What is human life worth? William James and Bossuet

Il a eu le paradoxe pour parrain, et le poesie pour marraine – Delvau on Gerard Nerval

In the third lecture of William James’ Pragmatism (1907), James gives us his sense of the pragmatic response to the great metaphysical question: is there only matter, or is there spirit too? A question which implies: is there a God?  And if there is not, does this have a bearing on the meaning of life in a world that is an ephemeral collection of molecules, which will be utterly swept away as all solar systems are ultimately swept away?

James takes Herbert Spencer as his defender of materialism – although, save for the Darwinism, the position Spencer defends could as well have been taken from Helvetius. Spencer sees no problem in substituting matter for God, and James concedes that Spencer is right not to think of matter as somehow “dirty” (James doesn’t explore, as 20^th century anthropologists will, dirtiness itself as a cultural construct, the abject pole in the sacred economy). At this point in the lecture, James paints an interesting counter-example to matter’s “dirtiness”:

Matter is indeed infinitely and incredibly refined. To any one who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact of matter could have taken for a time that precious form ought to make matter sacred ever after. It makes no difference what the principle of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate cooperates, lends itself to all life’s purposes.”

The intrusion here of the dead child or parent, this semi-explicit flashback, lends to James’s essay, at this point, a certain hortatory tone that derives from the sermon. It is not for nothing that James’s father was a religious figure, the leading American Swedenborgian. Metaphysics, for James I think, comes out of the funeral – out of death.

Which is my justification to compare what James is doing to a funeral sermon – an oraison funébre – by  Bossuet, the 17^th century French Bishop. England’s Anglican preachers, Donne, John Taylor, etc., were perhaps the greatest English artists of the sermon. In France, Bossuet holds that title. I’ve been reading his famous funeral sermon for Madame – Henriette d’Angleterre, the sister of Charles II of England and the (unfortunate) wife of Monsieur, Louis XIV’s brother . Monsieur was not into the female sex – at least sexually, although he loved dressing up as a woman. Unfortunately for him, he had to be married and his wife had to produce children, hence the incredibly unhappy marriage of Henriette. Not that she was incredibly unhappy – much of the time, she was entertaining lovers too, which probably included Louis XIV. Her problem with her husband came about as much from the fact that she was infinitely intellectually superior to him, and everybody knew it. Henriette was the friend and patron of Corneille, Moliere and Racine, all of whom dedicated work to her. She was, as well, Bossuet’s friend – he was her confessor. Her sudden death has given rise to speculation that she was poisoned, and the case has never been cleared. Monsieur’s second wife was told by a servant a story about one of the friends of Monsieur’s banished lover, the Duc de Lorraine, that seems to have been told to Saint Simon too, who records it in his Memoires. The story could easily be an Edgar Allen Poe story, replete with poisoned cups, substituted drinks, etc., etc.

Bossuet tells us in the sermon that her death, which was so sudden, left him unprepared to prepare her funeral sermon. So opening the Scriptures he came by chance to Ecclesiastes, which offered him the texts that he uses to structure the sermon. Already, then, the listener is clued in to accident as not only possible in the great wide world, striking down princesses, but also as a formal element in the sermon itself. Quite a neat trick.

Accident led to Ecclesiastes, and Ecclesiastes leads Bossuet to contemplate vanity. To an extent that is unparalleled in the Bible, the writer of Ecclesiastes seems prepared to write off the creation as an accident – defining our delusive satisfactions in that  accident as vanity.

There has long been a Christian thematic about the vanity of the world, and Bossuet follows it up to a point, where he asks if this is all the story. If man himself is a vanity, did God send his only child to die “for a shadow”?

This moment, this question, begins a re-ascent of the other side of the Christian scold, the discourse of amour de soi. It is a re-ascent that is not only rhetorical, but that points to the desire for “balance” that was not only inscribed in the classical age’s aesthetic, but as well in its metaphysics. Balance is not merely a formal preference, but a sort of end-state towards which rationality pushes the soul.  At the point of balance, the forces arrayed against that the forces arrayed for can be transcended. Balance is the grace of reason.

Balance is, as well, the grace of economics in the classical age. Fortuna plays a zero-sum game. When God exchanges his life for “man”, man must be as valuable as God’s life. Man’s redemption is, then, man’s value. And yet underneath this placid understanding of the ransom of souls is another thought – what if man is not worth God’s death? Or what if our reckoning here is absurd, an exchange of the infinite for the finite, of all for zero, of light for shade?

That fierce baroque irrationality breaks through in Pascal, but not in Bossuet. And even Pascal retreats to a less absurd articulation of the terms – Pascal’s wager is a way out of the question.

Bossuet himself considers the terms as double: on the one hand, the exchange of the infinite for the finite, in the world’s terms, is absurd – instead of revealing the value of the finite, it reveals its insignificance. Measured against God, however, man’s acts become suddenly important.

“Oh God, says the prophet king, you have made my day measurable, and my substance is nothing before you.” It is so, Christians: everything that is measured finishes; and everything that is born to finish never completely escapes nothingness, into which it is soon replunged. If our being, if our substance, is nothing, what about everything we build on it? No edifice is more solid than its foundation, nor is the accident attached to being more real than being itself.”

Bossuet’s movement pre-figures Hegel’s 19^th century notion of the two infinities, one of which is simple endlessness, and one of which is the Idea, the Spirit. The Spirit is the heir of this escape from the universal dissolvent of the bad infinity that is, ultimately, worth nothing more than a program that gives you an algorithm for always adding +1.  A program that is useless.

To return to James: in his pragmatic metaphysics, there is a variation of Bossuet’s dialectic, which goes to an interesting place.

James contrasts two time frames – or, really, two frames of reference which seem to be distinguished temporally.

One is that frame in which the entire contents of the world are irrevocably given – which is how James defines the “past”: “to end at that very moment, and to have no future, and then let a theist and a materialist apply rival explanations to its history.”

Immediately one senses that we are in trouble with this thought experiment when we see it commences with a “then”. Thought experiments are much more difficult to do than is thought of, for the most part, in philosophy. Here in James’ scenario, we encounter a scenario that seems to be larger than the philosopher’s attempt to understand or imagine it. If indeed the world is vanished in some absolute sense, the one thing that we won’t have is a materialist or a theist then applying their analysis to it. This is, in a sense, an example of Hegel’s bad infinity – the confusion of a finite endlessness and the infinite interiorization of the Spirit – which is something like what Christians like Bossuet would call eternity. In James’ scenario, the materialist and the theist exist only in a condition of impossibility. Any recollection, analysis, theory, expression, pulse beat – violates the conditions of their existential credentialing. It is important to remark on the invalidity of the thought experiment – that is, to remark on the fact that if a philosopher can imagine a thing, it doesn’t mean that he or she can imagine it well – before remarking on the fact that for James, this thought experiment is meant to lead us to what we might call the Ecclesiastes doctrine: all is vanity. All distinction between the theist and the materialist, for James, vanishes into uselessness.

Such is the prelude to his second scenario, which presses on the idea of the future:

“… in every genuine metaphysical debate some practical issue, however conjectural and remote, is involved. To realize this, revert with me to our question and place yourself, this time, in the world we live in, in the worth that has a future, that is yet uncompleted while we speak.”

Here, again, James has an uncertain grasp of the temporal mode. For the first scenario too has a future – unless of course time itself is abolished. Unconsciously, James is supposing a wholly subjective cast to the future – the future is only a human perception of time. It is upon this foundation – a shaky one, from Bossuet’s viewpoint – that he moves to a very American moment of “positive thinking”.

While the materialist has nothing to say about the nihilism of the endpoint, the theist, from James’s point of view, does. “… tragedy is only provisional  and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things… Here, then, is the different emotional and practical appeals, in these adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope and expectation, and all the delicate consequences which the differences entail lie the real meanings of materialism and spiritualism.”

This, then, becomes James’s argument about the truth of the matter:

“Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.” 

For a long period of time after World War One – perhaps all the way up to the 21^st century – this kind of thing was damning to the modernist. Hemingway mocks this kind of American optimism in one of the last lines in The Sun Also Rises:  “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” For the modernist, better the nihilism of the final end, as imperfectly envisioned by James, then the flatness of “positive thinking”. In American culture, though, positive thought has had a strong presence as a sort of defense of capitalism and the American order. From James to Dale Carnegie we can draw a line. Oddly, at the turn of the twentieth century there was a strong rush on the citadels of pessimism. Happiness therapy engages in just this kind of pragmatist sleight of hand. At the same time that Happiness therapy started to gain a foothold in academia, the positive thought meme in the general culture at large started to deflate. We have had more than enough evidence, over the last twenty years, of a despair culture – a culture of rising suicide and drug overdose rates. Meanwhile, the vision of the world’s end has become more real, and it doesn’t involve the sun exploding as much as it involves the climate shifting due to our very human success in making this world ours – even to the egotistical extent of calling this the Anthropocene.

Bossuet, in this sense, is less of a monument now, and more of a conversation partner, while James, in this instance, is less of a conversation partner and more of a monument.  Is there any importance to human life if it isn’t validated by some enormous, trans-human sacrifice? Are these our choices?

Rivers

The Heraclitians claim

that you don’t step into the same river twice

while all rivers are the same

in the Platonist’s eyes

Let us take a case:

the river of my skin

- a time lapse camera would show

From the body within

the belly of my mother

to the belly of my tomb

the skin flowing like a river

in which I swim.

The flakes, hairs, pores, moles, scratches

acne, scars, rashes, tags

are carried along in snatches

- they appear, they flow, they lag

and it all gathers in wrinkles in the end.

- I said swim? We are drowning in this river

and at every elbow bend

the river is drowning in us.

Being and becoming, the luck of the drowned

by and  by we’ll moulder in the cold, cold ground.

- Karen Chamisso

Making the Dems competitive

I am thinking about what will make the Dems more competitive with orange turd, and in the short term, it is obvious to me: better glasses. Both Warren and Sanders are still stylin the 70s,, 80s look. Come on! I think the presidency is worth splurging a little Both of them would look much chic-er Warren might want to look at the St. Laurent cat's eye style, here: 

Warren would totally rock with this look. I remember the green party candidate who ran for the presidency in france, years ago: Eva Joly. Even those who didn't vote for her had to give her the contest on the glasses: outrageous green and red frames that said: i'm on the next level. Well, that is maybe not the message that Warren wants to send. But the St. Laurent's scream, to me: I'm confident not only that I'm going to turn that Trump into a dump, but that I might literally turn him into a toad by doing a bewitched blink.

Sanders, on the other hand, needs I think something heavier. In my opinion, he could really thrill the masses in these Tom Fords. The glasses he has right now, too often he is obviously looking over the lenses. This is not good! It gives him some tad frantic energy, which is fine when you aren't the frontrunner, but now? I'm not talking the Scorcese "these glasses have invaded my face and now I have to pay them a vig" type glasses. But something heavier and slicker, something that anchors the look and says, I want Medicare for all, and I am cruisin' in these ultra frames, my companeros - for the people, united behind really groovy frames, will never be defeated.

On ACRONYM and the aristocracy of the mediocre

"And we have a situation where as a party if we are the good guys we have to be the good guys — not engaging in this,” Ganapathy told me. “There’s a reason why so many Americans think politics is an elitist plot to make a handful of people wealthier, and it’s kind of true." - see the outline article on ACRONYM and SHADOW - and weep

Ideology is excreted from practice. The practice in the American political establishment, since at least the seventies, is to professionalize it - to make it a source of juicy contracts and positions, with the credentialing done by people who have made those juicy contracts - and not necessarily won an election.

One fights for candidates. Is Sanders better than Warren? Is Biden acceptable? But in the political world, these are just actors in the larger movie, which is not about making the world or the country a better place, but about notches in the CV, leading to tv appearances and quotes in the newspapers, which leads to ever more money. It is a very white world - and a very close knit, insider dealing kind of world. These are people who, themselves, never have fought a campaign as anything so vulgar as a candidate. Rather, they develop "synergies" with candidates, or boast in the press that they are developing state of the art digital platforms to get a progressive - or conservative - message out, which means they have hit the hot spot: "doing well by doing good", as the rich donor class likes to say. Even though they are doing well by undermining good.

Ideology is excreted from practice, The political system in the US, in the 70s, was pathetically easy to buy. And in the next forty years, it was bought at knock down prices and turned a huge profit - with taxes sinking on Capital, the social insurance structure open for scamming healthcare services while being enervated from within, the huge expenditures for the military, and last and least, the campaign industry, where the point is to go to rich donors and canalize a living for yourself, your family and associates while making your services "indispensible" to politicians - who benefit by becoming lobbyists after their defeat or resignation, and whose family members get into the honey from the first. Its an adhoc aristocracy of the mediocre.

The GOP was always an adhoc aristocracy of the mediocre, propped up by the petrochemical industry. The Dems needed their own tycoons to party with, after they had sucked the unions dry. And with finance and tech, they found them.

So it goes on the fall down down down the dark ladder. Americans enter this century as, for the most part, bankrupt pions, fronted by billionaire monsters and celebrity monsters.

I write this as a goof, a mark. I have long thought that somebody like Trump, with his insanely low numbers, would be impossible not to beat. Watching the Dems get fucked up by the D.C. poltical management industry that is among the stupidest group of peeps ever to get an ivy league education and a head start from a trust fund (I omit, here, the Supreme Court - of course, they always win the palm for sheer stupidity), I have the sadness that Charley Brown must feel every time Lucy pulls away the football.

On Free Lunches

I want to cull this from  page 2 of Greg Mankiw’s popular Essentials of Economics – used by hundreds of Econ 101 classes, tucked under the arms of thousands of students, who paid a hefty price for it:

You may have heard the old saying, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”. Grammar aside, there is much truth to this adage. To get something we like, we usually have to give up something else that we also like.

I like to think of them, those thousands of scions of upper class households, products all of them of years of free lunches, nodding to this crackerbarrel truism. One of the great principles of education is to blind yourself to the self-evident. It is part of one’s self-fashioning, and it is especially useful as these scions go on to get positions in the upper ranks of management, investment, etc., and can look about them and say: I earned this.

By their truisms you shall catch them – this is the rhetorical ratcatcher’s faith. My faith, really. The crack in the neo-classical economics façade – the underpinning of that big neo-other, Neoliberalism – appears here.  If one looks deeply enough, many of the ideological decisions that go into the neoclassical model congregate around the idea that there is no free lunch – or as Mankiw translates it, there are almost always trade-offs.

The first and most important of those decisions is that the local difference between the person who pays for and offers the lunch and the person who eats it, free, is of no concern to economics. Thus, all sociology is given the bum’s rush at this banquet. The economist’s truth stops at the fact that if there is a free lunch, someone is paying for it, and that in the end, we are all someone. And it is true that if x is paying for y’s lunch, if we just move a level upward we can treat them as variables, so that y paying for x’s lunch is the same thing. But what if that move up the level is missing an essential fact – which is that there is always somebody paying for the lunch, and somebody eating it free? And what if there is a whole class of x’s who offer a whole class of y’s free lunch?

Read the rest at Willetts!

In a bar on the rue quincampoix

In a bar on the rue quincampoix

by Karen Chamisso

Cressida, I thought of you

wasting away in Margaritaville

as the hour came on to that gray and blue

moment -click - when it is time for a girl to chill.

Do foxes not have holes? I at least have one

on Rue Quincampoix, where I’m a known quality

where I’ve come to have my fun

where I’ve drunk my quantity.

In the glint of the lounge light there

I set up with a gin and tonic

a notebook opened on the sputtering flair

of a word – the chatter here is trans-Atlantic

the gals are Cally, the guy is German

and the French sociopetally clustered in the corner

eye contact is made by a man determined

to ask me what I’m writing – if he could have the honor

-well he can’t – I’m sorry – as you know

Cress, I too dive into the wreck

- and so many wrecks from long ago

- and so many from last week

- playing phrase and fable solitaire

to  find and wind my lash fine thread

through dead men’s eyes and dead men’s stares

the old old slag, the old old dread

- in particular, tonight: tart. A sweet, a pie

all the endless jar between honey and vinegar

I go to the OED, cause it don’t lie

I go to the Online, for the war

“Everyone wants a piece of the attention pie”

first came the sweet then came the bitter.

Adored the adored, but where incense upward flies

better be careful of the hitter

beneath the embrace. Cherchez la femme fatale

because she materializes suddenly, Cress, you with the bored

drawl,  cig in hand, like Lauren Bacall

that tall drink look - “will you walk in my lord”

and in a rush I see a visionary Gita

from Barbara Stanwyck to Gloria Graham

from Cressida to Nana, from Lana to Rita

from Hollywood Blv. to Iliam

Aaa…nd – and here the poem was interrupted. Just as I was about to put my migraine geometry to work, dot by dot, mapping out a state of exception that has lasted lo these patriarchal millenia, just as the postman always rings twice was going to disturb Cressida and Diomedes in their tent in my scratchin referorama, my friend Marc and his boyfriend (Luc?)  come barreling in the door, bringin in a night that will end I can already see at Cox,  heatseek my table and Marc lifts me up just as “Bonny and Clyde” comes on the P.A. and we dance a two step, and then start singing and the Frenchies join in in freaking out the American girls who haven’t yet experienced the French joy in singing along that sometimes just breaks out, a distant echo of Ça ira secularized, lyed and dyed and finding its objects in the popular song – of long ago.

Marc says, what is the poem about tonight?

“Vous avez lu l'histoire de Jesse James
Comment il vécut, comment il est mort”

party pic

The Party Pic
Karen Chamisso

It is just human nature to stand in a party pic
and gargoyle to the unknowns outside this magic circle
in your Alex McQueen threads while
your blush fails and the flash bounces
                                               off of your forehead.

His hands are comfortably round your waist
this host, not so cute as an octopus,
but coming on all tentacles and tan unattached
once the starter wife is ejected from the copilot seat.

It is just human nature for him
to stand in the middle and tycoon
a picaro of the scandal mags and loose with money
an advisor of sorts: a knower of politicians in their winter.

Your beaming smile on his left and hers on the right
Do you wonder about the captions for this night?

I know already that if I’m in this group of teeth
I will be retouched
since I am all blurs in the flash aftermath
my pic presence running for the exit.

Who's the racist? The tie between economics and racism

From Willettsmag

What is the tie between racism and economics? I watched the NYT video of Sanders explaining his take on it – that economic misery creates the need for an enemy other to explain it. This explanation is in concert with the general American mainstream idea that racism is concentrated in the most ignorant and poorest. Yet, at first glance, one would think that if the economic system is racist, then the people who benefit from it most would be the most racist.

This takes “racism” out of a certain imprisonment in the notion of sentiment, and makes it a socially constructed intersubjective bundle of characteristics. I think that is a better place for beginning this discussion.

With this beginning, we can ask again about economics and racism, with the corollary that the way in which the onus of the racism discussion singles out certain classes as racist and ignores others is, itself, part of the structural racism we are talking about.

In the U.S., recently, the question has been: what is wrong with those white people making below 50 thou per year and voting for Trump? And the answer is that they are voting for white solidarity. Yet here’s a puzzle: how about those same voters voting for Obama in 2012? And how about Romney’s overwhelmingly white voting constituency? In fact, Romney seemed to have cleaned up with the over 50,000 per year white voter. And yet, who spoke, then, about the upper class white sense of entitlement?

I am not saying that the Romney voter was per se racist. I am saying that the correlation between voter and candidate doesn’t give us an absolute x ray of racism in America. It does give us a starting point for talking about white supremacy as it insinuates itself into the symbols of well-being.

Well-being is a word from economics and sociology. I like to think here of an exchange between Nassau, an English liberal economist in 19^th century England, and Tocqueville. Tocqueville wrote, in Democracy in America, that in England, “the good of the poor ended up being sacrificed to that of the rich.” Nassau made the classic move that we see economists regularly make today: he disputed the idea that the salaries of the working class weren’t rising.

Tocqueville wrote back:

You attack me on this point, of which you are certainly a very competent judge. However, you will permit me to disagree with your opinion. Firstly, it seems to me that you give to the phrase “good of the poor” a very restrained interpretation that I hadn’t given it: you translate it by the word wealth which applies particularly to riches. I had wanted to speak, myself, of all the things which could concur in the well being of life – consideration, political rights, the ease of obtaining justice, the enjoyments of the mind and the thousand other things that contribute indirectly to happiness. I think, lacking a contrary proof, that in England the rich have little by little attracted to themselves almost all the advantages that the social state furnishes to men. In taking the question in your narrow way, and in admitting that the poor man gains a momentarily greater profit in cultivating the land of another’s than of his own, do you think there are no other political, moral, intellectual profits attached to the possession of land, and which compensate beyond, and principally in a permanent manner, the disadvantage that you signal?

Tocqueville here asserts the broader sociological claim. It isn’t the claim that Marx might make in exactly this way, but in fact, Marx began his career with a series of newspaper stories about the abolition of certain common forest rights that kept commoners from gleaning in forests – and he recognized, in that seemingly small moment, a central truth – that property is not derived from law, but from forces that shape the law. Property, then, can’t be the sole interest of the working class – because it is an illusory object, one shaped by Capital itself. And in this sense, one could reconcile the left interpretation of Marx with Tocqueville’s, to me, wonderful sense that interest is defined by “all the things that concur in well being”.

In the American system, the white settler self-image was long based on being superior to other races – blacks and indigenous Americans, and later, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. That sense of whiteness was bound up, then, with what Tocqueville calls “consideration”. It was an intricate bind, and persevered after the 1870s, when it should have changed.  It changed enough to eventually assimilate to the vast influx of immigrants in the late 19^th century. But it wasn’t until the Civil Rights era, of course, that the basis of the racist system was attacked.

The upper class in America, which was and is overwhelmingly white. To get a grasp of how the white upper and middle class made its money in a racist system, and how people of color didn’t, there’s a nice article by CityLab here. 

In the Civil Rights era and afterwards, the white upper class did develop its own version of anti-racism. They called it “color blindness.” I won’t go into the critique of color blindness here. I will simply point out that, in the wealthy world, which is full of curated diversity and overwhelming whiteness, color blindness  is the way in which the wealthy have reconciled having such an enlarged measure of well being – so many buckos! – with living in a system that “privileges” them, as they will agree. Privilege is a much pleasanter word than racism, or white supremacy. Profiting off white supremacy seems… ugly. Something we can safely let white blue collar workers do.

This is not to let the peckerwood element off the racist hook. I grew up in working/middle class white Georgia, outside of Atlanta, and I saw and heard enough there to know that Sanders is underestimating how much racism there is among working class whites. At the same time, I’ve seen their kids go to schools that are unimaginable for the upper class set, schools that are sixty percent black, for instance. I’ve seen and heard those kids, and I know that their social lives are full of uncurated diversity.

The direction of the question about economics and racism is, then, wrong. We should be asking about how the colorblind, liberal ethos has substituted for the reality of profiting from the racist economic system. And we should ask about how white supremacy still exists as a major factor in white working class life – and floats especially free for those who have no college education and whose incomes range between  50 thou to 200 thou. This is where Trump and Romney and all the GOP make their votes.  To make anti-racism a factor among those that concur to create well-being is, it seems to me, not a liberal, but a radical goal. 

Don't watch the news

Everybody's got a job to lose

I never watch TV news. We don't have a tv, for one thing, but I don't stream tv news either.

It may be that not watching tv news gives one a different take on politics, beyond ideology. I have my take cause I have certain lefty ideas. But I also have my take because my filter for the news is delayed, and in print.

My impression from everything I have read about the news media is this: that it is dominated by rich white men. They are the decision makers, they edit and report the news, and the picture they make pretty much reflects the world of rich white men. It is also the case that the demographic that goes most strongly for Republicans consists of rich white men.

Perhaps this explains a curious phenomenon among my liberal friends: an exaggerated sense of Trump's political popularity. I ran into this a lot at Christmas dinner this year. Although the last two years have been the worst for the GOP since 2006, the persistant belief is Trump ueber alles.

Obama, it must be said, was terrible for Democrats, and good for himself - thus, during his administration, the Dems lost something like a thousand seats on the state and national level. Trump has had a similar effect on the GOP. When the GOP can't even win the governorships of KY and LA, you know Trump's pull is limited. However, in contrast with Obama, who won quite handily in 2008, Trump won the electoral college by the merest hair in 2016. In the three key states, MI, PA AND WI, he won over HRC by something like 120,000 votes. What that means is that he starts out from an extraordinarily weak position. Still, to credit the big Orange idiot, he also spent half of what HRC spent on the election.

He definitely will outspend the Dems this time. But the configuration is really against him. He hasn't expanded his base. Not an iota. Those who voted for him last time will vote for him this time. If the Dems pursue the illusion they are going to lure Trump voters back, they are going to be in trouble.

But the Dem base is larger. And the potential for getting votes for those who stayed home in 2016 is enormous. Why, then, is this confidence not shared among the Dem elite and my liberal friends?

Frankly, most of my liberal friends are white. And many of them do watch the tv news. Their filter for what is happening is through Trump's most ardent demographic. More, I feel like the division between working class culture and upper middle class culture, which has become enormous under neoliberalism, works to make it the case that few upper class liberals that I know really know any working class people, white or black.

Trump is in it for the excitement. Thus, he allowed Pompeo to put him in an incredibly stupid position. But he also has a very injured sense of being pushed - which is why he got rid of Bolton. I have no idea what will come next, but I am still betting against a war with Iran and that Trump will run within his bubble. I argued against the war with Iran business in 2007, and I still think the argument holds today. Also, I don't think Trump wants to borrow the 400 billion dollars he would need to do this. He wants to run on a great economy.

And racism and misogyny, of course.

In any case, remember: old white guys are grossly overrepresented in the media machine that "reports" on the U.S. Never let that fact fade from your watching life. My two cents for the day.

two chamisso poems

Lucy's the boss

She loomed over my childhood
like a divorcee's vocation:
Lucy says put your hands on your head!

Philistine muse, crabby femme fatale
your schopenhauerian trick with the football
a mean koan.

Later she might have produced a line like:
I am big.
It is the pictures that got small.

Her choric darkness
Snoopy's anarchic daybreak
locked in eternal struggle.

I wrestle with Butler
under the table.
Dog germs! dog germs!

My barbies wait in a box
car crash odalisques
for her summons.

Lucy's the boss! Lucy's the boss!
so when did I stop wearing
my Peanut's gang pyjamas?

Moose agonistes

André Breton and Bullwinkle
set sail on a pea-green sea.
It was all a stunt, set up by a committee
to attract attention to a worthy cause.
Bullwinkle was uncertain. He was into the mob for a certain sum
which is why he took the gig. Usually, he had
a more certain sense of the perimeters,
what was expected of him. The bit with the rabbit
and the hat. The bit with the squirrel.
He and the squirrel hadn’t spoken for years –
it was a legendary quarrel. Supposedly, the squirrel once
even bit Bullwinkle, hard. Credits, money, usual
star vanity bullshit.
Bullwinkle put a poster up
in his dressing room: Beware of rodents!
it said, an X over a squirrel-like silhouette.

Breton, well afterwards everyone said
he’d misread the invitation.
Bullwinkle? he thought it said Bulgakov
an old Troskyist companero from Mexico City.
When the storm struck, the boat in which the camera crew
had set up was parted from
the Bullwinkle boat. The last anybody saw it
was through a fog, a moose silhouette surmounted
by a surrealist, the latter waving his arms.
Rocky, at the memorial service, broke down:
He was my best friend, he wailed.
Was it of the moose he spoke?
- Karen Chamisso

letter to mary shelley

Letter to Mary Shelley

Letters to the dead, or their conversations

No longer thrive among the literati.

We’ve all grown I-bound here, and no other demonstration

Is wanted, but only a sort of lyric potpourri

- which captures our moods and days

And is put quite nicely in quaint sachets.

I’m not complaining – I turn out my quire

And sometime make a little genius patter

Illuminating the soft and hard wires

That make up my neural personal matter

According to all the best popsci bestsellers

Apparently we’re just haunts in genetic cellars.

You were born to the royal anti-royal blood

the little red riding hoods of the revolution

but grew up, Gretel-like, to brood

on the wolf that might solve your family situation.

Then he came, dressed in robes of poesie

- which is how you eloped with the romantic agony.

I should tell you, Mary, we no longer brook

long letters written with that manual drolery

- letters as long as the chapters in your  book

in the tradition of epistolary -

rather we jerk out an email or fifty

under the burden of being short and nifty.

But what is a poet if not an anachronism?

a creature lost among  capitalist feeders

and accused of practicing onanism,

irrelevant,  being at best a loss leader

a prestige item with a hushed voice

on NPR, bloodless and choice. 

In other words, a downer. In other words, a monster.

so you see how much it’s in my line

to stir your shade, to disinter

you from the vaults of the gothic sublime

as you predominate in the culture

that has turned away from the bigwigs of literature.

You’ve had a husband. I’ve had too.

Why do we burn ourselves in the futile quest

to find a mate who is not askew

and will live and love beyond time’s test?

Yours,  his heart consumed in a barbecue

and mine, who I would have liked to have done the same to.

But you are thinking, you woke me up for this?

Couldn’t you bitch to some living friend?

I have other fans, who follow their bliss

by dreaming up quasi-pornographic ends

for me and my creature, a jumble anatomy

all cooked up for fan-fic fuckery.

I dig your objection, or my projection

(shades and shadows, death and the double)

girl – aren’t we the girls who’ve made

our project to cause a lot of trouble

to nitpickers, naggers, and no-nothing butts

who tend to write letters addressed: stupid sluts?

But I have a reason – here we come

Into, technically, the finis of this discourse

this insinuato – for unlike some

I’m keen on rhetorical resource

You, who learned the ancient Latin and Greek

will recognize of what I speak -

Okay, enough, incipit the story:

A friend who is always discovering the bizarre-est

Paris, Fragonard’s ecorchés,

or  sketches by some necrophile symbolist

invited me to the Hôpital St. Louis

where plaster casts from the nineteenth century

are exhibited to the select who ask

for tickets, a dwindling group it seems.

Physicians in training once had the task

of noting horrors that appear as though in dreams

of the worst that can happen to the human skin:

the 19^th century payment for each sin.

The crowding, hovels, debauchery and then some:

Hence the lesion-ridden penis, tumerous nose

adenomas, sarcomas, in a waxy gum

painted then and signed – it’s art I suppose

from which I’m sure that you can learn a bunch

by peering closely – just ask Edvard Munch.

The painter visited here, with some acquaintance

In the 1890s, when  nihilism was the rage

and then painted The Inheritance

where a syphilitic child lies like an open page

on his mother’s lap, diseased to the bone

- it obviously fed Munch’s  misogynistic jones.

The modern Prometheus – we never got it right

did we? In each vitrine a tragedy

 beauty and labeled deformity fight

out the issue of  transcendent agony -

limits imposed by the messes we are

and get into, on this tiny star.

This agony, it isn’t romantic

- these casts do not display the noble body parts

that went into the making of your maniac

a monster science born of the modern arts

mixed with the superstitious  – that was clever!

But these diseases are of another weather.

Frankenstein’s head – via James Whale –

would fit right in here: green skin, thick brow,

forehead scar, the morphine user’s pale

eyelids.

               How

the doctors and the casters would have loved to see

Frankenstein in the clinic for an advisory!

Did you approve from your heavenly perch

The cinematic annexing of your IP?

I’m sure you recognized in the monster’s lurch

through that landscape your demi-divinity

- “so dusk, so obscene and blind”

this untrammeled product of the human mind.  

  

Myself, my head would not fit here

- my fault is beyond this wax, God’s truth -

though I’ve seen diagrams that make clear

that the HOX proteins have failed to induce

the inhibition process that would lend opacity

– undermining the bod’s ombragenous capacity.

Yes, I’m the girl with no shadow. You missed

a subject so subdued to your dyer’s art,

no shadowless girl in some dying fire hissed

its matter into your gothic heart.

A monster me –  and not a faker

writing lit’s greatest monstermaker!

I’ll wrap this up – it has grown quite a size

- just I thought the scene of me here was for you.

I’m sure it has given you a surprise

that out of all of Percy’s crew

You are the studied, the referenced celebrity:

Quite up there with Byron, Keats and Percy.

My friend and I left the hospital grounds

and went for coffee to dissipate

the horrors that made their circus rounds

in my dreams, which I won’t relate:

it’s morning here, time to work, and so

sincerely, Karen Chamisso.

analogy fallacy

The analogies between the UK election and the upcoming American one remind me of the analogies that used to be tossed around in 2003 between occupying Germany after ww2 and occupying Iraq. They are analogies that simply ignore all the salient factors. In the UK, there is a genuine grievance among Labour's working class constituency about how the EU works, which led to Labour having the impossible task of trying to straddle a fundamental issue, becoming a house divided against itself, running against a flamingo fascist who had been in office all of two months by having to run on the flamingo fascist's chief issue.

In the U.S., on the other hand, there is no Brexit. There is an impeachment that lays out Trump's corruption, which - destined to defeat in the Senate - can provide delightful issues to hammer the Republicans indefinitely. There's the fact that, after four years in office, Trump appeals, massively, to Republicans, and not very much or at all to anybody else. Bush was re-elected with a very respectable 35 percent Hispanic vote, according to exit polls. I doubt Trump gets 20. The local elections earlier this year prefigured Labour's massive defeat, while the local elections this year are a clear signal that the electorate is riled up, and will vote against the Dems - as happened in the Governors' races in KY and LA, and in the Democratic triumph in Virginia, among other races.

The elites in the press have long turned into neolib fanboys. Culturally, this means they really, really despise workers. And fear them - this is a meme that goes way back in the history of capitalism. The neolib trick is to try to meld together, say, LBGT issues and NAFTA, or an economic policy favoring the plutocrats in all things with a cultural shift to the "left" allowing trans-"transgressive" artists space in the Style section. It turns favored marginals into entertainment objects which are mulled over by the kinds of people that worry, otherwise, that the Democrats are getting too "radical". In France, the same chemistry is at work - the "deuxieme" gauche, which isn't gauche at all - the type of "lefties" who accepted minister positions with Sarkozy and now fight to please Macron - has broadly the same op-ed beliefs.

Anyway, given the media peeps that try to "run" the narrative in America (all singing the same, Trump is uniquely awful real Americans love him! song), the Johnson analogy will come out heavily over the next media cycle, but I don't think it will make too much of a difference. The disconnect between the political establishment and the grassroots in both parties is deep and getting deeper. My advice: don't believe the hype!

Here's what I wrote in November, 2003

Historical analogies cannot take the place of historical analysis - Leon Trotsky

Jay Bergman, in an fascinating article on Trotsky published two decades ago in the Journal of the History of Ideas, noted Trotsky's borrowing of terms and phrases from the French revolution, and the way the neurotic recapitulation of this reference misshaped and ultimately falsified his analysis of Stalin. It is Bergman's thesis that one of the intellectual causes of Trotsky's failure on the level of practical politics was his habit of casting the contemporary history in terms of the French Revolution. Marx had already mocked the French revolutionists habit of clothing their every act in the language of Republican Rome, as if they could exchange their button up trousers for togas. Bergman has some fun in showing how the scare-word 'Thermidor' was thrown around in the early years of the Russian Revolution. The Mensheviks, in exile, poked at Lenin's NEP as a pernicious backsliding to capitalist norms. For them, here's the proof that Bolshevism was descending into its Thermidor. When Trotsky was still close to the center of power, he dismissed the analogy out of hand. However, once he was clawed out of the center of power, the old black magic of analogy appealed to his mind like that last pipeful to a pothead. Suddenly, the the Thermidor analogy seemed golden. This was a product of the fateful historical experience of the counter-revolution, i.e. Trotsky's being kicked out on his can, in the Soviet Union. One should always ask, when an historical analogy is offered, who benefits -- for usually it aggrandizes the image of its maker in some way. In any case, as out of Thermidor grew the context in which Napoleon emerged, so too, in Russia, out of the counter-revolutionary bureaucratic forces within the Bolshevik party grew the context in which the Soviet Bonaparte, Stalin, emerged.

There are serious problems with treating Stalin as a species of Bonaparte. Stalin himself thought he was a species of Ivan the Terrible. What is most interesting about the analogy, perhaps, is that both Bonaparte and Stalin came from peripheral cultural zones - Corsica and Georgia - to dominate the hegemonic center. So did Hitler, for that matter. But such insights into historical states of affairs afforded by analogies have to shuck off the analogic form in order to become serious. In other words, suggestion has to cede to hypothesis, and hypotheses are brutal.

Bergman is damningly succinct about Trotsky's problem.

"Trotsky, desperately seeking for something from the past that would make sense of the present and promise vindication in the future, failed to recognize (except on rare occasions) that historical analogies, especially inappropriate ones, can often obscure more than they clarify, particularly when the object of one's analysis - in Trotsky's case, Stalinism - proves to be far more rooted in a nation's history and culture than any transnational comparison or analogy might suggest. Indeed, the categories Trotsky borrowed from the French Revolution - Jacobinism, Thermidor and Bonapartism - were too much the product of one historical epoch and national history to be useful in explaining, or even in helping to explain, the evolution of another."

Given the way in which analogies are usually imperfect or completely fallacious guides to the future, their use as a justification for strategic choices is where the metal hits the road and buckles, crashing the plane into the schoolbus. Bremer, in Iraq, famously disbanded the Iraqi military under the premise that it was exactly like the occupation authorities in Germany disbanding the Nazi army. The insanity of this kind of justification will, I am sure, run rampant in the shop offices of the D.C. election consulting firms. We'll see what Democratic candidate suddenly decides to revamp according to the formula that Trump, like Johnson, is the heavy favorite. 

macronery overreaches!

From Willetts: http://willettsmag.net/macron-overreaches/

From a strategic pov, the Macron/Eduard Philippe proposals are curious. After all, the points system seems both so blurry and so technocratic that its real meaning – the gradual abolition of state support for the retirement of most of the working class, and the debauching of public service (conservative governments make th

eir case against government by the slice and dice method – they underfund state services, the services go to crap, then they say, justly, look at how crappy government is) could be achieved, and then they could creep towards the goal of raising the retirement age, and voila. But no: they decided to front and center what Philippe, comically, called “working just a little bit longer”. Hence, the crossing of the “red line” – the raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64 – and the turn of the moderate union, the CFDT – against Macronery. According to Le Monde, the house journal of Macronery, this has “shook up” Macron’s party – all of them, apparently, are pacing around their 800 thousand euro apartments in the 5th and 6th arrondissements going, we thought we had an understanding with the servants!

Historically, when a President of France is going to take a big dump on the population, he sorta disappears in Olympian fog, and his Prime Minister appears as the big target. This happened when Chirac tried this shit with Juppe, and it is happening now with Philippe. I suppose what is in it for the pm is that he gets a shot, latter on, as the candidate for president. But in fact, it is rarely a good position to be in. Juppe never recovered from the disaster of 1995. Philippe is now the face of “work just a little bit longer” – a phrase that will hang around his neck, I think, for the resgt of his career. Now that the Macronists have created an undreamt of unity – among the unions – in opposition to their quest to make France like Thatcher’s UK, what happens next is very uncertain. If the miners union under Thatcher had been able to leverage support from other unions and bring on a true general strike, who knows if Thatcherism would have recovered from the blow? But the Thatcherites were smart, and stuck to a divide and conquer policy.

The Macronists aren’t that smart.

the strike in France

There is no more telling symbol of my lackadaisical – my bobo – leftism than the fact that as I write this, I am enjoying a manifestation in the little sidestreet near us in the Marais. Enjoying it, in fact, from our terrace. Adam, my boy, home from school because of the strike, and I have enjoyably stamped around the terrace swinging our arms and shouting Macron démission! I have a strong suspicion that the little group of militants, who are stopping the traffic on the Charlot, have slipped the cop net. Adam, who is convinced that all manifestation end in the throwing of lachromygene by the police, is expecting this denouement. Myself, I am not,  since driving a crowd up a narrow street is an invitation to disaster, but it is always possible, given the ultra-authoritarian tendencies of Macron’s horrible interior minister (the cop minister), Christophe Castaner, surely the worst cop minister since the dark days of the early seventies, when Raymond Marcellin declared war on the “ultra-left”. The Macronist theme of casseur, which, in my opinion, was a threat meant to bring out casseur and discredit the gilets jaunes, is waved around time and time again as Macron attacks social security in France, radically shifts the tax burden to the working class, and in general views himself as a Thatcherite modernizer.

Talk to any French conservative and they will tell you that France is a conservative country. This counters the image that dances in the heads of American lefties, dreaming of the Commune and such. But there is a great deal of truth in it, enough truth that it works against the liberal fantasies of the Thatcherite modernizer. The French like government subventions, they like vacations, they like social security, national healthcare, and free higher education not because they are leftists, but because they are a national inheritance stemming not just from the Popular Front 30s, but from the dirigiste Gaulliste 60s. Mitterand, that political chameleon, sealed the deal. True, the 35 hour work week is dead – but it was never very alive even after it became law. That desire to “keep your stuff” is working against Macron, whose contempt for the attitude, even as his stuff is the typical Davos crowd stuff, keeps his approval rating pretty low. In fact, I would not at all be surprised if Le Pen gave him a much bigger run for his money in the next election. Le Pen has tapped into the conservatism of the French vis-à-vis the dirigiste state – and we now know that Macron wants a sort of Gaullist foreign policy and a Thatcherite domestic one, the first of which has an appeal or interest only to Le monde’s editorial functionaries, and the second of which is the sure road to unpopularity, already gone down by Juppé in the 90s.

As I am finishing this up, the militants are still chanting in the cold December street. So far, so good.

No time for Political Nostalgia

The GOP won’t vote for impeachment ever, but I’m glad the Democrats have decided to expand it – cause the more infuriatingly corrupt we find Trump to be, the better for the Democrats – obviously. But it is time to see a bit into the future. If, as I expect, the Democrats elect a president next Nov., Trump is not going away. He is going to sit on Fox news and punish any republican who dares cooperate in any way with the Democratic president. I think, frankly, this is what Obama should have done to Trump, but Obama. has never really understood that underneath the racist posturing of the Republican politicians, they really are racist, sexist, and contemptuous of democracy. They are not the friendly debater Republicans he met at Harvard. Anyway, forget cooperation. It will be political warfare. So the Democratic president will have to be in campaign mode for at least the first two years of the presidency – by which I mean leveraging legislative loss into campaign issues to blow up Republican incumbents. Otherwise, it will just be a farce, and Democratic voters won’t turn out in the midterms, etc. In other words, don’t replay Obama’s disastrous bi-partisan longing from 2009-2011.

My instincts about loss and win are, I know, based on my partisanship, my idea of what would be good to do in the face of all the forces with which we will soon have to reckon in earnest – from climate change to the deathgrip of the Davos crowd on our societies. I like to think that if the common people knew their own self interest, they would vote my way. But this is an awful egotistical presumption, and not a good one to go from in judging the mass phenomena of voting. On the other hand, it is not egotistical at all to observe that voters are moving towards a new paradigm everywhere, as the old Cold War/neoliberal order splits up. And in this new paradigm, the left – even the lukewarm liberal – must throw out all the old bipartisan, unifying concepts that allowed for the postwar deal, in effect welding civil rights gains to a politics that mostly surrendered to Capital in its current form, the corporation. In neolib thinking, NAFTA and gay marriage are somehow bound up with each other, so that if you are for one, you are for the other. This arbitrary synthesis has been shattered in the popular consciousness, though not among the upper class, as reflected in the major media.  

There’s a story put out by moderate Democrats of the Joe Biden/Pete Buttigieg type that we have to “talk to each other”, reach across the aisle, etc. This feel-good vibe is based more on nostalgia than anything else. Whether moderate or liberal, the Democratic president, from her first day in office, will face a figure who has long ago trashed the ethos of compromise for the art of the dirty deal. Unless Trump dies, no Republican politician will be able to escape his power in the party, and he will blatantly exercise that power. The old days are dead and gone. The last president who refused to go away was Teddy Roosevelt. He briefly split the system, but the Republican party recovered. This time, I don’t think things will be so simple.

The idea that the Democrats can find a way of governing with the Republicans is as dead as NATO. Only the Republicans get what they want under the current system. Vicious and continuing partisanship is being thrust upon the Democrats, under a leadership that hates it. I think that the Democrats should take a look around them, at, for instance, the Socialist Party in France, and realize something: they can easily dissolve after a presidential victory. Governance has to give precedence to partisanship before governance can actually happen, in the current circs.