Emily's Guns

The prudent with a revolver

The loaded rifle by the door

The violent chambers

Of old New England wars

Make me think of Uncle Samuel’s guns

That lined the walls of his hunting lodge

Though I little thought Uncle Sam himself

prowled the corridors of his own brain

like Emily D. prowled hers

Looking for the relics: out of the New England rain.

A nullified wilderness long time gone

a narrative of captivity on the ottoman

the gun she’d finger in her mind

when her brother’s girlfriend came around.

Uncle Sam’s girlfriend found him

on his cedar plank floor

In the gun room where he finished up his own war..

Who has not thought with all the vengeance

Of a child confined to her room

Ot taking a mighty gun

And making the house a tomb.

- Karen Chamisso

Nietzsche's umbrella, Lenin's laugh

 

There is a story, jotted down by Lydia Fotieva in her book, Pages from Lenin’s life, about a visit Vladimir Ilyitch made to Paris 1905. He  spoke at a conference with Jaures. The International was alert: Russia was in revolt. Lenin had been in Paris before. He liked the city. In 1910, when he lived for a couple of years in an apartment on 4, Rue Rose Marie, he liked to bike around the city on weekends. He was a fanatic biker, one who knew all about fixing the gears, oiling the chain, keeping his bike in tip top order.

But on June 1^st – or 6^th, the dates differ, Lenin was in the mood for amusement. He’d been to the Opera the night before. Now, Lydia and a comrade took him with them to the Folies Bergere. At that time, the theatre was not just a high class stripper heaven. It was burlesque. Fotieva remembered one vaudeville routine Lenin loved:

“They were showing short scenes of a light genre. I remember one called “the legs of Paris.” The curtain was raised knee-high, showing the legs of people of different walks of life and social standing moving across the stage. There was a workingman, a street-light man, a grisette, a priest, a policeman, a small shopkeeper, a Paris dandy, and many others. The legs were so emphatically typical that there was no mistaking their owners, and you could easily picture the person they belonged to. It was very amusing. Vladimir Ilyich laughed as infectiously as he alone knew how, and he really enjoyed himself that evening.”

The half lowered curtain, the pants legs and bare legs and soutaned legs, the people above them hidden, the guessing as to what legs belonged to what type, and Lenin laughing at the show like any schoolboy. Does history here ball itself into an allegory, or is this just another night on the town?

Derrida, to the disgust of all good positivist philosophers, wrote an essay on Nietzsche that asks us some questions on a philological philosophical matter:

“’I have forgotten my umbrella.”

“I have forgotten my umbrella”

Among the fragments of Nietzsche’s unpublished work, we find these words, all alone, between quotation marks.

Perhaps a citation.

Perhaps it was something taken from (prelevee) some other part.

Perhaps putting it here or there would make it understandable.

Perhaps it was a note to begin some phrase that he meant to write here or there.

We have no infallible means to know where the taking of the phrase took place, on what it could have been grafted later on. We will never be assured that we know what Nietzsche meant to do or say in noting these words. Nor even what he wanted. In supposing that there is no doubt on his autograph, that it was his handwriting, and that one knows what we put under the concept of an autograph and the form of a signature [seing – as in blank check, blanc-seing].”

Derrida is making a serious point non-seriously, or a non-serious point seriously, here. We make large metaphysical and epistemological decisions when we go through the papers of an author, or even through texts in general: our list of procedures,  very much in the line of Gricean implicature, escapE, somehow, the attention of philosophical questioning. Derrida speaks of “hermeneutic somnambulism”.

And then we have the texts of people’s lives, their biographies, their life writing.

I could see classifying Lenin at the Folies-Bergere with Nietzsche’s umbrella – if it was his, if he was the person who lost it – as barely worth comment.

Yet it has attracted comment, both from the anti-communist professionals (while the revolutionaries were suffering in 1905, there was Lenin, laughing diabolically in the lap of bourgeois comfort) and the communist professionals (Comrade Lenin, as well, sometimes enjoyed the people’s humor. Or to generalize this with Stalin’s phrase: "Life has become better, life has become happier").

“Its transparence spreads out without a fold,” Derrida writes, “without reserve. Its appears to consist of a more than flat intelligibility. Everyone knows what “I have forgotten my umbrella” means.”

Lenin’s laughter at the Legs of Paris also seems to be nothing special.

And yet, there is something different about thinking of Lenin at the Folies-Bergere. Rather like thinking of Ho Chi Mihn going to a burlesque house in San Francisco – which he well might have done.

So: there is this anecdote. And there is the person who tells it, who originally wrote it down. Lydiia Fotieva. In 1920, Le Miroir, a French newspaper, took a picture of the Russian leadership in a meeting, and helpfully numbered and named the bigwigs – one of which was Fotieva. Of course, this photograph to us now shows those who are going to die – as Stalin got rid of those who did not die naturally in the next 10 to 20 years. Almost all. Not Fotieva.

Fotieva was associated, at that point, with Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, whose secretary she’d been in the pre-revolutionary years in Paris and then in Switzerland. Back then, she’d been toughened by prison terms in Czarist jails. Perhaps that had taken some of the puritanism out of her, enough so that she could enjoy a good vaudeville act. After the revolution, she was Lenin’s secretary, and was a witness to, or a part of the quarrel between Krupskaya and Stalin that figures into numerous stories about Lenin breaking with Georgian before he died.

If these stories are true, why was Fotieva spared a bullet in the neck? Some have called Fotieva an informer for Stalin. Certainly she had good relations with Stalin, even as members of Lenin’s circle began to suspect that he was not good for the revolution. Stalin, according to Robert Conquest, found Krupskaya a problem in the 30s, when he took full command, and even thought about denying that she was Lenin’s final wife – or real wife. He might have meant to nominate Fotieva for that position. In the end, though, this wasn’t necessary. It would have been a bit too messy.

It was a bit messy, too, that Fotieva had been the boss of Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda. There might well have been a friendship between the two such that Nadezhda spoke up for Lydia. In any case, during the purge and war years, Fotieva hid like a mouse in the bureaucracy of the Lenin Museum, a demotion but not torture or death in some courtyard or digging in subzero weather.

It had all come out wrong. She must have thought, sometimes. But after Stalin died, she resurfaced, still communist, and when she died the obituary in Tass was signed by Brezhnev and some others.

The Paris of 1905 was a long way away on that September day in 1975 when Fotieva’s body was put in the ground. The legs had long since withered and died, for the most part, during the wars and massacres of the century. The legs of Paris is not a routine, or tableau, noted by the papers at the time. Even books on the Folies-Bergere mention simply tableau put together by Victor de Cottens, the theatre’s art director at the time. One wonders what Lenin made of Mado Minty, one of the stars of the ensemble that year, “la magnifique, la merveilleuse a la superbe pointrine”?

As he and his comrades filed out of the door, into the still luminous night, hailed a cab, and left for the more serious footsteps that would eventually take them to the Finland Station.

What just happened? I mean, before what just happened happened

Among the best responses to the election as far as I am concerned, the small post by Anna Kornbluh on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/annakornbluh - seemed to be the most sensible, contextualizing the Shithead's election in the context of global inflation and the neolib globalized fallout. Inspired, I wrote out something that makes sense, to me, of this election and its air of farce. Inflation has to be an important factor in the story. But I think there's another part, which begins with COVID, and it is this:

The Covid interval passed like a long nightmare, but strange and miraculous things happened in that nightmare. Among them was the U.S. response, under Trump. For fifty years we have been told that the welfare state is evil morally and economically disastrous. And then, in the space of two months, prodded by the Dems in congress and his treasury, the U.S. expanded its welfare state on a scale and at a speed it had never done before. It was like three great societies all crammed together. I can never get over marvelling at it: the charts are here:

https://www.nytimes.com/.../pandemic-safety-net-medicaid...

Besides which, Trump also signed off on a vacinne project that was, to my mind, as impressive as the Manhattan project.

Given these pluses, Trump should easily have been re-elected in 2020. But here's another kicker, a dialectical joke in the jokefest: Trump ran against his own record. He ran against the vaccine. He ran for school openings and said nothing about the numerous ways in which money flooded in to help working parents. A clever politician, a Richard Nixon, who also shredded GOP verities when it served his interest, woulda done it. But Trump is an entertainer. I don't think he even now knows what he did, titularly. In any case, as Covid closed, so too did the welfare state. Without discussion. In the course of twelve years, we have seen the system totally collapse - in 2008 and 2020 - and the state, which every book says is now on the wane, cause we got us these multinationals and financial capital and everything, the fading state - well, it just opens up shop, pays for everything, and people watch it in awe until the show is over and the bigwigs forget, or keep trying to make us forget. So Trump won his second term because of the things he did in his first term that he still doesn't know he did. I love the vaudeville act of history. Except when it stomps on my face.

On the social utility of fat cats

Since we have just decided to make our unofficial plutocracy official, I thought this essay I wrote in 2019 might be useful.

We need to discuss the social function of rich people. Besides the marginal entertainment and sports figures, I see two functions: administration and investment.

The social cost of administration has gone up considerably since corporations changed their nature, breaking the old postwar pact between capital and labor. Here, I am going to put to one side the growth of LBOs and private equity firms that developed new forms of looting corporations in the eighties in order to concentrate on the radical elevation in compensation for the highest levels of management. This took off in the 80s. The explanation for this, from the point of view of intellectual history, is that neoclassical economists provided a model that justified it. Then, as an instititutional addendum, business schools saw in this issue a chance to create an alliance with a trend in corporations that would pay great benefits: expanding its presence both on the campus and in the world of business. Harvard Business school in particular boasted a team of scholars who cheered on the insane compensations of the new class of CEO with arguments having to do with “aligning” the interests of the organization and the management: the famous principle-agent problem, the solution to which was to massively bribe the leader. The rationale for this was paper thin – one had only to compare the compensation for Japanese upper management in the seventies to Americans in the eighties to see that corporate productivity and return on investment did not depend on giving the CEOs carte blanche and stock options.

One must keep in mind, from a political point of view, that the lowering of the marginal tax rate as a result of bills passed in Reagan’s first two years in office was the necessary but not sufficient condition for the subsequent explosion in upper management compensation. The gesture normalized the transgression of the post war pact, which saw the worker in some relation to management. It gave boards of directors a material reason for allowing and even encouraging a practice that, at one time, would have looked like gouging or an exercise in contempt for the stakeholders in the firm. The normalization worked: in the nineties, Clinton Dems showed no inclination to take the punchbowl away from this party, thus cementing the new norm. Rich upper management types – donors! – were now consulted as oracles instead of targeted as moneybags. This, crucially, paid extra dividends once one was out of office. The shadow side of neo-liberalism was the creation of a whole new strata of well paid consultants, lobbyists, and general wheeler dealers. If corporation X could not bribe Senator Y, Senator Y’s children or spouse could perhaps be hired at excellent salaries to lobby, or perhaps to think hard at think tanks, which like business schools experienced a true boom in the eighties. These think tanks were being bankrolled by wealthy philanthropists, who, in time honored fashion, used this instrument to avoid taxes and exert power. As the CEO class became more and more entitled, there was considerable trickle down to the political class, which became abettors and scroungers at the till. Similarly, the CEO model spread to non-profits. College presidents and museum heads were soon being paid astonishing sums to do what previous college presidents and museum heads had done for considerably less. There was no visible increase in the quality of colleges or museums, but this didn’t matter: that standard was obsolete at this point.

Thomas Picketty, who studied changes in the source of wealth along with Emmanuel Saenz, targets the income derived from administration as as a major driver of income and wealth inequality in his book Capital. For a quick rundown of this, I’d recommend Mike Konczal’s excellent essay in the Boston Review in 2014.

Even so, if the exorbitant sums paid to administrators had resulted in a great increase in the pay to the median worker, it might be said that, on some level, it works. But this hasn’t happened. The very wealthy have seen their income growing by about 6 percent per year since the seventies – in fact, the starting point seems to be 1973. The middle has grown, if at all – it flatlined during most of the 00s – by one percent per year. The workers who comprise the lower eighty percent have seen their wealth, in Piketty’s phrase, “collapse”. This reverses the trends from 1945 to 1973, when it was just the opposite, with the wealthiest having less percentage gains than the middle.

The left argues that we have no reason to pay these exorbitant costs for administration. There’s no evidence that these costs have been worth it to the average worker in developed economies. On the contrary, they’ve decisively shifted power away from workers. This power is not just reflected in flatlining wages and increased debt: it is, as well, a matter of expectations, of seeing the future of one’s society as something in which one can expect justice, exert political influence, and enjoy the fruits of our greatly increased national product: making our lives more comfortable, but allowing us, too, to take risks without facing the chance of being kicked out on the street. And so on down the generations, ad gloria mundi.

Along with administration, the wealthy play a positive social role by making investments. The argument here is, it is true, circular – we need to the wealthy to invest, and that investment makes them richer, making us need them more – but it isn’t bogus. Investment means that credit is available to the masses; the making accessible and available credit to workers, beyond the mingy terms of the company store, was one of the great capitalist victories of the twentieth century. The Soviet Union died for many reasons, but one of the unheralded ones was the persistent refusal of the Soviet planners to create an internal source of credit. This devastated the economy that recovered very well from World War II, but that, by the sixties, was in desperate need of credit to renovate and take advantage of the efficiencies offered by technological progress.

So there’s that. One can accept that the sphere of financial circulation is necessary, however, without accepting the premium that is now being paid for investment is necessary or efficient – or accepting the massive shadow banking system that has developed according to a logic of its own. The proliferation of financial instruments whose sole purpose is a quick return – basically, the casino-ization of the banking system – has only been a bad thing. Although it has been an excellent thing for the very rich.

Our tax system mirrors the priorities of the very wealthy – hence, the flat tax on capital gains. This is a scandal, and everytime it is pointed out that it is a scandal, everyone is scandalized, and the moment passes. Here, the wealthy have been very successful at telling a story that is the opposite of what Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx told. It is perhaps the most successful propaganda ever to spread in America, if we discount the pseudo-science flogged by cigarette companies to keep regulation from happening in the fifties and sixties. The success of the cig companies can be measured in the obituary columns and the hospitals year after year. The success of the entrepreneur myth can be measured in bankruptcies, debt, and the decline in public investment is occurring not only in the U.S., but everywhere in the developed world save China.

The story made up by Schumpeter, and other conservative economists, went like this: wealth comes about because some risktaker seizes on an idea – a new invention or service, or a common one that can be done more efficiently, etc. – and founds a company. The company hires people, meaning that our risktaker is spreading the wealth. We need this person! And so the richer he is, the more he deserves our gratitude for graciously making such wealth for others.

This fairy tale is very popular on the right, and hardly disputed anymore on the left. Yet it is simply bogus. The wealth of the risktaker depends entirely on the services and commodities produced by the workers. The rightwing tale completely and neatly inverts reality. There’s no Gates, Jobs, or Bezos without the workers that embodied and carried forth the tasks that made them rich. All honor to their ideas – but they are ideas built on the labor, services and ideas of others. The indispensibility of the entrepreneur isn’t even believed by the banker class, which mouths this propaganda. As any glance at the history of the tech industry – where the myth of the wealthmaking wealthy is particularly strong – shows, when the idea of the risktaker becomes an actual company, his funders – those VC angels – in the majority of cases replace him. The VC angels have no sentimentality about the “entrepreneur”. They know he’s a replaceable cog. Unless, of course, it is the man at the top of some Venture Capital company – then he’s an irreplaceable genius.

So, to put it in one sentence: the entrepreneur myth inverts cause and effect, for the malign purpose of justifying an unnecessary premium to the administrator.

But to return to the social function of the wealthy, it is at the convergence of administration and investment that we see the need, such as there is, for a wealthy strata. That need is not, however, for an uber-wealthy strata. We need to allow a premium for investment and for the higher administrative tasks. At least, given the present form of our economic system. But a premium can really be limited, and its limits should be defined empirically, not with an ideological elevator speech about freedom. In the fifties, the wealthiest level of Americans, the top 1 percent, owned 9 percent of the national wealth. They now own 35 percent. The bottom 80 percent own ten percent. This has happened in my lifetime. In my son’s lifetime, if global warming is seriously addressed and there is an America left, we can correct this. In my utopia, the top 1 percent would own five percent of the wealth, and the bottom 80 percent would own at least 50 to 60 percent of the wealth – leaving the next 19 percent with the spoils. That 19 percent is composed of administrators, professionals and people in the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate sectors. These people have seen their incomes and wealth grow, but not in proportion to the freakishly wealthy upper 1 percent. That one percent – and even more the .01 percent – dominate the chart.

I’m conceding to the social function of the wealthy much that depends on the current system. That system itself has to adjust in a major way to the catastrophe it has generated and refused to confront – and who can predict just how that adjustment will be accomplished? But it should be pointed out that ecocide is not just a capitalist product – there was no country and system more devoted to ecocide than the U.S.S.R. As long as we refuse to rethink the treadmill of production, we will keep going the way of the Dead Planet. However, the acceleration in ecocide coincides, and not accidentally, with the increase in wealth inequality we have seen around the world. Economists, bizarrely, love to brag that really excessive poverty is decreasing, as if they had anything to do with it. This means, basically, that there are more families living on more than 2 dollars a day. Victory! But one can ask whether the price – a .001 percent that are living on 50 million dollars per day – is worth it. I for one say no. Inequality and the present system of industry are both factors in the same death march. One we can stop. And we can do that without rich people missing a single ten course lunch. The right will always complain it is a choice between the billionaire and the Gulag, but that is a false choice. We can choose to keep the wealthy without creating a wealth aristocracy. That’s the real choice.

The shithead won

 The Dems win all the wrong elections. If Clinton had lost in 1992, we'd have a much better Democratic party. If Biden had lost in 2020, the shithead would be heading out the door. And what in my life would have been worse if the shithead had his second term then? Cannot think of much. Abortion rights lost? Check. Corruption on the Supreme Court allowed to flourish? Check. Gazan systematically murdered in an American abetted genocide? Check.

Still, I voted for KH cause she was young, comparatively, wasn't the Shithead or Biden, and I thought in the end she'd be better in the Middle East.

The Dems ran, once again, as the respectability party. What this means in the neolib era is combining a vague Civil Rights culture with untrammeled plutocracy and financial capitalism. It is a mix that leads to wider and wider wobbles in our politics.

Summing up the Biden disfunction was the popularity of explaining economic discontent with the term vibes. The people only think they know what economics is - it has to be explained to them they never had it so good! That is a joke. Coming off of the COVID interregnum, people got a taste of a truly extended social security net. Money from the gov! That was rolled up, and inflation hit seriously, and where was the Biden people? Well, they were on tv, explaining that we never had it so good. 

In a final twist to the whole false synthesis of neolib economics and civil rights culture, we get it explained that economic malaise vibes is really an excuse for racism. Which I suppose explains the Shithead's success with black voters. Or doesn't. Guess which households have been hit worst by "vibes" -- if you guessed black households, you'd be right. 

Next four years of Shithead being in everyone's mouths makes me tired. I'm tired and old. I want to do something else.

I'll add this, from June. Back then, it was France, but the same system dynamic is at play in the U.S. I have been searching for a term to encompass one of the great features of capitalism – the non-necessary synthesis. I guess I will call it the mock synthesis.

A mock, or synthetic synthesis is the repeated putting together of two sets of concepts that are not necessarily joined together, creating a “discursive” necessity – or what I would call a mock necessity.

The third way, that ghostly nineties thing, corresponds very well to the synthetic synthesis model. A certain neo-classical economics is retrieved from the conservative opposition to social democracy, and is synthesized with an ideology that came out of the class struggles that brought about social democracy: that is, the struggle for civil rights of oppressed subjects in a liberal nation-state. So, for instance, the type of economic policies that favous a great increase in economic inequality, with its deregulation, its guarantees of support for the financial sector, its lower tax rate for the wealthy (in all its parts, including the blind eye turned to offshore money and the whole system of tax avoidance for the wealthy) is joined to an increasing concern with the legal equality of the oppressed subjects.

In the synthetic synthesis, the former left assumption – that class struggle is the shaping force of capitalist modernity – is simply dropped out.

Synthetic synthesis produces a certain type of managerial self. In corporations, in academia, in politics, in journalism this self is encountered over and over again. It is a self that is rhetorically virtuous, but anchored in every way in an economics of exploitation. The synthetic progressive.

That these syntheses are not grounded in necessity – that is, in any approximation of a total view of society – means that these managerial selves can easily adopt attitudes that go violently against the civil rights ideology that legitimates them.

In France, right now, we are seeing in real time how this works, as Macron – an almost ideal managerial self – and the National Front (the RN, but I’m going to refuse to call them their new audience friendly name) are tentatively reaching out to each other. Last year, Le Pen’s party joined the left in its criticism of Macron’s reactionary attacks on Social Democratic institutions, symbolized by the fight over retirement. Symbolized, I should say, by the theft, by the political establishment, of years of the life of the employed classes, from clerks to mid-level managers to every employee of every public service. The last named have long been the target of Macronist contempt, contempt at the deepest level.

On the way to assuming power, the National Front, much like some Marxist caricature of fascism, erased its dispute with Macron over economics. And, indeed, in the turning of these wheels, the fragility of the synthetic synthesis comes into full view: why not attack social democracy and promote racism? It is as necessary, or non-necessary, as its opposite.

One of the great terms that has arisen in the social media is “gaslighting” – and gaslighting is symptomatic in late neoliberalism of the grinding sound at the base, as the money that flowed into the plutocracy due to neoliberal policies starts flowing to the reactionaries and fascists. The billionaire philanthropists, it turns out, are billionaires first, and philanthropists only as it gains them power and tax breaks.

It is hard to get one’s mind around a society that has so amply and fully adopted to synthetic syntheses – as it makes the life-world seem, ultimately, a sort of petty game, where nothing is serious if you don’t have serious money. Democracy can be cast aside because it empowers “non-serious” people. The serious buy their seriousness with serious money.

On singing in the shower

 Who among us is not aware of shower tourism? By this, I do not simply mean the always tentative exploration of hotel bathrooms, with their varying accommodation for the traveler, their little tubes of cheap shampoo and body gel, which one nevertheless pockets, their towels of varying thicknesses, and their surprisingly common problem with retaining water in the shower or shower/tub area – the latter being home to a curious penchant among hoteliers for what is called, in the industry, the “flexible curtain track”, which allows ample space to pull the curtain shut – but which always produces a sizeable puddle at the end of the lustration process. That puddle into which the showerer plunges his feet, with a light grimace, when removing himself from the shower – how well we know it. Unlike our bathroom, however, the puddle is a matter for someone else to clean up. Yes, the hotel bathroom deserves a whole chapter to itself, but at the moment, I am talking of another facet of this micro-world, which consists of using the showers of others – of friends or family with whom one is staying, or who are staying with one. Both aspects are noteworthy – tourism is, in this sense, a transitive property, since if you have guests staying with you, your quarters are, for the length of the stay, going to be somewhat alien to you. In other words, the tourist is a catalytic creature at whose touch the familiar becomes a tourist site. It is this logico-magical property that makes for the tragedy of tourism, as the tourist searches for an authenticity which his very presence destroys.

Myself, I have stayed with many a host. I have entered naked into many a tiled domain in apartment and house, and, testing the water from the shower head or wand, surveyed the various unguents stored there. Sometimes, of course, I have entered carrying my own; sometimes, I confess, I have “borrowed” alien creams, soaps, shampoos and the like. This, you will say, is pretty un-guestly. It is a sort of vice. But it is also part of our everyday novel-writing – since we all engage in living through, or parasiting, other characters now and then. The grocery clerk surveys the line and sees Mrs. X and Mr. Y and that girl who always comes in and buys one item and the old woman who makes you go through endless rolls of curly edged coupons, the auto saleman guesses at the libido of the 20 year old guy, etc., etc. The self comes and goes, it doesn’t preceed self-interest so much as it follows it, becoming at worst a ghostly selfishness, and at best a moral worry.

So it is with conditioners. As we know from Kracauer and Benjamin, the houses and apartments we live in are potentially only repositories of clues for the classic detective. The doilies in the living room may be bought for decorative reasons, but ultimately they serve to soak up the blood from the murder victim, along with the velvety pillow. The shower contains – like the computer and its files – a veritable history of the owner of the shower for those with the eyes to see. Are the hair products bought from the low end? Are they cheap and general? Or are they bought from the high end, and are they expensive and specialized? Is the language on them, by any chance, French? Or English? Do the shower gels refer to milk? To almonds? To glowing skin?

The shower process itself nourishes speculation. We stand under the fierce beating down of warm drops and we think. We ponder the day, the tasks. We make up verses. We make up grocery lists. There are, of course, people who simply shower to get clean. But as every tv ad for shampoo or soap makes clear, cleaning is secondary to the ecstasy of soaping and rinsing, to swinging, fresh hair, to sparkling eyes, to the smell that film is just on the edge of throwing at you if it could – the whole transcends its tawdry utilitarian purpose as much as advertisement’s speedy expensive car transcends that mere metal carapace stuck in traffic jams and hustled into parking lots. Advertisement has a way of changing the purposes of the acts of everyday life. In the case of the shower, it has cinematized our experience.

There is a reason that some sing in the shower. This is my song.

pity for the word "excited"

 

I have lately been feeling pity for the word “excite”. The origin of the word is respectable, and even stuffy – from cite, or move, come forth. Cite appears in English first, as a legal term: a summons. Excite is a summoning too, but one that was connotatively associated with the body. When I learned French in high school, one of the things we were told that made us giggle is not to use “excite” in French, since it was vaguely sexual – a summoning of the libido.

To me, as an American, exciting is associated with more innocent things, or at least libidinously compensatory activities. “Isn’t this exciting” was inevitably ironic, for high schoolers. It was the type of thing the Sunday School teacher said about some dreary game meant to amuse us and edify us biblically.

Exciting still carried that whiff of the bogus, that eyeroll quotation marks, into the eighties. But at some point – perhaps when business schools overtook the humanities as the degree of choice – exciting was revived, a gadget for the new age of Babbitry. It was not only revived, but it started its march towards omnipresence. You could not announce you were taking a dump without saying that you were “very excited by the opportunity to take this dump.” If you were freelancing, and you have, as you must, a twitter account, you must always announce your feeblest initiative by saying how excited you were by it. Trevor Noah, for instance, wants you to know that he is “excited to announce my new 2020 tour dates!” Just to announce the dates! As a tv personality, you would think that he would be a bit blasé, but not Trevor. Bill Gates is “excited” about everything: about Boston Mills new “innovations” in steel production, about technology to “fix” flaws in photosynthesis (a big agro-business moneymaker that is “exciting” because it will, of course, help “poor people”), he’s excited all over the place about innovation. Anybody who has anything to announce nowadays – that they are taking a job or quitting a job, that they are going to school or just that they are one degree above comatose – must be “excited” to announce it. They are never sad, or indifferent; they are never simply announcing, telling, whispering, purring, etc. No, they are always excited. We live in a population that is carbonated on excitement, with bubbles of excitement entering their blood stream every second. You can hardly nail us down – so much are we jumping for joy.

All this excitement leads to a curious letdown feeling, in actuality. It is as if we have exhausted surprise itself, and nothing is exciting, since everything is. I do not deal in predictions, since I am so bad at them, but still, I’m excited to announce that I think excitement is about to take a turn for the less frequent. In the future, people will not be excited to announce anything. They will be, perhaps, ecstatic, orgasmic, or on the edge of their chairs; they will be cool, they will be beady eyed, they will be stoic, they will be anything but excited. This might seem impossible. It might seem like excitement and excited are set in stone, and that the seven habits of highly excitable people will follow us to the flooding of the coastal cities and beyond. But change is possible!

And I’m so excited about it!

The evolution of ghosts: Caspar R us!

It has long been my contention that there is no story about life on earth that does not boil down to an evolutionary story. The creationist version of life on earth has, since the 19th century, made large use of the notion of intelligent design – but anybody who knows anything about design knows that it evolves. The intelligent design argument is a mess, since the standards it uses to critique Darwinism are, of course, entirely absent when it tries to construct the meaning of intelligent design. Just as we can trace the evolution of the design of the watch by the material left behind in its wake – diagrams, tools, etc. – so too, if intelligent design were true, we would be able to see the material left behind in its wake – proto-humans, for instance. At this point, intelligent design simply gives up the intelligent part and opts for supernatural design, a design that defies the same physical laws that, on its critique side, intelligent design uses to try to de-legitimate Darwinian evolution.

Of course, creationists aren’t the only ones to ignore the evolutionary nature of all accounts of design. Philosophers, much to my distress, often assume things like zombies without having any sense that a zombie has to come with an evolutionary story, and that has to be packed into their account that a zombie doesn’t sense like a human being. This simply proves that philosophers are bad intelligent designers – something I think Wittgenstein spotted long ago.

At the same time, not all evolution is Darwinian evolution – that is, the statistical effect of selection, while definitely having some effects at the cultural level, does not play the role it plays in Darwinian evolution. Evolution on the cultural level often takes the form of assemblages that bring together different developmental paths as overlapping associations.

All of which is the wordy and way too wordy intro to what I want to do for a lark: understand the evolution of the ghost shape that one sees, in paper cutouts and cartoons, on Halloween.

Jean-Claude Schmitt, the author of Ghosts in the Middle Ages, lists six ways in which ghosts were depicted in the 13th and 14th century: the Lazarus, or resurrected man; as looking like a living person; as looking like a small, naked child, a common way of depicting the soul; wrapped in a diaphonous shroud; as a decomposing corpse; and as invisible, with the convention here depending on the text. In the last case, the text speaks of the ghost being sensed, but not seen.

It is striking how closely this list corresponds to features one finds in the common, commercial construction paper ghosts that are bought before Halloween in the store and strung up on doors and windows to create the “haunted house”.

However, in the age of drawing, painting and stonework, there were certain possibilities, mixes of the above categories, that were beyond the technological imagination. Clearly ectoplasm, that gross but fascinating presence in much of the spiritualist photography of the 19th and 20th century, is a compromise, a condensation, of the decomposing corpse and the diaphonous shroud. It was diaphonous matter in a state of decomposition. And yet, this decomposition was astonishingly lively – presaging the world of synthetics, the jello world, that came after 1945. Which was incidentally not only the year that the war gave up its ghosts, but also the year Casper the Friendly ghost was launched, a sort of Cold War parable – a friendly presence that was doomed to scare those it wished to greet. An image of American ambition throughout the world, or at least through American eyes, where we came with the noblest intention of helping and only seemed to scare and enrage the people we helped – so that we had to help them through other means, for instance, by bombing them or overthrowing their governments. We were the world’s Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Owen Davies popular history of ghost beliefs, The Haunted, proposes a close relationship between the way corpses were dressed for burial and the appearance of the sheeted ghost. The winding sheet as the last bit of clothing a mortal wears was, in the seventeenth century, supplanted by an increasing use of clothing – and yet still a white robe was often worn. “John Aubrey recounted that the Oxford philologist Henry Jacob, who died on 5 November 1652, appeared a week later to his cousin, the doctor William Jacob, “standing by his Bed, in his Shirt, with a white Capon on his Head”, which was presumably how he was dressed in the coffin.” Here we see an evolutionary fluke: the white sheet takes on a life, or afterlife, of its own with the ghost, as the human corpse is dressed increasingly in other raiment. By the nineteenth century the “bedsheet ghost” image had become standard. Davies thinks that the belief in ghosts, however, liberated itself from the contrivance of the bedsheet due to twentieth century movies. Early comedy silents and talkies extensively used the bedsheet ghost for hilarity. Since ghost belief is usually not about the funnies, but about the unheimlich, ghosts were seen not in sheets, but in their clothes – or sometimes wounded, or bleeding. There was, in the evolution of the ghost costume, this break in “seriousness”, with the children’s bedsheet ghost continuing its iconic run while the real ghost of ghost encounters lost the white sheet entirely.

How racism works

Racism has a double aspect: there is a racism of sentiments and a racism of structure. It is a mistake to think that these aspects are governed by the same dynamic, and will reflect the same “moves.” And yet, they are “aspects” – ultimately, sentiments and structure form a unity.

In a society that has bought into the myth of methodological individualism, the unity becomes ever more mysterious. According to that myth, if we operate on the individual sentiments, we are engaged with the determining cause of racism. If, that is, we could through some process make sure that nobody “feels” racist, then we eliminate racism.

Although intellectually many liberals think that structural racism is semi-autonomous, in some way, in everyday discourse these liberals tend to reflect the hegemonic position that it is sentiments that count. Thus, without considering that, objectively, those who achieve some success in a society that is structurally racist are themselves complicit in racism – or to be less wishy washy, are racist – they will much prefer looking at some other as the bearer of racism – the white redneck or trailer trash being, of course, the popular bugbear.

This is understandable. The relationship between sentiments and structure is a complex one, and not always easy to unentangle.

But even if the source of the racism, the aspect that is the larger factor in a particular instance, must be subject to analysis, one can still spot it pretty easily if we think about it. To give an example off the top of my head: Robert Caro’s analysis of LBJ’s election to the senate in 1948. This is how the NYT chose to summarize it:

“Mr. Caro maintains that although ballot fraud was common in the late 1940's in some parts of Texas, the Johnson campaign of 1948 raised it to a new level. Mr. Caro supports his charge with an interview with Luis Salas, an election judge in Jim Wells County who said he acknowledged his role only after all others involved in the theft had died.

Determined to Win at All Costs

It has been alleged for years that Johnson captured his Senate seat through fraud, but Mr. Caro goes into great detail to tell how the future President overcame a 20,000-vote deficit to achieve his famous 87-vote victory in the 1948 Democratic runoff primary against a former Governor, Coke Stevenson. A South Texas political boss, George Parr, had manufactured thousands of votes, Mr. Caro found. Johnson died in 1973, Stevenson and Parr in 1975. Mr. Caro says the election showed Johnson's determination to win at all costs as well as his coolness under fire and his ability to select gifted lieutenants, whom he then manipulated.”

One notices that the focus on ballot fraud lightly skips over the fact of real voter suppression in Texas in 1948. According to the Census of 1950, the population of Texas was 12.9 percent black, or 977,458, but until 1944, the state law allowed the Democratic party to exclude at its own will voters in the primary. That law was used to create a so called “white primary.” In one of the most important cases that the Supreme Court has ever decided, Smith v. Allwright, the Court ruled that this was an illegal infringement on African American civil riths. Interestingly, the 1948 senate race was one of the first statewide races after the Supreme Court ruling. So instead of speaking of “ballot stuffing” under the assumption that elections before 1948 were more licit, one should be asking whether lifting the long term illegal suppression of black votes made the 1948 election more democratic. More, I say, since grassroots voter suppression of black votes in Texas was still going on. It is only in the context of this much larger scandal that we can talk, with some historical understanding, about white election irregularities.

But the NYT synopsis of Caro’s research doesn’t touch on this, or even seem aware of the irony of talking about election irregularities in a system founded on a gross, systematic election irregularity. After all, that part of the story is in a separate compartment.

feuilleton and psychogeography

 

I came across a fascinating reference in Michael Bienert’s Die eingebildete Metrople – a study of Berlin the the feuilleton of the Weimar Republic – which led me to the Berlin Tageblatt for January 1, 1929. The editor, in a little burst of genius, had the newspaper pay eight writers to take rides on different routes of different buses going through Berlin from Potsdamer Platz to the Halensee neighborhood in Charlottenberg. The headline was “a relay race of writers”: in affect, these writers were to jot down their impressions, in whatever style and whatever way they wanted to. To use a term invented in the 1950s, they were given the task of writing short psychogeographies.

The eight writers were Alfred Doeblin, Alfred Polgar, Oskar Loerke, Arnolt Bronnen, Walter Mering, Walter von Mole, Alice Berend, and Arnold Zweig.

I can imagine some paper, say the Brooklyn Rail, doing the same kind of thing in present day New York. It would be cool.

Walter von Mole was a liberal writer whose sad fate was to have defended Jews in Weimar Germany against Nazis, to have tried to surrender after Hitler’s accession to power, and to be practically destituted by the Nazis in spite of this. His heart was not in pledging loyalty to Hitler, and the brownshirts could smell that. But in 1929, he was a big bestselling author. The little piece he wrote about Potsdamer Platz was a dialogue between a man and a woman who were going to see divorce lawyers, and exchanging spicy barbs about their mutually unsatisfactory sex lives on the way. It is a perfect little piece of mock eavesdropping, which ends at Potsdamer Bridge, where they get off. In the brief argument one gets a sort of precis of the post-war German breakup of sexual and family assumptions. This is the Berlin of decadence, Berlin Babylon, but in a minor key. Doeblin, of course, writes about Alexanderplatz. There are observations about the passing stores, monuments, and prices of goods. But the trip is also about the way the bus shakes, and its big engine – a Maybach engine. The voice is all about such things, the machines that make up the modern metro.

The only woman – Alice Berend – is given Tauenzienstrasse. As Mel Gordon, whose Feral House classic Voluptuous Panic is all about erotic Berlin, “TAUENTZIENGIRLS [were] Bubikopfed streetwalkers in the latest fashions (sometimes in mother-and-daughter teams), who silently solicited customers on Tauentzienstrasse, south of the Memorial Church.” Berend was a figure in the expressionist avant -garde, and a fairly well known novelist. One of her novels was a roman a clef about Carl Schmitt, who she knew in Munich, and who apparently filled her in with the sexual details of his relationship with his wife (Schmitt was the kind of guy who toted up his ejaculations in  his diary – for what that is worth). Her account is of the usual Berlin miseries, the socially come down, the former piano teachers selling postcards, etc., but no hint of Tauentziengirls, unless this is a distant reference: “Women in furs, with red lips, all young, however old they might be…”

Bienert’s thesis is that the feuilleton was an essential part of the metropole. His book is full of fascinating facts. Did you know, Frankfurt School groupies, that Kracauer’s paper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, was financed by I.G. Farben? We ponder the cracks and gaps in which the left intelligentsia had its say. We wonder: is this all going to be horribly relevant?

contempt

 

Mépris is French for contempt. Among aging American cinephiles, Godard’s film Le Mépris is enjoyed best if one retains the title without translating it, much as oeniphile prefer French terms to talk about wine.

The multi-disciplinary Jean Duvignaud – a sociologist, novelist, theater critic and the lover of Clara Malraux – wrote an essay on mépris which takes the word into an etymological socio-historical frolic – my fave kind of thing. The title of the essay is The counterfeit of contempt (La fausse monnaie du mépris) and he finds, in the word’s base, pris, or prendre – to take – a market gesture:

"Here we are at the market or the fair, long before Rabelais. “priser » to take or retain, as one does with a fish or game because it responds to a need, a desire, an expectation. And this give it a price (prix). To take is also to sniff, to aspirate by the nose, and the word was recognized by the Academy in 1878 in a hoomage to this secular practice.

From words grow gestures. Those who turn away from the fish or the duck – it smells bad, or its color is repugnant – disdain or have contempt for, as was meant in the 12th century the prefix “mes”. At what moment, and why here rather than there, did these words become ideas?”

This passage struck me, because lately I’ve been reading Jenny Erpenbeck’s The end of days, and there is a powerful passage connecting the collapse of the Austrian economy at the end of WWI with the daily life of a Jew among anti-semitism. They are somehow joined by the way the vendors of fruit and meat in Vienna are dealing with the influx of refugees, country people who come to a market and touch the goods: by posting signs forbidding, harshly, handling the goods and showing shopkeeperly contempt for those people who look like the type of people who handle goods.

“Every morning she goes to the market and gets in line. In the second year of the war, when she was still new in Vienna and there wasn’t yet a vegetable shortage, she liked to finger the carrots, potatoes, or cabbage, just like back home.

Hands off the merchandise! the Viennese shouted at her, sometimes even slapping her hand away as if she were a disobedient child.

Surely it isn’t forbidden to look a bit before one buys.

Look all you like, but no pawing.

Later they simply pushed her away when she wanted to touch something intended for her stomach. Fire, locusts, leeches, plague, bears, foxes, snakes, insects, lice. But did these people ever stop to think about what it really meant to introduce things growing in the world into their bodies?”

The vast contempt of the Viennese shopkeepers for the peasant, the urban ethnic contempt that flowered there, the way it is connected with touching, smelling, and forbidding touching and smelling – there’s a powerful nexus, here, the way contempt transmits itself in the socius, through small but forceful gestures. Erpenbeck is a marvelous suggester – the whole that waits out there, that the reader is conscious of, intrudes in these market interactions.

“In her own shop back home, if she had forbidden the customers to touch her wares, she’d have gone out of business right away. When she thinks of all she left behind when she fled — the eggs, the sacks full of flour and sugar, the barrels of herring, all the apples — she could weep. People here are insolent, and they won’t even give you what you are entitled to according to your ration card. When she stands in line unsuccessfully, she sometimes gathers up a few cabbage leaves, rotten potatoes, or whatever else may have fallen into the snow around the vegetable sellers’ stands, and puts them in her bag.”

I have been away long enough from Publix, from Winn Dixie, from Krogers that I don’t entirely remember the protocol. But I always handle the veggies. Smell strawberries. Sort through the vrac, to use the French term. And I’ve noticed that increasingly, the veggies are put in plastic. Nothing shocks me like seeing broccoli, which you should pick through, feel with you fingers, embalmed in plastic. I feel like they are being strangled in there. It is a feeling that leaps out of my heart of digestive system without me thinking about it at all.

Ah, the sources of contempt, it is a long topic casting a vast shadow over us, the fingering masses.

 

 

Damned and Rammed

 

One of the great books of my teenage life was “The World Turned Upside Down”, Christopher Hill’s masterpiece. Often disputed and disparaged, the book emanated a vibe, implicitly connecting up the Diggers in the English Revolution, and the multitude of wayfaring prophets in the highways and byways of that brief moment of freedom, with the Diggers in 1960s San Francisco, who were not yet through when Hill’s book was published in 1972. Implicitly is the big word here – for readers who were enduring the shocks of Nixon’s re-election, the Vietnam war “winding down” in big big puddles of blood, and the newly militarized younger generation of workers, The World Turned Upside down was not an antiquarian curiosity, but a utopian tract.

Peter Coyote, one of the founders of the diggers, wrote that Winstanley’s writing inspired the name. How did Winstanley arrive on the West Coast of California in 1966? I have to think that the San Francisco Mime Troupe with which both men were involved reflected Kenneth Rexroth’s influence more than the Beats. In Emmet Grogan’s Ringolevio, the name comes from some mysterious British history: “The name “Diggers” had been tossed forward by another member of the troupe who read about the seventeenth-century group in a British history book and felt that Emmett, Billy and their ideas about freedom resembled those of Gerrard Winstanley, William Everard and their one hundred supporters.”  This British history was almost surely Christopher Hill’s, who wrote a number of books in the sixties about the English Revolution. The quicksilver life of a book is something that escapes the academic game of “influence”; a book, a text, a graffitied slogan, a song, these are all things that go out there pentacostally and give people the shakes. Influence my ass - it is a permanent earthquake out there. 

The diggers were all well and good, but among the amazing figures in The World Upside Down, I immediately latched onto the obscure  Abiezer Coppe. This was a prophet to my liking, the kind one sees downtown in any huge urb, begging, getting drunk in the bus stop shelter, wearing garbage sacks. The evangelical movement in America and its awful roots elsewhere has drifted far from its radical beginnings, and is a sort of abusive household writ large. But the English Revolution and its American associates were made of different stuff. The older style of apocalyptic lit digs into the pork and corruption of a world that runs over the oppressed and sees its dark ends – the first who shall be last, here, include the rich evangelical types, being fed into the maw of some rich Bosch-style monster. When the World is turned Upside Down, the values that held it right side up will be turned upside down too – which means that profit seekers will suffer, while the idle will be rewarded for their intense study of the lilies of the field; which means that the pure to whom all was pure – the whores, wankers, tramps, schizos, pennyante artists, Sal Army Hall bedwetters, holy toothless fools, runaways, all the tranquillized children in all the foster homes, etc., etc. – will invade, with much hooting, the halls of power; the meek housewives who took up steak knives and studied their husband’s backs on all those electric lightbulb sick nights, Raymond Chandler’s heroines, will pack like Amazons and destroy the peace of mind we’ve all purchased by disciplining the libido, and banning the Id. Those mean streets, it turns out, are the streets of the New Jerusalem, and the mysteries here are beyond any that Philip Marlowe is programmed to solve.

Coppe, from Hill’s description, was an exemplary Ranter. He believed in free love, and drinking, and throwing himself under the wheels of luxurious carriages. He was a freelance prophet, not connected to the Diggers or Levelers and their more rational political schemes. When he was examined by the court, he supposedly bawled at them and tried to throw fruit about. He was more like Huck Finn’s father crossed with Ezekiel, if Ezekiel had been transplanted to the much colder climes of Albion. Then, of course, imprisonment, Cromwell’s reign, and the Restoration made him as lonely as a recalcitrant Yippie in the Reagan years, and he wilted away.

 Anyway, the intro to his most famous pamphlet, copped from the subgenius site, is rap of the highest caliber.

An inlet into the Land of Promise, the new Hierusalem, and agate into the ensuing Discourse, worthy of seriousconsideration.
My Deare One.
All or None.
Every one under the Sunne.
Mine own. My most excellent Majesty (in me) hath strangely and variously transformed this forme.
And beholde, by mine owne Almightinesse (in me) I have been changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the sound ofthe Trump.…

And it hath pleased my most excellent Majesty (who is universall love, and whose service is perfecte freedom) to set this forme (the Writer of this Roll) as no small signe and wonder in fleshly Israel; as you may partly see in the ensuing Discourse.

And now (my deare ones!) every one under the Sun, I will onely point at the gate; thorow which I was led into that new City,  Hierusalem, and to the Spirits of just men, made perfect,and to God the Judge of all.First, all my strength, my forces were utterly routed, my house I dwelt in fired; my father and mother forsook me, the wife of my bosome loathed me, mine old name was rotted, perished; and I was utterly plagued, consumed, damned, rammed, and sunke into nothing, into the bowels of the still Eternity (my mother'swomb) out of which I came naked, and whetherto I returned again naked. And lying a while there, rapt up in silence, at length(the body or outward forme being awake all this while) I heard with my outward eare (to my apprehension) a most terrible thunder-clap, and after that a second. And upon the second thunder-clap, which was exceeding terrible, I saw a great body of light, like the light of the Sun, and red as fire, in the forme of a drum (as it were) whereupon with exceeding trembling and amazement on the flesh, and with joy unspeakable in thespirit, I clapt my hands, and cryed out, Amen, Hallelujah,Hallelujah, Amen. And so lay trembling, sweating, and smoaking(for the space of halfe an hour) at length with a loud voyce (Iinwardly) cryed out, Lord, what wilt thou do with me; my most excellent majesty and eternal glory (in me) answered & sayd,Fear Not, I will take thee up into mine everlasting Kingdom. But thou shalt (first) drink a bitter cup, a bitter cup, a bittercup; whereupon (being filled with exceeding amazement) I was throwne into the belly of hell (and take what you can of it inthese expressions, though the matter is beyond expression) I was among all the Devils in hell, even in their most hideous hew.”

Those thunder claps – you won’t hear them in any American church. They sound, instead, in Finnegan’s Wake.  Which is a bittercup commentary on what we have all become, my deare ones, in this age of Late Looting.

 

The deathmarch of dweebs

 

Trump’s admiring remark about Arnie Palmer’s dick sent me back to something I wrote in the olden days of Bush. Remember, the Vulcans, Bush the cowboy, all that shit. Here’s what I wrote

One of the things that struck me as remarkable about the transcripts released by Ken Starr back in the impeachment days – the way in which Monica Lewinsky’s telephone conversations with Linda Tripp often included, as a helpful stage direction, the sigh. The whole bizarreness of the Starr crusade was summed up for me in the sighs of Monica. Sighs were never included, that I could see, in the Watergate transcripts. Sighs weren’t part of the Iran-Contra controversy. But sighs, for a person like Starr, go with women. Women sigh. Women don’t like sex. Women are forced to have sex when they have sex – unless of course they are really, really in love. And so on.

But that gendered subtext was never, ever seized in the press – which is an instrument of patriarchy with some concessions around the edges. The sexual subtext of what comes out of D.C. in reporting for the last six years has been quite comic, and quite unremarked. I wrote something a few weeks ago  about Jon Anderson’s New Yorker profile of the American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad . There was a lie in that piece that struck me, since I don’t think it is the usual kind of lying that is pointed to when we criticize the press. Anderson describes Khalilzad as having the lope of a basketball player – or ex basketball player. Now, that is obviously not true. From his description, Khalilzad never played basketball, particularly – and he is described as wearing expensive suits and presumably expensive shoes, and his ecological niche involves much footing over hard marble flooring down many a corridor. And he is in his mid fifties. There is no way he has that lope.

But the lie was part of the lie that the press is partly there to produce and preserve. As we all know, powerful men evoke powerful homoerotic feelings from the people who cover them. The male D.C. reporters are continually trying to get us to feel how powerful the men they are reporting on actually are. Now, I am  a sex friendly guy – I’m as happy as the next fella with homoeroticism. But as is well known, homoeroticism in a homophobic atmosphere generally turns ugly.

In the U.S., the upper class, Ivy league educated male has one ideal form in which to sublimate his homoeroticism: fandom. Fans are, as is well known, always on the sexual edge with regard to the heroes they admire, those tough men with the taut pecs. There is a problem, however, with powerful execs, politicians, etc. They aren’t tough at all. How could they be? They might exercise, but generally they don’t’ have time for the sportif. So the lie that the presscorps sets itself is to convey their own infatuation. Thus, the overwhelming reference to sports when one reads profiles of CEOS. One always feels that with a little more prodding we’d get a description of the big fat cocks they possess – they must possess. God forbid that some CEO isn’t ballsy. Doesn’t have a full foot.

The hilarious thing about the lie with the Bush administration is that here, we have a man who we all know was sportif in a certain way. He was a cheerleader. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, if Hillary Clinton had been a cheerleader, there would be a mention of it almost every week. But with GWB, cheerleader is a hole. Nobody credits him with being a good cheerleader, or mentions the word. No, he is bold. He is a cowboy. He is sooooo fit. He is Mr. Mission Accomplished.

The homoerotic subtext controls the way in which our leaders will be leaders. They will be bold. Even though anybody watching Bush knows that he is spastic, not bold, that is something that has to be suppressed, like cheerleading. Sometimes this is riotously funny. Slate’ Political correspondent, at the moment, is a stooge named John Dickerson. His takedown of Fred Barnes' new bio of Bush -- his ‘love letter” to the President -- is a little scene of homoerotic transformations and rivalries. Dickerson is disturbed that Barnes gushes too much over this manly, this bold, this commanding figure. Dickerson begins by defending the professional sycophants, the White house press corps, from the charge that they have been unfair to the President.

“The White House press corps has flaws: a herd mentality, a fixation on who's ahead politically, and difficulty engaging deeply with policy issues. I know, I was one of them. But Barnes has his boot on the scale, inflating the foolishness of the press to make Bush look better. Perhaps with so many books offering cartoon images of Bush as dumb and evil, the shelves need to be balanced out by one that errs in the opposite direction. But Rebel-in-Chief is such a love note that it fails to counteract the negative myths.”

The love note fails! This is heartbreaking for a guy like Dickerson. Maybe his own love notes will be more successful.

I should note that the homoerotic impulse functions in the lefty discourse too, where much time is spent making up images of fellatio and anal sex as signs of submission -- the press being on its knees, or in some indelicate way bending over, etc., etc. Again, this is also a lie – the lie being that one has overcome our homophobic culture while borrowing homophobic tropes. It is what makes comments so often unpleasant from both sides, as if the struggle, the deeper struggle, were about what male body was the most desirable.”

So – the watermark of the presidential penis that the media does its best to convey without making it clear it is conveying it is just put out there by Trump. Trump’s jestering – his senile gibberish – does hook clearly into the system of our politics. Which is the system, as well, of how our politics are “reported on.” Patriarchy at this point in the millenium is a deathmarch of dweebs, which is throwing us all in the ditch. So utterly appalling.