There’s too Little Real Anger

The inability of politics to say, think, do, something fundamental. The intellectual coma. Interview with the chief editor of ‘The Economist’ in Zeno, and the op-ed of Karel De Gucht (DM 6/12).

Frank Albers reacts astonished: “Nowhere do I see real anger.”

So, he goes ahead first.

There are days I want to hit the world. For her stupidity and her shortsightedness. For her powerful little men, her greed and her self-righteousness. No worse weapon of mass destruction than my species. The bomb! The bomb! Yeah, and there’s also Beethoven and Shakespeare, antibiotics and the Louvre, the right to vote and Venice. Long live the dialectic and I already hear you cite Walter Benjamin.

And yet: Quo usque tandem abutere, Capitalista, patientia nostra? It gets more outrageous by the day: how politicians in this hemisphere are not able to develop even one original thought that could possibly contain a pinch of a glimpse of an appearance of a fraction of a solution for the economic epileptic attack that was caused, once again – for the zillionth time in history – by the cruel free market. The zillionth Depression of this manic system. Whatever the diagnosis, the remedy is always the same: more of the same. Gossip over cents and percents. Thinking behind the comma. Fumble, compromise, chitchat. But in the end: not a millimeter of an interval between fact and wish.

More than ever, politicians are accomplices of powers they barely fathom, let alone control. Beachcombers. Vain slaves who apply make-up in the gloss of their shackles. More than ever, politics is the caboose that rides after the facts. “We have no choice”, they cried these last months. And therefore it does what it says it has to do: be nice to Freddie and Fannie, support suddenly collapsing banks, borrow hugely, lower sales tax and interest rates, let the budget go into the red. And if there is no more money, we print money. All emergency measures within the logic of a system that has got itself into these problems because of that same logic.

“It cannot be intended that profits are privatized and loss socialized”, according to the chief editor of ‘The Economist’ (DM 6/12). I’d say that that is exactly the intention of some, at least it’s what’s going on right now. In a less comatose world, this would cause a dangerous civil anger. But not in our best of all possible worlds, were no one thinks outside of the patterns.

I wonder how bad bad news has to be to be able to mobilize sluggish Europe to some kind of revolt. Meanwhile, the club of commentators, opinion makers and columnists struts behind the facts, like the band on the deck of the Titanic. Chittered the same chief editor of ‘The Economist’ in his speech: “Capitalism is a good thing. It should not even have to be discussed. The end of the free market would really be a global disaster.” The journalist as cheerleader. They should lock up such a guy. Starve him to death. The free market is a catwalk in a mine field. The stock market is a more powerful and more irrational sphinx than the Greek oracle has ever been. Compared to Wall Street, Lourdes is a scientific bastion. But no politician, from green to dark brown, fundamentally questions the power of the sphinx.

That is what this financial and economic crisis has clarified so painfully: the political class has no power, no ideas, no guts. In the bidet of the parliament, the free market flushes its pussy. As painful is, how such a chief editor praises a system whose logical consequences caused a minor wrecking in his own area of expertise. Maybe not among chief editors, perhaps. (Maybe press companies in distress should publish their wage scales first, before they get the IV of government support. The filing off of a couple of top salaries might save some C4’s.)

And then the intellectuals. The writers. The artists. The philosophers. Dancing and worrying, and splattering, filling its notebooks, tirelessly, industriously, valiantly. Pitching its subsidized discomfort, grumbling obligingly, me quoque, and secretly hopes for an award. The pious hit singers of the culture of critics — who still cares about their rebellious refrains?

If a Foreign Affairs minister starts praising the subversive power of the arts, as Karel De Gucht did last Saturday in this newspaper, you know what the condition of the subversive power of the arts is.

Nowhere I see real anger.

Nowhere does this deep and all-embracing crisis lead to a thorough cultural introspection.

Nowhere does a politically significant counter movement grow from the ruins.

“How many times can a man turn his head away, pretending he just doesn’t see,” Bob Dylan squeaked some forty years ago.

It is still unanswered.