Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones
Gary Y. Okihiro's book tells all about the roots of the pineapple in southern Brazil/Argentina/Paraguay, it's transplantation to 17th Century European hothouses as a symbol of empire and luxury, and its re-transplantation to the imperial perimeters, where it finally hit Hawaii with a bang at the turn of the 20th Century, just after the U.S. had (fraudulently) annexed the islands. The author, who's Japanese, uses the pineapple as a narrative vehicle for the plantation economies of the tropical empires, and the relationship between the temperate, imperial, masculine, civilized West and the exotic, tropical/semi-tropical, feminized, Oriental East. Reading the history, it's rather hard to imagine how modern (indigenous) Hawaiians could ever consider themselves "Americans."
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This is just one, very evocative glimpse into the Howard Zinn People's History of the United States-style of revisionist history. And as I read such things, I'm torn very deeply between the nasty, triumphalist, pro-imperial, White Power, Exceptionalist American, Manifest Destiny attitude, and horror at the dehumanizing, genocidal, exploitative barbarity that went into making Europe and the United States what it is today. Every splendorous aspect of the West was largely hacked through and pillaged from the East. The United States was settled through genocide, built by slaves and coolies, and expanded over top of indigenous peoples from Puerto Rico to the Pacific Rim. And then I found myself thinking back to the "Thank goodness we fucked the Hawaiians! Those islands make a perfect forward-base in Asia! Think of how we could have defeated the Japanese without a flotilla of islands like that dotted along the way. And won't all our Oceanic possessions make it hard for a rising China to dominate the Pacific!"
And that, pretty much, is the irreconcilable fact about America. I have it within my very DNA: 1/8 Native American blood. So, that means I'm a product of the very violence that "tamed" the New World. I'm sure the native woman who married my white relative was very enamored with him and all that, but I'm also pretty sure than his relatives had aided and abetted the slaughter and disenfranchisement of hers. My last name, "Greene" hearkens back to the very founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia. From there, my father's family migrated up to north-central Virginia, where they lend their name to a crappy little county there. Now, funnily enough, there are an awful lot of black Greenes around here too. Black people often ask me if I'm part black. It's good they don't know the real reason I share a last name with many of them in the mid-Atlantic region. It was common practice for plantation owners to extend their last names to slaves on legal documents.
The Israelites slaughtered the Canaanites because God had granted them the Promised Land of Israel. Today, their decedents oppress the Palestinians to get access to the same land. Every empire in history--and every civilization for that matter--was forged at the murderous expense of someone else (usually the more peaceable and civilized of the two). Today, even, we are supposedly "post-colonial," but the relations between the core and the periphery are the same, little more than the plantation economies of the 19th Century. The core strip-mines the periphery for resources and cheap labor, while tying its economies into dependent organs of the core, and undermining local industries. Peripheral people are consigned to wage-slavery to the capital-rich core. Sometimes they migrate to the core, and become it's loathed, second-class immigrants. Other times, they turn inward to exploit their countrymen, to becomes demi-cores themselves within their peripheral society.
Within the core, you see, there is a mini-periphery and mini-core. The latter have resources to weather even economic crises like the one they have now just reaped. Their record portfolio growth comes at the expense of their peripheral peers' economic prospects. At one time, the agents of the colonial core would call upon the government to stamp out political risks to their enterprises. Calling in the marines was the Turn-of-the-Century equivalent of requesting a Big Three bailout. The risks firms now undertake are tacitly guaranteed by the government, meaning profits from risk are private, while losses from risk are public (coming from tax revenue, or borrowed against public debt) when the Treasury and FDIC shore up failed banks and "toxic assets." In the aftermath of the Bush-Obama financial crisis recovery stimulus plan, we've seen trillions poured into the same banks that created the crisis in the first place, managed by the same banker ilk that oversaw the prelude to the crisis, without the requirement to alter in any way the management of those funds, or even Congressional oversight over the Department of the Treasury's TARP billions, or the secretive Fed's trillions-large portfolio. Regulation, which has even been supported by the financial industry itself, has gone nowhere. This, after even the most basic regulations were successively rolled back under Reagan, Bush the Elder and Clinton. If that free-for-all regulation regime hadn't have been born, there's no way AIG, an insurance company, would now have the dubious distinction of requiring the biggest government bailout in economic history for financial adventurism. In short, the American taxpayer--you and I--are bankrolling the speculative adventures of a couple of highly-paid frauds, whose claims of record profits don't even hold up over time scales of longer than five years (an investor in U.S. Treasury bonds would have witnessed a higher yield over any combination of stocks, bonds, mutual funds, hedge funds, etc. over the past 30 years--none of which were even profitable over the long term, when you account for inflation or financial services fees).
Does this sound Marxist? No, I'm not advocating a revolution on behalf of socialism here. My specific grievance is against the core-periphery corporatism that has displaced capitalism. The entire financial industry, considered since the Great Depression "too big to fail" is now not capitalist. It is insured and underwritten by the U.S. Government, and by extension, the taxpayer. There is no risk in taking risks, when you have a corporate safety net. Therefore, "irrational exuberance" is not only rewarded, by encouraged, structurally. The CEO A who makes 15% profits per year for five years for his investors, even at the almost certain risk of bubble collapse and the subsequent eradication of all that accrued value, is considered successful. The CEO B who makes a conservative, but sustainable, 8% a year, will be ousted for "under-performing" relative to his competition. Perhaps he can say, "I told you so" after the market crashes, and his conservative line is seemingly vindicated, but meanwhile CEO A may be tapped to be the Counsel of Economic Advisers to the president. (This is not hypothetical, every major member of President Obama's economic team is an alumnus of Wall Street). The thing about firms is that they can go bankrupt with little consequence to the major players. When people, however, go bankrupt, their credit is ruined for seven years (their student loans, and many other financial obligations, will remain, however, owing to recent bankruptcy "reforms"). Small, peripheral countries suffer a similarly dire fate when they go bankrupt (think Argentina or Iceland). But nobody's going to let the core U.S. Government go bankrupt, even as it sops up greater and greater shares of public debt. The ill effects will only be felt by the most peripheral members of society--in the form of foreclosed houses, bankruptcy, bad credit scores, debilitating credit card debt, higher tax burdens, and diminished employment opportunities. The little share of capital investment the peripherals have--their retirements and pensions--were all floating atop the foam of "market value." They are now decimated. Their real money, earned through wages, was transformed into virtual "value," and then rendered valueless by the crash. If the Republicans had had their way during the call to privatize Social Security, the same would have been true there. So, normal folks like me labor our entire lives in jobs we hate, in favor of a tacit economic agreement: Work hard, save away towards old age and your childrens' education, and you will receive not only the fruits of consumerism, but the Shangri La of independence at the end of the rainbow--Retirement. And now, normal folks about a half-century older than me have realized that they chased the toy rabbit of wage-labor and consumerist satisfaction for their entire lives, only to see their 401K, mutual funds and college savings decimated. Bait and switch. "Well, of course, we were trying to inject more growth into the fund!" says the California state pension fund manager (having been swindled himself by a Madoff pyramid scheme).
Well, guess what? Somebody profited from all that. The value, though diminished, has been consolidated closer to the core. Goldman Sachs has posted record profits this year. Madoff made billions before he was caught (who else like him hasn't been caught?). Shorts, hedges, options--the financial world has devised all sorts of arcane products to ensure that somebody's loss is their gain. The author of Black Swan made his first stack betting that the market would tank in 1983. Others' misfortune equaled his gain. At least there was something roguish about Mr. Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He's warned us all since about the inherent and unexpected volatilities in the market. But what of the Goldmans, who publicly assured everyone that the "market fundamentals were sound" while busily stocking up options against what they knew to be a creaking real estate market edifice?
All the normal guys, the unsophisticated ones who believed the government when it told them that home ownership was the soundest investment, and a moral good--no matter the terms. All those Joe Sixpacks who purchased interest-only mortgages, with the federal government's blessing, assured that there was no way the value of their house would go down. "Flip it!" became the mantra, "Think of a house as an investment!" The home was your "nest egg," a lock box impervious to the insecurities of modern life. Well, those guys were foreclosed on, and every cent they put into their mortgage is lost. One of them lived next to my parents. The bank sent some goons to throw all his stuff into the rainy front yard. He is 67 and lived alone and quiet on a polite block of the planned urbanist utopia of Columbia, Maryland. He is now homeless.
The pineapple guy likes to gender this line of thinking, so let's carry the core-periphery, colonialist duality to its logical conclusion. As John Lennon and Yoko Ono once sang, "Woman is the Nigger of the World," so this violent "progress" even cuts to the very core of gender relations, with male advancement dependent upon the subjugation of women. How could Great Men do things if they had no woman to tend house and care for children? And when Great Men do things (war, etc.) who suffers the most?
Great Men, macho men, they have manned the helm of colonialism and capitalism. Both activities required and rewarded the adventurism, risk-taking, monomaniacal focus, and fetishistic longing that are the hallmarks of the testosterone-fueled Ubermenschen. The "spirited" Westerner, extolled since the Greeks, is this manly man. The feminized, moist, soft, fecund, irrational East is a maiden awaiting the seed of his loins--material, intellectual, spiritual and sexual. Polytheistic paganism would be supplanted by male-linear monotheism. Communalism would be supplanted by possession and ownership. Blooming chaos would be tamed by classical formalism. Organic polyculture would be disciplined into artificial monoculture. The Western Man would penetrate, possess and domesticate the entire body of Mother Earth--as was written in Genesis (by a man, or men, on behalf of the Meta-Man: God). And they did. Almost every fertile inch of the earth's surface is tamed, formed and exploited according to the needs, tastes and desires of Man. He has implanted her with the same rapacity as the monarchs of yore implanted their wives and mistresses, solely to render sons. And as with King Henry VIII, non-productive wombs were merely cast aside or put to the sword.
(Andrea Dworkin: Not Hot)
In the bedroom, inequalities are considered normal, even necessary. Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin argued that all heterosexual sex was rape, and inherently violent, involving as it does, literal penetration. We should take her view with a grain of salt, coming as it did form an (astoundingly ugly) former prostitute. However, let us consider how it is normal practice to prioritize fellatio over cunnilingus, especially in macho cultures. Furthermore, it is quite normal if a woman never reaches climax, but quite unacceptable if a man "doesn't finish." The male orgasm is the period on the end of coitus, for obvious reasons. Once again, we have a core of the sexual union--the penis. Because the man's pleasure centers are very discreetly centered around the nerve-heavy glans, he is understandably phallocentric in his sexual approach. The erection and its decline are the opening and closing acts of this play, with the male climax as...well...the climax. Female stimulation is considered an enabling factor to the male's business, merely for lubricating his approach. The pleasure sounds of the female are themselves rendered as fetish, merely an encouragement to enrich erotic appeal for the man (he is usually silent). Most often too, a sexually-sophisticated woman will offer herself in whatever position the man prefers, to his delight. ("Take me" "How do you want me?" "Have you way with me") -- these exhortations are highly erotic.
Such language renders the female as an object to be possessed. We've been well-trained at the apex of consumer capitalism to crave and even require the possession of many objects. Marketers present them as fetishes, objects for worship imbued with otherworldly power. They enhance our prestige in the eyes of others, and even promise to confer upon us desired identities. Men--especially risk-taking, testosterone-infused Alpha Males--crave polygamous sex, while demanding and enforcing (often violently) the fidelity of their partner(s). There is no male equivalent of the word "mistress." There is also no female equivalent for "cuckold." Loosing ones possessions, in the form of being cuckolded, is emotionally damaging for men because of the co-current loss of prestige. It is as traumatic as being forced to relinquish colonial possessions. Just ask France.
Before the pill, women shouldered totally the omnipresent risk of pregnancy, and the often-mortal risks of childbirth. Think of how risky sex was for premodern woman. Between STD (which are tellingly referred to also as "venereal," but not "penile," disease), cancers, pregnancy, death in childbirth, permanent injury and death for genital mutilation, rape, unwanted pseudo-rape from husbands, etc., one wonders how in the world sex could have ever been enjoyable for women. All this stuff remains common practice in much of the developing world, not to mention in the peripheral sectors of our own, enlightened First World.
Males depend on the possession of women, not just for prestige and enjoyment, but for their very health--just as the colonial core depends on its periphery for sustenance. Studies have shown that men who marry young live significantly longer, while their younger wives live significantly shorter lives. Men are not as social as women, and with age they grow less so. Thus, it is extremely important to a whole variety of health indicators that older men be married. Study after study has shown that frequent and regular orgasm from sex reduces dramatically the incidence of chronic diseases among men.
Dependency upon women, like the core's dependency on its peripheral colonies, has always caused anxiety, however. "No man is an island," as the saying goes, but it should be equally said that man needs his islands. From childhood, boys are taunted for their dependence on the feminine ("Mama's boy!"). Later on, male peers jeer at their peers who "are whipped" by their girlfriends. As adults, the bourgeois professional jokes wearily about his wife: "Women--can't live with them, can't live without them." Indeed, the male core both loathes/fears his female colonial possessions, and requires them in order to thrive. The declining labor pools of the West require immigrants, and yet their fear their invasive, alien "horde." The tropics held fascination for the Westerner, seeming as a primordial Paradise, but they were deadly to the touch, full of unknown diseases and unseen dangers (like the vagina, perhaps). In order to be exploited without danger, the tropics--like women--had to be sanitized and domesticated.
The pineapple--all lavish, spiny exoticism--was re-presented as a healthful, versatile and sanitary product by colonial Europeans. The tropics were penetrated, dominated and sanitized literally and figuratively (by cutting back jungle, draining swamps and replacing the native fauna with uniform rows of monoculture cash crops). The tropics and their fruit were packaged, labeled and sold to the specifications of the core. Woman too was scrubbed, exfoliated, shaved, plucked, sealed with tampons, sprayed all over with "personal care products," rouged over, and distanced from the Earth on ungainly heels--sanitized. We take both for granted today, so that any reversal would seem "unnatural."
Unity and Order. The Celestial Kingdom. Platonic Forms. Heaven on Earth. All roads leading to Rome--from the periphery to the core. The centralized, unified, synthetic, sanitary, monadal, masculine Core. A reverse Big Bang sucking all of messy Reality into a neat, comprehensible singularity: God.
Have you ever seen true, virgin Nature in all its dark, womb-like glory? Have you ever seen an unaltered woman? The word for it is "grotesque," which comes from the same Latin word for "grotto," meaning a small cave or hollow. The finest remaining example of ancient grottesche--that extravagant form of Roman art--was discovered by a 14th Century audience in the Domus Aurea palace complex of Emperor Nero, corridors of lavish fresco overgrown and buried by Nature. Beauty buried within Nature--grotesque. As modern peoples of the core, we are both repelled and strangely drawn to the grotesque. It retains some primordial erotic edge. We hear the Call of Nature within it. Its savage, musky aroma quickens the heart. We can be caught in its full throes for a while. And yet afterward, we are ashamed. We wince, blush and turn away. Afterward, we reject. We reject the feminine. We reject the Earth. We reject ourselves.
Everything in life is a zero-sum game, and it's simply not reconcilable. The word "fallacy" is based on the same Greek root as "fascinate" and "phallus." The only way reconcile these irreconcilables to ignore reality, or practice hypocrisies. As a thinking, Western man, I too am culpable. And I do love a good pineapple.
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