THE AGE OF THE LICKSPITTLE

 

“A party of us were together one day – we’d been drinking, it’s true – and suddenly some one made the suggestion that each one of us, without leaving the table, should tell something he had done, something that he himself honestly considered the worst of all the evil actions of his life. But it was to be done honestly, that was the point, that it was to be honest, no lying.” – The Idiot

Dostoevsky is perhaps the greatest artist of the ugly story, the shameless and shameful anecdote. There are so many of them in his novels, and of course, Notes from under the floorboards is one big ugly story. It is obvious that Dostoevsky himself considers that he picked up the genre from the French. One usually thinks of Rousseau’s Confessions. Perhaps that is literally the source of the ‘game”, but, in broader historic terms, Rousseau’s Confessions emerge from a whole sub-genre of ugly stories. I could, perhaps, trace the psychology of these stories to the moralistes. As likely is the Nephew of Rameau, Diderot’s under the table masterpiece which first appeared not in French, but in a German translation made by Goethe. It was Rameau that impressed Hegel and found a place in the Phenomenology of Spirit. .

There’s a story Rameau’s nephew tells about a rich tax collector who wants to curry favor with a minister of the King’s. The minister has told the tax collector that he admires the latter’s dog. Now, the tax collector loves the dog. But love is subordinate to transaction in the Ancien Regime world. So to give the dog to the Minister, which would curry favor, seems a no-brainer. But the dog doesn’t like the minister. So the tax collector has a mask made of the minister. With that mask on, he feeds and pets the dog. Then, with the mask off, he has the dog beaten. He repeats this day after day until the dog prefers the minister to the tax collector – and then the tax collector present the dog as a gift to the minister.

It is the kind of ugly story that creates a  a secret bond, the kind of bond that is pointed to, negatively, by the phrase, "I don't want to hear this." To hear is to have, to be entrusted with, to share and have a share in. In the Idiot, when Ferdyshtchenko suggests the game at Nastasya Fillipovna’s birthday party, the intent is a general degradation of all present, and for reasons intrinsic to that moment, it is what Nastasya needs to break out of the situation she finds herself in as a trained and kept concubine.  But here is the thing - it is a degradation within the bounds of a game. It is the guise of the game that makes it acceptable, or makes it acceptable, at least, to suggest that we all tell the worst thing we have ever done. It becomes a competition. An odd kind of competition – a competition of lowness.  As a game, of course, it isn’t serious, but like Russian Roulette – its non-seriousness penetrates what is serious. It both makes the serious look shabby and shallow and suspect and gives the hearer of the tale a handle on the teller.

I have been struck, looking at film clips of Trump’s cabinet meetings, that Trump has an innate sense of the game – the game of the ugly story. Power, for Trump, like power for a Russian serf-owner or power for one of the Ancien Regime fuckers that Sade writes about, must be felt to be power.

In Rameau, the way the problem of brownnosing is laid out like a chess problem.  And the admiration demanded for something abject, something inhuman, something truly, in every way, shitty, is an admiration that will degrade the admirer. In his first term, Trump was, as it were, haunted by a story that  he had prostitutes piss on a bed the Obamas used when they visited Moscow. Whether this story is true or not, the gist of it is Trumpian. We see him, in those cabinet meetings, receive the insane tributes of his cabinet members very much the way he, a master of the revels of pissing, would watch a luxurious bed being pissed on by paid for minions.

 

Trump knows one thing that Sade’s fuckers also knew: that the  history of those humiliations will rise up again, ghosts that will torment the perpetrator, who will justify himself not be revolting against the master of the revels, but by currying to his whims on a level so deep that one can share in the humiliator’s pleasure. And to do that is to effect an imitation Trump: assuage one’s own wounded pride by the abasement of others  in an endless chain of non-being, going back to the Master.

While much is said about masculine aggression contributing to that curious eagerness for war, there is also the revenge for the thousand humiliations that have to be crossed in order to get to be fermier general, or undersecretary of Intelligence in the Department of Defense – and that mass accumulation of humiliations among a group that considers itself the most powerful, the most just, the most righteous grouping in history – ah, those are the boys to order the next deportation of orphans, the next degradation of journalists, the next kidnapping of college students.

The violence in this group is never pure, it is always muddied by obscure memories of toadying, the ingrown rancour. Giving up the little doggie – Cruz’s wife and father, for instance - just for just a little taste of the highest level of cocaine - fame, power, acceptance by the guys who count. Being made. Ah, the bliss of it, the entire bliss.