The Time of Monsters
This expression sings so very true today as our cities are under siege and the army, in the form of the mobilization of the National Guard, is being brought to bear first in the heartland of Minneapolis. “This is the time of monsters” is attributed to a a little-know Italian founder of the Communist Party there and it dates to that turbulent era of the post World War I to 1930’s when the “old world” was dying and the “new world” was waiting to be born. Antonio Gramsci penned the expression. He has a name that almost sounded communist, compliments of the more famous Leon Trotsky, the controversial Russian Revolutionary leader who’s hatred of the “petite bourgeois democracy” drove the revolutionary zeal of Marx and Lenin. Trotsky was ultimately put asunder by the Stalinist exaggeration of the very gulag-driven world that he espoused. Wow, that is a whole bunch of modern revolution study I did in college, all distilled into one thought during the turbulent times we face in the evolving post-modern revolution we see beginning in our midst.
What is the time of monsters? It first occurred when the Weimar Republic (think the Camelot of Barack Obama) fell to the National Socialism of the Third Reich (the forces of Trumpism). In some ways, these “outside agitators” are supposed by the forces of the establishment as the nameless, faceless (now behind legitimate COVID face masks) anti-establishmentarianists that are the monsters. But while the petite bourgeoisie refers to the shopkeepers that epitomize our capitalist society, and it is their property rights that are being burned and smashed supposedly by the monsters among us, is that really what this is about? These may be the pseudo-monsters, the scape goats that get demonized the way Trotsky was demonized by Stalin. Was Stalin not the real historical demon? Was Hitler not the real demon of Weimar versus the scape-goated Juden monster?
To me, the monsters in this interregnum are not the monstrous acts of a few looters. The power to defeat that is easily available and can be mobilized as it is in Minneapolis today. The real monsters are the promoters of this gratuitous violence, the political leaders that egg on the protests for their own insidious agendas of distraction and deflection. Trump is the monster’s monster. He stands for the petite bourgeoise in today’s society, the believes that all that matters is the economy, not civil rights, not humanity, and certainly not black lives. This is a moment of truth for our society. Can we dispense with he petite monsters looting our urban centers and keep the honoring of the pain being felt and expressed for the black lives that symbolize the growing pain of those people marginalized by our Uber-bourgeoise thinking in the time of Trump?
My head hurts thinking about all of this. My heart hurts worse. In the time of monsters people can choose to hide in their homes (we have the PERFECT excuse today to do so….thank you COVID?) or they can take to the streets and add to the turmoil. Therein lies the true dichotomy of our time. Will we hunker down or duke it out? The parsing of the mob is probably one of both economics and conscience. Those who can afford to shelter comfortably in place can choose to keep their head down and poke it up with a political contribution here and there to support their political views. It sounds weak and detached, but it is realistically predictable. I fear that Kim and I fall squarely into that category. I am not proud of that complacency, but we are a vulnerable cohort with “more to lose” than others. It is those with less or nothing to lose that are out in the street. They do not have the ability to comfortably shelter-in-place as we do. They are understandably more driven by economic practicality and the need to put food on the table. They are the Jean Valjean of Victor Hugo’s depiction of his revolutionary reality. Some are driven exclusively by Darwinian need and some are more passionate about the rights of mankind. People cannot help where they sit on this spectrum, they are who they are and think as they think.
Martin Luther King said that riots are the language of the unheard and that sparks strong feelings on both sides. But he also said that we may have all come here on different boats, but we are all now in the same boat together. That is my way of saying that you can’t build your walls high enough. You have to address the root cause of the problem if you hope to have peace in the streets. This month’s National Geographic has as its cover article the last of the voices of World War II veterans, who are aging out of the picture in 2020. Someone at NatGeo decided that it might be instructive to create a graphic that showed this history of brutality (a.k.a. war, conquest, tyranny, religious oppression, dominance and revolution ) over the history of human existence. This was expressed less in a quantification of human prosperity and mostly in a quantification of the loss of human life. Ultimately, life and death is the only counter that matters in the realm of inhumanity. Making a man hungry does not stack up against making a man dead. The graphic is worth contemplating, though I am not sure I get all the ramifications. It is depicted in a series of peaks and valleys that are formed by skewed squares that are color-coded representations of the scale of deaths from the various eras of conflict and brutality. It covers the ancient world, the medieval era, the age of exploration and colonialism and ultimately the “modern” world. While the records probably skew this somewhat, the unmistakable reality of the scaling is that we are more, not less brutal today than ever in the history of mankind. WWII, at 66 million lives lost is 50% greater than the next two in size, the two Chinese devastations during Mao and Genghis Khan.
Does this have any clues about our turbulent times? I think so. Between Hitler, Hirohito, Stalin and Mao, the world lost 126 million souls in the last century. We are clearly not evolved enough to know better, but we are making progress…or are we? Are Russia (think Ukraine) and China (think Hong Kong) more evolved than in the eras of Stalin and Mao? We could probably agree that Germany and Japan have democratized to an extent that all totalitarian shadows have dispersed. But a recent chart by WAPO that shows the world broken into four cohorts of democratization (versus totalitarianism) may place Germany and Japan in the top cohort and Russia and China in the fourth and bottom cohort, but it shows the U.S. only in the second cohort and falling fast. The chastised Germans and Japanese that humanized after the passing of their worst monsters are matched by the consistent brutality of Russia and China and the growing brutality of America.
This is the time of monsters and the United States has a choice here and now. These urban riots may tell this tale more than any other leading indicator. I am happy that it is Minnesota where the battleground seems to be set. I have as much confidence in the humanity of that state as much as any. Let’s see if they can find a path that leads us away from economically-driven brutality and more towards economically-driven enlightenment and justice.