Ruminations 101(3) (The year of Obatala): Looking Back on 2022 in Epigrams and Aphorisms --Part 3, "Words, huh, yeah, what are they good for?"

 

Pix Credit here

pix Credit here--Obatala Ceremony

 For the last several years, and with no particular purpose other than a desire to meander through reflection, I have taken the period between Christmas and New Years Eve to produce a s summary of the slice of the year to which I paid attention through epigrams and aphorisms.  It follows an end of year  tradition I started in 2016 (for those see here), 2017 (for these see here), 2018 (for those see here), 2019 (for those see here); 2020 (for those see here); 2022 (for those see here).   

Pix Credit here

At the start of this year I noted, in passing on the Annual Oracle of the Ifa practitioners of Cuba, that this was to be the year of Obatala (The Orishas Speak: The 2022 Letter of the Yoruba Association of Cuba (Letra del Año para el 2022 de la Asociación Yoruba de Cuba) and My Preliminary Interpretation). "This is a year of unsuccessful revolution, of challenges that may not succeed but that may weaken all orders. This is the year of rational irrationality, of creative destruction that is both rational and irrational. It is a year of great passion, if dishonesty, and of violence." (Ibid.). The ruling Orisha of the year was Obatala.  Obatala is the essence of rationality and irrationality.  Obatala represents the highest form of rational creative potential as well as its basest forms of dissipation. Obatala is, in the tradition of the West, the King of Cups in Tarot.  These are to be taken in their semiotic sense--they provide condensed representations of a related cluster of impulses that sometimes manifest.

And 2022 did not disappoint.  It was a year when the firmer the pull toward rationality, toward authoritative structures, toward management and control the more exposed its irrationality and failures. Obatala speaks of the simultaneous apotheosis and  rotting of the ideologies around which rational science is constructed, constrained, instrumentalist, and corrupted. Indeed if 2021 was the year in which what appeared to be new forms of collective management were undertaken (and the rage it was meant to contain), 2022 exposed its corruption--manipulation of social media in the US in the service of elections, abuse of discretion of the sort that exploded even the fig leaf of rule based containment; the corruption of religion by its ministers against its own devout communities. 2022 was the year that just as everything looked like it was going right, it went wrong. And it was a year of violence; of seeking to recreate a 19th century imperial state even as post global empires are forming. It was the year of doing and undoing.

And it is in that spirit, the spirit of 2022, that the epigrams and aphorisms that follow are offered. Each aphorism links to a essay written during the year. The theme of this third set are words. It focuses on the way that 2022 revealed words in their glory: objects, projectiles, theater, and invitations. In the process they better expose 2022 for what it was--a year that revealed as hard as it tried to veil. 

Links to the 2022 Year End Ruminations here:

Part 1, Seeing and Knowing

Part 2, War, huh, yeah; what is it Good For?

Part 3: Words, huh, yeah; what are they good for?

Part 4:"de Sade's Theater as Performed by the Inmates of the Global Asylum"

Part 5: Good intentions gone bad; bad intentions made farce

 

1.  The end of statements are the beginning of meaning.

Texts of President Biden's Remarks on his Visit to Poland 26 March 2022: The Discourse of War on the Periphery of Empires and the Sacral Constitution of Imperial Collectives. "And thus the message to the Ukrainian people delivered personally by Mr. Biden--"We stand with you. Period!" (Ibid) --acquires a more nuanced meaning in this context. One stands with another, but certainly that does not mean that one intervenes, or serves as surety, or otherwise makes common cause.  Solidarity is a discursive device first, and a structure within which carefully measured action may be tolerated. And here, Mr. Biden draws a connection--a critical one--with the American elite sense of relevant historical parallels.  And that parallel is the way in which the United States chose to avoid interference in the Soviet Union's management of its empire in Europe."

2.  Saying and doing unmask each other.

V. Zelenskyy: "It is time to do everything to make the war crimes of the Russian military the last manifestation of this evil on earth - address by the President of Ukraine" Speech to the Nation 3 April 2022. "Many of the states that have carefully refused to involve themselves directly in the military campaigns that constitute one front in the Russian invasion, and the global counter-thrusts, now, in the face of mounting evidence of violence that exceeds standards for the waging of war and acquire the character of criminal activity even when measured against the standards (broadly interpreted) of war, now seek to suspend Russia from the UN Human Rights Council. This will require a vote of 2/3s of the members of the UN General Assembly and in effect will constitute a sense of the General Assembly that Russia is "persistently committing gross and systematic violations of human rights." (Reuters). And yet, even if unsuccessful, that action continues to push forward the quite effective assault both on Russia's credibility (that is one that produces a successful assault on Russian narrative credibility in public and private fora), and on its ability to use the discursive battlefield effectively to support its military operations aimed. Military and discursive objectives have had to be changed quickly in light of the ineffectiveness of both. And it is not clear that the Russians will be able to recover anything like a credible discursive position even if they are able to reverse their military failures.  Yet it is the consequence of those failures--of military objectives--when combined with what appears to be the great success of its tactics (indiscriminate sexual abuse, mass killings of civilians, destruction of civilian targets unconnected to military objectives--the tactics so well used in pacifying Chechnya and perhaps to some extent Syria) that will combine to produce what is likely to be both the greatest tragedies of this Russian initiated war (for the Ukrainian people) and the greatest cost to Russia, its leaders, and ultimately its people."

3. Voting is meaningless outside of their context. 

Marxism by Referendum: Cuba's New Family Code; The State is Leading But Will the People Follow?."I have noted the unique aspects of the development of Cuban Marxist-Leninism (see here and here).  Among its most interesting feature has been the increasing use of the popular referendum to validate the enactment of important changes to the law and the governmental structure of Cuba.   In many ways, this represents a unique development of Marxist Leninist governmentalism--undertaken to be sure under the leadership of the Cuban Communist Party and its related mass organs (PCC), but at the same time indicative of an effort at something like a more consultative form of engagement with the masses. For all of its potential, it remains very much a work in progress.  Elections and referendums in Cuban Marxist-Leninism cannot be operated and interpreted the way that such devices are understood and used in liberal democratic states.  The vote of a majority is not merely a signal of approval but also an indication of the sense of the community.  But equally important is the process of mass consultation that precedes thevote.  While the vote signals the success of the vanguard's ability to manage a process of developing popular buy-in and affirmation of its policy choices, the consultation process provides the most significant opportunity to hear what popular opinions and to either "change" the draft or "engage" with the people.  That, at any rate appears to be the form in which Cuban Marxist-Leninism is sometimes performed. This has become more obvious in the current context of efforts by the Cuban leadership to enact and subject to a popular referendum a new Family Code."

4. And the corruption of their context is always masked as the stuff of politics.

Why the Twitter Files actually matter: Twitter’s previous management made some controversial political decisions. Some of them haven’t held up." Many inclined to distrust what they see as Big Tech’s liberal leanings have cried vindication. The documents show in detail how Twitter made key content moderation decisions that disadvantaged Trump, conservatives, and people who broke with the public health consensus on Covid-19. They say the evidence proves that, again and again, Twitter intervened to squelch speech that the liberal establishment didn’t like. Meanwhile, others — including most liberals and many mainstream journalists — are unimpressed. They say Twitter’s policies here were already known and that the specific decisions in question — blocking a story they feared stemmed from a foreign hack, banning the account of President Trump after he incited an insurrection, and deboosting accounts spreading public health misinformation — generally seem at least defensible.  The discourse has quickly become one of us versus them — perfect for Twitter. The journalists to whom Musk gave the documents — most prominently, Substackers Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss — are outspoken, unsparing critics of what they believe is the “woke” liberal groupthink that pervades mainstream American media institutions, making them now effectively allies of the right in the culture war. Musk’s behavior since buying Twitter has made him a villain to the left, too."

5. War erodes the barrier between immortality and the preservation of breeding bloodlines. 

Russia's mobilised troops entitled to free sperm freezing - TASS. "Russian troops who have been part of a mobilisation drive for military operations in Ukraine will have the right to get their sperm frozen for free in cryobanks, the state TASS agency reported on Wednesday. Citing Igor Trunov, president of the Russian Union of Lawyers, TASS reported that the Health Ministry responded to his appeal for budgetary assistance with the plan. The ministry "determined the possibility of financial support from the federal budget for free conservation and storage of germ cells (spermatozoa) for citizens mobilized to participate in the special military operation for 2022-2024", Trunov was quoted as saying."

6. At times, words are not enough to convey a strongly held point of view; in those instances windows and stairways more definitive, if fatally, underscore meaning. 

Russian sausage tycoon who criticised Ukraine invasion falls to death from hotel window : Pavel Antov, a member of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, is found lying in a pool of blood outside a luxury hotel in India. "Pavel Antov was a member of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party and a multi-millionaire, having founded one of Russia’s largest sausage makers. He was reportedly on a trip to celebrate his upcoming 66th birthday when he was found lying in a pool of blood outside the Hotel Sai International in Rayagada, a district in the southern state of Odisha. An unnamed police official told India’s NDTV news outlet they suspected he took his own life after becoming depressed about the death of his friend who was found dead in the same hotel. . . In July he posted a story on his WhatsApp messaging app, criticising Russia’s missile attacks on Kyiv as “terrorism”. He was referring to reports of a girl that had been pulled out from rubble after her house had been shelled. Shortly afterwards, Mr Antov apologised for the post, claiming that the message had been posted by someone else. He said he was “a supporter of the president and my country’s patriot” and “shared the goals” of the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.

7. Religion is the opiate of the judiciary.

 Frank Ravitch and Larry Catá Backer discuss Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, 597 US -- (No. 19–1392, June 24, 2022); the Implications for Religion Clause Jurisprudence. ("Nonetheless the Dobbs decision carries with it consequences that are already connecting it, its jurisprudence, and the principles that may be derived form both, into the heart of emerging Religion Clause jurisprudence. Within weeks of the decision, "Seven clergy members have filed five lawsuits in Florida contending that the state’s abortion restrictions burden their religious beliefs, speech and conduct." (Clergy members contend Florida abortion law violates their religious freedom; 5 suits are filed).  That implicates the emerging jurisprudence of Free Exercise ion two levels.  One touches on the constitutional transformation of Free Exercise (in cases like Kennedy v. Bremerton Sch. Dist 2022) and its reinterpretation of Lukumi Babaluaye and its progeny.  The second touches on the application of the sometimes stricter Free Exercise protections in state religious freedom restoration acts.")

 Frank Ravitch and Larry Catá Backer Discuss Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, 597 U.S. ___ ( No. 21-418, 27 June 2022): Murder in the Cathedral--The Lemon Test is Dead, Establishment Reduced to Spectre; Long Live Free Exercise as a Jurisprudence of History ("That termination provided the majority with the opportunity to undertake a jurisprudential transformation (revolution?; too early to tell) of sorts.  First the majority appeared to substantially rewrote the law of Free Exercise, effectively creating from out of the Lukumi Babaluaye case a presumption that statutes with secular exceptions are nether of general application nor neutral.   It continued the process of changing the  approach to the Religion Clauses from one driven by the Establishment Clause (from 1947) to one driven by the Free Exercise Clause. In the process the court appeared to constitutionalize the idea that the concept of French style laïcité must be rejected (in which it is expected that individuals enter the public space without their religion) in favor of a religiously infused but neutral public space, one in which individuals are expected to bring their religion bit in which all religions must be given neutral space. One now brings history and tradition into the mix.  But what history and what tradition? At its best the test would seek to generalize the accommodations Protestants made among themselves in the 17th century--now applied to all religions and non-religious moral systems. But the focus on Christian prayer as the exemplar of Free Exercise friendly performance suggests the challenge and the corrupting element. ")