M. A. Greenstein, writing from Boulder Colorado, U.S. (12/18/2006)

It was the summer of 1967, just two years after the passing of the Civil Rights Act, two years following the Watts Riots. In Baltimore City black citizens, driven by the summer heat of the civil rights movement, took to the streets and dramatized the art and consumerist mayhem of civil disobedience. Traveling in frenzied packs, they broke through store windows, filched goods, set buildings aflame, trampled innocent bystanders — the aggressive melee brought “Charm City” to its knees. Amongst the burning buildings on Eutaw Place was a late 19th century office space in which my father had started and grown his early medical practice. To a man born and raised in the western heart of Baltimore’s downtown and who spearheaded free clinics and orthopedic wings in hospitals throughout the Greater Baltimore area, the idea of leaving the city and moving his surgical practice to the ‘burbs’ constituted a conflicted sense of “white flight.” I can still remember the tension at home, made ever more taut by the curfew that had been placed over Baltimore City and County during the first few days of unrest. There remain too, the unforgettable memories of the dark, smoke-filled skies, already thick with summer humidity and the soft, black top convertibles parked around the neighborhood draped in white ash. To city and state patriarchs, ash is the sign of losing control; to a child’s eyes, ash looks a lot like snow.

After living in L. A. for over half my life, fire ash has now taken on a more eco-specific significance. Fire, after all, is old news in a city that was built on top of and around desert chaparral, a city that awaits deadly annual wildfires especially when the dry and unruly Santa Ana winds blow into town. For the Gabrieleno Indians who were indigenous to southern California territory, slash and burn practices defined their cultural terrain. For modern Los Angelenos, wildfire transforms cultural geography but without the luxury of expanding into habitable open space.

Yet in 1992, like in 1967, ember residue veiling the city of the angels, signaled its fall to the rage bursting from the seams of the economically, socially and racially disenfranchised. Throughout the megalopolis known for its “maya” of pleasure culture, the documented violence on home turf, by virtue of media projection, had the capacity to sink cultural illusion (if only for a moment.) In one video instance, with one image (the L.A.P.D. beating of Rodney King), a furious psychological repression was unleashed, beyond the far reaches of hipster hedonism. Those of us living in Venice and in Valley, in West Hollywood and in Pasadena, could hear the heavy din of silence filling the urban air as violence spiraled out of control. Sympathizers situated as far as the San Bernardino county line acted out in solidarity and in personal ire: Taking his turn to exhibit a new piece of performance art, one of my students set fire to a video monitor which quickly transformed the community college classroom into flames. “Culture war” with all of its socio-economic, racial, civil and aesthetic implications, grows wild like chaparral and remains endemic to So. Cal. ecology.

There were great ironies that week, which only “high art” could get a way with. HIGHWAYS managed to open its doors during the limited lifting of curfew hours, allowing those of us who could make it through the maze of police barricaded streets, to work off the heat and anxiety of the moment while Annie Sprinkle vibrated herself into spiritual orgasm. Grand seduction is always part of war, says psychoanalyst James Hillman, and who but Sprinkle could remind us of this fact?

Hillman, a student of mythology and of depth psychology takes another track to examine the ecstasy of battle. In his recent book, The Terrible Love of War, he makes a psychologically plausible argument for the history of human combat that goes something like this: The drama of war, and the hellish bloodbath that accompanies it, has played out on Planet Earth for eons. And while we busy ourselves with thick historical reasoning over the whys and hows of causation, we maintain that sick-hearted, aching feeling, knowing that with all the socio-biological, economic or religio-political explanations we give ourselves, we can neither satisfy, restrain, nor extinguish our primal need to reckon with the hearty, relentless resilience of war.

What then to do? Hillman turns to a nuanced examination of the Greek god and goddess, Mars and Venus, working his way through the attributes and examples of heart pounding, ardent passion, the aesthetically aroused motor drive that gloriously sends men like General Grant and Patton into combat. The erotic smell of blood mixed with mother earth, the seductive heat of conflict, the “sublime terror” that pushes soldier and radical alike to the razor’s edge of life– this is the primal “Martian” and “Venutian” stuff of war. This is the insatiable divine will to power that John Gray failed to address in his bromide for heterosexual romance. Less we forget this aspect of ourselves, Hollywood gladly fills in the dyslexic gaps of collective memory with uber-wide screen images of urban meltdown at the hands of state and rebel militia – the requisite burning city, the close up of the beaten, the raped, and the murdered, the ritual hoopla of victory scored! War breeds its own eidetic equanimity of rebellion and destruction whether we’re thinking Freetown, Gaza or Los Angeles.

To equate the 1992 L. A. Riot/Insurrection with civil wars conducted in Sierra Leona or throughout the Israeli/Palestinian territory may seem perversely misguided. Admittedly, the equation does not satisfy all algebraic laws. But the extent to which we can reflect on one of the more deadly culture battles dramatized in L. A., but pervasive throughout the U.S., we are free to think about civil war and civil disobedience in a broader, cross-cultural and for hermeneutic thinkers like Hillman, mythic light.

By turning to the mythos of the Greco-Roman empire, Hillman insinuates the aesthetic logic of war inherent in civil societies. Imperial power, colonization, remapping land for goods –- keeping a republic going is a tough day job, and as they say on the streets, ‘somebody’s gotta to do it.’ In any effort to consolidate and procreate an ideal of organized social contract, the irrational desire for combat precedes civility and it is here that Hillman encourages us to give up our hope for snuffing out the roots of war in human culture.

My father, who recently passed away, was a retired military officer, decorated in WWII with a Bronze Star and Purple Heart and in the final decade of his life, was promoted to Colonel in the medical league of the U.S. Army Officers Reserve. A fearless man (even to the end) and one of the world’s best problem-solvers, George H. Greenstein regarded hope as one of keys that opens the door to the human mind. “There are no hopeless situations; only those who grow hopeless about them,” he reminded me more than once throughout the sticky periods of my life. Hope, for the courageous and the visionary is just another way of viewing a seemingly impossible situation. Glazed eyes open wide, a fuzzy mind begins to work quickly, synapses crackle with the speed of chemical code. Hope, at best, gives rise to an alternate point of view.

For all of his psychoanalytic misgivings, Hillman does not wholly dismiss the agency of hope, especially where intuition and reason illuminate experience with the energy of hermeneutical analysis. I would agree with him that hope can sweeten the future with Talmudic- like moral inquiry just at it tends to sour when blown out of proportion by simple-minded, religious literalism.

That said, let us hope for days, months and years of renewed daring and thoughtful interpretive reflection, the sort that matches the inevitable radicality of civil disobedience, and let us further expect equal vigor from our artists who, after being made to read Kantian aesthetics in grad school, are surely ready to remark on our “terrible love of war.”