of Latin America”(Galeano); “Secret History of the American Empire”(Perkins); “American Exceptionalism and American Innocence”(Haiphong); “Drug War Capitalism”(Paley); "Bali."

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

October 24, 2019

An Inside Job

“The Testaments,” by Margaret Atwood, 2019

This is the long-awaited sequel to Atwood’s 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale.”  Between the rampant misogyny embedded in U.S. capitalist culture now exemplified by Trump, and the parallel Hulu series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Atwood was bound to do a follow-up.  This book is nothing like the flawed Hulu series, and for that we can be thankful.   It is far better.

 

Bit of a SPOILER ALERT

The story is presented as a series of testimonies, narrations and ‘holographs’ long after the fall of the religious theocracy of Gilead.  The 'testament' title might be a play on the Bible of course, indicating this is a newer testament.  The focus is not on the central character of Atwood’s first book, Offred, as in the Hulu series, but instead employs a large twist.  A certain person within the power structure of Gilead has access to information which can reveal the massive corruption and depravity among Gilead’s religious elite.  Hypocrisy is just a euphemism for their behavior, a hypocrisy we've seen among religious types for years. She has information about the real impact of women’s oppression on girls and women in a theocratic male-chauvinist state, from suicide, murder to sexual abuse - information that has been suppressed by Gilead.  That person is Aunt Lydia, who was one of the vicious disciplinarians in the first book. 

Atwood focuses on how women’s initiative does not die even when being forced to be part of an oppressive state apparatus.  As such, Atwood does not focus on a rebellion of the majority, or the initiatives of the Marthas, econowives and econohusbands, Handmaid’s, slave workers or others, but on a former judge, now the head of the Aunts.  It is ‘revolution from above,’ by scandal and exposure, not by mass action and politics.  Lydia is aided by several young Aunts who have a personal stake in the outcome to ‘help women.’  Baby Nicole, who was spirited away from Gilead to safety in Canada originally, also plays a role, as she has grown up. 

Gilead is isolated on the world stage, its economy in tatters, having lost part of the U.S. through civil war, with a ruling class that is consumed by in-fighting.  (Sound familiar?) The political economy of Gilead is invisible though, as it is not clear who is growing the food, maintaining the infrastructure or making anything, though there is one fishing boat in evidence. This is a personal story above all, similar to many dystopian fantasies which never explain certain basic things like origins or economics.  However, Gilead is not a fantasy, as there are obvious parallels with present right-wing political Christianity and political Islam, with political Hinduism and political Judaism not far behind. 

Atwood’s main point is that the oppression of women is central to certain conservative religious ideologies, born of ancient holy patriarchies.  An attempt to bring them back into the present will only fail, as the inevitable fall of Gilead makes clear.  According to Atwood, this happens through the courageous acts of women themselves.

Other reviews on the topic of women and religion, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Handmaid’s Tale,” (book and TV series); “Rise of the ‘Nones,’” “God is Not Great,” “Libertarian Atheism versus Liberal Religionism,” “Female Genital Mutilation,” “Annihilation of Caste,” “Jude the Obscure,” “Really, Rape, Still?”  “Marxism and the Oppression of Women,” “Feminists and Feminists,” “Fortunes of Feminism,” “Stitched Up – the Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion,” “Socialist Feminism,” “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again.”  

The Kulture Kommissar

October 20, 2019

The Children of the Past

The Italian Brand

Many U.S., British and Canadian tourists and wealthy ex-pats really like Italy.  And in ways the Italians feel much the same way, especially the jingle from tourist money.  Just listen to the pop music or watch Italian movies or TV, much of which comes from the U.S. and Hollywood. Check out the T-shirts, many of which are in English. My take on this is that ‘Americans’ feel Italy is a ‘beach beneath the street’ kind of place, to turn a phrase from the Situationists on its head.  A place where ‘la dolce vita’ is really true.  Italy is imagined as one long beach town between two seas where people eat, drink, swim and shop in an ancient culture providing a refuge from the present.  Party towns like Florence/Firenze bring this out the most, as tens of thousands flock the streets eating and drinking long into the night.

Trying to Get Into the Uffizi Art Gallery, Firenze, Italy

FOOD

But is la dolce vita true?  Take the food.  In the small town I’m in in Tuscany, (Estruscany!) there might be 35-40 ristorantes, trattorias, osterias and enotecas.  All but one serve only Italian Tuscan food, though two have hamburgers in a small part of the menu.  The same limited cocktails are served – Negroni, Campari spritz, Aperol spritz and plain prosecco.  Most do have large Italian-only wine selections - but only Italian.  The menus look suspiciously familiar – the same dishes seem to be repeated. The cooks are trained not to deviate from old recipes.  Fusion is almost unknown. Multiply that by every other Italian town in this area and you can see the uniform, ingrown, nationalist slant to the food culture.  

Some of the larger towns are getting Asian food due to a recent influx of Chinese.  Our best meal in Venice was north African, but we only found the ristorante by accident.  For urban U.S. citizens who are adjacent to food cultures from all over the world, this is extremely odd.  The beer and cocktail culture in the U.S. is years ahead as well, though Italians have recently added small selections of birra.  Even U.S. pizza surpasses the Italian version. 

The pasta is almost all white; the wine is mostly alkaline due to the soil; everything is bathed in olive oil (much as I love olive oil there is a limit); and being a vegetarian or vegan is like being a leper who slipped out of the colony. Italy’s food has the feeling of small town rural fare located perhaps 20-30 years ago, though certainly more organic, unprocessed and local - which is its big strength.  Inevitably if you are in Italy, you begin to look for non-Italian restaurants.  So one 'leg' of the Italian vita is not so sweet.

Gringos, tourists and Italians enjoy public eating and drinking in the piazzas and narrow streets. It’s the view! Yet eating close to a passing crowd seems somewhat suspect.  It is a bit like showing off and that might be the point.  The display, the ability to afford, the view of those not eating or who cannot afford to pay that price, who instead subsist on cheap focaccia street sandwiches.  Food seems to be around which modern Italian 'culture' circulates, as the evening meal is the focus of the day.  Most of the ads on TV feature food.  Many Italians eat out frequently, though they don’t all visit higher-end places with white table-cloths, mulitiple wine glasses, service fees and priced water, as classes exist in Italy too.  They might eat just a simple and inexpensive pizze or spaghetti. (By the way, in nearly all of the world, tipping is not done, but in Italy higher-end ristorantes charge a low fee for service, though nowhere near 15-20%.  Sorry U.S. service workers, but something is wrong in the States regarding tipping.)

CULTURE

A visit to Florence/Firenze, Venice/Venezia or Siena cements a certain essential symbiosis between shopping and aesthetics.  Once you’ve taken in the archaic church Duomos, Renaissance art museums, religious icons, the same Madonnas and child and crucified Christs and other innumerable ancient museums while walking the narrow cobble-stone streets admiring the very old architecture, you have paid your obligatory cultural dues.   

After all that somewhat boring religious hokum you, the tourist, have earned your just deserts.  You can now enter shop after shop and buy, buy, buy or ristorante and eat, eat, eat or enoteca and drink, drink, drink.  Antiquated aesthetics becomes the justified background to this commercial foreground. Tourist dollars and euros and real estate sales to ex-pats have pumped massive amounts of money into chosen towns, which were poverty-stricken after WWII.  The ones that aren't, still are.

Along with you, most Italians are also out for food and a stroll.They enjoy Sunday mornings as well, as many of their main churches have been turned into art and architecture museums.  And when they do go to church, most attendees seem to be over 50 or 60.  Canes are common.

What you then notice is that Italy lives off this hoary cultural history as their ‘brand.’  Yet its present ‘high’ culture is not painting or icons or frescos or sculpture, not Leonardo or Michelangelo.  It is the commercial industrial art of Ducati and Moto Guzzi motorcycles; Maserati, Lamborghini, Ferrari and Alpha Romeo cars; Vespa scooters, Murano glass, world-class textile machines and Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, Ferragamo and Versace clothing and accessories.  After all, its last real cultural explosion, long after pre-war WWII Futurist painting, was post-war Italian cinema.  This brought a plethora of neo-realism and post-neo-realism, political comedy and art-house wonders from world-famous directors like Pasolini, Bertolucci, Fellini, Pontecorvo, Wertmueller, De Sica, Rosselini, Visconti, Monicelli, Antonioni and Leone.  They made Italian culture known world-wide. But that kind of culture brand and 'vita' is over.

FILM

Fellini’s 1959 film “La Dolce Vita” (The Sweet Life) was a commentary about the sad empty state of present Roman life, not a celebration of the beach, gluttony and amore.  Like U.S. politicians who use Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” at rallies to promote patriotism, they have not listened to the lyrics.  Or in the Fellini case, they do not remember the actual point of the film.  Fellini’s last film in the 1990s commented on the takeover of Italy’s culture by commercialism, not actual la dolce vita.  The high Renaissance, the “David,” are ancient history. 

Anita Ekberg in Rome's Trevi Fountain in "La Dolce Vita."

The sad state of present Italian film is obvious.  In the late 1990s Italy had fewer movie theaters than France or Germany.  The highest-grossing films were consistently from the U.S. and Hollywood – 75% of those shown - while Italian movies were 14% of the total.  In the 1990s only 15 Italian films grossed 86% of the remaining tickets out of 150 Italian-produced films.   So quality Italian film culture, which was based on the anti-Church, anti-Mafia, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist ferment after WWII is now dead.  The heavy class-war years of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s fueled Italian cinema’s extension and they are over too.  Wonderful later films like “Cinema Paradiso” and “The Postman” provided codas.  Its last remaining survivor seems to be jumping Roberto Benigni, who not so recently turned a concentration camp into a vacation paradise for his son. (Refs. from P. Bondanella’s 2001 book “Italian Cinema.”)

New Claudia Cardinales, Sophia Lorens, Anita Ekbergs or Marcello Mastroiannis won’t be flouncing down your cobble-stone street anytime soon.

POLITICS

There is a larger organized fascist movement in Italy than even the U.S., given the history of Italy and Mussolini.  Rightists still make pilgrimages to Mussolini’s small rural birthplace in northern Italy, Predappio.  Italy was, after all, on the wrong side of the last World War, collaborating with Hitler, enthusiastically sending troops to invade the USSR.  Recently the present far-rightist Salvini was just stymied from taking national power.  Now he has promised to stage another “March On Rome” later this October.  This ‘march’ echoes Mussolini’s call for a ‘march on Roma’ before he took power in 1922 with the blessing of the Italian capitalist establishment. The Vatican is still a stronghold of the Italian right, and still holds enormous political and financial power, even given its long history of scandals.  It owns more real estate than anyone else in the country.  This ache for the ‘power of the past’ is what motivates all rightists.  Not so sweet.

Now that the Italian Communist Party is history and the effort by Rifondazione (Communst Refoundation Party) to bring together ex-CPers, Trotskyists, Maoists, Stalinists and assorted leftists has foundered, politics in Italy is also floundering for those at the bottom of the class ladder, rural or urban. African immigrants are shunned by landowners to the point where few can get paying work from olive or grape farms and subsist on selling trinkets while being homeless. In the cities some are getting the lowest jobs as laborers, doormen or restaurant help – but then this is no different from the U.S. and Latino or African immigrants.  This is a mostly rural country with little ethnic diversity and that rurality mitigates the proletarian influence of Milan or Turin or Rome, though poorly-paid Italian proletarians subsist in every town and village.  Labor in Italy is at present weak and the capos and padrones rule. 

I won't get into the health or vacation policies in Italy, which surpass the U.S. by a mile.  These and other advances are the product of the massive proletarian left that existed at one time in Italy.  Whether these gains will last is another matter.

 

So why do U.S. tourists and moneyed ex-pats love an insular, rural and seemingly apolitical country that lives in the past?  The question answers itself.  Living under the warm Tuscan sun is not just a movie.  Italy has the weather, agrarian isolation and culturally retrograde nature of the U.S. south.  It is like Florida on a really, really good day or like an imaginary beach town in California - though not California’s version of Venice.  It is ‘the beach beneath the street,’ set in a mostly curated and sculpted nature, a supposed escape from modernity, trouble and strife. It is above all, a commercial, aesthetic brand with its slogan ‘la dolce vita’ as a beguiling come-on.  But of course no place can actually provide a real escape or the permanent sweet life.  Italy provides an ostensible substitute for those tourists who don’t want to go a little deeper.

Friday - Rome General Strike Against Incompetent Mayor and Condition of City.  The Forze Proletariano.

In Firenze, there is a famous statue by Michelangelo, "The David," depicting the very naked and very human David on a massive scale staring southward towards Rome, the center of the retrograde Papacy and quite clearly the archaic Goliath in this Renaissance morality tale.  The question remains for leftists, where is the new 'David', the new Renaissance, the new forze proletariano which can conquer the retrograde capitalist Goliath? Certainly not in la dolce vita imitazione. 

P.S. - as my contribution to Italian 'fusion' I made up this drink - an Italian G&T. - 1/3rd Gin, 1/3rd Tonic, 1/3rd Prosecco.  Better!

 

Other reviews on Italian issues below, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Dark Heart of Italy,” “The Unseen,” “Amiable With Big Teeth,” “Spartacus,” “The Sixth Extinction,” “American Vandal – Mark Twain Abroad,” “La Biennale Arte 2019,” “The Beach Beneath the Street,” “A Travelers Tale.”

The Cultural Marxist

October 16, 2019

The Dirt Nap

“American Rust,” by Philipp Meyer, 2009

This is a fictional story of the U.S. ‘rust belt,’ specifically the Monongahela Valley south of Pittsburgh on the ‘Hillbilly Highway.’  It hits all the familiar problems with capitalism around 2007 – the massive and rusting steel mills closed due to automation, competition and outsourcing; the continued use of coal; a meth tweaker epidemic; suicide and homelessness; boarded-up stores and no good jobs; piecework and volunteer work; the intentional defunding of the mills by the U.S. steel capitalists. This is the book’s benefit and truth. It is background and foreground both. 

Meyer tracks the impact deindustrialization had on the people of the Valley – specifically six of them.  At the end it becomes a fictional equivalent of Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” – showing the human fuckupedness of everyone left standing in coal and steel country, with not a drop of politics anywhere.  No one draws a conclusion or takes action except for dreams of escape.  You see, it is ‘in the blood.’

The characters are Issac, a geeky, skinny kid excellent at math and astronomy, but a bit of a failure at reality.  His unlikely friend Poe, a tough, large ex-football player who enjoys fighting and doesn’t know when to quit.  Grace, Poe’s dependent middle-aged mother, who spends too much time with useless husbands and other mistakes.  Harris, a kind and a killer cop at the same time.  Lee, the bright student who got out of the Valley in time.  And Issac’s dad Henry, who lives too long for anyone’s good.  All sad as shit.

Meyer has an MFA in writing, a suspect degree I usually make fun of.  However here his subject is not the middle-class, over-the-top aestheticism or some ‘cool’ assassin, but those human lives destroyed by capital and ignored by most writers.  Kudos. The book rings true in this sense.  It has happened.  Steelworkers will approve.  But the absence of politics is telling.  Apolitical fiction is the rage in MFA programs, you see.

However, and there is always a however.  We have one killing, two murders, two suicides, two attempted suicides, three bloody fights in prison, several others outside of prison in hobo land, two robberies and several adulteries.  This as part of a narrative of hoboes and heroes. Most ex-steelworkers might balk at this swirl of incidents.  The book ultimately becomes a character study centered around a high and unlikely melodrama – a melodrama that seems overkill.  Literally.  After all, homeless people deserve to die because they are all criminals.  In the book, they are the approved victims in the process of protecting two local youths, including a David who slays a Swedish goliath with a stone.  Self-defense, as a lawyer might put it, is justified in this case - but ignored in the narrative to increase tension.  Instead we have a sacrificial Jesus and a failed legal system for the indigent.

Bleached Industrial Bones of a Lost Civilization

The real star is the Monongahela Valley in Pennsylvania and West Virginia - nature itself, rising above the temporary blinking lives of the humans.  Beautiful vistas, forests, hills, rivers and streams.  The deer come out as the humans suffer. The other stars, flitting around the edges, are the ‘bright’ people who go to Yale or Harvard and get the fuck away from the awful economics of trailer-life.  And here again we see Vance’s elegy, the stuck at-home benighted and the runners, the proletarian and the educated professional strata, the stupid and the smart, the addicts and the clean, the emotional and the intellectual.  As if intelligence only dwelt in these narrow realms.  This is the sad deposit that must be paid for an MFA.

As Ayn Rand maintained, the poor are a collection of individual failures and there is a perhaps unintentional echo of that here in this book.

Meyer writes in short sentences, in a staccato manner sometimes, immersed in the characters repeated thoughts.  He’s done his research and lays out the towns, nature and industrial bone structure of the Valley well – train tracks, mills, factories, power plants, refineries, barge traffic, locks.  A book that is worth reading, though in need of an edit and a strong dose of proletarian politics.  As the saying goes, fiction is many times more true than ‘non-fiction’ - which is why I review fiction books and why you should read them.

P.S. "American Rust" is now a streaming series.  The same sad crew of messes, with some added and unlikely side-stories, populate this story.  All of them make over-the-top somewhat crazy emotional mistakes - the duck-faced uncontrollable mother, the aging lovelorn cop, the impulsive footballer, the clueless gay son, the supposedly smart lost-love who didn't get away, the dying and obnoxious sick father.  In this series, the rust is inside them, not inside the system.

Other reviews that focus on Appalachia below, use blog search box, upper left:  “Hillbilly Elegy” (Vance); “White Trash,” “Southern Cultural Nationalism,” “Gray Mountain,” “The Hunger Games.”

The Kulture Kommissar

October 9, 2019

Commune di Cortona, Toscana, Italia

How the U.S. Won the Stalemate

“King of Spies – the Dark Reign of America’s Spymaster in Korea,”by Blaine Harden, 2017

Korea is the forgotten war and not for good reason.  Donald Nichols, the odd chief spy for the U.S., is doubly-forgotten and should not be.   This book revisits the Korean War as a prelude to the American War in Vietnam.  Korea had the same napalm, carpet bombing, mass executions, class conflict, butchery and dictators that populated that later war.  Korea was fought on one side by the militarily incompetent Kim Il Sung, along with the North Korean and Chinese armys and Soviet equipment and pilots.  On the other side was the bloody South Korean tin-pot dictator Syngman Rhee, his army and intelligence services and the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force in all their dubious glory.

3 million died as part of this event in the global class war, mostly civilians.

This book focuses on Donald Nichols – a tall, overweight and untrained 7^th grade dropout who amazingly became a confidant of Rhee and the key spymaster for the U.S. Navy in this war.  His accomplishments actually turned the tide, according to Harden.  The stubborn and arrogant General Douglas McArthur and his minions like General Charles Willoughby ignored Nichols’ warnings of a North Korean invasion in 1950.  Willoughby discounted anything provided by an unknown non-com using South Korean informers. The U.S. also missed the massive buildup of the Chinese People’s Army in 1951, as the U.S. army sat on the Chinese border along the Yalu River.  Both errors led to almost certain defeat for the U.S. military.

Nichols, a young and untrained soldier, through his connections with Rhee and the South Korean military, built an intelligence machine second to none.  It predicted the first invasion; disassembled parts of the first Soviet T34 tank; dropped defectors into North Korea or stationed them on islands along the peninsula to get intelligence; cracked the North Korean army’s military code (which never change!); retrieved parts from a modern Soviet MIG15 at a crash site and later first debriefed North Korean pilots who defected with a MIG15 and a YAK18.  He even looted Sung’s office in Pyongyang. The ‘cracking’ of codes - actually a defector under Nichols’ control got a copy of the codebook - allowed the U.S. to bomb and predict moves by the North Korean military.  The T34 analysis turned up an ‘Achilles heel’ vent at the back of the tank.  The MIG15 discovery helped the U.S. better develop their own Sabre jets.  And so on.

What Harden does not do as an author is connect the dots between a virtual civil war going on in South Korea prior to the 1950 invasion by North Korea and the invasion itself.  Most southern Koreans were on the Left after years of dynastic rule and then Japanese occupation. Rhee was roundly despised, as he blocked with pro-Japanese businessmen.  In response, from 1946 to 1950 Rhee and his South Korean security services waged a bloody civil war which killed over 100,000 men, women and children suspected of being Communists or connected with the South Korean Workers Party.  Many were not.  This includes the notorious mass massacre at Taejon, South Korea, which was covered up for years, then blamed on the North.  It was a prelude to My Lai, but worse.  This gives some logic to the North’s dangerous decision to invade southern Korea at the time, to protect their allies in the south.

Taejon / Daejon Massacre

Nichols was aware of the torture, mass killings and executions carried out by Rhee and his police and army thugs, but said nothing and reported nothing at the time.  He just took pictures. He himself sent many Koreans to spy and certain death by parachute or boat in North Korea, to the point where some tried to kill him in his tent.  He pushed some North Koreans out of airplanes and basically did what he wanted.  He was protected by the U.S. ambassador and Navy top-brass, who found his frequent and accurate intelligence reports useful.  They gave him carte blanche so he worked with almost no supervision.

Ultimately Nichols’ code-breaking and human intelligence helped lead to the destruction of every city in North Korea by conventional bombs and napalm, along with every bridge, road, tunnel, village, port, dock or structure that could be mapped. The North Koreans, much like their later Vietnamese counter-parts along the Ho Chi Minh trail, used human beings to carry food and materials to the war fronts, circumventing roads, and were thus able to still supply their armies.  This war-crime destruction by the U.S. remains unmentioned in current reports on the situation in Korea – as if the North Koreans have no reason to be suspicious.

After the stalemate and armistice, Nichols was removed from Korea by the military. It is not known quite why, except the military thought he was ‘deranged.’ He was demoted, institutionalized by them in several mental institutions on a wrong diagnosis, given electro-shock ‘treatments’ (which Harden amazingly defends!) and then discharged from the service.  Nichols was fond of young boys and was later convicted of sexual abuse of young boys in Florida.  He’d shown some of this behavior in Korea with young servicemen.  In his autobiography Nichols exaggerated or lied frequently, covered up abuse, but did hint at the Taejon massacre, though placing it in a different location.  But the true and dark story was still remarkable.  While in Korea he had access to massive amounts of U.S. and Korean cash that he kept behind his desk for spy purposes.  After the war he smuggled tens of thousands of dollars out of South Korea and used the money to buy property, houses, cars and a newer life in the States.

 

To this day, the war in Korea has not officially ended.  When Trump brought up officially ending the war two years ago as part of a peace deal, the media, the academics, the think tanks, the liberals, the conservatives, the neo-liberals and the neo-conservatives all howled.  Then his own advisors torpedoed any deal and Trump went along with them.  Peace is not in our time, not when capital rules. 

 

Other reviews on the subject of Korea below, use blog search box upper left:  “The End of Free Speech,” “The Grass,” “The Long Revolution of the Global South,” “The Vegetarian,” “Land Grabbing,” “American Exceptionalism and American Innocence,” “Why the U.S. Will Never Be a Social-Democracy,” “Modern De Facto Slavery” and “Kill Everything That Moves” (Turse, about Vietnam.)

And I bought it in Siena, Italy

Red Frog

Commune di Cortona, Toscana, Italia

October 4, 2019       

The Fantasy Factory

“Hollywood,” by Charles Bukowski, 1989

Bukowski was one of the last of the romantic proletarian ‘starving artists.’  He drank, fought, was evicted frequently, slept on the streets of east Hollywood and ran with a crazed alcoholic girlfriend for many years, with only two bouts of long-term employment at the U.S. Post Office.  Finally at 65 he hit it big – he bought a BMW, a house, dined in fancy restaurants, had a wife who took care of him and started meeting big Hollywood stars.  Why?  The 1987 movie Barfly, for which he wrote the screenplay based on his early life.  This book is the story of the making of that movie.

Making Fun of the Funnable

It is absent Bukowski’s consistent male chauvinism (he does sympathize with fake tough guy Norman Mailer once in the book).  But it contains his theories of horse-betting – sort of a ‘moneyball’ approach to winning - and also his constant drinking.  Bukowski secretly admired other drunk writers like Hemingway, Faulkner and Eugene O’Neil, but his hermit’s distaste for humans led him to drink too.  Ironically, the success of this film led to Bukowski’s declining health due to the heavy swilling he wallowed in during production.  According to him alcohol, writing and Mozart was his way to relax.

This is a hilarious book, with Bukowski’s dead-pan and blunt humor competing with the ridiculous people he meets – some of which the Cohen’s must have borrowed for The Big Lebowski.  It reveals the odd characters that surround Hollywood – prima-donna actors, crooked production companies, weird hangers-on, artistic ‘geniuses’ – including the producer that actually got the film made, a real director and wild man named Barbet Schroeder.  Bukowski meets the stars of the film - Mickey Rourke, playing himself as Chinaski; and Faye Dunaway, the too-beautiful version of his disturbed and dead girlfriend Jane.  Along the way he meets people like Sean Penn, Dennis Hopper, Werner Herzog, Jean Luc Goddard, Francis Ford Coppola, David Lynch, Isabella Rossellini and Roger Ebert, all under pseudonyms.  But the book is more fond than foul.  It is no scoop on Hollywood as advertised, nor was Bukowski equipped to reveal much more than personal events due to his apolitical and solipsistic approach.

The biographer of Bukowski, Howard Sounes, claims that all the incidents in the book are true, including the most incredible one.  At one point Barfly’s pushy director threatens to slice off bits of his body with a Black & Decker electric saw, starting with his left little finger, until the cheapo production company’s lawyer signs a certain contract to let Barfly go forward.  The contract was signed.

Is Barfly a good film?  No.  I saw it years ago and it seemed mediocre, not funny at all, unlike this book.  Bukowski had never written a screenplay before, though his books rely heavily on dialog.  It does have the seedy, dark ‘look’ that Bukowski wanted, as the director actually followed the screen writer’s suggestions, unlike most directors.  I will watch it again, but this book is the real barfly.  Worth it for the laughs, unless you are in AA.

Other reviews on recent proletarian and lumpen fiction, use blog search box, upper left:  “Post Office” (by Bukowski); “Red Baker,” “Factory Days,” “Suttree” and “All the Pretty Horses,” (both by Cormac McCarthy); “Polar Star,” “The Football Factory.” 

  

The Kulture Kommissar

Commune di Cortona, Toscana, Italia

October 1, 2019