THEY CLAMOUR FOR YOU
We have long admired Augusto Monterroso’s contribution within the category of very short stories:
ONE INTERPRETATION
A roving DP correspondent, knowing of our interest in etymological philosophy, has alerted us to Flies, a slightly longer story by Monterroso, gracefully translated by Adam Thirlwell, and excerpted below:
A THEORY OF LITERATURE
We take notice of the recent blooming of a corpse flower at the national botanical gardens in Washington DC. A roaming correspondent informs us that the flower’s distinctive stench has already dissipated, having served its function to lure pollinators into the fold like — well, like flies to a corpse.
OH, SO THAT’S WHAT A METAPHOR LOOKS LIKE
~~~
This particular Amorphophallus titanum last bloomed in 2007; rumor has it that Donald Rumsfeld visited the garden and classified the blooming corpse as an unknown known.
~~~
FUNERAL CORSAGE
~~~
One might imagine the garden visitor experiencing difficulty in picking out the fetid reek of Titan Arum from the capital’s broadly endemic stink; that foul and all-encompassing smog released by immeasurable heaps of rotting and rotten language, left from every level of its use.
Of course, corrupt language serves a very useful function for those exercising power. As expressed by W.H. Auden during his 1972 interview with Michael Newman of The Paris Review: 
In principle, it may be the poet’s role to protect and sustain the sacredness of language, yet Auden also well perceived how few poets were willing to accept the role, when other choices promised a more fragrant future.
Here at DP, the graveolent condition of language has become too persistent and widespread to terrify us anymore. No, what terrifies us is that nobody gives a mucid fig about it, least of all those for whom language is supposed to be “sacred”.
Elsewhere in The Paris Review interview, Auden mentions another useful (and long-discarded) role for poets and artists: to discern the truth, whether about flowers or corpses.
It appears that a Picasso painting titled Harlequin’s Head has been burned in a Romanian stove; the ashes subjected to forensic analysis seeking to confirm that the pilfered Picasso has indeed been incinerated. The painting was once part of the famed Triton collection assembled by Willem Cordia, who had an eye for unusual heads.
A buffoon character from the commedia dell’arte, Arlecchino remains a persona for all seasons. Consider for example the painting’s uncanny resemblance to a recent montage photograph juxtaposing two contemporary practitioners within the Harlequinade, a New York comedy duo known as Spitzer & Weiner:
We recall that great master of the schnitt/kopf, John Heartfield, who advocated photographic decapitation as retribution for cold blooded murder in the streets of Berlin on May 1, 1929:
Nowadays, there is no need for scissors, to reveal the true disposition of improbably aligned heads:
HARLEQUIN NAMED POTUS OBAMUSH
Among the other paintings presumed burned in the Romanian stove we find Lucien Freud’s Woman With Eyes Closed ….
… a painting that brings to mind Michelangelo’s Pietà, targeted for attack in 1972 by one Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian geologist who asserted that he was Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, before knocking off a chunk of Mary’s nose.
RISEN FROM THE DEAD
Toth was subsequently hospitalized for a two year examination of his head before eventual deportation to Australia. The sculpture was restored by a man named Deoclecio Redig de Campos, and is now protected by a sheet of bulletproof glass, similar to that employed by the below head, to protect against violence in those aforementioned oft-bloodied streets of Berlin:
BULLETPROOF HARLEQUIN HEAD
And finally, a painting that has not yet been stolen nor burned, and one that is worthy of long contemplation, a radical unmasking from the brush of Xue Jiye:
HISTORY IS A FROG
Here at DP, we are firm believers in anticipatory history. We prefer a truthfully imagined future to deceitful revisions of the past. Among the books shelved at arm’s length, we find a collection of Mark Twain with writings that imagine both pasts and futures, such as this excerpt from Outlines of History (suppressed.):
Writing for Tomdispatch, Alfred McCoy provides a brilliant summary of how command and control techniques hatched at the margins inevitably return for homeland deployment.
Now comes another anticipatory historian known to some as that great advocate for the Rights of Earthworms, the Honorable Keith Harding, and to others as the poet Jon Swan, who sends us the following report:
HAPPINESS IS A PERSONAL ALGORITHM
FULLY ORGANIC
SHOP UNTIL YOU DROP
FEEDLOT 2024
The largest algal bloom ever recorded in China has turned the Yellow Sea puke green. This year’s bumper crop has enveloped 28,900 sq km (11,158 sq miles) in algae, covering twice as much sea surface as the previous megabloom, in 2008.
Enteromorpha prolifera, with emphasis on prolifera, is not toxic to humans or animals if ingested; in fact, the Chinese refer to it as “sea lettuce”. However, the vast green salad on the surface (fed by fertilizer runoff and raw sewage) blocks sunlight from reaching the ocean floor while also sucking oxygen from the water, suffocating most other marine life.
Nonetheless, homo sapiens is nothing if not adaptable — for humans, at least for now, life goes on:
SLIPPERY FUN
BOY SERVED ON BED OF SEA LETTUCE
GROUP OF MEN MAKES HAPPY GREEN MEMORIES
~~~~~~~~
For their next holiday, the beach lovers depicted above may choose to travel to Chengdu for a swim inside the largest building in the world, a structure that includes an interior artificial beach. According to the official promotional materials….
FABULOUS HEAVEN
WHAT DOES THIS PLATFORM COMMUNICATE?
NO SLIME ON THIS SLIDE
LED SUNSET GIVES PERFECT PLEASURE EVERY EVE; THE LARGEST FLAT SCREEN TELLY IN THE WORLD!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In an open letter published on Tuesday, Edward Snowden’s father (assisted by his attorney) wrote:
The reference to Thomas Paine moved us to search for the original contextual source, yet while the approximate quote appears everywhere on the internet, attributed to Paine, we have been unable to trace the mother text.
SOURCED OR MEMED?
~~~~~~~~
A twentieth century patriot named Edward Abbey, much esteemed here at DP, voiced a similar idea in A Voice Crying From the Wilderness:
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
And while reviewing the extraordinary writings of Thomas Paine in search of the elusive quotation, we were reminded of his stirring opening paragraph to The American Crisis, written in December of 1776 during a time of extreme hardship for the American revolutionaries:
During our own darkening time of crisis here in America, we see throngs of sunshine patriots and summer soldiers, and a sad paucity of those willing to take a stand in defense of individuals like Edward Snowden who have risked everything to protect our country against its government. Most of us seem all too willing — eager, even — to renounce reason and to believe the vacant blather issued forth from the organs of Pacification & Hogwash.
Such observations return us to another sentence from Abbey’s all too contemporary wilderness cry, five simple words that we have just pinned to the wall above our desk:
WHAT SORT OF LIFE DOES THIS ENSURE?
Now comes Navy Captain Robert Durand, who reports that efforts to convince medical professionals to cease all assistance in the force feeding of hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay have failed to gain ethical traction. “They signed up to carry out lawful orders,” said Capt. Durand, adding “This is a lawful order.” He then went on to say, “We do it to preserve life.”
One hardly knows where to start with such twisted declarations. Did these medical professionals not also “sign up” to a professional ethos generally understood to mandate that they do no harm to any individual who comes under their care? Also, on what basis is Capt. Durand claiming legality for the order? Military chain of command? Finally, if “life” is understood to center around the conscious volition of the subject, and that subject explicitly wishes to cease eating, then does not forced feeding actually subtract from or even terminate– the life of the subject?
HEALING HANDS?
In any event, the notion that national law (as embodied, say, in certain imperatives of an invented or manipulated national security) cancels professional ethics has a long history to which we doubt Capt. Durand would like to find himself attached. To refresh our understanding of the psychology behind such thinking, we pulled out a well-worn copy of Robert Jay Lifton’s extraordinary study of Nazi doctors, above all his final chapter on the psychology of genocide (slightly re-formatted below, for readability):
As an alternative to the “genocidal direction”, Lifton goes on to discuss the “prophylaxis” of the “embodied self”:
Protections against the “machine” of “national security” requires a clear ethical detachment that supports the embodied self, while also supporting an individual capacity for empathy, a quality that appears to be totally absent within the regime of Guantanamo indefinite detention.
We close with a poem written in 2007 by Adnan Latif, found dead in his cell in 2012, purportedly from a drug overdose attributed to a “procedural error” :
It appears that Edward Snowden did not share his precise itinerary with the global media:
Those left on board the Aeroflot flight to Havana will no doubt devote their time to sober meditation on the role of journalism as a necessary check against unfettered state power:
Maybe all the booze that would normally be consumed by passengers on Aeroflot found its way into the bloodstream of John Kerry, who as America’s top diplomat supposedly in the midst of delicate discussions with his Russian and Chinese counterparts, chimed in with the rather abrasively impolitic ……
Of course, what Mr. Snowden champions is not “internet freedom”, but rather the fundamental human rights and protections against tyranny that are so precisely articulated in the United States Constitution. The NSA and its affiliated agencies in the vast networks of surveillance and control have been making fetid hash from what used to be considered inviolable and inalienable. We recall the delightful quote from that other great paragon of American statesmanship, Henry Kissinger:
Now the unconstitutional takes no time at all — the NSA rocks the Bill of Rights all around the clock. Mr. Snowden took a stand against such profoundly abusive violation of individual rights; for this he must be chased down, dragged into a secret court somewhere, convicted of God knows what, and then disappeared. Or perhaps his disappearance has already become part of our secret history?
Former Bush mouthorgan Ari Fleischer sent out the following tweet this morning:
What does it mean to take a stand against power? When a solitary individual chooses to take a stand against all the concentrated violence embodied within the State, is this bravery or madness?
MAN WITH SHOPPING BAG AND TANKS
In his famous sermon delivered inside the National Cathedral on March 31, 1968, Martin Luther King puts the question like this:
Most people are familiar with that passage from MLK, yet may not remember how the sermon begins:
WIDE AWAKE
Anyone who faces power, wide awake, will inevitably come under attack. Those who take a stand will be called traitors, perverts, demons. The bought voices of the sleeping intelligentsia will flow like Brooks through an alpine meadow. And those who are sleeping will one day awake to find themselves in a world without individual rights; a world with neither privacy nor sanctuary; a world without the rule of law.
Edward Snowden had every reason to follow the path of privilege and power, and go with the flow, like the brooks through the meadow. Instead, he has taken a stand, at great risk to his life and liberty. He looked straight into the twisted logic of the dark place (the totalitarian dream of omniscience and unencumbered control of the populace) and chose to follow his conscience through a carefully planned act of civil disobedience.
Let us hope that his brave and selfless act, like the silent stare into the face of power performed by the choreographer Erdem Gunduz inside Taksim Square, inspires others to choose the same path of conscience, and to take a stand against cowardice, expediency and tyranny.
We close with another passage from King’s sermon:
WHEN LOOKING INTO THE DARKNESS, MANY PEOPLE CHOOSE SLEEP
DATA MINE SCHEMATIC
Recent revelations of extensive online data mining by the National Security Agency should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention for the past decade or so, during which the surveillance dream of Total Information Awareness has become densely interwoven with the media dream of Total Connectivity. Whereas in previous media regimes, state surveillance required that citizens inform against each other, the internet makes it possible for each individual to serve as their very own snitch.
For intelligence analysts, the seductive appeal of a comprehensive map of the “social brain” (we know what you think as you think it) becomes too difficult to resist, just as the appeal of instant and universal connectivity drives individuals into social media.
A society that requires the extraction of information from one neighbor against another will inevitably experience stress:
THE SWEAT MINE IS A DIRTY BUSINESS
When every user of the network serves as their own informant, the scenario becomes far more tidy – no need to store stinky seat pads inside laboratory bottles when the same behavioral tendencies and affiliations can be revealed through elegant algorithms. Subjects become willing, and even eager to contribute their resources to the data mine, anxious to prove their innocence through stripping down and bending over, whatever it takes to confirm total obedience.
IF YOU ARE NOT A TERRORIST YOU HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE
Those who wish to restore some degree of privacy and anonymity must be willing to modify their relationship to the network, whether that means erasing social media profiles or withdrawing from the use of commercial air travel. Most are unwilling to take such action; networks create their own dependencies, even to the point of addiction. Withdrawal becomes painful and even unthinkable. In this way, subjection becomes voluntary, just as all forms of dissent become criminalized.
In time, severance from the network will become illegal; all citizens will be expected to contribute to the mine. The age of the Delta Depository will be upon us, soon enough.
BOUNDLESS SUBMISSION
Desperado Philosophy 