Never the twain

Attended the New York Public Library:LIVE event on "Eminent Domain" that was focused on redevelopment plans for the Atlantic Center in Brooklyn (proposed new home of the Nets). The speakers were urbanist Tom Angotti, photographer and activist Brian Berger, historian Marshall Berman, psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove, moderated by documentary filmmaker Michael Galinsky.

Basically the panellists were wholesaleally defending the rights of 'public' and 'homeowners' to defend their communities and living spaces in the face of private property development alloyed to government using tools of 'Eminent Domain' to nationalize and then cunically privatize their property in the mname of public good inter alia profit for the property developer (and in turn slush funding). It is an argument and a position I am familiar with and have engaged with in various ways over the last five years - in the context where I live (Vilnius, Lithuania).

The terms with which, or upon which, the panellists conducted their discussion (Berman hinted at something "vaguely left"), however, was anathema. And for which I coin a new phrase "Flabby Left". It is a set of tenets that belongs to a genotype I now call "Homo Americanus" (whom plays 'Abel' to the genotype known as "Homo Sovietikus" within the realm of soviet studies).

The 'flabbiest' of all of the criticism was pearled by Mindy Fullilove in reference to her theory [and eponymous book] of "root shock". That uprooted and displaced communities - she concentrated on innercity African American examples - are bound to suffer from serious ills and sociopathies - known as "co-morbidities". Roughly speaking co-morbidities are a rhizomatic set of corporeal and psychological disorders that resist treatment and are contingent upon each other (drug abuse, sexual profligacy, AIDS, TB, malnutrition, asthma, diabetes, et al.) And their best cure is "Nostalgia" the remembering of the originary home from which the sufferer was displaced.

Many people in the crowd exonerated her theory with testimony and rounds of applause... Tall Tales and True of elderly people dying from this 'homesickness". The terms "urban genocide" and "benign ethnic cleansing" were bandied around. Metropolitan displacement seems to be THE disease of the 21st century - and New York its patient or host.

When delivered en masse with a "call-and-response" feel, more familar to me from cinema depictions of Evangelist church services, than august lecture halls it felt like HEIMAT discourse.

In fact, the likes of Ms. Fullilove need to be challenged on the point that nostalgia is easily commodified and trucked as propaganda and tool of social manipulation by the same forces she was attacking. There is something referred to in European cultural criticism as "The Nostalgia Industry". A clear example is the "cult of strong leadership" trafficked by the Putin Regime - with a nod back to Peter the Great and pre-Soviet Tzarist imperialism. (Putin and Medvedev and the Russian power elite are from Peterburg). Russians understand a strong leader... as if the Tzarist age (the power of the Orthodox Church has been returned to it by Putin) was golden - and the revoltuion never delivered the people from but to evil.

Closer to home, in the United States, the great tool of the Nostalgia Industry is the Second Amendment:

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

The National Rifle Association (NRA), the GOP, and the Red States sell a vision of the everlasting American Frontier and the rights of frontiersman and homesteaders to protect their property [delivered to them by migration to the New World - the land of plenty] from in no particular order Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Mexicans, and Native Americans (that group of people who belong to this continent who suffered blitzkrieg and genocide - and understand that nostalgia is no good). This is Heimat discourse in translation "blood-in-the-soil" and Nostalgia at its ultra-American. Guns are for the protection of the "Little House On the Prairie" (and the virgin women volk who live there).

This description of Nostalgia should radicalise the realization of its negative heart. Guns in America kill innercity black males (killer-not-cure) and a few innocent bystanders with them. And the proliferation of guns is likely deliberated to this end (they weren't a threat on the original list because they were slaves) It is a useless emotion.

That nobody in the audience or panel reflected upon the sad fact that rallying around social issues on a larger scale is only happening - again - in relation to Kapital/property ownership (and in the face of US economic collapse) is a tell tale sign that the battle is already lost. Communism (community-ism) is dead and buried. This isn't a discourse about fellow man or neighbor but competing self-interest; blocs of capital vs. blocs of apartments (and apartment dwellers).

If there's any sense in looking back - it would be to analyze what went wrong and when.