Epidemiology of a cliche

Hendrick Herzberg at the New Yorker had the cleverest idea. Why not apply the  Kubler Ross stages of grief to the Romney defeat? I don’t know why nobody else has ever thought of this. 

“… the House. The Republicans will have seven or eight fewer seats in that body, but hold it they did, and this fact is what those among them who are stuck at Stage 1 of Mme. Kübler-Ross’s five-stage topography of grief (“Denial”), and even a few who are tentatively assaying Stage 3 (“Bargaining”), are clinging to. (Talk radio is permanently tuned to Stage 2, “Anger,” and Stage 4, “Depression,” hangs heavy.) In the view of these Republicans, the election was a tie; and on the legitimacy of their most cherished goal—keeping rich folks’ taxes at their current historic lows…”

Meanwhile, Will Oremus at Slate had the cleverest idea ever to brighten that mag: why not apply the Kubler Ross stages of grief to the Fox News perception of the Romney defeat? I can’t believe nobody ever thought of this!

In Fox News' election coverage Tuesday night, there was little pretense of fairness or balance. What there was, from the start, was a glum tone that turned downright funereal by the time Mitt Romney finally conceded, near 1 a.m. To watch the network's anchors and guests work through the dawning realization that their candidate was doomed was to witness a textbook case of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief.

Meanwhile, in the Guardian,Richard Adams and Tim McCarthy had the brilliant idea of comparing the conservative reaction to the Election to – Kubler Ross’s five stages of grief! I don’t know where these pundits get their ideas, but isn’t that just brilliant and unexpected? 

“On the Kübler-Ross model, Red State's Erick Erickson is still at stage one:

The odds were never with us historically. It has nothing to do with an embrace of one world view or rejection of another. It is just damn hard to beat an incumbent President who is raking in millions and laying a ground work for re-election while your side is fighting it out in a primary.That's like wandering around saying "I'm fine, honestly."

Meanwhile the RedState site itself seems to at stage two”

The NYT’ is unfortunately behind the curve this cycle in brilliantly and unexpectedly pairing  Kubler Ross and the election. Perhaps this is because Frank Rich, in 2008, was already using Kubler Ross to talk about the Republicans. Or perhaps it is because in the analysis of the 2010 defeat by the Democrats, political reporter Henry Alford compared the Democratic reaction to… Kubler Ross!

Then of course there is Jordan Bloom at the American Conservative, who analysed the GOP reaction  to their loss in terms of … Kubler-Ross! The Daily Kos thread which analyzed the GOP loss in terms of… Kubler-Ross! And the columnist for the Albany Union-Leader who analyzes the GOP loss in terms of… Kubler Ross!

This collection almost makes me think – almost! – that we have about done to death the comparison with Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief and elections. And having done it to death, are we going to grieve?

Perhaps. My grief will take the form of wondering if there is anything – burning the eggs, missing your bus – that can’t be subsumed into the Kubler-Ross grieving process. And whether that process with its supposed order cherrypicks reactions to create a pseudo-universal.

But I wouldn’t want to knock the sheer genius of the political analysis we have had during this election cycle. That would be anger and denial, and I won’t do that!

We are not post

I grew tired of living in the post – post whatever – age in the eighties. I suppose post-ness was inevitable. It was one of the great peculiarity of the imperialist mindset of the age of discovery and exploitation that time itself has been wrenched from the reality we all know – which is that we all live synchronically in the same time – to a time that reflects what we want to believe – that in th

e same moment x peoples are “modern” and y peoples are ‘primitive’, or in the “Stone Age”. The very idea that the ages have to do with hard materials – rather than, say, the age of knots, or the age of quincunxes - was part of the Man’s program. But the program got tired, hence the post-iness, as if we had been raptured from that history, even as we enjoyed its fruits to the last drop.
One of the posts we don’t live in is the post-phallogocentric age. This is something that comes through clearly when you have a baby, for one of the great games of babydom is to find who the baby resembles. Having a male baby – Adam – has made the game easier, for Adam is supposed to resemble me.
Myself, I don’t see it. I must admit, here, that I have an odd blindness concerning what I look like. When, for instance, I look at family albums, it always takes me a few seconds to put a name to the blonde haired, hunched teen that often forms part of the family group. Oh, me again! And I have lost complete contact with what I look like in the age of digital photographs. I put up photos of myself like any other digital narcissist on facebook, but they do slightly amaze me, because the person in those photos couldn’t be more alien to the person who is, supposedly, inhabiting the face, body and glasses that the photos portray. I have a certain, well, a-sthesia about my face and general aboutness.
But to come back to the point – it isn’t that Adam looks like me or A. that impresses me at the moment (A.’s relatives in America, in fact, think he looks “so French”), but how, at four weeks in his mission to planet earth, I can already see outcroppings of us, gestures and head turns and movements of the eyebrows. Gestures are the music of the body, and in Adam is met our two different melodies, while something – a vanishing point of genius – adds just a little turn to the mix, making all the difference. But there is only one gesture I wanted to write about here. Myself, I do not like being tucked in. Specifically, I do not like my feet being under a blanket. When we check into hotel rooms, I thoroughly and alarmingly deconstruct the bed sheets, which in hotels they have a tendency to fold rigidly under the mattress. They also have a tendency to pile on sheets, which adds to my discomfort. My feet are being strangled! I, absurdly, want to scream. I have noticed that Adam has the same disinclination to the whole totally swaddled thing. Perhaps every infant is the same, but still, I get a little possessive pride when I see my boy kick out of what we are wrapping him in - his Magic Wrap swaddling clothes, or his blankie – even if I know that this won’t do, and wrap him up again. Am I projecting? Or simply watching an impulse, a recklessness, that found its way through me, and is finding its way through Adam, and so on down the generations?

In my suit of irony

“As through this world I travel/ I see lots of funny men”… Truer words never came out of Woody Guthrie’s mouth. As through this world I travel, I also reflect on the funny man I have become. Especially now, as I am the privileged witness – a dad! – to the baby days of another funny man, our Adam. However, as I sit here, filled with a porridge like warmth of love, as another day struggles to drop a little light in the morning streets of Paris,  I also worry a bit that I am going to lose my edge, my attitude, my peculiar funniness. As proof, I can look behind me at the veritable pile of cuteness that has accumulated in the room that Adam will eventually be sleeping in. There’s the cute pyjamas with the cute print of bears and giraffes, there’s the cute dolls (among which I should mention a large donkey given to us by our friend Sylvie, which has won my heart, if not Adam’s – I do love donkeys), and I think to myself: am I losing my mind? For cuteness was the one thing that I have always feared, the one thing impervious to edge. Cuteness reverses the terms of irony. It disarms distance. To take an ironic attitude to nouveau-ne pjs is to make irony ridiculous. Which is a problem if, like me, you’ve pledged your soul to irony. That pledge goes back all the way to when I first heard of irony, which must have been in the sixth grade or so. In the Suburban South, you have to surrender your soul to something when you reach adolescence. Either you have to be washed in the blood of the lamb, or you have to figure out how not to be.

My choice was irony. Lesser lights (family, friends, teachers) mistakenly called it sarcasm (and my brother Dan improved upon that word by calling it sour-casm, perhaps the best portmanteau word I’ve ever encountered).  Myself, I called it irony, and I loved the very word. I loved the way “iron” is in it. Because of course iron is in stainless steel, and irony, too, has something stainless about it. Once you put on the armor of irony, you can go anywhere, through any flood – for instance, a flood of blood gushing from the Lamb of God – and come through unflecked. What’s not to like about that?

However, it was not only the savior who lurked around the corners of Clarkston, Georgia, waiting to leap out at you – equally powerful was the “cute” and the “darling”. What the passions were to 17^th century French moralists, the cute and the darling were to the suburban families of Atlanta – the fundamental grammar on which all style was grounded. This, actually, misstates the entire power of those words – it was not just a question of taste, but a whole orientation of the lifestyle. Once something was ‘cute’, it was lifted beyond aesthetics. It was headed towards being “too cute”. This meant, oddly enough, that it was just cute enough. At one point, apparently, in the noir 40s, too cute was a sort of putdown – that is how it appears in Raymond Chandler novels, where the not so latent homoerotic panic motivates both the private dick and his antagonists, the male buddy police detectives. But too cute lost the pejorative meaning about the time the GI bill came into effect.

All cuteness, in effect, emanates from the baby, perhaps because, holding your own baby, you become a conduit for such an overwhelming rush of emotion that you need to thin it out or it will short circuit your emotional wiring.  One thing is for sure:  you can’t sit there in your suit of irony, thinking you are sub species aeternitatis about the whole thing. At the moment, I have to confess, I find Adam’s pajamas ‘too cute for words.”

My hope is that we will grow out of this phase. I know at least Adam will. I’m having doubts about myself.

rivers and Adam

Sometimes, after Adam is full to the brim with milk and formula, I sweep him back to me and let him lounge on my chest, his feet hanging off one side of me, his head cradled in the crook of my arm on the other side, and I let him sigh, nestle, burb and burble there. At these times, I think of Adam as a little Huck Finn on his raft. It is a strained association, and yet, to me, an irresistible one. Perhaps it is that he is so small against me, perhaps it is that he is so contented – the analogy to Huck, being pulled by a gigantic force beyond his reckoning, while looking up after his stew at a night sky full of riddles and of vast extent,  at the still point in his flight from his father to territories unknown, conversing with Jim – well, the analogy makes sense to me, and it is why I jump from this image I have so clearly in my mind to  Adam, here, pulled in his own way by gigantic forces, too, the irresistible growth of the body that flows, too, forward, carrying brain, limb, heart, as relentless as a river heading South. And as vulnerable to the blows of life as any boy on a raft in the midst of a mile wide river. I see Adam’s tininess and how he is incredibly bereft of any way of coping with the world of adults, and that he it doesn’t concern him. He still trustingly sprawls across me, making those sucking motions with his mouth between yawns and shutting his eyes (and me on the lookout for the one sure sign of impending sleep, the balled up fists) – this sense of him in the play of giant forces of course floods me with a mixed sense of anxiety (knowing that my fuckups from now on out won’t just weigh primarily on me) and gratitude (to be entrusted with such utter vulnerability somehow must mean, or so my deluded feelings say, that I am  a trustable person).

Of course, Adam has never seen a river, never set eyes on the stars at night or the moon. He hasn’t perhaps even properly seen me or A, as his eyes are not yet operating at that level. Even if he could see, with Paris’ sullen weather and these chill evenings, he isn’t going outside to gaze at the cosmos. Myself, it wasn’t until I was a boy – seven or eight – that I really started dreaming of rivers. The nightly bath was the Amazon. The stream in the woods near our house was the Mississippi. However, I was a suburban Atlanta kid, and never ever imagined the Seine – which will, to my everlasting astonishment, be Adam’s first river. His second will be the Chattahoochee… just so he doesn’t get the idea that a river is always such a civilized thing, so easily spanned by old bridges, so tame, but a thing that is still of the New World, can flood, can carry uprooted trees and flooded houses down with it, and will not be taken for granted by God, babe, or the Corps of Engineers.  

on taste

Gracian’s first book to acquire a European reputation was The Hero. It was translated into English in the seventeenth century, and into French in the early 18^th century by a translator who remarked on Gracian’s resemblance to La Bruyere. A book with such a title, one might expect, is an essay on heroes that one finds in history or literature. But this isn’t so – the book is in a sense a how to book about how to become a hero, or great man. Gracian worked in the field of worldly wisdom – his distant heirs now retail banalities about “leadership science”. The heirs are writing for an audience of essentially uneducated businessmen, and are often as lacking in education themselves, and make up for this last point by being ardent collectors of the inspirational sayings of the famous. Context, of course, isn’t the point – leadership disdains context, which is full of obstacles and other people’s objections, and marches proudly into war, or a higher ROI, with the conviction that the long term will simply be taken up with collecting various sayings of the leadership that did it, to inspire others, and will pay no attention to the blood and guts on the field, the fired help, the long term disasters born out of intoxicating short term gains.

Leadership, in other words, is a royal screwing.

But we can’t blame Gracian for this sad state of affairs, since he was evidently intent on giving advice on how to become a universal man (suitably Catholicized). One of the properties of the hero that Gracian promoted was what his English 17^th century translator called “gusto” – evidently, taste had not yet grown out of its vulgar accountrements of tongue and appetite at this point:

“EVery great capacitie is ever hard to be pleased: The Gusto must as well be improv'd as the wit. Both rais'd and improv'd are like Twinns begotten by capacity and coheirs of excellency: Ne|ver sublime wit yet bred a flat or abject Gusto. There are perfections like the sun, others like light. The Eagle makes love to the sun. The poor frozen fly destroyes her self in the flames of a Candle. The height of a Capacity is best taken by the elevation of a Gusto.”

Gracian’s Gusto operates though the logic of praise and dispraise. The taste of the hero is perfect in as much as its praise and its scorn are appropriate to the object – and there’s the rub. There’s a crooked line under the skin of the culture that leads from Gusto to fandom, or from the universal man to the fan. The world of like and dislike – our ultimate buttons – have simplified and rationalized Gusto until it works for anything. Until, I think, it gets in front of everything.

For years, I was a book reviewer. I am not exaggerating when I say I’ve reviewed more than 500 books – mostly in small reviews for Publishers Weekly, but in bigger reviews for various newspapers and mags. And in the course of reviewing, I began to seriously hate like and dislike. It seemed to me that my like and dislike were not really at stake in reviewing a book. True, it was hard to give a “good” review to a book I disliked, and vice versa. Still, I tried to make my reviews struggles with what the books were doing. I tried to make them diagnostic, exploratory, a way of getting a good surgeon’s grasp on the innards of the book. This, I must say, didn’t go down well with editors, who would often send me emails commenting, what did you think of the book? Meaning, did you like it? And usually I had to throw in a few words of praise or dispraise. Mostly, though, I tried to so subordinate the like the like or dislike moment in the review to the more interesting business of, well, thinking of the book, thinking about it, thinking with it, thinking through it.    

traps

There’s an essay by Louis Marin, the French critic, which begins with him discovering a 16th century Venetian book with the marvelous title, Of traps, of their composition and use, which, in the fashion of the humanist epoch, took the metaphorical sense of trap as an argument to organize an investigation not only of those devises by which we catch mice and rabbits, among other varmints, but also by which we catch men, in courtrooms and in power plays, in art and in the street. 
However, I don’t think this book included the first and greatest of all traps: clothing. Just as we don’t really see ourselves as apes, which are an animal whose habitat is behind bars, or in front of a National Geographic film crew, contentedly shrieking and scratching their hairy hides, we don’t see our clothing as a way of trapping our ape’s bodies. Surely, however, they are. When I unbutton Adam to change him (showing a delight in the fact, if it happens, that this time, there is caca, that I would not have believed in myself a year ago – one so fears the mysteries of infant digestion!) and then diaper him up again and encase him in a thin undergarment, and then in his usual pjs, I notice, and he notices, that each snap is the closure of a trap – first his little legs, then the arms, then snap snap snap the stomach and chest. Depending on whether Saturn is in Virgo, or he’s hungry, or he’s not hungry, or he’s bothered by the light, he will kick against this indignity, the way a dog will try to escape from the grasp of a child determined to dress it up in human clothes. If the child is seen by an adult, he or she is scolded – dogs don’t wear clothes! But we, of course, do.
Snap snap. From the adult perspective, the trappiness of infant clothing really comes out in those pjs, which are all too common, which require snapping in the back. Sometimes these are the cutest clothes, but they require that you turn your child around, and this is not welcomed by any infant. So you pick him up, and you wrestle with the snaps as the protests get louder and the neighbors begin to wonder about your parenting skills. Oh well, let them. In fact, fuck them. And you briefly rehearse all the noxious noises that they have produced over time. This is displacing your frustration in a classically neurotic manner, yes, but you don’t care. 
Finally, though, I have all the snaps that I can reach snapped, and my little lapin is trapped, and sometimes we both have to acknowledge that that was, in a way, fun – fun the way a roller coaster is fun. The tears, the screams, the snaps are forgotten, and we are ready once again to live like human beings – the animal that traps itself.

the user illusion

When I stick the biberon in poor Adam’s mouth, quieting his protests (at having to face another day scanning this strange planet, perhaps) and getting him into the rhythm of sucking down formula (yes, Le Leche league – we are incorrigible half and halfers. Wanna make something of it?), I have a long time – or at least a couple hundred gulps of time – to study his face.

It is interesting how many people like to tell you that the expressions mean nothing – just a galvanic movement, a tropism. While we all recognize the cry and even grant it some symbolic status – cry equals pain – the smile, or the laugh, are definitely secondary properties, or so the common wisdom goes. Pain is fundamental, humor – which requires a minimal capacity to compare and contrast – is second stage, and if you live long enough, it will be jettisoned and there you’ll be, back to crying and peeing in your bed in some old folks home. Yes, we orbit around pain, our black sun, and smile first as a trick of synaptic firings, and then as a control mechanism that mediates pain.

I’m reminded of the “user illusion” that the computer designers talk about. We sit down and look at the screen and see files and docs, and we think of files as being cardboard, and docs as being paper, and writing as being the application of an instrument to a surface. But this surface appearance is a delusion – it is algorithms all the way down, schmuck. Similarly, we glance about us, we are bright, we are alert, we think we get things, but the bytes of info we deal with are a pitiful remnant, an insanely edited fragment, of the bytes that bombard us. We not only can’t bear too much reality – try as we will, we will never even be able to see it.

And so yes, I too go along with the common wisdom here. I project. My subconscious gets an A in “existing as Roger”, while my consciousness gets, at most, a D+.

But I have to ponder the illusion, too. Last night, Adam was just barely asleep, and I had turned away to read, when he made a sound that made me turn back to him. He was, apparently, laughing in his sleep. Or simulating laughter.

This made me laugh. My laugh is real – his is not. But…

In a famous essay, Can a horse laugh, Robert Musil reports on seeing a horse laugh when it was tickled – although he says that this was ‘before the war’, and maybe since the war horses have ceased to laugh. Musil describes how he watched a groom with a curry comb make a horse laugh by tickling it on its sensitive spot, its shoulder blades. The horse acted “exactly like a peasant girl” who you would try to tickle – this was, remember, the ancien regime, which still existed pre-1914 – by moving out of the way and swatting with his muzzle at the comb. When that didn’t work:

“But the boy took the advantage. And when his curry comb got near the shoulder, the horse couldn’t stand it anymore. It turned around on its legs, its whole body shook, and it pulled its lips back from its teeth, as far as it could. For a second, it behaved exaclty like a person who has been  tickled so much that he can’t laugh anymore. The learned skeptic will object that it couldn’t have laughed in the first place. I’d respond to him that this is correct insofar as the groom was the one of the two who neighed the most from laughter every time. This does seem in fact to be a unique hjuman capacity, that is, to be able to neigh from laughter.”

And I haven’t even gotten to how Adam balls up his little fists when he sleeps and melts my heart.