40.
[History is collective, even in a collective of one; truth and propaganda are not identical; representation is fungible; accountability is necessary; Karl Rove - time folder]
He writes to-do lists everyday. He marks through the accomplished tasks with a red marker. The lists, he believes, must be created and destroyed daily. Some tasks reappear on the list over and over, never done, always planned. Some he manages to carry out nearly immediately. The list creates a tension. He becomes aware of authority issues. This is problematic, since he himself is acting as time-manager, or self-director. He assigns himself new titles on an almost monthly basis. This month he is titled “acting regional standards project manager.” Last month, in April, he was inspired by the punk’d start of the month, to title his position “Fool in Residence.” He sometimes gives himself performance reviews, which are to varying degrees thorough or informal. He notices this leads him to engage in conversation, an ongoing exchange between his worker and manager selves. When someone else is present, he is surprised when the other calls attention to him talking to himself, and on more than one occasion, he has wondered aloud if he might be losing his mind. One friend assured him, “Talking to yourself is normal. People do it all the time. It’s a sign of motivation.” Another, who may only have been kidding around, he doesn’t know, suggested he might think about a counselor or therapist. “Don’t you think you should run these ideas past an outside arbiter, someone with some objectivity, another perspective?” “That’s just it,” he had replied. “I’m positive I need more subjectivity, not less!” He argued that dimensional times require dimensional persons, that the faceting of his personality into personas was not a form of divergence from his fellows, but rather, an embracing of human potential. His friend was not convinced. She thought his talking to himself might be a symptom of brain damage due to excessive alcohol and drug abuse. He was too young, she asserted to be so occupied with his own inner dialogue, to such an extent that it had begun to spill forth from his mouth. He stopped talking to himself when she was around. What finally fixed it - if indeed the self-managing discussions were a problem needing fixing - turned out to be electronic. He joined a busy chatroom, and started using instant messaging. Before long, he stopped talking to himself, manager to tasker. Eventually, he even stopped making lists. He noticed he began to visit the coffee shop less frequently. His old friends started phoning, asking if he were okay. His social life was migrating away from face-to-face contact, to virtual space contact. He wasn’t sure whether this were a good or bad thing. His hands and wrists started to ache, and he got fat. He missed talking to himself.
***
[From his journal]
I could use a haircut. It’s not staying in place, after I comb it.
I’m out of smokes. [Don’t feel like walking to store]
I need a shave. [No razors]
I need new tapes. [Tired of old ones. Threw away Crosby Stills Nash & Young]
I need a car. [Feet are very sore]
I need a TV. [So I know WTF people are talking about at parties]
I need to stock the pantry. [The Apocalypse is imminent, possibly]
I need a soulmate. [Better focus of my attentions]
I need to be picky about time with friends. [Everybody wants something, man]
I need to smoke pot, legally and cheaply. [Move to Cali, get a med-mari lic.]
I need to go for a walk. [Don’t get shot]
I need to write a book about all this. [Borrow a typewriter or buy a used one]
I need to figure out which section of the bookstore my book will belong in. [Poetry, self-help, non-fiction?]
***
Sometimes he is immobilized by fear. He sits in bed, smoking cigarettes and looking at Conan the Barbarian comics.
***
>>
As Colin Powell puts it:
“Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off. Good leadership involves responsibility to the welfare of the group, which means that some people will get angry at your actions and decisions. It’s inevitable, if you’re honorable. Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity.
…
Powell expands, “Ironically, by procrastinating on the difficult choices, by trying not to get everyone mad, and by treating everyone equally ‘nicely’ regardless of their contributions, you’ll simply ensure that the only people you’ll wind up angering are the most creative and productive people in the organization.”
<<
- Jeremy Gutsche, Exploiting Chaos
***
>>
We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more. Given Saddam Hussein’s history of aggression, given what we know of his grandiose plans, given what we know of his terrorist associations, and given his determination to exact revenge on those who oppose him, should we take the risk that he will not someday use these weapons at a time and a place and in a manner of his choosing, at a time when the world is in a much weaker position to respond?
<<
- Remarks to the United Nations Security Council by Secretary Colin L. Powell, New York City, February 5, 2003
***
>>
12/14/05:
- BUSH: I said I made the right decision. Knowing what I know today, I would have still made that decision.
- HUME: So, if you had had this — if the weapons had been out of the equation because the intelligence did not conclude that he had them, it was still the right call?
- BUSH: Absolutely.
<<
[Source: http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/15/wmd-irrelevant/]
***
>>
In what was a remarkable admission that contradicted - to a large extent - the past statements from his onetime boss, former Bush strategist Karl Rove said on Tuesday evening that had the President known Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, the United States would not have gone to war.
“In the aftermath of 9/11 the concern was about a tyrant accused of enormous human rights abuses,” but who also possessed weapons of mass destruction, said Rove. “Absent that, I suspect that the administration’s course of action would have been to work to find more creative ways to constrain him like in the 90s.”
<<
[Source: "Rove: We Wouldn't Have Invaded Iraq If We Knew The Truth About WMDs" by Sam Stein, Huffington Post [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/12/02/rove-we-wouldnt-have-inva_n_147923.html]
***
He comes across a Chinati Foundation newsletter, containing this essay:
>>
DONALD JUDD
Nie wieder Krieg
This essay was written in the days before the Gulf War began in January 1991. The title means “Never Again War.”It’s hard to write about constructive and peaceful matters before a war. It’s difficult to live threatened by war all your life, and further to know that the reasons are not outwardly determined and serious, but are inwardly caused and frivolous.
War is failure. War is caused by carelessness, wastefulness, thoughtlessness, incompetence, complacency and laziness. That’s why war is the solution and dream of governmental bureaucrats, and as well the easiest way out for their subjects. If the Americans, governors and gov- erned, ordinarily thought of war as failure, they would not be in Arabia. But even there, without being able to say why they are there, war is exciting and a little glorious and seems to be a brave defense. This war, which may carelessly grow to be World War III, will be very destructive in lives as in buildings, which are labor and effort, the construction of lives. But war is not just a mindless spasm that goes away. The preparation for war for all our lives has made our society. At length and steadily it destroys constructive
and peaceful activities.Almost no one in the United States has said that for fifty years the country has been a military state and that the “Cold War” was, as it is again, a situation devised to maintain that military state. War is patriotism, which is first, single, and sacrosanct. Hardly anyone dares to complain or object, mostly no one thinks to object. In August almost no one in the United States objected to Americans being sent to Arabia. The intention was obviously to set up a situation for further soldiers and for war. Since then there has been even less discussion than accompanied the last election, the least lively in a dead series, the height of the freedom worth dying for. War is sacrosanct. There can be no discussion of its benefits and results. Not even the most crass self-interest is considered; war is conspicuously without self-interest. To the Americans it immediately means the total destruction of the enemy. The last time that they couldn’t do that was against England in 1812. They have no grand plan, other than maintaining the military, only little schemes, and no purpose once war begins other than extermination. Here is an example from 1891:
Meager reports have reached Pine Ridge Agency of the battle fought on New Year’s Day between General Carr’s troops and the hostile Indians. Several Indians have been wounded and a number of Government horses captured by hostiles. General Miles is now at the Agency, preparing for the last act in the bloody drama. His plan is to completely surround the enemy; then, in case they refuse to surrender, he will lose no time in wiping the rebellious Sioux off the face of the earth.
The Americans are supposed to be innocent, which they are not, and naïve, which they are, and not good at diplomacy, which is true, having no purpose. They are vicious and naïve and just as dangerous as if they were calculating, even more so. The other extreme, however, of the calculating, selfish, and ruthless ruler is never reached. The originators of war are foolish and lazy and guided by the vague and dying slogans of institutions already dead. One generalization that I found, a better one than most, is that you should constantly check whether a big social institution, or its generalizations, are still alive, or if it ever was. Everything, good and bad, decays and all that remains for a while are slogans. Now neither the United States nor the Soviet Union can even speak in slogans—Bush mumbles one from time to time but he has trouble getting it right—and still the people of both countries submit and follow. It’s like watering the liquor until the drunkard gets drunk on water.
War is rich and lazy. It’s simple and easy. Totalitarianism is simple and easy. The Soviet Union thinks it’s easiest now, since the bureaucrats solved the threat of reform by moving even more slowly, to go back under the KGB and the military, even more idle, even more wasteful. The President of the United States, once chief of the CIA, is not interested in the declining productivity of the country and its debt, the results of the military economy; he is not interested in real problems and solutions. A war can hide these problems. No one has stated flatly that the main purpose of the invasion of Arabia is to provide a reason not to reduce military expenditure. The United States is in Arabia to continue its military establishment. It searched desperately after “the Cold War ended” and finally, since Panama was so quick and the “Drug War” so insufficient, found, even made a justification for the military. All talk of small reductions ceased. I suspect the United States “set up” Saddam Hussein, enticed him into Kuwait, so as to produce a situation of imminent war. It was desperate for the threat of war.
Once there is something to destroy, it’s easy to let destruction run in order to conceal the real problems. Destruction can only be of construction and consumes it. The Soviet Union ran what it had into the ground for seventy years and now that’s buried. As A.J.P. Taylor said, the Russian people are fine and don’t deserve their government. But of course everyone deserves their government since they allow it. The people in the Soviet Union, which is a perfect name for reform, should object quickly, while they can. The United States has been running down its economy for sixty years and had a better start, so that it will be later, but not much, in burying itself. World War II, in so far as it was about anything, was about the somewhat conflicting natures of the large central systems. The present threats and wars are the death throes of these systems, which will fight each other over minor distinctions as they collapse. They all have ideas of the future, based on central authority, joined to ideas of the past created for the nation. None of this hangs together, which is a good reason not to die for it.
There is not enough freedom in the Soviet Union to produce art. There will not be enough to produce science, even technology. At this point destruction collapses upon itself, like an old star, in fact like a “red giant.” Uncle Sam can be like the white dwarf. The steady pressure and bureaucratization and militarization has pretty much destroyed art and architecture in the United States. Art is back to less than the handful that it was in the forties and fifties. And like the Soviet Union, the United States proves that the large bureaucratic system cannot have its own art. This inability is the sign of its general inability, of its failure as a viable philosophy, just as the inability of Christianity for 300 years to produce good art is the sign of
its demise as a reality. Some institutions have produced good art and architecture, not lately, some at least have barely allowed these, as during the fifties and sixties in the United States.In 1984 I saw the cemetery of Piskaryovskoye in Leningrad. Five hundred thousand people are buried there, even so only a part of those who died during the siege. I made a poster of a photograph of the cem- etery as a poster against war. Last year in considering posters for this exhibition, I was inclined not to put this in the show, since it seemed to have become irrelevant. And now it’s relevant. The Soviet Union is going back to 1984 and the United States is in 1984, off in the desert preparing for perpetual war, claiming for itself the biggest justification ever, that of policing the world, forever seeking each Idi Amin. One hundred and seventy years ago Simón Bolívar said that the United States would destroy all freedom the name of freedom. Or as Simon de Montfort said of the Albigensians: “Tuez-les tous! Dieu reconnaîtra les siens.”
The consequence of a fake economy, which is the military economy, is a fake society. One consequence of that is fake art and architecture. As the enforcing bureaucracy grows omnipresent and omniscient, real art and architecture shrinks. As I’ve said elsewhere, architecture, which is more vulnerable, is gone for now. Art is next. There are certain architects that I don’t know of, but the ones I do know of internationally are almost all terrible, except perhaps Tadao Ando of whom I know little. Mario Botta has recently designed an art museum for San Francisco which establishes him solidly among the terrible. Art museums are the best form of fake architecture since neither the clients nor the architects take art seriously. And then many artists obligingly add fakes to those made by ignorance. The art museum becomes exquisitely pointless, a fake of fakes, a double fake, the inner sanctum of a fake society. Of course Hans Hollein is good at this. He and the Guggenheim Museum of New York plan a negative and fake Guggenheim for Salzburg, a hole in the ground. What is the public and what are students supposed to think of the horrifying design of Frank Gehry’s Vitra Design Museum? These buildings make a joke of architecture, of art, of culture, of the community, and of the whole society.
This allows the present horrifying situation; it decorates it. The so-called “post-modern” architecture is a manifestation of the fake economy, even of fake business, of fake institutions. It’s perfect that McDonald’s has opened in Moscow where the KGB can keep the line straight. It’s all meeting on the right. Eventually it will become obvious that fake was fake, but this is going to be too late for us. And probably when this is recognized, fakes will dominate. It’s endless. Fascist architecture’s main quality is not its aggressiveness but its mindlessness and vague generality, that is, that it is fake. Mostly the fake disappears, which is less likely in architecture than in disposable art, but for a long time now new fakes have far exceeded real work. This is a permanent condition in the
United States.The vague purpose of the museum is to immobilize art, to have culture without culture having any effect, to make art fake. The purpose of fake is to avoid disturbing the social hierarchy. The definite purpose of grand expenditures in a community is to show the power of the central government without disturbing the hierarchy of the community and without benefiting it. One reason for a great military force is the same. It uses up a lot of money and doesn’t do anything. An example of this in architecture is some news from Philadelphia:
“North Philadelphia is the city’s largest area of physical decay along with having the most concentrated poverty in the city,”
said Barbara J. Kaplan, executive director of the City Planning Commission. “But despite all the poverty, it has a significant
percentage of home ownership, ranging from about 38 to 60 percent in different areas, and that is a real strength.” On Monday night, the team held a town meeting and dreamed aloud about a utopian North Philadelphia, a place with a Crystal Palace for a train station, a glass-sided School for the Creative and Performing Arts and a Grand Civic Plaza.The solution is a palace, of course “post-modern,” as in Dallas, Texas, where the crime rate is the highest in the United States. The solution is an unnecessary token, a fake community. Thirty-eight to sixty percent of the people own their own homes. Since they are poor and since their ownership is stable, constituting a real community, the obvious way to help them would be to abate their property and income taxes, even to “grant” each family a little money to repair their homes. This seems harmless. But it’s unthinkable. Conceding money would bring them up a little in the hierarchy, which is absolutely forbidden. The implications are fearful: it’s undemocratic, it’s unfair to others, it’s a violation of free enterprise, it’s tampering with the market—who knows what might happen—it’s tampering with nature; and then the hand of the central government wouldn’t show—the dispensation wouldn’t be clear. Even to think of such a thing admits the existence of hierarchy and unleashes, who knows, my god, class war, and then they will never again be able to be upwardly mobile. Ten years ago in the once wealthy cattle town near where I live in West Texas, declining since the triumph of the United States in World War II and now sped to poverty by the invasion of Arabia, a tin “senior citizens’ center” was built over the town swimming pool with a $500,000 grant from Washington, D.C. First, there’s not a person in town who will admit to being a “senior citizen.” Second, throughout the town the water line is contaminated by the sewer line. Then part of the town doesn’t have sewers anyway, or paved roads, and most of the other roads need repair, as well as many of the homes. The solution to real faults is a tin box over a pool in a sunny climate. Of course this is a better monument to the central government than the ones for the eighty thousand coffins which it has just ordered for the soldiers in Arabia. But the attitude is the same.
The consequences of the invasion of Kuwait would have been minor and a lengthy embargo would have punished and moderated Iraq. The consequences of the invasion of Arabia are war and vast death and destruction and poverty worldwide. The consequences are the solidification of all right-wing governments — the Soviet Union now dares to send more soldiers to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — and the final, complete respectability of violence. The consequence is the culminating victory for the totalitarianism which has been growing for the last twenty years, for the last fifty, for sixty. Last year’s freedom is put down; last years moderation is discredited. What China did is worse than what Iraq did and China is forgiven now. For me and others, the consequence of the invasion of Arabia to the town in West Texas was that since August we have had to fire some twenty people because of the disastrous effect on the economy of the United States. Death is next. The consequence of the invasion to the employment was as direct as drinking makes you drunk.
The war next Tuesday is a military fantasy. Allowing this fantasy is a failure of the society, of people everywhere, just as allowing the rise of Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism was. The people in the United States said nothing in August against the first soldiers, just like Vietnam, or the second soldiers, also like Vietnam, and have not said anything since, and Congress mumbles O.K., whatever you want. Only people in the streets can stop this waste of their labor and lives. Only they can return this extreme fantasy to fantasy and make their fantastic problems real.
The two vast military systems, the United States and the Soviet Union, are being rattled for a couple of years, are recovering and cooperating to stop all change and freedom. Without opposition they will solidify a totalitarianism which will last for ten or twenty years or so, until incompetence and the poverty of thought and freedom cause the congealing systems to collapse. Their attitudes will continue in the collapse and into a nuclear war. This solidification of totalitarianism might be stopped now, but opposition next year will be too late. In fact, the fatal mistake may have occurred last year when the people didn’t go far enough, quickly enough. The Baltic republics, for example, may have lost their freedom through their own reasonableness and moderation.
Even last August, for the first time, Russia, for the last time, was free.
We had all left our countries as a result of the war. Ball and I came from Germany, Tzara and Janco from Romania, Hans Arp from France. We all agreed that the war had been contrived by the various governments for the most autocratic, sordid and materialistic reasons; we Germans were familiar with the book “J’accuse,” and even without it we would have had little confidence in the decency of the German Kaiser and his generals. Ball was a conscientious objector, and I escaped by the skin of my teeth from the pursuit of the police myrmidons who, for their so-called patriotic purposes, were massing men in the trenches of Northern France and giving them shells to eat, none of us had much appreciation for the courage it takes to get shot for the idea of a nation which is at its best a cartel of felt merchants and profiteers in leather, at worst a cultural association of psychopaths who, like the Germans, marched off with a volume of Goethe in their knapsacks, to skewer Frenchman and Russians on their bayonets.
(Richard Huelsenbeck, En Avant Dada, A
History of Dadaism, 1920)The signers of this manifesto are well aware that the recent venomous attacks on modern art are no accident. The violence of these attacks stands in direct proportion to the worldwide growth of their totalitarian idea, which makes no secret of its hostility to the spiritual in art or its desire to debase art to the level of slick illustration.
(Richard Huelsenbeck, Dada Manifesto
1949, 1949)This essay was originally published in Donald
Judd Architecture, Museum für Angewandte
Kunst (MAK), Vienna, 1991.
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***
His son is born on the day the First Gulf War ended. The second one has not ended, after a decade. His son is 19. The thought of the second Bush President landing on the aircraft carrier, pimped to look like a soldier, makes him spit. He spits and shakes his head. He curses such men, if you would call them that. “Mission Accomplished!” Traitors.
©2001 PJM