The Epistle to the Libertarians: Left (Anarchists) and Right (Randians, Conservative)

Chapter One
Historically speaking the bureaucracies that so many libertarians rail against are the product of population growth, the rise of cities, the rise of city-states, and the rise of territories (kingdoms, states, duchies, nations). As population and population density increased so have cities, "civilisations", city-states, states, and bureaucracies, bureaucracies of social control (the military, the police, education, and so on) and redistribution (religious bureaucracies, economic bureaucracies, political bureaucracies, and so on). Why? Because as Max Weber pointed out some hundred years ago, bureaucracies are most efficient and most effective at controlling increasing populations and collecting and redistributing the "goods" of large scale societies (pastoral, agricultural, trading, industrial) from the powerless to the powerful, from those opiated on religious ideology to those who engage in religious opiation (rulers as god's chosen and priests as his chosen helpmeets on earth), most efficiently and effectively.

Given these simple historical facts de-bureaucratisation is highly unlikely to occur in complex societies (nation-states) because de-bureaucratisation would require population decreases, the breaking up of mega economic entities like corporations into small locally based and locally operating entities, and the breaking up of nation-states with their mega-bureaucracies into much smaller units on the scale of Quaker meeting houses.

Speaking of the Religious Society of Friends, Quaker meetings are the only type of relatively successful libertarian organisation that has functioned relatively egalitarianly for hundreds of years that I know of. It must be asked, however, whether this religious group that came into the world in the 1600s just as modernity was emerging, functioned and functions because it exists within the modern economic, political, social, and cultural institutions that dominate the world and, in particular, dominate the Western world. It must also be noted, that Quakers constitute a very small percentage of the global and Western population and that their libertarianism itself may be a product of the wealth and culture that modern population growth and bureaucratisation has created.

So breaking up bureaucracies is rather a Sisyphean task, wouldn't you say? Given that we are, as Weber once remarked, trapped in the iron cage of bureaucracy the question we should ask is how to make bureaucracies function more effective and successfully to bring about greater justice and equality of opportunity.

Chapter Two
The social theoretical hallucination of many libertarians, left or right, that men were free before the imposition of the social contract or social compact is a myth. The earliest humans apparently lived in groups that hunted and gathered and goods were redistributed in these societies for the common good. And while there were and are inequalities in hunter-gatherer societies, mostly of gender and likely having to do with procreation, the cooperation and sharing in early human groups allowed humans to survive and procreate in a hostile environment.

Again the issue here should be about how to create greater cooperation and greater justice and equality of opportunity in large scale bureaucratic societies and between the powerful societies of the West and the societies they have exploited and continue to exploit for their benefit.

Buffy Blog: "Doppelgangland"

In my discussion of “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” I wrote about how the Slayers Buffy, Kendra, and Faith were doubles or doppelgangers of each other. In the Joss Whedon penned and directed “Doppelgangland”, a sort of sequel to “The Wish”, we learn that the alternative Scoobies we viewers met in “The Wish” are less alternative versions of Willow, Xander, Buffy, and Giles than doubles of Willow, Xander, Buffy, and Giles. So that Faith like loner cynicism of AltBuffy may be more than simply a product of the alternative universe of “The Wish”. She may be, as “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” seems to show, a part, a generally submerged part of Buffy, herself. Whither Buffy?

“Doppelgangland” is largely a Willow tale just as “The Zeppo” was primarily a Xander tale. In a sense both “Doppelgangland” and “The Zeppo” are continuations of season one’s“Nightmares”, season two’s “Halloween”, and season three’s “The Wish” where the inner fears of our Scoobies, be it Buffy’s fear of becoming a vampire, Giles’s fear that he will get his Slayer killed, Willow’s fear of what others think about her, her fear that she is boring, and Xander’s fear of clowns and fascists, and character traits and character development, be it Willow becoming more, though not fully, comfortable with herself, Xander becoming more heroic and less confused about his manhood, or Buffy becoming more comfortable with her Slayerness. The difference between “Nightmare”, “Halloween”, and “The Wish” and “The Zeppo” and “Doppelgangland” is that “The Zeppo” and “Doppelgangland” focus more on specific characters, Xander and Willow, and hence the character development of Xander and Willow.

The on the surface narrative of “Doppelgangland” centres around Anya’s attempt—yes Anya is back and her frustration with being a high school student without power is superbly played by Emma Caulfield and wittily written by Whedon—to get her power back first by appealing to D’Hoffryn (this is the first time we meet this master of vengeance demons), who refuses her pleas, then by getting Willow to help her cast a spell that will return her to the moment she lost her power. This being Buffy the spell Anya and Willow cast goes wrong, thanks, in part at least, to Willow putting an end to the spell because of the visions of the dark world, the world of “The Wish”, Anya wants to return to (an ironical act on Willow’s part as it turns out and we will see). What the spell ends up doing, once Anya breaks the plate with the representation of her necklace, her power source on it, on it is to bring the alternative Willow, Vampire Willow, VampWill from “The Wish” into the Sunnydale world most of us viewers know and love.

“Doppelgangland” is more than simply the Willow/VampWill tale, however. The Scoobies are still unaware that Faith is working with the mayor and is now playing the role of fifth columnist in the Scooby gang. While being rehabilitated and trained by Wesley Faith learns that Willow, on Giles’s orders, is trying to get past the firewalls the mayor has put in place to protect his electronic records to learn what the mayor is up to. Faith tells the mayor this little Scooby secret leading the mayor to arrange for the execution of Willow. Faith also gets a new apartment from the mayor suggesting that Mayor Wilkins, at least on some level, has some affection for his new Slayer. Cordelia is still angry at Willow for her role in the Xander/Willow fling and gets to express it to who she thinks is Willow accidentally locked in the cage in the Sunnydale High Library. Of course, the Willow she takes out her sense of betrayal out on (there’s that betrayal again) is not Willow but VampWillow. When Cordy lets VampWill out of her cage AltWillow tries to kill Cordy this time without Alt Xander and this time without success thanks to a semi-bumbling Wesley who comes to Cordy’s rescue with cross in one hand and holy water in the other. Whither Cordy? Whither Wesley? Is there a little Cordy/Wesley relationship in the offing?

While these other character tales are prominent in “Doppelgangland” the real focus of the episode, as I noted, is on Willow. Willow is once again feeling the sting of being “reliable” “Old Faithful”, as Buffy and Xander call her, and the sting of being the dormat of Principal Snyder who has not ordered ordered her to tutor star Sunnydale High School basketball player Percy West in history yet again (remember that similar tale in season two’s “Go Fish”?). Percy expects less tutoring from Willow and more of the you do my schoolwork.

It is just at this inopportune or opportune moment that VampWill, thanks to Anya’s and Willow’s mucked up spell, finds herself in the “normal” Sunndale universe. VampWill actually helps Willow out of several jams. She beats up the vampires sent to kill her by Mayor Wilkins making them her minions instead. She slams Percy down on a pool table at the Bronze resulting in, by the end of the episode, Percy actually doing his homework including papers on the two President Roosevelt’s since he did not know which President Roosevelt he was supposed to write on. Actually he didn’t even know there were two President Roosevelt’s. He even gives teacher Willow, in a comically touching moment, an apple.

Now back to the heart of the Willow arc in “Doppelgangland”. Willow and VampWillow despite Buffy’s claim that “… a vampire’s personality has nothing to do with the person it was”, are, as Angel almost admits, similar in personality. Both are “bored” by life. “The world’s no fun” both agree. Both have the teaching bug. VampWillow asks if anyone has any “questions” or “comments” in that teacherly way when she and her gang take over the Bronze. Willow is tutoring Percy. Both are dismissive (eye rolls and simultaneous pffts) of Anya’s claim that everyone, when she gets her power back, will “all grovel before me”. Both may be a little bit “gay”: VampWillow runs her tongue up Sandy’s (the human she kills and, as we will see turns) and Willow’s neck. And both are a little bit “skanky”: Just look at VampWill’s outfit; remember Willow’s come as you aren’t kit in “Halloween”? Whither Willow?

Mise-en-scene, as is almost always the case in Buffy, tells us something about the narrative of the episode and about the characters themselves. Clothing. “Doppelgangland” counterpoints the almost childish and largely asexual clothing, including that fluffy pink sweater, of nerdy “reliable” Willow with with the black leather in your face sexiness of Alt-Willow (“Gosh, look at those”, says Willow masquerading as Alt Willow, in reference to her now very noticeable breasts; Xander being Xander does try to look at “those”).

“Doppelgangland” with its playfulness, its comedy, its wit, its drama, its tragedy, its fascinating minor characters, its memory, its superb ensemble acting, its superb writing, its humanistic and existentialist heart represents in microcosm everything I love about Buffy. What a great episode. What a great television show.

Buffy Blog: "Bad Girls"/"Consequences"

Musings on “Bad Girls”/”Consequences”
Just as Buffy creator Joss Whedon treats “Bad Girls”/”Consequences”, written by Doug Petrie and Marti Noxon and directed by Michael Lange and Michael Gershman, as one episode in his interview on the season three Buffy DVD, so will I. “Bad Girls”/”Consequences”, in its narrative, in its mise-en-scene, even in its rhythm, is, like “Welcome to the Hellmouth”/”The Harvest”, “Surprise”/”Innocence”, and “Becoming, Parts One and Two”, best seen as a single episode.

There is, as is always the case in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a lot going on in “Bad Girls”/”Consequences”. On the narrative level “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” moves several season three arcs along and is, as a result, the season three counterpart to season two’s “Surprise”/”Innocence”. Like “Surprise”/”Innocence”, which was one of the most important if not the most important episode in season two, “Bad Girls”/”Consequences”, is one of the most important if not the most important episode, in season three.

Both “Surprise”/”Innocence” and “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” are, in many ways, very similar structurally. Both episodes have their monsters of the week: in “Surprise”/”Innocence” it is the Judge in “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” it is the been in the sewers so long that his skin is going all white and sickingly obese Balthazar and his virtous and honourable sword wielding knight like vampire warriors the El Eliminati. In both episodes the big bads are front and centre: in season two’s “Surprise”/”Innocence” the big bads Dru and Spike, revive the Judge in order to destroy the world (though how serious Spike is in destroying the world can be debated), in season three’s “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” the big bad, the Mayor, prepares for and undergoes a transformative rite of passage, the “Dedication”, a ritual, as we find out, which makes him impervious to harm. And in both episodes we viewers are in for a surprise: in “Surprise”/”Innocence” the surprise is that Angel is transformed into the evil Angelus who will become, along with Dru and Spike, the big bads of season two while in “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” the surprise is that Faith, who has been hovering near the dark side since she arrived in Sunnydale, takes a job as the mayors right hand muscle after she kills his former right hand muscle man, Mr. Trick and become a big bad in season three. In each case these surprises played and will play important roles in how season two and season three spin out.

The transformation of Faith from sometime Scooby into the mayors muscle underlines the centrality of character developments or character arcs in “Bad Girls”/”Consequences”, a title itself that has great resonance with what is happening to several characters in “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” and season three of Buffy in general. The bad girls of “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” are, of course, primarily Buffy and Faith. Faith has, since she arrived in Sunnydale, been characterized by a kind of hedonism of the moment, a “get in, get it, get out” sort of mentality that underlines not only her view of sex but also her conception of slaying itself.

Buffy and Faith (not to mention Kendra) are, as Whedon and Doug Petrie say in the interview on“Bad Girls”/”Consequences” on the season three Buffy DVD set, doubles or doppelgangers of each other, doubles being a literary and filmic tradition that has engaged the interest of literary and film analysts, folklorists and even psychologists and psychotherapists including Rank and Freud over the years. In “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” Buffy becomes enticed by the same hedonism of the moment that is at the heart of Faith’s view of life and slaying. Buffy starts cutting class, acting as though she is Watcher free—she isn’t since young, arrogant, self-satistied, self-righteous, and bookish Wesley Wyndham-Pryce the new Watcher arrives at the beginning of the episode—and returns again to the rashness that sometimes characterized her actions in season one and season two and which dominates almost all that Faith does, in order to experience the joys of slaying (“hungry and horny”) with Faith. This rash hedonism of the moment for both Faith and Buffy reaches its zenith when our Slayers break into a sporting goods store to “want, take, have” weapons in order to confront Balthazar and his minions without going to Giles first.

Buffy’s flirtation with the dark side is short lived. After Faith accidentally kills a human, Allan Finch, the deputy mayor who apparently has come to warn our Slayers about the dastardly deeds of the mayor as they are fighting the El Eliminiti outside Balthazar’s warehouse hideout.

The difference between Buffy and Faith, as Whedon says in an interview on “Bad Girls”/”Consequences” on the third season Buffy DVD’s, is that Buffy’s moral conscience will not allow her to bury what happened to the deputy mayor. Faith’s lack of moral conscience will. The resurfacing of Buffy’s moral conscience is reflected in Buffy’s nightmare after the accidental killing of the deputy mayor by Faith. In her nightmare Buffy dreams that she is underwater trying to escape the grasp of the deputy mayor who is trying to hold her underneath the surface of the water. But it is not only the deputy mayor who is trying to pull Buffy down in her nightmare. Once Buffy escapes from the deputy mayor and surfaces it is Faith who pushes her back underneath the surface of the water. It is Faith, who wants to keep what happened between her and Buffy, and her rash hedonism that is killing who Buffy really is, a Slayer with a conscience.

While Buffy grieves over the death of the deputy mayor Faith seems, at least from Buffy’s point of view, to be “laughing and scratching and zipidee doo dah[ing]” again as though nothing happened. It is in the confrontation scene between Buffy and Faith on the streets of Sunnydale in act two of “Consequences” that the differences between the two Slayers become clear and Buffy’s moral conscience finally fully resurfaces. Faith argues that accidents happen and that while she is sorry for what happened to the deputy mayor what she and Buffy have done and continue to do, every night, killing the evil that goes bump in the night, evens the scales. Buffy does not let it end there, however. Pushing Faith to go to Giles and tell him what happened the Nietzschean Social Darwinism that is at the heart of Faith’s conception of the Slayer finally fully surfaces: “You're still not looking at the big picture, B”, says Faith, “Something made us different. We're warriors. We were built to kill…We are better. That's right. Better. People need us to survive.”

The Faith and Buffy character arcs aren’t the only ones playing themselves out in “Bad Girls”/”Consequences”. The theme of betrayal hovers over almost every major character in the Buffyverse in “Bad Girls”/”Consequences”. The mayor is betraying Sunnydale. The deputy mayor is betraying the mayor by keeping records of what is going on with him and by going to see the Slayers to tell them about the mayors demonic plans. Giles betrays the new Watcher Wesley by talking to Buffy about Slayer stuff. Willow learns about Xander’s “unhh” with Faith in “The Zeppo” and feels betrayed by the Xandman giving us viewers yet another one of those emotionally wrenching scenes where Willow cries this time in the Sunnydale High School bathroom. Faith betrays Buffy by telling Giles it was the Buffster not her who accidentally killed Allan Finch. Faith betrays Xander by choking him during almost sex without a safety word. Buffy betrays her moral conscience, her Slayerness, and her best friend Willow for a relationship with Faith ("hey girlfriend") that is not only slayerific but almost sexual in nature. Faith betrays Buffy and the Scoobies. The by the Watcher book Wesley betrays Faith to the Watcher’s Council after overhearing Giles and Buffy talking about Faith’s killing of the deputy mayor all the while feeling that he is doing his duty. Faith’s “arrest” by the Watcher’s Council does nothing except push her further to the dark side as Faith betrays Slayerness.

So what will the consequences for all these bad betraying girls and boys be? I guess we will see.

Making Historical Sense of Redistribution and the Just Society...

As you dear unreaders have probably noticed by now I am amused and bemused by a lot of the discourse, particularly the right wing discourse, surrounding politics in the Western world and particularly in the United States these days. Why? Because it is so ahistorical and so lacking in sociological understanding. Take the issue of redistribution.

Any time you have large scale societies with significant chasms between rich and poor and growing chasms between rich and poor and between the powerful and powerless you are going to have redistribution. Look at Ancient Sumer, at Ancient Egypt, at Ancient China, at Mediaeval Europe, at the Byzantine Empire, at the Soviet Union, and at the US, all societies where power, money, and wealth (including property) were redistributed generally in very similar ways. I apologise to all of you out there who prefer to have your US and USSR history in binary and manichean form but hey, history is history.

Generally redistribution takes money from the less powerful and less wealthy and redistributes it to the more powerful (political, economic, religious) and more wealthy (politicians, business leaders, religious leaders). It is almost impossible to escape redistribution because of these imbalances of power and wealth. Why? Because as history shows there are generally imbalances of power whenever you have complex societies, complex societies with kings, princes, priests, party chairmen, politburos, corporate robber barons, congressmen and women and so on. Even communes in Western complex societies, that form that has most tried to do something about the inequalities that characterise the modern world of economic and political bureaucracies and inequalities of power and wealth, have generally been unable to turn back the inequality clock. The only time in human history, in fact, that we have had significant equality was in the human past before the rise of cities and "civilisations" and in those hunter-gathering societies that survived the rise of the modern world.

Now don't get me wrong. There are things complex societies and states can do about inequalities. Some nation-states have used the apparatus of the state to try to create a juster society. The problem here, of course, is that not everyone agrees on what constitutes the just in the just or juster society. For those on the puritanical and religious right just often means using the federal or state apparatus to censor television, censor radio, censor films, inhibit gay and lesbian practises, inhibit abortion, inhibit the imbibing of alcohol or other drugs, build up a strong military defence (where defence, ironically, usually means just the opposite, military offence). Laissez-faire Liberals have tended to use the state to provide economic leaders with the means to the end of ever greater profits via its legal and police apparatus including the use of the state militia to put down attempts by workers to unionise. Social Liberals have tended to use the state to ameliorate the more negative Scrooge-like aspects of "unfettered capitalism" but only to a limited extent. Leftists have long had dreams about bringing about a just society through cooperation or via eliminating the factors that the believe drives extreme inequality.

In Scandinavia, for instance social insurance liberals and leftists used government action to reduce quite significantly the chasm between rich and poor and reduce poverty particularly after World War II. In the process they have become some of the wealthiest nations on earth (when measured by GDP), quite an achivement given the poverty in the region in the 1930s. Even in that vaunted "holy land" of "free enterprise", the United States, the gap between rich and poor was reduced as were levels of poverty between 1945 and the 1970s. It was A.R., after Reagan, that in the US, that chasms between rich and poor and poverty levels rose once again thanks in large part to a renewed war on the left, on labour, and on the social insurance state itself, a "populist" revolt led by right wing "populist" demagogues in the service of the rich and powerful.

What is ironic here, of course, is that while many neo-liberals issue jeremiads against welfare and public utilities they are far too often silent if not supportive, of the wealthfare state (the mote in their own eyes?), the wealth that is redistributed from taxpayers to wealthy corporations. But then I suppose such inconsistency or hypocrisy is inevitable given that most people have imbibed the status quo ideologies of the wealthy and powerful which maintain that inequality is natural rather than as social and cultural.

BallyKissMe: Musings on Ballykissangel

I recently completed a return sojourn through the six series of Ballykissangel. BallyK, as its fans affectionately came to call it, was a BBC Northern Ireland programme, made with Irish government support, about a British Catholic priest, Father Peter Clifford (Stephen Tompkinson), who is sent from Great Britain to serve as priest for the small rural village of Ballykissangel in Ireland. Created by the Irish writer Kieran Prendiville Ballyk ran for 58 episodes on the Beeb from 1996 to 2001. I thoroughly enjoyed my return trip to and through Ballykissangel, my first since the show was first broadcast in the late 1990s and early 2000s and which I watched on local PBS affiliates.

While rewatching Ballyk a number of things kept running through my mind. I thought about how Ballykissangel reminded me of those other whimsical and eccentric dramadies that have become prominent since the 1980s such as the BBC adaptation of James Harriot's All Creatures Great and Small (BBC, 1978-1990), which like Ballykissangel, ran on the Beeb in the Sunday night family slot, like Carla Lane's sitcom dramady Butterflies (BBC, 1978-1983) about a housewife's midlife crisis, like Bill Fortsythe's films Gregory's Girl (1981) and Local Hero (1983), and like Monarch of the Glen (BBC, 200-2005), another BBC Sunday night show. I thought about how Ballykissangel's eccentric Irish were rather like All Creature's eccentric Yorkshire men and women, like Forsythe's eccentric rural and urban Scots, and like Monarch's eccentric rural landholding, tenant, and village Scots. I thought about how Ballykissangel like All Creatures, Butterflies, Gregory's Girl, and Local Hero before it and Monarch of the Glen after it mixed and matched comedy, drama, tragedy, nostalgia, parody (and sometimes even satire), and topicality, something that has become more and more common in film and particularly television since the 1970s and 1980s. I thought about how, as with the tales of All Creatures, Butterflies, and Monarch of the Glen, Ballykissangel's stories and character arcs continued across episodes and even across series. I thought about how All Creatures's Skeldale House and Yorkshire, Gregory's Girl's Cumbernauld, Local Hero's Aberdeenshire, Ballykissangel's Ballyk (played by the lovely Irish village of Avoca south of Dublin), and Monarch of the Glen's Glenbogle are all just as important characters in each of these shows as any of the human characters and how All Creatures, Gregory's Girl, Local Hero, Monarch of the Glen all have a strong sense of place. I thought about how many of these shows and films begin with the arrival of an outsider to their very specific places, the vet James Herriot (Timothy Christopher) in All Creatures's Yorkshire, "Mac" McIntyre (Peter Riegert) in Local Hero's Scotland, the English priest Father Peter Clifford (Stephen Tompkinson) in Ballyk, and Archie, the prodigal son more at home in London who returns home to become laird of Monarch's Glenbogle, and use these new arrivals to introduce viewers not only to Yorkshire, Scotland, Ballyk, and Glenbogle but also to the people, and something about those people, who we will get to know in each of those places, Ballykissangel in a particularly elegant way.

Of all of these whimsical, eccentric, arc driven dramadies Ballykissangel, Bailie Coisc Angeal, the town which banished the angel--the Irish village becoming modern? Ireland becoming modern?--is perhaps the most tragic and emotionally intense of the lot of whimsical and eccentric British dramedies. Across its six series many characters I came to know and love departed for the supposedly greener fields of Dublin or London. Characters suffered from mistakes they had made in the past and present, drank too much, suffered from physical and mental pain, suffered from loves lost and loves wanted, among other things. Two major characters died during Ballyk's run. Assumpta Fitzgerald (Dervla Kirwin) and Garda Ambrose Egan (Peter Hanly) met dramatic and tragic deaths at the end of series three and the beginning of series five respectively, something you don't see very often on TV whether in the UK or the US. Assumpta's death at the end of series three before she and Father Peter Clifford were able to start the romantic relationship they had finally decided they would, a relationship most dedicated fans wanted to see consummated, was an important and shocking moment in Ballykissangel's broadcast life and lost the show a number of fans and viewers as the online posting sites and youtube comments about how Assumpta's death and Father Peter's decision to leave Ballk as a result continue to show.

Ballykissangel was also probably the most self reflective of the whimsical and eccentric dramadies of the 1980's and 1990's. Over its six series Ballyk parodied The Godfather (book 1969, film 1972), parodied Irish "traditions", satirised the Catholic Church, and even, on occasion, broke the fourth wall. In one episode of series four, for instance, the punters at Ballyk's gathering spot, the pub Fitzgerald's, watch a Spanish language telenovela on a new wide screen TV. The viewers, despite not understanding much Spanish, manage to make narrative sense of the telenovela they are watching in what has to be a shout out to those fans of the series who saw Ballyk itself as one big Irish soap opera. Over its six series Ballykissangel was the most religious and probably the least religious of the whimsical and eccentric dramadies which, I suppose, befits an Irish TV show made in the late 1990s and early 2000s, an era of increasing secularisation in Ireland. Musically, Ballyk did what is rare in a TV series, it used music to underline and counterpoint the narrative, to reveal something about character, and to foreshadow things to come. The theme tune of the show itself wonderfully captures the whimsy and eccentricity of the village and the village's "odd" residents. As I watched this wonderful programme I often caught myself wishing that I was one of these eccentric village inhabitants.

A word of warning about the Ballykissangel DVD's. The region one set includes the series three episode "Waiting Game" while the region two set does not. No idea why.

Socialism and the Idiocies of Human Life...

You have to love an article like this (http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/06/20/what-are-the-ndp-talking-about-when-they-talk-about-socialism/). Why? Because the first sentence in this article is historically and culturally inaccurate.

According to the National Post, one of Canada's self-proclaimed national newspapers along with the Globe and Mail, socialism was once a social movement defined by its belief that the state ownership of industry and the equitable distribution of wealth were moral, political, and economic goods. Can you say fairy tale? In reality socialism has always been a social movement made up of different visions and versions of socialism. Socialisms rather than socialism, in other words. Getting empirical and historical I give you communal socialism (Owen, Fourier), Christian socialism (Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr), Scientific socialism (Marxism), and Democratic socialism (Michael Harrington, Bernie Saunders). In historical fact, socialism has always been about as sectarian as Christianity with its multitude of churches, denominations, and sects, including its 40 plus versions of Anabaptism. I have always appreciated this last fact because there have always been so few Anabaptists in the world, 1.6 million at last count, but they have created 40 different Anabaptist groups all of who think they are the one true version of Anabaptism and Christianity..

While there are problems with this National Post article on the NDP, the Canadian social democratic party that arose out of the merger between the largely rural Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Canadian Labour Congress, and socialism it is far superior in its historical understanding of socialism than many of the Facebook posts underneath a link to this article on Facebook. For ideologues and demagogues Leigh Patrick Sullivan and C.G. MacKay socialism "means" and "equals" failure". Not to be outdone poster Andrew Horton raises the linguistic stakes by claiming that socialism equals "epic failure". Unfortunately, but understandably Messers Sullivan, MacKay, and Horton have to ignore real history in order to make such statements. Quite clearly to anyone with historical eyes, ears, a sense of smell, and a sense of touch, Scandinavia, where socialism has dominated since the 1930s, has given us the social democratic success stories of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, all of which, simply to focus on economics, have some of the highest standards of living in the Western World.

One of the most unfortunate forms of historical amnesia on posting boards, all generated by ideology and demagoguery rather than empirical historical analysis, by the way, is this historically bizarre equation of socialism and bureaucratisation. Historically, of course, Paternalistic bureaucracies have existed at least since the 300s of the current era if not before. I give you the Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church, and the Chinese imperial apparatus, paternalistic bureaucracies all.

Modernity, as Max Weber pointed out over almost one hundred years ago, transformed bureaucracies as efficiency, effectiveness, professionalism, merit, modern military structure and strategy, and notions of progress came to dominate the modern world. Today bureaucracies, be these political (governmental apparatus like the federal and provincial governments of Canada), economic (GE, Apple, Microsoft, Caterpillar), educational (UofT, SUNY, the University of Notre Dame), intellectual (the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation), religious (the Baptist Church, the United Church, Coral Ridge, the Union of Reform Judaism), journalistic (the National Post, the NY Times), etc. are all bureaucracies rent through with the ideologies of modernity (in their "meritocratic" form) and are all products of the modern world. As anyone with eyes can see "modern" "meritocratic" bureaucracies have "triumphed" and rule the modern from Vancouver to New York to Copenhagen, to Moscow, to Melbourne, to Auckland. Meritocratic bureaucracies, in other words, are as modern as capitalism, socialism, and liberalism and more than compatible with all of them.

Finally a word on the equation of Hitler and socialism that one finds in a blog by John J. Ray linked to by another Facebook poster under the aforementioned National Post article named Graham Martin (http://matiane.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/hitler-was-a-socialist/). This linkage of Nazism and socialism, of course, is not new. Conservative ideologue and demagogue Thomas Sowell made it in a editorial I happened upon several years ago, for example. It is so used and abused, in fact, that it has become a cliche. It is a curious equation even if we admit, as we historically must, that socialism is and has always been multiple.

So what is Nazism? Nazism is a fascinating bird. Historically Nazism has been seen as a type of fascism, other forms being Mussolini's fascism and Franco's fascism (love that alliteration). On one level, fascism and hence Nazism is conservative. It looks back to a golden age in the past be this Rome in Mussolini's case or German racial purity in the Nazi case. On another level, however, fascism is a product of the modern world along with liberalism (of the laissez faire and social insurance varieties), socialism (of its many flavours), and, perhaps most importantly, nationalism. Nazism is a form or ultra nationalism. It is a form of ultra nationalism (Germans as the superior race) that explains any national problems by pointing to the pollution of the fit Aryan body politic by racial and political outsiders and inferiors such as Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and socialists. And it is a form of ultra nationalism that sees this struggle between Aryans and diseased others, particularly Jews, in apocalyptic terms (the cosmic struggle between good aryans and evil others, particularly Jews and Jewish-Bolsheviks) as a struggle for control of this world. The apocalypticism here should remind us that Christianity with its apocalypticism and its anti-Semitism, was an important cultural factor in the rise of Nazism and the creation of its culture. Christian primitivism, with its hope of returning to an original order, an original golden age, to the utopian garden of Eden, and Christian apocalypticism, with its prophetic vision of a battle between good and evil for control of the world, merged in nineteenth and twentieth century Christianity (a final apocalypse followed by a return to a paradise where the lion will lie down with the lamb) and twentieth century Nazism to produce, in each case, two kinds of conservative modernism.

Nazism is not alone in its utopianism. For laissez-fair liberals it was and is the free market and the belief that free markets will spread the wealth. For socialists utopia was, remember there were and are different socialisms, the commune, the industrial anarchic paradise where one could philosophise, fish, and work all on a given day, and the cooperative, democratic, and just society. Like other modern supposedly secular movements socialisms had their own vision of a golden age in the past to which it to some extent wanted to return, for marxian socialism it was the cooperative society of the hunter-gatherers with industry.

The moral of this tale? Nazism is very different from socialism socially, culturally, and intellectually despite the fact that Nazism, socialism and liberalism (of the laissez-faire and social insurance varieties) are all, to a great extent, products of the Enlightenment. They are products, at least in part, of the Enlightenment because they are all rent through with ideas and ideals of liberty, fraternity, equality, happiness, property, justice, citizenship, etc. The problem is that these Enlightenment ideas and ideals were never consistent and were always contradictory (even for the "great" John Locke). Liberty and equality and justice simply, particularly under the impact of industrialisation and capitalism, aren't harmonisable though the various ideologies that arose out of the Enlightenment try to harmonise them or at least some of them.

Anyway, wouldn't it be nice if people used real history rather than kneejerk and often fear based ideological demagoguery to analyse things like socialism and to understand the world? Well yes but it is not part of the nurtured "nature" of most humans. That said over the years I have observed that those who describe themselves as leftists (a very different animal, historically, from liberals, by the way) have a much better grasp of history than those on the right. I think this is because those on the right (like most religious folk) tend to ground their "analysis" in myth, nationalist myths and economic myths, in particular, and use these myths to make and remake history in their own image, while most people on the left start from the historical facts and, even when they twist and manipulate this history, still remain grounded in a kernel of historical truth.

Buffy Blog: "The Zeppo"

“The Zeppo”, to paraphrase Spike from season two’s “Halloween”, is just plain fun. Written by Dan Vebber (who would go on to write for Matt Groening’s and David X. Cohen’s Futurama) and directed by James Whitmore Jr., “The Zeppo”, along with season four’s “Superstar” and season seven’s “Storyteller”, both written by Jane Espenson, can, I suppose, be seen as“postmodernist” because it, and they, are all self-aware, all seem rather off kilter, all manipulate audience expectations, and all break, to some extent, the mythical fourth wall as a result.

“The Zeppo’s” narrative, mise-en-scene, and music all reflect the off centredness of the episode. And they reflect it from the very beginning of the episode. The teaser to “The Zeppo” begins with a knock down drag out battle between the sisterhood of Jhe, an all female demon cult that eats those they triumph over and who want to bring the world to an end (apocalypse again) and is the monster of the week, and our heroes Willow, Buffy, Faith, and Giles. The off kilter quality of the episode comes into play because of the absence of Xander in this fight, an absence which gives us the viewer, or at least this viewer, a sense right away that something is a bit off, that something is a bit weird, that something is a bit strange. It’s not long before we find out what happened to Xander. About a minute or so into the teaser the Xandman, who has been thrown by one of the warriors of the Sisterhood of Jhe into a pile of rubbish rises out of a pile of rubbish. Even the mise-en-scene, in other words, marginalizes Xander.

This sense that something is off and that Xander is suddenly being marginalized from the Scooby Gang continues throughout the remainder of the teaser as our supernatural superheroes, Willow the Witch, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Giles the Watcher, Faith the Vampire Slayer, and Angel the Vampire each, out of a concern for the unsuperhuman Xander, tell him one after the other that it is too dangerous for him to take part in the battle against the powerful and strong Sisterhood of Jhe.

This marginalization of Xander in “The Zeppo” continues throughout the length and breadth of the episode. The school bully Jack O’Toole, whose soda is knocked over by a football Xander is unable to catch during a game of catch at Sunnydale High, threatens to kick Xander’s ass. That other human in the Scooby Gang, Cordelia, who is missing in action, seems to have returned to her mean girl persona of season one and some of season two form and is in full revenge and Xander put down mode, calling him a “little nothing”, a Jimmy Olsen, the cub reporter from the Superman comics who often puts himself intentionally or unintentionally in harms way, and a Zeppo, the fourth of the Marx Brothers who starred on stage and on screen but who virtually no one remembers these days. Angel, who Xander runs into at the Bronze in act one, tells Xander to steer clear of the dangers associated with the coming apocalypse. Giles, who Xander runs into in one of Sunnydale’s cemeteries in act two as the Watcher is trying to learn more about the apocalypse by communicating with the spirit guides, leaves Xander behind with his new friends while going off to prepare for the coming apocalyptic battle. Willow, who Xander runs into outside a magic shop to which Willow has come to supplies for a protection spell later in act two, tells Xander she loves him not sure she will ever see her again. Faith kicks Xander out of her apartment after he saves her from one of the female warriors of the Sisterhood of Jhe early in act three. Buffy and Angel, who Xander goes for help later in act three, are in hyper exaggerated almost campy gothic romance and apocalyptic mode (something the music reflects) and and hence of no help to the Xandman who seems ever more isolated from them.

One of the things that is really off kilter about “The Zeppo” is the fact that we are only shown snatches of Buffy’s, Willow’s, Faith’s, Angel’s, and Giles’s struggle to keep the world from ending on what will be a very long night in Sunnydale. It is also off kilter because, as we the viewers learn very rapidly, this is not a Scooby episode. It is a Xander episode. “The Zeppo” largely centres on Xander’s character arc, an arc the other Scoobies are simply not aware of.

This Xander episode begins with Xander’s accidental involvement in spilling Jack O’Toole’s soda. The interaction between Xander and Jack, one in which Xander’s manhood is threatened by Jack and right afterwards by Cordelia (the you are a Zeppo speech I referred to earlier) underlines that “The Zeppo not only about Xander, is not only about manipulating the audience, but is a parody of macho manliness. Feeling marginalized by the Scoobies and feeling emasculated by Jack O’Toole Xander attempts to find the thing that will make him, as he says to Oz, “cool” and that will make him feel like a man.

Xander, of course, has long been concerned about his manliness. And the “thing” he comes up with to do something about it is a “thing” Buffy very appropriately refers to as a “penis metaphor”, a car, a 1957 Chevy Bel Aire, an appropriate “penis metaphor in a US in which males are obsessed with their automobiles. And while the car enables Xander to do his formulaic donut run for the supernatural Scoobies it also, after he is put down yet again by Cordy the mean, enables him to pick up a “chick”, to Cordy’s surprise.

With “chick” in tow it’s off to the Bronze for Xander and Lysette. There Xander runs into Angel, as I noted before. Unfortunately for Xander it’s also at the Bronze that the he and Lysette run into Jack again. As Xander and Lysette are leaving. Xander crashes his “penis metaphor” into Jack’s car, Jack’s stolen car it turns out. Ubermacho Jack, responds to the accident the same way he responded to the first accident Xander caused, he threatens the Xandman, this time with his knife Katie. Xander’s manhood goes once again into deflation mode. Xander manages to extricate himself from his dilemma by telling a policeman who happens upon Jack threating him that he and Jack were “’rasslin”. As a result Jack asks Xander if he wants to have some fun.

The fun Jack has in mind is raising his “boys”, his “buddies” (Bob, Dickie, and Parker), from the dead. This is why Xander is in one of Sunnydale’s cemetaries when he runs into Giles. With the “boys” raised and Lysette gone—she is freaked by Jack’s raising of the dead—Xander becomes wheel man for the “boys” who resurrected from the dead now want to have a bit of fun. The fun they choose is “bak[ing] a cake”. While the “boys” are collecting what they need to “bake a cake” from a hardware store they break into Xander runs into Willow coming out of the magic shop across the street.

Running into Willow seems to lead to a bit of self-reflection in Xander and he decides that hanging with the dead and becoming a member of the gang of the dead by becoming dead himself is not for him. So he splits in his “penis metaphor”. Running into a Faith battling for her life with one of the warriors of the Sisterhood of Jhe in act three Xander rams his “penis metaphor” into the warrior incapacitating her for the moment and allowing Faith and Xander to escape. Hungry and horny (remember that line in “Faith, Hope, and Trick” earlier in season three?) and ready to pop (wow there are so many sex metaphors in this episode) after not getting a kill Faith helps Xander get “up with people” (a reference to the late 1960s musical group that always seemed like a mainstream response to the hippie and countercultural movements of the late sixties and seventies), gets Xander, and then gets him gone.

With his virginity lost and his sense of manhood inflated as a result Xander looks at the supplies the “boys” stole in order to build a cake and discovers it is not a cake they are building but a bomb. Trying to figure out where the gang might plant a bomb Xander goes to Buffy and Angel later in act three but to no avail. As he is driving to the school to ask Giles about where the dead boys might plant a bomb he comes across them walking in the street, grabs Parker while driving, interrogates him, and gets almost all the answers he needs—the bomb is at Sunnydale High—before he decapitates Parker by driving too close to a post box. Hilarious.

Xander, now that he is knowledge guy, heads to Sunnydale High to defuse the bomb with Jack, Bob, and Dickie in close pursuit. In the chase through the high school halls Xander manages to dispatch Bob with a soda macine. Dickie is killed when trapped in a room by the Sisterhood of Jhe. All the while we see glimpses of the apocalyptic battle Buffy, Faith, Willow, Angel, and Giles are involved in during the chase. Then he traps Jack in the boiler room where the bomb lies. Xander, in a scene laced with references to Donald Siegel’s machoish Dirty Harry (1971), refuses to let Jack leave and thus forces him to defuse the bomb. On his way out the door Xander tells O’Toole that he doesn’t want to see him on campus anymore. And he won’t since Jack is eaten by Werewolf Oz as he tries to exit through another door leaving Oz feeling “oddly full” the next day. Hilarious.

In the final scene of “The Zeppo” Cordy tries once again to pull Xander’s chain. This time Xander smiles and walks away from Mean Cordelia. Xander, at least for the moment, is a new man.