Part 5
Two seemingly unrelated things began just as Britain was pulling out of the Middle East as part of its general imperial stand-down: William Levitt (of Levitt & Sons) broke ground on a potato field near Long Island in 1947 for a housing project called Levittown, and in 1948 European Jews who had spent the last few decades moving into Palestine as part of a militant, secular colonial sect called Zionists declared a “Jewish State” in the heart of Arab Palestine.
Levittown — a housing development of 17,447 homes, all nearly identical — would come to be seen as the vanguard of a new phenomenon, the residentially-zoned car-suburb.
The State of Israel would come to be seen — in the guilty post-holocaust imaginations of “the West” — as a struggle between European (civilized) Jews and primitive Arabs, as a David and Goliath struggle between the embattled Israelis and an Arab Goliath, and as as forward base of civilization in the wild Middle East. The term “Judeo-Christian” that linked the two religions in a common genealogy gained currency only after WWII as a mechanism of denial for a largely anti-Semitic Christianity after the public acknowledgment of the death camps, and it supported the political policies of a newly emergent American global empire with an ideology of common cause against “Muslim savages.”
The division of he world, after the imperial challenge from Germany and Japan had been firmly put in its place, into Civilized and Primitive is nothing new. But its forms change. Beaten down by the Great Depression and then the war, American whites (who were still overwhelmingly and openly white nationalists then) craved the trappings of predictability. Keynesian economics combined with the post-war industrial boom gave them predictable living-wage jobs; and the suburbs would come to meet the demand for predictable “safe” living areas. Safe meant away from the opposite of Safe: dark, primitive.
With only this epistemological trope in common, these two events — Levittown and the State of Israel — would be inexorably brought together by three trendlines: (1) a global population of 2.5 billion in 1948 (US population app. 146 million) would leap to our present global population of 6.5 billion (US - 301 million) today; (2) 53 million automobiles were on the road in 1950, and today we are approaching 700 million (243 million in the US); and (3) per capita oil production peaked in 1979.
As the suburbs grew along with the US population there was a demographic shift from both rural and urban dwelling to suburban dwelling. Today more than half of all US residents live in suburbs. Because these are not mixed-used developments, and because of facilitation of time-space appropriation by massive road-building (mostly to support business and the military-industrial complex), private and commercial automobiles have become a necessity for continued, stable capital accumulation inside the United States, and a survival necessity for most suburban dwellers.
To fuel these cars, the US now acquires more than 60% of its petroleum supplies from abroad — the lion’s share from the Gulf States. In this process, which we will cover in far greater detail on the section about agriculture and finance capital, to provision of food to most of the US became thoroughly dependent on this automotive transportation grid and on petroleum by-products as well (especially fertilizers and plastics). With around 5 percent of the world’s population and more than a third of the world’s automobiles, the US uses fully one-quarter of the world’s total energy. Our demand continues to increase, even as per capita production has been falling since 1979, and the world’s two most populous nations (China and India) are embarked on rapid industrialization programs. Conflict inheres in this competition for the remaining petroleum in the world.
But in the zone that still has the highest concentrations of easily recoverable oil, there is another conflict that continues to metastasize: Israel and Palestine. The US decision in 1948 to throw in with Zionism — with its European racialism and its devaluation of Arabs and Muslims — has borne one foreign policy conundrum after another in the region. These conundrums constitute a stranglehold on our oil-dependent system. Exactly how this comes to pass will be explained in more detail further along.
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A point that must be reiterated again and again, because it is so incredibly counter-intuitive in a system understood as a taxonomy of simple bipolarities. There is no way out. The only way left is through.
The 300 million residents (especially the 225 million who have reached the age of majority) of the United States cannot and therefore will not abandon or turn against this system. Any ideologue who makes claims to the contrary is self-delusional or manipulative, or both. In a system this vast, this subdivided and technocratic, and this dependent — with a land base that quite simply does not have the legally available space for most people to simply “check out” — no individual and no organized social formation has the power and therefore the agency to overthrow that system. The overwhelming majority of people in any large social system — when that system is stable,and this one is (crisis and instability are not the same things) — do not know how to survive outside that system, and therefore will not abandon or resist that system. Their fear that systemic collapse endangers them is realistic.
Hypothetically, an abrupt cut-off foreign petroleum inputs into the US system would result in an unimaginable series of catastrophic sequelae, characterized by death, disease, malnutrition, mass displacements, and a spike in openly violent social antagonisms. People who fail to acknowledge this because it is inconvenient to their utopian fantasies are not being honest. I am in no way here saying that this is an excuse to let things continue as they are; or de-acknowledging the fact that this same system is already one that immiserates billions, and that is completely and categorically unsustainable.
What I am saying is that ignoring political obstacles to transformation — which I thoroughly believe is necessary — does not get us any closer to accomplishing transformation. On the contrary, clinging to Panglossian ignorance and hiding the brutal and inconvenient truths from people traps us in an endless cycle of whining and waging ineffectual outbursts. We must be honest with people that there is no soft landing for this system. We must prepare for an inevitable crash. Being ineffectual will not merely make us wrong. It will guarantee “mass death, disease, malnutrition, displacement, and a spike in openly violent social antagonisms.” It is our responsibility to future generations to take an honest an fearless account every time we suspect we are being ineffectual, and to quit making excuses.
When one falls off a 50-story building, the consequence is delayed until the fall is completed. Then it arrives with an abrupt finality. Time fractals. Right now, we are saying hi to people in the windows — each story representing years — on the way down.
We are facing a horror, and we have long passed the point of no return. This is not a particularly salable statement. Utopian and reformist cake-and-ice-cream sells much, much better.
Most people do not know how to live otherwise. They have neither the political power, nor the resources, nor the practical skills. Most people in the US are not operating alone. They do not make decisions based on the consequences only to themselves, but based on the consequences for others for whom they have taken various degrees of responsibility. Their shelter, their food, their water, their health, and the shelter, food, water, and health of their loved ones, depend on the energy. The energy comes mostly from abroad.
Those who are in power know that they will not remain in power if they come to be associated with dramatic and painful disruptions among that dependent population.
Political power in the American democratic system (it is dishonest to deny that there is a form of democracy that still requires elected officials, no matter how fixed the system is, to win over voters) operates within its own time fractal. Every two years for the House; every six years for the Senate; and every four years for the Executive. Other cycles at other levels of government. Policy development and implementation, then, is geared to winning these elections — where cake-and-ice-cream — along with other forms of short-term bunkum — is always and inescapably more marketable than the truth.
This fundamentally incapacitates political solutions to the most serious of our difficulties; and in a stable system (one where there is no credible threat that it will be overthrown), this means those most serious problems will continue to fester for the time being.
They are, therefore, for the time being, insoluble. Period. No escape. None.
The cold fact we have to come to terms with to be effective in the long term is that the system will destabilize itself; and only then will we have the requisite political agency to make the deep changes that we need… if we prepare now with some element of clarity. (This does not mean we abandon the ongoing struggles for reforms within the system. It is within those struggles that we will build the relationships for future struggles.)
The social contradiction most likely to precipitate that destabilization is industrial energy.
The Market (TM) does not guarantee that the energy will flow to the US in adequate quantities to maintain this economic and political equilibrium. That’s why the backstop is an internationally deployed US military, and the hostage-leverage of monetary hegemony. The willingness to kill Arabs and others to guarantee not just oil, but a high volume of oil, is necessary to maintain what we call “the American way of life.”
This is not a politically palatable statement, and it will not enchant many on the left either. That’s why politicians dress up this reality as “democracy building”; they are giving us our cake-and-ice-cream, our rationalization.
We need it. Because we are stuck, and don’t know another way to live, and if we did, we don’t control the levers of social power.
This is also why “we” need a kind of aircraft carrier permanently stationed in the region that can strike out against non-compliant, independence-minded Arabs. That carrier is named The State of Israel.
We also needed a Euro-identified proxy with internal priorities that dovetailed with US international priorities.
That’s why even as key Executive Branch officials couldn’t yet enter many hotels inside the United States because of anti-Semitism, there was already an effort underway to re-cast the West as not Chistendom, but now as Judeo-Christianity — because we had to absolve ourselves of Germany’s industrial killing machine… at least, in part.
We will be discussing Israel further along, but as a place-holder, let me quote Mamdani:
When it comes to the Middle East, Israel is the Achilles’ heel of American liberalism, the blind spot that is part of its “common sense.
It’s complicated; and it’s connected. And it’s about a system that has no option but the deeper re-conquest of that region as a way to continue our own “way of life.” We are not en route to the promised land. We are in a Hell, and the ‘burbs are where we can best avoid the heat for now.
What comes after this system will not be gardens of delight, with all of us living together in longhouses and smoking the post-revolutionary dope. We will be constructing a society on the mangled wreckage of the most destructive epoch in human history. And ideology will not hold sway in that construction. Skills, determination, and creativity will. Or it will just get much, much worse. It can always get worse.
Since more than half of us now live in these automotive suburbs, perhaps we need to understand more about them — past, present, and future — to get a realistic idea of what is and what isn’t politically possible there, in the near term, mid-term, and long term.
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This is the intellectual backdrop we need to bear in mind when looking at the inter-fused history of the suburb and the occupation of Palestine.
Policy and ideology are mutually supporting; and the reliable State-sanctioned groupthink of Safe World-Dark World that held sway as part of the shift to suburbia inside the US has maintained a policy of uncritical support of Israel — an international scofflaw regime that practices an explicit, politically-sanctioned racial apartheid.
The realities of Arab and Muslim existence in the same region have been so caricatured by the West as part of this Primitve Other trope that it might as well be the dark side of the moon to most Americans. Even liberals in the US have overwhelmingly eurocentric (white supremacist) impressions of the region, which accounts for their readiness to believe that a summary withdrawal of American forces from Iraq would somehow be a more unspeakable disaster than what has already befallen Iraq’s residents under US occupation.
Of everything I have read so far, the most sensible and accessible antidote to this US orientalism is a book by Mahmood Mamdani, <>a href=”http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?isbn=0385515375″>Good Muslim, Bad Muslim - America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. In foregoing sections, just as I have relied on the insights of others, I shall lean heavily on Professor Mamdani’s analysis, while recommending a direct reading of his work.
Mamdani makes several crucial and connected points about politics, religion, and culture. Perhaps the most crucial is that Western discourse on Islam and Muslims and this strategic region with all that oil — private or public, polemical or “objective,” right and left — can be characterized as “Culture Talk.”
This substitutionism of “culture talk” to describe essentially political phenomena can be accessed in our own society in the way anti-essentialism was so easily co-opted by people like David Horowitz to continue to devalue African Americans. “Genetic superiority” was no longer requried. Politics, the struggle for (and against) social power, is no longer about power at all, but a cultural clash. The postmodernist co-optation of feminism demonstrates the same dynamic: where systemic power held by men collectively over women is disappeared into a putatively “transgressive” cultural pluralism of “identities.” In the case of Arabs and Muslims, we hear about a “clash of civilizations” which is seen as a competition between “cultures.”
The debate over why the attacks of September 11, 2001, occurred has been dominated by different versions of “culture talk,” the notion that culture is the most reliable clue to people’s politics. Their differences notwithstanding, public intellectuals such as Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis agree that religion drives both Islamic culture and politics and that the motivation for Islamist violence is religious fundamentalism. Ascribing the violence of one’s adversaries to their culture is self-serving: it goes a long way toward absolving oneself of any responsibility…
It is essential to make this distinction [between cultural and political identities] in an era of nationalism and the nation-state; in other words, in an era where the claim that cultural communities should be self-determining - meaning they should have their own state (with the “self” in self-determination a cultural self) - is considered obvious and normal, something which does not require an explanation. It is important to recognize that the raw material of political identities may be taken from the cultural sphere - common language, common religion, and so on - but once these identities are crafted into political identities, enforced within a territorial state, and reproduced through the mechanism of the law, which in turn recognizes its bearers as particular subjects, then identity becomes rather more complicated. It becomes extremely important to distinguish between political and cultural identity because political identity, unlike cultural identity, as enforced by the state through law, is singular, it is uni-dimensional: “You are this and nothing else.” Whereas cultural identity is not only multiple but also cumulative, and it is not really territorial - something now widely acknowledged. It may have a territorial resonance, but it is not reducible to a territorial dimension nor is it reducible to power. Political identity, on the contrary, is enforced through law and is an effect of power. I would even go further and say that, even in the case of resistance, its starting point is none other than political identities reproduced through the legal regime. This is notwithstanding the fact that there is a world of difference between resistance that reproduces political identities, whether in the name of reform or revenge, and resistance that sublates the political order by forging new political identities.
I will leave the explication of the complex and diverse politico-intellectual trends in the region to Professor Mamdani. My detour here refers back to the claims I made in earlier installments that September 11th was not a religiously motivated action, but a uniquely political act by a non-state actor, yet an action that had everything to do with a struggle ultimately for state power in Saudi Arabia.
Culture Talk obscures this reality, but that is not the same thing as making it go away… or evading the consequences.
For the next step in weaving our historical tapestry, we need to talk about nationalism.
End Part 5
Stand by for Part 6
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Posted by stan in Analysis