After the Future

Whither the Democrats?

I'm not sure whither, but for me it all comes down to understanding where the power is now, and where it might be hence.  We're in a temporary power lull at the moment, and it's not clear what direction things will go. There is a power struggle in this country that transcends party politics, but there are also internecine factional power struggles within each party, and the party that resolves those conflicts most effectively and quickly is the one more likely to be able to seize the initiative, for good or for ill. The Republicans have proved they are capable of getting organized and seizing the initiative; the Democrats have yet to prove that they can. Anybody who thinks that the Dems have the upper hand simply because polls show that more Americans support Dem programs than support GOP programs is mistaken. It should give them an advantage, but it's not one they have yet to figure out how to work with.

A basic principle of analysis for me is that power lies with the group that is most  organized, focused, and motivated to achieve basic goals. It doesn't matter so much whether a group has broad support so long as there is no organized, focused, and motivated opposition to the group's objectives.  Well-organized minorities can accomplish what unfocussed and unorganized majorities cannot. It's not a question of whether what they accomplish is good or bad; it's just the way power works.

This power dynamic explains the minority successes of the civil rights movement in the sixties and the feminist movement in the seventies. And it also explains the successes of the succes of minority factions within the GOP over the last fifteen years or so to implement an agenda that did not have widespread popular support.  The Dems continuously point out that the polling shows most Americans support Dem programs, but that doesn't seem to help the Dems get anything done. And it explains why GOP strategists don't really care about polls--they understand how power works. They only need to keep the general electorate confused and disorganized. People can disagree all they want, so long as they don't do anything about it. It doesn't matter what they think, so long as they don't get organized into a motivated opposition focused on pushing back.  The only real pushback the Dems mounted was against the GOP assault on Social Security.  It just shows what the Dems could do, even as a legislative minority, if they had the will to do so.

And it also explains why the strategists behind the GOP for the last six years were largely successful in getting support for their absurd policies that should have been exposed for the nonsense that they were had there been a well-organized and motivated opposition. Compare the Republican ramming through the Medicare Prescription bill that nobody wanted (except the in the pharmaceutical and insurance industries) to Hillary's and the Democrats' attempt to reform health care, something most Americans want, over a decade ago. The difference lay in a cadre within the GOP that organized, focused, and motivated even those small-government Republicans who were against the program to get on the bus.  The Democrats rarely show that they have any ability to do that kind of thing.

And this principle also explains what is going on among the Iraqis.  Early on most Iraqis welcomed the US's toppling of Saddam, and looked forward to a reorganization of their society that would bring peace and prosperity.  But organized, motivated, and highly focused minorities, otherwise known as insurgents, easily overruled the will or the majority.  The insurgent minority had the power, seized the initiative, kept everyone off balance, thwarted a much more powerful military force, and there was nothing the Iraqi majority could do about it. At a certain point the Iraqis saw that the Americans could no longer offer them a better future, that the real power lay elsewhere, and so they made the necessary adjustments.  And as soon as they did, Iraq was irretrievably lost to the American cause.

Somewhere over the weekend I read someone describe the minority group that has hijacked the GOP as the "chess club on steroids."  Think Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, Bill Kristol, Karl Rove, and Paul Wolfowitz: very smart, geeky guys with second and third rate souls holding weird, strongly held, sometimes extremist, nerdish, borderline crazy ideas about how the world should be run.  They are so many Bobby Fishers supported by cadres of guys like Dwight from "The Office" who have risen to take over the Republican party establishment.  This is hyperbole, but it points to something fundamentally true.

These guys are smart enough to recognize that they hardly represent the interests of most Americans and that their geekiness is not something most Americans could easily identify with.  They craftily devised ways to deflect attention away from themselves by branding the Democrats as the party of  "liberal elites,"  and found an affable, down-home, empty suit with a political pedigree to be their front man. It was so much smoke and mirrors, but Americans  preoccupied with their own personal lives and so not paying too much attention went along with it and trusted that these guys knew what they were doing and had the best interests of the country in mind--lowering our taxes and keeping us safe and all. And Americans would have kept going along with it if it hadn't all gone so colossally wrong. That's what you get when you put too many Dwights in charge of the various governmental agencies.

But the lesson to be learned is this: power does not lie in unorganized majorities. The Republicans lost this month not because the American electorate was motivated to follow Democratic leadership, but because they were nauseated by Republican incompetence and corruption.  Nausea motivated the majority to kick the bums out, but there is no mandate for the Democrats.  Surely there is an opportunity for the Dems now, but it remains to be seen whether they can are motivated enough to get their act together to focus on solving problems that the majority wants solved. And the GOP can take solace in the fact that while the American electorate was motivated to remove their legislative majorities, it has a short memory and still remains confused, unorganized, and unfocused.  It is ripe for the taking by whichever faction gets it together first to do the taking.

So once again: majorities accomplish little if they are not organized, focused, and motivated; the minorities that are well organized, focused, and motivated get the job done.  I don't see the Democrats as having it together to get much done yet. And while it has been set back, the geeky leadership minority in the GOP has not disbanded. It has created a mess domestically and abroad that we'll be cleaning up for years, but this faction doesn't look at it that way. And you can be sure that as you sit there reading this it is reorganizing and focusing on new strategies to retake control in '08. And it will succeed unless the Dems get organized and focussed enough to resist their assault. Does anyone really believe that Hillary is the one to lead the Dems in this critical period?  The jury's still out on Pelosi, but early signs are not that encouraging.

Along these lines it's interesting to read this evaluation of the Democrats prospects by Thomas Edsall and a critique of it by Jonathan Weller.  Edsall's piece supports the points I made the other day about the weakness of the Democrats lying in the fragmentation of their base and the lack of focus of the people who self identify as Democrats. He sees the Pelosi/Murtha affair as a bigger deal than I tended to see it, so we'll see. But Weller, it seems to me, misses the point.  The Republicans might have their own issues with fractious factions splitting the party, but they have proved that they can overcome them, and the current Dems have not yet proved they can.  The Democrats might have policies that most Americans support when asked by the pollsters, but the Dems have not shown that they are organized, focused, and motivated enough to get those policies implemented. But these are complex and interesting issues that deserve more attention another time.

Defining the Center

I'm going to restrain an impulse I'm feeling now to go on a rant about the MSM and the fatuousness of the Beltway media and their fatuous analysis of what this election means. But it also strikes me that the fatuousness does not lie with the media, but with the people who take it seriously.  The MSM execs are anything but fatuous in promoting the fatuous in their news programming and commentary. I'm talking about the Chris Matthews, Joe Kleins, and Wolf Blitzers--the ones that are supposed to define the sensible center.  The center as the MSM defines it is not the real center.  It's a center that serves their agenda because it excludes voices as fringe that pose a serious, credible challenge to the assumptions of the power elite whose interests the MSM represent:  Everybody focus on the futuous, and nobody gets hurt.

People like Chris Matthews and those who take him seriously accept the whole unbalanced, unfair, skewed system as it is, and they accept the basic assumption about how the world works as it has been defined by those who are gaming it.  Right now the American system is a lot like a casino where the games are rigged to favor the house, but the house allows a winner now and then to give the others enough hope that they keep buying into the game as the house has set it up. 

We needed a serious, respectable political alternative.  And right now there is none.  But even if you are someone who disagrees with the basic approach and positions of the political and economic left (as opposed to the cultural left, which is different), I hope you can agree that we need it as a robust opposition to provide a counterweight to the power elite.  Right now there is nothing in the public forum that most Americans are exposed to that offers a substantive, fact-based, principled, and intellectually sound critique of the "casino" system as it currently operates.  There are no authoritative voices to challenge and explain how rigged the system is.

It is a  very important objective for the power elite at this time is to define the center as Liebermanesque and to associate the political and economic left with the cultural left proponents of sexual liberation issues like abortion and gay rights, issues they know the political center will always be uncomfortable at best with.  The serious economic and political left, insofar as it exists, is marginalized as the "extreme" or "radical"  or "flakey", and rendered completely irrelevant and voiceless.  Look what the media did to a centrist like Al Gore because of his reputation as an environmentalist.  He was dismissed and continuously branded by leading representatives of the fatuous MSM as flakey, and not to be taken seriously.

But I would argue that this will not change so long as the general public associates the left with the radical style of the sixties and seventies.  "In matters of grave importance, it is style, not sincerity, that is the important thing," says Gwendolyn in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.The left has been effectively marginalized not because of the substance of its analysis and its position on the issues, but because of its style. Even though the political and economic left come closer to representing the interests of most of the people in the middle, the people in the middle feel no affinity for the left aesthetic or for its basic radical secularist sensibility--and the MSM exploits that. And so a party like the Greens, insofar as it is associated with that sensibility, is condemned to irrelevancy.

That's something the propagandists on the right understand, but strategists on the left don't.  And I believe the secularist style of those who drive left politics in this country will keep them estranged from the center that any political movement needs to win over if it's to be successful.  It doesn't matter how much the political interests of the center do in fact align with the left--too many thoughtful, decent people in the center are simply never going to accept the substantive critique and proposals  of the left so long as it is associated with a leftist aesthetic. 

Abortion is a substantive issue, but it has far greater symbolic connotations for many Americans in the middle. The typical left-leaning secularist thinks that the only people uncomfortable with abortion rights as they now exist are the wacko right.  They think of themselves as advanced thinkers ahead of the curve, and it's just a matter of time before the rest of the culture catches up to them. They believe that the religiosity of most Americans is something that they will eventually grow out of and that American culture will secularize and become more like Europe's. 

They simply do not take into consideration the possibility that people are uncomfortable with something like abortion because deep down they know it's just wrong. And I would argue that the feeling of its being wrong is not going away, and abortion is always going to be an issue that will segregate the left from a populist center whose political and economic interests they represent better than, say, the DLC wing of the Democratic party. If you are a pro-choicer committed to a larger progressive agenda, you have to realize how deeply alienating the abortion-on-demand mystique of the secular left is for many Americans who would be sympathetic to a left critique of the American economic and power structure.  The clash of cultural values on this and other issues presents a huge obstacle for developing a large, broad-based, progressive movement focussed on economic and political issues. 

And so all of this plays right into the hands of the propagandists of the power elite and its media lackeys. The word "left" is always put in quotes, because it always connotes irrelevance and flaky radicalism.  I'm interested in a left politics that has a middle American political sensibility, and I just don't know if it's possible for such a thing to emerge in American society as it is currently structured. It might be due to the limitations of my imagination or intelligence, but that's the reason I'm relieved but not excited by the Democratic victory last week. The Republicans are horrifying; the Democrats are just plain bad. The Democrats, as things are currently skewed, are the left wing of a constituency that comprises mainly the country's corporate and power elite.  The ordinary people in this country, including most of us in the middle are a base that is waiting for someone to represent it.  We are deluded if we think the Democrats are ever really going to do that.

If the American political sphere were structured the way I think it ought to be, the kind of rightist, authoritarian power politics represented by the GOP over the last twenty-five years would be completely and forevermore repudiated. The Republicans are just an embarrassment and that they are taken seriously at all is a testament to the power of the fatuous agenda of the MSM.  If our politics were not skewed so far to the right, DLC types like Lieberman and Clinton in a would define the traditional interests of corporations and the power elite at the right end of the political spectrum, and people like Nader, Kucinich, and Chomsky (and maybe Sanders--don't know that much about him) would represent a serious and respectable left end of the spectrum. And then we would have some interesting debates.  Right now all we have is a fog of fatuousness that veils what's really going on.  The left needs a larger than life type like G.B. Shaw to bring things into focus for the rest of the country.

The point I'm trying to make here is not about specific policies or positions, but about how the debate is skewed so that the basic assumptions of the casino system are never challenged. If they were a legitimate, serious left, then a politics of the real middle would emerge from Americans listening to the merit of the arguments presented by both sides and figuring out what was best for America, not on the basis of tribal affinities and style, but on the basis of a much more probing understanding about how our system works and in whose interests.

As it stands now, this debate is horribly skewed to the right.  The people who think of themselves as in the "Lieberman" center right now, are simply coopted by this MSM definition of the center, and they are collaborators, whether consciously or unconsciously, with the agenda of this country's power elite.  And that's the way it's going to be until a legitimate, credible left emerges that has a style that middle America can take seriously. 

Late Update: Bill Maher makes similar points here.  He's probably not too sympathetic to my points about the leftist aesthetic, though.  But I'd be fine with a more out-of-the-box left than we have now, if there were also a left with a centrist sensibility that was taken seriously and had widespread credibility as the representatives the broad interests of the American people.

Dream Analysis

Have we fully awakened from our six-year nightmare, or are we just going to stretch, yawn, and go back to sleep?  For a particularly cogent analysis that attempts to describe to a blinking, sleepy-eyed public what we've just gone through, read Tom Englehardt's piece "Plebiscite on an Outlaw Empire."  It's a failed empire, but we're still stuck with all the wreckage and the expense of cleaning it up and maintaining what's left.  But let's not think about that.  Let's just go back to sleep where this time let's hope our dreams will be pleasanter.

So another litmus test for the Democrats that I did not directly address in my election postmortem earlier this week is whether they will be able to lead the American public to repudiate the imperial legacy of the last sixty years, or whether they will continue to find excuses to keep propping it up. It's a question of whether they will be able to lead the American people to recognize that it's too late for empire.  It's not just a question of extricating ourselves from Iraq, but of reevaluating who we Americans think we are in relationship to the rest of the world.

As with the other litmus tests I discussed the other day, I don't think there is much reason to hope that, say, by the year 2012 that much will have changed even if the Dems hang on to the pilot wheel until then. The Democrats are too complicit, and they not strong enough, nor commited enough, to take on the biggest special interest of them all--the military industrial complex. A lot of Americans still resist the idea that we have become an empire, and it's understandable because it's not stated policy.  It's not something we consciously set out to become. The United States has  drifted into empire unconsciously. It has done it step by step as the military industrial complex got bigger and its feeding demands increased. 

And Democrats have gone along with it, not because they wanted empire, but because they felt compelled to feed it.  It meant jobs for their constituents, and to refuse to feed it meant (and still means) political suicide. It's a beast that gets cranky when its blood sugar is low and it'll bite your head off. If you want a career in politics, you find ways to accommodate yourself to it.  For Republicans it's called being strong on national security.  For Democrats it's called being a moderate. To want to put a check on it will earn you dismissal by the punditry as 'unserious'.

And so as with the other issues I discussed the other day, this one is central regarding the future coherency of the Democrats as a party. And there's little reason to hope in that regard. As Englehardt puts it: Can the Democrats even be considered a party?

If Rovian plans for a Republican Party ensconced in Washington for eons to come now look to be in tatters, the Democrats have retaken the House (and possibly the Senate) largely as the not-GOP Party. The election may leave the Republicans with a dead presidency and a leading candidate for 2008 wedded to possibly the least popular war in our history; the Democrats may arrive victorious but without the genuine desire for a mandate to lead. Unlike the Republicans, the Democrats in recent years were not, in any normal sense, a party at all. They were perhaps a coalition of four or five or six parties (some trailing hordes of pundits and consultants, but without a base). Now, with the recruitment of so many ex-Republicans and conservatives into their House and Senate ranks, they may be a coalition of six or seven parties. Who knows? They have a genuine mandate on Iraq and a mandate on oversight. What they will actually do -- what they are capable of doing (other than the normal money, career, and earmark-trading in Washington) -- remains to be seen. They will be weak, the surroundings fierce and strong.

Exactly.  It's the very incoherency of the Democrats, no matter how much of a majority of Americans it embraces, that has made the country defenseless to the assaults of extremist minority groups that are clear and focused about what they want. And when such groups, like the Neocons, get hold of the pilot wheel, there's no coherent counterforce to stop them from running the ship aground, as they have done over the last six years.  The general American public will support factions in the political sphere who present themselves as strong and decisive, no matter how horrible their program.  Until some coherency, some consensus about what American common sense and common decency mean, both domestically and in foreign affairs, the government will be continuously vulnerable to boarding by buccaneers.  These pirates push the competent but timid crew aside telling the passengers wild stories about horrible threats they alone can protect them from and filling them with false promises that they will make everyone rich. 

But behind the phony smiles and glib rhetoric is the real message:  "Everyone do as your told, and no one gets hurt." They pillage the ship and then jump off when it's run aground and there's nothing left to steal, leaving the hapless former crew to clean up the mess.  Everyone breathes a sigh of relief, glad that this nightmare is over.  Thing is this will be a recurrent nightmare--the pirates will go into hiding for awhile, but they'll be back.  And they will be met with as little resistance in the future as met them in the last six years unless the American people figure out what's happening and develop a strategy to resist their assault. And in order to do that, you need a party that knows what it stands for and has a power base that enables it to fight back.  That's simply not a description of the Democrats.

Karl's Math Way Wrong

A perfect storm of bad news for Republicans over the last couple of months has finally convinced the country, two years too late, that GOP rule has been a disaster.  My basic emotion is relief. I have no illusions that Democrats are now going to make things better--only not as bad, but I am relieved to learn that there is a limit to the abuses the American electorate was willing to tolerate. I was beginning to wonder after 2004. I was beginning to lose faith in the common sense and common decency of the American people. I expected the American electorate to repudiate Bush and his party in 2004 in the way they finally did it yesterday. They didn't do it then, but better late than never. I feel better about being an American this morning.

All the Dems sites are giddy at the scope of the blue victory, but the Democrats' taking control doesn't alter some of the fundamental structural elements that have been driving the regressive social and economic changes that we've seen in the last twenty-five years.  In other words, the Dems are deeply complicit in a system where money and well-healed special interests drive policy.  And let's not forget, twelve of them in the Senate voted for the MIlitary Commissions Act.

There are exceptions, but I think it's fair to say that individual politicians, whether they are Democrat or Republican, are motivated by what is in their political self-interests, and do what their consultants tell them to do. And consultants are interested only in doing what will keep their clients in office. The will of the people or public opinion, of course, is a factor, but too often is dealt with as something to be manipulated or worked around. These politicians tell their mostly inattentive constituents what they want to hear, and then do what they have to in order to advance their careers, which requires playing ball according to Beltway rules--a game they need consultants to understand. And so those careers depend more on what well organized and well financed interest groups and their lobbyists want than what is in the best interest of the country.

Liberal Democrats are wrong if they think this election is magnificent validation of their progressivism.  The Republicans lost not because the American electorate rejected GOP political philosophy, but because of the Iraq fiasco and because Republicans overreached in their venality.  GOP venality is at the heart of the matter.  It was more than ususal the tail wagging the policy dog for the past six years. And it was the chief reason for the incompetent management of everything this administration has touched, both domestically and in Iraq. 

Politics is for this group not about effective governance but about providing a feeding trough for GOP cronies.  Political philosophy has nothing to do with the way they operated except to provide an ideological smokescreen to hide their crimes. That's what has the principled, small-government conservatives up in arms, and I don't blame them. They began to catch on that they've been used. They recongized that their agenda has  a fairly narrow power base, and calculated that an alliance with the venality wing of the party would enable them to implement their agenda, but they found out how little real influence they have.  The venality wing could care less about the agenda of principled conservatives.

But while the Dems take more seriously than the Republicans the challenge of governing competently and effectively, at least at the national level, the Clintonista, center/right DLC wing has proven time and time again that it is basically ok with an agenda that is dictated by the already rich and already powerful.  Why?  Because the power is where the money is, not where the unorganized people are, and if you're in politics you care mostly about where the power is.  And  the traditional middle- and lower-income groups don't have a strong institutional or organizational voice or power base.  The unions used to be the great counterweight to traditional wealth and power interests, but they are now confused, weak, and ineffective.  Democrats who are interested in advancing their careers understand which side of the bread is buttered. The definition of "moderate" for such Democrats has come to mean being comfortable with the agenda of the already rich and powerful.

A more progressively oriented political agenda embraces a wider swath of the American public opinion than the culturally conservative one does, but real progressives will not be able to enact anything until they develop a organized power base.  They don't have one now. This is why I find facetious all this fretting from moderates and conservatives about the threat posed by the "left."  What power base does the left have at this time?  There is no left in this country except a toothless fringe that rants in the blogosphere, but has little influence in shaping policy. But there is a vigorous, well-organized, and well-financed alliance between the cultural and corporate right, and it will continue to put enormous pressure the system. 

Democracies like ours respond more to the agendas of well organized minorities than they do to the amorphous opinions of unorganized majorities. Most normal Americans oppose the agenda of the cultural and corporate right, if we've thought about it at all.  But we are divided and effectively conquered.  We comprise a complacent, easily manipulable, fragmented chaos of conflicting values and opinions from the center leftward that is incapable of developing a united front to achieve a positive agenda.  We have little effect in shaping policy except to register our disgust, as we did yesterday, when the power and wealth elites become too blatant in their grabfest. We congratulate ourselves that the system works, and then go back to sleep.  But the minorities on a mission stay awake, and they keep plugging away.

So the Democrats have won, and now normal, sane Americans can forget everything they've learned about how the right in this country operates, and look at this horrible six years as an historical aberration.  And when the organized right makes its next assault in '08 or '10, there will be a huge chunk from this amorphous mass of disorganized Americans that will by and large believe its propaganda just as it did for the best part of the last six years.  And so it goes.

I could be wrong, but here are some of the things that would have to happen to change my mind:  I want to see the new congress repeal the Military Commissions Act.  I don't hear Pelosi or anyone else talking about that.  I want to see serious campaign reform to restrict the influence of big money driving the system.  I want to see very serious election reforms that de-politicize the redistricting process and the secretary-of-state system that oversees elections. I want to see serious restrictions on the influence of lobbyists.  And along those lines I want to see some effort to develop sane health care an energy policies that serve the common good and not corporate interests. 

There are a bunch of other things, too.  But these are the litmus-test issues for me, and I doubt that we're going to see much happen on any of them in the next two years or if someone like Hillary is elected in '08. It's possible that some progress can be made on one or two of these issues, but I have my doubts. I just don't see the leadership or a power base strong enough to counteract the special interest powers that will viciously fight to defeat any legislation that will affect them negatively.  American public opinion is irrelevant.  The opinions of the disorganized don't matter. 

I'm not optimistic about the long-term effectiveness of netroots organizing.  It's not nothing, but it's not enough.  I hope I'm wrong about that, and I'm interested to hear anyone make the case that I am.  But the problem is not Dems or Republicans; it's the system as it's structured.  And I just don't see any plausible fix for it because there is no power base to drive the changes that have to be made. 

Lost Eko II

Last Night on Lost (#305--"The Cost of Living"): The Smoke Being reappears, and it becomes clearer that it is the spirit of the Island that is the object of Locke's faith.  The Smoke Being is what Locke refers  to when he says things like "The Island brought us here." It also seems pretty clear that the Smoke Being took the shape of Eko's brother, Yemi, in last night's episode. And if that's true, it eplains the other "hallucinations" that appear to the castaways from time to time--Jack's Father, the dripping-wet Walt as Shannon saw him once, Boone as Locke saw him a couple of episodes ago, the horse that Kate saw, and probably the boar that harassed Sawyer, not to mention the polar bear and the whispering.  We're not talking about a being that appears in ordinary daylight consciousness, but a shapeshifter that exists in the dreamtime of shamanic consciousness. The castaways may or may not be dead in the "Sixth Sense" way, but they are not living in ordinary day-time consciousness.

In my recollection Locke and Eko were the only two who had come face to face with the Smoke Being and survived.  I described this encounter in previous posts as a moment of judgment, and that was precisely the nature of Eko's encounter last night. In Locke's and Eko's first encounter they stood face to face with it, and the Smoke Being withdrew.  So there was a reason that both Locke and Eko were spared the violent fate that the others suffered.  In Eko's case I took this as an indication that the Smoke Being looked into his soul and saw the goodness there that derived from the way his life intertwined with his brother Yemi's life.  And that this connection with Yemi had redemptive value that outweighed the grisly violent evil done by Eko as a Nigerian drug lord.

Locke's encounter with the Smoke Being both terrified and fascinated him.  He ran from it, but he was willing to let it take him into that hole it was dragging him into toward the end of the first season. Remember how angry he was at Jack for "saving" him?  That's the normal reaction when you have an encounter with the "sacred"--both fear and fascination. And last night Locke told Eko when he had encountered it before he saw in it light and beauty, suggesting that this being was not the evil monster, at least for him, that everyone thought it to be.  Maybe a better way to think about the Smoke Being is similar to the wrathful Old Testament God who is merciful to those who know and love him but who is at the same time quite capable of inflicting the worst horrors on those who defy him, as for instance his wiping out half of the Pharaoh's Egypt in Moses' day. 

I don't know.  I'm just thinking out loud here. The Moses' theme was earlier connected to Eko when he learned that Claire had named her baby Aaron.  Eko told Claire that it was the name of Moses' brother.  Not that that proves anything, but the brother and sister theme is important for the writers:  you've got Charlie/Liam, Shannon/Boone, Eko/Yemi, and even a hint that Jack/Claire are  sibs unbenownst to one another. 

But I digress:  In Eko's encounter with  Smoke Being last night, he he comes face to face with the spirit of the island, and the spirit of the island has the face of his brother, and he is the spirit of judgment. Testing and judgment, if my theory about the show is correct, is the whole point about one's existence on the island.  If Locke is right and the Island did bring all the castaways to the island for a reason, the reason is judgment. And so the Purgatorio idea still has legs.

The Smoke Being's relationship to the Others is not  clear. I used to think that it was  a tighter relationship than the story as it has developed now supports--that they too were agents of judgment, but they seem to have their own intramural dramas, which might be in their own way for them tests or dramas of judgment.  But who knows?  It might all just be elaborate theater, a con to put the castaways in test situations to see how they will react, The Others, like the Smoke Being, are shape shifters.   What you are allowed to know about them has little to do with who they really are.  The prickly Henry/Ben is likely to turn out to be the island's benevolent Prospero or Sarastro, and the vulnerable, sincere, sympathetic Juliet, the steely, evil, vindictive Queen of the Night.

But last night was Eko's story, and I was disappointed to see that the writers killed him off.  It seemed rushed and premature to me, and inconsistent with the way they had been developing his character. I liked the way the writers were depicting Locke, the white middle-class, middle manager of a box company, as the group's shaman.  And then contrasting this with the Eko, who images the powerful African tribal chieftan, as the representataive of biblical religion.  It fit in so nicely with what I have been writing about retrieval and fusion: that as traditional cultures modernize, modern cultures premodernize. Maybe Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, the actor who plays the part, had other commitments and would no longer be available, so they had to write him off the island.  There are too many questions left unanswered about him to just let him go like that.  It looked like he was being set up to play a key role in the story as it evolves.

In any event, whatever Eko saw in his first encounter with the Smoke Being, it was clear he was not seeing light and beauty in this last encounter with it.  He was meeting the "wrathful" Smoke Being that judged him unrepentant and worthy of death.  So the moment of judgment for Eko was a negative one, and that's the part that doesn't make that much sense to me.  Was the reason for his condemnation his refusal to acknowledge and confess his sinful past?  That's what the writers seem to be suggesting, but it seems like such a flatfooted and simplistic reason that goes against the sophistication and complexity of Eko's story as it had been developed, especially in the second-season episode called "Psalm 23". 

"Psalm 23" was the episode that really got me hooked on Lost because it was a remarkably well-crafted story about the interpenetration of good and evil and of the redemption of evil by Goodness and Love which has the last word.  Last night's episode suggests that Eko's redemption hadn't taken, that he was still the captive of his violent past, and that his brother's love was powerless in the end. Condemnation rather than redemption had the last word.

Eko's refusal to repent on one level seems feisty and noble, but isn't it really no more than the Darwinian, lizard-brain justification of all thugs and fascists--"I did what I had to do to survive." No he did far worse than what was needed to survive. His situation is morally complex only because his original sin was commited out a love for his brother.  The brutality of his later life was set in motion by what happened to him in that critical choice he made as a child, but cannot be solely attributed to it. 

The Eko that I thought the writers had created would have understood that. He was far more morally complex and interesting than the self-justifying thug he was portrayed to be in last night's episode.  This end for him seems too contrived. Either the writers were forcing something for reasons that are hidden from us, or I just don't understand what they're trying to do, which is probably the more likely explanation.  But it just left me with a bad taste and a little worried that the writers are floundering.

Previous posts on "Lost" can be found by scrolling through the Pop Culture Archive page, which you can find here.