An Incidental Trajectory Through Art and War

The “apocalypse section” is the first thing one sees if looking straight into Brooklyn’s Freebird Books and Goods. What started with their whimsical gimmick was but a foretaste of what I would discover in a book from an adjacent section: The Design of Dissent.

War and revolution are most provocative when considered through art. Hollywood hero-porn and dry historical treatises both lack the verve, perspectival complexity and continued relevance that comes from a great painting or sculpture. (Think of the most obvious 20th century example, Guernica, and a copy’s veiling during Gen. Colin Powell’s UN Security Council address on the debated Iraq War.) An artwork can lead you to consider a conflict that you’d never have paused at: the Napoleonic Wars felt remote and irrelevant until I learned of Goya’s Disasters of War prints, one of which is engraved with “I Saw This.”

Similarly, I never gave much thought to the Yugoslav Wars, but when I bought Design I found they had striking posters. What had merely been televised backlighting for my early adulthood was momentarily thrown into sharp focus by excerpts in Design from another book: Sarajevo Survival Guide.

…SARAJEVO MAKES MAD MAX 5 POSSIBLE! SARAJEVO CAN TEACH YOU HOW TO SURVIVE THE POST CATACLYSM!…blares the Guide’s front cover as would a town crier hiding under a car in a cratered square. The contents were written in Sarajevo between 1992 and 1993, and veer between advice to help you enjoy your trip (“Prices are war-like. The average menu is 50 DM per person…Service is decent. At night, the hotel resembles Casablanca”) and a blackly humorous, ironic accounting of life under siege (“Sarajevo is a city of slender people. Its citizens could be authors of the most up-dated diets…The only thing you need is to have your city under the siege – there lies the secret of a great shape”). Plenty of photographs preserve the ambiance: here a teenage girl scowling over her shoulder which supports several empty plastic water drums, there a mannequin’s head perforated by a sniper on a deserted street.

All this dovetailed with my ongoing research into early industrial music. In my continual efforts to find industrial free from gothic dullness and without a preponderance of right-wing allusions, I found Autopsia, a staple of Yugoslavia’s 80s scene. Prior to the Yugoslav Wars, Autopsia (whose one constant seems to be Radovan Milinkovič) produced its finest work. It was when the wars broke out that Autopsia decamped to Prague—itself an interesting choice, given the Eastern Bloc’s chain re-ruction.

Autopsia is often described as “martial industrial,” an ad hoc microgenre so small that it wouldn’t even warrant a plastic separator card in record stores, if those still existed. It’s also infested with every type of unsavory authoritarian from sneaky right-wing entryists (aiming to win the trust of people/organizations only to infiltrate and subvert them) to outright jackbooted fascists. As such, very few of martial industrial’s acolytes produce anything of provocative ambiguity comparable to the paintings of Dalí when he was exploring the fascist psyche and its allure. N.B.: During his investigation, perhaps because of it, Dalí succumbed to Falangism’s wiles himself. That will be a blog for another day.

Autopsia’s catalog largely predates the MI category, as does the more well-known Laibach and the Neue Slowenische Kunst (“New Slovenian Art”) collective of which Laibach was a part. I doubt there’s any reactionary message to the timestretched and looped vocal in “Signs of Bodies”: It’s from “Fortune plango vulnera”, the second movement of Carmina Burana, Carl Orff’s wildly popular cantata. In any case this entire album is chilling given the outbreak of hostilities throughout the former Yugoslavia a year after its release and two years after its recording—at Serbia’s Radio Novi Sad. Autopsia’s two most orchestral and martial albums (Death is the Mother of Beauty and Palladium) were recorded there.

The uncanny transformation that happens throughout “Signs of Machines” similarly suggests the emergence of militarism from civil society as though it were always latent therein:

The whole experience, from Freebird to Autopsia, left me in my rhetorical wheelings again: What is art’s role, if any, in forecasting, directing or influencing revolution? How should one represent incipient catastrophe actuated by politics? Is an artist derelict to ignore the transformation until it happens or flee it when it sweeps over? Must one be a Lorca?

Coupture: neither jewelry line nor party line

Arab Sprang…the centerpiece is a 1958 Egyptian (the Arabic reads “Misr”) 8mm Mauser brass cartridge, surely made in anticipation of war with the nascent Israel. It’s flanked by a 1975 Chinese 7.62x54R steel (copper-washed) cartridge and a 2012 Russian 7.62×39 commercial case.

COUPTURE beats swords into ploughshares. The steel, brass and aluminum droppings from rifles, handguns and shotguns pile up worldwide: It must be every second that a gun is fired. The ejecta glint in the sun and rust in rains. Each cartridge a fallen kernel of grain, its germ discharged, run to seed.

Coupture exempts them from recycling and rebirth, offers them a conditional discharge or conscientious objectorship. Made into accessories (not to say “attackcessories”), perhaps they glorify revolution in the same way that Che Guevara does: in vain and emptily, and for the profit of the unlicensed that use them.

But no! Coupture will not be coopted by the market, and as such is not for sale. It will not let the story of each cartridge be effaced. For better or worse (usually worse), each was made for a reason: this brass Egyptian cartridge stamped “Misr” made in 1958 by men knowing there would soon be war with Israel is TIG-welded to a bland Russian steel commercial round, made in a former Soviet factory for use from Afghanistan to Arkansas. Disjunctions abound, but such is the business of weaponry, and so it is with fashion—where a Stalinist guerrilla can become the denatured figurehead of change subverted, worn over imitation camouflage patterned into a garment too impractical for the military and too shoddy for service.

Trystero…this 1963 Czech (CSSR) 7.62x54R steel case is welded to a nailhead to recreate the muted post horn.

Coupture also adopts the smashed glass of broken windows, of civilization rent by gunfire. Melted and nestled into the primer cavities of a Tito-era casing is the glass of a school window, a car window, eyeglasses crushed in a fall. Perhaps the garnish is the stained glass blown out of a church, as in former Yugoslavia.

Coupture reminds the U.S. of its draft into ongoing sub rosa wars. We all continue to fight with every tax dollar spent, every penny (itself an amalgam of copper and zinc=brass) melted and extruded into a shell which is packed with gunpowder and crowned with a bullet. These in turn are the coin of a new realm, “Ammo: The Currency of the New Millennium,” and those restless for sharp change hoard brass if not gold—or both.

cHeart_ridge…the ubiquitous 5.56/.223 commercial brass round favored by NATO cradles an all-American .45 Colt commercial brass round. All are fused with stained glass. “I’d die for you” is so Bon Jovi. “I killed a sheet of paper for you” is both moving and manly.

Coupture throws its arms up at the canard of world peace. But it can face the lie, literalize it, shove the Cross of Iron in the face of milquetoasted leftist pacifism. Passivism, et passim.

For the full gallery of Coupture photos, visit www.alexfethiere.com

Heart of Snarkness

While you're here, doesn't China Miéville (right) bear an astonishing resemblance to fellow leftist Sergei Udaltsov, outspoken Putin critic of the Russian Left Front?

I almost missed this February piece from the inimitable China Miéville, but for the blog Who Makes the Nazis? reposting it as “China Miéville: When Did Bigotry Get So Needy?” London School of Economics doctorate and literary polymath Miéville demolishes the logic behind the Belgian Supreme Court’s decision to allow the publication of Tintin au Congo without any label warning against its acrid racism; he responds with a tour de force of arguments encompassing very au courant tropes of free speech, political correctness, and libertarian saber-rattling. I should have mentioned him here sooner, as possibly my favorite polemicist and fiction writer.

[…]To claim that everyone talked like Tintin about the Congo back in the day is (whatever other serious political arguments we may have with them) to slander, say, Felicien Challaye, Albert Londres, the French Socialist movement that declared at its 1907 conference that colonialism ‘relies on violent conquest and institutionalises the subjection of Asiatic and African peoples’.[…]

[…]There is the absurd hyperbole, to turn a victimiser’s culture into a victim. In his effort to derail the issue, Staggs insists that the ‘trump’ of racism is ‘used to blot out any part of our cultural heritage that might cause embarrassment.’ ‘Blot out’. Right. Who, after all, could forget the monstrous erasure performed by Stalin on Trotsky, by putting a warning sticker on him & refusing to shelve him alongside The Gruffalo? The Tintin Vanishes. Quick, conjure images of book burning! First they came for the Boy Reporter & shelved him alongside Persepolis & Sandman, & I did not speak out, because I was not a Boy Reporter, &c.[…]

Again, read the entire essay here.

Sieben—Sanguine Consanguinity

In the United States, the right has talked about “culture wars” ever since we borrowed the word from the Germans. In Europe, the concept has come a long way from its 19th-c. roots of government vs. religion to suggest more of a guerrilla conflict of “folkish tradition” against an overweening liberal welfare state. The reactionary neoplasm loosely known as “neofolk” is the self-styled bard of this clash, obliquely nurturing the next generation of [color]-shirts.

Britisher Matt Howden’s one-man project, Sieben, has taken an unequivocal political stance within the European neofolk scene. Like the talented Karl Blake, he works as a hired strings (violin, whereas Blake is a bassist) beside musicians who flirt with the dangerous blood-and-soil aesthetics that were so seductive during the 20th century’s darkest hours. (Aesthetics the proponents of which, in our festering worldwide recession, are building their followings zealously in discontent as they did before, and always will.) Unlike Salvador Dalí, it seems unlikely that Howden will be seduced by the company he keeps.

In comments at the watchdog blog “Who Makes the Nazis”, the aforementioned Karl Blake speaks of his days touring with neofolk bands of questionable ethics. The information does not come out under interrogation, or “pulling worms out of the nose” (die Wurme auf die Nase ziehen) as Germans graphically put it. Ruing wilful blindness, Blake volunteered anecdotes over time which WMTN’s editor collected in the linked post:

“If I come out with “hate-speech against hate speech” it is my reactionary shift against all of that – I’ve got ‘Neo-poisoning’ if you like! I really am fed up with it and a lot of that is down to feeling thoroughly used and duped. I hold my hand up and say I enjoyed going abroad and playing all the time – and recording. Its my own fault that I took the path of least resistance and sat back and took the easy option of just turning up and playing bass and laughing at all the idiots with silly haircuts and anal-aryan uniforms.”

Howden won’t make that mistake. He’s an accomplished violinist who uses the instrument in much the “one man with processing” style ably practiced by Iceland’s Mugison or Finland’s Kimmo Pohjonen. His voice is finer and his lyrics more nuanced than many neofolkers bar Karl Blake himself (and Rome, about whom I wrote previously). And though Howden’s career took off through associations with Karl Blake and dicey Sol Invictus, he puts paid to any ambiguity in the song “Rite Against the Right” while acknowledging that musicality is an afterthought in much of the scene: “Licking the dregs of evil—it’s feeble…using symbols to shock because your music is cock.”

I’m not a fan of the purple cover featuring a prone naked dude and a big stick (erm), but it’s otherwise a fine album, like the rest of his releases:

Murdochtopus

The phone hacking scandal of 2011 inspired MURDOCHTOPUS, but its 2012 birth coincided with revelations of News Corp. involvement in computer hacking, an FBI bribery investigation, the resulting depredations-defense legal fund nearing $1B USD…and Murdoch’s endorsement of Rick Santorum. Further, Murdoch recently tweeted his support for Scottish independence, possibly owing to the Murdochtopus’s striking resemblance to a bagpipes.

Fortunately the Murdochtopus is made of dyed, anodized aluminum, and therefore colorfast, weatherproof and a poor conductor of heat and electricity. As such it will doubtless survive its electrified kingdom crashing around it with such force that the rubble stops only at a sewer splashdown. Yet The Sun never sets on this empire, for its body is made from a streetlight reflector, disabled and torn as a refutation of the maxim: “sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

The lost foam-cast tentacles preserve the undulatory movements of the octopus, and the lost wax-cast face is that of the legendary mug at its most cheery and unflappable. As empires go, it’s a decent housepet—but you’ll never train it on newspaper.

Cabdriver Chronicles: New York’s Real Giants

Last week’s New York Giants Superbowl game ended in a victory prompting plenty of local news puffery. But the real giants are among us in this city, in their towering vertical Jotunheim: corporate clients like those served by the car service I take on late nights. This driver’s vignette made me wonder who’s got it better:

He was asked on Sunday to take a “timed job,” in which the driver takes a client somewhere and waits for him to return to the car, getting paid the while—about $100 an hour. He was to take someone to a bar to watch the Giants game and then home after an estimated 4-5 hours.

But the driver turned down $500 because he wanted to watch the game with his extended family, and apparently one of his relatives wouldn’t let him live it down if he missed it. (As a side note, this relative was both his cousin and brother-in-law.)

“♫♪ Nice work if you don’t need it, and you can get it in N.Y.! ♫♫♪♫”

“Art Holds a Unity That History Does Not”

Accompanying illustrations: Revolutionary images in pointillized sepia imprecision.

My interest in Luxembourgish band Rome providentially coincided with my participation in early Occupy Wall Street. I was looking for cultural products that bore witness to, examined and problematized past revolutions. Rome’s latest release, “Die Aesthetik Der Herrschaftsfreiheit” (The Aesthetic of Anarchy), is a 3-album epic that opens with the statement: “Art Holds a Unity that History Does Not.” On the facing page is a pointillized image I suspect is from Spanish Civil War-era Barcelona. Like the image at left, the rendering hearkens to both newspaper-printing and the yellowing of time, while making indistinct the revolutionary image portrayed.

Though founder Jerome Reuter is from Luxembourg, Rome has been based out of Germany for some time. This changed recently, and I wonder if it had anything to do with Germany’s understandable sensitivity towards any talk straying beyond reformism. The music is very European: lyrics are in English but extensive samples and commentary are in German and French with the occasional Italian and Spanish. Reuter says English is “neutral.” As far as I can find, Rome is the only band in the European underground “neofolk” movement that is not crypto-/fascist in its iconography and lyrics, although it doesn’t shy away from confronting the ideological past and its legacies. (UPDATE: England’s Sieben is also clearly opposed to right wing use of “Blood and Soil” aesthetics, which I write about at this post.)

I recently ordered the European edition of 2011’s Die Aesthetik Der Herrschaftsfreiheit (3 CDs in three beautifully-bound booklets) to better understand and translate the lyrics; entire passages of this album are in German and my German is not strong enough to translate by ear. In the booklets, Rome credits its inspirations to “Bertolt Brecht, Peter Weiss, Pablo Neruda, Abel Paz, H-M Enzensberger, Georg Büchner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Reinaldo Arenas, Bertrand Russell, P-J Proudhon, Gustav Landauer, u.a. [und andere, and others]”.

The ballad “To Each His Storm” is a suitable introduction to this album. Though it uses the singer/songwriter format that Rome has increasingly used over its career, Die Aesthetik includes many fine examples of all styles and voices used by Rome across its prolific release calendar since 2006. Look for further translations and perhaps critiques as I proceed.

TO EACH HIS STORM

This is close, far too close
You just might
Be blinded by this crown’s golden light
You just might
Be putting yourself in the flame
Which can only burn and shame

Our lawless life
Just seems so compelling
Because you too
Could ennoble yourself through rebelling
But what good are they
Ideals soaked in blood
What good are they
Buried in the mud

To each his ground on which to flourish
To each his storm in which to perish
Now that we’ve shed our clothes and shared our oaths
There’s no way back for you
Don’t kid yourself
We’d rather be mad than delighted
You’d rather be entertained than enlightened
There’s no way back to you

(ref)

This is too close… (cont)

Die Keller versiegelt
Die Bücher eingestampft
Die Bibliotheken verriefelt
Die Schriften verbrannt
Die Zeitungen geschwärzt
Die Portraits gewechselt
Die Vorstellungen gestört
Die Theater geschlossen
Die Filme zerstört
Die Spiegel erblindet

(trans.:)
The cellar is sealed
The books are shredded
The libraries are locked
The newspapers are redacted
The portraits are swapped out
The beliefs are deranged
The theaters are closed
The films are destroyed
The mirrors go blind

UPDATE:

I thought I’d not cause offense in uploading “To Each…”, since many other Trisol releases of Rome are on Youtube with thousands of views and comments. It was a considered decision.

But within 12 hours of posting a link to the video I made of this image & song, copyright owner Trisol Music Group GmbH had it removed. Fair enough. I’m sure they’ve put some money into developing Rome as a talent and {shudder} brand and it’s their right to manage their “content.” If you’re interested in Rome after this post and the 30-second clip I linked to on Amazon, much of Rome’s work released on the redoubtable Swedish independent, Cold Meat Industry, can be heard in its entirety on Youtube. (See Querkraft, a more industrial early release, with this chilling fan video.) It’s easy enough to buy the individual tracks from eMusic and Amazon/Google Play (or, if you must, iTunes), and for “Die Aesthetik” be aware that the U.S. edition is almost as costly as the EU hardcopy, for what appears to be very little: 3 individual CDs, priced around $31 apiece.

UPDATE 2: After almost a year, someone else has uploaded this tune, scoring a noirish video. Finally this post can be complete, for posterity.

Another Rome post: The Chronicles of Kronstadt translation

Actions at #OWS: Babylon

A Saturday night on the commons.

“Co-optation” is a hot topic among OWSer strategists this week. Besides the enormous support of several large unions, the possible support of the NAACP (reportedly, Ben Jealous is mulling it) and the considerable news coverage, there is the very real possibility of the movement being smothered by its own inclusiveness. Zuccotti Park has become a Babylonian sprawl of ideological dialects mirrored by a barely-contained material/matériel disorder.

Some appreciate this inclusiveness for self-serving reasons. I checked in with Solomon on 10/8/11, whom I had mentioned in my first #OWS post as “S.” in case he didn’t want to be known. I asked him what he was getting out of #OWS and he said with a leer, “entertainment, sex, free food. Look at that line to the kitchen, that’s socialism.” He gave me a wristband that led me to this website. He told me it was a “cooperative of artists and entrepreneurs,” but that’s not how it comes off. Now I know why he’s so cocky and arch: He aspires to cult leadership, and is trawling OWS for the impressionable.

The NY Times has attacked the inclusiveness and its sullying sequelae for local residents and the park, and rightly so. I have watched the movement get steadily ruder and messier as it grows. (In fairness, this partly a consequence of Zuccotti Park being too small.) Organizer C., whom I respect, told me the movement is founded on the anarchist cooperatives that briefly flourished during the Spanish Civil War. By all accounts those were truly democratic and responsible collectives. But he said this near a triad of 40″ plasma screens set up by “some leftist group,” and the red glow of whatever they showed illuminated several of the hypnotized tele-faces that I believe OWS exists to obviate. “Twenty people could sleep there,” he criticized, but the screens were gone when I returned to investigate.

Beehive Collective’s G8 Japan poster. {CLICK}

I’ve hoped to scrap with artists who went to OWS only when it became a media platform to cynically promote themselves, but I haven’t really found any. Noah and his coin masks has incorporated OWS into his larger “Summer of Change” narrative, which manages to be both elegant and pointed, and he’s been a periodic fixture from dawn. Someone who painted a ~3’x6′ mural including the Statue of Liberty, the Towers, an eagle etc. in oils that I first saw on “Radiohead Hoax Day” (9-30) only signed it on the back, which I discovered when I rolled it up to protect it. And the wonderful Maine-based Beehive Collective  (right) made a one-day appearance (10-07) where they owned the area under di Suvero’s orange megalith Joie de Vivre (indeed!) with their posters, patches and a printed supermural. When I asked their member L. about it, almost all of their “merch” was suggested donation, and the quality and topicality was unassailable. Really, I was only slightly annoyed by someone selling vaguely lefty buttons for his profit and a drummer (9-30) who played great funk breaks and solos to draw attention to his email address on the bass drum.

Will we continue to deserve the world’s attention? With freedom comes responsibility. Every OWSer, as an autonomous unit qua representative, should remember the dictum from Thus Spake Zarathustra: “Ask not free from what, but rather free for what?”

Market Moksha*

I had a couple of minutes to kill in after visiting the scrapyard and working at my internship yesterday (and before going in to the city for my night job), so I visited Beacon’s Closet to poke through secondhand clothes. I used to live in Bushwick, Brooklyn in the Streetlightless Years of Feral Dogs & Carfires, so it’s nice to see what’s left.

I’m always taken aback by how much Gap and H&M crap Beacon’s buys. Hennes & Mauritz AB is an inevitability in NewYork, and I have a few of their fitted basics. Fitted basics are a big market here. The problem is the ethical entanglements that inhere to this price-sensitive market.

Uniqlo’s single-source Chinese and now Bangladeshi production raises questions about human rights. Zara claims to be vertically integrated (itself producing everything from raw materials to finished product in retail facilities), but in the same presentation says it makes 60% of its own products (?!), leaving little question as to where the balance could be produced on the cheap. American Apparel occupies a higher price bracket for their touted “sweatshop free” manufacturing, but recently almost a third of its Los Angeles workers were found to have improper legal work documentation—and its owner famously treats AA employees as sex vending machines. H&M makes a lot of clothing in Turkey, which has a big child labor problem (to be fair, it’s largely agricultural in practice), but I groaned when I saw that some suitable H&M jeans in Beacon’s were made in Bangladesh.

A December 2010 fire started by crap wiring and/or short circuits roared through a Dhaka, Bangladesh factory making clothes for American Eagle, Sears, and The Gap (inter alia). It killed 21 workers because the exits were b/locked (to “stop garment theft”). Dangerous electrical conditions are not unusual to That’s It Sportswear (indeed!), Ltd. Scores of the 2.5 million underpaid sweatshop workers in Bangladesh are killed every year by such fires. In a fabulous irony of time, this happened almost 100 years after the famous Triangle Shirtwait Fire in NewYorkCity, where 146 poor immigrant women were killed working under almost the same circumstances.

It’s a century later, and I’m in New York looking at Bangladeshi jeans of possible blood and fire. But the circle cannot complete: They’re second hand. H&M has already reaped its profits, and I am only supporting a local second-hand retailer. In the same way that I minimize market culpability by buying military surplus, I trust that the cinders and tears were washed out of the jeans by the previous owner.

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*Moksha, in Buddhism, is the transcending of the cycle of suffering that is birth, life and death, or samsara. I thought if I clumsily deployed some Oriental (things are Oriental,people are Asian) concepts in this post it would help my search engine indexing, given that the Buddha is the un-ironic marketing coup of the past two decades.

The Most Frightening Force Is…

“It’s Mahagonny again.” —FM Einheit, Stein

8-27: 1520. As I prepare for Hurricane Irene’s arrival in New York, rain alternates with a dull, sodden stillness teeming with mosquitoes. Neighbors inspect their properties and squirrel away loose backyard objects in garages and basements. We closed all the shutters in the office yesterday to keep broken glass from flying in, and at the funereal opening at the gallery last night, staff finished by lashing everything down on the roof and moving art away from the skylight and off the floor.

8-28: 100. The rain is no longer falling, but whipping against all parts of the house. Cynics on both social media and hard life (the existence equivalent of a “hard copy”) think the news’ storm coverage is fodder to distract folks from important issues, and to whip up consumer frenzy for staples. I’m the only person I know with 8 pounds of rice, 10 pounds of beans and 6 kinds of soup; at 2 surveyed supermarkets, the first products to disappear were beer and Entenmann’s baked goods.

"Best before..." you die.

Seems clear who will survive, and have the energy to bail out the basement. The neighbors have been guffawing on their porch and plinking empties into a bin of bottles since midafternoon.

Thinking about disasters and human nature, I turn to art again, which lately has meant so much Bertolt Brecht. (Einstürzende Neubauten’s former percussion engineer, FM Einheit, may reference this inevitability when he notes the above beside “Mr. Smith” on the Stein album.) I listened to The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny today while tying down or locking up everything in the yard today, and think how funny it is that Eric Cantor would insist that federal emergency aid be offset by matching cuts. Seeing that Ron Paul finished second behind Michele Bachmann in the Iowa Straw Poll, it really seems that we are in the land of Do As Thou Wilt; and Texas Governor Rick Perry has told residents that they should “pray” to relieve the state’s drought.

In Mahagonny, at the end of Act One Scene 10-11, the Vegas-type gangster-founded funtown of Mahagonny is being threatened by a typhoon/hurricane. One of the “residents,” Jimmy the lumberjack who made a fortune in Alaska chopping for years in the freezing wastelands, is annoyed with all the laws that make the town dull. Mahagonny’s founders, themselves criminals on the lam, wanted to create a land of peace and contentment where there are niceties “a man can depend upon” (they also want it to be their predictable cash cow). These polar worldviews clash when Jimmy erupts in exasperation at the narcotizing tameness of the city, and just as he exhorts people to break the rules and think their own thoughts, a hurricane menaces Mahagonny. He explains:

“We don’t need help from hurricanes, let whirlwinds do what they can / For though they may cause their share of pain, the most frightening force is Man.”

Widow Begbick, founding grande-dame of Mahagonny, comes to see his point:

“So do whatever you enjoy, or typhoons will do it for you / For when hurricanes start to destroy, there’s nothing that we can do.”

What a parable for our times in the United States, occasionally compared to those of Weimar Germany. That was Brecht’s era, one of postwar depression and reforms that did too little too slowly, resulting in a widespread discontent ripe for Nazi mining. He produced art that decried and satirized that dangerous vulnerability, which seems more a fundamental of human nature than an artifact of its time. Just juggle current U.S. politics and climate change (Hurricanes Irene and Katrina specifically) in your forethoughts as you consider the Weltanschauungen exhibited in the clip linked above.