“Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope…”
Turn to good old T.S. for your prime modernist bluesing. Or to Billy Holiday.
There has long been a sort of myth in historiography: the sighting of the “turning point”. Like the great white whale, like the unicorn or the black swan, the turning point is out there, but we can not really see it until we are posterior to it, until it happens.
Thus, that structures of governance that have been in place since WWII are collapsing all over the world might be an ephemeral sequence. In the 1970s, after the revolution in Portugal, many of the grave Western war criminals in international relations, people like Kissinger, expected Eurocommunism to advance forcefully and inevitably until Europe was Red.
Well, that didn’t happen.
So that Europe looks Brown to me might be a case of jumping the gun on the part of yours truly, who has jumped many a gun before.
Still, a turning point seems in the air. The venerable Crooked Timber, the Ur-academic blog, has solemnly decided that the U.S. is no longer the “indispensable” country. I’m not sure that is a call a blog can make. As far as I know, the U.S. has the largest economy in the world and a stock of world annihilating weapons that would make the comet that rammed into the earth and slew all the dinosaurs whistle with admiration. So that it is no longer indispensable just means: another neoliberal fairy tale, this one about interventionist democracy, is shattered into crymaking fairy-dust.
In France, the creepy Macron stays in power by finding even creepier prime ministers to force the country to swallow the same mouthwash – massive tax breaks for the wealthy, massive cuts in services for the rest of us, and a deficit accumulated almost completely by the incompetents that have surrounded Macron since the beginning – since the golden time that the media, from Le Monde to the Figaro, ran to him like puppies just wanting to be petted way back in 2016.
In Germany, an utterly soulless SD and a Green party that transformed itself into the War party without blinking are about to be ousted by the usual conservatives flanked by a neo-Nazi party supported, of course, by Elon Musk – the man who is playing circusmaster to the far right.
Of course, that same Musk has committed a rare crime in America, something out of the corruption of the 1870s, by stealing data with the connivance of Trump’s secretaries of Treasury and whatever. This happens on the same day that the NYT headlines a story: ‘We Have No Coherent Message’: Democrats Struggle to Oppose Trump.’
We lack a term forceful enough to cover the field between feckless, disgusting and hilarious. Once that term is found, linguistic scientists, we can pin it on the Democratic party – which had a good run back in the distant past I hear.
“Turning point” comes, I think, from both Christian doctrine and Galenic medicine. To quote the College of Physicians website:
“What did Galen mean by “crises”? Traditionally, a “crisis” in medicine meant a turning point for better or worse. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “crisis” as (definition 1):
The point in the progress of a disease when an important development or change takes place which is decisive of recovery or death; the turning-point of a disease for better or worse; also applied to any marked or sudden variation occurring in the progress of a disease and to the phenomena accompanying it.”
Neoliberalism – the disease that kills liberalism – has long been denied as a pertinent term by, um, neoliberals. It is a perfectly good term for the strange utopian dream of attaching a deregulated capitalist system, a la 1900, to the Civil rights advances of the 1960s-1970s. I’ve called this a mock synthesis, since it has, really, no philosophical foundation, but pretends to find, in the contingent historical encounter of Ronald Reagan’s economics and Martin Luther King Jr.’s demand for equality some timeless transcendent.
Well, all good things and bad takes must come to an end, and this has certainly ended up putting egg on all our faces.
The laughs on us! Now comes the bad part.
Or as Billy Holiday might have put it:
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us…
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