The Wrong Geometry

We are not lines; we don't and shouldn't fall along a linear political trail comprised of the detritus of past ideologies. Yet, we see the world in these terms and we're increasingly worse off for it. It's inescapable in many ways since there is no such thing as a total revolution of consciousness. But we're not doing too well with the possibilities of human imagination unless we can sell the product or rally enough troops into marching off the cliffs.

Left-Center-Right. That is largely the extent of our flaccid political imaginations. Why not trapezoids? Roughly-hewn circles and marvelously vertiginous spirals? Feedback-loop evolution? Hilbert space? Asterisks embedded within asterisks? The unprovable proof that there is no mathematics to politics, ethics?

In the US, we gravitate towards an imaginary center of moderation, along with its imaginary valuative judgment that this magnetic center is somehow good, godly even (except that the US God hates faggots). That's the logic of the line. The old "natural" geometry, that is, the one Socrates had Meno draw from his mind. The one that ultimately articulated a left and a right - arbitrarily - so that politics could be understood by the benighted masses. You have two hands and two feet, see? One is bad and the other is good. You are maladroit (literally, "bad with the right"), left-handed, a practitioner of the dark arts. The political "right" got the better arbitrary prize with the simple equation of right as in right/wrong with a direction we eventually turn when our right foot is smaller than the left foot. "Moderate" means somehow being able to switch-hit, adjust to political pitches, maybe even think briefly about opposing issues. Good enough, our geometry says. A few random policies have in the interim come to settle on either side, depending on whichever side you fall out of bed. For the most part, however, the alleged virtue of moderation prevents Americans from really ever getting out of bed, or that famous slumber.

Elsewhere - say, among Latin American leftists - the other side of mindless linear geometry reigns. In DC, we obviously hear endless insipid arguments for the "right" or for "moderation." But we "lefties" also hear endless insipid arguments for "leftism." People sell lots of books making the case for their leftism. I'm invited to plenty of their readings. Sometimes I go, and the authors tell me something that was already intellectually boring 40 years ago. Tariq Ali told us a few weeks ago things about American imperialism in Latin America that we already knew to death, into the ground, screamingly boringly, insipidly, awfully, and linear-confirmingly known. Without a proposal, an idea, even much of a thought, which is nearly as awful. And everybody in the leftist audience clapped vigorously, startling me from a much-needed, but unfortunately front-row nap. Doomed they are to the linear geometry of left and right, they have nothing to propose that's novel, that does anything but swing a political pendulum back and forth for eternity. This excites a lot of people, this ticking, danceable metronome; and, given the basic limitations of human mortality, it has an ever-fresh generational army of new recruits and tap-dancers. Tick tock tick, until the next linear move. Good luck, revolutionaries - your philosophy was both sparked and killed at the moment of the Eighteenth Brumaire. There is nothing to revolt against except your masters, who have already set the terms of your revolt, which you will reset until you face the revolt. Live it up while you can. Your book-signing lecturers are closer to this knowledge than you realize.

Yet,... endless tracts, endless shopworn bromides, endless fame out of endless shopworn bromides, endless pointlessness with nary a novel note floating in the bromidic air. Who set up eternity in such terms?

I refuse to accept this geometry. I can't take it from American politics while real problems become increasingly entrenched. I can't take it from Chavistas (or their power-greedy, corrupt opposition), who shag all the appropriate leftist slogans but with barely an original thought in their heads, and have great difficulty competently handling what they do have. Living in DC, spending time in Venezuela, France, Japan, and other places around the planet, I see nothing except the same geometry running its see-saw course, creating demons out of the other end of the line so that their own point, dot, spurt might look just a little better for the brief time they can legitimately suspend it in Euclidian space for pay and power. One bold-typed line with the number of hungry, oppressed, uneducated, diseased, poor people growing minute by minute, living in increasingly grotesque environmental conditions on a dying planet regardless of where their leaders place themselves in the archaic, feeble geometry of modern politics.

I'm not a nihilist. I believe in something - if nothing else, a kind of loyalty and generosity we owe to each other, whoever we are. I just don't believe in your political geometry any more, whoever/whatever you are.