The Interregnum Revisited
It has been the continuing obsession of this writer that we are entering an Interregnum, best summarized by Gramsci’s description.
The old is dying and the new cannot be born;in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.
The economic collapse that we chronicled here for almost two years has exacerbated the morbidity. Demagogues like Glenn Beck have played on the confusion and uncertainty of the working class–chanelling their anger away from the capitalists and towards a young Black President–”the other”. So this anger in the general populace manifests itself in strange ways–racial animus; thuggishness that leads to fame; a general anomie best described almost a century ago by Yeats.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
I’ve been writing a book called Outlaw Blues about the century long culture war between America’s artistic avant-garde and the radical right, and so I can say with some confidence that this current culture war is not new. It’s been an ugly battle for 110 years since Mark Twain was denounced by the New York Times editorial page for saying, “I am an anti-imperialist. I’m opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.” Sometimes the artists have just left the country like in the early 1920′s–escaping to Paris to avoid the religious bluenoses, the KKK and prohibition. Sometimes the artists have gone to jail, like the Hollywood Ten in 1950. But in each of the earlier periods of rising right wing repression and paranoia, the fever abated in three or four years when responsible Republican’s stood up and denounced the dangerous paranoids within their ranks. Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Maine Republican rose to denounce Joe McCarthy in June of 1950 and was soon joined by six other Republican senators. McCarthy called them “Snow White and the six dwarfs”, but within two years his reign of terror was over as he was censured by the whole Senate. In the late 1950′s, the John Birch Society’s Robert Welch denounced Republican President Dwight Eisenhower as “a dedicated conscious agent of the communist conspiracy”. But it was only in 1962 when William Buckley and Barry Goldwater decided the Bircher’s were going to destroy the Republican conservative movement, that Welch’s paranoid ravings were pushed out of the national conversation.
So what distinguishes this consensual paranoid hallucination sponsored by Fox News from the witch hunts of 1918, 1950 and 1962? To begin with, the Republican leadership is so afraid of the power of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, that they refuse to take them on. But the second problem is the nature of the balkanized world of 21st Century media. It is quite possible that the nature of modern social media choices can sustain irrational behavior far longer than would have happened in a world where everyone tuned in to watch the evening news on one of three channels in 1962. Two social scientists have been studying health outcomes in a well surveyed population in Framingham, Massachusetts. They noted how the number smokers dropped over time and then stabilized, no matter what the evidence or advertising that it was bad for you.
When Christakis and Fowler mapped out the way Framingham people quit smoking during roughly the same period — 1971 to 2003 — they found that the decline was not evenly distributed across the town. Instead, clusters of friends all quit smoking at the same time, in a group. It was like a ballroom emptying out one table at a time. But this meant that by 2003, the remaining smokers were also not evenly distributed: instead, they existed in isolated, tightly knit clusters of like-minded nicotine fiends. Worse, those clusters had migrated to the edges of the social network, where they were less interlinked with the mass of Framingham participants. In their everyday social lives, Christakis and Fowler say, the town’s remaining smokers are thus mostly surrounded by people who still smoke, and they rarely have strong connections with nonsmokers. Nonsmoking may be contagious, but the smokers don’t appear to be close to anyone from whom they could catch the behavior.
The people who are angry and paranoid listening to Glenn Beck are like the smokers–they don’t associate with happy people and they only listen to media that keeps them riled up. The social contagion of anger is catching and they spread the virus to all of their friends. Glenn Beck knows this. He says his hero was Orson Welles and he cites Welles’s ability to create mass hysteria with his War of the World’s radio drama of a Martian attack as evidence of the power of radio. He even named his company Mercury after Welles’ perhaps not understanding that Welles was a passionate anti-fascist who was denounced by right wing Senators for being an agent of the communists. Now Beck makes $23 million per year and Limbaugh makes even more. As they ride around the country in their private jets they may be laughing at how they are able to get the poor crackers all riled up about an imminent invasion of martians or socialists or Nazis while they take it to the bank.
While Beck and Limbaugh may view the current interregnum as a gravy train, the anger virus will keep spreading for two reasons. There is no reason to believe that unemployment won’t continue to rise and so while the capitalists may be happy with the 40% rise in the stock market, the working class only sees things getting worse. But because they have no means to turn their anger towards capital–(what are you going to do, take your money out of the bank?)–they direct it towards the party in power and the President. And as Gary Wills points out in an important essay, the President is trapped by the facts on the ground of the National Security State–the “entangled giant”.
the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the “war on terror”—all these make a vast and intricate structure that may not yield to effort at dismantling it. Sixty-eight straight years of war emergency powers (1941–2009) have made the abnormal normal, and constitutional diminishment the settled order…
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that turning around the huge secret empire built by the National Security State is a hard, perhaps impossible, task. After most of the wars in US history there was a return to the constitutional condition of the pre-war world. But after those wars there was no lasting institutional security apparatus of the sort that was laboriously assembled in the 1940s and 1950s. After World War I, for instance, there was no CIA, no NSA, no mountain of secret documents to be guarded from unauthorized readers, no atomic bomb to guard, develop, deploy, and maintain in readiness on land, in the air, and on (or in) the sea.
Now a new president quickly becomes aware of the vast empire that is largely invisible to the citizenry. The United States maintains an estimated one thousand military bases in other countries. I say “estimated” because the exact number, location, and size of the bases are either partly or entirely cloaked in secrecy, among other things to protect nuclear installations.The secrecy involved is such that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy did not even know, at first, that we had nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey.
Here is the irony. Reagan and the neoconservatives managed to convince their followers that the only thing the government knew how to do well was fight wars. All the rest–building the Interstate Highway System, running Social Security and Medicare–the government must be incompetent. But it is the financing of the National Security State that prevents us from providing a world class universal health care and K-College education system. Nothing else. And until the Democrats are willing to provide a counter-narrative to Glenn Beck’s vision of what’s wrong with America–one aimed at the working class and not Wall Street–the social contagion of the interregnum’s morbid symptoms will continue to spread.
The New Republic has just published this very interesting take on what the Dems are contending with on the other side of the aisle.
The piece then departs from the public sphere, and suggests that the real bone of contention is extraordinarily private. So much of this view (holding that material security is a direct function of moral virtue) rests on a remarkably shaky moral foundation.
That’s not exactly fertile ground for bipartisan agreement. It’s actually the kind of thing that the body politic rightly seeks to purge from power via the ballot box.
Jon-
I agree with you on so many things, but I think we had a chance to enter an interregnum – a chance for real and substantial change in America – and I think that the lack of boldness by BHO has pretty much thrown that out the window.
There is still a slight window of opportunity, but I think we can see now that BHO is a conciliator and not really a driver.
With the present financial team in the lead, the changes necessary, will simply not happen. It is return to the status quo – of 2006, preferably.
I do agree that, from all the studies I’ve read, the conservative mind is not capable of accepting facts that dispute their position. They need the status quo to tailor the reality to their thinking.
But that doesn’t mean that we are going to get the interregnum – I did have high hopes, but as time and events progress, I don’t see it happening, in fact, much to the contrary.
“Reagan and the neoconservatives managed to convince their followers that the only thing the government knew how to do well was fight wars. All the rest–building the Interstate Highway System, running Social Security and Medicare–the government must be incompetent.”
The cognitive dissonance required to maintain this sense of reality is tragicomic — hilarious at the individual level but disturbing when I think of how many individuals go along with it.
Of course, cognitive dissonance is also an essential part of the idea that America’s government is good at fighting wars. (I’m reminded of the NPR story where parents began sending soldiers cases of silly string for trip-wire detection after hearing about it from letters home.)
@alex: Historically, this viewpoint that wealth equals moral fitness can be traced back to Calvinism and, believe it or not, Hinduism.
Disproportionate wealth has been a problem for those with an ounce of decency left in them. This is a crucial point: an embarassment of riches is still embarassing. Will Rogers used that to some effect on Rockefeller and other wealth men during the great depression. Sadly, with the decline of spiritual values this is less effective than in Roger’s time, but still a lever. Rather than go with anger, humor that points out outcomes in slow persistent messaging can have an effect. Overcome the media meme of superior brains leading to great wealth. Emphasize the “accidental billionaire”.
This is where the old hippies lost it. Too many were covert millionaire wannabes and found they could use the beliefs to keep competitors down. That is how Calvinism works.
clint, i think you nailed. BHO is a complete waster as president. his is the conciliatory pulpit.
his team of clinton re-treads, tiny-tim geithner, and build-up-the-banks-ben is a travesty.
And then we have this kind of shit, complete with invocation of those magical words, “victory” and “failure,” without an ounce of reality or definitional, what, rigor? in the whloe sorry shitstorm. How many times will the sheeple be led up the ramp to be sheared and “humanely killed?” Even the slightly saner voices are ‘way out there in la-la-land.
Maybe folks who actually care and understand could try to get something started — a renaming of the current “United Nations of America” expedition to Afutilitistan, to “Operation Shitstorm.”
“Support Our Troops.” My effin’ ass.
Critical to the reemergence from an interregnum is a rethink/reset of what a nation and/or government is supposed to be. I’m not talking among the pols, but among the people. Here is where the problem lays. Unlike most parts of the planet, the United States hasn’t had a war on its’ own soil to recover from for more than 150 years.
When you look at other nations reinventing themselves, they usually do so after horrible loss and trauma. Given the economic and post-traumatic social situation of Europe, Asia and England at the end of World War Two, it’s easy to understand how the populace could shift its’ thinking into looking for something other than what they had, since they were mostly stumbling over the residue of what they HAD had nearly everyday.
Last years economic failure is small potatoes compared to those types of scenarios. Additionally, most nations and peoples have had a history of reset/readjust due to constant wars popping up all over the joint. Lack of stability tends to lead a person toward flexible thinking, examining options on a regular basis. Sedate living acclimates people to the exact opposite.
The fact is, life for most Americans is currently “uncomfortable”. Sedateness and serenity went out the door a year and a half ago and most folks are like Paw Joad in “The Grapes of Wrath”, point out the guy responsible and I’ll shoot him and then life can get back to normal.
Problem is, normal failed. Until there is some subconscious understanding on the part of the populace as to what the “new normal” is, there are going to be an awful lot of Paw Joads running around.
This is a first-rate piece, Jon, and I look forward to your forthcoming book. I was a bit surprised to see your citation of Garry Wills, a rare example of a conservative who commands respect today.
Three quibbles. First, McCarthy’s investigations certainly spurred paranoia, but in themselves they were not paranoid until the end, in that the breaches of internal security, we now know, were so broad, deep and hoary. They really did constitute a menace. Second, and as I’ve said recently, Reagan wasn’t a Neocon, just a boon for that faction. Third, I would argue that in the post-WWII period the U.S. did manage, largely with public financing, to build the most extensive and exquisite system of higher ed seen before or since.
@Hugo-
I’ve yet to see any credible “Commie Threat” evidenced. Even the Russkies didn’t have much on us with all of their apparat…
More straw men and Boogie men – not real threats.
Jon,
Likewise looking forward to the book.
Hugo,
If Garry Wills represented modern conservatism, I’d probably qualify as a conservative. I read practically everything he writes. But he’s worlds away from most of the self-described ‘conservatives’ I read elsewhere.
And as for the system of higher education we “built” in the post-war period … well … a) we inherited the intellectual legacy of Europe when Hitler’s madness chased them out of the continent (why did Einstein move to Princeton?) and b) we were flush and we decided to fund these people (and the relative handful of intellectually-inclined American-born students).
We sort of ‘lucked into’ our system of higher ed. And are now busy fumbling it away. Our culture celebrates success in inverse proportion to the intellectual effort involved.
It was real enough. It wouldn’t be proven until the Venona papers were released by Moynihan. It turns out Hiss was a spy, the Rosenbergs were guilty, penetration via the British services by Soviet moles was complete and so on. While there is still debate, it revolves around harm committed or intent to harm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_in_the_Venona_papers
This still goes on on all sides.
@clint,
If you want names illustrating the depth of Moscow’s penetration of high-ranking U.S. agencies, then see for example the cases of the American functionaries Owen Lattimore, Lauchlin Currie, Harry Dexter White, Agnes Smedley, Alger Hiss, J. Robert Oppenheimer. These persons, and many more, operated at every point to which the Comintern sought to exert pressure, variously to steal secrets, steer U.S. policy and skew public perceptions. Each of these was a member of an active cell run out of the USSR.
A different approach might be to list the U.S. agencies involved and to overlay those agencies with the Soviet exigencies of the day. Alternatively, one could examine a list of interlocking front organizations traceable to Moscow.
The reasons for the depth of these and so many other penetrations had mostly to do with Washington’s mercurial attitudes toward Moscow as first a threat, then and ally, and later a kind of moving target. These changing tides, of ideological war, war and Cold War meant fitfull reversals in the USA’s policies for vetting its federal officials for possibly subversive activities.
Particularly disturbing is the success with which Moscow’s Amercian agents, together with active CP members, managed to subvert U.S. policy in Asia (by dint of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, to embrace Japan as a neutral lest it set its sights again on Russia; following Hitler’s breach, to tout the Chinese Nationalists as a buffer against Nippon’s opening a second USSR front; after the war, to trash the feeble and corrupt Nationalists in favor of Moscow’s Maoist pupets who all the while had been kept judiciously warm in chilly Yenan) and in Eastern and Central Europe, the Balkans and Greece.
Seth,
I share your enthusiasm for the careful thinking and writing of Garry Wills. I especially liked his book on the Gettysburg Address and the one entitled “Confessions of a Conservative”, which I keep shelved beside Ted Sorensen’s “Why I Am a Democrat”.
Sign me onto your last paragraph on U.S. higher education. Interesting that you should mention Germany in the preceding paragraph.
I see three profound German influences on American higher ed in addition to the one you cite, the blowback from Nazi oppression of Jewish scholars. Prior to that, the American founders were duly impressed by the German model of postgraduate and positivistic research universities. That was Jefferson’s model for UVA, and for a time it was best exemplified on these shores by the Johns Hopkins University. Later, this graduate approach became the standard among all elite American universities, public and private.
The interim German influence came from Hitler himself, as his Germany was the first nation to guarantee a free university education to all qualified students. (The qualifications, needless to say, were however not only academic, but racial.) Still, the Third Reich set a new standard for public higher education. It’s often pointed out that the consequent erudition of that Nazi generation obviously did not have a humanizing effect.
In the postwar U.S., the G.I. Bill, insofar as it vouchsafed a bankable flow of students with federal money attached, was recognized by American universities as a form of collateral with which to upbuild their operations. Significantly, this involved the securing of financing for advanced scientific projects, equipement and laboratory space. The U.S. emerged with a panoply of some 4,000 colleges and universities, the latter of which were in many cases newly established public ones capable of sophisticated R&D. As a result, both the public and private sectors of the American economy continues to farm out the bulk of their(arguably inadequate) R&D to universities rather than to government-run operations. We remain unique in this regard, even as our campuses remain dominant on the worldwide academic stage.
But I certainly agree with you about both the decay and the anti-intellectualism of American higher education. It’s part of why I sometimes take refuge in the 12th Century.
This makes it sound like McCarthy was justified, which I can’t agree with. Yes, there was justification for HUAAC, but not for McCarthy’s hijacking of it, and use of it destroy lives indiscriminately. Every modern government has been and will be infiltrated. Turning that into a justification for the paranoid clusterF of the McCarthy hearings is just wrong.
So now we’re defending McCarthy.
Man.
We are SCREWED.
This is certainly not to justify McCarthy’s ultimate excesses, but: HUAC was House committee, while McCarthy never served in that body; and McCarthy, like his predecessor Rep. Martin Dies, the first HUAC Chairman, were forced to fly almost blind, as the FDR, Truman and finally the Eisenhower administrations circled wagons in hopes of concealing their security indiscretions by, at various times, forbidding the naming of names.
We have now the benefit of information not shared with Dies and McCarthy. Now we have access the Venona decrypts, to Kremlin made public after the unexpected collapse of the USSR, and to FBI files and files from military intelligence outfits finally made public, under FOIA, after the half-century ban on their release.
It would be convenient to chalk it all up to McCarthy, rather than to Moscow, as we then could continue to paint him as a hick, a paranoid, a lout. But the people he went against, be they Ivyish sophisticates or their runners in the USSR, were still more loutish than he.
We all esteem the courage to “speak truth to power”, as long as the speaker isn’t as unseemly a person as McCarthy challenges the domestic and foreign superpowers of his day. So, not a hero, but certainly an underdog. It’s almost disappointing to see now how much he got right.
The similar problem with holding up McCarthy as a poster child for GOP misconduct is that one finds so many counter examples. Dies, for instance, was a Democrat. RFK worked for McC. The fellow Yalies Wm. F. Buckley and L. Brent Bozell, backers of McC for a time, nevertheless later denounced him. And, as len brings up, in more recent years we saw D.P. Moynihan’s exposure of Venona. Sen. Moynihan once was considered a founding Neocon–a feat for a big-spending, liberal Irish Catholic representing New York–but probably he could be said to have been a proponent of Wilson’s and FDR’s liberal internationalism. Could be, that is, except that it would blur distinctions beyond our patience for limning them.
Ken,
Please excuse all the typos. I’m juggling duties here. I’d of course meant to say, for example, “Kremlin FILES made public…”
Like Joe McCarthy found, it’s easy to toss poop-bombs and much harder to clean them up. Any lawyer knows that it’s darn near impossible to “prove the negative.”
Hugo puts it out there that during Red Scare #2, 1947 to, like, now and running until all the Cold warriors are finally dead, there were all these secret stooges in the government, reporting through secret cells directly to the minions of the Evil Empire, warping our sacred policies and polluting our bodily fluids.
No doubt there were some, just as “we” who also are all unawares “protected” daily by our own set of evil men willing to do just about anything, had our moles and plants and double-triple-quadruple agents sitting in on policy-making in the Kremlin and telling us The Enemy’s deepest darkest secrets. But it would be nice to keep the scoring honest. Historians that don’t toe a particular line at the far right of the center of the road are of course suspect as being Left-Liberal Commie-Symp Cominterm drones. But let me just ask for a little positive proof of some of the Red-scaring here, and maybe one little corner especially: J. Robert Oppenheimer, who according to Hugo, based on who knows what, was “a member of an active cell run out of the USSR.”
Wiki is wacky some of the time, but the Oppenheimer article has this to say, and it’s worth reading the whole thing and maybe following the references to draw your own conclusions about who’s on the factual straightedge and who’s not:
“In a seminar at the Woodrow Wilson Institute on May 20, 2009, and based on an extensive analysis of the Vassiliev notebooks taken from the KGB archives, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev confirmed that Oppenheimer never was involved in espionage for the Soviet Union. The KGB tried repeatedly to recruit him, but never was successful. Oppenheimer did not betray the United States. In addition, he had several persons removed from the Manhattan project who had sympathies to the Soviet Union.”
But hey, no matter what “side” you are on, if you spent all those years responding to that part of the brain that wants to believe there are evil creatures under every rock, and in the knowledge that your side too has planted bugs and worms in the gardens of The Enemy, the Rooskies had their set too, and if you were involved in the espionage and disruption and disinformation games from “our side” such that you are convinced that “their side” was up to the same tricks, hey, who’s to say you’re wrong?
Any questioning of the orthodoxy is treason per se, to be punished through a different J.’s approach (J. Edgar “I do NOT wear dresses in private” Hoover, that is) to investigation and harrassment and then Star Chamber proceedings to prove your guilt unappealably.
“Everybody” thinks Edward Teller was a staunch fellow. Who did so much to try to get monomaniacally even for his family, who suffered under the Soviets, by getting us all set up for Dr. Strangelove-Land, at enormous cost. And these days we have A.Q. Khan, nominal Pakistani “hero,” actual living demon, happy to peddle the tools and toys of Armageddon across the planet (with great industrial companies as happy partners in profit) just “because.” Et, as the lawyers say, al.
But far be it from me to cavil, convinced as I am that our Stupid Human Tricks, carried out in Darkness at Noon on all “sides,” with squared jaw and patriotic squint, are all pointing us in the direction of that Long Fall and Sudden Stop at the bottom.
We should at least move up to the 14th century, and take a good look in “A Distant Mirror.”
Also, it’s not right to say that Buckley and Bozell “denounced” McCarthy. What they tried to do, after the fact, was to show, on the basis of the information then available, where they thought he was right and where they thought he’d gone wrong. Certainly one of their motives was to try to keep McCarthy’s effort from being lost in the ad hominem, to try to combat the energetic efforts to turn the deceased McCarthy into a kind of metaphor, a facile bogey whereas there were actual bogeys in those days.
I’m not defending McCarthy. I’m refuting the notion that all of the Communist infiltration investigations were as wrong as he was. Baby and bathwater, Ken.
JTM,
I confess that I threw Oppenheimer into the mix to stirs things up. Forgive this descent into Morganism. But it doesn’t mean that I threw him under the bus. Dies, McCarthy and others did not have the benefit of what we now can find: that the CP of Alameda County proudly boasted, in meetings picked up on FBI wiretaps, that their own JRO was one of Moscow’s greatest assets, and that they’d have to respect his request to be scrubbed from their membership rolls on account of his new assignment at Berkeley’s rad lab. (Released Soviet files confirm that he’d already informed them that the Army was working toward a nuclear bomb.)
His postwar vetting was even more defficient, as it was based on the argument that he’d done the nation such great service during the War. (It seemed to have escaped the U.S. government that, by, say, 1947, our ally in Russia had become a foe, but by that time the shifting sands in Moscow had long become the quicksand of our internal security discipline.)
While I deplore the turpitude, and indeed the paranoia, of Teller’s sketchy but decisive dismissal of Oppenheimer (the recsission of Oppy’s “Q” clearance and his removal from the Atomic Energy Commission), what if Teller’s hunch had been correct? Turns out it probably was so.
As regards the others, I stand by those claims, and already have listed the freely available sources. What I wish would be taken from these rehearsals of the past: Joe McCarthy no longer makes for an all-purpose target; there really were forces bent on encompassing the undoing of the U.S.; they were better at penetration, theft and manipulation than we were at stopping them; the successes of the penetration were more partisan in nature than were the limited successes of its prevention. That is, while the Democratic Party largely presided over the breaches, both parties took part in efforts to combat them.
There were actual agents and spies and enemies working in the Soviet Union during the early 1930′s too.
So I can kinda see Stalin’s point, now.
Nah, that too is too binary. It’s better to say that both parties played both roles. This is worth belaboring because so many bloggers today keep trying to pigeonhole misfits. McCarthy was a misfit, and worse. But he was a misfit.
It won’t do to call Ronald Reagan or Milton Friedman “Neoconservatives”, anymore than it would do to say that the GOP brought us Red paranoia. (What role the Reds themselves?) Who, then, would be the obscurantist here?
Let’s instead try to come closer to charting each of the vying forces, ideologies and factions that ushered us into the darkness that WTM, for example, now so eloquently discerns with his night-vision goggles. Those forces aren’t any more susceptible of overarching labels than is a nascent hurricane of being described in terms of barometrics or wind velocity.
In this larger, necessarily more complex view, a Glenn Beck looks like a speck unless he somehow invites us to drag swaths of history into his vortex.
Yeah, Dan. There were indeed. Relatively feeble ones, but intrepid.
Incidentally, I never saw the point of eschewing the study of Cold War espionage as though it were somehow all a lot of hokum or Bondian derring-do. George Washington built a pretty able spy network upon which he relied, and so did Jefferson Davis, the Confederate President, do. So what? (One could even say that Dr. Franklin spent the latter half of his life as a kind of operative specializing in spying, disinformation and propaganda; I mean, who better?) We try to fit into their strategems the pieces they gleaned from intelligence, but in studying the 20th Century why would we draw a blank, in this regard, suddenly across the Cold War? Part of what made the Cold War “cold” was that the hostilities shifted largely to espionage and in any rate to means kept short of the previous, total warfare. Spying and infiltration were part of the mix, obviously.
Even Stealth technology was developed initially for purposes of pure espionage, and not for offensive purposes. (Tee up: JTM.)
Douglas Rushkoff has an especially interesting take on the Interregnum.
Here’s an excerpt from the sales pitch for his book, Life Inc.
Where this gets interesting is in his theory that there’s no necessary connection between various economic functions, and the particular institutions that perform them without question today (or did, until this time last year).
In other words, recovery is not necessarily about these institutions recovering what they lost – it’s about other players recovering losses from them.
This type of recovery does not refer to monetary losses. Rather, it refers to a loss of autonomy. In this context, economic recovery becomes a very creative process through which currently centralized functions are reproduced in highly decentralized ways.
In a recent essay for Edge, he observes that
In reading this stuff, it’s important to note that when Rushkoff specifies a difference between evolution and design, he appears to be using a very focused definition of evolution, specifically, one limited to the genetic level, and operating between generations.
He does not use the word in the broader, more popular context that applies it to any product of design that can’t actually reproduce itself, and is seen to ‘evolve’ only as a consequence of an external designer’s changing views and understanding.
In fact, he seems to be saying that using evolution to describe design products is a case of metaphor being taken literally, or the map being mistaken for the territory itself.
With regard to economics, confusing genetic evolution with conscious design becomes a major barrier to clear thinking about what’s actually happening, while giving entirely too much power to those who benefited from this confusion in what may be the modern equivalent to the Divine Right of Kings. In the same essay, he concludes that
If the medium is truly the message, then the last decade’s worth of dislocation of the media trades should probably be seen as precursor to – and pattern for – much larger changes to come.
Yes, it is “an especially interesting take on the Interregnum”, Alex. We seem to have lost sight of intrinsic value vs. use value, to have confused wants with needs. This raises the question of whether Rushkoff, at the end of the final citation you quote, is fuzz on Science’s already fuzzy distinction between “inventions and discoveries”. In these two pairings, do you see conflict?
P.S. Whenever I see McLuhan quoted as claiming that the “medium is the message”, I recall that he later said that “the medium is the massage.” In the first he posits that the medium works to trump its content; in the later form, he suggests that the medium trumps all content whatever. His revision seems even more prescient than the first.
In fact, systems iterate. Designer understanding evolves. It is a crucial distinction.
I’m not sure I preferred the system when the bankers had the motto “Not for self, but God” and rode under the symbol of the two men on one horse. Then of course, when the pope gave them papal status eligible to receive donations, it all went sour.
As I said, a complex systems theorist views an economist with the same disdain as an astrophysicist views an astrologer. Some understandings evolve into new logies and others get left at the altar or are reforged into them.
“the medium trumps all content whatever”
More prescient than you possibly know, Hugo. Consider this: the new proponents of browser-based web 3D use the same models of spinning teacups and planets to prove their more complex code can produce the same results that far simpler VRML code produced a decade and a half ago. Somehow this is considered progress because it is said to be more standard than the standard that precedes it, when in fact, it is just another generation of toys to sell.
As a result, the content market is enthralled in poverty and cannot evolve while the toy makers get to sell yet another 8-track player. This should sound spookily familiar to the songwriters among us. Sad but so.
Go ahead and have the last word, I will only offer one more time that a pass through the “historical record” leaves me still convinced that “Turns out it was probably so” is conditionally stated because there ain’t any smokin’ evidence, except that Oppy did a good job of pulling quotes from the Bhagavad Gita after helpin “us” all a whole lot closer to the thousand suns. But that’s only one tiny little turd in the toilet, now isn’t it?
When everything is everything else, nothing means anything, now does it? I thought moral relativism was anathema. And since when are Americans, you know, REAL Bud-drinkin,’ full-auto Americans, likely to descend into vaporous refinements of categories? Oh, that’s right — when it appears necessary to generate a squirt of squid ink to becloud clarity and obfuscate the increasingly obvious.
I’ll stick with my comfortable, supported-by-at-least-as-much-credible-evidence-as-Revanchist-Realism conviction that humans as a species can’t ethic their way out of a paper bag.
Yep, and a wise Senator during WW II read that all the buildings in Japan were made out of rice paper, bamboo and dry old wood. So he got an appropriation to turn bats into weapons, with tinly little hypergolic incendiaries tied to their little legs, so when they were dropped by the thousands over Tokyo they would fly up into the attics and belfries and burn the place down.
Babies think about what they want right now. A little older and you add the notion of some kind of group, from clique to gang to race to tribe to nation. All overlying that sneaky bit about me-now. What is not going to happen is ever getting to the ethical point of asking of any action or decision, “Does this further or tear down the likelihood of the survival of the species?” We’re so good at submerging ourselves in foggy minutiae, feeling powerful in our mastery of arcane jargon and acronyms and Hellfire/Reaper technology and power projection, that feels so Goddam good, that who gives a shit for the species? I will have my fun in my time, let the other mopes take care of themselves and people yet unborn try to clean out the Augean stables and untie the Gordian knot.
Funny how once you get into the right way of thinking, everything is a weapon. Even the Frisbee.
len,
Sure, it’s true that the popes became, in their avarice, apologists for Christian usury in the context of the Church’s historical anti-Semitism. I’m unfamiliar with Wall Street, but it’s not surprising that traces of this exploitation would show up there in symbolic form. For his part, McLuhan was expert in reading these signs.
On your point about the impoverishment of content in favor of gadgetry and delivery systems, all I can say is that I feel, and have felt, impoverished. But believe me, even from this receiving end of the line, there’s often a perception that the over-abundance of our toys creates a paucity of artistic product. Because this is, I sense, so often and so strongly felt at both ends, the situation can change. Hallelujah!
Sometimes I’m with Leon Redbone: give me the cracked horn of an antique gramaphone any day. On it I might play Bix in his element. Or, for, say, early, R&B, maybe I’ll stack a set of scratchy ’45s on a portable record player purchased with Green Stamps. Let the tech follow the art, and not the other way ’round.
JTM,
Doubtless I’m late in the game, but recently I was given this frisbee (didn’t Whammo originally conceive of them as “flying saucers”, with windows and exhaust ports and all?”) that consists of a weighted ring to which is strung an aerodynamic, nylon sail. I reckon you could knock those things off for less than the cost of the plastic in a music CD, yet the thing flies and flies. My dog loves it. RIP, the molded Frisbee.
You gotta love the incendiary batshit, though. It was so mendaciously delusional, or delusionally mendacious. But then, at a time of Total War, viciousness became a kind of virtue. As you surely know, the Imperial Japanese, who’d long since acquired a taste for blood, were busily drawing up even more diabolical, if somewhat more feasible, schemes to dust the Aleutians and the West Coast with crude aerial drones laced with chemical and biological mayhem. It all goes to your point about the latent violence of the species and to mine about the desperation of the times.
It’s interesting, what you say about childish persons maturing into an identity with the group, with a larger collective (if not a “whole”). Margaret Mead, for my money the greatest native American mind of her century–certainly the greatest Anthropologist–worked for the war effort. She did so in service of a national collective, ours, but her stock-in-trade, even then, was to point to the importance of ethnic groups within the larger U.S. war machine. Her point was that the machine would function best as a sum of its parts, rather than as a homogeneous whole.
Were she alive, I’d bet that she’d agree with you that the machine, in whole or in part, should not have outlasted the war.
Just as it’s time to put to rest the charicature of Joe McCarthy as a drunken bully, so is it time to bury the image of Robert Oppenheimer as a dewy-eyed dreamer with a taste for timely Sancrit, a man who could be portrayed on film only by Sam Waterston.
From time to time, I think the Templars had the final laugh and are still laughing where the Hospitallers wound up being uniform geeks without much to say about much.
But that’s just the History Channel at it’s worst.
len,
May God bless the Hospitallers, but the most interesting Europeans of that period, for me, were the scholars who so carefully described the outlines of higher education–and therefore of elementary and preparatory education–how and why, and who/whom, and toward what ideal. Those academics benefited from the wars concomitantly, but yet they were neither jingoes nor themselves combatants. As scholars they nurtured a respect for both the rabbis and the mullahs–as well as for the rediscovered Ancients. We are so far from their mark now.
As you know, by dint of Muslim colleagues they also revived an interest in pre-Socratic and Socratic notions of the relationship between techne and artis, a dominant concern of yours to this day. Now that’s just damned interesting, even apart from its admixture of Greek and Latin.
I’d always understood the observation to mean that the totality of factors involved in any medium formed an independent message about the social orders that sustained them – at least to those who knew they could be read as such.
Take television, for example. Electricity didn’t exist in any commercially viable form before the 20th Century, and when it was mastered, the effect was socially transformative. Accordingly, it would be absurd to expect that the dominant medium of the century wouldn’t rely on electricity, when this newly harnessed power was busy changing nearly everything people would want to talk about in the first place.
It’s not just television. Many other hallmarks of 20th Century social life – particularly the more centralized, bureaucratic, features, were epitomized in the modes of industrialized cultural production that defined that century’s zeitgeist.
If I’m reading Rushkoff correctly, he’s saying that the same factors contributing to the dominance of a given form defined productive life outside the media sphere as well. And in the same way that the media of the age was simply developing from (while expressing the potential of) underlying organizing factors (e.g. newly mastered material physics), it makes sense that the enormous destabilization we’ve seen in the media sphere is an expression of more profound factors emerging – the continued emergence of which will have equally dramatic effects in spheres well beyond media.
It’s important to remember just how many facets a medium has – scientific, artistic, aspirational, commercial, legal, financial, and so on. A medium is really an intersection between various aspects of life – all of which have spheres of influence that extend well beyond the range of the medium that markes their point of intersection.
The simple fact that the once dominant medium is entering decline as another ascends is, in and of itself, a powerful message that historic poles of attraction are going to be diminishing as society reorganizes around new models – models which will be probably be epitomized by the still emerging frameworks for communication, and the creative forms that do best within them.
If a society’s dominant forms of media are experiencing massive disruption, three things are certain. The first is that there will be loud and very discontented noises made by whoever benefited from the established order. The second is that they will be largely helpless when it comes to reversing the tide, since the same factors destabilizing a medium are operating throughout society in a broader range of disconnected ways. And the third is that this disruption will be a prelude to the emergence of new order – order which, again, reflects the capacities and biases of the new medium.
If McLuhan is right, the medium is such an accurate reflection that it can actually be seen as a perfect proxy for the change itself.
Yes, it fascinates me. Today just as one group of techies extolled the return to doing less with more, Vivaty announced the X3D content inside Flash by minimizing the number of nodes and building a Flash-based engine. Thus, they get world wide presence at some cost of expressiveness but a huge increase in content lifecycle insurance.
Ok… that may not mean much to those here but to some elsewhere, it is getting more with less.
Talks about hijacking the starship…
Yours is such an insightful reading, Alex, that I’m going to print it out right now and stick it in a McLuhan book as a kind of postscript. Throughout your post I found myself thinking, “yeah, that’s right”, or, “yeah, McLuhan did do”, or “well, I’d never thought to take it that far, but makes sense”.
Your final image, of the medium as a mirror image, is in a certain sense morally terrifying. (Perhaps you’ll agree that McLuhan was, among other things, a radical ethicist.) The creepy thing about the multi-imaging mirror, for me, is that it distorts and therefore lies. The medium absorbs objective truth and excretes almost inevitable distortion and deceit. Those of us on the receiving end of this alimentary process, therefore consume the execrable.
I’ve just cut the colon, the diverticulum and the hiatus out of this process, but trust me, I did so only in the interest of efficiency and of a sleek, Hollywood build.
Going back to the commies behind every bush. Certainly there were some, you named a couple, and you named a couple who were “named” by McCarthy, and later exonerated – guilt by association seems to be a real conservative trait these days – and a bad one. A real poor one, IMO.
BTW- the paranoia about the commies was adn is seriously flawed.
If our system is so bad that the communist system could possibly overtake us, then I guess that is an answer in and of itself.
I happen to believe that our system is better and will right itself eventually, though that faith is flagging.
I do not believe the commies are going to over run us. I don’t believe they have ever had the capability and most Americans don’t embrace that ideology.
No, I think our oligarchy is our undoing – the rise of corporate America, which is partly at least, a result of the MIC will be the death of our way of life.
And, Eliot-like it will end with a whimper…
Thanks for the kind words. And yes – I should have said near perfect. There’s still a gap, and room for justified alienation.
clint,
Which, of the half-dozen (not “a couple”) I happened to select, is exonerated by history?
Actually, clint,
let me make one more attempt toward a fresh break from this–because we are unfortunately recapitulating the divisiveness of the 1950s (something I’m sure neither of us wants to do)–and then I’ll shut up.
The only reason I took issue with the McCarthy scapegoating is this: recently released records. They are vast, and they came at almost the same time from four main sources, enabling us to square them with each other. FBI files now available; the declassified Venona transcripts (U.S. intercepts of Soviet transmissions to USSR functionaries in America); and the vast archives, released on order of Boris Yeltsin, of the Soviet KGB and GRU. If you’d like, I could furnish links to each of these sources (in the FBI instance, secondary source, as the only alternative is file one’s own FOIA request, and wait). This vast windfall of testable information virtually revolutionized the study of that period.
I happen to be interested in only one figure from that era, Harry Dexter White. But I can tell you honestly that if you delve into virtually any of the toadies named by the Senate (I’m not saying the House), you’ll almost immediately find others and, from those others, others still. From the historiographical perspective, it feels to the researcher something like spelunking in an abandoned lode mine, in which one finds vein after vein, vault after vault, story after story–all leading to an engine room, the Kremlin. One finds now former KGB officers and GRU bureaucrats who positively insist that their erstwhile country, the USSR, be recognized for the sophistication of the penetrations, and indeed the Soviets were simply better at “humint” than anyone opposing them.
As early as 1991 I engaged some curators in efforts to establish a museum of the Cold War. My initial motive, but not theirs, was vindictive: to bury the dead in the same manor in which the Stalinists had buried Russian Orthodoxy by turning their churches into museums. The curators with whom I worked took a broader view, however, convincing me of the advisability of curating such a project under the direction of boards composed of a fair representation from all sides.
My final thought is just this: that we discredit ourselves if we either oversimplify or else gainsay the complexity and seriousness of those times.
I would really like it if you would furnish those links. That’s got to be interesting. Where do you find this stuff?
Congress is a legislative branch of government, not a court (except in cases of impeachment) or a police force.
McCarthy accused, denounced and destroyed countless innocent people. Even if he did denounce some people who were actively seeking to undermine the US government, he conducted a witch hunt.
If we get rid of all the spies and subversives and dissidents and enemies and fifth columnists, we’re all in jail.
“One finds now former KGB officers and GRU bureaucrats who positively insist that their erstwhile country, the USSR, be recognized for the sophistication of the penetrations, and indeed the Soviets were simply better at “humint” than anyone opposing them.”
Aging fossils of a now-defunct and discredited empire insist that they really were better at the spy game in the 1950′s than we were.
Aging German fossils who commanded the German army in WWII also insisted for decades afterward that they were better at the military command thing than anybody else, and if they lost, it was because of this or that or the other thing, not their fault.
I bet there are all kinds of other “facts” and “revelations” in Soviet archives that you’d be not nearly so willing to accept.
What McCarthy did should fill us with shame and resolve never to let one man arrogate such power to himself again.
This is the “but the torture WORKED!” argument all over again.
Umm… Dan, by most serious military analyses, the German military commanders were brilliant on the ground and even despite the pasting by the US and British bomber forces mounted fierce campaigns up to the crossing of the Rhine by US forces. While any analysis can be finessed, if you look at the record up to the invasion of the USSR, on the ground, they were very successful. Don’t get your history from US movies which are themselves in measure, propaganda. The Germans were formidable and the Allies occasionally incredibly inept (See Market Garden and the design of the Sherman). For any reasonable analysis, it was the Soviet Union that defeated the main forces of the German Army.
The obvious blunders:
1. Failing to stop and take time to consolidate after France. Some in the high command did understand the problem. The Corporal was not one of them.
2. Underestimating the effects of an enemy with tremendous manufacturing capacity should they ignore item 1. 1 and 2 are possibly cultural in origin. Some did understand but the Corporal was not one of them.
3. Overestimating their air power particularly the need for long range bombers and underestimating the need for surface-to-air weaponry, thus focusing on the A4 and fighter development and not developing the Wasserfahl faster. Goering played a role in this. Failing to keep the pressure on the British airfields and bombing civilians instead was a bad move considering their enormous superiority in electronic warfare and the relative slow advances in electronic countermeasures from Harvard. They had clear advantages but once again, the Corporal did not understand them.
Some think they could have made faster advances in atomic research but the ideology that sent the best and brightest out of country ensured that would never happen. They were never even close.
However, the ability of Stalin to move manufacturing beyond the Urals and the fact of geography that shielded the US mainland from attack provided the biggest advantages to the Allies. The history of weapons development post-WWII is shaped in the main by attempts to overcome those advantages on both sides of the Cold War, thus elint and rocketry. The need for global espionage was even greater than during the war.
For bonus points, not killing the Corporal.
Read that article on the Basics of Human Stupidity that JTMc posted a link to. The conclusion regarding the fate of societies where stupid people are allowed positions of power and influence by helpless people is particularly relevant.
@len,
Kudos for your meta-analysis.
@Dan,
Reckon I get a lot of what you’re saying, but too much of it is drawn from the old narrative, which no longer holds. My concern is that Prof. Taplin not be counted among what you call the “aging…fossils”. And it was I, not the old Reds, who averred that the Soviets really did fox the U.S. and the U.K.
@KingRat,
I’d be happy to provide links. Let me ask you: Not to be abstruse or disingenuous, but are you wanting Internet links to the sources of information, or are you asking about my reference to links, or linkages, amongst the spooks? About which of these do you request further information?
I’m not going to get into a nerdy and irrelevant debate on the relative merits of military leadership in World War II.
I have read dozens, probably hundreds, of books on the war, from memoirs and diaries of the major players to scholarly histories. I am well versed with the history of the times.
Well-versed enough to know an old blowhard warhorse engaging in CYA by mongering excuses and insisting that things would have gone even worse for the Germans even sooner if not for his own strategic insight, in contrast to that lame-brained stiff-necked fool they put in command of the division next to him.
“One finds now former KGB officers and GRU bureaucrats who positively insist that their erstwhile country, the USSR, be recognized for the sophistication of the penetrations, and indeed the Soviets were simply better at “humint” than anyone opposing them.”
“The old narrative no longer holds.”
If that means that you think McCarthy has been vindicated, I can only disagree, strenuously, for as long as there is breath in my body.
It’s tougher than that, Dan. He’s been partially vindicated. That’s the thing. So please don’t turn purple, but do open yourself to a reading of how that very flawed, self-destructive boor was relentlessly discredited for years by those who taught us and had a stake in their teachings. To put it another way, if you remove McCarthy himself from the problem, you still have a problem on your hands. Internal security was not then, any more than it is now, to be taken lightly.
I’m sorry. I’d promised to shut up on this score, and here I am violating that promise. Just please don’t think of it as McCarthy vs. the U.S., as it really was more like McCarthy ET AL v. the failures of the U.S. (I emphasize the “et al”.) We should stop rejoicing in the fact that the man self-destructed in time for the young careers of e.g. Robert Kennedy to flourish–stop dancing on Joe’s grave lest we find ourselves whistling past the graveyard. See what I mean? I mean nothing more.
Dan, really,
After all, it was a long time ago. Why now the high anxiety over it? Is Glenn Beck really that big a threat? I think he’s just a jerk, and don’t lose a wink over his ilk. Jon’s probably diligent in watching these developments, but although I’m devoted to a study of American culture, for the life of me I can’t see the significance of the Beck phenomenon. We’ve so many better things to do, no? I mean, seriously: this could be a time for us to run with the ball.
P.S. On the chance that this strikes a chord with you, let me admit that I was raised largely by a grandfather who was an historian. From the crib onward, I was taught to object to perceived misreadings of the past. By “object”, I mean, “to engage”. I’m beginning to feel that our present conduct is only as good as the accuracy of our reading of the past. It’s iterative, I fear. Yunno?
I guess a long time ago is open to definition. It was people just a bit older than my parents’ generation who were being sacrificed on the altar of McCarthy’s alcoholic ego. His personal Persecution Machine was ramping up just as the full implications of Stalin’s purges and Hitler’s nightmare were becoming fully recognized.
Any man who holds up a list, and says it contains the names of enemies of the state, but refuses to make that list public, so that due process of law can determine who is a villain and who is a slanderer, is not to be trusted.
I’m not afraid of Glenn Beck, who is a cable TV pustule. Glenn Beck does not have the power of a branch of federal government behind him. If he could use a Congressional committee to haul people before his kangaroo court and demand that they tell all they know about the political opinions of their friends and colleagues, or else face denunciation and prison, then I’d be afraid of him.
Are you saying that it was worth it, to have McCarthy be able to do this, with no presentation of any evidence of wrongdoing of any kind? Would it worry you to have this kind of thing come back again?
As far as present conduct and accuracy of reading of the past, I’m not sure there’s any linkage. I think those in power do what they want to do, and cast around to find whatever evidence in history it suits them to use.
Last-word scorecared:
J. McCarthy, at least half-Right/good
J. Oppenheimer, at least half-Red/bad
History, the undiscipline, proven once again to be “bunk,” though not as bunky as Economics, the unscience.
Dan, I wouldn’t fall into the trap of personalizing anything to people like McCarthy and Beck-erhead. (What IS that sticking out of his mouth in the header, anyway?) These folks and so many others are just storm-crows, who ride the updrafts ahead of the roll clouds and downbursts. McNasty had tricky Dick and Roy Cohn and if you believe it, the Kennedys and so many millions of others, whose body heat and righteous spittle made up the wind beneath his personal wings. Beck-erhead and Limbaugh (no epithet needed, that sweaty boy-gropin’ oxy chewin’ hip-hip-hypocrite is his own caricature, kind of like Goebbels and Lord Haw-Haw) are riding the thermals of much the same kind of overheated reactionary mindlessness as the last set of baiters. But given the extraordinary improvement in the tools to motivate and manipulate crowds of people (see “political operative tricks of the trade”), maybe we could label this bunch “Master baiters?”
Just a thought. You listening, Carville and Matalin et al?
…except that Stalin’s purges and Hitler’s putsches occurred more than 20 years before McCarthy hit the scene. What’s the point in getting it wrong? Wishful thinking?
“getting it wrong?” Sez who?
Of course, a hackneyed view would say, “So what? Big deal.” to all of this. What’s new about people lying and cheating and killing and raping and looting and organizing to institutionalize all of the above under the banner of some Faith or Creed or Hysterical I,perative or other that makes what the Chief Pigs, the More-Equal Ones, do, All Right, or at least unexceptionable by all the other animals because they are individually weak and their little brains don’t let them keep track of what the rules originally said or can’t, given chaotic nature, hew to a single clear purpose to Make Things Better that can’t be warped into more decades of pain and destruction by a Savonarola or Robespiere or Lenin or Goebbels or Pol Pot or even “Bomber Joe (just kidding about the DFC, heh heh)” McCarthy and all the others.
On the other hand, revisionism in history is fun, because you know it gets the other guys’ juices just a’boilin and a’roilin’ as they try to get their shots in. And we all like to feel justified, like our lives had or have meaning, or for some of us in whom the veins of ego or nihilism or just plain ornery obsticracity run particularly deep, we just have to persist in insisting We Were There and We Are Right as a result.
Gotta remember, in America (and a lot of elsewheres) “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the ONLY thing.” Even if the winner can’t define “winning” winningly, and it’s not clear at all what the game is or where the boundaries of the playing field are.
What’s the point in discarding the rule of law and using a Congressional committee as a private police force and court?
What’s the point in establishing a climate of fear in which even a vague suspicion of having once entertained socialist ideas in one’s youth was tantamount to treason?
The fact that Hitler’s and Stalin’s purges occurred long before ours was exactly my point. I would have thought, I would have hoped, that we would have recoiled with horror from the spectacle of a kangaroo court that denounces deviation from the party line as crime, especially considering the previous 15 years.
Dan, I’m sorry I didn’t take your point about the U.S. following on the Stalinist and Nazi repressions. Are you sure you’re not humoring an unfortunate moral relativism, though?
What are you guys really on about with this? Don’t you see it as the Senate’s duty, the job of our elected representatives, to compel e.g. the State Department and DoD to report on possible breaches of national security by sophisticated foreign powers? Should that body not have held hearings on the domestic penetrations, in recent decades, of Israel? Should we bar legislators from following the yellow-cake road? Should Sen. Feinstein not have held the intelligence community to account for its laxity over against Chinese techno-warfare? And on and on.
This country is uniquely open and embracing, and therefore uniquely vulnerable. The RCMP turn out to have been, in the event, the security force of LAX, Y2K. I’ve said all along that I would have wished for a better steward than Jos. McCarthy, and consistently I’ve denounced the House activities of his era, but I wouldn’t want the stewardship itself to vanish.
I was asking most sincerely for internet links to the information.
Oh, yes, KingRat, I’ll get them to you. Sorry for the aphasia. I was involved in a road accident yesterday and so have been a bit out of sorts. My face is hamburger.
Ouch. What happened, Hugo? You’re alright, yes?
Not really all right, but nothing broken. Some Georgia crackers decided to roll down the window, holler at me and run me off the sidewalk as I was walking my dog. I got tangled in the dog’s lead and tumbled face-first down the hill on my street, off GA Hwy. 120. My right eye is occluded from swelling, but that just gives me bragging rights. Fortunately I took advanced First Aid years ago and still know about wound care. But thank you for your concern.
@KingRat,
On the VENONA cable intercepts, you could see the original CIA release from July 11, 1995, found on the NSA website under David Hatch, “VENONA: An Overview” (American Intelligence Journal, 1996). The intercepts are found also in book form. See “VENONA: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939-1957″, Rover Louis Benson and Michael Warner, eds. (National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency, 1996).
Summaries of the relevant Soviet archives are found, for example, in Klehr and Haynes, “The Secret World of American Communism” (Yale Press, 1995). I think you’ll also wish to consult the groundbreaking book entitled “The Haunted Wood”, by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev (Random House, 1999).
For released FBI files one goes to NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration, //www.archives.gov/historical-docs/, and searches for files on the person in question. What isn’t available online usually is accessible via a FOIA request. The FBI stuff almostly always comes redacted, but it does show up in your mailbox in due course and the older files, especially those released by virtue of the expiration of the 50-year embargo, often are revelatory despite the black ink.
If you want overviews of any of these I’m sure that the Wiki community have assembled good fora in their essays on these topics, authors and sources.
Hugo I give up. I believe in rule of law.
Period.
This closes the subject for me.