Arnold Schwarzenegger, speech to the Republican National Convention 2004-08-31:

My fellow immigrants, my fellow Americans, how do you know if you are a Republican? Well, I tell you how. If you believe that government should be accountable to the people, not the people to the government, then you are a Republican.

USA Today 2004-11-17: GOP changes ethics ruleto protect House leader DeLay:

WASHINGTON — House Republicans moved Wednesday to protect controversial Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s job in case he is indicted by a Texas grand jury on political corruption charges.

Republicans changed an 11-year-old rule requiring party leaders or committee chairmen to give up those posts if indicted on felony charges.

Washington Times Op-Ed 2004-11-19: Congressional prerogative:

Congress cannot allow its leadership to be placed in the hands of partisan prosecutors, or whosoever wishes to subvert its authority.

Rep. Tom DeLay (R–TX), quoted in USA Today 2004-11-17:

DeLay, 57, defended the change. We’re not going to let Democrats dictate to us who can be leaders, he said.

King Charles I of England, January 1649, in defense of Royal prerogative:

I would know by what power I am called hither … I would know by what authority, I mean lawful; there are many unlawful authorities in the world; thieves and robbers by the high-ways … Remember, I am your King, your lawful King, and what sins you bring upon your heads, and the judgement of God upon this land. Think well upon it, I say, think well upon it, before you go further from one sin to a greater … I have a trust committed to me by God, by old and lawful descent, I will not betray it, to answer a new unlawful authority; therefore resolve me that, and you shall hear more of me.

… I do not come here as submitting to the Court. … a King cannot be tried by any superior jurisdiction on earth …

Further reading

• GT 2004/09/04: In Their Own Words

I’ve mentioned a few times here already how brilliant and important I find Andrea Dworkin‘s work (in That Feminist Boy Thing (GT 2004/09/06) and Andrea Dworkin, Feminist Icon (GT 2001/07/03)); so I was glad to catch (through Feminist Blogs, no less!) feministe’s post today on Andrea and her critics. She quotes at length from an interview of Dworkin by Michael Moorcock, where Dworkin, inter alia, sets the record straight on the all intercourse is rape slander (she doesn’t believe that and has never argued for it). There’s more too; read the whole thing and follow the links.

Ms. Lauren is, unfortunately, right when she describes Dworkin as one of the most vilified and misquoted women in recent history. It’s worth taking the time to look at what she has actually had to say. So here’s your Dworkin for the day; it comes from an essay that’s been perhaps as important to me as anything else ever written: I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape. It’s Dworkin at her best–a damning indictment and a call to arms, reflections on men and feminist activism that have literally changed my life, and the best argument for radical, unapologetic feminism that there is: a confrontation with the simple, heartbreaking, terrifyingly ordinary facts.

And if there would be a plea or a question or a human address in that scream, it would be this: why are you so slow? Why are you so slow to understand the simplest things; not the complicated ideological things. You understand those. The simple things. The cliches. Simply that women are human to precisely the degree and quality that you are.

And also: that we do not have time. We women. We don’t have forever. Some of us don’t have another week or another day to take time for you to discuss whatever it is that will enable you to go out into those streets and do something. We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape for us. We use statistics not to try to quantify the injuries, but to convince the world that those injuries even exist. Those statistics are not abstractions. It is easy to say, Ah, the statistics, somebody writes them up one way and somebody writes them up another way. That’s true. But I hear about the rapes one by one by one by one by one, which is also how they happen. Those statistics are not abstract to me. Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.

And it is happening for a simple reason. There is nothing complex and difficult about the reason. Men are doing it, because of the kind of power that men have over women. That power is real, concrete, exercised from one body to another body, exercised by someone who feels he has a right to exercise it, exercised in public and exercised in private. It is the sum and substance of women’s oppression.

It is not done 5000 miles away or 3000 miles away. It is done here and it is done now and it is done by the people in this room as well as by other contemporaries: our friends, our neighbors, people that we know. Women don’t have to go to school to learn about power. We just have to be women, walking down the street or trying to get the housework done after having given one’s body in marriage and then having no rights over it.

The power exercised by men day to day in life is power that is institutionalized. It is protected by law. It is protected by religion and religious practice. It is protected by universities, which are strongholds of male supremacy. It is protected by a police force. It is protected by those whom Shelley called the unacknowledged legislators of the world: the poets, the artists. Against that power, we have silence.

On male supremacy and militarism:

I have heard in the last several years a great deal about the suffering of men over sexism. Of course, I have heard a great deal about the suffering of men all my life. Needless to say, I have read Hamlet. I have read King Lear. I am an educated woman. I know that men suffer. This is a new wrinkle. Implicit in the idea that this is a different kind of suffering is the claim, I think, that in part you are actually suffering because of something that you know happens to someone else. That would indeed be new.

But mostly your guilt, your suffering, reduces to: gee, we really feel so bad. Everything makes men feel so bad: what you do, what you don’t do, what you want to do, what you don’t want to want to do but are going to do anyway. I think most of your distress is: gee, we really feel so bad. And I’m sorry that you feel so bad–so uselessly and stupidly bad–because there is a way in which this really is your tragedy. And I don’t mean because you can’t cry. And I don’t mean because there is no real intimacy in your lives. And I don’t mean because the armor that you have to live with as men is stultifying: and I don’t doubt that it is. But I don’t mean any of that.

I mean that there is a relationship between the way that women are raped and your socialization to rape and the war machine that grinds you up and spits you out: the war machine that you go through just like that woman went through Larry Flynt’s meat grinder on the cover of Hustler. You damn well better believe that you’re involved in this tragedy and that it’s your tragedy too. Because you’re turned into little soldier boys from the day that you are born and everything that you learn about how to avoid the humanity of women becomes part of the militarism of the country in which you live and the world in which you live. It is also part of the economy that you frequently claim to protest.

And the problem is that you think it’s out there: and it’s not out there. It’s in you. The pimps and the warmongers speak for you. Rape and war are not so different. And what the pimps and the warmongers do is that they make you so proud of being men who can get it up and give it hard. And they take that acculturated sexuality and they put you in little uniforms and they send you out to kill and to die.

And, finally, on equality and bullshit excuses:

I want to talk to you about equality, what equality is and what it means. It isn’t just an idea. It’s not some insipid word that ends up being bullshit. It doesn’t have anything at all to do with all those statements like: Oh, that happens to men too. I name an abuse and I hear: Oh, it happens to men too. That is not the equality we are struggling for. We could change our strategy and say: well, okay, we want equality; we’ll stick something up the ass of a man every three minutes.

You’ve never heard that from the feminist movement, because for us equality has real dignity and importance–it’s not some dumb word that can be twisted and made to look stupid as if it had no real meaning.

You really ought to read the whole thing.

It’s all coming down to the last few days before The Election now; and in all the (understandable! sympathetic! important!) rush and clamor it’s important to remember that we live in a wide, old world and that there has been a lot more before this November and there will be a lot more after every last one of these men and their works on the earth has crumbled into dust and ashes. So it’s hard to say just how glad I read a beautiful, moving article by Alina Stefanescu on living in history–on history, and living memory, and making our way in the midst of horror and hope.

History inspires, as it legitimizes and shames. The Bush administration has attempted to legitimize the Afghan and Iraqi transition to a democracy by involving historical institutions assumed to resonate with the local public. The extent of Russian and Chinese liberalization is constantly conveyed as a grappling with history– scholars resort to descriptions of strong-man rule and reverence for authory as stumbling-blocks in the path to free societies. Dale Richmond even goes so far as to define “South Eastern European values” entirely with reference to historical political institutions in the area.

While government-oriented institutional theories prove effective in short-term comparisons, their comparisons are often limited to explaining the political behavior of elites. Truly effective institutional paradigms would encompass social and non-governmental institutions, for it is these institutions which act as incubators of social change, creating classrooms of oral history and legendry, encouraging the laboratories of revolution. You don’t have to be a radical deconstructionist to acknowledge that the tale told by history textbooks is often a politically-motivated one, which sustains and reinforces current political arrangements. And you don’t have to worship Howard Zinn to acknowledge that the most crucial history for transition states is “the people’s history”– the one that legitimates and supports regime change.

Clausen’s includes a moving quote from one of my favorite authors, William Faulker. In “The Jail” (1951), Faulkner channeled the memory of a Alabama Civil war soldier’s widow to unveil the vividness and poignancy of historial memory:

“so vast, so limitless in capacity is man’s imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream…there is the clear, undistanced voice as though out of the delicate antenna-skeins of radio, futher than the empress’s throne, than the splendid instantiation, even than matriarch’s peacful rocking chair, across the vast instantaneous intervention, from the long long time ago: Listen, stranger, this was myself: this was I.”

Who am I? Who were “we”? Must the “we” be delegitimized to make room for the repentant “I”? Every time I return to Romania, I silently observe the reckonings of individuals seeking to reconcile their present conceptions of morality with their past communist complicity (or lack). The older generation brushes off such difficult reflection with statements like, “It was better then..” or “Who cares? Politicians are all the same– I just did what I had to do to put food on the table”.

How we justify past horrors is the cornerstone of future political arrangements. How governments obscure past and present horrors can be exhumed through an analysis of propaganda. The stories we tell to hold our worldviews and self-images together cannot be discounted, especially when the stories don’t quite match the official explanation.

You should read it all. I’ve talked a lot, especially over the past year or so, about history and its importance, but I couldn’t hope to say why I do it better than Alina already has. All I can add is how much her post reminded me of another remarkable talk about history, from Utah Phillips, recorded on Fellow Workers (one of his collaborative albums with Ani DiFranco). The album–you really ought to get a copy of it, now, if you don’t already have it–is a passionate, moving, and often very funny collection of stories and songs from the anarchist workers’ movement of the early 20th century. And along the way, Utah Phillips muses on history, memory, and coming to terms. I couldn’t hope to duplicate in print that achingly earnest passion or that long, steady rumble of his voice. But here it is; listen to it some day, as soon as you have the chance:

The old songs, these old stories… why tell them? What do they mean?

When I went to high school–that’s about as far as I got–reading my U.S. history textbook, well I got the history of the ruling class; I got the history of the generals and the industrialists and the Presidents who didn’t get caught. How about you?

I got the history of the people who owned the wealth of the country, but none of the history of the people who created it… you know? So when I went out to get my first job, I went out armed with someone else’s class background. They never gave me any tools to understand, or to begin to control the condition of my labor.

And that was deliberate, wasn’t it? Huh? They didn’t want me to know this. That’s why this stuff isn’t taught in the history books. We’re not supposed to know it, to understand that. No. If I wanted the true history of where I came from, as a member of the working class, I had to go to my elders. Many of them, their best working years before pensions or Social Security, gave their whole lives to the mines, to the wheat harvests, to the logging camps, to the railroad. Got nothing for it–just fetched up on the skids, living on short money, mostly drunk all the time. But they lived those extraordinary lives that can never be lived again. And in the living of them, they gave me a history that is more profound, more beautiful, more powerful, more passionate, and ultimately more useful, than the best damn history book I ever read.

As I have said so often before, the long memory is the most radical idea in America….

–Utah Phillips, The Long Memory, Fellow Workers (with Ani DiFranco)

Some more from Tolkien’s letters, to go along with his comments on the horrors of war:

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically conceived, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to unconstitutional Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance at recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to King George’s council, Winston and his gang, it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.

–letter to his son Christopher Tolkien, 29 November 1943. Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #52

I suppose that Hans-Hermann Hoppe would like the kind words for unrestrained Monarchy. Otherwise, though, a lovely statement.

(The link is courtesy of Aeon Skoble on Liberty and Power, who got it from Fark.)

Among the wits who brought you such straight-to-DVD cinematic masterpieces as FahrenHYPE 9/11 (which is advertised as a rationalization for your preconceived conclusions about Michael Moore) and Celsius 41.11, this, apparently, is the sort of thing that passes for sophisticated satire:

Fellowship 9/11

. . .

Michael Moore’s searing examination of the Aragorn administration’s actions in the wake of the tragic events at Helms Deep. With his characteristic humor and dogged commitment to uncovering — or if necessary fabricating — the facts, Moore considers the reign of the son of Arathorn and where it has led us. He looks at how — and why — Aragorn and his inner circle avoided pursuing the Saruman connection to Helms Deep, despite the fact that 9 out of every 10 Orcs that attacked the castle were actually Uruk-hai who were spawned in and financed by Isengard.

… and the film goes on like that.

Fighting the War on Evil

Now, I don’t have any problem with a good send-up of Michael Moore; but as satire, this is as artless as a MAD Magazine comic, and ends up making warhawks look an awful lot sillier than Michael Moore.

If George Bush were personally going into battle to lead the fight against a massive assault already launched against all the strongholds of the civilized world, by monstrous armies of vile, inhuman goblins, directed by undead great lords of men, and bent to the unholy will of a supernatural Dark Lord who desires nothing less than the complete desolation and domination of the whole Earth, then I don’t doubt that Michael Moore would not have had quite the same objections to Mr. Bush or to his policies.

Misunderstandings of Tolkien’s work abound.

Do warhawks actually think of the war against Iraq like this? As much you might be inclined to say, Come off it, it’s just a stupid joke, the fact is that much of their rhetoric outside of this silly little film seems to indicate that they honest-to-God do. And if they do, it would be very funny–except for all the people who have died because of such childish conceptions of the world.

J.R.R. Tolkien, for his part, put it this way:

The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-d?@c3;bb;r would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict, both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves.

. . .

An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous. It is also false, though naturally attractive, when the lives of an author and critic have overlapped, to suppose that the movements of thought or the events of times common to both were necessarily the most powerful influences. One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.

–Foreword to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings

And this way:

Life in camp seems not to have changed at all, and what makes it so exasperating is the fact that all its worse features are unnecessary, and due to human stupidity which (as planners refuse to see) is always magnified indefinitely by organization. . . . However it is, humans being what they are, quite inevitable, and the only cure (short of universal Conversion), is not to have wars — nor planning, nor organization, nor regimentation.

–from a letter to Christopher Tolkien, 6 May 1944, Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #66