Posted on 10/22/2007 6:40:16 PM PDT by dufekin
William Gibson, South Carolinian by birth, British Columbian by choice, is famous for inventing the word "cyberspace," way back in 1982. His latest novel, Spook Country, offers another interesting coinage:
Alejandro looked over his knees. "Carlito said there is a war in America."
"A war?"
"A civil war."
"There is no war, Alejandro, in America."
"When grandfather helped found the DGI, in Havana, were the Americans at war with the Russians?"
"That was the 'cold war.' "
Alejandro nodded, his hands coming up to grip his knees. "A cold civil war."
Tito heard a sharp click from the direction of Ochun's vase, but thought instead of Eleggua, He Who Opens And Closes The Roads. He looked back at Alejandro.
"You don't follow politics, Tito."
That's quite a concept: "A cold civil war." Since 9/11, Mr. Gibson has abandoned futuristic sci-fi dystopias to frolic in the dystopia of the present. Spook Country boils down to a caper plot about a mysterious North America-bound container, and it's tricked out very inventively. Yet, notwithstanding the author's formidable powers of imagination, its politics are more or less conventional for a novelist in the twilight of the Bush era: someone says, "Are you really so scared of terrorists that you'd dismantle the structures that made America what it is?" Someone else says, "America has developed Stockholm Syndrome towards its own government." Etc. But it's that one phrase that makes you pause: "A cold civil war."
Or so you'd think. In fact, it seems to have passed entirely without notice. Unlike "cyberspace" a quarter-century ago, the "cold civil war" is not some groovy paradigm for the day after tomorrow but a cheerless assessment of the here and now, too bleak for buzz. As far as I can tell, April Gavaza, at the Hyacinth Girl website, is pretty much the first American to ponder whether a "cold civil war" has any significance beyond the novel:
What would that entail, exactly? A cold war is a war without conflict, defined in one of several online dictionaries as "[a] state of rivalry and tension between two factions, groups, or individuals that stops short of open, violent confrontation." In that respect, is the current political climate one of "cold civil war"? I think arguments could be made to that effect. My mother, not much of a political enthusiast, has made similar assessments since the 2000 election ...
Indeed. A year before this next election in the U.S., the common space required for civil debate and civilized disagreement has shrivelled to a very thin sliver of ground. Politics requires a minimum of shared assumptions. To compete you have to be playing the same game: you can't thwack the ball back and forth if one of you thinks he's playing baseball and the other fellow thinks he's playing badminton. Likewise, if you want to discuss the best way forward in the war on terror, you can't do that if the guy you're talking to doesn't believe there is a war on terror, only a racket cooked up by the Bushitler and the rest of the Halliburton stooges as a pretext to tear up the constitution.
Americans do not agree on the basic meaning of the last seven years. If you drive around an Ivy League college town -- home to the nation's best and brightest, allegedly -- you notice a wide range of bumper stickers, from the anticipatory ("01/20/09" -- the day of liberation from the Bush tyranny) to the profane ("Buck Fush") to the myopically self-indulgent ("Regime Change Begins At Home") to the exhibitionist paranoid ("9/11 Was An Inside Job"). Let's assume, as polls suggest, that next year's presidential election is pretty open: might be a Democrat, might be a Republican. Suppose it's another 50/50 election with a narrow GOP victory dependent on the electoral college votes of one closely divided state. It's not hard to foresee those stickered Dems concluding that the system has now been entirely delegitimized.
Obviously the vast majority of Americans are not foaming partisans. It would be foolish to adduce any general theories from, say, Mr. "Ed Funkhouser," who emailed me twice in the small hours of Tuesday: the first epistle read, in total, "who needs facts indeed. How do you live with yourself, scumbag?" An hour and a half later he realized he'd forgotten to make his devastating assessment of my sexual orientation, and sent a follow-up: "you are a f--kin' moron. and probably queer too!" No doubt. Mr. Funkhouser and his friends on the wilder shores of the Internet are unusually stirred up, to a degree most Americans would find perverse. Life is good, food is plentiful, there are a million and one distractions. In advanced democracies, politics is not everything, and we get on with our lives. In a sense, we outsource politics to those who want it most and participate albeit fitfully in whatever parameters of discourse emerge. For half a decade, the "regime change" and "inside job" types have set the pace.
But that, too, is characteristic of a cold war. In the half-century from 1945, most Americans and most Russians were not in active combat. The war was waged by small elite forces through various useful local proxies. In Grenada, for example, Maurice Bishop's Castro-backed New Jewel Movement seized power from Sir Eric Gairy, the eccentric prime minister, in the first-ever coup in the British West Indies. Mr. Bishop allowed the governor general, Sir Paul Scoon, to remain in place (if memory serves, they played tennis together) and so bequeathed posterity the droll paradox of the only realm in which Her Majesty the Queen presided over a politburo. Though it wasn't exactly a critical battleground, Grenada springs to mind quite often when I think of cultural institutions in the U.S. and the West. The grade schools no longer teach American history as any kind of coherent narrative. "Paint me warts and all," Oliver Cromwell instructed his portraitist. But in public education, American children paint only the warts -- slavery, the ill-treatment of Native Americans, the pollution of the environment, more slavery ... There are attempts to put a positive spin on things -- the Iroquois stewardship of the environment, Rosa Parks' courage on the bus -- but, cumulatively, heroism comes to be defined as opposition to that towering Mount Wartmore of dead white males. As in Grenada, the outward symbols are retained -- the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance -- but an entirely new national narrative has been set in place.
Well, it takes two to have a cold civil war. The right must be doing some of this stuff, too, surely? Up to a point. But for the most part they either go along, or secede from the system -- they home-school, turn to talk radio and the Internet, read Christian publishers' books that shift millions of copies without ever showing up on a New York Times bestsellers list. The established institutions of the state remain under the monolithic control of forces that ceaselessly applaud themselves for being terrifically iconoclastic:
Hollywood's latest war movie? Rendition. Oh, as in the same old song?
A college kid writes a four-word editorial in a campus newspaper -- "Taser this: F--k Bush" -- and the Denver Post hails him as "the future of journalism. Smart. Confident. Audacious." Anyone audacious enough to write "F--k Hillary" or "F--k Obama" at a college paper? Or would the Muse of Confident Smarts refer you to the relevant portions of the hate-speech code?
Speaking of which, Columbia University won't allow U.S. military recruiters on campus because "Don't ask, don't tell" discriminates against homosexuals, but it will invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose government beheads you if they think you're bebottoming.
It's curious to encounter the soft-left establishment's hostility to the state. Go back to that line of Gibson's: free peoples develop "Stockholm Syndrome" about government all over the world, not least in Stockholm. It seems a mite inconsistent to entrust government to manage your health care and education and to dictate what you can and can't toss in the trash, but then to fret over them waging war on your behalf. Perhaps the next president will be, as George W. Bush promised, "a uniter, not a divider." Perhaps some "centrist Democrat" or "maverick Republican" will win big, but right now it doesn't feel that way.
Asked what would determine the course of his premiership, Britain's Harold Macmillan famously replied, "Events, dear boy, events." Yet in the end even "events" require broad acknowledgement. For Republicans, 9/11 is the decisive event; for Democrats, late November 2000 in the chadlands of Florida still looms larger. And elsewhere real hot wars seem to matter less than the ersatz Beltway battles back home. "The domestic political debate has nothing to do with what we're doing here," one U.S. officer in Iraq told the National Review's Rich Lowry this week, "in a representative comment offered not in a spirit of bitterness, but of cold fact." As Lowry remarked, "This is the lonely war" -- its actual progress all but irrelevant to the pseudo combat on the home front. In Neuromancer, William Gibson defined "cyberspace" as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation." The "cold civil war" may be another "consensual hallucination," but for many it's more real than "the lonely war."
Yes, it might be similar to some of what we have been seein happen in Iraq recently.
I think it was really cheap as a Borders-printed paperback, IIRC. Ping me tomorrow and I’ll look for it when I’m at home.
It was many years ago I studied the Spanish Civil War. If you’re interested, the standard work then was by Hugh Thomas, ‘The Spanish Civil War’ (a huge work). The standard work on Spanish fascism and Jose de Rivera then was ‘The Falange’ by Taylor.
They have discovered our system carries the very real possibility of them losing the ground gained through manipulation and demagoguery in the first place, and they are determined not to let that happen "by any means necessary."
Sorry, on Spanish fascism the cite should be Payne, ‘Falange, A History of Spanish Fascism.’
Yes, I am familiar with ‘Homage to Catalonia.’ Of course, Orwell’s experiences didn’t stop him from being a leftist, just made him anticommunist.
I've often wondered about that as well. You'll get a myriad of answers to that question but to me its simply that they were unable to recognise evil so long as it benefitted them.
The scary thing is that in hindsight the evil of Hitler is so clear, but was that so in 1933? Today the evil is clear enough but there are so many that stand to gain from it.
It could win in '08.
To be fair, the Denver columnist may have been being at least a little ironic, maybe even critical:
Audacious. Profane. He won.
By Diane Carman Denver Post Staff Columnist Article Last Updated: 10/06/2007 11:26:03 PM MDT
Twenty-year-old J. David McSwane is the future of journalism. Smart. Confident. Audacious. Opinionated. Brief.
Very brief.
He writes tight.
Short sentences.
Readers can finish an editorial in three seconds.
Its impact lasts weeks.
...
Are we in a "cold civil war?" I don't know. Things were a lot worse forty years ago.
I just ordered a used copy of HTC off of Amazon.
Thanks. BTW, I had the chance to hitch hike all over Spain in the summer of 1976, a very interesting year in modern Spanish history.
We may see the Civil War start in Europe, as they are closer to the point where those who work will no longer be able to support those who won't.
The fall of a welfare state tends to be messy and violent, as those who have an entitlement mentality become enraged when reality intrudes
Which is the scenario the Dems and MSM would like to see
I agree that Rudy supporters would rather vote for a social conservative than vote for Hillary
In 1933, many members of the middle class were FAR more worried about the Communists, and embraced Hitler as the only candidate who was serious about stopping them. Keep in mind that Germany experienced an attempted Communist revolution a few years earlier in 1919, a bloody Communist revolution occured in Hungary in 1919. Germans in contact with ethnic German relatives in Russia and Ukraine were hearing about the purges, killings, and the Ukrainian terror famine, etc, etc. People were scared enough to elect ANYBODY who seemed a strong leader
Considering some of Monica’s pictures, I don’t think Bill did all that well.
Ah, cool. I was going to mail you mine, if I could find it. I think I may have loaned it out, though. It’s not sitting where I expected to find it.
I’ve had good luck buying used out of print books through Amazon. I think it’ll be a keeper for sure.
If you haven’t read For Whom the Bell Tolls, I recommend it as well, even though Hemingway’s protagonist is a lefty.
And vice versa, to enthusiastically support the government taking any powers it wants to wage an ill-defined "War on Terror" while not trusting them to manage any part of the domestic agenda. Consistency requires that one identify as a statist or a libertarian - the "partial-sort-of-free-market-statist" we see in both parties today ends up adding ever more to the state's power, regardless of his reservations about doing so.
And of course, the only candidate expressing consistently anti-statist positions these days is the one who everyone thinks is an unrealistic loon. ;)
That thought has stayed in my head since and Setyn only solidifies that thought.
I am still predicting a "hot" civil war within 20 years.
More than one historian of the 1790s has speculated that if the “Republicans” had not won that there would have been civil war. The tie between Burr and Jefferson certainly dampened any revolutionary ardor, as it required Federalist aid to tip the balance. Wonder what Jefferson—as devious a politician as ever practiced the trade—really thought when he found out that Burr had double-crossed him?
There is an interesting book called ‘They Thought They Were Free’ by a journalist (I have forgotten the author’s name). It consists of interviews with a variety of Nazi Party members about why and how they joined the Party. There were a variety of reasons. The Nazis tried to be all things to all men.
Analysis of voting patterns in Germany leading up to 1933 shows the electorate becoming more and more radicalized. They were abandoning centrist parties and moving to the radical left and right, the Communists and Nazis.
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