We've been doing this forever: U.S., Israel and Iran, 2007

 Back in 2006 and 2007, Israel, with Bush’s blessing, was doing its usual razrez in Lebanon (as Alex in Clockwork Orange might put it), I wrote a bit about that affair in the long perspective of Israel’s’ malign policy of perpetual war.

This is still relevant today.

So here it is:

January 21, 2007:

… Exhibit no. 1, yesterday, was the astonishing Deborah Lipstadt op ed piece about ex President Carter’s rather mild plea for the withdrawal of Israeli settlements from the West Bank and the end of the governance mess there and in the Gaza. About which Lipstadt had only to say that Carter has not genuflected with enough fervor to the holocaust, and thus is an anti-semite – but, being a just person in all things, Lipstadt was willing to concede that perhaps he is just an unconscious bigot. Lipstadt, you see, embraces the larger view.

This is almost spookily stupid – especially as you can tell that Lipstadt’s (non) argument is pretty close to the orthodoxy among the muscular liberal-neo con set that so rule the roost in the WAPO op ed pages, and probably does reflect the central bias of the policy set in D.C.

The Eichmann made me do it excuse for the West Bank land grab wouldn’t convince a first grader. Lipstadt, a historian, would do well to read a book of history – any book of history – about Israel’s post 67 West Bank policy.

However, I am not going to grapple with a piece that serves, really, only that old and hoary function of injecting a vague hint of anti-semitism into any criticism of Israel. Rather, I’d like to spotlight one of the mythemes in the piece, since it now travels about in the Press like as a convenient warmongering piece of DNA, a little transpone, bringing us visibly nearer to war with Iran. I find the idea that the U.S. is going to war with Iran anytime soon, the idea that Bush is always a week away from it, so prevalent among leftwingers – who have been saying we are a week away from attacking Iran since 2004 – extremely puzzling. Both the left and the right often participate in a shared illusion of American hyper-powerdom, but reality has always put strict limits to the extent and exercise of American power. It is exercised best when America has implanted, in a given country, an endogenous pro-consular class. But usually, America avoids the direct violence route.

Still, in the final instance, we are being run by an essentially criminal collective, which is obviously thinking of winding up its pathetic run by attacking Iran. If the wishes of the executive were obeyed as direct orders – the Fuhrer-prinzip that Cheney has tried to instill in the government over the last six years – than we would be attacking Iran. In lieu of that, the warmongering sockpuppets do try to inject, in any mention of Iran, the idea that the country is on the verge of attacking Israel. And one of the ways they do this is to infinitely fold spindle and mutilate a quote of President Ahmadinejad – in Lipstadt’s piece, that comes out as: “When an Ahmadinejad or Hamas threatens to destroy Israel, Jews have historical precedent to believe them.” I’m not even going into the facile identity between Israel and Jews, here, - an identity that is unrealistic and, in fact, symbolic of the kind of nationalism many of the greatest figures of Jewish culture in the 19th and 20th century fought against like mad – or the idea that the threat to a state, Israel, is of the same order and nature as the threat to the Jewish inhabitants of various countries in Europe. This is to spiral down into Ron Rosenbaum style madness. No, what concerns me is simply that quote. Not whether the quote has been mistranslated – I don’t know enough about Farsi to give you a donkey’s fart worth of wisdom on that issue. What isn’t undisputed is that Ahmadinejad is citing Khomeini. Now, if we are truly to take the quote as a military threat against Israel, then surely it was a military threat when Khomeini uttered it too. Logically, then, Israel should have received it as a threat from Khomeini and acted accordingly.

But if you look back at the 80s, you will notice right away that the quote wasn’t pulled out to justify some attack on Iran by Israel – rather it was ignored as the rightwing government in Israel helped arm Iran and support a closer relationship between the U.S. and Iran. Far from viewing themselves as partisans in the Polish woods, at that time, the Israeli government viewed themselves as maneuvering an alliance against Iraq. They viewed themselves, quite sensibly, as a state.

An article in the summer, 2005 issue of Iranian studies by Trita Parsi, “Israel-Iranian Relations Assessed: Strategic Competition from the Power Cycle Perspective,”

sums up the real history of the relationship between Iran and Israel quite well:

"Iran’s foreign policy is believed to have lost much of its ideological zeal after the death of Khomeini. One often cited exception to this general pattern is Iran’s relations with Israel. Tehran’s posture on Israel and the Middle East peace process is often explained as a remnant of its revolutionary and ideological past and contradictory to Iran’s national interest. However, this analysis neglects crucial systemic changes that occurred in the Middle East after 1991, as well as

Israel’s willingness to improve relations with Iran at the height of Iran’s revolutionary fervor in the 1980s and the Islamic regime’s refusal to allow ideological considerations to stand in its way to purchase arms from Israel. Furthermore, it reduces Israel’s role in the equation to that of a non-actor whose destiny is limited to mere reactions to Iran’s ideological designs."

Parsi hauls up a lot of inconvenient, old news from the memory hole:

"The two Israeli leaders that in the early 1990s initiated a very aggressive Iran policy pursued a diametrically opposite policy only a few years earlier. In 1987, Yitzhak Rabin argued that Iran remained an ally geo-politically.40 Shimon Peres, who sought a “broader strategic relationship with Iran,” urged President Reagan to seek a dialogue with Tehran."

It is an axiom of punditry that, in pursuing the usual quest to kill people on a large scale, one needs to forget that those same people, years earlier, were allies in another quest to kill another set of people on a large scale. For the Lipstadts of the world, of course, being pro-Iranian in 1987 was resisting the Nazis, and being for war against Iran in 2006 is still resisting the Nazis. We evermore resist the Nazis.

Well, enough of the various bogosities of this subject, and onto another piece of news about the Bush administration which is – in obedience to the law of news governing the way the press has reported the Global war on Terror – 3 years late.

“An Iranian offer to help the United States stabilize Iraq and end its military support for Hezbollah and Hamas was rejected by Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003, a former top State Department official told the British Broadcasting Corp.

The U.S. State Department was open to the offer, which came in an unsigned letter sent shortly after the American invasion of Iraq, Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, told BBC's Newsnight in a program broadcast Wednesday night. But, Wilkerson said, Cheney vetoed the deal.”

As faithful readers will remember – well, not really, but as this faithful writer remembers – my position before the invasion was that the U.S. could and should aim at having Saddam Hussein overthrown in Iraq. It could do this by a., establishing détente with Iran, Hussein’s number one enemy, and b., showering Northern Iraq, separated from Hussein’s Iraq for 5 years, with aid. Sanctions were stupid and killing so long as they were instituted in the framework of the double sanctions on both nations. The neo-cons were right to decry the sanction system as it was under Clinton, but wrong to promote the belligerent approach – and wrong to think that the U.S. policy should be aimed at maintaining American hegemony in the Middle East when the conditions for that hegemony had so dramatically changed in the post Cold War era.

Obviously, myidea was not only rational, but possible. Its rejection has led to the current debacle. Neither party is willing to de-structure the root cause of that debacle – American superpowerdom.

Let the empire turn up its little heels and die is our advice.

Assassination blues

 

1.The Headline in the New York Sun, April 15, 1865 was: HORRIBLE! THE PRESIDENT ASSASSINATED! MR. SEWARD’S THROAT CUT AND HIS SON ASSAULTED.

“The theatre was densely crowded, and everybody seemed delighted with the scene before them. During the third act and while there was a temporary pause for one of the actors to enter, a sharp report of a pistol was heard which merely attracted attention, but suggested nothing serious, until a man rushed to the front of the President’s box, waving a long dagger in his right hand, and exclaiming “sic semper tyrannis” and immediately leaped from the box, which was in the second tier, to the stage beneath, and ran across to the opposite side, making his escape amid the bewilderment of the audience, from the roar of the theatre, and mounting a horse, fled.”

The Sun’s reporter was in such a stupor that his report is a mess of confusions of both grammar and sense – where was the horse, anyway?

2. Some addresses:

Dealy Plaza, Dallas Texas

The Lorraine Hotel, Memphis Tennessee

146, rue Montmartre, Paris

11, rue de la Ferronerie, Paris

4, Rue Rollin, Paris

20, Rue de la Cordellerie, Paris.

3. I have been to Dealy Plaza and paid homage to Smiling Jack. Hell, when I was a 5 year old I saw it on tv, the black and white tv downstairs, in York, Pennsylvania. I’ve not been to the Ford’s theatre. I had a crush on Abe Lincoln when I was a schoolboy, and still wish he had not gone to see My American Cousin,  much as I respect the fact that he needed a break from stress.

My list of addresses is a list of assassinations. Do the places where the shot was fired, the knife was thrust, remember? The spirits of the place – Lares – kept a memory, it was once thought. Some trace, some mnemonic vibration. We have now moved those vibrations to other crossroads in the brain, crossroads of neurons. There, somehow, they exist. But we still retain, in popular culture, a certain dread of certain places. The haunted house. The slasher is killed and maniacally, in sequel after sequel, reassembles and reattacks. The spirit remains – or the box office and the laws of gender make their fated demands.

4. I did not go to the book depository in Dealy Plaza. All respect, though: JFK’s assassination continues its underground existence in the nether side of this country. A world within a world, Lee thinks in Don Delillo’s Libra.

I’ve never been to the Lorraine Hotel, never gone out of my way to go to Memphis, though I have been to the MLK memorial in Atlanta. Nor to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Bobbie Kennedy was, astonishingly, shot and killed. It is a rare thing that two rich and powerful men are gunned down in America. That is usually reserved for the mean and the lowly.

In French, assassination is often used to mean murder, but in the English speaking world, that term is usually reserved for high fliers. Myself, if I was so unfortunate as to meet a bullet, a knife, a hatchet, and so on, would be reported as murdered. Killed. But the president, or king, or leader of the revolution, or other highly placed individuals get assassinated when the projectile ends their dreamtime on this earth.

5. The French assassinations on my list: Jaures, on July 31, 1914; Henri IV, May 14, 1610; Henri Curiel, 4 Rue Rollin, May 4, 1978; and Jean-Paul Marat, July 13, 1793.

Paris is the capital city of assassinations. I have merely listed a small number from among the hosts of spies, White Russians, Presidents, Ambassadors, and others who have been put down in this beautiful city.

Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,
Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant !

6. Assassinations are the center of little worlds, and upset the standard intellectual belief in uniformian historiography, one that does away with “great men” and puts social forces or production or the progress of knowledge in its place. Ah, history as, essentially, a movement like the wind or water – all very interesting mathematically, but with no part essentially different than any other part.

And yet, who can believe that the ghost futures that die with the assassinated are not notable! One thinks of JFK serving two terms (which would have probably meant that his brother would never have been in the Ambassador Hotel that night); one thinks of Martin Luther King’s middle age – he died at 39 – and the danger he would have posed to the racist order; one thinks of Henry IV surviving, once again, and perhaps preventing Frondes to come, changing the entire culture of the l’age Classique.

Oddly, the burden of assassination is borne, especially, by the left. From Rosa Luxemberg to Fred Hampton, the list of the assassinated is heavy with promises arrested. The river is deep and the river is wide, and there are times when you need to nurse your drink, your wine or your gin and tonic, and weep a little bit. My idea is that to be a lefty is an enormously tiring thing anyway – there’s no clubs, no rich man’s money behind it all. And you are always facing a wall of cops. To go against the grain in societies where the grain is very very hard costs and costs. And thus, the cast of prophets unarmed or, like Che, badly armed, follows us all. It has followed me, at least in my thoughts, for a long long time. Lost time, indeed.

The pawned guillotine

 

It is said that the last of the “sombre dynastie” of Sansons to be the chief executioner in Paris, Henri-Clement, was a well known gambler and epicure, a great favorer of masked balls and card games. Now, in the 1840s, the chief executioner kept that great, terrible machine, the guillotine, in his home on Rue de Marais, which was approximately where Rue Faubourg San Martin in the 10th arrondissement is today. He would sometimes display the machine to guests, just as his father had – at the same house, his father had once eaten dinner with Balzac in which he discussed the chopping off of the King and Queens head in 1793 with the ever curious novelist.

As a gambler, Henri-Clement Sanson was sometimes plunged into debt. To raise money to pay his debts, he did an unusual thing: he put his guillotine in hock. One night, in 1847, he was called on by the messengers from the court to get everything ready for an execution of two prisoners. He confessed that he needed to go to the pawn shop to get his instrument. I don’t know if the messenger loaned him the money to do so. In any case, the court was not pleased, and demanded his resignation.
This is, to my mind, a kind of allegory of Critique, that activity infinitely perfected by Leftists (under which rubric I include myself). Like the pawned instrument of a supreme violence forever associated with Revolution, in time of crisis, when critique should turn into revolution, it finds it has lost its instrument, its connection to any real social force. It has been, as it were, put into hock.
I think a lot about that the instant in which critique fails to turn into revolution, because I often feel that it structures the 21st century Left - it normalizes disappointment. A Leftism of dis-appointment - that seems more of a hindrance than a help, doesn't it?

QUITTING: A VICTORY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

 Philosophy got its start in slave and serf societies, so it is no wonder that it is structured, systematically, around the master – slave (or serf) encounter. All of modernity is summed up in the simple phrase: I quit. The slave or serf can escape – which is at the root of adventure – but they cannot simply quit.

Modern philosophy should, then, be able to tell us something about quitting. Mostly, though, it doesn’t. It is most unhelpful about this simple fact of secular life. Heidegger in Being and Time can start a discourse about technology with some observations on a tool or instrument breaking – that is, no longer working. But the idea of no longer working as a voluntary act for someone, stopping doing this or that for pay, which is a small baseline for understanding one’s whole adult life in the "Free World", is part of the modernization project he rejects.

Myself, I’ve had, I reckon, at least thirty jobs in my life, from the time I was eleven and started bagging ice for my Pa’s ice company up until I had a part time job trying to sell over the phone a software designed for doctor’s offices. In the 00s, I’ve basically lived a hit and miss life on gigs, writing or editing, freelancing my way to the poorhouse.

I sort of miss quitting.

Quitting is a very context-specific kind of deal. It has inherited the slave’s escape, at least unconsciously, but the quitter is not pursued. Or, if pursued, only by the usual suspects – the landlord, the power company, the peep’s you owe five hundred more dollars to on the used jalopy you are tooling in. Sometimes, quitting is resigning, and has that sad little dignity, crowned by going out for drinks somewhere with your fellow workers. Sometimes, not. One inglorious job that sticks out in my mind was working as a laborer at a site where they were building warehouses, which I got via a highschool friend, Woody. We worked in the Atlanta summer heat – which was not great – and we did things like put down the asphalt for the parking lot, etc. I would have stuck it out except that somehow, I got assigned to follow around a spoiled son of one of the warehouse owners – or, perhaps, the son of some bigshot in the construction company that was erecting said warehouses. In any case, he was a rare combination of stupid, arrogant, and bully. Not my friend! I’m averse to the put on servility that is the mask demanded in such situations – I just can’t do it.

I remember little about that job, but I do remember the day I quit. I had no money nor prospects, and I was thus in a pickle – but that quitting was a high like unto some heroin user’s finest shot. It glows in my past. Sometimes, quitting is the best thing.

Other times, it isn’t. Quitting for instance a job I had as a searcher for a real estate insurance company in Santa Fe was a sad thing. I was leaving town. My supervisor said I was blowing my chance, and that was true – I probs could have stayed there and climbed the ladder of real estate insurance searching, such as it is. But I had wandering feet, at the time. Still, it was a big suppressed sob laden farewell.

As everybody knows now, the air of freedom is being sucked out of the Western neo-lib societies, and nowhere is that truer than in the way quitting has dropped out of our popular imaginations, except for those on the upper level – the top echelon can be seen to quit on tv shows and movies and in newspapers in the same way they take vacations to beach destinations in the far niente. Beyond our means, viewer.

You can dream a little dream, but can you afford it?

Bring back quitting.

It’s just that demon life has got you in its sway…

 

 

In Fathers and Sons, Bazarov, the nihilist hero and the son of an old army doctor, makes a remark to his friend and disciple, Arkhady, son of Nikolai Kursanov, an aristocrat and landowner, about the latter: “The day before yesterday I saw him reading Pushkin,” Bazarov continued… “Do explain to him that that will never do any good. After all, he’s not a boy: it’s time he threw that he threw aside that nonsense: wanting to be a romantic in these days!”

I recently re-read Fathers and Sons. It was in this remark, and others of that type, that I recognized something, that a grand thesis suddenly presented itself in my mind.

But I have to preface the grand thesis riff with a little autobiographical remark.

In 1970, I was 12. In 1980, I was 22. That decade marks me – though I have ranged pretty far to be sitting here in Paris, with a wife and a boy and my life, such as it is, entering the retirement twilight, it is most likely the case that I am of the 70s generation.

In Russian intellectual history, the members of the “1830” generation, like Herzen, self-identified as such. So did the “youth” – the generation of the 1860s, the shestidesiatniki. These identifications are, of course, fluid and non-binding – and yet they evoke something like different moods and modes that are actually experienced. In the 1830s, Herzen and Turgenev, among other intellectuals, took it as their task to propound, or to pound out, what it meant to be a member of the Russian civilization. An important word, for this cohort – to be a member of a civilization was, above all, an existential task. Were they to be real subjects, like the Europeans (the idea of a European subject, here, meant basically a thing composed of bits of the French Enlightenment, bits of Hegel, and bits of the English economists, but it meant, as well, to dress in a certain way, feel in a certain way, love in a certain way – above all it meant freeing the serfs), or were they condemned to be Russians under Nicholas – a sort of slough composed of Dead Souls, samovars and flies. And yet, wasn’t that slough a warm and live thing, unlike the mere surface of the Europeans?

For the sons, however, the shestidesiatniki: this generation of the 1830s, which rose up and were put down in 1848, was full of the most pathetic dreamers. Reading Pushkin! What rubbish.

The struggle between the heirs of these decades was fought out, most openly, in Russian literature – in poems and novels. Novels such as Fathers and Sons.

Now: here’s my grand thesis. If I think of the generation of the sixties, and the generation of the seventies, in America, and so on, it is striking to me that the terrain in which our generational mood, so to speak, was fought out – our Russian novel – was popular music. Instead of Herzen and Turgenev, instead of Chernyshensky and Pisarev, instead of Doestoevsky and Tolstoy, the terrain was the British invasion, Bob Dylan, Motown, R & B, Disco, and Punk.

This is not about the aesthetic quality of these cultural products, but rather their existential, identifying effects. What Bazarov says about poor Nikolai Kursanov and his affection for Pushkin could easily have been said by some late seventies punk about some aging hippie child’s affection for the Beatles. It is not just a comment about the Beatles as a group, it is a comment about the whole little world in which you would listen to the Beatles, you would know their songs, you would quote them occasionally, you would care for them in a certain way.

It is a sociological fact that I don’t quite understand about my own growing up that it was not novels, or movies, or television – which were all massively consumed, of course – but popular music, albums and concerts, that provided the terrain upon which was fought out a certain mood and a certain existential identification that gets harked back to, that still can suddenly start up in the brain. A sound, lyrics.

Myself, I read enormously between 12 and 22, and would not have thought of myself as a “fan” – but I know, now, that even though I did read the Russian novels then and thought I was Ivan Karamazov, my lodestar was really Bobby Dylan. Like everybody else I knew,  my little bit of this history was enacted more through music than anything else. This was true for the back of the class, the fans of Freebird and Southern Rock, as well as the front of the class, the fans of David Bowie and Patti Smith.

I don’t think that popular music plays this role for, say, my son’s generation. Rap is very important, but it doesn’t set the communal mood. I’m sure that mood is set by Internet genres that we don’t really have genre knowledge of – social media, for instance. What is Tik Tok or Instagram? I’m not sure they bear the burden of the Russian novel. Perhaps, in fact, the task of existential identification comes and goes – is there any need of it, or desire for it, at the moment?

In the creche, the nursery located behind our apartment, the three year olds are chasing each other around and screaming at the top of their lungs at this moment. I can’t tell you what their communal mood will be. Out of those screams, what art, what tragic love, what happy or sad life arrangements are to come I can’t divine. I can only look backwards, it seems.

But Fuck it. Lot’s wife has always seemed much saner to me than her husband, with his bizarre methods of childrearing. Three cheers for the backward’s glance.  

Breaks

 

 

Breaks on a bus, brakes on a car  Breaks to make you a superstar

Breaks to win and breaks to lose

But these here breaks will rock your shoes

And these are the breaks

According to Robert Craven’s 1980 article on Pool slang in American speech, breaks – as in good break, bad break, those are the breaks – derives from the American lingo of pool, which is distinct from  British billiard terms. The difference in terminology emerged in the 19^th century, but  he dates the popular use of break (lucky break, bad break, the breaks) to the 20s. I love the idea that this is true, that the Jazz age, the age of American modernity and spectacle, saw the birth of the breaks. If the word indeed evolved from the first shot in pool – when you “break” the pyramid of balls, a usage that seems to have been coined in America in the 19^th century, as against the British term  – then its evolution nicely intersects one of the favored examples in the philosophy of causation, as presented by Hume.

Hume’s work, from the Treatise to the Enquiry, is so punctuated by billiard balls that it might as well have been the metaphysical dream of Minnesota Fats – excuse the anachronism – and it has been assumed, in a rather jolly way in the philosophy literature, that this represents a piece of Hume’s own life, a preference for billiards. However, as some have noted, Hume might have borrowed the billiard ball example from Malebranche – whose work he might have read while composing the Treatise at La Fleche. But even if Hume was struck by Malebranche’s example and borrowed it, the stickiness of the example,  the way billiard balls keep appearing in Hume’s texts, feels to the reader like tacit testimony to Hume’s own enjoyment or interest in  the game. Unfortunately, this detail has not been taken up by his biographers. When we trace the itinerary of Hume as he moved from Scotland to Bristol to London to France, we have to reconstruct ourselves how this journey in the 1730s might have intersected with billiard rooms in spas and public houses. In a schedule of coaches from London to Bristol published in the early 1800s, we read that there is a coach stop at the Swan in St. Clements street, London, on the line that goes to Bristol, and from other sources we know that the Swan was famed for its billiard room. Whether this information applies to a journey made 70 years before, when the game was being banned in public houses by the authorities, is uncertain.  One should also remember that in Hume’s time, billiards was  not played as we now play American pool or snooker. The table and the pockets and the banks were different. So was the cue stick  – , it wasn’t until 1807 that the cue stick was given its felt or india rubber tip, which made it a much more accurate instrument. And of course the balls were hand crafted, and thus not honed to a mechanically precise roundness.

If, however, Hume was a billiard’s man, one wonders what kind he was. His biographer Hunter speaks of the “even flight” of Hume’s prose – he never soars too much. But is this the feint of a hustler? According to one memoirist, Kant, too, was a billiards player  – in fact the memoirist, Heilsberg, claimed it was his “only recreation” – and he obviously thought there was something of a hustle about Hume’s analysis of cause and effect, which is where the breaks come in.

There’s a rather celebrated passage in the abstract of the Treatise in which Hume even conjoins the first man, Adam, and the billiard ball. The passage begins: “Here is a billiard ball lying on the table, and another ball moving towards it with rapidity. They strike; and the ball which was formerly at rest now acquires a motion.” Hume goes on to describe the reasons we would have for speaking of one ball’s contact causing the other ball to acquire a motion. The question is, does this description get to something naturally inherent in the event?

“Were a man, such as Adam, created in the full vigour of understanding, without experience, he would never be able to infer motion in the second ball from the motion and impulse of the first. It is not anything that reason sees in the cause which makes us infer the effect.”

This new man, striding into the billiard room, Hume thinks, would not see as we see, even if he sees what we see. Only when he has seen such things thousands of times will he see as we see: then, “His understanding would anticipate his sight and form a conclusion suitable to his past experience.” Adam, in this example, is the gull that any hustler dreams of.

And as in a dream, Hume’ Adam is an overdetermined figure. On the one hand, in his reference to Adam’s “science”, there is a hint of the Adam construed by the humanists. Martin Luther claimed that Adam’s vision was perfect, meaning he could see objects hundreds of miles away. Joseph Glanvill, that curiously in-between scholar – defender of the ghost belief and founder of the Royal Society – wrote in the seventeenth century:

“Adam needed no Spectacles. The acuteness of his natural Opticks (if conjecture may have credit) shew'd him much of the Coelestial magnificence and bravery without a Galilaeo's tube: And 'tis most probable that his naked eyes could reach near as much of the upper World, as we with all the advantages of art. It may be 'twas as absurd even in the judgement of his senses, that the Sun and Stars should be so very much, less then this Globe, as the contrary seems in ours; and 'tis not unlikely that he had as clear a perception of the earths motion, as we think we have of its quiescence.”

However, this is not the line that Hume develops. His Adam has our human all too human sensorium, and is no marvel of sensitivity. Rather, he belongs to another line of figures beloved by the Enlightenment philosophes: Condillac’s almost senseles statue, Locke’s Molyneaux, Diderot’s aveugle-né. Here, the human is stripped down to the basics. The gull is fleeced – he comes, in fact, pre-fleeced.  Adam’s conjunction with the billiard ball, then, gives us a situation like Diderot’s combination of the blind man and the mirror – it’s an event of illuminating estrangement.

It is important that these figures were certainly not invented in the eighteenth century. Rather, they come out of a longer lineage: that of the sage and the fool. Bruno and his ass, Socrates and Diogenes the cynic, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza – it is from this family that all these deprived souls in the texts of the philosophes are appropriated and turned into epistemological clockworks.  

Hume’s point is to lift the breaks from off our necks, to break the bonds of necessity – or rather to relocate those bonds. In doing so, he and his billiard balls are reversing the older tendency of atomistic philosophy, which was revived by Gassendi in the 17^th century. Lucretian atoms fall in necessary and pre-determined courses, the only exception being that slight inexplicable swerve when the atoms contact the human – hence our free will. Hume, who had a hard enough time  with Christian miracles, did not, so far as I know, discuss the Lucretian version of things even to the extent of dismissing it. Lucretius’s clinamen is, for the philosophical hustler, the original break.

To be a little over the top, we could say that the eighteenth century thinkers disarmed necessity, exiled Nemesis, and the heavyweight heads of the nineteenth century brought it back with a vengeance, locating it – in a bow to Hume, or the Humean moment – in history. Custom. From this point of view, Hume was part of a project that saw the transfer of power from God and Nature back to Man – although we are now all justly suspicious of such capitalizable terms.

But the breaks survived and flourished. There is a way of telling intellectual history – the way I’ve been doing it – that makes it go on above our heads, instead of in them. It neglects the general populace, the great unwashed. Book speaks to book. To my mind, intellectual history has to embrace and understand folk belief in order to understand the book to book P.A. system. The problem, of course, is that the great unwashed didn’t often write down their thoughts, so that we have to depend on those thinkers that did, using them to angle backwards like surveyors do.

Still,  we can approach the breaks in another way.

In 1980, I was going to college in Shreveport, Louisiana. I went to classes in the morning, then worked at a general remodeling store from 3 to 10. I worked in the paint department, mostly. At seven, the manager would leave for home, and Henry, the assistant manager, would let us pipe in whatever music we wanted to  - which is how I first heard Kurtis Blow’s These are the Breaks. I also first heard the Sugarhill Gang’s Rappers delight this way, and I still mix them up. I heard both, as well as La Donna and Rick James, at the Florentine, a disco/gay bar that I went to a lot with friends – it was the best place to dance in town. Being a gay bar, it was always receiving bomb threats and such, which made it a bit daring to go there. We went, however, because we could be pretty sure that the music they played would include no country or rock. It was continuously danceable until, inevitably, The Last Dance played.

At the time, I was dabbling a bit in Marx, and thought that I was on the left side of history. At the same time, 1980 was a confusing year for Americans. The ‘malaise’ was everywhere, and nothing seemed to be going right – from the price of oil to the international order. There were supposedly communists in Central America, African countries were turning to the Soviet Union, and of course there was the hangover from the Vietnam War – the fantasy that we could have won that war had not yet achieved mass circulation, so it felt like what it was, a plain defeat.

I imagined, then, that the breaks were falling against a certain capitalist order. In actuality, the left – in its old and new varieties – was vanishing. Or you could say transforming. The long marches were underway – in feminism, from overthrowing patriarchy to today’s “leaning in”; in civil rights, from the riots in Miami to the re-Jim Crowization of America through the clever use of the drug war; and in labor organization, from the union power to strike to the impotence and acceptance that things will really never get better, and all battles are now rearguard.  

My horizons were not vast back then – I didn’t keep up with the news that much, but pondered a buncha books and the words of popular songs. But I knew something was in the air. As it turned out,  Kurtis Blow’s breaks were not going to be kind to my type, the Nowhere people, stranded socially with their eccentric and unconvincing visions. However, after decades of it, I have finally learned to accept what Blow was telling me: these are just the breaks. That is all they are.

You’ll live.

 

On the death of Leonard Bast

 E.M. Foster is an admirable writer, who can be read simply for his technical perfections. Here’s how he does that most difficult thing, letting time, blank time, pass, in Howard’s End.

“And the conversation drifted away and away, and Helen’s cigarette turned to a spot in the darkness, and the great flats opposite were sown with lighted windows, which vanished and were relit again, and vanished incessantly.”

This is superb on every level. The great flats opposite will soon be figuring in the story, for one thing, so their place as a sort of chronometer is appropriate - and yet, since the reader, at this point, doesn’t know that, their insertion here is one of those ways a writer insinuates his facts into the reader’s unconsciousness, becoming a sort of fate in the process, something that presses, however mildly, upon the reader, as we know that those lights will press upon Helen Schlegel - whose cigarette is (in a bit of a cheat) lit for an awful long time. The perfection of this kind of writing extends to the freedom it gives Forster with regards to his characters. Forster, again and again, will come out of his seemingly neutral role and make blatant and manipulative comments that he means to be read as blatant and manipulative. The reader, who is already caught up in the artificial fate spun by the text, has the sense, in these passages, that luck itself is speaking - that here at last privilege, the unfairness in things, is disclosing itself, becoming palpable.

Which brings us to Bast. Those who’ve read Howard’s End will remember that Bast is the striving clerk, the lowbrow from the East End whose entanglement with the Schlegel sisters will lead to disaster. Forster sizes up Bast with a famous passage. This passage crystallizes a mood and tone that, at least since the seventies, has been endemic to the American progressive culture. It comes in Chapter VI, which announces “We are not concerned with the very poor.” The hauteur of this announcement sets the whole tone for Leonard. He doesn’t have the Dickensensian advantage of rags and sentiment. No, he is merely one of the lowly.

And the lowly must be squashed. In Howard’s End, literally.

“He knew that he was poor, and would admit it: he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of him. But he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it.” This, so far, is such a break with the politics of the English novel that we have to pause. Even Thackeray, who probably thought along these lines, never violated the novelistic rule here: the poor might be shown as greedy, criminal, ungenerous, etc. But at the end of the day, the poor anchor the novelistic notion of virtue. This is true not just in Bleak House, but in the Princess Cassamassima; in Vanity Fair, which departs about as far as any Victorian novel from the sentimentality that we associate with the Victorians, the excesses of the rich, or at least those who possess the credit of the rich, are projected, as it were, upon the screen of a society in which one man’s excess is the absence of another man’s bread.

What Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians was supposed to have done, Forster, with these brief sentences, does; he rings down an era by negating its deepest sentiments. It is a curious gesture. There’s a fierce defence of caste encoded in it - a freezing of the social whole to preserve it from the social mobility that Wells’ characters were all about - as well as Dickens, although his poor are definitely helped by godfathers and the death of distant relatives. As well, perhaps, as Becky Sharp. This, in a way, is Foster's blow against the Invisible Man -- for the Invisible Man is from that class of the self-educated whose threat to Foster's own group will grow with the century. Forster effortlessly merges this affection for a rentier caste into a liberalism of what we would now call identity. His caste might take on a progressive role, but that role is to worry, infinitely, about the social inequities at the origin of their wealth, even as they weld it as a weapon to defend their cultural privileges. This, I think, has a lot to do with the alienation between progressives and what would seem to be their natural constituency. Here is how Foster catalogues the gulf between Bast and the Schlegels (who, we later learn, are rich only by Bast like standards - between the three of them, they bring in a rentier income of about 1,900 pounds a year, not exactly wealth on the American scale -- but much more like the kind of income a tenured American professor can depend on): "He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food.”

The astonishing impudence of this affects a reader like me with the force of a slap in the face, because I am much like Leonard Bat than I am at all like E.M. Forster. It is rare for a novelist to so forcefully hustle the reader out of the door because the reader doesn’t have what it takes to be the author’s friend. This, I think, is snobbism raised to a novelistic principle. It is this, more than anything else, that makes the Bloomsbury set so curiously indifferent to Ullyses – when Woolf compares Joyce to an undergraduate scratching his pimples, she is Bast-ing him. She was too great an artist to let this be the final word, and in fact Woolf, like Joyce, was a genuine socialist, one of the few British writers to support the General Strike of 1926, and a pamphleteer whose pacifism is, to my mind, so much more convincing, on a moral level, than any George Orwellish bellicosities.

In my opinion, the corpse of Leonard Bast is buried under the British novel of the twentieth century, which is why it never quite adopted to modernism, save in a comic mode.