I recall reading, a number of years ago, Raymond Chandler's introduction to a new edition of his short-story collection, "Trouble is My Business". That introduction, written well after the stories themselves were first published, consisted of a meditation on form and substance, content and technique.
The gist of it was this: while in his early years as a writer, Chandler felt that he was bursting with ideas, and struggled with his perceived inability to express those ideas coherently. Later, the situation was reversed: while he no longer felt constrained by matters of technique, he increasingly found it difficult to generate any ideas worth expressing.
This is perhaps an evolution that many creative artists experience during their careers.
All of which leads to today's topic, which is the hysterical outburst on the Right over the publication, by the NY Times and others, of a report describing the Bush Administration's program of monitoring international banking transactions, presumably with a view toward identifying money flows used by terrorists. In the blogosphere at least (the "official" Right media was hardly more restrained) the term "treason" was thrown around with abandon.
Of course the whole thing is absurd; Bush himself years ago stated that financing was going to be among the most closely watched aspects of terrorist activity, and no terrorist worth taking seriously could have believed that his transactions were going unscrutinized.
What all this demonstrates yet again is that, in the competition among values, for some on the Right the value that will always win is Security. Not freedom, not liberty, not democracy, not virtue, not justice, not transparency in government, not anything. The highest - the only - value is Security, and when Security comes into conflict with other values then those values will simply have to yield.
Now during this same week, we get a report showing that - a la Robert Putnam - Americans are leading increasingly isolated lives, characterized by few if any close relationships. The average American apparently leads a life of dismal loneliness.
The connection to the Chandler anecdote now comes into focus: just as we are reaching a point where more and more Americans are questioning the value of their lives, we increasingly demand that those lives be protected, no matter what the cost, no matter how much of our American heritage we must throw overboard to do so.
This to me is the very essence of Decadence.
Perhaps some of the language used by early Americans is a bit stark:
"Give me liberty of give me death" - Patrick Henry
At the same time this type of statement points to the fact that in a nation that has not yet lapsed into decadence there are values higher than security, perhaps even some of those which I enumerated above. There apparently are a sizable number of Americans who ever since September 11 have been living in a constant elevated state of fear and anger, who see the pursuit of terrorists by whatever means necessary to be the only acceptable policy for the US government. The idea that, as time moves on, security should takes its place as one among many competing values, is anathema, and those who disagree with their obsession with security are traitors.
Frankly, there are times when I fear these people more than I do the terrorists themselves.
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