Dennis Hollingsworth

Notes over Coffee for Jacques

Notes Over Coffee was an editioned project I did with Joel Mesler three years ago whose theme was taken from the communal habit we had of starting our days in ChinaTown with a rendezvous at the local coffee shop. It was common to share newspaper clippings and magazine articles and talk about their significance, conversations full and plump and robust, how great those days were. Jacques deBeaufort was with us on many a morning, and I remember talking about how exciting the phenomenon of blogs were and maybe we should get involved in the new medium.

Now here we are together in the fullness of time and I am happy to see that our Notes Over Coffee has lived on via the internet, plumper and robuster. This post is a kind of dogear of topics that Jacques has touched on in his blog recently, things that I am keen to talk about when we get together this week.

1. I don't think that Jacques is an anti-military type, but I wonder about the drift of his recent post singing a song of praise for an anti-military sentiment dressed up in scholarly garb: "I've been reading a brilliant work by Andrew Newberg,"Why We Believe What We Believe"... " where heros are killers, murderous Islamofascists are humans too, that soldiers kill with a shrug, that our military is no more than a cult. He then excerpts the author's list of 17 steps of indoctrination that results in murderous dehumanization... which is strange since this list could also describe his/our experience in grad school:

When I was in CalArts seven years ago, in some circles it was considered quite wrong to engage in visual pleasure. I wonder if that attitude still persists up in Valencia? I guess it depends on who you talk to...but I'm sure my current work would be torn to shreds in Michael Asher's Post-Studio Seminar. I do wonder if CalArts students still take all that severely puritanical brainwashing to heart. It was always sort of curious to be forced sit and listen- up to 12 hours at a stretch- to a thinly disguised radical leftist critique of commerce*.....especially coming from someone who has lived off of a trust fund for all of his adult life. Daniel Mendel-Black recently commented on Asher colleauge Benjamin Buchloh in a brilliant article. Radicals in any guise are essentially ideologically militaristic. They believe in the absolutes of Truth..and so in a sense remind me of world leaders who couch their policy decisions within the rhetoric of "Good vs. Evil". This is something I have absolutely no tolerance for.

Ideological radicals = militarism? It is not uncommon, this reflexive bias within our artworld, our liberal, multicultural, tolerant, intelligent, worldly, broadminded, progressive culture. I remember casual remarks in grad seminars about baby killing soldiers. I remember the ocassional friend who blithely tossed off the idea that soldiers are too stupid to succeed inthe civillian world. Little do they know the dimension of intelligence that there is in the services. I am darkly amused as social encounters freeze when people discover that I was enlisted in the military out of high school, where rage of dinner companions is barely repressed and cordiality devolves into contempt, seething, sputtering. My "tolerant" acquaintances search for signs of apostasy in me against that martial world. It is at that point that I like to say that I made an oath (eyebrows arch) to protect and defend the constitution of the United States (eyes become daggers) and that I still believe in that vow today (conversation frozen, dead). Silence is awkward as I wait for the fool who would repudiate that ideal.

But Jacques is no fool, and I'm keen to unpack this topic over coffee. He is someone who is individual enough to question the answers given to him in school. I see his explorations into Eastern mystisicm as an effort to escape that solipsistic coffin that we have built for ourselves, and I recognise a seeker for a post-postmodern new world. Jacques is a jack-postmodernist too.

2. Jacques is jacking Eastern metaphysics for the tonic that will remedy the ills of our cul de sac aesthetic/philosophical/political cultural order, but the problem is that Eastern mystisicm merely side steps the problem. I recognise that there are many who would dispute this indictment of the status quo, and to this I lay out the fact of the sheer lack of new ideas, the eternal stylistic recurrence of the 60's, the sad reality that education has become based on indoctrination instead of a neutral equippage of intellectual tools to help the next generation to survive in a changing world...

And what is the problem? The problem is that freedom is threatened in this world.

Those of you who would roll your eyes at this point are part of the problem. Some of you are innocently mistaken, misled. Some of you are too scared to stray from the herd. Some of you are a bit dense. And some are simply psychopathic, mild or strong. Real Liberals would not simply dismiss freedom's defense.

In my recent post "The Anti-ist", I had a bit of a problem with this passage from Joseph Joffe's "DISSECTING ANTI-ISMS":

Jews, Indians and Chinese have always embodied the wrenching economic transformation that threatened old habits and dispensations—and Jews suffered twice because they were agents of intellectual and cultural upheaval, to boot.

I remember encountering prejudice against Chinese merchants by Filipinos in Manila when I was a kid living in the Philippines (not in my family per se, it was an idea in the air). I remember trying to digest the idea that these were rapacious people, pirates in the marketplace and it took a while for me to puzzle it all out. But this civilizational trio shared the common trait of being uniquely successful economically. Today, we call that entrepreneurship, our new world order. I think that calling the Jews "agents of intellectual and cultural change" is misleading because they are not agent provocateurs as might be implied. Radio talk show host Dennis Prager has an interesting take on the nature of the Jews and their special status as the Chosen People (...his name would send many a Liberal cognoscenti crawling up the walls, stay calm if you can and keep an open mind. That is our claim to fame after all. I assess Prager to be wise despite some shortcomings, and that he offers much of value for those on the Left side of the spectrum...). Prager says that they are not chosen by G-d as the favored child, but as the child who has been tasked with special responsibilities, like taking out the trash or washing the dishes.

Chores.
Work.
Duties.

Their specific responsibilty is to maintain a house for that special meme called freedom. Freedom is the one human property that is set apart by the sanction from G-d. The Chinese and Indians are within the outer zone of this narrative because commerce is predicated on the precondition of freedom. Freedom gives us our right to the property that we create and we take that property to the marketplace to negotiate price and value in the way that Hayeck (--not Salma and certainly not Marx--) describes so well. Artists do this every day. The art world is predicated on this. If property is a crime, then artists are criminals. Some criminals like to pose as artists for elegant cover and some artists like to pose as criminals for the same reason. But if virtue matters, then it's worth considering that the art world would not exist without freedom and the consequent struggle to distiinguish oneself from others.

Jacques, you might not greet this with open arms because the Eastern mystic thing is to dissolve the self. But to that I would say that there is no inherent conflict with the self-manifesting freedom of the Judeo narrative and the mystical paradigm that you are exploring. It's just that there are these other ideologies that seek to dissolve the self for pernicious reasons. Some are the viscious ones of Islamofascism, some are simple yet stubborn patriarchies (bossy men --you know who they are--) and others are the lovely-yet-deadly totalitarian flower that lures with the scent of brotherly love.

Freedom is defined and housed in Judaism, and no where else is this done in the world. Freedom needs the intervention by G-d to remove it to a place safe from meddlesome humans, for intentions good or bad, a denouement for interminable philosophical musing, a literal deus ex machina to make the ulimate abstraction concrete. And because the Jews were chosen to administrate this task, everyone else is free to do as they please, short of burning the house of freedom down. We can all fly our freak flags because that's what freedom implies, because that's G-d's loving gift to the world, because G-d's house has many mansions after all.

So this is why I have trouble with the anti-militarists amongst us. Those who hold our soldiers in contempt are too dense to appreciate the twist of irony as they polish their virtue at the expense of life and freedom of others in the inhuman parts of our world. If it is virtue that scoundrels would steal at the expense of the soldiers of the (Western) world, then the world should know something that soldiers are too noble to admit: that there are few as altruistic as those who would fight for the freedom on mankind's behalf. To be a soldier is to choose something near to a vow of poverty, to be willing to go into harms way so that others can live peaceably. No glamour. No glory. No recognition. Most good soldiers wouldn't even think to ask for it.

Posted by Dennis at February 17, 2007 04:09 PM