Politics of Polarization in America?

Is it possible that the vicious rhetoric and the threats of violence coming from demogogues such as Glenn Beck, and the organized mobs known as Tea Parties, are potential prelude to a politics of violence? John Naar, an artist and political activist for most of a century, has coined the term "Weimarization" to stand for just what might be happening to American society. The historian Fritz Stern, who lived through the Weimar era in Germany, saw the rise of Nazism but escaped to the US to survive into the present, has just published a letter in the November 9, 2009 New York Times to offer a similar point of view. The cleavages between the political parties are growing, with the Beck/Palin partisans ousting moderate Republicans and thereby pushing the Republicans, who are always more disciplined than the Democrats, into a unified position on the far right. Think of the many proto- and not so proto-fascist parties, e.g., the French Poujadistes; Le Pen's followers; the late Haider's in Austria; and so many others, that had a similar rightwing-militant lower middle class anti-tax, anti-immigrant, racist, outlook. History offers too many lessons about the formation of a social base of the angry, the disenfranchised, and the alienated, all set for a neo-fascist politics that leads by its very nature into mob violence.

Current Fiction

I’ve been reading some fiction, most current, most but not all with political tones or overtones:

Horacio Castellanos Moya, SENSELESSNESS
Stuart Arthur Cohen, THE ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC
Mohsin Hamid, THE RELUCTANT FUNDMENTALIST
Michel Houllebecq, PLATFORM; ATOMIZED; POSSIBLITY OF AN ISLAND
Ferenc Karinthy, METROPOLE
P.F. Kluge, GONE TOMORROW
Jonathan Lethem, CHRONIC CITY
Boualem Sansal, THE GERMAN MUJAHID
Kamila Shamsie, BURNT SHADOWS
Mario Vargas Llosa, THE BAD GIRL.

Realities within Realities/Comix

I've just finished Jonathan Lethem new CHRONIC CITY, which poses realities within realities, and is thus in clear resonance with, among others, Philip K. Dick's THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH and Paul Auster's NEW YORK TRILOGY. But where Dick was realistic in understanding how power manipulates and even "creates" reality, Auster and Lethem offer tours de force of puzzle making, detective work and puzzle solution (of sorts). Lethem, in addition, offers Pynchon-like wacko characterization and endless spinning out of plot. Why Manhattan as locus for Auster and Lethem's realities within realities? My friend JJ Penna offers as explanation the fact that a Manhattan dweller or frequent visitor (CHRONIC CITY takes place on Manhattan’s upper east side) is continuously shocked by the rapidity of turn-over of shops and sites – one’s bagel shop today is a GAP shop tomorrow. Second Avenue in Manhattan is in the throes of a cacaphonic excavation for the development of a new subway line that is uprooting cherished neighborhoods north and south. In other words, the visible and virtual commonwealth of civic life is overthrown: one finds oneself in foreign terrain. For upper east siders, this is especially tough because much of the old neighborhoods have withstood the changes that had engulfed so many others over the last decades.

But these changes are symbolic; metaphoric, only exemplary of other changes.

Another explanation: reality is for the most of us televised. But in what reality sit those who determine what is the televised? And behind them? And think of the Bush administrator who told Rick Perlstein that the White House and associates were creating realty. So reality exists within reality. And thus back to Philip K. Dick

Lethem is a minor master of the list -- names, for example, that make him and/or his characters seemingly au courant with literature, pop and high arts, politics, etc.; but each entry at best a clever synecdoche that alludes to something else, to which he does not go, but the reader comes to feel that he/she is making connections and is thus “with it.” As for the characters -- they are themselves two-dimensional. Of course the major protagonist, Chase Insteadman, is in fact self-confessedly two dimensional, admitting his own utter banal superficiality. But the other characters are as well comic book types. Which leads me to wonder about why, along with multi-dimensionality, has arisen a major contemporary theme, the comic book. Chabon writes about comics (or "comix" as I've seen it spelled); R. Crumb and Spiegelman write and draw them, as do legions of other graphic writers, illustrators and now, film makers. Can it be that the powers of graphic lit and film lie in their ability to take us back to our childhood, rooted as it was in timeless myth and wonder, thereby retrieving for each of us a vantage point of supposed innocence and naiveté from which we can once again engage and confront reality, this time with wonder, yes, but a wonder of the world weary variety that moves dialectically into cynicism and despair?