Protagoras and AI: Boxers, come out of your corners.

There are two stories about Protagoras. In the hostile account of his life written by Diogenes Laertius, it is said that he was a porter, a relatively humble position, and that he invented a porter’s pad for carrying things. But in Philostratas’s Lives of the Sophists he is given a much grander birth, being the son of a wealthy citizen of Abdera who “amassed wealth beyond most men in Thrace”, and who entertained King Xerxes in his house. Philostratus claims that this Persian connection effected Protagoras’s thinking, since he became versed, to an extent, in the doctrines of the Persian magi. Whereas Diogenes Laertius (writing with all the snobbery of the ancient world at his back) attributes Protagorus’s education to Democritus, who was impressed by Protagoras’s invention of the porter’s pad. Somehow, this story rings with the implication of slander – it gives Protagoras’s cunning all too menial a cast. And yet Diogenes also casually attributes the invention of philosophy by dialogue, or the Socratic method, to Protagoras – a rather big invention, the invention of a form, which Diogenes, in his usual way, mentions and goes on. The  biographies of the Philosophers tumble and jumble off the page like some inventory landslide, leaving us frustrated, howling outside of the sacked walls for more. 

One thing that is agreed between Philostratus and Diogenes is that Protagorus, like Socrates, was accused in Athens of disbelief in the Gods. In Philostratus, his person was condemned, and he fled from place to place like a philosophical Flying Dutchman, seeking refuge, until he drowned in a shipwreck. Diogenes L, however, maintains merely that his book, On the Gods, was burned in Athens. He read this book, supposedly, at Euripides house. The scandalous import of the book comes out in Diogenes quotation: “As to the Gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life.”

This quotation, of course, doesn’t tell us much about the argument that Protagoras develops about the gods; for after all, the argument might show that most probably, they exist, and that their existence is bound up in our not knowing. Or otherwise. Protagoras’s life – which is a bit undecidable itself – might have provided a good context in which to ponder undecidablity and the shortness of human life. Surely some echo of Protagoras’s phrase is contained in the story, in Acts, that Paul discovered an altar in Athens inscribed, to the unknown God.

I have always found Protagoras a sympathetic figure, whether or not he came from the working class. He has been demonized for millenia as the “founder” of relativism. One of Protagoras’s book, lost like all of them, has the nice, Nietzschian title of “Truth, or The Overthrower” - (Kataballontes Logoi). What we have from Protagoras (as though proving the shortness of man’s life has an imminent effect on what he can know) is fragments, the most famous of which, pondered wonderfully in the Theaetetus, is: ‘Of all things, the measure is man, of things which are, that they are, of things which are not, that they are not.’ What this means is elusive, of course. It is not that man is the inventor of all things – nor does it say that things do not exist outside of man. These are, of course, possible interpretations. But it puts man in the position of “measurer”, and in one sense that goes well with the Pythagorian viewpoint according to which number is at the ontological base of things. Yet in another sense, it displaces number with the measurer – begging the question of whether measure itself “depends” on man.

Myself, I think the measure fragment links up to what DL claims about Protagoras’s invention of the socratic dialogue for doing philosophy. DL writes that Protagoras was the first to say “that on everything (pragmatos) there are two accounts (logous) opposed each other.” This would seem to make  “man”  the measurer a more suspect unity; for if pragmatos is the kind of thing that is subject to exponential account making, it might be more reasonably said that of all things, the measureless is man. Plato of course saw this, but he nevertheless decided that “man” meant an aggregate of individuals, each person, instead of something like Dasein, or the collectivity of the human, divided within itself. If we are seeking the geneology of what Bakhtin calls “broadness” – the way many views, acts, desires and beliefs can be attributed to persons, without there being a core coherence – then we would have to start, I think, with Protagoras.

There is a story about Protagoras that is recounted in Plutarch’s life of Pericles that exemplifies this theme. Pericles bratty son published a “Daddy Dearest” book trying to mock Pericles for, among other things, hanging with the sophists. “For instance, a certain athlete had hit Epitimus the Pharsalian with a javelin, accidentally, and killed him, and Pericles, Xanthippus said, squandered an entire day discussing with Protagoras whether it was the javelin, or rather the one who hurled it, or the judges of the contests, that "in the strictest sense" ought to be held responsible for the disaster.” This was an entire waste of time for the son, Xanthippus; but it is a moment of radical recognition that stands out in legal history, with the sense that liability can be mediate as well as immediate. But what we see, in this discussion with Pericles, is an effect of there being two sides to each question, and two sides after that – two sides, indeed, to whether the right question is being asked.

The interesting question to ask of those who oppose relativism relates to this issue of measure and measurelessness, and it is the question of the disposability of form, whether it can be discarded once we get to substance, or whether it is, indeed, so tied to substance that our abstraction of one from the other is a distortion. To put it another way, by rejecting Protagoras, which happens in the Theaetetus, is Plato actually rejecting the socratic method? Is he rejecting Socrates? For if Socrates is taking up Protagoras’s technique, it would seem, from Plato’s non-relativist view, that Socrates made a mistake, gave too much to the enemy. For Protagoras’s invention would seem designed never to get us closer to what we want - the list of imperatives in the realms of knowledge, ontology, ethics and aesthetics that can tell us what is true and what is false, what is knowledge and what isn’t, what exists and what doesn’t, what is right and what isn’t, what is beautiful and what isn’t.

With Protagoras, don’t we begin, in earnest, the battle between the dialogue and the list? A battle that each generation fights. Ours, for instance, is confronting the list disguised as dialogue - AI. Protagoras would have loved this.

Jokes in the cold war

 

Since Kundera’s death was announced, I’ve been thinking about the eighties – his great decade in America – and about rereading The Joke, his four times translated first novel.

The idea of a joke that pursues the joker and ruins his life has a lot of attraction for me. I am fascinated by jokes. But I don’t hear many anymore.

When I was in my twenties, I often found myself in the midst of a joketelling orgy – that is, I found myself among joke tellers. I’d tell some jokes myself, but I did not have the rhythm of the great joke teller. I was equipped with one advantage, however: I was a great laugher. I could laugh until, literally, I ran out of breath. Not only that, but I laughed not only at the punch line – for the punch line, for the great joke teller, is only the final touch on the whole artistic edifice, the last gargoyle, so to speak, on the cathedral of shit – but I would laugh even more at the absurdities that the joke piled up, especially if it was an obscene joke.

Obscenity requires a concatenation of circumstances that remove us more and more from social reality, and each step is funnier. In a sense, I was a strange audience for a joker, who is used to the laugh coming last, and to an air of concentration among his listeners, who are like fans in the stands, waiting for a hit.  But the talented joker would realize that though my laughter was, in a sense, a territorial incursion on the story, he could use  the rhythm my laughter threatened to interrupt to make the joke even better, even more a jazz solo.

I was also among a literary set, and some of them – notably my friend Stefan – were very aware of the joke as an artform. Stefan was a very good joke teller, but he was not a great joke teller because he was too aware of the art. Sometimes, though, when he just let his natural flow take him there, he was a great one. Joke telling, back then, had a setting: it was in a bar, or a coffee shop. It was close to a college or university. At least, for the joketellers I knew. And this closeness made jokes something like an anti-classroom. In a classroom, you read, or you talked about texts - and were talked to about texts, and were generally educated in the complexities of reflection, the necessity of critique, and the never-ending task of imagining the good life arising out of the crimes of history. The joke climbed joyously back into the crimes of history and wallowed. In the great jokes – which were almost always dirty, misogynist, homophobic, racist, etc. – liberal society, indeed any social ideal, was turned upside down, its pockets were picked, and its underwear observed – and its underwear was always dirty.

Time, man. Clocks, calanders, insert here the leaves blowing away. I’ve been freelance now for twenty-five years, and I never find myself in joke telling orgies anymore. Is it that the age for them – my twenties and thirties – has passed? Or is the joke itself falling prey to its internet counterparts – the tweet, the Instagram caricature, etc.?

Was there a special joke in the Cold War era? Something like Delillo’s Lenny Bruce monologues in Underworld?

There’s an essay by Andrei Sinyavsky, the Soviet dissident, entitled The Joke in the Joke. It is a very good essay, one of the best on jokes. Written in the early eighties, it is also rather sexist. Conservatives often complain that the use of sexism and racism as interpretive categories distorts the past. This isn’t true - they help one see more of the past. Benjamin’s dictum that every monument of civilization is also a monument of barbarism finds its practical application here.

The core of the essay – which contains some silly and some truly disgusting jokes, and ends with a misogynistic rape joke – is that jokes are philologically important, and are the popular art form, just as folktales were in the past.

“In a closed society of the Soviet type, where the parameters of self-interested and complete existence are marked by all sorts of prohibitions (especially verbal ones), the joke is the only emotional outlet. More than that, it has actually developed into a model for living and serves the function of macrocosm inside the microcosm. As such, it becomes a kind of monad of the world order. The joke is in the air, but not in the form of dust. Like a spore, which contains everything that the soul needs in embryonic form, it is capable of reproducing the organism whole at the first opportune moment. Hence its readiness to provide universal formulas, explicating the epoch, history or the nation.”

Much emphasis is put, here, on the closed society of the Soviet type. But as all wee peas in the cogs of American capitalism can testify, the prohibitions here are cruelly marked out in dollars and sense, in time devoured, in exhaustions never to be redeemed; in cross-purposes between races, classes, and “discourses” that seem to have become zones of lies entirely. Here, the joke’s redemptive purpose, its “monad-hood”, seems lost to the onrush of ever more comic catastrophes. Of that which take your breath away, you physically cannot speak. And as I am removed, now, from the culture of oral jokes, I can’t really testify as to its health. But thrust into the pseudo-society of social networks, I can testify that everything begins to look, in a ghastly but undeniable way, like a joke. So much so that it has become a joke that one can’t joke, that irony needs an emoticon to explain itself.

There’s another wonderful bit in the Sinyavsky essay that is worth digging out. Here it is:

“If it weren’t for one more characteristic feature of the joke, perhaps the most important one, we could end our story here. I am referring to the joke’s philosophical relation to the world, to things, to the old and the new, when the new is a variation on the old but is nevertheless a new variant. We can imagine the joke in the form of an endless chain which connects just about all possible human situations. It can be likened to Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements, which has empty spaces for new valences as if for new jokes. The heading for this chart consisting of humorous parables would read something like “Human Existence” or “Human Reality”.

We laugh, so we don't cry. And then we discover that we laugh cause we can't cry. And then we cry with laughter.

the hammers have boxes

 

“And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.”

 

 While the division of labor increases the productive power of labor, and the wealth and refinement of society, it leads to the impoverishment of the laborer until he sinks to the level of the machine. While labor incites the accumulation of capitals and thus the increasing well being of society, it makes the laborer ever more dependent on the capitalist, thrusts him into a greater competition, drives him into a rush of overproduction, from which follows an equivalent slump.” - Marx

 

Kolakowski has correctly written that Marx, unlike the socialists of the 40s, had a firmer grasp of the fact that capitalism was rooted in de-humanization. His economic analysis does not marginalize this insight, but builds upon it – which is why Marx never puts the market at the center of economic analysis, even as he is able to represent the reasons that mainstream economists do so.

 

In the Economic-Philosophical manuscripts, the figure for that de-humanization is the machine.

 

Not, I notice, an animal. Traditionally, the poor were compared to animals.  In a wonderful series of essays by Sergio della Bernardina, an ethnographer of hunting, he found that the animal is not considered a machine by the hunter. In fact, the animal – the deer, the bear, the fox – is considered a-like being. For the person,  outside of philosophy, is a matter of degrees and situations, and not an absolute. Which means that how personhood intervenes in social practice can’t necessarily be predicted from our definition of personhood – in the cases Bernardina examines, the tormenting of a bear or a bull before it is killed does not happen because its tormenters lack a sense of the animals personhood, but precisely because they want to provoke aggression on the part of the animal to which they can respond, shifting the blame for the animal’s death to the animal itself as a person responsible for lashing out, for acting badly.

In the Christian tradition, it is only recently that environmental historians have pursued the thesis that Christianity, by entrusting nature to man, devalued the environment. I am skeptical. Christianity, in the broad ancient tradition, certainly did not ascribe property to animals. They owned nothing. Yet they did have holes and nests. They had families. Christian iconography is actually replete with peaceful animals, with the redeemed sheep, with the dove, etc.

 

The animal might not have a property relationship with the world – they could be hunted, they could be sacrificed, they could be eaten – but they were, of course, God’s creation.

 

Not the machine. The machine not only has not property claim on the world – it has no home. It has no family. The son of man would not say, the chariots have sheds, the hammers have a box – although he’d know it, being a carpenters son. In the double logic of the dissolution of the human limit, when Descartes and the early modern natural philosophers compare the animal to the machine – and man, too – they both advance a new claim about the human relationship to the world (dissolving any limit to its use) while advancing a new and unrecognizable form of human – the man machine, the Other – as the human subject.

The poverty of the worker, who sinks to the state of a machine, is the flip side of the glory of the proletariat, the Other who is the subject of universal history. What does the poverty consist in? Marx sees it, of course, in terms of wealth – but also refinement – the “Verfeinerung der Gesellschaft.” I would call this poverty an imprisonment in routines. It is hard to resist jumping ahead to Freudian terms, having to do with obsessive behavior and neurosis, which, after all, is the mechanical coming to the surface – the arm or leg that doesn’t work, that has returned to dead matter.

It is easy to forget that the Descartes or Le Mettrie’s machine was an automaton, an entertainment. Court societies love F/X, whether it is Versailles, Hollywood or D.C. – but in real material terms, the automata did nothing more than demonstrate the uses of a winding mechanism. What Marx is talking about is not that kind of machine.

As Wolfgang Schivelbusch nicely puts it at the beginning of The Railway Journey, the Europe of the eighteenth century, which was still the Europe of wood and woods, of energy supplied by streams and forests, was losing its woods. He quotes Sombart – and I am going to give some elbow room here to exaggeration and the blind eye turned to the forests in America. Still, wood was becoming more expensive, and in this way an opportunity opens up for other means of energy and structure – notably, coal and iron. To which one must add that water, too, but in a new form – as steam – is part of the complex. In one of the historical ironies that the economic historian scrupulously skirts, even the Corn laws, decried for two centuries, actually contributed to the industrial revolution, for, by raising the price of grain and thus of keeping horses, they “helped replace horsepower by mechanical power in much the same way shortage of wood in 18th century Europe had accelerated the development of coal production.”

So, the older elements of life – that obsession of the romantics in perhaps the last final bloom of eotechnical Europe – were being reconfigured before Marx’s eyes. When Marx was expelled from Paris in 1845, he took the messagerie – the stagecoach – to the Belgian border. In 1848, when he was kicked out of Belgium, he took the train back to Paris.

We could measure those three years biographically – or geologically, as human technological needs produced wealth and a planetary alteration in the cosmic order we are beginning to feel.

thinking something else

 

Like many people – hell, I’m going for the vulgar generalization and saying like ever-y-body – I am always thinking of something else. I don’t think it is a bad guess that when Descartes wrote “cogito ergo sum”, he was thinking of something else – where am I going with this? Is the woman across the canal going to be in the fruitmarket again? I wonder if I should have some chicken broth? Hmm, bet those foutus Jesuits are going to piss in their gowns over this part, but ha ha – I’m out-Augustine-ing you, mes freres! Things like that.

A good deal of thinking, in my experience, is thinking of something else. I go down the street and instead of thinking about the street and its multiple ghosts and encounters, I am thinking about, say, writing about thinking of something else.

Yet the cogito’s thinking is supposedly a straight shot, from subject to object. The “else” that gets in there doesn’t figure much in philosopher talk. Yet my head is as filled with “else” as a pinball machine is filled with combination shot opportunities. Some people spill that else into conversation, making it hard to keep up – the conversational topic keeps reeling around. In moments of physical action, say in brushing my teeth, though I do look at the teeth and the foam churned up in there by the brush, I often find myself thinking of a news story, or a person in the news I hate, or the laundry, or money.

Else does not correspond directly with a logical function. It is chased about in Grice’s rules of implicature, which put a premium on pertinence. Else’s book is Tristam Shandy – or Potocki’s Manuscript found in Saragossa. Etymologically, else is an other – it is related to the Latin alius and the Greek allo. An other, a foreigner – thinking of something else has a certain retroactive power, making the subject a foreigner to itself.

To “only connect” is to come home – but the possibility, in every homecoming, is that the homecomer is alien to the home by the very nature of his trip. He’s someone else. How did he get there?

Odysseus found this out the hard way.

 

poem for Stevie Smith

Isn't it dishonesty

this felt disproportion

between the gaps in my head

and the words in my mouth?

What I do around here

What I do

Is lie in bed

Dressed in Grandma's clothes.

In the movie

The old samurai

Dusty at the entrance to the village

Unsheathes an eloquent sword

With a rusty gesture.

I can identify.

To take strategies from the fox

Arbitrager’s carnivore

To fill my hunger

Clucking like an old hen

With oafish bit players

Instead of dangerous prey...

Oh chateaux – oh bandes dessinées!

Maybe I should exit stage left.

It's the dishonor I can’t stand.

Not the woodman’s necessity sharpened axe.

For Daniel Ellsberg

The background story to the Pentagon Papers started out with a payment of 6,742 dollars. That is how much the U.S. government, in its majesty, decided to shell out to the family of Thai Khak Chuyen, who was a Vietnamese “translator and informant” who worked with the Green Berets in Laos. That the Green Berets were in Laos was, itself, a rather iffy proposition – who authorized that? And who authorized the torture and murder of “Mr. Chuyen”?

The first question is answered, in various stories about this incident, with the phrase: “covert mission.” In the semi-democracy of the United States in its Cold War phase, “covert missions” could emerge, with no traditional legal warrant, at the whim of the executive branch, and be carried out with the compliance of a Congress that took on the role of the blindfolded observer, the Daddy warbucks who passed the bills doling out money to intelligence agencies who worked for the “Defence Department”. In the end, as the Nixon regime battled to pull out with “peace and honor” from Southeast Asia, some Congress peeps even sought to exert some control over executive whim.

The Cold War foreign policy struggle was ultimately won by the Cold Warriors – Truman through Bush, the whole lot.

The second question, though, was a story now pretty much forgotten. Highlights: Mr. Chuyen appeared, or so it was thought, in a secret photo that showed him talking with a North Vietnamese officer. But he was suspected, as well, of being a channel to the South Vietnamese, to the government of Thieu. And the Central Intelligence Agency, which was ultimately pulling the strings in Laos and in much of South Vietnam, wanted to control the information that went to Thieu’s government.

Thus, Mr. Chuyen, unconsciously, was at the center of both a geopolitical and interbranch conflict.

At the same time, Mr. Chuyen had made friends with some of the Green Beret’s he was interacting with. One of them, a sergeant, Alvin L. Smith, went to Saigon with Mr. Chuyen, Phem Kim Lien, his wife, and Lien’s sister. “He was always going to Saigon with Chuyen for one thing or another. But it didn’t seem wrong until afterwards,” his Captain, Robert F. Marasco, testified.

At some point in June, 1969, questions arose about Chuyen. These questions were circumscribed by the situation of the Green Berets, who, under the indirect direction of the CIA, were part of something called Operation Gamma. Operation Gamma was enacted outside the purview of American law, and involved hazy incursions into Cambodia and Laos.

Smith “decided that because he was the only enlisted man, a non-commissioned officer, involved in the Chuyen thing, that we did not trust him and would kill him,” according to Marasco, who also said that was “ridiculous.” It might be the case that Smith had seen how killing could be done to not seem like killing – how a man could be told to head down a trail, for instance, by people who were pretty sure he wouldn’t come back. It might not have been so ridiculous.

Even for an American. For Chuyen, what happened was: the Green Beret’s arrested him, hooded him, took him to an island prison camp, pumped him full of sodium pentothal and for six days interrogated him, depriving him of sleep. But they couldn’t get him to confess.

At a certain point, then, the question was elimination, or what other people call murder. Consulting with their CIA contact in Saigon, they got an ambiguous answer. The CIA wasn’t opposed or for. They were tossing the question back to the Green Beret group. They weighed letting Mr. Chuyen go, but then, what if he spilled the beans, dread thought, to the Saigon government? Fighting for a democracy that had never been a democracy was one thing, but telling the government in Saigon what the Americans were doing was something else.

The solution came out of the Green Beret discussion, in which the options were: drop him out of a plane over the Sea, land him in Taiwan and let the secret police disappear him, garrot him, or do the right thing, the only thing – put two bullets in his head and dump the body.

Captain Marasco did the shooting. Then they dumped the body in the sea, wrapped in two iron chains. And then their consciences began to work on them.

Meanwhile, in Saigon, Ted Shackley, the CIA head, decided that they shouldn’t eliminate Chuyen. So he asked the Green Beret unit to put him in touch with Chuyen. The unit responded that he’d gone back to Cambodia. Shackley knew what that meant, so he laid the matter down with General Abrams – making it an army matter. The army investigated, questioning the CIA contact in Saigon, who said: “I advised Major Crew that eliminating Chuyen couldn’t be approved. However, I did say it was the most efficient course of action.”

The wheels grind. The Green Beret unit is arrested on the charge of murdering Chuyen. And this is where politics enters in. Nixon’s people were advised by the CIA that if it really came to trial, they might have to testify about Operation Gamma – essentially, blowing the cover on their illegal operation. Nixon’s people did not want the cover blown on Gamma. Nixon’s people were all about delivering a hard body blow to the North Vietnamese and their allies so that Nixon would have time to withdraw with “honor” from Vietnam. But Nixon’s Defence Department was, after all, at war as well with the CIA. The Defence Department said that at the trial, they would call CIA agents to the stand.

Helms said no. No agents could be called to the stand. The Defence Department, on September 29, announced the trial couldn’t be held, and the men were free. The headline in the NYT read: ARMY DROPS BERETS’ CASE AS C.I.A. BARTS ITS AGENTS FROM TESTIFYING AT TRIAL.

The Los Angeles Times had a similar headline. It was read that morning by Daniel Ellsberg in Malibu. He had had been moving towards the decision to leak the documents he’d been copying, and that story decided the matter for him.

Mr. Cuyen’s murder was a small thing in that murderous war, and it is just its smallness that should make us wonder about Nemesis and her instruments. Out of that murder arose the decision that resulted in the publication of the Pentagon Papers. And out of that leak arose the decision to stop leaks, leading to the formation of the White House Plumbers Group. And out of that group arose a number of decisions – the burglary of Daniel Ellsburg’s psychiatrist’s office, for instance – that led up to the Watergate burglary. And out of that fifth rate affair, as Nixon called it, arose the investigations, the Senate and House Committees, and the resignation of President Nixon.

On December 29, 1972, Edward Lorenz gave a talk to the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science with the title: Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas. Scientists don’t dicker with nemesis. Novelists do. Yet at that date, all unconsciously, the splash of a weighted body being lowered into the South China Sea one June night in 1969 was causing, in its small way, the overthrow of the American emperor. Who had just celebrated the biggest landslide victory in twentieth century history.

cormac

 

To sic James Wood on Cormac McCarthy is unfair to the sensibilities of both writers. The New Yorker obit/review of the two last McCarthy book tries for the sweeping overview, but Wood is permanently not in the mood for McCarthy - hence his elevation of The Road, surely one of McCarthy's minor novels, as the major work over Blood Meridian, against which Wood tosses such howlers as: "Of course, his earlier novels explored “themes” and, in their way, ideas; an academic industry loyally decodes McCarthy’s every blood-steeped move around evil, suffering, God or no-God, the Bible, genocidal American expansion, the Western, environmental catastrophe, and so on. But those novels did not purvey, and in some sense could have no space for, intellectual discourse. These books were inhospitable to intellectuals, with their characteristic chatter." For Wood, an intellectual must either work at the New Yorker or teach at some respectable Ivy League school. They wear an I badge. But anybody who reads Blood Meridian and encounters the Judge encounters intellectual talk as high placed as that iof the figures in Moby Dick. The inability to see ideas in ordinary life - in ordinary American life - marks Wood's odd relationship to American letters.

Dwight Garner, god bless him, is much better in the NYT obituary. He gets McCarthy's oddness right. McCarthy's world is marked, like the world of Melville's Pequod, by a startling absense of women, of the feminine in general. But the homoerotic bonds don't find their hetero places as friendships - male friendship is as passing a state as, say, marriage. These are books essentially about loners and their disastrous effect on those about them. The Border Trilogy is McCarthy's exploration of what it might be like not to be a loner, but there is a certain static in that exploration, a certain sacrifice of narrative magnificence.

The truly American torture is solitary - something visited upon thousands of men every day in that God forsaken land. It is an extension of, a sort of diabolical parody of, individualism - that strange and very hetero fantasy ideology, which suppresses the mother role entirely, which seriously holds, among people whose lives were spent, as babies and children, eating free lunches, breakfasts and dinners, that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Taking that asociality into the wilderness - or its shadow, the backwards culture of pre-Civil Rights Dixie - is what makes McCarthy fascinating. It is also what makes McCarthy repulsive - especially to someone like James Wood, who can't "see" it.

This, from the great - or in Woods' view, unsound- Blood Meridian. The Judge is sketching and writing things in a notebook:

"A Tennessean named Webster had been watching him and he asked the judge what he aimed to do with those notes and sketches and the judge smiled and said that it was his intention to expunge them from the memory of man. Webster smiled and the judge laughed. Webster regarded him with one eye asquint and he said: Well you’ve been a draftsman somewheres and them pictures is like enough the things themselves. But no man can put all the world in a book. No more than everthing drawed in a book is so.

Well said, Marcus, spoke the judge.

But dont draw me, said Webster. For I dont want in your book.

My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it’s writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all."

 

Nathaniel Mackay's oppositional nostalgia, and mine

 

The poet Nathaniel Mackay wrote a brilliant, manifesto-like  essay in 1987 entitled “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol” that begins, as most American poetic manifestos do not begin, with a consideration of anthropological fact. Mackay begins with the belief about sound and music – bird music, wind music – of the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea. Kaluli myth – rather like Greek myth – locates the origin of music in the moment in which a human being is transformed into a bird. Philomela of course has left her mark on modern poetry – jug jug to dirty ears/so rudely forced. In the Kaluli case, a boy and his sister are catching crayfish. The boy begs some of the crayfish from his sister. She refuses. He puts a crayfish over his nose, which becomes a red beak. Then he spouts wings and flies away as a muni bird. Rather like the Grimm’s tale, the Juniper Bush, in which the soul of a murdered boy becomes a bird that sings an accusatory song, the muni bird’s song goes: "Your crayfish you didn't give me. I have no sister. I'm hungry . . .”

Mackay begins in Papua because he wants to make a point about the world.

 

“One easily sees the compatibility of this musical concept of the world, this assertion of the intrinsic symbolicity of the world, with poetry. Yeats's view that the artist "belongs to the invisible life" or Rilke's notion of poets as "bees of the invisible" sits agreeably beside Zuckerkandl's assertion that "because music exists, the tangible and visible cannot be the whole of the given world. The intangible and invisible is itself a part of this world, something we encounter, something to which we respond.” Victor Zuckerkandl is the musicologist whose story of the Kaluli is sampled by Mackay.

Which brings us to the question: isn’t this all just pre-scientific nonsense?

Mackay’s argument, his poetics, begins with the rejection of the overarching positivism that poses that rhetorical question and comfortably answers it with an “of course”. But Mackay doesn’t want to reject that positivism for some reactionary theology. Instead, in a wonderful coinage, Mackay calls for an “oppositional nostalgia.” Mackay’s essay is centered on black music, the orphaned boy’s song, but moves widely among a number of texts, including Toomer’s Cane. “Cane is fueled by an oppositional nostalgia. A precarious vessel possessed of an eloquence coincident with loss, it wants to reach or to keep in touch with an alternate reality as that reality fades.”

My own sense of politics is absolutely in touch with Mackay’s poetics. My mature life has coincided with the fading of all the postwar social democratic institutions. And I have seen the left hamstrung by a rhetoric and conceptual structure that, while useful to the making of those institutions, seems at a loss to defend them. I’ve seen that especially lately in France, where Macron’s killing of the social security system is opposed by the vast majority, which is an opportunity that the left does not know how to take advantage of. But this is an old story, as old as my twenties, the years of Reagan and Thatcher. The reification of revolution only gives us a past to break from. But a larger perspective shows us the need for an oppositional nostalgia – for the reference landscapes of childhood, for instance – those landscapes that have been decayed and attacked by our petrochemical treadmill of production, to the point that they are turning against us.

There are many levels of oppositional nostalgia. I think I have moved within that term, without knowing it, my entire life, and I think I know some of those levels.

The reference landscape and the big fire

 

It is hard to keep hold of an emergency feeling when the urgency is sliced and diced by the news cycle. We know that the past twenty years have been crucial. We know that once, in the old days at the end of the Cold War, we – we meaning the developed economies of the world – actually acted to prevent the ozone hole from eating us up. And we know since, we have done squat as we watch through our windows, on our nature specials, on our vacations, the world as we know it undergo what fire historian Stephen Pyne calls “the spectacle of unremitting loss.”

As the atmosphere emergency drifts South and West, the focus turns to the usual trivia. Well, naturally. Still, a good time to read Pyne’s essay in Aeon.

 An excerpt:

“I see the world through a pyric prism. In the reforging of Earth, I see fires, especially those burning fossil fuels, as a cause. I see fires, mutating into megafires, as a consequence – and fires everywhere as a catalyst. The Anthropocene is, for me, a Pyrocene, as humanity’s fire practices create the fire-informed equivalent of an ice age. But fire, and even the charred landscapes it can leave in its wake, is more than an issue of human health, busted ecosystems, creaky institutions or bad behaviour. This is also a matter of aesthetics.

This thought came to me during a field trip to the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico in 2014. Three years earlier, the Las Conchas fire, part of a wave train of conflagrations, had blasted across the Pajarito Plateau and into the Los Alamos National Laboratory. When its plume collapsed, the fire sent hot air across forested mesas and through gorges, like the pyroclastic flow from a volcano. The flames culled woods, dappled the forest with blowouts and, in some sites burned down to bare rock, not even blackened stumps remained. Craig Allen, a fire researcher with the US Geological Survey, was our docent, and as we scanned the still-scorched countryside, he described not so much the scene before us as the scene that the fire had taken from him – a vision of the land restored to its precontact state.”

The contact – a term which has displaced the old Eurocentric term, “discovery”, but which has still not found its poetic bearings. The warmer climate has been thought of in terms of mounting ocean levels, and it is that. But so far are we from the trees that have sustained us, that we don’t see the fires mounting up, just for us.

"Lord Krishna said: The universe (or human body) may be compared to an eternal tree that has its origin (or root) in the Supreme Being and its branches below in the cosmos. The Vedic hymns are the leaves of this tree. One who understands this tree is a knower of the Vedas. (15.01)

The branches of this eternal tree are spread all over the cosmos. The tree is nourished by the energy of material Nature; sense pleasures are its sprouts; and its roots of ego and desires stretch below in the human world causing Karmic bondage."

Werner Sombart,  an early twentieth century historian of capitalism – a man of the right, I should say – saw how the trees were necessary for the ships that formed the logistical core of imperialism and trade up until the late nineteenth century. Da steht ein Baum – well, Rilke’s Orpheus was smarter than he knew. Marx’s economic enlightenment came about when he discovered changes in the laws on gleaning wood in the land around Koeln. The Russian novelists depict feckless landholders whose wealth is measured by the forests that they sell to entrepreneurs. Set the Dead souls to one side, it was the trees from Russia that went into the great liberal era in Europe.

Another excerpt from Pyne's essay:

"Yet I wondered what my grandchildren might see if they were present. I recalled a comment by Bertrand Russell who said that what most people mean when they speak of returning to nature is really a desire to return to the world they knew as a child (or, I would add, the world they knew when they came of age). What existed then seems natural. Whatever comes next – new species, new habits, new machines – seems intrusive, disturbing and alien.

That childhood world – what we might call our ‘reference landscape’ – is the marker by which we measure the present and coming world. It’s how we judge the new world as welcoming or hostile, lovely or marred. A reference landscape might be personal, but it might also be shared by a society or nation. When the world itself is being overturned, personal grief can become intergenerational."

Our reference landscapes are coming apart. Russell, a product of the nineteenth century industrialized Britain that produced, among other things, the first diagnosis of allergy, had a reference landscape that was already radically different from that of his eighteenth century ancestors.  I think of Shelley's reference landscape and how the seeds, in the coming storms, will be all burned to a crisp:

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Cain's papers

 

Few writers have seen their best sentences become their death sentences. Morris Markey, though, was one of those few.

Lawrence Morris Markey. He is best known, if known at all, as an early New Yorker writer. He wrote novels too – about Dixie. His wife was related to Margaret Mitchell, but he married her before the latter became the author of Gone With The Wind. That must have peeved him – he’d been the one to leave Atlanta behind and make it in New York and the big time. The big time dwindled in Hollywood, in Holiday Magazine, in writing radio spots.

As well, while Mitchell went in for 19th century prose, Markey’s reporting on murders, vagabands and riff raff was very much Neue Sachlichkeit, the American version.

Markey is associated with two engrossing articles about murders, some of which are still recycled for the mystery and the podcastery in them. One was the murder of Starr Faithfull, whose body was tossed up on the shore of Long Beach, Long Island on June 8, 1931. The other murder, also of a flapper, was of Dot King, who was found murdered in her “love nest” on the 15th of March, 1923. Both murders have generated books and websites.

The second paragraph of the Mysterious Death of Starr Faithfull  begins as follows:

“It lies within the very nature of a mystery story that it must be told backward. The only possible beginning is the corpse. And then things are learned and told about the corpse and the creature that existed before it became a corpse…”

Did I say that Morris Markey and James Cain were friends?

Of course, the corpse is definitely a given, but it need never be discovered, or it can be discovered within the elastic schedule of the writer’s telling.

However, I rather like it, gruesomely, that Morris Markey, who left an imprint on the Cold Blood genre, was a creature who left a mystery with his corpse himself, one that the coroner left open: suicide, accident or murder.

On July 12, 1950, the Atlanta Constitution published a story that began: “Gunshot kills L.M.Markey, ex-Atlantan: Lawrence Morris Markey, 51, former Atlanta newspepr reporter, died Monday night of a gunshot wound in his home in Halifax, Virginia.”

And thus, the corpse with the small .22 entrance wound behind its ear.

In the Constitution story, Markey was found “in a downstairs hall and that a .22 caliber rifle lay nearby, one cartridge fired from it.” It doesn’t tell us if a relative of Margaret Mitchell was in the house.

The coroner relied in his account on the testimonies of those in the house, but he must not have relied entirely, since he does leave the case open. A question mark that could be seen as an accusation against someone in the household.

In his biography of James Cain, Morris Markey holds a considerable place. Markey introduced Cain to Harold Ross at the New Yorker.  When Helen Markey called him up and told him Morris was dead, and invited him to the funeral, Cain went. Oddly “Helen had not said how Markey died, and it was not until Cain reached Petersburg and bought a Richmond paper that he learned Morris had been shot.”

Truly, here’s the set up for a short story. Cain, the author of Double Indemnity, goes to Halifax Virginia and spends a few days snooping about, hearing stories about the death of his friend. Cain heard the tale from Morris’s brother, Marvin Markey.

“On the day before his death… Sue [his daughter] had driven to a store and along the way had seen four little puppies on the side of the road, where somebody had abandoned them. Deciding they should have a merciful end, she took them hom, got out the family .22, and shot them. When she went to bury them, she left the .22 in the hall.”

The family agreed that Morris, drinking and depressed, had jammed the gun against his head from behind and shot himself, presumably to make it look less like a suicide and more like an accident. Insurance reasons. But it made it look like somebody shot him from behind.

Cain, according to Hoopes, wrote this all down in a letter he sent to Laurence Stallings, a mutual friend.

And, to make a true mystery writer’s death  true mystery, the letter has not, as far as I know, been published. It is among Cain’s papers.

Which is a potential title, no? Cain’s papers.

Lead dogs: Kriegszittern and the post-war

 

Kafka being an expert on work related accidents was called upon, in World War I, to use his talents in Prague’s Temporary Psychiatric Hospital for shell shocked soldiers. He wrote a publicity sheet for the Hospital that rather disconcerts his biographer, Reiner Stach.  Far from Kafka the response of the Dadaists, which was to spit on the war. Instead, this is how the sheet begins: “Fellow Countrymen!  The World War, in which all human misery is concentrated, is also a war of nerves, more so than ay previous war. And in this war of nerves, all too many suffer defeat. Just as the intensive operation of machinery during the last few decades’ peacetime jeopardized, far more than ever before, the nervous system of those so employed, giving rise to nervous disturbances and disorders, the enormous increase in the mechanical aspect of contemporary warfare has caused the most serious risks and suffering for the nerves of our fighting men.”

 

This is written for a good purpose, because returning shell shocked soldiers – the famous Kriegszitterer – were definitely in need of care. But it is clothed in the average middle class patriotism of a good Kakanian citizen. Nothing here leads one to doubt the systems at play – they are the given.

 

Of course, at the same time Kafka’s feeling about these systems flowed into such stories as the Penal Colony, where the functionaries of the system that destroys its victims themselves submit to its machinery – but only, note, because there was some bug in the machine, some fault.

 

It is interesting to contrast the end of World War I and the end of World War II. In the second case, the end led to what the French call the “thirty glorious years” – a Keynesian capitalism subtended by extensive social democratic institutions, which were funded, the latter, by heavy taxes on the wealthiest. The former ended with a vast global spirt of liberalism – in the U.S., taxes on the wealthy were halved, and regulations were loosened, while in Britain and France, the movement was to gold standards and financialization of capital.

The currents of the collective psyche are murky. Contemporaries can dive in there, but they come back with doubtful impressions. It is even worse diving into the collective psyche of eras past. However, I do wonder if, after bombing had extended the trauma to civilian populations, the fauna of the urban postwar in the twenties – the crippled, the Kriegszitterer spastically selling pencils on street corners, the literally defaced, all of which became part of ordinary life without really pushing society into a more pacifistic and socialistic system – I wonder if the memory of this worked on the good people streaming away from the onset of the Soviets, cleaning up the rubble in Berlin and London, figuring out the balance of treachery and resistance in Paris, etc.  – I wonder if this memory worked as a powerful incentive to the social insurance put in place in the late forties and fifties. The fate of the mustard gassed veteran from World War I was now no stranger to the firebombed or V2-ed citizen of any European urb.

 

The shell shocked did not only include veterans – in Germany, in particular, it led to an art of shock, of outrage that included in its scope not only the leaders but the led, the frustratingly led. The led who never woke up, who spoke in an already outmoded feudal trance.  There’s a poem of Kurt Tucholsky that has this spirit of outrage in it – Lead dogs. Actually, Tucholsky’s entire work contains this demon of outrage, but this one is short and sweet.  It was published under one of his pseudonyms, Theobold Tiger, in the Weltbuehne in 1921.

 

 

Clever dogs lead the tip tapping blind through the streets

Knowing how to find the right ways, scent and seek.

Once, you sightless, others lead you for four and a half years.

They growled and howled and made living men fear.

 

Once, blind ones, wolves led you into filthy pits,  

Put you in chains and foddered you with bits.

They ran away when it all collapsed. Following their bloody feasts

they skipped over the border with the liability round their necks   . . .

Carefully, your dog quivers at the end of his lead.

His look is faithful, ears cocked, watchful for your need.

 

You, blind men! None, none, of your puffed up, pimped up

Leaders stands so human and high before God as your pup!

 

 

 

 

Beggars and billionaires

 

The beggar and the billionaire bookend neoliberal culture. During the era of the social democratic exception, from the mid forties to roughly the eighties, homelessness – and vagabondage – fell considerably. Not that this was an unmitigated good – from the mental asylum to the housing project, coercion, violence, despair and underfunding were endemic. But the effect of state cuts to welfare and to the general withdrawal of the state from housing, mental health care, and retirement funding had effects that were seen throughout the developed economies.  In Les gens de rien: l’histoire de la grande pauvreté dans le France du XXe siecle, Andre Guesclen traces the decline of vagabondage and homelessness during the thirty glorious years and their return at the end of the century. The same story was told, in 1991, by Joel Blau in The Visible Poor.

The visible poor, an excellent title.

I have a media knowledge of billionaires. How could I not. They populate telenovelas, like Succession, are featured extensively in the business and political press, have groupies and fans, and in general are all around us as parts of the celebrity phantom tribe we think we have a relationship with.

I have an experiential knowledge of beggars. Beggars are not the stars of popular telenovelas, are not extensively interviewed or featured in the business and political press, are not influencers on Instagram or in any way part of the celebrity phantom tribe. But for any urban dweller, they are ghosts of another sort, flesh and blood ghosts. They sleep on doorsteps or in tents or in sleeping bags or in improvised nests of trash. They prostrate themselves in pedestrian heavy areas, with plastic or paper cups by their sides for the stray coin. They choose their spots – outside grocery stores or by ATMs – where, by some perhaps shared convention, they know that people have loose change  on them. They get drunk, or they get stoned. They preach, or they scrawl signs, they favor parks, they tell stories of hunger on subway trains and trams.

On the whole, my experience with beggars is much like anyone else’s. That is, if they anyone else has some money somewhere. Sometimes I give, more often I don’t. I have a sort of tally in my head, and if I haven’t given for a while, I give more. Never a lot. Mostly I say no, no thanks, sorry, etc. No, no thanks, sorry, etc. constitutes, for the most part, the conversation between the beggar and the non-beggar population.

A couple days ago I tossed out my “non” to a man accosting me on Rue Charlot. However, he aimed a few words at my back that made me turn around. I don’t remember what they were. I approached him. He was a short black man of beggar’s age – that is, anywhere from 30 on up. Living rough has a way of erasing the middle class marks of age and registering new ones. This man had a hat. He held in his hand a booklet of some sort. As I came closer, he showed me what it was: song sheets. And he explained that he was a singer, that he sang for his money, but that he was too tired to sing today.

I gave him some Euros, and went on. A singer.

Where the media culture does feature the beggar, and there in abundance, is in poetry. In song, Gypsy Davy still steals the wife of the landowner. The hobo rides the rails, and Beau Jangles will dance for you in worn out shoes.

Why song and poetry has the beggar in its heart, and not the billionaire, is of some interest. Song and poetry is as servile as other media – it has long celebrated kings and warriors. But it has never celebrated the bourgeoisie. Other supposedly non-poetic objects – a note about plums on a table, a bright particular chameleon – have roused the poetic consciousness, but the bourgeoisie have been turned over and over by novelists, who found them dramatic in exact proportion to the scandals that de-bourgeois-fy them, and been ignored, mostly, by the poets. True, the sitcom is the glory of the bourgeoisie, and that is no mean thing in the history of art. However, I don’t quite know how to measure this.

Beggars have attracted some  attention on tv, but mainly in shows that are framed around the police. The Wire, even, is framed around the police – although I remember seeing the first shows of the first season of the Wire and crying, because finally, finally people in a housing project were being seen. The visible poor were being made visible. Of course, they were visible as part of a larger plot, but still.

That singing beggar rang a lot of bells for me. We live near a park named for a singer and songwriter, Beranger, whose songs were sung by beggars on the street in 19^th century Paris. Baudelaire, who lived around here  (it is hard to find a spot in Paris that is not near where Baudelaire, a most homeless man, lived for a while), wrote a poem that is still unloved and very analysed, La Mendiante rousse, about a redhaired beggar clothed in rags that barely covered her – much as, today, beggars in real desperation sometimes clothe themselves in such plastic sheeting as you find at construction sites, a costume that parodies the gaudiest bride’s gown.

Blanche fille aux cheveux roux,
Dont la robe par ses trous
Laisse voir la pauvreté
Et la beauté.

The poverty and the beauty. A combination we have lost. Bo Jangles is deader than a doornail.

 

The Forseeable third: Albert Thibaudet and the Sybilline Prophecies

 

Albert Thibaudet was a ferociously learned man, which was both his glory and his great fault. When he would travel from the towns in which he taught – Abbeville, Amiens – or from the town in which he was born – Tornus, a wine town midway between Dijon and Lyon – to Paris, he’s carry one valise with his clothes and toiletry, and a heavier valise with his books.  He was the type of man to whom nothing exactly happened: born to a wealthy landowner, he went through the university system in the late 19^th century, became enamored of Mallarme’s writing and wrote a book about it, was published by the thick magazines and ended up at the NRF under Gide, and wrote more books, articles, letters to the mandarins (Valery, Gide, Maurras, Barres, etc.), all of whom he knew.

This life of nothing happening was interrupted by World War I. He was in his forties, but he enlisted and was put in a company that built roads and structures for the soldiers – and even buried a few. These were happy years for Thibaudet. He stayed, even though he could have pulled strings to get out, all the way from 1914 to demobilisation, in 1919. He discovered the “people”, and this was a wonderful discovery for him – it kept him from the natural arc towards the right. He was always suspicious of xenophobia, and the Action Francaise attacks on romanticism, the Germans and the Jews.

About the latter: Thibaudet seems to have had the tepid anti-semitism of his upbringing, but in general he was opposed to anti-semitism. This opposition took a strange form: he believed that anti-semitism was a media thing that peaked during the Dreyfus affair (during which he took no sides, barely noticing it). Thus, after the war, when he did his greatest work, and even wrote some still readable books about the history of French politics, he didn’t see what was happening before his eyes. He died in 1936, in Switzerland, and thus missed the events that crawled out of his blind spot.

Like Ford Maddox Ford’s character Christopher Tienjens, Thibaudet was a humanist – albeit not of the martyring Tory type. He marched off to war with three books in his backpack – Montaigne, Virgil and Thucydides. After demobilization, he collected the notes he made on Thucydides into a book: Campaigning with Thucydides. Thibaudet definitely had the Greek for it – in some ways, he is like Leo Strauss with his sense that the classical writers had, in a sense, foreshadowed the modern era. I like the book for its beginning.

“One knows the story. One day the Sibyl brought nine books to Tarquin; in them was contined the future and Rome. She demanded a considerable sum for the books. Tarquin, a careful man, refused. The following year she returned, told the king that she had burned three of the nine books, and offered him the others for the same price. Tarquin took her for a crazy woman and chased her away. A year later, he saw her again. She had burned three more books, and she wanted the same sum. Then Tarquin, be it that he was given good advice, be it that his own inspiration,  recognized her for a sage, counted out the money to her and conserved the three books in the Capitol: the Sibylline  books.”

It is a story like one of Jesus’s parables in the Bible, and like the great parables, it is the story of a deal.  Thibaudet approaches the story as a symbol of the intersection of history and politics.

Historians, thinking of “six lost books, can reflect that the proportion of a third in our possible knowledge of the future was nearly normal, and proportioned to human intelligence.

“The study of history might also lead us to conclude that there are laws and there is what will be. It can thus lead us to think that the historic duree is as unforeseeable as the psychological duree, and that history represents an incessant import of the irreducible and the new. These two arguments are equally true and face each other like Kant’s antinomies. But given a long experience, we receive the impression that in reality, the two orders is mixed together indiscernibly, and that what is reasonably foreseeable exists, penetrated at all points by what is not, by what is, in its essence, inexistant, and that human intelligence, applied to the practical, must ceaselessly find the mean between the two tableaux, and that that proportion of the foreseeable third constitutes a healthy pragmatic belief…

“This foreseeable third, founded on the regularity of the laws of the universe, suffices, when we know to exploit it, for our action and the almost reasonable enchainment of our individual and social life. Without it we could not live. But without the unforeseeable two thirds we couldn’t live either, or rather, we would live as machines. The Sibyl could have sold even more dearly a premonition of the three nineth than of the nine nineth to the King of Rome. A complete foreseeing of the future would take from our action all its human, living, tragic character.”

Underneath Thibaudet’s rather brilliant exposition of this fragment of Roman history, one sees one of the questions of Jesus, known in the homiletic literature as the “foolish exchange”: “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

The Roman notion of virtue fled from the touch of the absolute, and bargained for the foreseeable third. It was not by some vote, some consciousness, that we – we humans, all of us rock n rollers – decided on the nukes, on the hole in the ozone layer, on the heat waves and acidification of the oceans, on the inequality and the squalor. These things happened as man writ large decided to go for curtain number one, the World.

Two traditions. It is a funny thing how little we remember, we who lived through it, the 00s. I do remember them. I remember how, in the invasion of Iraq and its occupation, the magical thought, cheered on by journalist and politician, was that there was no “then” there – that by magic, by some spontaneous generation, democracy and peace would descend on what was a cold blooded act of aggression and violence – since of course the responsible parties could never be held responsible for their cold bloodedness, their ignorance, their aggression, their violence. And so it has actually been – those acts were knotted, so to speak, into what came after. All was forgiven, the torture tapes were burnt, our attention spans were invited to other venues, and a culture that deserved, by any measure of justice or simply practicality, to be cancelled, wasn’t. In the aftermath, it was so tender about cancelling that even a comedian masturbating before his workstaff was considered to be martyred if he didn’t make his next 100 million.

Cancellation, though, has been the fate of maybe a million Iraqis. And will be the fate of millions in the heat and the floodwater to come. The cancellation is coming like God’s own planet sized hammer.

There are many stories in the books that the Sybil burnt. This is one of them.