The Great wrong place

 

In his famous – and to my mind famously wrongheaded – essay about “mysteries”, W.H. Auden wrote:

“Actually, whatever he may say, I think Mr. Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his powerful but extremely depressing hooks should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art.”

We have long accepted not only Chandler but every motherfucker who writes as writing works of art. Art is a category,  not a laudative. The reason that this passage sticks with me is the naming of the Great Wrong Place.

I have often felt like I have spent a considerable portion of my life  in the Great Wrong Place, and that it didn’t have to be like that. This is why, I suppose, I am so fascinated by seedy stories of crimes and misappropriations during the Cold War, and the entire history of that encounter between two bad options, squeezing us, the inhabitants of our various Great Wrong Places, into slots that we did not chose and knew were not optional.

The Cold War is over and now we live through its shredded supplements – oh, how recently the Great Global War on Terror died, to be replaced by the Putin wars! And meantime, Chandler’s mean streets have been gentrified – but the mean is there, as plain as ever, and when it is pointed out, the books in which it is pointed out are banned in the libraries of Florida and Texas. Naturally.

Within the crime statistics, you can find the corpses of so many choked revolutions. But how many revolutions can the cops and their bosses choke?

Surely a puzzle for some crime novel detective.

The Trump impeachment - a symbol-event

 In the thumbnail sketch of modernity I carry around in my head, I see it as the result of two revolutions, both of which have failed. The first, or bourgeois revolution was basically about justice and equity. In this revolution, the powerful would no longer solely make the rules to which the powerless were subject, nor would they escape the rules that had been made. Where once the powerful were shielded by a system of immunity from obeying the rules and regulations that whacked the lower class, there would be true equality before the law.

This ideal has shaped a lot of political movements, from the French revolution to the American civil rights era. It has always failed to dissolve the immunity of the powerful, nor has it restrained the whacking of the powerless. It has, however, given that whole process a bad conscience.

The second revolution necessarily comes after the first: it is the revolution of the system of property relations in the broadest sense. This revolution shaped itself first as capitalism, in which capital was, ideally, wrenched free from an entrenched, privileged class and the market system destroyed all privileges that could not be justified by efficiency, and then as a socialist revolution that destroyed the last privilege, that of the holders of mere capital over the producers of goods and services. As we know, this revolution has also failed, and spectacularly failed where it was not preceded by the first, bourgeois revolution.

We live among the corsi and recorsi of these revolutions. The recorsi of the last forty years has been hard. Trump’s acquittal is a symbol-event – either the recorsi continues, and we go down before remorseless reaction, or we actually take up the long task of those revolutions with some chance of success.

There’s no compromise with the tide.