You miss one day of news and you’re in a different reality. The fascist regime is good at speed and erasure of memory. Add the speed of machines to the genocidal fury of people’s worst instincts, and history is made instead of being forgotten. Making history requires blood, indifferent of causes. The Trump regime has until now required symbolic sacrifices, but it has now transitioned to the murder of protesters and outright war on memory.
It took me one week in 1991 to miss the Russian revolution that deposed Gorbachev and demolished the Berlin Wall. I was at a retreat at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, hoping to wash out all the evil juju that stuck to me when I covered that history for the news media. Omega used meditation, yoga, saunas, massage and chanting to keep out the outside world. It was great. That week I missed the Russian revolution in the same place that Rip Van Winkle slept and missed the American revolution.
We don’t have that luxury. Retreats are luxuries now, and they are on the side of fascism. What does missing the horror mean now? Your flesh body against the machine. The machine isn’t just tanks and guns, like it was in the 20th century. It is also the fastest disinformation machine in a history that is falsified the moment it happens. Words and images change sides the second they are uttered. The ears and the eyes no longer hear and see what they hear and see. The algorithms move faster than our senses, truth and propaganda have become indistinguishable because the machine works for an antihuman ideology.
I lived under the authoritarian regime that people resisted only through fables. Recalling those times, a Romanian journalist, Horia Ghibutiu, called that brand of resistance to the Communist regime “asopic,” meaning that Aesop wrote about animals to point to the evils of men. Say “wolf” and you mean “tyrant.” Ghibutiu proposes that algorithms could work the same way, if they create inexistent events to move the masses of their followers away from censored language. The phrase “musical festival,” for example, would mean “mass demonstration.”
This is an old and tried trick for Black Americans who resisted and confused racism by changing the meaning of widely used words. For those resisters, “bad” meant “good.”
Translating that for a fast machine programmed to use words in any way their owners want has made those end-of-the-20th-century tactics quaint. Aesop is quaint as well, because the age of words has ended, and the anthropomorphized animals are now endangered species.
The Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, where Rip van Winkle slept and missed the American Revolution, is palliative. The gurgling milk of the oligarchy soothed my restless psyche. The retreat wasn’t cheap. People were paying dearly to stay away by using yoga and astrology, meditation, reading the tarot and studying each other’s auras.
We don’t have the same luxury, no matter how much we would like to. The old magic of retreats will not stop the machine. Only our flesh bodies can. Lenin and Chernyshevsky’s question “What Is To Be Done?” rears its head again.
Unfortunately, we know what the answer was then. What is it now?
