notes on le carre

I read a lot of early or mid John Le Carre novels this month. Vacation, what? An interesting experience. At the back of the reader's mind is a little hole, a leak, a sense of the futility of all the excitement of finding the mole, of placing the agent, of playing the game. It had, in the end, nothing whatever to do with the end of the Soviet Union. It did, of course, end the lives of many people, and in a more general sense - as the vast price for actually making anti-communism a state activity -produced millions of casualty, besides distorting beyond repair the fragile hopes of a post WW2 social democratic order. George Smiley, that hidebound reactionary with the cheating wife, is not so much a tragic figure as a puzzling one: why waste his intelligence to become an intelligent agent? There is, in the books, not one shred of the idea that the British government is a democracy - these people could be working for Franco, or Pinochet, save for the clubbish glass of sherry or two.

In a sense, the spy novel handled by a fine writer - Le Carre goes in and out of frequency as a fine writer, but Tinker Tailor Spy still kicks ass - is a comment on meritocracy and its downfalls. The "merit" is a value judgment made by those who are already in positions of power and wealth, or rather transmitted through every media and in every institution by those who have accepted the criteria that legitimates those who already have power and wealth. In other words, you have a very conservative sense of order, which compromises with the egalitarianism of social democracy by making the social churn in that order seem like the healthy result of liberating the individual character, instead of the social condition which fiercely protects upper class prerogative and condemns those who violate a certain narrow protocol.

Of course, this is neither how those novels were produced or received. Le Carre is famously anti-American, or at least looks down on the States, but he has swallowed the most fatuously American idea on earth, that communism is evil - and when he plays the existential card with Smiley, it is all about Smiley getting tired of the "game", i.e. the old weltschmerz of the radical right that the West is too decadent not to succumb to evil communism.

This isn't quite fair - Smiley is also famously cuckolded by his wife Ann, who seems to have made up for the democratic deficit in the book by sleeping with the entire population of the UK. Le Carre is pretty bad with female characters who still have a sex life - he's good with women who have retired and retreated to the bottle, a certain kind of dissolute "aunt" figure, but otherwise this is a world antithetical to women.

I've not yet found an American Le Carre - a spy novelist with a real artist's view of the spyworld. Although Ross Thomas, from the few novels I've read, might be a competitor. Gore Vidal once wrote that E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate figure (and William Buckley's best friend - when Buckley worked in the CIA, he was under Hunt) was a good spy novelist. Maybe I'll look there.

my canon - a poem by Karen Chamisso

My canon

What’s Uh huh Uh Huh

Among all the best that has been said and thought?

In what canon

Is it to be sought?

That’s the way (uh huh uh huh)

ran up my leg and up my spine

as I bumped it out at club Limelight

in 1989.

It led me (I like it) to a sweet fuck

If not to something worse

at least from Mama’s point of view

and perhaps Wordsworth’s.

It was already a funny tune

from the age of Kitsch (uh huh uh huh)

But it melted my honey right enough

with some Georgia Tech bubba.

I’ve forgotten the particulars

(it’s the essences we remember)

- all I know is that my canon

has many different members.

- Karen Chamisso

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m

hitchens and cancel culture (oh god)

David Brooks column has set twitter media peeps talking about, oh God, Hitchens again. And cancel culture. Oh God.

So I'm reprinting my 2004 summary of Hitchens agonistes.  Just cause.

Comrades one and all....

There's a rather genteel exchange between Doug Ireland and Christopher Hitchens in this week's LA Weekly. It begins, unpromisingly enough, with Ireland writing: "My old friend Christopher Hitchens will be in Los Angeles on Saturday, March 15, for a debate at the Wiltern Theater." The phrase "old friend" pops up with distressing frequency whenever anti-war media people start writing about Hitchens. It's the friendship that blinds them, perhaps, to the kind of figure he is. This kind of transplant from the left to the right is a familiar figure in times of violent reaction. In France in the thirties, Drieu de la Rochelle moved from a radical branch of the Communist party to Nazi sympathizer, leaving behind a similar trail of "old friends." In Drieu's case, his politics had an echo on the national level in Doriot. The political fault lines aren't as hyper-charged at present, but the phenomenon Hitchens could prefigure some similar authoritarian politician -- somebody like McCain.

Ireland is 'shocked' to read that Hitchens gave an interview in which he remarks, casually, that he would have voted for Bush. No surprise there. Ireland, though, finds this all too upsetting, and sets down at his computer and mails his old friend some woolgathering emails that are pallid even by the low standards of the baby boomer New Left. Here, for example, is Ireland arguing that Bush, being against condoms, is for AIDS, and thus for "millions" of more deaths than can possibly be contrived by evil old Saddam.

"The effects of denying people access to condoms and science-based sex ed, not to mention the continuing efforts by the U.S. to blackmail countries on access to AIDS drugs and sabotage the WTO agreement at Doha that public-health crises take precedence over patents, means that millions and millions more will become infected and die between now and 2050, the earliest possible date by which - the scientists now tell us - we might reasonably begin to hope for an AIDS cure.These are not just people who've had sex, but their many children. That's more than Saddam Hussein has killed, more than will be killed in the coming war (unless Dubya starts chucking around the nukes he has now authorized). There would be a huge difference on this issue between Bush and the likely (from here) Democratic nominee, Kerry. Just in terms of sheer numbers of dead, Kerry trumps Bush (and Saddam) on that one. Yes, I have been a sharp critic of the Democratic leadership, and will continue to be. But to go from that to supporting Bush in 04 and publicly urging others to do likewise seems to me to be a rather dangerous excursion into full-blown Stephen Spenderism, and very shortsighted to boot. So I'd ask you a further question: Since you suggest your commitment to social justice is undiminished, from what I have seen of your public expressions, how do you square that with this undiluted support for Bush's re-election? Do you no longer believe in creating a democratic social-justice movement to work for change (however hopelessly)?I remain your affectionate friend, Doug (for regime change and revolution abroad and at home)"

The lather, the lather. Plus the revolution remark, in perfectly comic juxtaposition with the support for that old Jacobin, Senator Kerry -- an enemy of capitalism if there ever was one! Eventually, Ireland gets over the rubbers issue and down to the war, and Hitchens fills in the blanks with his usual debased rhetoric, which is all about Bush fighting a war against theocracy. Which prompts this kind of reply on the part of the hapless Ireland, always trying to figure out if Hitchens is just making some super-clever Marxist chessboard move:

"I still have trouble discerning a coherent politics of a progressive hue behind your support for the re-conduction of Bush in 04, as you claim."

Well, that's because there IS no progressive hue. There is, however, a huge amount of dishonesty. Hitchens simply substitutes one war for another. This is Hitchens' role. Like a lot of the DC commentariat, his propagandist function consists of putting a consistently moral interpretation on a consistently immoral policy. Because such a policy requires a maximum of secrecy, Hitchens is just as happy to discuss and debate the war as if it were his war. He is not tied to the reality of the war -- to the war that is supposedly going to cost two hundred billion dollars, to the war that is going to use up the blood of American soldiers, to the war that is going to be crowned, according to the administration, with the appointment of Jay Garner as crown prince of Iraq -- and so can defend the war of his fantasies.Slowly those fantasies will converge with reality -- the collapse of an ideological position usually involves some transition period in which you defend a radically different politics by claiming that your only real sin is a rigid consistency. Because Ireland is much too highminded to mention things like the cost of the war, the national interest of the U.S., and other technicalities -- because he wants his wars and his protests against them to be conducted on the purest ethical plane -- he's rather flummoxed by Hitchens. It is pretty easy to convince Ireland that roosters lay eggs. But, after searching high and low for Hitchen's subtle ultra left theory that would make even Vladimir Lenin's head spin (and we know he, too, was forever signing his emails "for regime change and revolution abroad and at home" -- what a fierce change agent that Vladimir turned out to be!), even Ireland is forced to face the fact that his buddy is a reactionary not that different from Charles Krauthammer or Karl Rove.

"Well, Hitch, I shall always love my friend, but I mourn the loss of my comrade. To see such talent as yours put at the service of a truly repugnant crowd like the Bushistas makes me weep. No doubt we�ll have occasion to continue this debate, even if we�ll soon be squabbling about whether all those coming deaths in Iraq have helped shape a better and more secure world."

Let's hope that debate never comes off.

Neoliberalism and privilege

Marx was the great theorist of the revolutions that ushered in modernity, and if one is seeking the genealogy of “privilege”, that elusive neo-liberal concept, he’s a good person to go to. Marx thought that the old hierarchy, the old social order, was largely determined by family and provenance (provenance being basically ethnicity, and religion), while the new social order – one that came in, symbolically, the bonfire of “privileges” – the casting off of the aristocratic governing class and the entrance of the bourgeoisie -was characterized, as a total social fact, by the exploitation of labor by capital.

However, Marx’s model was ideal. It was an ideal that was being realized, patchily, in real time. All that was solid did not, really, melt into air. Moreover, with the elastic but handy notion of alienation, Marx had a conceptual tool to understand not only the affect of the new order of exploitation, but the existential effect of the undermining of “all that is solid”.

As we know, Marx’s simple picture of capitalism, while it traces out a path that has been tread by the peoples of the world, is intersected by many persistent remnants of the ancien regime. It makes sense that Cold War liberals would seek to preserve the order while expanding it by returning to the notion of privilege. Instead of speaking of the masses oppressed and exploited by Capital, they spoke of the underprivileged. And what were the privileges? In many ways, they return to ethnicity, race, and education as a guild system – provenance once again. In this morass, the state had to help the underprivileged – hence the great welfare projects. From the retirement system in France to the welfare system in the U.S., these projects worked well to push the underprivileged into middle class status.

The Cold War liberals died with their war, and there is not a statue of one of them. Their descendants, post-war neoliberals, enjoyed the fruits of the massive expansion of exploitation, which involved destroying the welfare system in the U.S. (courtesy of Clinton), and is presently going about destroying the retirement system in France (courtesy of Macron). Yet the rhetoric under which these events were engineered is a far cry from those of the Cold War conservative. The defense of a hypercharged predator form of capitalism has been combined attacks on privilege. Hence, the absurd conjunction of, say, dropping tariffs, protecting “intellectual property”, on the one hand, and promoting a euphemistic diversity in management, with a special emphasis on the glass ceiling. In the process, white privilege, which had been the tactic of the union-busters of yore, and which is exemplified in the astonishing whiteness of the upper 1 percent, a confederate monument all by itself, has been disowned by the privileged. Unsurprisingly, the era of euphemistic diversity coincides with the era of the collapse of black household wealth – as the same people who urge sensitivity to black lives matter are, very often, the same people who have devised the means for immiserating black lives.

We’ve seen this before. The great Justice Department report that x-rayed Ferguson, MO resulted in – zip. The system of predatory fines, the system of police harassment, the constant inequality dosed out to African-Americans at the end of a taser or baton is still going strong. Defunding the police is this year’s occupy Wall Street – sweet, but then the grownups, the mostly white managerial class, will take it from here. After occupy Wall Street, the Obama administration went on to preside over a recovery that favored the rich, astonishingly, more than even the Bush tax cuts did, with zero action taken against the incredible fees that are required for being credentialed in modernity’s guild – higher education – and zero action taken to address the housing crisis that, in particular, disproportionately affects black households.

Yet, yet … this time is always different, because it is this time. With a great depression brewing among the 80 percent of Americans who make less than 150 thou a year, and with an unstoppable pandemic revealing that the American health care system doesn’t only suck, but is booby trapped – and with the American government full throttle saving the richest through the most lucrative policies ever devised by a national government, with the Fed making sure that the investor class is so bathed in trillions that the financial markets are completely untethered from the real economy – this time might be different. If we begin a bonfire of the privileges, the country club will be on the pyre.

two poems: mallarme and chamisso

Two poems

From Mallarme

Male anxiety

I can’t seem this evening to conquer

your body, beast, in whom the sins of a people

stir, nor pit a sad storm in your dirty hair

under the incurable boredom of my poured out kisses.

From your bed I want that heavy, dreamless sleep

floating on sheets that have never known remorse

such as you might have tasted after your black lies

- you who know more of nothingness than the dead.

For vice, gnawing my native nobility

has marked me, like you, with its sterility;

while as long as there lives in your stony breast

a heart that the tooth of crime cannot tear,

I flee, pale, defeated, haunted by my winding sheet

afraid of dying when, alone, I sleep.

Crematoria

Dad said the crematoria

were expensive to build and upkeep

- they spend money on natural gas

like it is going out of style.

Two million BTUs -

the cast alloy metal ovens

the fire bricks,

this is the down side.

I said she started out in pets?

Absolutely.

People have to dispose of their pets

Darling.

I said upside?

Dad said they always say

Invest in the future.

And what’s more future than death?

I thought of chorines stretching back

From Nefertiti to Donna Summer

Toi qui sur le néant en sais plus que les morts

I said Dad I’m pretty sure

sure and sure

this is gonna bite you in the ass.

He said, the chorines said, the streets say

they have to go somewhere.

We have to go somewhere

when we have nowhere to go.

- Karen Chamisso

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On the anti-cancel culture culture

The bitching and moaning about cancel culture requires a genealogy. I’ve been thinking about where these tropes come from, the ones used by the gatekeepers to say, essentially, peons, don’t fuck with me, but in more elevated language. And I’ve been thinking about the sites that promote them. You have the Atlantic, you have Harpers, you have the NYT opinion page. In England, of course, The New Stateman. And … you used to have the New York Review of Books. You used to have The New Republic. Until some awful  change came, and many of the dinosaurs were not given infinite space to scribble in. Cathedrals fell, cities were sacked. Ian Baruma lost his editing position. TNR was sold by Marty Peretz. The

Ah, the New Republic. If you are going to do a real genealogical trace of the cancel culture is mean crowd, you will inevitably land on the old New Republic, which was owned by Marty Peretz mentioned above(the man who liked to write about how black culture was primitive and Palestinians were animals, and distributed these ideas in every raving column he crammed into the mag). Peretz had a magic touch with assembling just the right krewe that went on to write for all the solid D.C. and NY mags. You’ll find Andrew Sullivan, firm believer in black IQ inferiority, at New York magazine. You’ll find Jonathan Chait there too. Weekly Standard, before it folded, was a hive of New Republic alums. So was Slate.

One name, though, seems to have dropped out: Ruth Shalit. This is an instance of the ingratitude of history. Although she was given the heave at the New Republic for plagiarism and inaccuracy, these are, really, petty crimes in comparison to her genius as a charter member of the “cancel the pc police/cancel cancel culture” group.

Her opus was not the hit piece that supposedly helped since Clinton’s healthcare plan in 1994. That plan was a self-sinking rubic’s cube of evasions. No, her opus was ‘exposing” the horrid, horrid effects of “diversity” at the Washington Post. Or, hiring black people to important positions. It was written with that brilliant trolling style: we all admit bigotry is bad, and having so admitted, we don’t have to change a damn thing, and if you ask us to, its PC Police time!

Shalit’s piece on “Race in the Newsroom”, which dissected the diversity program at the Washington Post, could be published tomorrow in the Atlantic – save for a few lamentable errors of fact, six or seven or eight, that weigh on the piece. But the basic reasoning – that once upon a time in white America, meritocracy ruled, open and free like the Great Plains (without those horrid indigenes crudding it up), and now the “brittle sensibilities” of “minority groups” peddling their grievances are messing up the whole deal, and thus, Freedom like the Great Plains! (without those horrid indigenes crudding it up).

I have to confess, the sparklines of Shalit’s prose, for which so many praised her in DC, seems sort of paste jewels to me. But the general thrust seems so contrarian, so Harpers, so “lets write a letter with this in it and get Steven Pinker to sign it”, that I think Ruth is owed. Time for a comeback.

Here’s a few bits: Here’s the being “sensitive” [thinking that there might possibly be a legitimate P.O.C viewpoint] is a surrender of truthseeking bit: “But it's unclear how sensitivity training can be "woven" into a profession which has traditionally held that reporters should tell the truth as they see it, without fear or favor. Public reaction, hostile or not, is not supposed to be anticipated and muted in the editing process but embraced as a healthy consequence of the search for truth, since the charge of bias is best dealt with in the marketplace of ideas. [the boilerplate prose just drove DC thumbsuckers into paroxysms of praise. There’s nothing that helps you succeed as a contrarian more than tossing approved clichés at the wizened old thumbsuckers. They go for it like seals smelling smelt at feeding time.

 There a dozens of bits all about lazy stupid black peeps are hired instead of bright washed white ivy leaguers, so I’ll leave that out – although Atlantic would definitely go for that sort of thing. It is all told in a more sorrow than anger troll voice, too, which adds to the general tone of frolicking centerism.  Then there’s the appeal to the old order, the noble cause, even, being threatened by (at that time) PC!

“Indifference is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it denotes neutrality and a desire for objectivity. In recent years it has become fashionable to criticize objectivity, to attack it as a mask for interests. For journalists, however, such a view is dangerous. If objectivity is not possible, then journalism is not possible. And a newspaper's indifference to the subjects of its coverage is the sign of a newspaper's integrity. Or so it used to be.”

Talk about contrarianism - the proposal that keeping in place an almost all white newspaper in a 60 percent black city has finally found its legitimating joke.  Ruth Shalit, the distinguished signatories of a deeply brave Harper’s Magazine letter salute you! I’m thinking: isn’t it time to give Shalit the Orwell medal she so obviously deserves?

suggestions for making law law and order order: the police and us

1. Radically de-police traffic. Police now have the equipment to take pics of moving violations. Just as they have put up cameras to take pics of cars at stop lights. There should be a vast fall off in police stopping cars, when they can simply clock and photo, and send tickets via mail. These violations should, themselves, be in the nature of very low fines. The Sandra Blands of this world should never, ever be stopped.

2. “Just cause” has been used extensively to allow violent cops to get back on the force, via arbitration. This is an abuse of just cause, which should only be used if it can be proved that some kind of political corruption was behind the firing. Narrowing the just cause clause for police arbitrations would eliminate the abuse of the community having no say in the retention of violent cops.

3. Profiling the racial profilers. Every policeman has a record of what they do and who they do it to at the end of the day. If those records consistently show a racial bias, the cop should be pulled and questioned. And if this continues, the policeman should be dismissed.

4. Controlling the system of enabling. This is the trickier part. The oppression visited on Black America is not an accident of the system, but its logic. And it is the judiciary and the prosecutors who, in the end, are the drivers of the thing. We need a better system to, a, make sure that judges are neutral rather than cop friendly, and b, make sure that D.A.s are doing their job for the community, rather than a part of the community. The entire system of the judiciary in the U.S. needs to be re-constructed. Term limits are, of course, necessary. But there are a number of things that need change, from the way that the judiciary is used to predate on the low income population (a la Ferguson) to the use of threats to people who use their constitutional right to plead not guilty. That plea should never be the basis for a longer sentence. That should simply be outlawed. If the system is overwhelmed by the number of cases, then perhaps there is something wrong with the number of cases.

5. Drug reform of course. We need to look to places like Portugal and de-criminalize drug use.

6. Police should be licenced. Like doctors. A policeman fired for beating someone, or torturing or killing someone - vide Elijah McClain - should have his or her licence yanked, and thus be unemployable as a cop in any town. As with doctor licences, the decision can be periodically reviewed.

metempsychosis of statues

“A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders

braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw

and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry

on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,

propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.”

Thus, Robert Lowell in For the Union Dead, a poem which centers a monument. Among the army of statuary that occupies America’s cities and parks, this is one of the rare statues that is signed by an actual famous artist: Augustus Saint Gaudens. In the later nineteenth century, he was the most famous American sculptor. It was Gaudens as well who made the famous tomb to poor Clover Adams, Henry Adams’ wife, in the Rock Creek Cemetery in D.C.

In the most recent overthrow of a buncha statues of unworthies, one argument is oddly missing: that these things are valuable art pieces. Not a peep is uttered about their artistic worth – it is all a question of history. It is unlikely that anybody knows the names of the sculptors who created their equestrian visions of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson which gallop across Richmond Virginia or Stone Mountain, Georgia. These sculptures were by contract and design of an extreme banality. There was no Greek nonsense – nobody even thought about showing, say, Stonewall’s dick, a la Greek Olympic sculpture.

Evidently, these statues are ways of monumentalizing a race hierarchy – or racism. But I want to poke along in another, related direction and ask about their social existence as objects.

One thing is certain: when you have a mass social phenomenon, you have a system. The question is: what is this system about? If we have read our Barthes, the first thing we want to know is: how substitutable are they one with the other, this banal troop?

If I substituted, say, a statue of Ulysses Grant for Robert E. Lee in Richmond (under cover of night, and carefully keeping the sign that read Robert E. Lee) would anybody notice?

I would imagine the answer is yes. But the substitution would have respected the system’s rules, and helped us think through the limits of substitution – limits within the statuary universe. Here, I would tentatively claim, we get to the totemic limits defining these things in the urban space. For surely these sculptures are rooted in the white culture’s fetishes.

There is a school of cultural studies that has been here. Inspired by such figures as Louis Marin (notice how my reference here itself erects a statue, a fetish, how I am caught within the system I critique), historians have long been fascinated by public “objects”, from stamps and coins to statues. In Paris, which is a city of statuary, I am surrounded by a violent history sedimented in statues and bas-relief whereever I turn – and I love it. I love it as a walker. Statues are simply another set of blurs to the car driver, but to the walker they are presences. Unsurprisingly, historians have picked through the statuary history of Paris for clues to the meaning of these totems. Here’s a nice paragraph from Victoria Thompson’s essay, The Creation, Destruction and Recreation of Henri IV Seeing Popular Sovereignty in the Statue of a King

"At the moment of their creation, public monuments are typically designed to reflect and communicate a single meaning. In reality, they often reflect competing values. This is perhaps most evident in efforts to commemorate some of the major events of the late twentieth century—the Holocaust, the Vietnam War and the fall of the Soviet bloc. The intense conflict generated by these attempts has allowed scholars to better under-stand how difficult it is to establish a stable and unifying meaning of an event using a public monument.4 In societies where diverse constituen-cies have a voice, debates over public commemoration reveal how various groups imagine their community and its history.5 And even in societies where the state determines what to commemorate and assigns monuments an official meaning, that meaning is subject to contestation by populations who vandalize, make fun of, or otherwise subvert the official meaning of a structure constantly in public view.6 The destruction of a public monument can similarly elicit diverse reactions, and the traces of its memory can exert an influence over communities long after it has disappeared.”

Thompson’s essay is concerned, in part, with the politics of revolution and reaction – revolution knocked down the statues of kings and saints, and reaction re-erected them. I live within a couple of blocks from the statue of Henri IV (an assassinated King) and a couple of blocks, as well, from the Parc du Temple, which is a third Republic park, a park designed under Napoleon III but really instituted by the Republic that came after Napoleon III’s overthrow. As a sign of the Republican ideal, a statue of Pierre Jean Béranger was erected, by popular subscription, in the park. Béranger lounges, now, in the limbo of forgotten celebrities – in his life, he was famous as a people’s poet, a maker of extremely popular songs with a democratic bent. His statue had a political meaning that was strong enough to incite a symbolic gesture when Paris was occupied by the Nazis – the statue was taken down and melted (it was made of bronze). That bronze then was recast for a statue in honor of the Nazi victories by Arno Breker, Speer and Hitler’s favorite artist. That monument, in turn, was destroyed by the Red Army.

That the fetish is fated to destruction is one of the unconscious principles of modernism. The alternation between the invention of universals and the destruction of people is the fort/da of the bit of history I have experienced, that little chunk of time, 20th/21st century.

Incidentally – two years ago, when I was in Berlin, I went to Treptower Park. There is an astonishing collection of statues there, built by the Soviets, to commemorate World War II. It is as impressive as, say, the statue of Liberty. Those statues are bronze. I wonder if Beranger’s statue, which was melted down to become part of Breker’s statue, which was melted down by the Red Army, didn’t end up there. The metempsychosis of statues – a subject for some Kleistian tale.

GROPING THE TROPE

The poet sings – or so she used to

And there are those who’ve returned to guitar

Or drums to sing the things that are

While others never finished piano lessons.

Otherwise poets are silent as Quakers

And all that song stuff is for fakers

Unless, as I do, whispering and claw voiced

They sample the goods to have a taste

- roll their tongue over the cut and paste

My muse is mainly a tick in the mind

Which throws out of hem my rants and pleas

- fr’instance, this here poem is one of these.

- Karen Chamisso

Handwriting

I don’t remember my first writing lessons. The bubble and squeak of my first letters, those wobbly circles and jerkily disproportionate lines which flowed out of my pencil onto the cheap, thick, lined paper – I can only envision them through their descendants, the degenerate scribble of my declining years, where the bubbles are less bubblicious and have been through the rat race. But I can remember the devises that went into writing – that paper, the thick lines spaced just so and the dotted line between them, the thin, bright yellow pencils with the little intaglio number near the metal band the holds the erasor, and the sharpeners. The little oblong plastic box with the hole in one end for the pencils and the two evil little blades that would bite into the cedar-y matter of the blunt end and shave off perfect little fans of thin thin wood. As well as a dusting of pencil lead, which would somehow get on my fingers.

There was a subtle competition, I remember, between the brilliant hand pencil sharpener and the noiser larger unit you would usually find at the front of the classroom, bolted to a corner of the teacher’s closet. That was crank run, which meant using your whole arm to turn it. It had a thick plastic disc with different sized holes through which to stick different thicknesses of pencil. Somehow, I associated that pencil sharpener with industry – with steel mills and tanks and such. It would make much more racket, which would draw attention, especially if you were sharpening a pencil during a test.
This, then, was the entourage, the court around the monarchical activity of calligraphy. In my case, mere graphie – I have never been a beautiful writer. In the third grade, when we started having spelling tests, I did poorly – it was my poorest subject on the report card. For one thing, I had a sovereign contempt for the homework, which bored me. Lists of words to spell seemed infinitely less interesting than lists of words, such as you would find in the dictionary. I was always a dictionary stan. I don’t remember any real problem with my handwriting as far as teachers were concerned. But it didn’t satisfy me none, as I got older. I wanted to be able to write the address on an envelope with a real piss elegance. I wanted my various scribblings to look more intense in my notebooks. I wanted some famous dead writer’s handwriting, but I only ever have had my own.

In France, I am discovering, handwriting is not dead. One of the standard thumbsucker topics in the U.S. is: Is the computer killing handwriting? The wee-est toddler in Manhattan, we are assured, knows her way around the keyboard. There are keyboards in Paris, even portable phones, but the school system is curiously centered on handwriting. I’ve been assured that Adam must practice his handwriting if he is to get anywhere in the terribly hierarchic French school system. Parents even show each other specimens of their children’s handwriting, worriedly.

I worked, as a grad student in philosophy, on Derrida – but it has only been in the last few years, experiencing the French education system, that I quite understood the social context of Derrida’s emphasis on writing and the place of logocentrism. For the French, the dictée is at the heart of the curriculum. There really is no American equivalent. Teachers in my elementary school never gave us set speeches that we were supposed to listen to and write, that I can remember. Of course, I recognize in the dicteé a genealogical kinship with the classical educational system of the Greeks and the Romans, but the American school system broke away from that family tree when Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod – or something like that. Americans have always been, they like to think, practical.

This has lead to a curious neglect of the oral-to-hand culture in the States. I am rather pleased with the ingrained habit of the dictée and how it organizes, subtly, the whole French system. The hand, here, still leaves its mark on the text. But try as I may, I can’t get too anxious about Adam’s handwriting. I’m just too American.

Jesus’ politics.and mine

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As the few who have actually read the Gospels know, Jesus said relatively little about sex. For him, it was a thing that occurred in the structure of families. Jesus didn’t much like families. He was only half joking when he said that he had no patience for him who didn’t hate his mother. He thought if you entered into a marriage, that was the end of it – no divorce for you. Of course, marriage, back in Jesus' day, wasn't the love match it is today, but an exchange between parents and clans in which the individuals exchanged had little say. So this is a hard saying to understand -- was it a way of warning men not to desert their wives and children?

In any case, he looked upon the marriage and family racket as hopelessly perverting -- there'd be no giving and taking of wives and husbands in the Kingdom of Heaven.

There's an  odd strain in the Gospels that shows Jesus's affinity with outcast women. This has been massively understated, since of course churches are male-controlled, but once you think of the society in which Jesus existed, the uniqueness of the protagonist of the Gospels comes into focus. One must always remember not to substitute the bourgeois society of 2020 for the Eastern Mediterranean culture in which Jesus lived. The status of women in that culture was complex. An anthropological generalization about these societies is that  the mother, at a certain age, within a household that often contained grown up sons and their wives, had a large tacit power, even as their recognized political power was null. This power was often exercised massively against the  wives of their sons. Within this society, freefloating women were rare - the prostitute, the unmarried daughter, the woman who'd outlived her entire family, these were types for whom Jesus had an affinity.  It was the outcasts, those who had a position at the bottom of society - the quintessential last - to whom he was called. 

In the only gospel story of Jesus losing an argument, it is a Samaritan woman who rebukes him for making a typically ethno-racist comment to her when she needed healing: that wonderful phrase about how even the dogs under the table were allowed to eat the master's crumbs. That immediately went to the heart of the Jesus's hypocrisy in rejecting her, and he owned it. This is a remarkable instance in the vita, for it is unusual for the revered hero, the sage or savior, to feature in a story of loss of face. But the remarkable thing about this story is that it questions the worth of face.   I do not remember the name of the critic who remarked, about Henny Pollit in  Christina Stead's The Man who Loved Children, that this character understood the  essential "outlawery" of women - the kind of soul formed literally of being outside the law, which refused to recognize in her a sovereign person - but I like that phrase. From whatever source inside himself, Jesus recognized some essential virtue in that outlawery too. This sensitivity to the outlaw prefigures a radical doubt about the law. Paul wasn't making this up entirely.    

Donc, donc, there is that. On the other hand, Jesus had numerous opinions about wealth. He unequivocally thought that the wealthy would not be in the kingdom of heaven. He thought that they were scanty in their sacrifices, and pushy in their lives, and in general a diabolical nuisance. Just getting wealthy, Jesus thought, probably entailed doing things that would send you to Hell. He had no hesitation about saying so. When a rich man came to him who had sacrificed much of his wealth, Jesus famously said that it was harder for the rich to get to heaven than for the camel to get through the eye of a needle. This saying is one that the most literal American fundamentalist suddenly gets all liberal about interpreting - surely he was referring to a narrow street in Jerusalem! Cause otherwise what he said is too terrible! But the meaning is made clear by what Jesus did before he made that comment – he clearly thought that the rich man hadn’t given enough. He hadn’t really destroyed his wealth.

While there is, currently, a great deal of kowtowing to a bunch of pissants who call themselves Christian in contemporary American culture, one can be confident that, if Jesus is within the ballpark of being right, most of the Christian right, from George Bush to Franklin Graham, are going straight to hell. (Although to be clear, I do think the place of weeping and gnashing of teeth is a metaphysical place, within the individual and collective consciousness - just as  geographical coordinates of the Kingdom of Heaven are within you). It isn’t really even a close call. All are wealthy. All retain their wealth in the face of a world in which masses starve. All have let these people starve during the whole course of their lives. Some, such as Pat Robertson, have acquired their wealth through such bloody associations that they are obviously immoral. But Jesus really didn’t make a lot of distinctions here. Gays are never condemned by Jesus. The wealthy are, time and time again. As for the clergy that coddles the wealthy and themselves become rich, they are what Jesus called Whited Sepulchers, filthy on the inside with death. Among the certainly and for sure damned, one can spot some easy prey: the creators of the Left Behind series (sin against the holy ghost, wealth), Dr. James Dobson (wealth, refusal to visit those in prison, definitely on the left side of the Son when he judges the quick and the dead), Newt Gingrich (are you kidding me) and many others who are going to go the inferno route.  . It is, of course, my burden that, as a non-Christian I am probably ending up spending the afterlife with a bunch of yahoo evangelical leaders. Just my luck. Although God has infinite mercy, and I can't imagine him so cruel as to put me next to Billy Graham's deluded son. Many of these men are under the misapprehension that Jesus gives his unconditional approval to heterosexuality, confusing viagra with virtue. Jesus made know his contempt for the family whenever he got a chance; his contempt for the mere industriousness that leads to wealth (behold the lilies of the field), his contempt for profiteers on the poor (you have made my father’s house into a den of thieves), etc. As for the membership of the political class, they have as little chance of making it to heaven as a vampire bat has of winning best in show at your local kennel club. If there is one crowd that has beast written on their foreheads, it is this one. Hopeless, from the divine point of view.

However, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out long ago, hardly anybody believes Jesus anymore, especially Christians. Shaw said that Christians are, almost to a man, followers of Barabbas: worshippers of ostentatious power, self-pitying about their cruelties, absolutely unable to sympathize with those lower than them if they aren’t allowed, at the same time, to strip those lower than them of all dignity – in other words, cannibals and freaks and the usual good booboisie you see buying steaks in the grocery store. Shaw thought certain of Jesus’ communistic ideas might work in today’s society. We don’t. That is, as a majoritarian stance, what Jesus taught leads to chaos and cruelty. The Grand Inquisitor is right about that. But as a minority stance, here and there, it is an experiment well worth doing.

poem

Too late I saw I’d got the wrong end
thinking that the dough and good legs
would always be enough. I turned away from wisdom
and subscribed to 1000 cable channels.

“I will also laugh at your calamities
I will mock when your fear cometh she said,
tagging another city gate
before the heat closed in with the tasers.
No big deal, I thought, another extra gone.

Sometimes though at precisely 4 a.m.
I remember that I haven’t paid the ransom yet.
- Karen Chamisso

Balzac's World

At the beginning of Balzac’s l’envers de l’histoire contemporaine – one of the most brilliant title ever -the narrator, who is easily recognizable as the ever voluble Balzac, places his still unnamed protagonist at the “heart of Paris”:

“In 1836, on a beautiful September evening, a man of about 30 years of age leaned on the parapet of the quai from which onne can see both the Seine flowing downriver past the Jardin des Plannttes to Notre Dame and,   upriver, the vast riverine perspective as it passes by the Louvre.”

The heart of a city changes more than the heart of a mortal, according to Balzac’s contemporary, Baudelaire. But this perspective is still there – I biked past it yesterday. True, the Notre Dame is a half charred skeleton, and the Louvre is presently defaced with an enormous advertising placard for some miserable luxury object, the kind of neo-liberal graffiti we see, now, in all the world’s hotspots, from corporation named stadiums to the university buildings named for odious tax avoiding plutocrats, philanthropists all.

Yet Paris is a stubborn fact. As is Montpellier, Nimes, Arles, Aix-en-Province, Nice, etc. This stubbornness makes for some despair among the neoliberal set: doesn’t this mean the heart has stopped? Where’s the disruption? Change for its own sake, imposed by above, permits rent-seeking possibilities beyond the wildest dreams of Balzac’s most superhuman speculator, and that’s what its all about. It is not hard to see that we are living, extras all, in the season of their fever dream – from the horribly incompetent Trump to the horribly incompetent Macron, all that is solid melts into the pipeline between the central banks and the investment banks. Ghost financial instruments and watered stocks, such is the economy of the movers and the shakers. Outside, corona takes care of the disposables, while party-on is the motto of the lesser bourgeoisie, that aspirational group who haven’t made it and won’t, but who long for a simulacrum of the lifestyles of the rich and the famous.   The aspirational zombies of the apocalypse of pseudo-freedom – Balzac would have enjoyed them immensely.

Or to put it differently: it is still Balzac’s world. The sentimentality of Dickens has degenerated into greeting card slogans that are now ironic even to their purchasers and their receivers. George Sand’s socialism has disappeared. Flaubert’s contempt for stupidity has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the most flatheaded reactionaries possible. But Balzac, I thought, passing by that quai and that perspective, lives.

The police function in a system that reaches beyond the police.

Cast your mind back to every Western you have ever seen. Most of them, I’d bet, featured or included a sheriff. The sheriff “kept the peace” but, if you think about it, never stopped a single wagon, carriage or horserider for speeding. Consequently, the sheriff never examined a single wagon, carriage or saddle bag for “contrabrand” material.

In Sara Seo’s Policing the Open Road, the burden of the narrative is on  the legal construction that allowed police, around the Prohibition era, more power over the car than the Customs officer had over the incoming ship – that is, police were allowed to make reasonable searches of vehicles without a warrant, and with the standard of “reasonableness” amounting to: what the policeman says.

The interesting subtheme, here, is that policing followed technological and legal changes, which intersected with an already existing hierarchy that separated the respectable (white) people and the non-respectable (working class, black, immigrant) people.

“Certainly, traffic laws, like prohibition laws, established mala prohibita—acts that were wrong only by virtue of statute. No inherent sense of morality deemed, for example, driving at the speed of twenty-two miles per hour a per se evil like murder or theft.”

Prohibition and the policing of the automobile came together in court cases that started to allow a growing police force a greatly expanded amount of power not only to regulate the traffic, but to search cars on the instinct of the police.

The addition of police union power beginning with the Civil Rights era added to this police power. Even so, the police would not have become the community’s ruler instead of their servant if the political power of the unions had not been flexed to take the power directly away from local law.

A good example of how the system works is found in Ohio.

On  August 12, 2017. 25-year-old Richard Hubbard III was pulled over on E 228th St. just before 10:30 a.m. for "a moving/traffic violation” by Michael Amiott. “Hubbard was ordered to exit the car and face away so he could be taken into custody. Police say Hubbard refused, and a violent struggle ensued. The video that was captured showed Amiott taking Hubbard to the ground, punching him multiple times.”

Thus far, a typical instance of the combo of race – Hubbard is black – the auto – Hubbard had committed a minor traffic infraction and had an expired license – and police authority – the taking into custody of a person without a licence is extraordinary. I speak from authority, having once been stopped by a policeman for a minor traffic infraction and then being told that I would get a major fine if I didn’t renew my license, which was out of date. At no point did the white policeman think that I was going to go down with him to the police station. Cause I’m white.

The video made Amiott’s action undeniable, although the police issued the standard pr piece about how Hubbard had violently resisted. It did not explain why Hubbard was taken into custody – this was, for the police, a simple norm. They get to decide who to take into custody. That power has been given to them when they were given untrammeled power over the streets.

In the next step in this drama, the town of Euclid reluctantly responded by suspending and then firing Michael Amiott. The mayor referenced further instances in Amiott’s record. Amiott’s case was then taken up by the Fraternal Order of Police, even though the Euclid police department is represented, technically, by another union. See this site for an indepth look at Euclid policing and race, including other violent incidences involving Amiott. (see all parts of Series 3)

In 1983, Ohio – like many Midwestern states with a strong union presence – instituted a  collective bargaining law that outlawed strikes in favor of arbitration. The driver, at that time, was the fear of teacher strikes. But included in that law were all public employee unions – the police unions foremost.

Ohio was once the heartland of American industry, and consequently, of the factory worker unions that allowed the working class to negotiate with Capital. Some leftist economists have pointed to the benefits accruing to public employees from these laws. At the same time, there is a difference between teachers and cops – the arbitrators and judges have myriad links with the police.

A study by Mark Iris in 1998 of arbitration results in Chicago bears out the bias:

“A total of 328 disciplinary actions were decided by binding arbitration during that period [1990-1993]. In addition, under a new process started in July 1993, 205 disciplinary actions have been reviewed by arbitrators for nonbinding advisory opinions as of July 1995. These two distinct data sets demonstrate remarkably similar patterns of outcomes; collectively, the discipline imposed upon Chicago police officers is routinely cut in half by arbitrators. This pattern recurs despite an elaborate, lengthy review process and close scrutiny before the suspension of an officer is ordered.”

This result should not surprise us, given the larger history outlined by Seo: the abdication of a large degree of sovereignty to the police. In a 2016 article by Tylor Adams,  “Factors in Police Misconduct Arbitration Outcomes: What Does It Take to Fire a Bad Cop?”, he summarizes other studies that show the same interventionist tendency. Although police chief, mayors, and the community may want Michael Amiott fired, he does not work at the will of the community: his fate depends on his union and his arbitrator.

Adams remarks that the reason for overturning suspension or firing is most often categorized as a Just cause mistake. “A principal reason why arbitrators overturn police discharges is a department's failure to prove just cause. The meaning of just cause is derived from principles of fundamental fairness that evolved over time through the decisions of arbitrators.” Adams does not question the circularity of this “evolution” through time: a biased system will become more and more biased as precedent is set.

What does this mean? It means that we are depending on the “reasonableness” of cops and the precedents set by police-biased arbitrators. It means that the community needs to take back power. If we dismantle the way the police operate, we have to dismantle  and clean up the system of arbitration that is broken. A simple but effective tool is to take away the “just cause” rationality from arbitrators, and have the legislature spell out very what just cause is. I would think that process would weed out bias from racial and gender causes that might make a mayor fire a police officer;  but it would not allow police judgment about the appropriate use of force to triumph over the community.