The most unhappy country in history

You know how it is. You are tempted to submit another comment in a comment thread discussion but then think better of it. Because you don't want to monopolize the discussion, appear too negative or just because "less is more."

Disagreements are intrinsically more interesting than agreements and I am often drawn to challenge statements either for what is being said, or for how it is being said.

Take this brief extract from a piece by E. John Winner which appeared recently at the Electric Agora:

"And it has been my experience, although widely denied, that Americans, despite wealth and power, remain the most unhappy people in history.  Others suffer greater physical suffering, of course, but none experience angst, dissatisfaction, frustration, hopelessness, depression, disappointment, more deeply than we..."

There is, at least from an outsider's perspective, something darkly comical about these claims. It's not just that they are hyperbolic. It's more that they come across as yet another manifestation (albeit rather strange and perverse) of American exceptionalism. We are not only the most unhappy people in the world, we are the most unhappy people in the entire history of the planet. We suffer angst, dissatisfaction, frustration etc. more deeply than foreigners can even imagine!

There is something to this however, and it relates to imperial decline. The wealth and power is slipping away, just as it did for the British who faced a series of debacles (including Suez) and eventually the humiliation of an IMF bailout. This process is very painful for those who grew up believing that the status quo would continue indefinitely. I understand that.

I was going to make a moral point here, referring to foreign victims of American violence and suggesting that some kind of karma or communal guilt might have been in play also. But this would have been disingenuous. I don't believe in karma; nor, really, in communal guilt. Besides, it would have been a cheap shot. Bad things happened; and pointing the finger at one group or nation necessarily lets other groups or nations off the hook.

Young anarchists

You've seen it before, I'm sure, many times. Very respectable parents telling enquiring journalists that their child would never have been involved in that kind of (illegal) activity.

The latest focus of attention is on fringe politics. 'Oh, Imogen would never get involved with anything violent.'

Well, Imogen would actually, especially if she gets carried away by the sense that the established order is racist and sexist and rotten to the core and hell-bent on destroying the environment and precipitating climate chaos in pursuit of profit and the maintenance of hegemonic power.

She has no religious scruples (what are they?); no sense of love for or identification with Western civilization (dead white males, etc.); nothing in fact to hold her back.

Take Felicity Ann Ryder. She is apparently hiding out somewhere in Mexico after the arrest of her presumed boyfriend Mario Antonio López Hernández who seriously injured himself when his improvised explosive device went off prematurely on a Mexico City street in June.

Her mother Jenny has told the press that it was 'beyond comprehension to think that our daughter would have had any involvement with violence... We as her parents, and her family, have the utmost respect for her beliefs, her commitment to social justice which we know is very close to her heart.'

Typical doting parents. (In denial?)

Felicity Ann Ryder, a politics and history graduate and a 'talented linguist', is described by friends as 'quiet and quite serious', 'not someone who drew attention to herself'. She is interested in animal liberation and environmental protest, and is said to have worked (as what is not clear) in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

After the arrest of López, Ryder posted a statement on a Mexican anarchist website thanking 'everyone who has worried about me and my situation [and] those who have shown solidarity with Mario and I.'

Ryder, López and their revolutionary friends probably genuinely believe that the old power structures and those who benefit from them are in fact soon to be swept aside and replaced by a new, just and glorious social order.

Don't count on it.

I would counsel young anarchists (old ones are too far gone) to do a bit of reading on the fate and effectiveness of earlier anarchist movements; to note the parallels between their ideas and groupish ways, and religious ideas and structures; and consider the possibility that the ideals to which they aspire are ultimately unrealizable on any significant scale.

Sure, what you are doing feels good and right (and just a little bit exciting). But it is based on myth and fantasy.

In the end, you are fooling yourselves. And doing harm rather than good. Society is more complex than you think, and fragile in ways you do not understand.

Yours is a comic-book view of the world, of good and bad, of black and white. And your sense of solidarity is as fatally restricted and limited as your understanding of history and the human condition.

We are all – all of us – just stumbling around in the dark until death takes us. Base your sense of solidarity on that.

Rhubarb to you

As I have been immersed for a while now in deep and serious topics (to say nothing of a brief exchange on another site on the use of explosive rhetoric in the discussion and analysis of contentious issues of global politics), I feel the need to rebalance and recalibrate. And nothing assists the recalibration of one's reality sensors more effectively than the mundane and the superficial.

A friend recently baked what she called a 'cottage pie' (potato topped mince-meat pie); my family calls it a 'shepherd's pie'. What do you call it?

In my mother's family it was a Monday-night dish made with left-over meat from Sunday's roast lamb. My maternal grandmother - not a stickler for accurate nomenclature - rather unhelpfully called it 'potato pie'.

Which reminds me of something in Willard Van Orman Quine's account of his childhood. He referred to 'pie plant' growing in the garden - "rhubarb to you," he wrote.