The indefinitely postponed real, or how the monkey came to the jungle gym

 the indefinitely postponed real

I wrote this in 2010. This was long before I or anyone else could see that the monkey was coming to the jungle gym – the monkey being Trump, of course.
But we could see decline and fall everywhere, if we had the eyes for it.
“In the history of the professionalization of philosophy in the Anglo-sphere since the beginning of the Cold War, one notices that there are periodic crises of realism, in which its enemies are warded off in one way or another. In the division of intellectual labor that organizes the universities, the philosophers have taken up the vocation of defending the real. Still, there is the problem of what the real is and how it can be attacked in the first place. On the one hand, there is the inclination to make the real synonymous with what there is – the universe, say. And yet, few realists would say, I think, that the real began with the big bang. If the real is the universe, why not dispense with the term real as a superfluous and confusing lable? Yet one feels that the realists are uncomfortable thinking of the real as having a beginning or end, or having dark matter in it, or black holes. These things are real, but they aren’t in the real. Then there is the tendency to make the real the objective, as opposed to the subjective – thus a black hole is real and a thought is not. But again, this seems an oddly bent way to talk – how could a thought not be real? Is there a domain of irreality? And can I have a ticket to it, please? One way – cause I’m not coming back.
No doubt, the real – reality – is an odd term.
There is an excellent riff on the philosophical use of the real in Engel’s small book on Feuerbach.
Poor Engel’s suffers from the self-inflicted wound of never quite being real himself – his commentators will forever compare him to Marx, and take Engel’s writings to be either a translation or a distortion of Marx. This is, however, what Engels wanted to be seen as. Inevitably, if one member of a dyad is to play the role of the sage, the other must be the fool. If one is the knight, the other is Sancho Panza. If one is Bruno, the other must be Bruno’s ass. And, indeed, Engels is the sensual man compared to the ever harassed Marx. Marx, at one point in his desperate attempt to change the world and not simply understand it, applied for and was refused a humble job as a railroad station accountant; Engels, on the other hand, was apparently a successful manager of a branch of his family’s business in Manchester. It was Engels who turned Marx on to the political economy, not vice versa. It is as if Sancho Panza loaned the romances of chivalry to Don Quixote. Otherwise, Engels seemed to see himself in this dyad.
Engels, who attended lectures at the University of Berlin as a soldier but never took a degree as a student, never fully imbibed that obsessive stylistic tic of Marx’s that Benjamin (in a different context) calls la culte de la blague. Often, in Marx’s writing, when the reader feels the roof being lifted off the house, we know we are in the presence of that tremendous, even prophetic sarcasm which makes Marx so pre-eminently a writer, a man of textual strategies. Engels likes a little Hegelian word play as much as the other guy, but when he tells a joke he is sure to label it a joke – not for him Marx’s habit of throwing all his genius into a joke, so that it becomes Satanically, sublimely … not funny.
Engels begins his book on Feuerbach by discussing a well known maxim of Hegel’s: all that is real, is rational, and all that is rational, is real. He notes that his has been seen as Hegel’s blessing of Prussian despotism. But Engel’s disagrees. Those who quickly rush to make Hegel a bootlicker of the Prussian court forget that for Hegel, the real is the necessary. And this is key.
“But what is necessary, shows itself as rational in the last instance, which, applied to the Prussian state at that time, means, according to the Hegelian proposition, only: this state is rational, that is, corresponds to reason, only in so far as it is necessary; and if it appears terrible to us, and yet, in spite of its badness, continues to exist, the badness of the government finds its justification and explanation in the badness of its subjects [Untertanen]. The Prussian of that time had the government they deserved.
“Now, reality – according to Hegel – is not an attribute that a given social or political arrangement retains under all circumstances and times. On the contrary. The Roman republic was real, but so was the Roman empire that crushed it. The French monarchy of 1789 had become so unreal, that is, so robbed of all necessity, so irrational, that it had to be destroyed through the great Revolution, that Hegel always spoke of with the highest enthusiasm. Here, the Monarchy was the unreal, the revolution the real. And so it goes that in the course of development, all that was earlier real loses its necessity, its right to existence, its rationality; a new, lively reality steps into the place of the dying real – peacefully, when the old state of affairs is rational enough, without striving to be carried off by death, and violently, when it holds out against this necessity. And so the Hegelian proposition is inverted through Hegelian dialectic into its opposite: everything which is real in the domain of human history will become unreasonable with time, and thus is already according to its pre-determination irrational, is qualified by the irrational from then on; and everything, which is rational in the heads of men, is predetermined, to be real, may it contradict existing reality in ever so many ways. The proposition of the rationality of all the real is dissolved according to the rules of Hegel’s conceptual method into its other; the value of everything that exists is the fact that it dies. [Alles was besteht, ist wert, dass es zugrunde geht]"
I interpret this wonderfully uplifting, almost surrealist credo in terms of our sense of reality, which is our sense of how everything, as it were, works.
Any newspaper reader of the past ten years must have noticed the loss of this sense of reality in the Americanized part of the world. This loss comes through in two ways: a deep failure of the mechanisms of social cause and effect, and a profusion of symbols that become issues. The three most recent events in which one feels the deep mechanism, the machine, has jumped the track were the invasion of Iraq, the Great Slump, and the earthquake in Haiti, where we witnessed obsessive acts that seemed to respond not to cause and effect on the ground, but to a whole other set of status making motives that failed to recognize or in any way integrate what was happening on the ground. As for the politics of symbols – the real for Engels certainly generates symbols; but the unreal, mesa mis, ah, the unreal can only and always deal with symbols. Symbols define the politically possible, which nobody even pretends is a response to or solution for the politically impossible, that is, real social problems. The left and right still debate, for instance, the invasion of Iraq without any sense at all that the invasion had to do with a whole broken structure, going back to the double sanction policy against Iran and Iraq, that had everything to do with navigating the great problem of maintaining a feudal oil supplier, Saudi Arabia, and an irredentist state that is way too small for its irredentism, Israel. Iran is still unrecognized, Osama bin Laden and the magic pygmy pony by which he escaped Tora Bora is still at large, Israel is still irredentist, and D.C. will spend 800 billion plus on war this year with no questions asked. These are the lineaments of dysfunction. They go deep. They sap the real.
The earthquake is coming. How long will it tarry?"
It tarried for 15 years. And not the best years of the Republic.

The Sunday of Life

 

It happens, occasionally, that an author can be argued into the canon – as for instance the case of Virginia Woolf, who was ignored by the mostly male canon-makers of the 50s and 60s, since her genius as an artist went against their grain. Feminism helped, of course. But genius will out.

Mostly, though, an argument is a holding operation, a way of waiting for attention to shift.

This is how I feel about Raymond Queneau. I first encountered Queneau in Barbara Wright’s translation of Chiendent, englished as Bark Tree, and now as Witchgrass. Now, if you haven’t read it, stop reading my nonsense and read it!

I think it was first issued by New Directions. It was at some point in 1974 bought by the Decatur Public Library in Decatur Georgia and checked out for two weeks by a local goofball, me, who brought it home and read it will sitting at a picnic table on a porch.

Since then, I’ve learned French, and I read Queneau in Queneauin, his version of French. I have a few Pleiade editions in my library – among them are all Queneau’s novels. I’ve often wondered, why is this guy not better known?

Of course, there is a cult around him. Italo Calvino. Georges Perec. The Dalkey press people who run the Review of Contemporary Fiction. But among the literati who know the names of Queneau’s contemporaries, Bataille Breton Malraux Sartre Camus Blanchot Beauvoir, Queneau gets the short end.

Pity.

I’m re-rereading The Sunday of Life (which was translated by the indefatigable Barbara Wright and published by New Directions) because I’ve been thinking of ordinary life within a reactionary age – the age of White Terror. The setting of the novel is France in the popular front era, 1937-1939, but Queneau wrote it in 25 days in 1951 – having lived through the Occupation, in part in Paris, in part in Limoges. From the viewpoint of 1951, one knew what the ultra-right in France, and the often feckless Left, were dancing towards.

But these political events occur,in the book, as it were overhead.

The very title references a history that is philosophical, not political – or not political in terms of left and right. The title comes from a passage in Hegel’s lectures on Aesthetics, from the section on painting, where the Berlin sage contrasts the Italian school of renaissance painting and the Flemish.

“This painting [Flemish] has developed unsurpassably, on the one hand, a through and through living characterization in the greatest truth of which art is capable; and, on the other hand, the magic and enchantment of light, illumination, and colouring in general, in pictures of battle and military life, in scenes in the tavern, in weddings and other merry-making of peasants, in portraying domestic affairs, in portraits and objects in nature such as landscapes, animals, flowers, etc. And when it proceeds from the insignificant and accidental to peasant life, even to crudity and vulgarity, these scenes appear so completely penetrated by a naive cheerfulness and jollity that the real subject-matter is not vulgarity, which is just vulgar and vicious, but this cheerfulness and naïveté. For this reason we have before us no vulgar feelings and passions but peasant life and the down-to-earth life of the lower classes which is cheerful, roguish, and comic. In this very heedless boisterousness there lies the ideal feature: it is the Sunday of life which equalizes everything and removes all evil; people who are so whole-heartedly cheerful cannot be altogether evil and base.”

A hard lesson to hold on to in 1951, when the evil and base were in your nostrils.

Queneau had gotten his Hegel from Alesander Kojéve’s Lectures on Hegel, which he sat through next to Bataille (who, Queneau said, sometimes fell asleep). And we get our Kojéve through the book, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, which was “assembled” from the notes that Queneau took of the seminars. I think Queneau was a very intrusive editor in that book, which was all to the good as far as its coherence goes.

The Sunday of Life is about the marriage of an owner of a mercer’s shop, Julia Segovia, to a soldier, Valentin Bru, and how that affected her family and Brû. On the simplest level, this is what this comic masterpiece (to lay it on blurb thick) is about.

So, contestant number one, I can hear the game show host in your soul ask, what is sooooo special about The Sunday of Life?

I’m just going to mention one thing, a small thing, that keys us into the larger things that Queneau brings to the novel.

We all know that the novelist is a bit like a hostess throwing a party. And just like a good hostess, the novelist gives us the names of the playing characters, most of the time. The novelist might vary this with an unnamed I narrator, but mostly the name tags are firmly in place. Fred Raskolnikov, sitting behind the punchbowl with his long beard thrown across his shoulders, is going to be Fred Raskolnikov doing this or that, axing his pawnbroker or visiting a brothel, until the end.

But as we know from going to parties and in general life, life itself, names don’t stick on like that. In a large family, a rookery with many kids all screaming for food, the parents often call the kids by the names of the other kids. This happens. Moreover, in life, even among our friends, we sometimes get the family name wrong, mispronouncing it, or semi-forgetting it.

This is not a thing novelists normally play with. But Queneau does. The character of Paul Britouillat, fore instance, Brû’s brother in law, goes through enormous changes that go along with him being a bit of a dipsomaniac, a big eared schemer, and a French functionary in the department of weights and measures. Sometimes he is called Bredega, sometimes Butaya, sometimes Brodouga, etc. He is a most unmemorable player, but he is made memorable by the routine that shows how unmemorable he is.

It is a subtle thing, but there is, here, a good humor that is uncommon in a French novel that is basically farcical. Celine, who also dealt with the small and ordinary, never finds the Sunday of Life among them – their schemes are rotten. Only the sex is good.

Queneau, however, brings off the almost impossible: a happy novel that uses routines rather like his contemporary, Abbot and Costello, in their Whose on First playlet.

This is not ordinary life in escape mode, as in Wodehouse, but ordinary life viewed, as it were, on the ground level, the level we live and gossip and tell funny stories about each other in.

And I like that.

The graduate and world history

 

I was around 15 when Watergate became TV. I was brought up in a conservative Republican household and considered myself a very conservative little chirp, so much so that Nixon’s trip to China made me think he was a bad man – China was communist! I hadn’t yet shucked all of that bullshit, although by the end of my teen years I was a Marxist – so there you go. I was helped on the way, though, by Watergate. The President (back then, it was in Capitals that I thought of the mook) had so obviously and painfully lied, lied, lied – and I swallowed the press narrative that this was the worst crime a President could commit.

Later, however, I began to see that there was, to say the least, some disproportionality here. The lie that the president told that resulted in the secret bombing of Cambodia and the horrific spread of the war was skipped over nimbly by the press. The lean towards Pakistan that encouraged a genocidal civil war in which a million were killed in Bangladesh was also as nothing. It was the coverup of the break-in to the Dem headquarters (and not, say, the eternal spying and placing of agents provocateurs with the Socialist Workers Party, which, as Noam Chomsky pointed out back then, was simply considered normal and unscandalous by the press) that undid him. Undid him for months and months of wonderful worldtheater.

History, like all cold cases, depends a lot on trivia. As I grew into your average paranoid loser leftist, I began to get this. I also began to get that conspiracy theory might not be true, but it was a great vehicle for spotlighting the weirdness of ordinary life among the American elite – and even among the American lumpen. Whether Oswald was or was not a lone assassin is one thing – but the very social possibility that was inhabited by his friend, the hairless David Ferrie, was a more important other, at least as far as the American circus was concerned. The Watergate scandal was absolutely full of kooks and eccentrics and wheeler dealers.  As well, it ultimately made no sense.

I recently re-saw The Graduate, a movie I also associate with my biologically misspent adolescence. I must have watched for the first time on our tv set in the basement of the house on Nielsen Court in November, 1973 – I looked up when it was shown on CBS and the date was November 8.  Seeing it now, I wonder if my misspending biology absorbed that beautiful California landscape – the 60s landscape, before it was swallowed up by a tide of housing, and that beautiful red Alfa Romeo speeding Ben towards Elaine at Berkeley – and had any premonition that the American wanderlust and wonder of the postwar prosperity would not last my lifetime. I know I wanted the life I saw in movies, contrasting it with the soggy Georgia hills of my suburban Clarkston neighborhood, where everything seemed so slow. Now, of course, I return to Atlanta and marvel that the metro is so multi-culty, so arboreal, so pretty, and I read my lifeline into the trees I see. And somewhere in that lifeline was Watergate, as it pinged on the radar of one little white male adolescent.

This is the personal sublime, the comparison of the tiny firefly light of my existence with the impersonal grandeur of a politics that I can, I know, do nothing about. Ben in his diving suit is still a striking image from The Graduate, but my empathy, my identity focus, is much more on Mrs. Robinson and her eyes, the way she looks there, lying on her side in bed, listening and not listening to Ben’s nasal patter.

 

Robert Walser's The Brueghel Picture

 

Rosemarie Trockel - Triple Bob

Yesterday, I read Robert Walser’s “essay” on Brueghel pictures – in German, Das Brueghelbild, first published in the Prager Press of May, 1927, reprinted in the Zarte Zeilen, the 18^th volume of Walser’s works, and translated in a little book I have yet to get ahold of, Looking at Pictures, some of which was translated by the ever industrious Susan Bernofsky, and some by the English poet Christopher Middleton, who I knew in the 80s in Austin, where he taught.

But this is fill in. Or is it? Walser has an uncanny ability to make one ask: what is fill in and what is important?

What is the topic?

Talk about topics sound either scolding – the teacher criticizing the student for not having a clear topic sentence – or linguistic, where the classics come from the seventies: Teun A. van Dijk’s Text grammars and H.P. Grice’s Some Models for Implicature especially, disturbing the analytic’s proposition-mania by reminding philosophers that truth (truth-finding and truth-making) is merely one of the many purposes of language – or sensemaking in the largest sense.

And at this time, the whole rhetorical/linguistic approach to literature can feel demodé. Van Dijk is not exactly anybody’s cause, anymore. But I’m embracing being an old man in a dry month/being read to be a boy/waiting for rain as my persona of the month.

So fuck it.

The text grammar approach attempts to map the governance of discourse – a governance that is not, of course, directly referenced by most discourse. Although, as any arguer knows, there comes a moment in the argument when one side or another asks the question: what are we arguing for?

But it is the rare arguer indeed who asks: how are we arguing? Send that person to a philosophy class right away!

Walser’s “The Brueghel picture” is built on a certain defiance of what topic structure we expect from a text so named. However, the defiance – a certain aggression – is of a, if you will, non-ideological kind.

In the reviews I’ve read of Looking at Pictures – it piqued the interest of a number of reviewers when it came out  - the decision about the topic of Walser’s piece was that it was about the familiar painting of the Parable of the Blind.  This painting, and Walser’s way of seeing it as representative of our not-seeing, our brawling selves, is indeed within a possible abstraction of the topical focus. But once we are “inside” the essay, we find that the Parable of the Blind is not the “subject” of the essay. It is rather a node in a much stranger passage from one topic to another.

Topics are not just my interpretive gift to this piece. At the very beginning of the essay, we find that the subject of the essay is in question, is commented on before it quite begins.

“THE BRUEGHEL PICTURE: “All of the other things that may be understood under this introductory phrase need hardly concern me, I think, and this will become only a wee, vanishing little essay-ette about an imprisoned, naked man from some…something. From that time.”

This is a masterpiece in promising that what we are about to read is no masterpiece. That is, the mastery in the masterpiece is to be avoided, the great references, the tracked down dates. At the same time, its very désinvolture seems uttlerly designed, to leave us with a question that we want to stay to have resolved: what about this imprisoned, naked man?

The essay is, in a sense, a kind of ekphrastic homologue of those Brueghel paintings that scatter across the canvas a thousand small scenes, thus diffusing our sense of a painting as having a center, even if that center is not at the physical center of the square of the picture. The center is what the painting builds its purpose out from – it can be Mona Lisa’s smile, or it can be Van Gogh’s bandaged ear. But in Brueghel, some dysfunction in the world itself makes the center something that doesn’t hold – even as that dysfunction – an apocalypse, a village, children playing a game, blind beggars falling in a ditch – gives us a strong sense of theme.

Susan Bernofsky’s Biography of Robert Walser is, I am finding, a sort of essential nearby for reading the man himself. The man’s strange, crippled sexuality. The man’s lack of standing as a writer in his lifecourse, in his own mind and that of others. His enigmatic shiftlessness. His mental demons. His seeming innocence.

The Brueghel picture contains a digression that turns it upside down, as far as the topic structure is concerned. In the second paragraph, when one expects the painting of Brueghel, or the painter Brueghel, to be treated in some way, we are instead treated to the author thinking about writing about Brueghel but having other thoughts as well – just as, writing this, am thinking about the bag of Doritos on the table, the noises outside of workers drilling on the building, and of getting up and going to take a pee.

Here's the digression: “I’m dealing, quite otherwise, with a quasi-adventurous question, which is even the small or great question of the day, to wit, whether a masseur would be allowed to kiss the woman he is massaging into an entrancingly beautiful shape. Couldn’t it occasion surprise, drama, and unpleasantness of the first order? Mister, what are you doing? Could be said to the body artist to whom it thus occurred to extend himself beyond the limits laid down by the definition and obligations of his profession.”

This digression is in line with certain letters Walser would write women who he was, in his manner, courting, especially as he moved past his fortieth birthday and found himself a bachelor. The fantasy of the masseur is, evidently, sexual, but it is an eroticism that censors itself into a very tame, and for that very reason very creepy,  paraphiliac fantasy, the fantasy of a timid frotteur.

What role does this digression play? It leads us, for one thing, into a ditch – like the blind men in Brueghel’s painting. The ditch is a topic-ditch – we are, with the masseur, way off topic. But it asserts an unconsciousness in the selection of the Brueghel pictures Walser wants to talk about that lends them a very personal pathos – these are pictures as seen by Walser. And we are not going to see the Brueghel picture without going through a sort of interior exposition, a memory show.

In particular, the picture of the naked man:

“Yet back to my poor man, who stands there completely naked. Might one speak, in relation to this creature, of an unparalleled abandonment? I hope that one might speak so. Today the sun is shining on a day that could be called Wetnurse day. A girl, as young as a bud, asks me if I have thought about doing something to this humane end. Can I refuse to? That seems impossible to me.

A famous poet, in book form, sits next to a loaf of storebought bread in the larder in my dressing closet. And now there will come something peculiar of me from this laughing mouth, which I owe to my Father and Mother; the erect prisoner stands in a sort of container or iron cabinet completely isolated and upright. By the least movement he may make, he will be pricked by a dagger. He is imprisoned between their sharp points. He is crowded into a space by them. What loneliness this means for him! One can hardly conceive it. The thing with this poor, upright, lamentable man is he has let something for which he is guilty build up to this point, he’s made himself unloveable in the most emphatic way; as a punishment for his sin he is shamed, here, in this relatively narrow cage, where he exists in unspeakable discomfort. “

This passage again tears us from the apparent topic signalled by the title of this essay-ette. Where, one might ask, is this picture in Brueghel? 

Walser drops the imprisoned man in the next paragraph and muses on a painting of Brueghel’s he seems to have seen in an exhibition in Berne in 1926: The Parable of the Blind. Where the usual art historical version of this painting describes it as blind men with their sticks leading each other into a ditch, Walser sees those sticks as cudgels, and sees their party as a brawl. In truth, that they are brawling and following each other seems a valid way of looking at this painting. But why, we want to know, have we been haunted by this abject man, upright in a cage? What does he have to do with Brueghel?

Walser returns to the man after thinking about the blind men hacking at each other in the night on the edge of the village. It turns out that the naked man is a memory. Walser writes that he came upon this picture as a boy, turning over the pages of a magazine that might have been Kunst für Alle.

Here, then, is the essayette – we move from a fantasy about a masseur kissing one of his patients, or daring to, to a naked man upright – his erection is emphasized – in a cage that has been penetrated by a multitude of daggers, giving him little space in which to remain unpricked, to Brueghel’s blind men. These associations constitute a sort of insurrection against the usual topic that would be expected from the title, ‘The Brueghel Picture.’

It is an association that brings us back to the writer. It is as if the haunting image of the man, burdened by a guilt he has never atoned for, naked and in a dangerous cage, is the real topic of this essay or revery. By way of Bernofsky’s account of Walser’s love life, it is hard for me not to see something magical here that I want to resist: if Walser saw this striking image when he was a boy going through an art magazine, the image did not curse him, give him the evil eye, condemn him to suffer a painful fate of loneliness and abandonment. Pictures do not enchant, nor do masseurs create “enchanting beauties” out of the women they massage.

Yet I love this associative lure, somehow.

I love it and fear it.

Cabaret faschitude

 The question of whether Trump is a fascist or not holds a fascination with the politically interested professional class. It is as if classifying Trump is like classifying a virus – you know what it is, you can inoculate against it.

Myself, I think there’s a whole lotta diminishing returns in fighting about this question.

On the other hand, I think it takes a rare type of heteronormative white male to wholly ignore the question of style, as if style were some epiphenomena, a “not-real” which we wave away as we do our hardcore comparisons of economic policy between Trump and Mussolini, circa 1930.

This is one of the reasons that the debate seems, on the one hand, so airless, and on the other hand, so frustrating. Because it is the fascitude, my droogs, which we can all see.

It is the style that attracts the boys.

Thus, instead of leafing through Mein Kampf and Ian Kershaw, I’d suggest participants in the Great Fascist Debate watch Cabaret, and in particular, the sequence: Tomorrow belongs to me, here:

Every innovation in media in the twentieth and twenty first century has made style, the fashion for liking things, the fashion of the things liked, an ever more politically potent imitatio drive. Style, as all us post-postians know, is the royal road to substance. While the neolib technocrats celebrated Biden’s push for a change on clause 3 (a) of the amended Taft-Hartley law of 1962 – that will surely touch the heart of the working class and lead to victory for a thousand years! – the style background was in flux all around them – on the one hand, the mobilized college student protests, on the other hand, the dude-ish, reddit rejection of college at all. The style of Trumpism in all its forms is all fascitude. False bravado. And if my Mr. Professional, with a smirk, asks, well, where is the policy – it exists as only a further stage of the right wing paradigm since Reagan.

Within a framework of laws, which is legitimated by the cockeyed idea that nine justices are just gonna run everything through a constitutional test. Eventually, of course, if the rightwing dynamic grows stronger, they will make exceptions, rule some things as constitutionally relevant, and read other things that are literally in the constitution out of the constitution.

My feeling, as an aging pen-pusher, is that the fascitude style is much more important than the classification of Trump’s toybox of policies. And that the Professional flight into the various happy traps they have devised during the last forty years – rational choice, behavioral economics, the whole grab bag – is a flight from what we all see too clearly.

The explainers are failing us.

Borges on Trump (sort of)

 “At length we arrive at the topic of Peron’s return to power.

‘Is history going to repeat itself, Borges?’

‘History may well repeat itself.’ H is referring to his own dilemma as well as that of his country. He speaks at length nd with frankness about the character of Pron and of the cynicism of the Peronists. ‘ If you call Peron a rascal, they do not mind. They mind only if you call him a fool.’

The most pertinent piece about Trump’s spree in the NYT is not in some op ed column or some copy of the indigestible Ezra Klein’s podcast (“how I learned to hate birth tourism just like you, my neo-Nazi pal”, etc., ad nauseum). No, the best piece is dated September 9, 1973, when the NYT was still a great newspaper. It is an interview with Borges about the return of Peron, the figure who is the closest pre-figuration of the vulgarian Trump. Rascal is of course a word from another time. Thug, Felon, Crook – these are more appropriate.

Borges puts his fingers on something that has a long history in popular culture. In spite of the liberal moralists, the crook, the thief, the Jesse James figure still wins the illiberal heart – or rather, the heart that is still fashioned in what James Scott calls the “little tradition”, which sees in capitalism not a system for creating the best outcomes given the constraints of the Pareto Principle, but sees, instead, a Squid Game where the rich use their advantage to shut out the rest. In which case, our choice among the rich is the one who most boldly expresses this principle – who combines banker and robber, since in truth, the bankers are the robbers of banks. To the liberal, who thinks in terms of systems drummed up out of books, this is vaguely Marxist. In fact, it is the principle of the “limited good”, as the anthropologist has named it: the principle that any good x has has been taken from y.

In the Kingdom of heaven, x and y sit like the lion and the lamb and share the abundance. But in the Squid Games of America, x puts his knife to y’s throat, and you don’t want to be on y’s team of losers.

Even the pre-censorship in Argentina in 1973 sounds up to date – our moment indeed:

“He then explains how the ‘great funk’ already involves him as an individual and a writer. “Editors who have invited me to do an article for thei journal now write back to suggest that I hold off. Friends who have asked me to giv e a lecture now suggest it is not the proper time.”

Or, to quote the great intro song to Seven Beauties:

‘The ones who don't enjoy themselves even when they laugh.

Oh, yeah.

The ones who worship the corporate image not knowing that they work for someone else.

Oh, yeah.’

Incidentally, even Trump’s shock tactics as he comes back seem more Peronist than anything else. Martin Anderson’s book about the Dirty war begins with that notorious return. First, of course, before Peron returned, there was the staffing of the “cabinet” with incompetents and thieves, with the RFK Jr. place held by a man named Lopez Rega, a professional astrologer and occultist, much adored by Peron’s second wife, who was given charge of the Social Welfare post – basically, health care insurance.

Then Peron returned. Three million people greeted him at the airport.

“On June 20, Flag Day, millions of supporters—perhaps as many as 3 million— flocked to Ezeiza airport to welcome Peron. It was the largest rally in Argentine history. People poured in from the federal capital and the sprawling industrial neighborhoods ringing Buenos Aires and from far-flung provinces. Many spent the night in sleeping bags or huddled around campfires, trying to get a good spot from which to catch a glimpse of Peron. When the sun broke through the clouds shortly after noon, spirits soared even more.

At 2:30, the area around the airport was a festive sea of banners and flags. Musicians from the National Symphony Orchestra played the Peronist March from the rostrum. A column bearing posters and banners announcing themselves as members of the FAR and Montoneros approached the podium. Suddenly, they were met by a hail of machine-gun fire.

Many of the leftists had come armed with chains, a weapon used in the fights that sometimes broke out at Peronist rallies; a few, in charge of peripheral security for the columns of marching people, carried guns. Nevertheless, the gunfire continued intermittently for two and one-half hours. The scene was one of pan¬ demonium: Bodies dropped from trees, and the master of ceremonies, on the verge of tears, pleaded for calm. People ran for cover or fell—dead, wounded, or terrorstricken—to the ground. In the confusion, the rightists fired on one an¬ other. Meanwhile someone released doves from the podium.

One gang leader, the brother of an army colonel, later bragged he had lynched “two or three lefties” at Ezeiza. Rucci’s chief bodyguard participated in the tor¬ ture of “captured leftists” in the Ezeiza International Hotel. There, in room 118, municipal physicians found the walls splattered with blood. A business partner of Osinde [a thief who was given a ministry post] directed the firefight from the podium, as well as the torture later in the hotel.”

And so on and so forth.

“The ones who say that's for me.

The ones who say, you know what I mean.

Oh, yeah.

The ones who vote for the right because they're fed up with strikes.

Oh, yeah.

The ones who vote white in order not to get dirty.

Oh, yeah.

The ones who never get involved with politics.

Oh, yeah.

The ones who say, be calm. Calm.”

Where'd you go, Magnus Hirschfeld, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you

 If, in some sense, one can speak of a “sexual revolution” in the twentieth century, then surely Magnus Hirschfeld was its Trotsky or Lenin. The arson that destroyed the Reichstag in 1933 has received a vast amount of attention, as it was the pretence that led to the Nazi seizure of power. Similarly, one can view the sack of Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology in Berlin on May 6, 1933 as a definite defeat in the struggle for sexual enlightenment.

In the 1980s, in the revisionist currents that were then emerging in Germany, two historians attacked Hirschfeld as a eugenicist whose theories preceded the Nazis, who attacked him not because he was Jewish and gay but because they no longer “needed” him. In the late period of the Cold War, with the fall of the prestige of Marxism in academia, anything went.

In an interesting response by Liliane Crips, she showed that Hirschfeld, that making a bow to the then prevalent eugenicist ideology, did not thereby show any commonality with the Nazis. He used arguments that were social – founded on his belief that women who had to many children were often strained to the breaking point – to argue for contraception and the right to abortion; all of which fit into his panorama, so to speak, of enlightened Sex-pol, which would include removing laws against homosexuality, and viewing all sexual laws in the light of a notion of the greater good that must include human sexual pleasure.

Hirschfeld was born in the 19th century – in 1868 – and thus was well into his fifties when the World War took place. It was in his sixties that he had his greatest successes, with his program of liberalization adopted, in part, by the Weimar Social Democrats. Even in Wilhelmine Berlin, he had achieved enough celebrity that there was a cabaret song about him entitled “The Hirschfeld comes”. I should probs say that “comes”, here, is no play on words – that linguistic crossing had not been constructed at the time, I think. Rather it is a reference to the Sandman.

Yet a story that ends with the Nazis and Hirschfeld dying in exile in Nice is evidently not one of onward and upward. Fascist sex-pol emerged at the end of World War I at the same time as leftist sex-pol.

For instance: In October, 1920, Hirschfeld came to Munich to give a talk. Munich was just coming out of the reaction that followed the overthrow of Munich’s Soviet Republic – a Republic that was less Soviet than Dada. After giving a talk on the 4th, Hirschfeld was followed by a crowd of what the newspaper called Swastikers, who attacked him with kudgels and left him for dead. His body was retrieved by his comrades, who got him to the hospital in time to be saved. Recovering, he had that rare chance: reading his own obituary.

It is one of the hard truths of intellectual history that even those intellectuals one looks up to – Hirschfeld as the Trotsky of the sexual revolution, to use my image – are never straightforwardly heroic. On October 4, 1920, Hirschfeld’s talk was about a man named Steinach. Steinach had a rather nutty surgical theory about being able to transplant glands to prevent aging, and as an addendum, he claimed to “cure” homosexuality. Though Hirschfeld had every reason, personal and scientific, to oppose Steinach, he thought Steinach was onto something. At least in 1920.

Hirschfeld, then, sometimes let his science envy get in the way of his intuition. But he continued even after the near death experience of 1920 to lobby for the abolition of the legal prohibition of homosexuality, Paragraph 175 to the Legal Code; in 1929, a Reichstag committee of Social Democrats and Communists voted to abolish Paragraph 175, but this was never implemented, and the Nazis of course reversed it. Astonishingly, it hung on in West Germany until 1992. In East Germany, it was abolished. So, in one of those bits of liberation that Cold War histories forbid us to peek too much at, in East Germany people were not imprisoned for homosexual sex; in West Germany, maybe about 50,000 people were convicted, mostly in the Adenauer era.

Interestingly, Kurt Tucholsky, otherwise a man of impeccably enlightened sentiments, wrote an article about Hirschfeld’s assault that begins by assuring the reader that Tucholsky finds Hirschfeld a kitsch personage, and only then goes on to howl about the brutality of the assault and the complicity of the police in hiding the assailants. Tucholsky, as he said in a latter article, “could hardly imagine man on man sex” – which, of course, is a rather suspicious denial. However, in 1929, he came out for the decriminalization of gay sex on grounds that Hirschfeld had laid down:

“To me, the sexual relationship of a man to another man is hard to imagine – but I would never dare to make my sentiment the basis of a moral law. One could, with the same right, create a law against redhaired women or against men who are heavy perspirers. So long as sexual play does not harm society, Society has no right to attack it. … A legal code is not an ethical fable, and the ethical principles of the Catholic Church, which by its indisputable service to society bears most of the guilt for this legal fabrication, are debateable, and not the basis of all things. This is Terror, which we cannot tolerate.”

One should remember what role homophobia played in the rise of the radical right in Germany. The NYT and the Centrists are playing a dangerous game by tossing trans rights in the garbage can. But it was ever thus with centrists.

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