The Ten Commandments

I stayed up late yesterday to belatedly fulfil my most important annual religious obligation: a viewing of the Ten Commandments.

I missed it on network TV. Every spring to this day, the Ten Commandments plays on ABC. Not a reading of the tablets themselves, just the four hour 1956 Hollywood epic: The Ten Commandments, starring Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brenner as Pharaoh and alongside them a massive row of 1950s stars. Like so many religious epics, it's a movie that apes religious piety while providing pruriently sexy content through its many scenes of pagan idol worship. The loftiness of the subject matter is an excuse for scenes of the most massive spectacle, full of lavish costumes, gigantic sets, and scenes which are masterpieces of coordination involving 14,000 extras and 15,000 animals. It's rumored that the production resulted in multiple deaths.

It's not a good movie.

The script is full of the most lofty sounding bullshit, most of the special effects don't hold up in the face of modern developments. Many very skilled actors try the best they can, but the famed director Cecil B. DeMille was trained by the silent era and clearly instructed them to make all kinds of woodenly absurd gestures; completely unnecessary mannerisms in an era when stories may be told through words.

The interest in the movie, as always in Hollywood, is erotic. Moses and Pharaoh compete for the hand of the sex kitten Nefertiri--her name changed for obvious reasons from the historical NeferTITI, yet that doesn't stop her character from being fitted in the most boob filling ancient dresses. When Moses arrives in Midian, he marries the equally beautiful Sephora as a kind of consolation prize. Joshua and slave overseer Dathan compete for the beautiful water girl Lillia, a slave girl fitted in a golden gown when taken to the overseer's house for sexual slavery. The muscular chests of Moses, Pharaoh and Joshua are all paraded in undress, sometimes quite oiled.

It's the old trick of the preacher inveighing against pornography while holding his worshippers' interest by describing the acts depicted. If Hollywood has a biblical epic genre, this movie defines it with constant push pull between ersatz piety and ersatz sex.

And yet I love this movie to pieces. I love every stupid campy faux-profound minute of flowery excrement in this zit on the face of cinema. I've practically memorized whole scenes, I can impersonate Heston, Bryner, Edward G. Robinson, and Anne Baxter, and take particular joy in doing her famous cry: "O Moses, MOSES!"

Part of my love is sheer familiarity. My parents taped the final two hours of the movie on VHS, and through my childhood I wore it out. Did I enjoy it that much? I wouldn't call it enjoyment, but in our non-cable house, it's what we had.

I'm pretty sure what I felt was exactly the primordial awe this work is supposed to inspire. I was a naive kid, and as religion always understood: when you hook kids while they're young, Bible stories inspire a lifelong awe. The Ten Commandments tells the story of the Exodus, and for those taught to believe, it's Exodus come to life: our mind's eye image of how it all happened. Who now can imagine Moses looking like anyone but Charlton Heston? Who now can imagine Pharaoh without Yul Bryner's sphinx-like scowl? Who now can imagine the Golden Calf without women dancing around it, striking tambourines while carried on the shoulders of men? Who now can imagine the slaying of the first born without that blue mist that's clearly dry ice symbolizing the Angel of Death?

But all that happens in the second half of the movie. In some ways it's the first half of that's more interesting: centering on the sibling rivalry between Moses and Ramses in the prime of their youth, competing for fatherly approval from the Pharaoh Sethi (in a magnificent performance from the great Cedric Hardwicke--who was Bernard Shaw's favorite actor), and particularly for the hand and love of Nefertiri, promised to whomever is the new Pharaoh; and while it goes unmentioned, Nefertiri is presumably the blood sister of Ramses; as such brother-sister marriages were expected of a Pharaoh to preserve the purity of the bloodline.

Moses's early years at Pharaoh's court are the source of nearly as much speculation as the missing years of Jesus. If something like the Exodus did happen, one has to figure Pharaoh's hard heart was not just the machinations of a god who may or may not be there, but rather due to a deep animus born of some rivalry. There are many other parts in Exodus about which to speculate, no less an eminence than Sigmund Freud theorized that Moses was not even a Hebrew but an Egyptian priest. This might explain why Moses was 'slow of speech and slow of tongue'; perhaps he barely spoke ancient Hebrew.

Not only did Freud speculate that Moses was an Egyptian priest, he speculated that Moses was a priest of the sun god, Ra, and a follower of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, who declared that Aten, an aspect of Ra (don't ask, I dunno...), was the only god--presumably upending Egyptian society irrevocably. It was only fifty-seven years from the end of Akhenaten's reign to the beginning of Ramses II, surely Akhenaten's followers could maintain a faction for that long.

But where did Akhenaten get the idea for monotheism? Did he get it from his slaves? Did his slaves get the idea from him? Did the Egyptians enslave the Hebrews because the Hebrews were the decisive element that destabilized Egypt?

One can also look at the list of plagues and see that many of them are caused by one another. It's much tougher to explain the last two plagues, but perhaps the others can be explained, if you want to...: according to the internet, the Nile is known on occasion to turn red to this day due to certain types of mud, which may cause certain semi-aquatic animals like frogs to vacate, who can bring with them all sorts of bugs like gnats and flies, some of whom may carry diseases that affect livestock and cause boils on human skin. All this would be most likely to happen during the wet season, and if there's enough rain, surely hail is possible too, even in a river country surrounded by desert. All of these scientific coincidences are partially depicted in Ridley Scott's filmed dramatization of the Exodus--called Exodus, as it happens.....

The other part of why the movie works in spite of its longueurs is the sheer scale. Not just scale of the production, but the Shakespearean scale of its characters and relationships: it's obviously far from Shakespearean as an achievement, but it's Shakespearean in its ambition--and part of why we love this movie is how hilariously it fails to grasp nearly so high as its reach. There are twelve major characters in this epic, each of whom has a larger-than-life combination of emotions, motivations and sentiments. For years, when my musical ambitions were vastly greater than my talent, I wanted to make an opera from this movie. It's the perfect subject: a mixture of world-aspirational themes and soap opera tawdriness.

But even bad entertainment posing as art can move us just as good art can, and if The Ten Commandments can stay fresh to someone who's viewed it once every year or two for nearly forty years, there's something much better about it than we give it credit for being.

Viewing it this Passover is a particularly jarring experience. As always with art, different people will take different meanings from it. Some will take the Jewish slaves to mean the threat to the Jewish people in all times and places, particularly now as the war against Hamas renews itself and the world circles its wagons against Israel's Gaza operations and the millions of Jews who believe in them. Another enormous segment of the world would view the modern Jewish people as some of today's Egyptians, all but enslaving the people of Gaza and the West Bank so as to maintain their own prosperity. Many others will see Trump as a stupid hard-hearted tyrant like Pharaoh who deserves comeuppance on the most massive scale, with all who collaborate with Trump punished along with him. One can particularly see Trump in Pharaoh's treatment of Nefertiri. Still others would, inexplicably, see in Trump a Moses liberating his people from liberal tyranny. Many would look at the modern American people and see slaves, many others would look at us and see taskmasters getting their just deserts.

This Passover is a fraught one as much of the world presses on Jews to view themselves as Pharaohs. Even some Jews view us that way. Others among us feel the pressure of it, and even if we have a litany of reservations, we fully understand the legitimacy of the argument, and for us, this Passover was a deeply complicated holiday as we wrestle with a moral issue that cannot be easily solved no matter how much pressure is brought to bear on us from either side.

The world is very different than 1956, when America was ready to tell Jewish stories as though their own. The Shoah was still fresh, and even if many didn't know the details, they certainly remembered the Nuremberg laws and Kristallnacht well enough. Hollywood made a movie about Moses five years before they made a movie about Jesus. Objectively, the Western world was more antisemitic in 1956, how could it not be when still crawling with Nazis? But one of the great priorities of the era's liberal project was hearing the Jewish story, empathizing with Jewish feelings, supporting the State of Israel, telling Jewish 'truth'.

If it was the fashion of a lifetime ago to hear our story, it is the fashion of today to hear other stories, even if those stories are at our expense, even if the telling is simplistic and sloppy, even if the expectations of those who follow fashions are always unrealistic.

The world is a complicated place: much more complicated than myths in an old book. If this is ever to end, one side has to kill the other the way the Israelites annihilated Amalek. Either that or there has to be a place for the Palestinian story, and all Middle Eastern stories, alongside the Israeli story, alongside the Jewish story, with every side getting their place in the stories among the nations.

My Single Favorite Missa

 I don't believe it.

After ranting about Klemperer's famous Missa, I finally listen all the way through to his first recording of fifteen years before it, and along with Walter, it may be the most extraordinary Missa I've ever heard and, relatively speaking, in much better sound than Walter Klemperer's Missa is not a work of hope like in Jochum or joy like Bernstein or peace in Kleiber. It is, rather, a version that, like Beethoven, has not experienced such emotions but demands them as an inalienable right.

This approach is truly the best of both worlds. Its tempi are not all that different from Gardiner, but in place of an immaculately drilled and blended chorus we have the sort of chorus that surely Beethoven heard in his head. Unblended voices of extremely well-prepared amateurs, some of whom at times stick out of the composite like a frankfurter too long for its bun, but pronouncing Latin as Beethoven would have, along with an orchestra of particularly Viennese sounding instruments and the gut strings the Vienna Symphony, which was practically the last trad orchestra in the world to preserve a completely unreconstructed sound of pre-recorded epochs well into the stereo era.

The orchestral soloists cover themselves in glory - the actual soloists... can any soloists get a laurel wreath in this impossible to sing Everest (check out Masur's recording for the best singing)? This quartet comes as close as anyone ever has, but I wonder if Beethoven's Missa Solemnis is written to be impossible.

To me, this is the closest I've ever heard to the thing in itself: pure schwung and no sprawl, but no sense of drilling the human expression out of the work in the quest to nail its million technical demands; full of that mellow Viennese character, yet rising to every demand of divine fire. And not once does this famously sloppy orchestra come unglued even amid the most appassionata virtuosity (and unlike what a certain critic says, the beginning is quite together, the chord is just deliberately spread.)

...It always seems to be Walter and Klemperer standing alone at the top amid so many holy masterworks... Listen particularly to their radio broadcasts of Don Giovanni, Fidelio, Figaro, Deutsches Requiem, Zauberflote, and wonder if anyone was ever so profound in either before or since. A few get consistently close in multiple core repertoire Everests--the usual suspects of course: Erich Kleiber, Ferenc Fricsay, Eugen Jochum, Carlo Maria Giulini, Fritz Busch when he's available. But in both Walter and Klemperer, there's something in the atmosphere they generate--not an imposed vision but rather a simple reflection of the lofty but many sided way they viewed music itself. It's almost impossible to talk about, but one day I'd like to try.

Beethoven - Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Otto Klemperer – Missa Solemnis recorded from vinyl

Teach the Songs You Love

If you have an uncommon song you know by memory, a poem you love, a quote you love, a melody you love, teach it to anyone who will listen: friends, family, strangers on the internet. Don't just make them listen once, make them really know it. If you have unread books, make sure they get read, save them to a hard drive or flash drive, loan them out to anybody curious enough to try them. If you have scientific or math skills, teach them to friends. If ten people know something, and each teaches it to another ten, the bastards can't touch what's a part of us all.

It may be of the very far future, it may be the near future, but at some point, some powerful person will try a great internet wipe in many countries of the world: a modern bonfire, in which most disappears of wikipedia, youtube, mental floss, open culture, coursera, ted, podcasts, blogs, magazine archives, the information storehouses of the future, anything with a hint of subversion. When there are too many things to learn that we can't keep track of them all, the people with the most power can wipe it out and hoard the remains for themselves without our even knowing it's gone. Knowledge itself becomes the prerogative of the few who will only teach what's necessary to consolidate their power over the rest of us.

But what exists in your memory has a chance of escaping any purge. Don't let it disappear.

My 13 Favorite Missas.

I listened to it like a maniac a few years ago while my grandmother was dying. I prefer something warmer than many seem to. No Toscanini, no Gardiner, no Karajan, no Szell, no showcases for execution. What's at stake is much too important for virtuosity that displays a lack of humility before a work so holy that we can only be unworthy of it.

Others are good but don't quite make it, sometimes quite good: Giulini (live, NOT the 88 minute studio job), Solti, Haitink, Jacobs, earlier Horenstein and Davis and Harnoncourt and Bernstein (the latter being not too different than the Bernstein I pick)... The performances I love are not necessarily old fashioned and romantic, but warmer and more cantabile than many while still keeping the rhythmic interest of the HIP way: the best of both worlds. 18th century tempi, 19th century sound. I get why people love the sonority and diction of HIP, it clearly fits Beethoven's conception like a glove and is easier to sing, but to my ears it also makes the performances sound rather interchangeable. We are still in the adolescence of HIP, and waiting for most of its executors to awaken to the full gamut of capabilities HIP gives us.

OK (literally)... I also need to rant about the famous Klemperer performance. It sucks all the air out of the room like a late Celibidache. It's Wagnerism at its worst: bombastic, pompous, larger than life with a missing heart.

There is so much by Klemperer that is great, particularly in Beethoven. There's even a truly great Klemperer Missa Solemnis ten years earlier. Even by his eighties, Klemperer was still doing high quality work, but how this recording is touted as one of his crowning achievements I'll never know. In Klemperer's famous reading, I feel no spiritual grace, no hope, no transcendence; only the trappings of solemnity without the real thing.

...though it's still much better than the Giulini studio recording which makes flies drop to the floor as quickly as reading a doctoral thesis on statistical methodology.

I believe the Missa Solemnis is a work about hope: hope in this world and the next. Hope for the future, and hope that our ends are not ends but transitions to something that makes our suffering here worthwhile.

There are also certain performances of which I'm of two minds. Particularly Szell and Toscanini. 

On the one hand they sound 'defiant' and 'heroic,' which can give off a kind of optimism and hope and joy. On the other hand, they sound like they're always pissed off. I've always felt you can hear the rage disorder in Toscanini and Szell, but raging in Beethoven is usually to the good... But there is so much virtuoso exhibitionism in those recordings. What's the point in mastering the Missa Solemnis's labyrinthine challenges if the focus becomes the technique rather than the spirit? To me, tough 'new objectivists' like Horenstein and earlier Klemperer (irony duly noted) achieve the kind of 'defiant heroism' I think Szell and Toscanini aspire to when they yield to their better angels.

We could talk about singing and playing and microdetails, but this post grew out of a small note to friends, and I'd rather not spend a Beethovenian length of time on this post. In some ways, ideal execution misses the point of this work. Every moment spent on getting the technical details exactly right is a moment that can be spent on getting more expressive nuance.

Best of both worlds:

Michael Gielen. My single favorite Missa (note: until right after writing this post. See two posts above): HIP tempos, traditional sound. I don't know what else to say. This is what I dreamed of hearing in my head. Maybe your own ideal of a work is not enough and you should seek out the versions which tell you what you didn't know already, but I can't deny that this is what I hear when without judging the performance, I simply want to sit in heartfelt contemplation of this work I hold sacred.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcGS6zs6Rxs

Rafael Kubelik. My all time favorite conductor giving a slightly slower and more flexible performance but still kinda similar to Gielen: spiritual without the sludge. At many points it is mercurial and visionary after the manner of certain performances below, but not larger-than-life after the manner of Bernstein and Walter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MM2K1OHGgA

Kurt Masur doing another similar one from East Germany, still fleeter and more metric than Gielen's. Many performers you can describe as 'warmth coated discipline', but for Masur, regimented as his interpretations always were, the warmth always mattered more. In Masur, it's 'discipline-coated warmth.' I don't want to focus on the actual singing in these recordings, because once you start on that subject it's impossible to stop, so I'll simply say, from soloists to chorus, this is the best sung Missa I've ever heard, the velvet orchestral playing of the Gewandhaus supporting them at every turn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-KkCOVVT48

'Ecstatic visions':

Bruno Walter - If you listen all the way through to one.... so far as we can tell, maybe the best performance of it ever caught by mic, but the sound's absolutely atrocious. It's not just exciting, it's not just moving, it's not just passionate or spiritual, it's as though the entire universe of the Missa Solemnis' potential meanings and emotions and soul-states are encapsulated into one performance. If you can persist, it's as worth hearing as any performance of anything has ever been. I don't know if Mahler did it, but if he did, this must be close to how.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9refwV3Ka8

Dmitri Mitropoulos - Another personal favorite. The most exciting conductor who ever lived, gives another performance in Walter's ecstatic mode with the same orchestra in the same hall five years later. Two performances in which tempos, dynamics, and phrasing are completely unpredictable. Another that demands to be heard in spite of atrocious sound. There used to be a video of this on youtube that was not quite this tinny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UysjVu6dWHM

Lenny at Tanglewood: sparks everywhere... We're lucky the grounds didn't catch fire.

...I'm tempted to leave this comment alone, but the truth is that Bernstein does similarly, and as well in the New York studio recording of 11 years earlier, which has certain weaknesses (oversaturated sound that makes the choir sound like a Golden Age Disney musical), it is much easier to find (not, however, in the more famous Concertgebouw recording, which is unusually lacquered for Bernstein. Perhaps the chemistry with the Concertgebouw was lacking). This being Lenny, drama will always take precedence over spirituality, but what drama! This is a Missa of enthusiasm, and even if Lenny veers into exhibitionism, the constant precedence of his New York sized heart over his Boston-sized ego is a large part of why we love him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0EA9yNuOXQ

Eugen Jochum - another personal favorite conductor. Similar in scale to the famous Klemperer, but much more flexible tempi and less pompous. Jochum was the warmest of all the great German conductors, and more emotionally willing to be vulnerable than any of them until Tennstedt. No celebration of his musicianship has yet been great enough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KsF2fdMdRo&list=PLxV6VwFCe969ZDcL3FM2nwunPTsZZigAN

Tough New Objectivists:

Erich Kleiber breaking every rule in the book, holding our attention with an eighty-five minute Missa that's five minutes slower than the famous Klemperer I complain about. Erich Kleiber, at least in his mature phase, is a dry-eyed conductor, completely dismissive of any affectation that might bespeak sentimentality. This is not the most moving Missa Solemnis, but it is the most profound and creates a rapt atmosphere of calm. The vocalism and sound is not great (at the opening of the Credo, the sound wavers slightly in pitch), but the pianissimos make your heart stop. Before you know what happened, the soul is cleansed.

Mass in D Major, Op. 123, "Missa Solemnis": Kyrie: Assai sostenuto (Mit Andacht)

Otto Klemperer pre-sludge, ten years and change before the famous recording. This is the Klemperer we all say we love, when every note feels like a statement of defiance and heroism from which no obstacle can deter. Not necessarily granitic, but focused on the structure's giant arc and underlying spirit of the piece with no frills at all. Like Kleiber, this is where catharsis lays, and in both of them there's some absolutely beautiful organ playing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LylzR4SZP4


Jascha Horenstein shoehorning everything into decidedly odd tempos but getting the most explosive sounds any performing forces ever got in this piece. A truly expressionist musician unlike any other, who unleashed unprecedented expressive extremes within an iron frame.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbGI6KIho-w

Bizarre late thoughts:

Nikolaus Harnoncourt's last performance before he died. A very different, introverted, lyrical Missa. My only preferred HIP version because most of the others sound alike. Harnoncourt, so filled with larger than life personality in so much else, scales the Missa down to intimacy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE6pX7_tzoA&list=PL9JH_yeccE1qa2-J6Qae-e3rIE7CQHj9I

Colin Davis shortly before he died. The height of spirituality, very slow yet iffy execution even so. If you have a sound system for it, there's sonority in the fortes that peels paint, but Davis is at the height of his late style's luminous warmth. It's fallible, but even so, it's soul music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_gAcPWm6aI

Herbert Blomstedt, who never dies, doing a genuinely happy, merry Missa as though it were by Haydn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWumpBmp7P8

Personal favorites among the favorites:
Gielen

Kubelik

Walter

Bernstein

Jochum

Haggadah for a Dissolute State - Part 1

Kadesh:

Seder is the Hebrew word for 'order.' Judaism is a religion of order, it is a religion of ritual, rituals that have been passed down for 133 generations at the slowest possible evolution.

Yet we exist in an era of fluctuation. The world grew faster with the industrial revolution, exponentially faster with revolution of mass production, exponentially faster yet again in the digital revolution, and a mere generation later we stand on the cusp of exponent still faster in the revolution of artificial intelligence.

The technological revolutions have grown so fast that no person will track its developments as accurately as our own inventions. We have created technology of extra-human capability that knows us far better than we know it. We have, in effect, built our own god, and this god may judge us and find us wanting.

What means order in a world where we build an idol whose power is more demonstrable than a god who chooses not to present Himself? We have built the ultimate idol, an idol to whom we will bow down most every minute of every day, who watches us in sleep and judges us in wakefulness, an idol far more difficult to resist than God.

But like idolworship of all eras, God will rain destruction upon nations who worship false gods: the innocent along with the guilty, gentile and Jew. In God's desire to punish the wicked, death passes over few good households. How much greater may His jealous vengeance be against an idol so powerful? And yet, in an irony that may be unprecedented, the idol itself may be the instrument through which God wields His destruction.

But after periods of death come rebirth and life. Israel will rise up again, not just the people of Israel but the Israel of the world. Jerusalem of this world will be rebuilt, and through its rebuilding we discover our personal visions of a more celestial Jerusalem.

This is the order of things, and so has been the world's order since God's very discovery.

This, not just the liberation of Egypt, is what is commemorated in the spring of every year, in every culture and every era. After winter's death comes spring's rebirth, commemorated in the holidays of Pesach, Easter, Holi, Norwuz, Songkran, Ramadan and the birthday of Buddha.

In our end is our beginning, and on this night, before our harvest, we prepare the rituals of rebirth.

Amen

----------------------------------

Orchatz

We now wash our hands. No blessing is necessary. All that's necessary to recall in this abundance of water is the water shortages that befall two-thirds of the world. Not just for far-flung billions of South Asia and the Arab Middle East, but in places we know intimately like Israel, California, and the Great Plains. Around the world, fire is the ever present possibility. Those who cannot cleanse with water may cleanse with fire, and time runs short to irrigate before their fires spread.

-------------------------------------

Karpas:

By dipping parsley in salt water, we now commemorate the tears shed by Hebrew slaves in Egypt.

At this moment we have to remember the suffering of the Israeli hostages in Gaza and our fallen soldiers, but to stop the commemoration there would be outrageous. It is a Jewish custom from time immemorial to commemorate fallen foes. Vengeance is a right reserved only for God. We exult in the deaths of leaders like Sinwar, Haniyeh, Nasrallah, Raisi, and we make no apologies for celebrating the deaths of their many, many collaborators; but under no circumstances may we celebrate the deaths of the innocent - be their deaths collateral or unnecessary, they are innocents as deserving of life as we, and whether their leaders bear much responsibility, we are the instruments by which their lives were taken and sometimes the conductors of their atrocity.

The tears do not end in Gaza, they extend to the world: to the fallen soldiers and civilians of Ukraine, Russia and Crimea. They extend to the world's many underreported conflicts like the missing million Uigyur Muslims of China, to the five million displaced Sudanese, to the lost 600,000 of Syria and the 18 million refugees, the lost 176,000 of Afghanistan and the 7 and a half million refugees, to the lost 110-200 thousand of Iraq and 2 million refugees, to the two million refugees of Congo, to the dire situations of Ethiopia, Yemen, and South Sudan. To the twenty-six and a half million of North Korea.

They all deserve commemoration and assistance.

----------------------------------------

Dialogue of a Dissolute State

AC Charlap: You should have been at the protests.

Evan Tucker: I hadn't taken a shit in a week and I'd just taken three laxatives!

AC Charlap: Are you really writing that on facebook?

Evan Tucker: Anybody who cares unfollowed me, what does it matter?

AC: Do you want the rest of the world to unfollow you?

ET: I'd alienate every potential reader in the world if it bought me a good bowel movement.

AC: Well keep going on this track because the that is exactly what you're doing.

ET: I didn't have time to go to the protest, I was too busy being sick.

AC: Wasn't that your excuse for why you didn't do any field work before the election?

ET: I WAS sick! Maybe the sickest I've ever been, and the world is better off without my canvassing.

AC: If another thousand people in swing states reasoned like you then we have our reason Kamala lost.

ET: You remember what happened in 2016! I locked myself out of my car in Chester County, PA while my phone was out of battery and I had to flag down three other volunteers to help me figure out my car situation when they could have been knocking on doors.

AC: It's absolutely true, you are the reason Hillary Clinton lost. I suppose the world is better off without you protesting.

ET: Damn straight!

AC: But just in case your reasoning is flawed... just in case... couldn't the extra laxatives have waited until Sunday?

ET: You try walking around and shouting with a stomach the size of a volleyball.

AC: That's not what I mean. Are you sure there aren't... other reasons you didn't go?

ET: Of course there were other reasons!

AC: Would you care to enumerate them?

ET: No.

AC: Are you sure?

ET: Anybody who's read my writing for long enough knows exactly what they are.

AC: Then why are we having this dialogue?

ET: Because if I don't have someone to talk to about all this with I'm going to go crazy.

AC: Crazy like... what? Create an imaginary interlocutor?

ET: Exactly!

AC: How can you talk about all this if you refuse to talk about it?

ET: Not my opinions, my dread.

AC: Is that a pretentious way of saying 'fears'?

ET: No. It's a precise way of saying 'fears'.

AC: OK, what do you 'dread'?

ET: If I found it easy to say I wouldn't have to have a dialogue about it.

AC: What's so hard about saying you're scared?

ET: Saying the 'why.'

AC: OK Chicken Little, why?

ET: Why what?

AC: Why're you scared?

ET: Because people like you aren't acknowledging what's going on.

AC: Like me?

ET: Yes, people like you. People who were raised on American can-do optimism and believe we're evolved and sheltered from the animals our peoples used to be.

AC: You do realize that I'm you, right?

ET: That's what makes this so difficult.

AC: OK now I'm confused.

ET: The whole world is right now, why should you be any different.

AC: Why should YOU be any different?

ET: Fuck you.

AC: Why do all your dialogues end up with insults like this?

ET: I am that I am.

AC: What you are is crazy!

ET: Were you the last to notice?

AC: Alright sparky, let's both settle down. So what in particular is driving you crazy today?

ET: I think you know exactly what's driving me crazy.

AC: Why would I know that? Because I'm you?

ET: Because it's what's driving everyone crazy today.

AC: So why can't you talk to them?

ET: I don't want to scare them.

AC: So why don't you write them down where an audience of every facebook friend who hasn't unfollowed you can read it.

ET: Yeah, but if I write it here they can choose to stop at any point.

AC: Is that why you began by posting so vulgarly about your constipation?

ET: No, I chose to write about that because that's the other major thing that's on my mind.

AC: So this is all a bit like a mental bowel movement?

ET: If you want to be vulgar about it.

AC: You're the one writing about taking three laxatives.

ET: AC shut up already or I'm going to kill you off.

AC: Alright Hamlet Jr., let's hear your kvetch-de-cour.

ET: Here it comes asshole...

AC: Can we get rid of the BM metaphors please?

ET: My last little corner of hope for the world is gone. Even if the world gets better, my world never will. Or more to the point, our world never will. It will take the rest of our lifetimes to rebuild what's being destroyed over my generation's lifetime.

AC: 'Your generation's lifetime'?... You're forty-three, not 607, and almost half your generation will live to a hundred.

ET: You said you'd listen!

AC: Not if what you say is bullshit.

ET: My generation will live to be a hundred if we don't die in war or environmental catastrophe. And even if my generation rebuilds the world successfully, it will be for the benefit of someone else. With any luck it'll be for our children and grandchildren and not for the benefit of some far off people we know fuckall about who accrued rewards purchased with our blood.

AC: You're a lot of fun on dates aren't you.

ET: That's what happened everywhere else but here!

AC: That's quite a selective reading of history but do go on.

ET: The US lost one in every three-hundred-ninety-five citizens in World War II, Russia lost one in six, yet we were considered equal partners in victory.

AC: You don't think Stalin's incompetence had something to do with that death toll?

ET: His determination to spill blood until he won had even more.

AC: Are you pr*ising St*lin for being willing to k*ll people?

ET: Of course not, but when the world lapses into total war, somebody has to die.

AC: Okayyyy...

ET: In a total war, the society which wins sacrifices on a level so unimaginable that everyone has multiple loved ones who died and multiple loved ones who wish they were dead.

AC: You're lucky I'm the part of you that's unaffected by these thoughts or else I'd be advising you to drive to a psychiatric hospital.

ET: And then once they've thrown enough death at their enemies, the war stops, and the country that lost everything has to share their victory with some Uncle-Sam-come-lately intercessor who waited until the last possible moment to tip the scale toward the victors and lost so comparatively little that they're in a 100x better position to enjoy victory's fruits.

AC: So you're saying that 21st century America is 20th century Russia?

ET: If we're not Nazi Germany.

AC: Forgive me, Tucker, for suggesting, I do think you're letting emotion cloud your judgement.

ET: I have no idea if there's any comparison that works, but we are so close to a tectonic eruption. The Republican party spent an entire generation carefully removing all the levers of power so that they would have an unbroken, generations long hold on the American government.

AC: Everybody loves a good conspiracy theory.

ET: But the moment the Republican establishment was ready to seal off power's levers from everyone but them, their party was kidnapped by the country's smallest mind who flew over the plans of dozens of clever men by acting like the child Republicans hoped every American citizen would become.

AC: The point being...

ET: The point being that we are at the precipice of a world where all the safeties are completely hollowed out of democracy and liberal rule of law. Leave aside global warming and AI for a minute and just focus on the international system: Putin, Trump, Xi, Modi, Netanyahu, Erdogan, they're all old as shit. They'll be gone in five to twenty years, but according to polling, the children of their subjects are the most divided generations in modern history, and they will be left with the chaos of a world whose safeguards they hollowed out for everyone but a few autocrats and a couple hundred oligarchs.

AC: Your good cheer never ceases to amaze.

ET: Democracies are no longer democracies again. Capitalism is once again an indisputable socialism for the rich. International systems are being destroyed to which we owe everything like NATO, the WHO and the World Bank. After the Ukraine invasion every small nation in the world has incentive to build weapons of mass destruction and AI could make them as easy to construct as a bow and arrow. And all that is without taking global warming and AI into consideration.

AC: You say all this like it's a foregone conclusion! Nothing is written! Didn't the basket cases of your grandparents' generation think the world was going to end in a pile of nuclear ash?

ET: In my grandparents' generation there were exactly two existential threats, both of which were pointing thousands of nuclear weapons at the other, watching them vigilantly, and no other country had the power to distract them from each other. However close the Cold War came to nuclear war, we didn't get there because the world always knew who to call to stop it.

AC: And we don't now?

ET: We don't now.

AC: Why not?

ET: Because when you have eight separate cold wars between twenty-eight nuclear powers, one of them is going to get hot, and the world would very quickly choose sides, and any of those other powers could be drawn in: who even knows if the alliances will remain stable?

AC: Won't we learn how to control this?

ET: Eventually, but we may easily lose a billion people first.

AC: Well now you're making me depressed.

ET: I can scare you so much more if we keep going.

AC: You've worn me down. Mazel Tov. I can't take any more of this tonight.

ET: Well if you're not going to fight back I can't keep writing.

AC: If it helps you write I promise I'll go back to bullying you tomorrow, but for the meantime I need to get some rest and dream about cleansing the world in a lake of fire.

Diary of a Dissolute State: Preface

You never thought you'd make it to this age. Not because you expected to die by now, though some part of you did, but because no human mind can conceive of itself being 43. You had just gotten used to not being a kid anymore when life ambushes you with your forties, but you still think yourself twenty-five when at twenty-five you barely got over the thought you weren't eight anymore. Not that you take getting there for granted, but how much more unreal will sixty-five be?

Old certainties melt away, the certainties within you grew up, the certainties of there being time, the certainties of there being world enough. You're already too old to recognize the world. Changing the world is a job for young people, and when the world is only left to us at fifty, how are we expected to have enough time and energy to change a world we have not years enough and energy to change?

What is there now? It's our world, not our parents', and fuck does it not feel like their idealism was the most selfish thing ever; breaking the world just in time leave us with the job of fixing things that cannot be fixed. Not your parents, they were cynical puritans, and you've inherited their constant anti-boomer fulminations. But the evidence piles up that you exist in a world grown impossibly decadent. Ever since you were an adult, the world felt unmoored, but every day for ten years you've woken up with that dread of a world tilting off its axis. Now you're at just about your mid-forties, and what felt like tilt feels like hanging by a thread. By fifty-three, the world could be upside down and we could fly toward the nuclear energy of the sun.

This is your world now, but it's not YOUR world. You never wanted this world, you disagreed with just about everything anybody's ever done with it: the decisions of your parents, the decisions of your peers, even whatever decisions were your own. Maybe your nephews' generation will get it right, even though they won't either; but with any luck you'll be around to snarl at their generation too, even as the terror creeps up on you there won't be much generation left to snarl at.

So long as there is a new generation, there is hope. They can still get it right where we got it wrong. They won't, yet somehow the world burbles onward. For all we ever got wrong, there has always a new generation even as dissolution threatens the future itself. That faith has to sustain you: the belief that in spite of every bad decision, even if some of us don't make it to old age, no decision is risible enough to break us all. Humanity is great not because we triumph, but because we survive our defeats. Whatever comes, it is still likely that a vast majority of us will survive it, even as we dwell in terror from the thought that we won't. However many of us are left, we will regroup, we will find a way, existence moves onward toward the next triumphs and the next follies, forever repeating the story of our victories becoming our defeats, and our fulfillments arising from precisely those defeats.

We will win, we will muddle through, not all of us, but many of us, and whomever is left will tell our stories and posthumously give us the reason we endured whatever we endured.

We will still be here.

Amen.

What He Wants

  Another sleepless night in the world of Trump.

Dictators want to occupy your every thought. They exist to subsume your individuality with thoughts of them, him, only him, ever him, eternal and without interruption, him, that joke of a man, that voice, that hair, that gold plated shitcloud turning us all into him. Even those of us who hate him become Trump, hear his every thought broadcast into our heads until we dream Trump and breathe Trump and his monologue sings over silence where once were thoughts.

The temptation to retreat is overwhelming: you have that luxury. Divorce from the news and arm yourself with a barrage of selfish entertainment: movies, music, fiction; yet the valves feel clogged and your guts ready to implode on themselves unless you say something, lash out, write, write, write; you can feel the black dog creeping up, breathing at the back of your legs as inertia takes you over and the slobber paralyzes. You must act, you must write, you must strike back to claim fate as you own, but in what direction? What direction leads us to life, and where leads us to death?

Our minds are beset by the exact paralysis he wants, knowing that two months and eleven days into his world, everyone is so sore and disoriented that any attempt to exercise your voice will change something in the life you constructed so carefully to keep the dog at bay for as long as its jaws let go. Anything you say, anything at all, is bound to offend somebody, because you know that eventually you must commit to some belief, some action, some movement, that can go so wrong that if a couple thousand of us move in unison, it can forge its link in a chain of reactions that imprisons the world for a hundred years. Not that you have that power, but in times of revolution, the world acts as though everyone does, and your little world certainly acts that way.

You have to write, you have to speak out, you have to commit, you have to go on the record, but with what? You can't even hear yourself think anymore. Something is in there, a mental bowel movement, constipated and screaming from your very guts to shit and sing it out. But what melody is it? No matter how right it will sound in your head when you hear it, you know that any score you compose will sound shit brown in the ears of any reader. However powerful the opus, you still can't hear it, but you can smell it, and the odor is rank.

Class #4 - A tiny bit more - Focus is getting hard

   Perfection

We'll start with a quote that stands by itself.

...the authority of the nation state itself depended on the economic dependence and political neutrality of its civil servants becomes obvious in our time; the decline of nations has invariably started with the corruption of its permanent administration and the general conviction that the servants are in the pay, not of the state but of the owning classes. At the close of the century the owning classes had become so dominant that it was almost ridiculous for a state employee to keep up the pretense of serving the nation."

What can I possibly say to illuminate that more than the quote does on its own?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Who is the bourgeois?

Let's keep going on Arendt's mob...

"A rioting mob is not composed of any particular class but from 'the refuse of all classes. ... What they failed to understand is that the mob is not only the refuse but the byproduct of bourgeois society, directly produced by it and therefore never quite separable from it... 

The implication here is that the bourgeois produces a mob by pursuing bad policies. 

So this definition depends on who the bourgeois actually is. Fortunately there's a lot of blame to go around. 

If the bourgeois is the millionaire class, then the explanation is pretty obvious. By letting the economy grow so unequal, by slashing taxes to the 1% to so low a rate, by cutting government spending on welfare programs, education, job training, and social services, the government flattened social mobility, ended the growth of working class income, and created a dissatisfied mass of over 150 million people. The reason then that the mob would have formed against the left rather than the right that slashed the programs is because the millionaire class funded a vast network of right-wing propaganda that distracted the masses with cultural issues of little consequence designed to create resentment against precisely those forces who mean to alleviate their frustration. 

On the other hand, if the American bourgeois means the progressive 'creative class' we spoke about in the third talk, then the mob was created by precisely those cultural issues that the rightwing media speaks of: liberal hypocrisy in pretending to care for the poor while enriching themselves, claiming that poor whites are oppressors rather than victims, policing language about minorities while often holding white people to ridicule, tying disproportionate college acceptance and employment opportunity to race rather than income, and putting the concerns of relatively affluent minorities like certain parts of the queer community over straight poor whites (gay men earn 10% more than straight men). By this definition, many of the cultural complaints of the right wing are not without merit. 

I'd ask which is the more likely explanation, but every liberal will take one side, every conservative will stand on the other. 

--------------------------

Fascination vs. Interest (double meaning) 

",..notice high society's constantly growing admiration for the underworld, which runs like a red thread through the nineteenth century, its continuous step-by-step retreat on all questions of morality, and its growing taste for the anarchical cynicism of its offspring. ' 

By either definition, this creates a right-wing mob that the American 'elite' grows fascinated by. There are two explanations for this, and I think both have much true about them. 

The first that the 'aristocratic elite' (meaning 'particularly affluent Americans') seeks to have ever more lack of accountability to consequence, and perpetually increase their money, power and influence. The viability of this explanation should be pretty obvious. 

The other is that the 'elite' has a cheap, even pornographic fascination with a force so déclassé as a mob. The lure of the forbidden draws them to it. Being part of a 'mob' is usually the one thing you can't accuse an aristocrat of being. The 'mob' is the ultimate force that has no care for accountability to consequence. And so the elite uses all kinds of means at their disposal to egg the mob onward--both to advance their interests and excite themselves. 

---------------------

Once Again, Self-explanatory

"Racism is a necessary tool if the powerful wish to make the powerless do their bidding."

Well duh. 

---------------------------------

 

Double Duality: 

Demographics vs. Morals

Exploitaion: funds rise or funds decline?

'...no matter what learned scientists say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.'

We could leave this as a truism, but there's an essay's worth of meanings here. 

We do have to consider the double meanings inherent in 'humanity.' One meaning of 'humanity' is obviously humankind as a species, but it can also mean 'humanity' as in our capacity for moral compassion. In that sense, racism is obviously one of the traits that most prevents us from realizing our potential for humanity. 

There's too much book to make an essay out of this, but just consider it for a moment; think of the Spanish Empire: discovering the New World was a death sentence for 95% of the Native American population, and even if Spain flourished from its flush of gold into a golden age, it was the moral, spiritual death of Spain, not just in the new world but in the old world where suspected heretics were burned after confessions obtained under torture, and an eighty-year war because of their colonization of the Low Countries (Holland & Belgium). Sometimes, virulent racism signified the actual end of a country's dominance: obviously the Nazis severely depleted Germany's international standing until quite recently. 

The ways decline manifests itself through racial thinking are many and varied, but is it decline if it results in greater affluence? 

I don't know how to answer that except to note that many historians posit a cyclical theory of history where all things rise and fall, and if you view history through the lenses of patterns--and I'm not quite convinced history has any pattern, you can note that so many civilizations are in some senses built on an 'original sin'; what enables a rise is inevitably some form of blood money, and eventually the original sin catches up with a society. The Boyar class built Russia on the suffering of its peasants, and eventually the peasants rose up and liquidated the Boyars' noble descendants. Or think of Spain again: for centuries the Spanish lived off gold and genocide, but eventually the gold destabilized the Spanish economy and the Church used it to grow fat and powerful, so powerful they used their influence to fund an inquisition for centuries that rooted out 'heretics.' Spain may have been wealthy and powerful, but even at its most powerful, Spain lived in fear. 

So here are two questions for you:

1. What do you think is the percentage chance that countries maltreating races will eventually backfire? How would it backfire?

2. By exploiting one race for the gain of another, are countries facilitating their own fall by instituting such inhumane, demeaning policies, or are they setting up their rise? 

---------------------

Racism Against Patriotism

"Historically speaking, racists have a worse record of patriotism than the representatives of all other international ideologies together, and they were the only ones who consistently denied the great principle upon which national organizations of peoples are built, the principle of equality and solidarity of all peoples guaranteed by the idea of mankind."

Once again, I have to editorialize and say that I'm not sure about the veracity of this quote, but what can't be denied is that racism is a perfect excuse to sabotage one's own country. If an historically white-run country is, say, oh... I don't know... led by a black man, the racists not only have motivation to take sides against the government, they even have a motive to conspire with the country's historic enemy to take a more diverse government down. And if they're successful, they not only make this indefensible enemy into an ally, but their alliance compels them to incorporate into themselves many of their previous enemy's pathological traits that they'd formerly professed to loathe. 

Since a country's more powerful races have incentive to like their country more, they often have more incentive to be patriots than those from less privileged races, and even if they have no racism in their hearts, they have plenty of incentive to act with racist manners. But the more they get to remind people of their superior status, the more powerfully they get to perceive themselves; which creates a self-reinforcing pathology in which they perceive themselves as deserving their own power because they act powerfully. 

Which leads us to the next quote...

"Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible 'explanation' and excuse for its deeds, even if no race thinking had ever existed in the civilized world."

----------------------------------

'Gold hardly has a place in human production and is of no importance compared with iron, coal, oil, and rubber; instead, it is the most ancient symbol of mere wealth. In its usefulness in industrial production it bears an ironical resemblance to the superfluous money that financed the digging of gold and to the superfluous men who did the digging. To the imperialists' pretense of having discovered a permanent savior for a decadent society and antiquated political organization, it added its own pretense of apparently eternal stability and independence of all functional determinants. It was significant that a society about to part with all traditional absolute values began to look for absolute value in the realm of economics where, indeed, such a thing does not and cannot exist, since everything is functional by definition. This delusion of an absolute value has made the production of gold since ancient times the business of adventurers, gamblers, criminals, of elements outside the pale of normal, sane society.' 

If there is no place in gold for human production, then what place is there for bitcoin? 

When you talk to powerful Republicans, 9 out of 10 will tell you privately that 'I'm actually a libertarian.' Libertarians still have a yen for the erections they can build from gold. Their argument has always been that gold is a currency so solid that it will be there long after paper money disappears: yet now they're passionate about currency that has no physical presence at all. It's an astonishing transformation. 

Lesson 4: Still a Very Little Bit More

   Perfection

We'll start with a quote that stands by itself.

...the authority of the nation state itself depended on the economic dependence and political neutrality of its civil servants becomes obvious in our time; the decline of nations has invariably started with the corruption of its permanent administration and the general conviction that the servants are in the pay, not of the state but of the owning classes. At the close of the century the owning classes had become so dominant that it was almost ridiculous for a state employee to keep up the pretense of serving the nation."

What can I possibly say to illuminate that more than the quote does on its own?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Who is the bourgeois?

Let's keep going on Arendt's mob...

"A rioting mob is not composed of any particular class but from 'the refuse of all classes. ... What they failed to understand is that the mob is not only the refuse but the byproduct of bourgeois society, directly produced by it and therefore never quite separable from it... 

The implication here is that the bourgeois produces a mob by pursuing bad policies. 

So this definition depends on who the bourgeois actually is. Fortunately there's a lot of blame to go around. 

If the bourgeois is the millionaire class, then the explanation is pretty obvious. By letting the economy grow so unequal, by slashing taxes to the 1% to so low a rate, by cutting government spending on welfare programs, education, job training, and social services, the government flattened social mobility, ended the growth of working class income, and created a dissatisfied mass of over 150 million people. The reason then that the mob would have formed against the left rather than the right that slashed the programs is because the millionaire class funded a vast network of right-wing propaganda that distracted the masses with cultural issues of little consequence designed to create resentment against precisely those forces who mean to alleviate their frustration. 

On the other hand, if the American bourgeois means the progressive 'creative class' we spoke about in the third talk, then the mob was created by precisely those cultural issues that the rightwing media speaks of: liberal hypocrisy in pretending to care for the poor while enriching themselves, claiming that poor whites are oppressors rather than victims, policing language about minorities while often holding white people to ridicule, tying disproportionate college acceptance and employment opportunity to race rather than income, and putting the concerns of relatively affluent minorities like certain parts of the queer community over straight poor whites (gay men earn 10% more than straight men). By this definition, many of the cultural complaints of the right wing are not without merit. 

I'd ask which is the more likely explanation, but every liberal will take one side, every conservative will stand on the other. 

--------------------------

Fascination vs. Interest (double meaning) 

",..notice high society's constantly growing admiration for the underworld, which runs like a red thread through the nineteenth century, its continuous step-by-step retreat on all questions of morality, and its growing taste for the anarchical cynicism of its offspring. ' 

By either definition, this creates a right-wing mob that the American 'elite' grows fascinated by. There are two explanations for this, and I think both have much true about them. 

The first that the 'aristocratic elite' (meaning 'particularly affluent Americans') seeks to have ever more lack of accountability to consequence, and perpetually increase their money, power and influence. The viability of this explanation should be pretty obvious. 

The other is that the 'elite' has a cheap, even pornographic fascination with a force so déclassé as a mob. The lure of the forbidden draws them to it. Being part of a 'mob' is usually the one thing you can't accuse an aristocrat of being. The 'mob' is the ultimate force that has no care for accountability to consequence. And so the elite uses all kinds of means at their disposal to egg the mob onward--both to advance their interests and excite themselves. 

---------------------

Once Again, Self-explanatory

"Racism is a necessary tool if the powerful wish to make the powerless do their bidding."

Well duh. 

---------------------------------

 

Double Duality: 

Demographics vs. Morals

Exploitaion: funds rise or funds decline?

'...no matter what learned scientists say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.'

We could leave this as a truism, but there's an essay's worth of meanings here. 

We do have to consider the double meanings inherent in 'humanity.' One meaning of 'humanity' is obviously humankind as a species, but it can also mean 'humanity' as in our capacity for moral compassion. In that sense, racism is obviously one of the traits that most prevents us from realizing our potential for humanity. 

There's too much book to make an essay out of this, but just consider it for a moment; think of the Spanish Empire: discovering the New World was a death sentence for 95% of the Native American population, and even if Spain flourished from its flush of gold into a golden age, it was the moral, spiritual death of Spain, not just in the new world but in the old world where suspected heretics were burned after confessions obtained under torture, and an eighty-year war because of their colonization of the Low Countries (Holland & Belgium). Sometimes, virulent racism signified the actual end of a country's dominance: obviously the Nazis severely depleted Germany's international standing until quite recently. 

The ways decline manifests itself through racial thinking are many and varied, but is it decline if it results in greater affluence? 

I don't know how to answer that except to note that many historians posit a cyclical theory of history where all things rise and fall, and if you view history through the lenses of patterns--and I'm not quite convinced history has any pattern, you can note that so many civilizations are in some senses built on an 'original sin'; what enables a rise is inevitably some form of blood money, and eventually the original sin catches up with a society. The Boyar class built Russia on the suffering of its peasants, and eventually the peasants rose up and liquidated the Boyars' noble descendants. Or think of Spain again: for centuries the Spanish lived off gold and genocide, but eventually the gold destabilized the Spanish economy and the Church used it to grow fat and powerful, so powerful they used their influence to fund an inquisition for centuries that rooted out 'heretics.' Spain may have been wealthy and powerful, but even at its most powerful, Spain lived in fear. 

So here are two questions for you:

1. What do you think is the percentage chance that countries maltreating races will eventually backfire? How would it backfire?

2. By exploiting one race for the gain of another, are countries facilitating their own fall by instituting such inhumane, demeaning policies, or are they setting up their rise? 

---------------------

Racism Against Patriotism

"Historically speaking, racists have a worse record of patriotism than the representatives of all other international ideologies together, and they were the only ones who consistently denied the great principle upon which national organizations of peoples are built, the principle of equality and solidarity of all peoples guaranteed by the idea of mankind."

Once again, I have to editorialize and say that I'm not sure about the veracity of this quote, but what can't be denied is that racism is a perfect excuse to sabotage one's own country. If an historically white-run country is, say, oh... I don't know... led by a black man, the racists not only have motivation to take sides against the government, they even have a motive to conspire with the country's historic enemy to take a more diverse government down. And if they're successful, they not only make this indefensible enemy into an ally, but their alliance compels them to incorporate into themselves many of their previous enemy's pathological traits that they'd formerly professed to loathe. 

Since a country's more powerful races have incentive to like their country more, they often have more incentive to be patriots than those from less privileged races, and even if they have no racism in their hearts, they have plenty of incentive to act with racist manners. But the more they get to remind people of their superior status, the more powerfully they get to perceive themselves; which creates a self-reinforcing pathology in which they perceive themselves as deserving their own power because they act powerfully. 

Which leads us to the next quote...

"Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible 'explanation' and excuse for its deeds, even if no race thinking had ever existed in the civilized world."

----------------------------------