Preface
We hear a lot these days about failure.
“Failure is not an option” said President George W. Bush when speechifying about his war in Iraq. This meant that, though administration leaders were dead wrong in their analysis of Iraq’s WMD, and dead wrong about Saddam Hussein’s connection to Al Qaeda, and dead wrong in their estimate of how easily American know-how would transform Iraqi tyranny into consumer heaven, our nation under Bush became so deeply immersed in this misadventure that we could not call it off, nor withdraw, nor cut our losses, nor stop the killing. We had to, no matter the cost, succeed; not least because failure would have signaled a fatal weakness in our dominion, in our global image, in our very being. And that would have constituted the most intolerable failing of all.1
We also hear a great deal about a related nemesis: ‘failed states.’ Though the exact meaning of the term is never fully clarified (though attempts are made: ‘failed state, a state that is unable to perform the two fundamental functions of the sovereign nation-state in the modern world system: it cannot project authority over its territory and peoples, and it cannot protect its national boundaries’--Brittanica.com), the examples are all too obvious: Afghanistan before, and after, the U.S. invaded and then pulled out. Iraq before the U.S. invaded (but after crippling sanctions, almost-daily bombings, and finally the U.S. pullout). Iran after the Shah was deposed. Sudan. Libya. Somalia. North Korea. And in our hemisphere, Cuba. Haiti. Colombia. And probably, since their recent left-wing tilts, Bolivia and Venezuela. And, of course, Palestinians even thinking about their right to statehood, failed or no, but not the Marshall Islands or Micronesia or Kuwait after its U.S. rescue or Pakistan under whichever ruler one can name. And, as we list them, it becomes clear that the term ‘failed state’ signifies a political entity which fails to conform to U.S. plans for full-spectrum dominance. The inference becomes that no leader in his right mind would want to lead a ‘failed state,’ nor any people agree to be part of one, for the list of such states reads like a list of the damned: the pathetic, impoverished outcasts of the world. By contrast, we are meant to infer, ‘successful’ states are those which, like the U.S. (until recently, that is), can boast of a healthy GNP, privatize their economies, export more than they import (though, again, the United States has become a notable failure in this regard), count for something in the UN (especially if they merit a seat on the Security Council) and produce populations of rosy-cheeked, extroverted citizens who travel the world with their cameras and travelers checks and cell-phone-activated credit cards upon which they can draw without the fear that hobbles failed-staters.
The operating principle in these examples of failure is easy to see: fear. For it is fear of failure that underlies them all. The word, and the concept of failure reverberates so fearsomely in our time, in fact, that we might call it a phobia. To be failed, to be a failure in any sense, thrusts one immediately to the bottom of whatever pecking order one occupies. Or removes one from the order entirely. We Americans learn this very early. As children, we are constantly warned not to fail. In school, our grades become the accepted metric by which we, our intelligence and capacity for learning, are calculated. And the worst possible outcome, always, is the F word, the F grade, failure. Nor is it simply our school work that is measured in this way. So internalized does this system become that throughout most of our lives, we continue to employ these measures either literally or metaphorically. ‘How am I doing?’ becomes our constant inner refrain. ‘Am I succeeding? In my job, my marriage, my parenting, my health, my life? And if so, how thoroughly, what grade am I getting? Have I failed, even in part, ever? Will I fail in the end? What will the final report card conclude about me, about my life’s worth?’ And of course, if we happen to be Christian, we believe that our lives will be quite literally weighed and judged and rewarded in the end as well—success to be signaled by the sound of trumpets opening those pearly gates; failure to be met by the steamy yawn of that raging hellfire below.
History supplies endless reminders of this final-report syndrome. The dinosaurs, we are told, failed. The dominant creatures during the Jurassic period of evolutionary history, regnant and unchallenged for millions of years, the dinosaurs suddenly disappeared. And no one knows quite why. Though there are theories aplenty, the issue remains in doubt. Which leaves us with the question: How could these immense, varied, and totally-dominant creatures have suddenly died out? Their remains only add to our fascination, and our horror; for if such overwhelmingly powerful, perfectly adapted, magnificent creatures could fail, what might be in store for humans (especially given the current climate crisis caused by excess CO2)?
The Mayans add to our perplexity. Fully equipped with a fertile territory, and an astonishing array of civilized instruments allowing them to invent not only a system of writing, but immense ziggurats and astronomies and calendars and histories and sport and trade and art and an obvious food surplus that made all these things possible, yet these noble creatures with their elegant civilization suddenly and swiftly failed. In a matter of what appears to be a few hundred years, their imprint on the central American jungle goes from complete control and rising dominance over their environment to total collapse. They vanish. And no one knows, with any degree of certainty, why.
The list of other cultures and states filling out the roster of failed civilizations knows almost no limit. After bestriding the known world as no one before or since, Rome fell ignominiously to invading barbarians from Italy’s north, leaving behind an immense store of monuments and artifacts and manuscripts and achievements which testify predominantly to the precariousness of even the most-stable societies. So too did ancient Greece, Egypt of the Pharoahs, several city-states in Mesopotamia, Crete, the Aztecs, the Incas, and virtually every other civilization to inhabit the earth. And our response to each of them is the same: wherefore this failure?
Our answer, often enough, is to foreground their successes. The Romans: what a magnificent run they had after all. So, too, the ancient Greeks who built Athens and our very way of thinking. So too Egypt and Sumer and ancient Tenochtitlan and Macchu Picchu and on and on. And it becomes clear from even a cursory reading of human history that we all, all humans almost without exception, harbor deep within us an allergy to failure. Only success is worth having, only the successful of our world are worthy of remembering. And so we salute those who “ride in triumph through Persepolis,” who cross the Tiber to enter Rome at the head of victorious armies, who raise a fist bearing the trophy or the award or the tribute or the encomium written for the ages that says: “Veni, vidi, vinci, I came I saw I conquered.” I succeeded.2
Nor is this pressure to succeed limited to leaders or states. The very nature of the scientific enterprise has yielded to the success imperative so completely that the world was, a few years ago, stunned by the most visible scientific fraud in recent history: the spectacle of Hwang Woo Suk, Korea’s foremost biologist, having to admit that he had faked results in his ‘successful’ drive to produce stem cells from cloned embryos. The underlying dynamic turned out to be all too clear: Hwang felt so much pressure to win the Nobel-driven race to use stem cells to cure intractable diseases, that fundamental scientific ethics were jettisoned. Hwang thus did what countless students at all levels now do: he cheated, doctoring his results to hide the embarrassing facts of his failure. The world was properly outraged, but should it have been? when it has for years sanctioned by its silence and acquiescence the similar but mostly hidden ‘success-at-all-costs’ code of its political leaders, its business leaders and its moral leaders demonstrating daily, and in no uncertain terms, that success, no matter how achieved, is all that counts?
And why? Just consider the failures; those who bring up the rear; those whose cities are toppled and robbed and burned, whose peoples are raped and slain and enslaved, whose experiments end in disappointment, whose explorations or businesses or sports careers or artistic endeavors or lives come to little. What do we make of them? They are mostly forgotten. With the exception, perhaps, for the few who are resuscitated periodically as ‘noble failures,’ or trotted out as object lessons for our edification in how not to conduct ourselves, they are consigned to the dung-heap of history.
It is this imbalance that has impelled the writing of this book—a book that, for a change, attempts to shine some light onto that dung-heap of failure. And the questions it asks are simple: Is dung truly dung? Is it only dung? Does it make sense to thus divide the world: the ice cream of success up here, the shit of failure down there, and never the twain shall meet? Does it even make sense, in the end, to speak of failure?
Nor are such questions meant to justify egregious failure, to submerge everything in a pernicious, homogenizing refusal to make elementary distinctions, one that deprives each thing of its proper place and evaluation and unique function. Far less is it meant to justify a callous or punitive attitude toward individual failures, to rationalize them as deserving of their lot, and therefore as suitable for sacrifice as mere filler or ‘cannon fodder’ in the grand scheme that allows the more armored or worthy or wealthy or successful to thrive. Quite the contrary. What is intended here is a questioning of such rationalizations, an overturning of such easy notions. Including the very concepts, the conceptual apparatus behind the terms ‘success’ and ‘failure’ themselves. For it is this conceptual apparatus that consigns so much, so many, so regularly to misery, to want, to failure, to the dung-heap of history. And it is that absolutely nihilizing, occultating, dung-rejecting paradigm, in both substance and symbology, that needs to be, that here is, one hopes, exposed to something of a revealing, even restorative light.
Lawrence DiStasi
February 2006 & May 2022
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Endnotes
1. It should perhaps be said right here that the most notable instance of an American leader’s fear of failure comes from Donald Trump’s pathological need to succeed in his quest to remain President in 2020. Though advised and begged by his White House advisers, lawyers and confidants to concede that Joe Biden had won the presidency, he kept insisting, both in private and in public, that he could not have lost, and that the election had been ‘stolen’ from him. He repeated (and still repeats) this Big Lie everywhere, galvanized armed militias and supporters to use violence to stop the Congress from certifying the electoral count on Jan. 6, 2021, and demonstrated that he was quite willing to sacrifice his Vice-President, Democracy and the nation itself to his deathly terror of admitting to failure.
2. In fact, the world reeled, may still be reeling from the spectacle of Lindsey Jacobellis turning certain victory into defeat by risking an airborne bit of hot-doggery a few yards from the Olympic finish line. Intending to cap her anticipated success in the 2006 snowboard-cross with a signature move to cement her anticipated fame in Turin, she tumbled instead, allowing her Swiss rival to pass her and win the gold, thus transforming herself from beloved heroine into scorned, and pitied, goat. (Jacobellis may have been redeemed more recently by her wins in two snowcross events in the 2022 Olympics in Beijing.)
This tells us that the American mania for success continues to grow to monstrous proportions. Gloating over success, rubbing it in to humiliate one’s competitors, has become the rule rather than the exception. Where once a sports figure would limit his or her acknowledgment of victory to a modest nod, today it is necessary to maximally puff up one’s exultation move to say: ‘I did it! I did it on my own! I myself, alone, deserve all the applause and adulation the world can give me.’
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