The anti-charlatan charlatan

 

… jede Stunde mit dem letzten Schlag von tausend unschuldigen Herzen durch die Welt dröhnen müsste – “every hour must roar throughout the world with the last beats of a thousand innocent hearts.”

Optimist: But all wars have ended with peace.

Faultfinder: Not this one. This one has not taken place on the surface of life… no, it has raged inside life itself. The front has been extended to the whole country. And there it will stay. And this changed life, if there still is life, will be accompanied by the old spiritual condition. The world is perishing and we won’t know it. Everything was yesterday and will be forgotten; no one will see today or be afraid of tomorrow. They will forget that the war was lost, forget they began it, foret they fought it. That is why the war won’t end.
 Ou
- Karl Kraus, taken from Calasso’s essay, The Perpetual War.

Calasso’s essay on Kraus focuses on an experience that Calasso himself, as well as most of his readers – all, now, surely – never had: Kraus’s readings. In particular, Kraus’s reading of his giant play, The Last Days of Mankind. The reading of this play, in absolute opposition to Austro-Hungary’s participation in the war and, more generally, to the war itself was an act that Calosso, using as his witness Elias Canetti, imagines like this:

“Outside there was still the war, and in the darkness of the hall, this tiny man with “a face so mobile that its couldn’t be pinpointed, penetrating and exotic, like the face of an animal, but a new, a different face, an unfamiliar one.”

Kraus was something we see in all the great polemicists: he was an anti-charlatan charlatan. Mimicry was the weapon, incitement by quotation was the point. I have long thought, since the Bush decade, of Kraus as a reference point to understand the moronic adventures of the U.S. in the 21^st century. The U.S. cam into the new millenium in the  most favorable circumstances possible. It could have continued to be at peace. It could have repaired and social and physical infrastructure. It could have made the necessary changes to repair the evident obsolescence of its constitutional order.

Of course, none of that happened. We are creeping out of this year with the U.S. government owing 40 trillion dollars, engaged on a smaller scale with an even stupider war than the unnecessary wars it engaged in in the 00s. Our constitutional order is now a bloody abortion, done to death by a lynch mob Supreme Court, and allowed to do so by an inane, inert, and senile legislature. Our economy is dominated by the illmeaning and cretinous offspring of the “third way”, our plutocrats, who make our 19^th century Robber Barons look cultivated and gentle by contrast. We have seen the government, aided and abetted by corporate media, shit all over the proudest product of 20^th century America, the civil rights movements. The climate is ruined, and not a hand has been raised to stop that foreseeable event.

Even the golden age of TV seems to be over.

Yet I’ve grown suspicious that my reference, my admiration for “prophetic denunciation’ is simply false consciousness patting itself on the back. When the poetry of indignation holds itself unaccountable for the predictable effects of total negation – depression, listlessness, quietism – then it is bad poetry. Poetry should not be employed to promote a cowed attitude towards life and energy. Those who pronounce the end of the world – or the end of this or that – are too slick, and too self-pleased with their disease. Ending is either an existential experience or another cause for making a pronunciamento, for self-advertisement. The end-makers are, really, all in the great muddle with the rest of us.

Note to self.