Chicago: The Symphony der Grossstadt
In ‘America: The Farewell Tour’ Chris Hedges paints a bleak picture of the United States. In a number of chapters covering de-industrialization and the unemployed; prisons; the epidemic of synthetic painkillers; porn and sadism; social inequality; police brutality; racism and hatred and other ills, he comes to the conclusion that the corporations, the economic and political elite including the ones on the ‘liberal’ camp have enabled the fall of the ‘American Empire,’ coming soon, like tens of others in other parts of the world that came and went before. The argument’s strength lies as much in the testimony of tens of people he interviews along the way, as it is in references that he quotes and precise conclusions that he arrives at. It has the workings of excellent journalism, accompanied with an extended ‘opinion piece’ which for obvious reasons can not find a place in the New York Times, that Chris Hedges left a long time ago. Meanwhile, this apocalyptic view of the land and phenomena has some appeal. It has a deep rapport with history, it is sharp, assertive, and a little sermon-like, much like the way Dr. Martin Luther King would speak to the masses. But then one needs a minimum exposure to the sunday mass, or the friday prayer (or to the divinity school education) to be deeply moved by the tone. In written form, what leads a Marxist closer to a state of divine wisdom (and epiphany) is to hear what Walter Benjamin has to say in aphorisms (Theses on The Philosophy of History.)
So, what is it to me regarding the demise of America and its lamentable symptoms that are out there in the open? For one thing, I guess I consider the United States to be my second home, not because I live here on and off for extended periods of time, far from it, but because I dwell in the language and its environs. This residency is not exactly that of a writer, but of an observer and a dedicated reader, not much of fiction but other literature. And more, in the longer periods that I lived here in the past, I enjoyed the wide open spaces and urban forms, horizontal and vertical, much in contrast with my convictions as an enthusiast of historical and modern architecture of human scale. The size and scale of (almost) everything human made in America appear unsustainable and ‘gross,’ yet I suppose this has a deeper relation with the dimensions of natural landscape at large, still for many to be roamed in an outsize pickup truck. Yet, coming from the cramped quarters of human habitation in my country, here I can breathe more easily for a while. Intellectually, there are other reasons to be excited about this country, in comparison to other centers of Western civilization with historical baggage that is prone to segregate on varied fronts. For instance, like many others, nowadays I am encouraged by dissent and outrage that comes from America’s youth in the university campuses, facing the genocide in Gaza. In order to appreciate this, one ought to be familiar with ‘The People’s History of United States’ (a book by Howard Zinn.) In a historical cycle, the fight for justice, equality and freedom has landed once more in the new world, after its 20th century voyage in revolutions, failed and semi-failed, and in revolts and carnage elsewhere. The youth are once more showing, to a bruised generation, what it takes to be a human of conscience above all else. It is an act followed closely by the hopefull all over the world.
Next to the ruins of empire (not one but two) that I have followed in the city of Istanbul for years, my eyes are also accustomed to the decomposition of urban sights, dilapidation and ruined lives in American cities. As an artist and a photographer, I had been deeply stimulated by what Benjamin would call ‘catastrophe,’ a term that opens up history in war, human detritus and other sights which brings an image of the past as conveyor of political significance in the present. Meanwhile, when photographed, the ruins do not frequently yield an elegy except for human faces. This is the weakness of photograph as metaphor, unless accompanied with some caption of context. Right now, Gaza is the biblical catastrophe unfolding in real time, and what moves every person of conscience are the faces of Palestinian children that can come out of the zone of annihilation, rather than vast urban landscapes of rubble under which thousands are still buried.
The melancholy induced by varied signs of catastrophe in my country is of a different order than what one can observe in the United States. It comes with around one hundred years of history to cover the Armenian Genocide, a civil war, oppression, massacres and poverty that inflicts millions. What the several centuries of a multi ethnic and multi confessional empire had left behind are a modernity cut short, an arrested democracy, fervent nationalism and in certain cases just plain racism, incarcerations of the most peaceful dissenters, and the dispossesion of millions in favor of the wealthy few. All these under the auspices of the oppressive state. And all these after a promising start in 1920s. It is all out in the open, all is perpetrated with impunity, with a much scarred sensation of justice for the majority where the responsible parties would not need intricate schemes to cover it up. It appears that in Turkey the last safety net where the individual keeps her sanity (and minimal conditions of survival) is a feudal network of cooperation among one’s kin, which, in its iterations, is also responsible for a diffused corruption of the whole society where micro-profits trickle down within a grander scheme of theft. Meanwhile, on the streets of American cities and towns everybody seem to be on their own, with a disposition of extreme loneliness and estrangement for some, while the talk of ‘community’ invades the public speech after every tragic occasion. The obvious question for an outsider is ‘how come?’ (in a country of such extraordinary wealth.) Much of the answers are in the Farewell Tour. In comparison, evil in United States goes by the book, it is transparent using all possible folds in the law to legitimate itself, to exclude the ninety nine percent. It exploits and devours bodies with consent.
Walter Ruttmann’s film ‘Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt’ was made in 1927. An ambitious experimental documentary narrating a day in the life of a metropolis, it has all the signs of industrial modernism bestowed upon the city: the railroads, trams, cars and factories, buildings, stations, streets, machines and more machines, and the masses of people intertwined with all these in the scope of a single day. Workers, clercs, shop owners, children, women of the house work, and the poor, the idle crowds and the rich fill the factories, offices, streets, parks, restaurants, theaters, shows and dance halls from the calm of the early morning to late hours of the night. Every now and then the film carries the suspense of the coming fascism in the encounters of decadance and poverty, in street brawls and in scenes suggesting despair and suicide. In this sense, it can be considered a visual supplement to its contemporary, ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’, a great novel by Alfred Döblin in which a cast of characters are mired in crime and misery in the Weimar Republic. But then, Ruttmann’s film is eclipsed by its rival from revolutionary Soviets, ‘The Man with a Movie Camera’ by Dziga Vertov, which was made two years later. In Vertov’s film, the protagonists, the man and the camera, fly over the cities (Moscow, Kyiv and Odessa,) always in motion, getting ever closer to the scenes and action, and on the way exposing the inner workings of cinema to come, as in epic theater. It convinces its viewer on the virtues of the revolution and tells that a new world was born even in a more impoverished country. It carries the last signs of revolutionary optimism, humor and the childlike fascination and freedom for one instance, to be cut short by the purge, gulags, famine and the coming war.
Every so often, comparisons are made in between the times we are living and the time between the two world wars of the twentieth century. For some, this is about the signs of a coming war (a great one) picked up by varied centers of power. I guess for me and many others, the redundancy of this kind of ‘strategic think-tank analyses’ are obvious. Yes, we would want to believe, a change is coming but its significance lies beyond the intricacies of world domination or trade wars. The axiomatic conflicts of the world order at large give a false sense of the state of the globe, whereas the rich are at ease everywhere; capital can travel easily without a trace, it is fiercely protected by all governments, and the toxic environment it can generate and tolerate is huge. In this case, the rift in between Putin’s Russia, or China, and the Western world can be seen to be negligible, while the rift in between (i.e.) the revolting university students and the majority of governments and establishment worldwide is immense. If a comparison has to be made with Europe of one hundred years ago, it should be about the signs of a proto-fascism on a global scale. This is not only a generational issue. For a long while we see a convergence of global movements of resistance: around freedom, justice and basic survival, from demands on equality to climate justice, to the claim on the basics of commons, water, earth and nature at large, from cities to the countryside. And the militarized police unleashed onto the masses look the same worldwide; from the digital surveillance and tactics they use to the armored vehicles and the body armor, and to the gas canisters, sprays, plastic bullets and water cannons. They become a familiar sight not only in authoritarian regimes but also in the ‘civilized’ world. What we are up against is The Empire.
May 2024