I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: AGAINST ME!-“I Was a Teenage Anarchist” (2010).

I heard this song on the radio today and thought it rather ideal for this book.  (Except for the part about the music industry, of course).

I was a teenage anarchist, looking for a revolution.
I had the style, I had the ambition.
I read all the authors, I knew the right slogans.
There was no war but the class war.
I was ready to set the world on fire.
I was a teenage anarchist, looking for a revolution.

I was a teenage anarchist, but the politics were too convenient.
In the depths of their humanity all I saw was bloodless ideology.
And with freedom as the doctrine, guess who was the new authority?
I was a teenage anarchist, but the politics were too convenient.

I was a teenage anarchist, but then the scene got too rigid.
It was a mob mentality, they set their rifle sights on me.
Narrow visions of autonomy, you want me to surrender my identity.
I was a teenage anarchist, the revolution was a lie.

Do you remember when you were young and you wanted to set the world on fire?

Sums up the book (at least from Sophie’s side, pretty well.  And in 3 minutes, no less.

I rather like Against Me!  Although this song is far poppier than punk.

[READ: Week of August 13, 2010] Letters of Insurgents [Ninth Letters]

The penultimate week of Insurgent Summer has everything you always wanted in a book: a teenaged girl trying to seduce her father while her mother looks on and encourages her.  And the sad thing is that that scene, and not any of the political discussions or anything else is what I will remember this book for.  This scene, as corrupt and creepy and hurtful as it was is what I will think of if anyone ever asks me if I read Letters of Insurgents.  And that, I think, is a crying shame, because there are so valid and interesting discussions about individualism in the book, but I’ll just keep seeing Yara forcing herself on Yarostan (and probably Mirna having sex with the devil).

Yarostan is dismayed by Sophia’s letter: “How can a population that just woke up be back asleep?” (663).

Yara and Mirna are back from their trip, and the upshot seems to be that they argued a lot with Jasna about Titus.  But Yarostan was still inspired by Mirna’s trip.  When he and several workers traveled to other plants, they didn’t investigate the specifics of carton making.  He argues

This willingness on the part of so many people to continue letting themselves be represented obviously allows the “representatives” of everyone’s liberation to remain at the “head” of a movement that seems to be on the verge of ending the history of representatives (665).

At the same time radio announcements are talking about tanks and troops mounting on the borders, clearly an attempt at intimidation.  Of course, even if the population is free within the borders, having the military there is a virtual cage:

A population out of control within ‘national boundaries’ is like an animal in a zoo–it’s caged, imprisoned by zoo keepers; it isn’t a free population (667).

And yet despite this, there seems to be a vast amount of what he calls play acting: people are leaving the plant daily with no specific purpose, Mirna and Yara seem determined to achieve their wildest fantasies.

Nevertheless, the police have returned to their old ways.  Mr Ninovo made a complaint about snakes in his house.  The same police who last time told Yarostan to beware of whiners like Mr Ninovo, this time gave him a real inquisition about where the snakes came from.  They also said that he and his family were prime suspects.

When Yara, Mirna and Jasna return, Jasna tells Yarostan that she is engaged to Titus.  This of course leads to more Titus bashing which upsets Jasna to no end.  Jasna knows that there are questions about the past, but why not let two people who are happy now be happy.  As to the issue of why he didn’t tell Yarostan about the letters, Yarostan argues that Titus told him about Yara’s birth, Jan’s disappearance, Mirna’s mother’s hysteria and Mirna’s father loss of a job.  He had a lot on his mind.

Mirna cites example after example of Titus’ behavior and then concludes that he was just like her mother.  And then she finally explains her whole devil theory.  When Yara told Mirna that Vesna was kissing herself in the mirror, Mirna knew Vesna had a devil in her too:

That night Yara convinced me it wasn’t the devil that had killed Vesna, but fear of the devil.  It was the intrusion of the world Jan had hated, the world that makes our love impossible, Titus Zabran’s world, that killed Vesna.  Yara showed me that what my mother had called the devil is what’s most natural in all of us, what we feel; it’s our desires and our passions; it’s what we are.  No sword is needed to embed the devil in us, the devil is already there; it’s the removal of the devil that requires a sword.  It was Zabran and my mother with their crystal palaces and heavens and gods that made Vesna fear her own self, her own desires, her devil (673).

This all may be true but it’s still a bit of a jump from the top of the mountain/sex with the devil scene, frankly.  And the crystal palace thing only came up from what Sabina said, none of the people in Yarostan’s world ever talked about them.  Yarostan agrees about the crystal palaces,  saying that Sabina was talking about industrialization, not repression of desires.

And then Mirna, frustrated with it all, shouts, “I’m going to force you and Jasna to decide which side you’re on, once and for all” (674).

This leads to the most outlandish and disturbing scene that I can imagine.  Yara and Mirna drag Zdenek and Yarostan to the mountaintop in the rain and, essentially, Yara tries to seduce her father, trying to prove that he does have a devil in him. It’s a brutal and nasty scene.  And I refuse to accept that it’s some sort of faux morality/lack of passion that makes me think this whole thing is dreadful.  And I’m proud of Yarostan for resisting (and I may even excuse his hurting his daughter in the process).

Yarostan flees to home.  When Mirna arrives she yells, “I’ve had enough God-worshipers in this house already” (682).  And it’s at this point that I would leave, because she has gone over the deep end.

The next morning Mirna puts on hypocritical sweetness, but Yara is shooting daggers at him.  Mirna’s sweetness continues, and when Jasna arrives later, Mirna invites her and Titus to come over to their house for a nice evening.

When Titus arrives there is polite discussion with Titus laying out his opinion:

For me the autonomy of the class has always constituted the indispensable condition for its revolutionary activity.  The trade union council was not an instrument of that autonomy.  The work wasn’t only repetitious; it had no historical significance; that apparatus did not carry any part of the proletarian project (686).

Mirna pretends to ask him naive questions but is actually grilling him about all of this.  And they eventually get to “the letter.”

Jasna says that the first time Titus heard of anyone being arrested because of it was when he visited [Mirna] after [she] left a message for him at his office.  He immediately went to the police to try to see if Yarostan and Jan could be released since he was convinced they had been arrested by mistake, but he got no further than to provoke them to arrest him (687).

After much back and forth, Titus reveals that

Capitalist social relations become a fetter to the further development of the productive forces capitalism itself created.  Those relations become an obstacle to the further developement of social capital (689).

Yarostan is surprised and asks, is he’s really devoted his life to remove the obstacles so people can create objects.  Jasna objects to that phrasing.  And Titus says that he has devoted his life to “theoretical reflection and elaboration, a work which permits the proletariat’s activity to be based on an understanding of its past experience and future course” (690).

And as the discussion draws to a close, we see that Titus has some distinctly different attitudes about some things:

Those workers [at the barricades] like you and Jan; they were workers whose actions reflected the class’ implacable hatred of capital, its will to struggle against the entire bourgeois order, its repudiation of class collaboration.  What I’m saying is that what guided those workers was class instinct not proletarian theory.  And instinct is not enough for the proletariat.  In order to liberate itself and emancipate humanity, the proletariat requires organization and consciousness (692).

Mirna asks him if he sees the same thing happening now.  And he says yes.  Mirna says she knows of people who would be very interested in a discussion like this about current affairs.  So Jasna invites everyone to her house in two weeks for a combination political discussion /engagement party.

As the letter ends, Yarostan knows that Mirna is up to something.  He says he no longer agrees with the ideas that Titus espouses but he does not find him suspicious of event in the past.  And yet we have to wait two weeks until the big party!

Then it’s Sophia’s letter, and please please please letter there be no incest!

Sophia is sympathetic to Yarostan because he seems so lost (not , apparently because his daughter tried to have sex with him).  And yet now she’s on the offensive saying that he didn’t do very well in his interrogation of Titus.  She and Sabina argue that Titus’ position is similar to George Alberts:

the population consisted of hotheads, hoodlums incapable of industrializing themselves.  The only difference Sabina or I can see between them is that Alberts’ special field was technology whereas Zabran’s was politics (696).

Sabina had learned from George Alberts that he had been given an assignment abroad to work on the atomic bomb.  Only Titus knew anything else about it.  And all of the people in that first carton factory arrest were hired while Alberts was away.  So they couldn’t have been under his influence.  Titus is making Alberts a scapegoat by claiming that his influence on Yarostan’s failure to do his job.  Certainly lumpen Yarostan couldn’t have done his own thing, he must have been manipulated.

Then Sophia tells Yarostan that something has happened with Ted.  They’ve become very close [and in the margins I wrote, Oh God, because]: “I think I love Ted in a way I’ve never loved anyone before” (698).  Ted was released from jail with Minnie’s help.  And since Ted’s place was destroyed by the police, he asks if he can stay in Sophia’s house.  He stays in the missing Tina’s room.

This leads to the full redemption of Ted.  He was not in fact a pedophile.  And we learn from Ted’s point of view most of the story that Tissie told about Ted in a previous letter.

He remembers fondly working with Sabina and Tina, and was devastated when Tissie (whom he thought of almost as a sister at this point, go hooked on heroin).  Then we finally hear about how Alec made things more bearable in the garage for Ted.

Alec understood the difference between dope dealing and all the other things we did… [He] opened Jose’s eyes too.  Not that he was ever blind but he couldn’t make himself go against Sabina (701).

He says that he and Jose became friends eventually too, and they wanted out of the situation, but not without the ladies.  But Sabina was totally wrapped up in the bar and the garage.  He speculates that Jose got arrested as the only way he could get out of the scene.

Then we get a lengthy discussion with Minnie.  Minnie reveals that she had loved Alec for years, since the newspaper days and wanted him very badly.  But he was so focused on Sophia that she never thought she had a chance.  Alec had made sloppy advances at Minnie, but mostly as a holding pattern for Sophia.  And Minnie wouldn’t be Sophia’s second.

And then of course, Alec and Sophia were together for two years.  Wait, no true! Sophia tells her that Alec was with Luisa.  It was Luisa’s house and Sophia had moved out once she saw that Luisa was with Alec.

After about two years with Luisa, Alec ran into Minnie again, and she told him about the political movement she was involved in now.  He seemed interested in the movement, not in Minnie, and wanted to know more.    Alec threw himself into the politics with fervor, and then he threw himself fully into Minnie (he was a monster in every way, she brags).

But soon Alec took over the organization and alienated almost everyone except Minnie, Eric and Carmen, a 16-year-old girl.  Minnie grew jealous of Carmen and that was the end of them.

Alec and Carmen opened an independent bookstore which sold all kinds of good stuff.  But one day they were arrested for dealing heroin (trumped up charges, obviously).  And after that their meetings were all about action.  Alec, Carmen and Eric were arming themselves as a “suicide squad.”  They became urban guerrillas.

When the riot broke out, Alec grabbed his gun and said he was going to get the local heroin dealer (who was Seth at Sabina’s bar).  They were shouting “clear out the rats!”  Alec and Carmen ran in with guns.  They came back out moments later looking victorious and then they were gunned down.

Eric was totally freaked by it and he and Minnie have been together ever since.

Then Sophia talks about Daman.  How he can compartmentalize his life so efficiently.  He is a wonderful and considerate man to whomever he is with at the time, but once they are in a different situation, he becomes businesslike and shuts out affection.

Daman invited Sophia and Ted to a meeting of the repression group (which Minnie is a part of too).  Art Sinich was there too.   It turned out that Art had been intertwined with Sophia in many ways.  He knew Luisa and Lem Icel for many many years.  When Sophia asks how he can agree with the Repression Committee if he is a pacifist, he answers “the violence of the oppressed isn’t the same as the violence of the oppressor…that the oppressed races carry the seeds of liberation” (723).

But Art disagrees with Luisa in that it’s not  mass movement that will achieve anything.  Rather, it’s race “We seek to maximize the power and influence we can exert as an organized minority” (724).

Sophia is freaked out by this turn and leaves Art alone.  When she gets back to the committee she sees Luisa hovering over Ted and she freaks on her.  But hilariously they get into a cab to have the argument (poor cabbie).

They rehash the arguments that they’ve been having for the whole book.

Luisa says that when she first met Nachalo, he was an individualist terrorist.  She made him a union militant admired by thousands.

Sophia argues that she didn’t do it for love or any other reason that her beloved union…her higher power.

Luisa leaps on her and lists all of Sophia’s nonsensical “relationships’ and how dare she says anything about love.  She argues there’s no way Sophia can justify her submission to Jose.  But Sophia asks what about Luisa and Alec, then?

Luisa clams down and admits she was initially very flattered by Alec’s attention.   She craved his love.  And she achieved it and was very happy.  Then she started to lose him, and she was devastated when he was killed.

After their fight, they have breakfast together, and Sophia returns home to confess her love to Ted.

She ends her letter with the bizarrely cryptic:  “I still love you, but no longer as a god.  I feel just a little bit sorry for you” (7).

COMMENTS

I don’t know that I have ever hated a book as much as I hate this book.  I don’t mean I’m not enjoying it, because there are parts I enjoy.  I like the discussions and politics.  I even like seeing things from different points of view.  But I hate this book for trying to convince me on several occasions that medicine is bad, that incest is good and that behaving like a wild lunatic is the way to get things done.

I hate that there are no decent people in this book (except maybe Minnie and Daman, although Daman has been made to seem like a robot).  I hate that Titus, a low level employee could have the power and influence to incarcerate all of these people that he knows, in the name of the cause.

Okay, well, maybe Ted is okay too, but why did he have to be accused (somewhat convincingly) of pedophilia?  Why does this book hate all of these people?  And why does the book then expect me to care about any of them?  Or to listen to their ideas, which are not realistic in any way?

I’m just not even sure if I’m supposed to be rooting for anyone.

I just hope that the final week will give some sort of redemption for everything.