"Tumbal," by Ida Bagus Made, Balinese artist-priest,

the Agung Rai Museum of Art,
located in Paliatan, Ubud, Bali. Via Nusantara .com


To be uncompromisingly clear-eyed about it, which in my opinion the situation requires (and has required for decades now), causes me to point out here that
this NYRB article(Tony Judt, The New York Review of Books: "The New World Order," Vol. 53, no. 12, July 14, 2005), unlike the ones I mention below (yesterday on Billie Holiday, and last week by Joan Didion) is not POV as in merely Point of View, but POV as utter Point of Vomit: it completely overlooks the regions of rhetoric where analysis and circumstance make clear that the other highly transparent motives served by the current type of "humanitarian" perspective (those considered in the article) are cultural imperialism and self-serving, profit-mongering, resource-stealing economics.

In that, cultural imperialism and self-serving economics are not separate motives but are intimately related: capitalism as a system will always need to be the kissing cousin of political domination--captitalism is not about sharing wealth and resources, it is about hording for the few, competing to knock out all comers, dominating or eliminating those who are perceived to be weak, survival at all cost--that is why essentially it is a system that does not care about the environment, people, and artful culture unless those elements are compartmentalized into commodities.

Beyond the obvious problem of hording, though, why should it be necessary right now for capitalist interests based in the U.S to be kissing cousins with territorial and cultural imperialism?--because it is running out of places, resources, and peoples to exploit so to satisfy its beastliness, its continuing need for the profit that sustains our comfortable lives. Get it?--that is why the world picture and situation are worsening and difficult for us, here in our comforts, to understand.


"Beastly," by Tan Oe Pang, Singapore Museum of Art, 1988
via Nusantara. com

"Humanitarianism," as this writer frames the use of this term, is not in trouble because of an elementary contradiction in its principles, to "do good," and to "prevent ill" in the world, which are wonderful ideals. No. Humanitarianism is in trouble because those ideals are not enough: they've been cut-off from the materialist sourcing that is the basis for life and world. "Humanitarianism," in that definition, misrecognizes its complicity with destructive and self-serving corporate interests. Humanitarianism has cut itself off from ways of understanding and dealing with socio-economics as systems, and history as structure, a combination that governs lives and how resources are used/managed materially: in real-life places, over time. Simple as that.

If so cut-off from recognizing and integrating a response in terms of the macro governing structures of life, I'm now wondering if the "humanitarian" ideals, "to do good and prevent ill" in the world can even work on the micro levels of one-on-one relations between people. It's a serious and an on-going question--one where getting at answers (which are never permanent) means continually re-inventing ways and means according to unique situations and perspectives. That is primarily a rhetorical framework, and is essential, then, to survival of many. Apart from the other kinds of rhetorical situations that are escalations beyond that level of the rhetorical into material violences such as war, then, this is what is meant by life being a constant struggle--rhetorical awareness and responsibility for understanding, recognizing, not blindering oneself with ideals ungrounded in materiality.



--cm
o~o/