And how all that had led, ultimately, despite Obama, perhaps because of Obama, as a reaction to the perceived menace of Obama, to Trump. And the nerdy agent would smirk at me, accuse me of simplifying when I had promised nuance, could I seriously accuse Trump of creating a police state, of emulating Pinochet? Was I going to throw around words like fascist without scrutinizing the clear historical differences?
And I would have to admit that, in effect, we don’t live in a police state, not yet, not yet, but who could deny that the same doctrine of national security which poisoned Chile is taking over every inch of public space and every corner of public dialogue, who could deny that all it would take was a really devastating attack, an act of colossal terror, for the landscape to change even more drastically, for democracy to founder, and then yes, I could well find myself back in this room and it wouldn’t be so easy to get out next time, it wouldn’t be a casual conversation next time. It could happen here, it can happen anywhere, that is what I needed to say, that is what I did not say. I did not say that we Chileans had indeed learned lessons of some value during the long years of repression and terror and banishment, discoveries also made by so many others in the precarious nations of the world. I did not say that now was specifically the time when an exchange of ideas and experiences across time and geography and cultures was required, now was the time to examine how remote intellectuals had sought to surmount the catastrophe which had befallen them in their forgotten lands, now was the time to remember how we had managed to think ourselves out of that catastrophe.
Think ourselves out of a catastrophe.
Not a bad formula. Isn’t that precisely what defines an intellectual in times of strife, in this present moment of adversity and also in the future as more disasters loom; isn’t that the best way to use our talents, our knowledge, our imagination, our intelligence in the twenty-first century?
So I formulated it to them: “Here are my twenty-one words. Count them: We’re living a catastrophe and need to find ways to think ourselves out of it, think ourselves out of the catastrophe. ”
The brainy one counted the words with pursed lips and nodded; his associate stood up from his chair.
“All right, you go and do that, Professor, go do some thinking. But you won’t be needing this speech, because it certainly doesn’t explain how to accomplish that, how to think yourself out of a catastrophe. So we’ll just keep it and that way you’ll have to figure out something else to tell your friends at the MLA. See it as a favor, our contribution to this debate, what do you think?”
I stood up to go. I gathered my belongings. They didn’t help me, just watched.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“You didn’t answer my question,” said the nerdy agent, his glasses twinkling. “About being ambiguous and tentative while you’re trying to serve a cause, fighting a war.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right,” I said. “That’s the foremost source of tension. Not only for the intellectual, but for every citizen: to battle for what you believe in and yet be critical, be suspicious of your own motives, your own positions, be relentlessly complex. That’s the difficulty, always has been. To be transgressive, a pain in the ass, even when the house is burning down.”
I turned to go.
Behind me, I heard the voice of the stocky one, the agent who had not even tried to pretend he was remotely interested in one syllable I was pronouncing. “One more thing,” that voice said. And I turned again, back towards him. “You know what I think?” he said. “I think you guys are too serious, take yourselves way too seriously. You want people to understand what the hell you’re talking about? Try a bit of humor, for a change, what do you say?”
He looked at me as if he were trying to remember my face. I knew I wouldn’t forget his.
“I’ll think about that,” I said. “I’ll just have to think about that.”
An inevitable postscript:
Everything I recounted above has, obviously, been a gigantic fabrication. Throughout my remarks to the audience at the MLA, I sprinkled numerous clues that I was engaged in a tongue-in-cheek attempt to illustrate the contradictions of intellectual life in our times of turmoil. I referred to Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov, masters of deception and false manuscripts, pushing the absurdity of my tale to inverosimile extremes.
The whole exercise was a gentle way to poke fun at the self-importance of intellectuals like myself and my academic public by showing that my high-sounding arguments could not even persuade these two agents, one of whom suggested that I “try a bit of humor” if I wanted to persuade anyone who was not already convinced.
So I followed my own character’s advice and told the assembled professors this story.
But I quickly discovered that some took my whimsical literary inventions seriously, way too seriously. One professor later stopped me and wondered why the agents had not Googled my name to determine that I posed no real danger. Another wanted to know if my computer had been confiscated. Still others asked if “those brutes” had roughed me up. A former student of mine told me she was writing a letter to the Washington Post to protest my mistreatment. In an afternoon session, a graduate student confessed to me that my story had filled her with fear because if someone like me could be detained and interrogated, what might happen to ordinary people like her when they enter the United States?
It then dawned on me how deeply my fictional account of detention by Homeland Security agents had resonated with the unbridled fantasies seething inside the heads of so many of my colleagues. I doubted that any of them were about to be sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And as my spurious agents had pointed out when I tried to convince them that the U.S. is on the verge of becoming a police state, I was free to say anything I wanted at the Modern Language Association convention.
Yet there was no denying that my tale had tapped into a deep paranoia. If entirely rational men and women, experts in literary interpretation and ironical readings, believed me, it was because they must have already imagined the possibility of my sham experience befalling them. Not one of my friends and associates at the convention or afterward dismissed my tall tale as patently absurd. When I lamented the naiveté of my sophisticated audience, the response was unanimous: it was I who was naive.
Maybe they were right. My fraudulent yarn was apparently all too terrifyingly plausible in a country where citizens can be held indefinitely without charges, where domestic overseas telephone calls are monitored by an agency of the government without warrants, where a vice president defends the use of torture against alleged terrorists and where a president invades another country under false pretenses.
The sad truth about my story is that it comes straight out of the trepidation and terror caused by 9/11 and its aftermath that we are still living and that has led to a strongman like Trump being elected. Before that day, I would not even have thought of concocting it, because most Americans would not have understood what I was talking about. The joke would have fallen flat.
The sadder truth is that I can imagine an epilogue to my story.
The United States is hit by an even more lethal terrorist attack.
On that day, can I confidently say that there will not be a knock at my door and that two men, one tall and gangly, the other short and beefy, will not ask me if I recall spreading lies about their efforts to fight the war on terrorism? And that they will not demand that I accompany them, just for a few hours, for some routine questioning?
19.
ALICE IN LEFTLAND: WILL YOU, WON’T YOU DANCE?4
“Tut, tut, child!” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.” —Alice in Wonderland.
Not far from where Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was first published in July of 1865 and not many months after the book appeared, a young girl was avidly reading it at the feet of her father as he worked in his London study on an entirely different sort of book, one that would change the world. The daughter’s g
iven name was Eleanor but she was known as Tussy in the family. Her father was none other than Karl Marx and he was laboring on Das Kapital under unfavorable circumstances: in perpetual debt, a queue of creditors hammering at his door, living “solely on the pawnshop” as he confesses to his benefactor Frederic Engels in a letter at the end of July of that year, perhaps at the very moment that Tussy was reading Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece.
Given how much Marx loved his little Eleanor (“Tussy is me,” he once announced), we shouldn’t be surprised if the man who inspired most of the major revolutions of the next one hundred and fifty years had read the children’s classic that so enthralled her. As to the men and women who led and participated and often suffered in those upheavals, there is also a strong probability that many of them enjoyed Alice, which was, after all, extraordinarily popular (second only, it is said, to Shakespeare and the Bible). More’s the pity that most of the radicals and revolutionaries of the next century and a half did not heed some of the lessons hidden in that book that would have abetted them in their quest for justice and peace and freedom, intuitions and gems that might have helped them avoid so many pitfalls and mistakes and defeats, that could have warned them to refuse invitations to multiple Mad Tea Parties that led to disaster instead of paradise.
“The game was in such confusion that she never knew whether it was her turn or not.”
I had read Lewis Carroll’s book many times—as a child and then to my own boys and recently with my wife Angélica, simply to relish its chaotic wit—but to once again plunge down the rabbit hole, employing as a lens the perspective of a hundred and fifty years of struggle for a better world, was surprisingly revelatory and frequently disturbing, with sundry phrases and situations resonating with my own experience of progressive activism and engagement over the course of more than five decades.
Had I not spent, along with so many of my luminous comrades, countless hours “busily painting [white roses] red?” Have we not habitually exclaimed to those who would like to sit at our table: “No room! No room!”, when there was, in fact, “plenty of room”? And doesn’t this sound sadly familiar?: “The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the while, and fighting.” Reminiscing about immeasurable meetings with militants of an array of left wing organizations and factions that were, like the mouse, “so easily offended”; having ardently bickered over tiny, rarefied details and abstruse, murky theories, I can’t ignore Alice’s observation that “the Hatter’s remark seemed . . . to have no sort of meaning, and yet it was certainly English.” And I found it all-too-easy to identify with Alice as she muses: “It’s really dreadful . . . the way all the creatures argue. It’s enough to drive one crazy.”
To those who nod their heads in appreciation, remembering their own misadventures in Jargonland, Lewis Carroll won’t let us off the hook so easily. When Alice, polite and invariably reasonable, presumes—as we would—to be above the surrounding bedlam, the Cheshire Cat has no trouble in proving that she is just as insane as everyone else: “You must be mad,” the Cat states irrefutably, “Or you wouldn’t have come here.”
At times that general madness takes the form of harmless nonsense but it is also often embodied insistently, nightmarishly, in Wonderland violence. “Sentence first,” the Queen of Hearts commands, as if she were Stalin or Mao, “verdict afterwards.” Beatings, mock trials, threats of imminent execution, inhumane treatment of underlings, and, above all, the incessant chopping off of people’s heads at the slightest mistake: “They’re dreadfully fond of beheading people here; the great wonder is, that there’s anyone left alive!” As if Lewis Carroll were unwittingly warning readers of the looming dangers of dictatorship, whether perpetrated by twentieth century revolutionaries assaulting heaven in the name of the people or regimes trying to salvage capitalism and privilege against the assault by those same neglected, beleaguered people. The crazed rush towards the future justified by the urgency of now, the certainty that “there was not a moment to be lost,” so we repeatedly find ourselves impulsively going down the nearest rabbit hole, “never once considering how in the world…to get out again.”
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to walk from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
So, where do I hope to get to myself with this somber meditation on Alice and her potential adventures in Leftland? Is it fair to turn a book so rowdy and light-hearted into an ominous critique of radical projects and methods? In despondently imitating the gloomy March Hare by selecting only lamentations as my bread and butter, am I not ignoring what is essential, enduring, lovable, emancipating about Lewis Carroll’s story and characters?
Because Alice in Wonderland can also be read as a seditious text, overflowing with utopian impulses. Why not emphasize Alice’s realization “that very few things indeed were really impossible,” a credo that has fueled the fire of so many social crusades, that the gay rights movement and the ecological wave of initiatives and protests have recently revealed to be true? Why not blaze in bold letters the words of the Duchess, “The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours” —a dictum that skewers corporations and gluttonous executives who collect millionaire bonuses while rejecting a raise in the minimum wage? The book celebrates rebellion and disobedience (the cook throws frying pans at the Duchess, the Duchess boxes the Queen’s ears, the Knave steals tarts, Alice refuses to cooperate, the guinea-pigs cheer despite being suppressed), while despotic figures are derided as bumbling and ineffective.
What we should rescue, above all, from Alice in Wonderland is its subversive, rambunctious humor, the same wildness, the same core questioning of authority that has inspired the insurrection and resistance and dissidence of millions over the last century and a half, the imagining of a possible parallel reality that does not obey the rules of a society in dire need of transformation. It is this carnavalesque energy and playfulness that we should recognize and embrace as ours, a crucial part of our progressive identity.
There is a tendency, of course, towards the opposite language and style and demeanor on the left: a heavy, ponderous solemnity, as if all the tragedies of history were weighing us down. We take ourselves, and our discourse, seriously, and for good reason. The suffering is immense, the injustice intolerable, the stupidity widespread, the pillages of the industrial-military-surveillance complex expanding, the future dark and dystopian, the planet on the verge of meltdown.
All the more reason, then, to exult in our own liberation when we have the chance, to revel in the thrill of breaking conventions and interrogating our own beliefs, certitudes and dogmas. All the more reason to recognize the re-enchantment that is reborn with each small act of hope and solidarity, and to extol the sheer joy that accompanies the certainty that we need not leave the world as we found it.
“It must be a very pretty dance,” said Alice timidly.
“Would you like to see a little of it?” said the Mock Turtle.
“Very much indeed,” said Alice.
During the Chilean Revolution (1970-73), the people of my country marched endlessly, attending interminable rallies in defense of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. The energy of those brothers and sisters by my side, their resilience and fortitude and inventiveness, their irrepressible jokes and home-made placards, have inspired me ever since. What has also stayed with me is how much more vibrant and creative were those men and women in the streets of our cities than most of the men (they were predominantly male) who droned away for hours on the podium, exhorting, analyzing, swearing that the masses could not be stopped. I wondered then, as I do now, so many decades later, why the enthusiasm and defiance of those democratic multitudes was not unleashed, why there was such a contrast between the leaders and the people? And it pains me that our peaceful revolution culminated in a cataclysm, Allende dead, so many tortured, persecuted, exiled, so many dreams that ended, seemed to end.
> The King in Alice in Wonderland has some grave and presumably commonsensical advice for the White Rabbit about how to tell a story: “Begin at the beginning . . . and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
He is mistaken.
Those of us who thirst for a different world, who seek alternative horizons, know that you do not stop when the end has been reached, that there is no end to our need for justice, that rebels never go “out altogether, like a candle.” Rather, we are like the Cheshire Cat. Even when our body has vanished, a grin will always remain obdurately behind, a ghostly presence, to prove that we were once here and may re-emerge, that we can’t go on but, as Lewis Carroll’s heir, Samuel Beckett, understood, we must go on.
Ultimately, as those of us who still believe in radical change as the only answer to the continuing wars and greed of our suicidal times, this is what we should learn and cherish from Alice in Wonderland for the next one hundred and fifty years of illumination and struggle, the challenge that this fantastically absurd text provides us.
After so many tribulations and trials—those we have been through and those that await us anew—are we brave enough to again and again respond to the Mock Turtle’s summons: “Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?”
I believe he is not wrong, that Mock Turtle, when he sings, when he promises as he dances that “there is another shore, you know, upon the other side.”
20.
THEY’RE WATCHING US: SO WHAT?
A few years ago, before Trump was even a blip on my mind, I attended a forum in New York, convened by American PEN, the ACLU, and the Center for National Security at the Fordham School of Law, in order to address the contemporary dilemma of proliferating surveillance in the digital age. During this day experts and participants explored how free expression might exactly be hurt by the new technologies, how spying concretely impacts creative freedom in democratic societies, and tried to come up with ways in which advocacy groups could press the case in Congress and the courts that such an assault on privacy is detrimental to our public discourse and civil liberties.
Homeland Security Ate My Speech Page 12