I was out walking, sweaty and with hair plastered/to my face/when I saw Ernesto Cardenal approaching/from the opposite direction/and by way of greeting I said:/Father, in the Kingdom of Heaven/that is communism,/is there a place for homosexuals?/Yes, he said./And for impenitent masturbators?/For sex slaves?/For sex fools?/For sadomasochists, for whores, for those obsessed/with enemas,/for those who can’t take it anymore, those who really truly/can’t take it anymore?/And Cardenal said yes. –Bolaño
Ethnobiography: The Museum of Eternal Ephemera
In Berlin, I was once present at a gathering of Slavs. A burly guy who looked a little like Fassbinder came up to me and said, in a thick Russian accent, as if his syntax were reaching me through a primeval silence of forests and snowy steppes—the silence of communist poets who couldn’t take it anymore (Mayakovsky’s chronic silence, Crevel’s bisexual-Stalinist silence, Roque Dalton’s stoically screaming, unprosecuted silence, Paul Robeson’s lysergic silence after the CIA poisoned and electroshocked him, etc.)—, that he wanted to show me something. Ok, I said. He led me outside to a small balcony. I looked down into the courtyard below and then looked up at him. This is the end, I thought, convinced that my death would be like a montage from an Eisenstein film: stylized class gestures, over-rehearsed class rictuses, a Tsarist villain, his hapless victim. He must have sensed my fear because he smiled at me. Then his smile changed and he started tugging at his mustache, as if he were suffering from an incurable case of neuralgia or of psychopathy. Do you know who I am?, he asked me. No, I said. He lowered his eyes suggestively towards his mustache. I’m Nicholas II, he said. And in fact he did, at that moment, bear an uncanny resemblance to the last Tsar. I told him so, and he responded with one of those enigmatic, contemptuous half-smiles that are common among metaphysically corrupt Faustian-types, bourgeois Satanists, semi-professional mercenaries, semi-professional rapists, and other exhibitionists. Then he started rearranging his mustache and tugging violently at his goatee. I thought of three things while he was doing this: the guy’s insane, what the fuck am I doing out here, cruising with death?, and it takes him so long to move from one persona to another not because of any technical-aesthetic difficulties he’s having with his facial hair, but because for him this is a fucking séance. Well, and who am I now?, he asked. I don’t know I said, although I had an idea. Guess, he commanded. Felix Dzerzhinsky, I said. Alias Bloody Felix, founder of the Soviet secret police, he said, and his eyes lit up and he giggled like one of Bulgakov’s effeminate, middle-management devils, or like one of Gogol’s hysterics. Very good!, he shrieked, very good! One more?, he asked. Or am I frightening you? I wanted to say, No, you’re boring me. But I bit my lip and nodded in a way that he interpreted as permission to go on. This time he covered his beard with his left hand, and instead of forming his mustache into a calligraphic lowercase “w,” he let it sink morosely into an upside down “u.” In the middle of his latest pulled trick, a girl came out and put her arm around him. Greetings, comrade Gorky, she said. And to me, Is he bothering you with his Soviet facial hair routine? And then: he looks like Trotsky, she said, pointing at me but turning to the mustache artist, who was presumably her boyfriend. He let out a belching laugh and insisted that she take a picture of the two of us. I’ll do my Nicholas II, and you, Trotsky, why you’re such a spitting image of Lev Davidovich that you don’t have to do anything but smile, or, better yet, scowl. The girl took the picture. Are you a Trotskyite?, she asked me, seriously. No, I said. Well, then what are you?, she said. Wait, don’t tell me, I can tell by looking at you that you’re a Judeo-Bolshevik. A pause. Me, personally, I’m a Bolshevik, too, but a National Bolshevik (perhaps you’ve heard of Eduard Limonov, he’s like our David Lynch but he puts his money where his faggot mouth is). My boyfriend, he’s apolitical, isn’t that right? The guy shrugged. But he has reactionary tendencies, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Another girl, a blonde, came out onto the balcony. They spoke in Russian for awhile and then the second girl translated for me. I’m Polish and a left-wing monarchist, she said. Personally, I think the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising were fifth columnist Bolshevik assholes, and they deserved what they got. Sometimes they talk shit about me for being Polish, but deep down we’re all pan-Slavists. The guy said something truculent about pan-Slavism in Russian, and then the girl started singing various ballads, folksongs, and Soviet-era anthems. This one’s from Uzbekistan, she’d say, and then sing for a minute. This one’s from the Caucasus region, this one’s from Estonia, etc. She said she was the lead singer in a Bulgarian reggae band that was getting pretty big in Berlin, in a niche way.
Several years later, or earlier, I don’t remember, a friend of mine who was a militant socialist had just finished his thesis defense and had gotten fucked up in celebration. He could barely keep his eyes open, I remember, but for the next three hours (interrupted by bong hits and bouts of uneasy sleep), he ranted, for a reason I can’t remember, about his passionate hatred of the Slavic race (racially, he was a Litvak Jew, his extended family a pile of bones in an Auschwitz exhibit and Celanian smoke). Not only did they fuck up communism for the world, but that crazy fascist Milošević destroyed the social-democratic left, gave them the ideal pretext to fall into the arms of NATO. Later, when he was sober, I asked him about his schizoid break, and he said, simply, I don’t know where that came from, honestly, but I stand by it. Fuck the Slavs.
As an aside, I’ve been told many times that I look like Trotsky. I don’t, or at least no more than any existentially undefeated young-ish black man looks like Huey Newton.
The Museum of Archie Bunker/Anders Breivik’s Memory (the Museum of the Anti-Establishment)
The institution of neoliberal memory is not based, as we’ve sentimentally come to believe, on amnesia, on end-of-history post-memory consumerism, markets, techno-dehumanization and human rights. It’s based, rather, on an overcharging of memory’s credit card, a nightmarish museum of memory itself, like the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, which means amnesiac tolerance for Israel importing death-squad military technology and personnel to Guatemala and, in fact, to nearly every country south of the border, but the active memory of Mexican homophobia. It means the newest chapter of the Museum of Tolerance being built over a Muslim burial ground in Palestinian Jerusalem.
Neoliberal memory is also based on the classic European modernist and postmodernist techniques/affects of melancholia, intertextuality, hybrid, pastiche, vulgarity, sentimentality, Eliotic traditionalism, and scatiological/Joycean desecration. Donald Trump: promising not the return to a Golden Age which could be the subject of passionate libidinal aspirations, but the re-creation of the Sunset Boulevard 1950s, of a hybrid-plundered Nazi-Soviet Space Age: a fake age of cultural white-Americanism plagiarized from its own indigenous roots, on the one hand, and from its French high-culture reflection, on the other: the autistic suburbanite Archie Bunker who remembers what it was like to be a good, slightly desexualized oppressor and a false monarch, missing not his own culture or his own kingdom, but his insecure illusion of being an average man with anal-sadistic tendencies. We used to win, by cheating, and now we win, by cheating, but it doesn’t feel the same.
The return of the 1950s, but with more racist abreactions, more Mexican deportations (like Eisenhower).
For instance, let’s talk about the so-called North American Left.
Bernie Sanders (another Eisenhower disciple) doesn’t remember when he betrayed his own Vermont libertarian-socialist anti-war base, when he called the cops on them when they protested his decision to bomb Belgrade into a hybrid of Baghdad and Flint, Michigan, he doesn’t remember the North American radical tradition, but he does remember that Chavez is “a dead communist dictator” and he does remember Denmark. He also remembers when we used to win, like Anders Breivik remembers Norway. For Sanders, the Sandinistas (not the Sandernistas who have conveniently replaced them) are the memory of youthful indiscretion.
Sanders is hated by the bourgeois remnants of the white sixties New Left, not, as some have claimed, because he prods their guilty conscience (though he does do that), but because deep down they think they could have scammed it better. (To paraphrase Coates, I say this as a Sanders voter, though I’m trying to commit so-called voter fraud to vote for him, because the U.S. persists in voter suppression, they make it almost impossible to vote abroad outside of the corporate confines of London or the fascist confines of the military, though, to tell the truth, Sanders is getting a disproportionate number of votes from those locales).
According to Nate Silver and also, in a very different way, according to Michelle Alexander, black America “remembers” the Clintons. More than the slanders about Sanders’ non-existent socialism or his almost non-existent chauvinism, the main criticism of Sanders is that he doesn’t figure in the hologram of technic memory. Who is this spit-filled, hoary-headed, hippie-Jew-commie dinosaur?
It’s an impertinent sticking out of a slimy, eocene tongue from the forgotten cunt of time.
Of course our New Republic-an liberal Jews keep telling us that Sanders isn’t really Jewish, because he says he’s the son of Polish immigrants once in awhile, and doesn’t say that he’s Jewish at least once every week, as we should expect of a kike wearing a red-yellow badge (a yellowish-red badge, I might add).
The Museum of Anti-Communism and Other Fetishes
Outside of Budapest, one can easily get to, and is readily encouraged by the neo-fascist tourism industry to get to, Memento Park, an open-air pavilion where all the old statues from Hungary’s Communist period (its human period, the period in which the surviving post-war progressive order tried but ultimately failed to restore Hungarian culture after its long period of reactionary dejudaization and extermination: in spite of the best efforts of Wes Anderson and Madeleine Albright to re-create Judeo-kitsch Mitteleuropa as an infantile-quietist ideology for bored millennials, as if the Jewish bourgeoisie could be redeemed as the fun part, the foreplay, the proto-nationalist (with the Jews booted to Palestine) part of Central European fascism) are housed in a kind of mock-mausoleum: you’re there to solemnly sneer at so-called totalitarianism and also, ironically, to buy shit: rap albums sampling Lenin’s speeches and CDs of old communist anthems, South Park t-shirts reading “I can’t believe you killed Lenin, you bastards!”
The pièce de résistance is a giant replica of Stalin’s boots, supposedly torn down in 1956.
The question is, who is the foot-fetishist here, the ones who froze Stalin’s boot as an object of castrated mockery and of “authentic Hungarian” hatred, or the castrated foot itself, cast off like Kafka’s Odradek, that harmless dick who harms no one and who, as Almodóvar understood, can only at this point be recuperated as a queer totem of mockery and desire?
And whose boot is the oppressor here? Stalin’s dismembered masculine boot, or the sensibly platformed feminine shoe of the blonde neo-fascist Hungarian journalist who tripped a Syrian refugee holding his small child—out of malice, out of an almost understandable human reflex to torture and humiliate the weak—and who is now suing both Facebook and the refugee himself for “stirring hatred”? Her life is ruined, she tells RT, and she may in fact be forced to move to Russia.
The park’s architect said that the park is about dictatorship, but also, about democracy, to the extent that “only democracy is able to give the opportunity to think freely about dictatorship.” Which is to say, only “democratic” society is able to give us the opportunity to contemplate, from the dead, static graveyard of absolute memory (that graveyard washed constantly with fresh blood), the uprooted “totalitarian” products of the past. It’s true that if you define the past as the congregation of trauma and hope, then the present is a kind of mutually willed democratic submission to torture, to revenge (revenge against the last vestiges of Dionysian energy). Which is to say the present is memory or museum.
And the future? An annihilating and incessant prediction, from the cancerous bowels of the demiurge of a false world (a Karl Rovian world that constantly falsifies itself, in order to prove that truth is a utopian hypothesis, a market loser). In order to prove that everything’s going to be alright. Don’t trust your lying eyes, your lying reduced life expectancies, your lying poisoned children, your lying revulsion that everything is shit, is a concentration camp. Trust the consistently false futures market which is another name for profit, for disorientation (how could this have happened?).
One doesn’t even need to have a residual loyalty to modernist, or cubist, or socialist-realist art, a desire to see the heritage of the twentieth century preserved, or a residual understanding that, as Vallejo said, beware of the hammer without the sickle and vice versa (the center of the park is a garden of red flowers in the shape of a hammer and sickle), or some basic fealty to the workers who fought off Nazism or to the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, to despise the strange sadomasochistic phenomenon of Memento Park. Nor does one need to have any knowledge of the neo-fascist Hungarian regime that has basically given up its past as the “democratic opposition”: though we should be prepared for Samantha Power-types to spread a coup there, decrying homophobia (probably not anti-Semitism, because anti-Semitism is a crucial strategy of U.S. foreign policy) now that Orban is moving towards Russia.
One can immediately sense that this art was banished to its museum because, were it to remain on the streets, it would remind us of a time when art had some kind of synesthetic interaction with the public, when art reminded (re-minding, in this case, the guilt of Hungary’s collaboration and the minority of its resistance, re-minding a public whose government is devoted to the decerebration of its own culture, the don’t-mind appropriation of its own culture).
Love Takes Ironic Photographs to Preserve Its Own Purity
R took a picture of me standing next to Lenin, gazing at the camera with boundless—and only superficially ironic—melancholy. She said that if she were to put it in an exhibit, she’d title it something like A Trotsky Lookalike Before a Statue of Lenin, or just Trotsky and Lenin, or maybe something more abstract, such as Tempus Breve or The Eternal Return or Go Fuck Yourselves, Proletarians, Or We’ll Do It For You!
Then she asked me if I’d ever read The Chronicles of Narnia. When I was a kid, I said, skeptically. Do you remember when the kids go to the castle of the White Witch and they find all those statues of Narnians who it turns out aren’t statues at all but captured or captivated Narnians, political prisoners or victims of the petrifaction of false consciousness? And at the end, Aslan, the lion, who for that reactionary shit C.S. Lewis was the lion of Christ but who in the reality is the lion of the Proletariat, or the Lion of History (History which is nothing but a frozen desire for flight, for ethnogenesis), frees the prisoners and leads them into the final eschatological battle?
And then I smiled, almost against my will, as if I were imagining Stalin’s S&M leather boot stomping on the heads and the power-fully engorged testicles of all those Central and Eastern European fascists eulogized by Timothy Snyder.
And then, to be honest, I thought about love: first love and also the love we suddenly find later in life. I’m not talking about the Beckettian love in the concentration camps, the only sexual frisson that Snyder believes Jews should have, but about the love we found in the Partisan quilombos outside the concentration camps where, starving and hypothermiacal, we took up arms against Polish and Ukrainian thugs (by we I mean the Jews who refused to die, and everyone who could plausibly be called a Jew).
I thought about love and the way love erupts and knows its own gratuitous origin, knows its own non-objectivity.
And I thought about sex, and not only abstractly, but about an orgy, a socialist-realist and a modernist orgy, an orgy for sinewy, bronzed, lapidary workers and for pretty Jewish girls with jammed-up rifles strapped over their shoulders, in Spain and Latin America and in the menstrually orgasmic, un-halachic European Blood Lands, the girls who fucked in the freezing starving shivering cold in order to survive, with hard clits pressed up against hard dicks, with a few hard guns they’d managed to steal from the pieces of shit in the Polish Home Army who wanted to eliminate them.
And I went away from Memento Park, without buying anything and without buying into anything, with a huge, violent erection.
A communist erection, like a stigmata, of suppurating, soporific stone. An erection that one day should be set aside Rasputin’s foot-long cock in a jar of formaldehyde in an erotica museum in Saint Petersburg: Rasputin whose cock preached against the conventional wisdom that siding with the British and French Empires would bring unlimited, millennial happiness to Tsarist Russia, sublimating domestic opposition in a patriotic war, but fortunately, only the Tsarina understood, in her orgies-unto-death.
I’ve gotten in the habit of these communist-kitsch or communist-melancholic photographic tours, and it’s a habit—like all of my habits—for which I feel no shame, or if I do feel shame, it’s a dead, a murdered shame, a monument to the ancien régime of shame.
In Rosario—Argentina’s Sodom, or Argentina’s Naples, or Argentina’s Juarez, the kind of place the Pope might go to utter some pious platitudes about crime and savage capitalism, before meeting with some dignitary, some state killer, or some pedophile-cartelist—I spent my single day in the city—with a horrific case of conjunctivitis, the new kind that resembles ebola more than conjunctivitis—traipsing from Che site to Che site. There’s a photo of me in front of the house where he was born, where his elite parents took him to hide the fact of his out-of-wedlock conception. There’s a photo of me in a park populated by small groups of drug dealers and soccer players, pibes, kids, in front of a large statue of Che, drinking a coke and smoking a cigarette (no rum, no cigar, a kind of joyless carcinogenic homage to a Cuban paradisiacal pleasure). There’s even a photo of me in a more gentrified park where the first photograph of baby Che was taken, and, in spite of the marketing mystifications of Don DeLillo—who claims in White Noise, more or less, that photographs are taken by dupes who still believe in the aura of place, when in (DeLillian) fact the only remaining aura is neither of place nor of work (including or especially the literary work), but of the aura-cidal author-capitalist—, the reverent substitution or splicing of a sick, world-weary, Jewish-bourgeois gringo communist, physically and metaphysically orphaned, was in fact an auratic event.
Memory is Like, Fucking Capitalist
Over and over again, sneering Wall Street Journal scribblers and right-thinking leftists inform us that the fact that Che merchandising is the most profitable iconographic merchandising in the world (though I think they now include Obama, too) proves some kind of ironic joke of the capitalist demiurge and an allegorical tool to understand the inevitable triumph of capitalism—and capitalist patriarchy—within the psyche of the teeming masses.
It’s a cliché, more pernicious than the “Berniebro.”
I haven’t seen trust-fund kids wearing Che t-shirts in fifteen years, but I have seen obese, working-class family men—wife and kids in tow—at Argentine supermarkets wearing them, and I’ve seen them at every protest against the increasingly fascistic Macri government, and I’ve even seen them plastered on the wall of the neighborhood assemblies that were bought-and-paid-for by the kirchneristas, whose hybrid iconography includes not only Che but the virulently anti-communist Pope Francis and Juan Peron, and the Kirchners themselves, those opportunists who dicked around with the left.
But the use of Che’s image is no more discreditable or disgusting than the continuing “use” of Nelson Mandela’s image, despite the unpardonable criminality and treason of the ANC in the past decades.
Perhaps a ruthlessly iconoclastic deep left, a people emerging from the catastrophic debris of history, will one day throw Che and Mandela in the pyre (hopefully sooner they’ll throw Obama).
But the fact is that the faces of Che, Mandela, and Obama are merchandisable because, beneath the phenomenological-historical hologram of their features, one senses the hypostasis of a revolutionary hope.
No one has ever accused Reagan, or Hitler, or Anders Breivik, of having their historical personalities and images coopted by the kids who live in the gigantic, striated favela or concentration camp to which this world has been forcibly converted. They don’t wear/buy those images because those images frankly inspire something much worse than disgust. They don’t inspire religious dread, either. They inspire, I suppose, either a cold shrug, an aversion as in an aversion to a dead rat, or a Bakhitnian hatred, a scatiological frenzy.
Soros-Eichmann City Planning: Or, How to Ethnically Cleanse Budapest of its Jewish Working Class and Replace It With Beer-Swilling, Ruin-Tourist, International Hipsters
It’s a well-established fact, even among Jews, actually especially among Jews (who, to their credit, went as far as assassinating guilty parties back in the 1950s, though admittedly in a kind of proto-Likudnik putsch), that the Jewish-Zionist ruling class in Budapest, which included the Soros family, not only collaborated with the German occupiers but struck a deal with Eichmann that organized exit routes for privileged Jews at the very time that the vast majority were being transported to Auschwitz, while essentially lying to their workers and so-called co-ethnics (etymologically, their co-animals or their co-heathens), assuring them of their safety and of the fact that no Popular Front insurrection was necessary.
Now—in the factories vacated for different destinations by the owners and the workers (the owners: a train to comfy positions in the Ashkenazi elite of Israel by way of Switzerland, the workers: a train to Auschwitz, a Celanian train not only to their own deaths but to the death of the so-called European Culture we keep hearing needs to be saved, at all costs, especially fascist costs)—the Hungarian creative class (the kids of its fascist intelligentsia, with Lollapalooza tickets) and international hipsters, looking for a cross between “a chill Berlin squat with a smallish Munich beer hall,” congregate at what are unironically called, or perhaps hyper-ironically called, “ruin pubs.” These pubs “offer live music or DJs on the weekends, as well as film nights and art exhibitions. Some even have light food and hostel accommodation. They’re the perfect spot to unwind on a warm summer night after a busy day of sightseeing.”
A “more sanitized and sophisticated version of the ruin bar experience can be had at Mazel Tov,” naturally. Here “gritty furnishings and vibrant art….are ditched,” and supposedly the “Jewish heritage is honored” by eating indigenous Palestinian food and listening to indigenous Palestinian music, with a genocidal Zionist renaming/sampling.
In the cornucopian museum of genocidal memory, as in a dystopic Arcimboldo painting, one eats an assemblage of the dead or dying culture of a foreign indigenous people, but, in a willed bourgeois pareidolia (which is currently misnamed “appropriation”), one believes one is eating the living culture of another dead indigenous people: the “tragically lost” waste products supposedly “redemptively reborn” in the new avatar, which is nothing but the metabolic energy absorbed from the putrefying carcasses of its victims, in all places, in whatever place.
In the U.S., you can find white hipsters meeting for Tinder dates on the rooftop bar of what used to be the best vocational school in Philadelphia, a school that gave the non-white and/or non-privileged majority a chance to enter the spheres of skilled labor (which is better than the spurious sphere of “the middle class”).
But the fantasy of the white hipster—who has gone so far over into fascism that he no longer recognizes himself as a metabolic being, a center of production, but as a purely sublime, though constantly degraded, eidolon—, doesn’t even depend anymore on the original hipster recycling or parasitism of indigenous cultures.
The white hipster is a parthenogenesis of Capital, the one who knows along with Thomas Friedman, the well-educated but hygienically decent pater familias, where babies/employment come from.
At the very best, the knowledge that their surroundings had once been an important source of public education is broached as foreplay, either as guilt or as abreactive sadism.
The Museum of Terror
Probably Budapest’s biggest tourist attraction is its House of Terror, ostensibly dedicated to “the victims of both the Nazi and the Communist terror,” though one should (not overly
paranoiacally) read “dedicated to ‘the victims of both the German and the Jewish terror.’”
To echo Dostoevsky, if forced to choose between the German and the Jewish terror, between truth and Christ, the cultural apparatchiks of Fidesz choose the Nazi Christ.
A steel blade juts out from the building: decorated with the hammer and sickle plus the Iron Cross.
Whose actual equation is Hammer&Sickle + Iron Cross = 0, the apotheosized cipher of the kitschified pastoral anti-history championed by the New European Right, the authentic identity of sublime nothingness only made possible by the early-to-the-party Hegelian antithesis.
The positive integer (fascism), which arrived too soon to defeat its Jewish cosmopolitan thesis (communism, liberalism), except by metaphor, by apology, by clever doublespeak, by Pierre Menardism, by the violent yoking of juxtaposition: as if the talismanic power of fascist insignia today is to be able to infect, with its obvious malignity, whatever stands next to it, and to cure itself by that one-way infection, in the same way we’re told that certain people believe HIV can be cured by passing it along.
Every (neo-)fascist combines a pastoral view with a sadomasochistic view, a hypocritical wistfulness for folk traditions with a hypermodernist/(Italian) Futurist worship of machinery and death.
The House of Terror is no different, with its Lynchian fascination with decontextualized, glossy/sexy cars, its blaring death metal and Hitlerian speeches, its reconstructed torture chambers, its nooses and neon crosses, its glamorizing of the raw spectacle of psycho-physical suffering and humiliation and its hygienic insistence that humiliation needs to be avenged by a post-totalitarian, democratic order.
I think one room, maybe one and a half, is devoted to the Nazi period (with no mention of the fact that the Nazis only invaded when their ally Horthy’s incompetent clerical-fascist regime seemed in jeopardy) and the rest is about Communism.
The mass extermination of Hungary’s Jews, naturally, is passed over mostly as a regrettable detail, ideologically constructed as a weapon against Hungary. Hungarian “goulash socialism,” which among its many accomplishments was the thorough de-Nazification of the country and the destruction of its utterly worthless feudal-bourgeois elite, is depicted as if it were the truly terroristic, Nazi system.
What I remember most of all from the museum is being bombarded, in every room, with paperwork. I probably left with 150 sheets of shoddily printed polemics, apologetics for the Hungarian Catholic Church, for Horthy, casuistry about the Holocaust, tendentious propaganda, the lost or rejected nationalist dissertations of ultimogenituric closeted homosexuals who almost certainly ended up in the Ministry of Culture or in secondary education or wistfully seeking out Roma child prostitutes in the middle of a terrifying night they couldn’t possibly understand:
Because how could they, in the labyrinth of their guilty and obscure desire, their lost or rejected desire, possibly understand?
The Nothingnew World
The Spanish Inquisition in the New World—a minor and relatively legalistic/humane blip in a five-centuries and still ongoing Catholic project of genocide—killed relatively few people. Almost certainly fewer people than were tortured at Guantanamo. Absolutely fewer Latinos than those who were sent to their deaths by the Obama Administration’s Trumpian deportation policies.
But a feature of our neo-memory, as Heriberto Yépez calls it, is that we project our crimes into the prolepticically plagiarized memory of a future scapegoat, a future villain, just as the Oedipal murder was a kind of alibi, not for any crime against a father, but for a crime against the possibility of all relationships, including fatherhood. Trump absolutely can’t be allowed to assume the office of the presidency, or he might embody or deify our own guilty consciences (not that guilt matters too much). Later the imperialist core will say that, like the Incas, the people welcomed Trump because they mistook him for the creator-god, the white foam of the sea, they mistook his hairpiece for a divine lightning.
In Lima, perhaps the only never-republicanized, never decolonized city in Latin America, the Museum of Inquisition comes with a TRIGGER WARNING: not for the excruciating violence of its torture instruments, the claustrophobia of its catacombs, but for the possible offense to Catholic sensibilities (and I witnessed poor Peruvians, perhaps on their only visit to the capital, lining up to see the museum). Yet while we walk through this more ornate House of Terror, witnesses to the Monty Pythonesque comedy of Hispanic genocide, we’re reminded who the real culprits were: the imperialist ambitions of the Umayyad Caliphate and the grubby anti-spiritual mercantile aggressiveness of Dutch Jews.
In the catacombs, but only in the catacombs, of one of the Spanish Empire’s most important palaces, also in Lima, one finds a more humble admission of failure: the failure to bury the dead, the overproduction of death which these technologically and ethically illiterate Spaniards were forced to resort to.
How does one bury? Body upon body, a licentious parody.
But later, the bones begin to be laid out in mandalas, the skulls forming the circle, the femurs and other bones the spokes (the speaking bones, the spoken laboring bones), the skulls again in the center, as any good Cartesian European would think. One finds the dead buried heavily and circularly as in a Spanish peso, that 16th-century peso which the Opus Dei Catholic Right constantly refers to in its attempt to salvage the bones of Hayek from its dead theology.
One also finds in the catacombs a bilingual American-Peruvian girl—her Peruvian parents bringing her back to see the miscegenated crimes/victims of her fatherland—a cheeky, brave, but manifestly terrified six year-old girl, who knows how to mock and honor the dead, “oh pobrecitos!”, as if they were puppies with a broken leg, and who also knows how to ask sensible questions, scientific questions but also metaphysical questions, such as, “What would happen if a little girl got lost in here without her mommy and daddy, if her mommy and daddy became bones in a picture of more bones, if everything around her became a tyranny of memory and memory’s shortcuts, its lack of honor in a foreign land, if the very idea of her mommy and daddy became a joke, an unassimilable and uncannibalized loss, and she were still all alone, without her mommy and daddy, in a dark and malodorous room, a kind of bifurcating urethra, a sperm-girl in a phallic womb, what should that little girl, neither heterosexual nor homosexual, agnostically indifferent to necrophilia but scared of death, do?”
Dying Imperial Memory
Atahualpa, the last pre-Hispanic (though unfortunately not completely pre-Hispanic) Inca—who had been captured and held in Cajamarca due to a series of foul plays (later they said he was defeated due to internecine warfare, but they always say that)—was executed one night in 1533, falsely converting to Christianity in order to have a less painful death and to preserve his body according to his own cultural mores.
His hasty execution was due to the panic of the notoriously weak-willed but homicidal Pizarro, who had been convinced to do away with Atahualpa by the kind of paleo-hedge fund manager Diego de Almagro.
The Spanish mercenaries who had held Atahualpa for months—and who had come to love not only him but the Peruvian people who provided for them materially, culturally, and sexually—were shocked, disgusted. The Spanish Emperor Charles V and his legal authorities were also dismayed by the bourgeois upstart Pizarro, who had killed a king without permission. The written Hispanic record is filled with “shocked, shocked” expressions of horror that could be read or heard, right now, as eerie echoes of The New York Times editorial board after repudiating both Judith Miller and the Bush administration. They even waxed about international law, the rights of kings, and certain governors in Panama claimed they would have preferred to have Atahaulpa installed in some kind of Hispanic-Qatari puppet-kingdom, with harem.
At first, it’s important to emphasize, the execution of Atahualpa was condemned, in the same way that the Iraq War was condemned.
It all hinged, in a falsely empirical legalism, on whether the Incan general Rumiñavi had been planning an invasion from the north, from Quito: had he been planning his yellowcake uranium invasion, then Atahualpa’s execution would have been justified. If, on the other hand, that invasion was the invention of paranoid fantasies and of putschist conspirators, then…well, an indelible stain would have been ejaculated onto the intrinsic honor of Spanish ambitions.
(Nowhere is it entered into the equation that perhaps the annihilation of the Spanish invaders was an existential necessity, a Stalingrad).
After awhile, the litterateurs set to their tasks: the 16th-century Thomas Friedman López de Gómara, in his Hispania Victrix, expatiated in completely falsified detail about the so-called trial that Atahaulpa had enjoyed. Then Garcilaso de la Vega, more of a story-teller than an ideologue (but all story-tellers are ideologues, their yarning thirst nothing more than a kind of courtier’s impulse to entertain ingratiatingly), made up an entire Platonic “trial,” filled with ostentation and bullshit, so that later even anti-communist historians compared Atahualpa’s death to the Stalinist show trials. The result of all this pompous lying was that Peruvian citizens, up through the twentieth century, were taught that a noble ten percent opposed the execution of Atahualpa, while the masses had clamored for his execution (and even a kind of Joseph Wilsonian messenger and a Chalabi interested party were blamed for bringing back “false information”).
In fact the masses even of the Spanish mercenaries opposed killing Atahualpa, but Atahualpa was killed all the same, because a section of the Spanish-colonizing bourgeoisie wasn’t getting the gold ransom.
Modern Parallelism in a Bent Universe
Not too long ago, Obama went on international television to proclaim that Guantanamo (a relic of U.S. imperial conquest) is a burden and a stain on our national honor, but that we, the people, who elected him on the promise to close the prison in his first year, were at fault, because we were “frightened.”
Who, in fact, was “frightened?” The first black president who had deep-state guns pointed at his face? Or left-liberal and otherwise heartland voters who thought that the U.S. was committing, and continues to commit, war crimes?
We have nothing to fear.
Obama even told Goldman Sachs bankers that he was the only one standing between them and our pitch forks.
He meant it twice: as the anointed last chance candidate to save U.S. capitalism, and as the literal “black body” who won’t receive a pitchfork, but a bullet.
Why Can’t We Have Good Things Anymore?
Since apparently we’re forced to choose between Beyoncé the Black Panther billionaire and the fucking white supremacist cops, pop culture is just another Maoist sphere for empty petty-bourgeois contestation.
In that vein:
Louis C.K., in his celebrated new show as in his past show and his stand-up, presents the pitiful, tragic Pietà, the breasted bisexual white man in the arms of the absent, conflicted, schizophrenogenic mother, who reiterates herself and who’s either dead or who makes you buy weird retrograde spermicide before you fuck her (along with blueberries, courtship, and Minnesinger-esque lyricism).
Louie, as he’s known (like Bernie, but that’s a false, DNC comparison), is feted as a sorrowful truth-teller, the guy who will tell you when a woman’s a cunt, but also when a guy’s a dick.
In the early, pre-Trumpian stages of the alt-Right, they flirted with Louie, but then some archivist “dug up” (it was always explicitly and implicitly acknowledged) that he was a Jew, and they decided his misogynist truths were just a hook-nosed assault on Aryan women.
Louie flirts with vague progressivism, like a universal basic income or reparations for slavery. But essentially, as much as we feel for this Sophist, it’s inevitable that we understand what he’s saying.
And what is he saying?
“Hey, you, sufferer.
“Why are women so cunty these days? Why are blacks so extra-sensitive? Why are gays so faggy but not in a campy, a creative way? Why are Muslims ululating, lalalalalala, and beheading, seemingly more so than they used to?
“Wait, wait, I’m not the typical comedian. I’m going to tell you what we, the sufferers, did.
“Three thousand or so years of rape and patriarchy, slavery, death and ostracism for homosexuals, wars in the Middle East.”
There’s a certain admiration for a lost ingenuity, a certain recidivism: at least they were men!
But if we just dig into our melancholic chrysalises, perhaps, something new can be born…
The Museum of Prophecy
Then my muse said she was going to a continent I’d never know (especially not with a map, especially not by intuition): a cordillera beyond the bounded hell of desire, where the last guerilla war was being fought by fanatic sensualists, by nymphomaniacs suffering from incurable illnesses, from anteretrograde amnesia, and that in those dark patches of rock, those stained nocturnal sheets, they were battling—using all the indigenous materiel at their disposal, including avant-garde torture, mirthless laughter, and ascetic perversion—an anhedonic foreign occupier, flying the flag of communism: a communism of pure pain, a delirium tremens communism, a communism whose nature was cold sweat and the alienated stars, whose praxis was maenadic violence but also horrifying discipline: and that I could only follow her by leaving my body behind, hitchhiking in another body pieced together through the most violent cannibalistic absorption, speaking the most unscrupulous dialect which one had to be born into to understand (not born again, but born for the first time, now), and that, were I to arrive at her foco, her cadre, her unsentimental love, I’d wake up as my vestigially anti-Semitic grandfather on a boat in Lake Geneva with his young Jewish lover, in a photograph he showed me before he died, trying to explain how beautiful she was, how disappointing his life had been, he who like Jung wanted to spank a passionately masochistic Jewess in pristine Swiss-bourgeois environs, and then I’d wake up again and again I’d be my grandfather, only a year later, his brother a political prisoner in Dachau, he fighting with Tito’s Partisans on skis, shooting old hunting rifles at young Germans and thinking about his dissertation in molecular biology, about something he didn’t yet know was DNA, and then I’d wake up again and this time I would be an anonymous commuter on a major city’s subway at rush hour, my eidetic lust vaporized into a mobile, crashing, machinic lust, a lust whose stations compensated for the pain of Baudelairean departure with the additional pain of new semblances, unknowable lives whose violence had nothing to do with their being unknowable, but with their being my own caesarian life, my body lost in a sea of other bodies, whose destiny is not to know the sea in which it’s dying. And my muse said, when I asked her if I’d ever see her again, that she didn’t know, but that she didn’t expect to die in the guerilla war, because no one dies anymore, it’s a kind of rite of passage, we do it when we’re thirty or thirty-five because we’re bored out of our fucking minds and because we can’t live with ourselves anymore.
Epigraph to Silence
It is a convention among us analysts that none of us need feel ashamed of his own neurosis. But one who while behaving abnormally keeps shouting that he is normal gives ground for the suspicion that he lacks insight into his illness. Accordingly, I propose that we abandon our personal relations entirely.–Freud, breaking with Jung