the ghosts of my lives
3:22pm, 2 November, 2008: Twenty years ago, my sister was studying photography in New York. She lived out in Brooklyn, in Bay Ridge, near the Verrazano Bridge, and I stayed with her for a month or so in 1988, just after I quit the NME. The house she stayed in was large -- vaguely like the Charles Addams house from the cartoons -- owned by the Catholic Church, and rented out to a collective, who each had their own room or rooms, with communal bathrooms, TV room, kitchen and so on (an unusual set-up for New York, apparently). The inhabitant of longest standing, a therapist called Joe, had been there since the 60s, when it had been a genuine hippy freakout commune, and a few relics of that era were to be found, mostly in a large rumpus/chillout room at the top of the house, where I slept some of the time, which was filled with books, all four walls, from all the eras Joe had lived through in the house, left there by everyone that had passed through -- who knows how many by then? There were several copies, for example, of Stranger in a Strange Land, and at least three of Dhalgren, the original 1975 Bantam edition that sold so wildly well. Sedimented detritus of an underground: for years afterwards I dreamed of its presence, tidied away into careful psychic shelter all across America, like books waiting dusty but galvanising, hiding in a wait on shelf in a a topfloor room…

One that reached out, or in, to grip me, alien message in a klein bottle, was a compendium of polemics, essays, and counter-cultural ephemera from the very late 60s, title now lost to me, abiding fascination unforgettable (I considered ‘borrowing’ it, Abbie Hoffman-style, aware its spine hadn’t been cracked for a decade or more -- but it wasn’t mine and I left it there). I was in New York in the 20th anniversary of 1968, all kinds of books had been opportunistically rushed out, I was reading a couple - but here was an unmediated treasuretrove, of the mindset and feel of those accelerated, high-pressure times, put together to agitate and to sell with no idea of hindsight.

Striking me most deeply, the statement put out by by Bernadine Dohrn of the Weather Underground in the aftermath of the Townhouse Bombing of 6 March 1970 (I’d never heard of Dohrn till then). What d’you want to call it? Eloquent, defiant, monumentally deluded, a mark of, well, what exactly? The extent of the extreme brokenness of American society, certainly, that a privileged child like Dohrn should be have fallen so far from any imaginable civic centre. Weatherman ideology was febrile, protean, desparate, certainly desparately stupid: caught between the furious vanity of martyrdom, and a desolate, extreme, guilty distancing from the USA’s very real crimes, at home and abroad. She was in my mind when I wrote my book on if…. : the smart guntoting terrorist rebelgirl, sexy heart of a cadre that no longer knew who its enemies were -- themselves, if Townhouse is a guide; the three dead were all Weatherman, the shattered townhouse owned by the (unwitting) well-heeled parent of a fourth.

Writing in his news-sheet Hard Times in the immediate weeks after the blast, radical journalist Andrew Kopkind was melancholy -- he knew all three Weatherdead personally -- and measured: weather ideology was a chaotic mess, a useless blowback of the violence it claimed it countered. Terrorism, notes sour Debord somewhere, is merely an affirmation of the Spectacle, never a counter or a workaround. The Kopkind editorial begins with a Eldridge Cleaver, citing Bakunin and Nechaev -- which is to say, legendary nihilist anarchists -- to characterise his own fatalism: revolutionaries, says Cleaver, must know they are likely marked for violent death, and find ways to come to terms with this. Kopkind’s response is above all a buried ambivalence, I think, an ambivalence all the more powerful for being so elliptically expressed: acknowledging the feeling as fact, but declining to go all the classic 60s way, declining to accept the fact of a feeling as the irrefutable Demonstration of a Truth.

Note, though, how utterly unsurprised writer, reades and quotee are with this reference itself, to the Mythic Age of actual real 19th-Century European bombthrowing revolt. “To articulate what is past,” wrote Benjamin, “does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was.’ It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.” And here, suddenly, in the semifinal spasm of the 2008 US presidential, arose a name from that same -- haha -- matrix: Bill Ayers, Malcolm MacDowell to Dohrn’s Christine Noonan, her husband then and now, flung from shelved obsurity right into the cockpit of debate. Obama had sat on a board with Ayers; Obama “pals around with terrorists”; Ayers -- my favourite loony rumour -- had ghost-authored Obama’s memoir.

Now in a sense all this is no more substantial than the famous Tory Blair-has-demon’s-eyes poster: it’s a last, panicky fling of the dice from an embattled (corrupt, dishonest, bigoted) party that has no better arguments. Obama is being cast as (as one blog mockingly summarises it) a “Marxist Muslim Arab Jesus Black White Terrorist Technocrat Racist Do-Gooder Liberal FDR Stalin Hilter Commie Fascist Gay Womanizing Naive Cynical Insider Noob Boring Radical Unaccomplished Elite Slick Gaffe-Prone Pedophile Pedophile-Seducing Liberation Theology Atheist Etc. & Anti-Etc. with a bunch of scary friends from - wait for it! - the Nineteen Hundred And Sixties.” But unlike the silly Tory poster, (some of) these are real figures from actual history, American history as well as European; to invoke them as demons is to bring to bear, in the present, genuine past-times social or political or cultural forces, and almost certainly in unintended ways. If all this is in play, and Obama goes on to win, then all this remains in play: even if Obama turns out to be the super-cautious centrist technocrat he surely is, the Overton Window will turn out to have swung sharply in an anti-GOP direction, way beyond the current centre; beyond Obama’s centre also, if these are even different. Vox populi will have sed: we are down with all that, we don’t mind any of the above, let it all be true, we are voting for him anyway. When Obama fails, all the vast space between him and, well, Kopkind and Ayers has also, jaggedly enough, been brought back to the table, for the first time in a generation. Rhetoric is never just a game; the poison is coming out now for a reason.

However this election falls out, a win for Obama or for Palin, we are moving, generationally, out of the penumbra of the turbid 60s: and in that move there is complex, daunting loss here as well as gain -- and not just for my generation. I’m nearly 50; no one has twice raised Paris to revolt, and -- given my temperament (I’m a Giles, not a Buffy) -- I am really not very likely now to do it even once. I am happy enough to be a semi-shelved book; a quiet curator of missed possibilities, and things worth remembering.

rob’s FQ
10:34am, 12 September, 2008: pimping this bcz (a) rob was my (excellent) editor for the if.... book, and is doing a rigorous and tough job well at film quarterly... (b) ... inc.askin me to write for FQ obv

viz “ghost law" for the non-fictions column (warning: pdf), abut the legendary and currently hard-to-see adam curtis documentary series “the living dead” (scroll down for the link)

(there’s one late clause slightly awry in it -- i think the product of a last minute editorial tweak-and-cut which i should have spotted and re-tweaked: a political claim which is justifiable with a bit of definitional footwork, but should really have been said a different, more robustly convincing way...) (exercise for the reader haha)

there have in fact been worse
11:57am, 28 August, 2008: 100 today

Yes yes Vietnam (which he inherited)

But also:
1964: Civil Rights Act
1964: Urban Mass Transportation Act
1964: Wilderness Act
1964: Nurse Training Act
1964: Food Stamp Act
1964: Economic Opportunity Act
1965: Higher Education Act
1965: Social Security Act
1965: Voting Rights Act
1965: Immigration and Nationality Services Act
1967: Age Discrimination in Employment Act
1967: Public Broadcasting Act
1968: Bilingual Education Act
1968: Fair Housing Act

He was pure politician to the bone of his bone, as the Robert Caro book exhaustively shows. And yet...

rose alert
11:01am, 10 August, 2008: I didn’t think: the US were blindsided here--see, maybe they were but I didn’t think that. I thought: why did the US greenlight this? To give Putin a bloody nose? How was that ever going to happen? Why, in an election year, would the Bush administration be quite comfy to see a small, far-off, not-very-democratic ally--with an evocatively close-to-home name--be pummelled and humiliated?