to: future historians of the reign of the Bush the great

Prufock, contemplating old age, asked “do I dare to eat a peach.” Myself, near that same dire portal, am asking myself “do I dare to read Peter Baker’s massive fluffing of the Bushies?” I think the medically sound answer should be no. Any reporter who proves that Bush was not bossed around by his VP by quoting Bush’s and Cheney’s friends –well, that reporter should go quail hunting with the monster formerly known as the Vice President. What did Baker expect? Interview the friends of Vlad the Impaler and I’m sure you’d get a picture of a man who saved the lifes of small birdies who had tumbled from the nest. Especially if they know Vlad can still fuck with them.

But it was ever thus with Peter Baker. No, he did not reach the heights of ludicrousness ascended by certain of Bush’s flatterers – oh who can forget – or who wants to remember – Fred Barnes Rebel in Chief, a book where asslicking and orgasm tinge the pages (and will probably transmit a sexual disease to you if you turn them – beware!). But Baker was no slouch in the sycophant department. On my blog, I have a post from september, 2008, in the midst of an unexpected meltdown that seemed to be happening under the reign of the bestest guy you’d ever want to chop brush with. Baker, at that point, began to sing of the true heros of the day: Paulson and Bernanke

It is nice to see that some of the bigfoots – Greider and Krugman, and even the Bushite pinhead, Sebastian Mallaby in the WAPO – are coming out of the shrubbery to denounce the Treasury department’s theft in the offing. The NYT, in contrast, has set Peter Baker to the task of licking up a monument of bubble gum and marble for those two superheroes of this Bushian time, Paulson and Bernanke. Baker is the man for the task: on the Washington Post, he strove mightily to apologize for mass murder and torture, covering President Backbone with the same objectivity that might be expected from one of Nero’s catamites, reviewing Nero’s acting abilities in the Coliseum. His description of the brain (Bernanke) and the man of action (Paulson) is like a Damien Hirst piece, if Hirst took to carving Pierrots out of his own shit: it is kitsch cast in excrement: 

“The two men have been working early and working late, tracking Asian markets and fielding calls from their European counterparts, then reconnecting with each other by phone eight or nine times a day, talking so often that they speak in shorthand. Mr. Paulson has powered through the long days with a steady infusion of Diet Coke. Asked twice to testify by the Senate last week, he begged off. 
“He told me he had like four hours of sleep,” said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Banking Committee. But there were limits to Mr. Dodd’s sympathy. “The public wants to know what’s going on,” he said he replied.
Mr. Bernanke (his drink: Diet Dr Pepper) has made a point of leaving the office by midnight to get at least some rest, but friends say the toll on him is clear as well. Alan S. Blinder, a longtime friend and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, recalled seeing Mr. Bernanke at a conference last month in Jackson Hole, Wyo. “He looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders,” Mr. Blinder said. And that was before last week.”
Baker, whose effusions about the heroic, surge-right Bush in the NYT Magazine a couple of weeks ago did had a dramatic effect on LI (we wanted to vomit after the first couple of paragraphs) is in the fortunate position of the right sycophant at the right moment, and one can feel him wiggling with excitement. And he has that eye, doesn’t he: diet Dr. Pepper. Don’t you feel his maternal, servile ache as he longs to perhaps bring one of his action heros, a true Batmen out to free Gotham from its bad debts, another can. He understands, as does the NYT, that this huge crisis in the Bandit class can only be assuaged by an obsessive, massive theft that will make our successful and oh so smart masters feel, well, masculine again; one that will exist like a burning yearning brand on the hides of Americanus bovus, all of us lower downs: bought and sold at undermarket prices. But of course, we out here in the fields, we cant understands theft! So hard! Maybe the smarter peoples will figure it all out for us! Then we votes for them!
Of course, in the UK, the New Labourites have already figured this out and have translated it into the ineffable language of toadeating. This is one of the Blairites, explaining, oh so delicately, that we can’t, just can’t, return to cutting into the hides of the wealthy, who are generating our prosperity at a fearful rate. Such genius brains!
“But is an economy which promotes minority wealth and privilege and requires the state to tax the beneficiaries to support those it excludes really the only alternative to the current order? An agenda based on the redistribution of wealth rather than the redistribution of opportunity can only ever deliver justice as compensation; mitigating the worst effects once the damage is done. It is morally unambitious and likely to fail in the long run because by taxing the beneficiaries more heavily, the wealth-generating capacity of an already underemployed economy is further compromised.”
Oh my! Such butter and shit on the tongue, lodged firmly in the City asshole! We have to (sob) redistribute opportunity! We need Blair, with all his evangelical fervor, that wondrous Uriah Heep persona, to intone things like this, so that the press guys in the pew can say Amen, and explain it to the plebes.

news from nowherre

Well, two news items about that old festering crime we’ve all forgotten, the occupation of Iraq, recently came to the surface – giving us a really sweet juxtaposition of the 00s. One comes from the NYT world class suckup, Peter Baker, whose reporting in the 00s was to reality as Oz was toKansas – quite a distance away. In his opus of insiderdom (he talked to all ofBush’s friends and ministers! And it turns out he was an excellent president!),he reports that Bush, during some rough spots in the war in 2006, ground histeeth so much they hurt. The darling! One can tell that Baker is himself moved,and probably, as he typed, had to swallow tears himself, such are his feelingsfor the great man. 

The other is a rather unimportant item. Item: best estimatesare that nearly 500,000 Iraqis died in the 2003-2011 period due to our bigadventure.

But Bush’s aching teeth! My, how we sacrificed to set the Iraqis free. I get all well teary eyed thinking about Operation Enduring Toothache.

our lulu

Adam is one year old today. A year! And yet, it is, on some days, hard to imagine we were ever without Adam - the laughter in the morning, the falling asleep to either ocean waves or cricket sounds via YouTube, the unpredictable enthusiasms for the stuffed gorilla, the slow, concentrated way he will at first point and then press his finger on a button, a piece of lint, some presque rien that, for reasons I'll never know, has come into his consciousness for a moment and reigns there, like the full moon lights up a dark night. What is rarely said - because we have to hide this behind complaints, otherwise the world would fill up with babies - is how enjoyable a baby is. Nobody wraps their arms around your neck with such utter, trusting abandonment like a baby - or makes such marvelous burbles, or makes ordinary things - standing, rolling, looking out the window - seem so never done before. 
Ah, our lulu!

In praise of firbank

I’m interested in a tone.

This sentence, for instance, in Ronald Firbank’s Caprice.

“My dear, I once was thought to be a very pretty woman. ... All I can do now is to urge my remains.”

This comes from an otherwise mildly repulsive secondary character, a Mrs. Smee, who Firbank mingles in with the theatrical set he is writing about. A woman whose first and abiding characteristic is her two moles. When two moles are thrown at the reader first thing, the reader backs up a bit, and a quick bit of mental business equating moles and witches occurs in the subconscious. Yet, Mrs. Smee’s remark implies a sort of conversational intelligence that is both bound to a certain class, or idea of class, and a certain ambiguous sexuality, the degree of which corresponds to the legal rigidity with which it was persecuted. One might well say that camp sprang from the law book.

One can in a way divide writers as followers of the law book or eccentrics from its captiousness by using the test of Firbank: those who can’t stand him – such as Kingsley Amis – will never find Mrs. Smee anything other than repulsive. Auden wrote that those who could not stand Firbank were all very well in other respects, but as for himself, he avoided them. It was Auden who saw the sly genius, the religious genius, in Firbank:

“All that really matters is in fact that the Firbank world should exist,  a world in which a country church can have the “scheming look of an ex-cathedral” and a choir-boy who has been taking the lead in a mass of Palestrina’s “the vaguely distraught air of a kitten that had seen visions”, in which an inflamed girl can “leave the room warbling softly “depuis le jour,’”, and a queen motor for hours and hours with her crown on, it “was quite impossible not to mistake her”…

“Firbanks extraordinary achievement was to draw a picture, the finest, I believe, ever drawn by anyone, of the eafthly Paradise, not of course, as it really is, but as, in our fallen state, we imagine it to be, as the place, that is, where, without having to change our desires and beihaviour in any way, we suffer neither frustration nor guilt.”

The distinction between paradises – those we can imagine and the unimaginable paradise beyond our reckoning – is perhaps an Auden touch, whereas Firbank could reckon very well with the paradise in which his dolls hold sway. Still, what Firbank presents, and what Auden sees well, is that Firbank creates a world where, in spite of scandals and insinuations, nobody gets hurt. Innocence, here, is invulnerability – and it is that invulnerability which threads its way into the prose, into the style.

Style is, to use Barthes’s distinctions, a matter of the punctum, not the studium. A style is the equivalent of the italicized word – we recognize the difference in that word from its plain print kin, but at the same time, it is the same word. The style is meant to establish a clique – and to brave the dislike to which it is inevitably destined, the dislike of the rough and tumblers on the playground come to adulthood and hard liquor – the Kingsley Amises of the world. Firbank abounds in felicities – while it is the rough and tumblers glory to leave them out. Yet it is obvious to me that the greatest roughs in twentieth century literature – writers like Hemingway – learned how to write from the felicity-mongerers. Hemingway is forever paired with Stein in my mind.

  

the family luck

I’ve never murdered anyone. My father never murdered anyone. My grandfather never murdered anyone. Alltogether, we’ve lived a shelter life, us Gathmann men, in the twentieth century, for the state’s nets were out, and millions fell into them, drafted and turned into murderers. Or lets not exaggerate – there were those among the drafted who did not serve in the infantry, sail the seas, or fly in bombers and fighters. But millions did. It was in fact a generational experience for American men, a first blood kind of thing. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam – duty or at least the law armed the stripling male and commanded him to murder. The same thing, of course, was demanded of British men, Russian men, German men, French men, etc. It was always the same thing: see the woman there, nursing the child? The command was simply to roast her and her suckling, make sure it was good and hot, and that around her the houses burned and the streets buckled from the heat. Simple. See the man advancing to murder other men with his rifle? Put a bullet in his skull, or perhaps blow his legs off, double quick! Its an order.

And so it goes down to now. I’ve recently been reading Randall Jarrell’s war poetry. Jarrell, like all the generation of poets that experienced WWII, was permanently seared. Robert Lowell said that Jarrell’s war poetry was the best to come out of those particular years of mass slaughter. There are small perfect poems, and larger ones that are more drafty. But the eye is on what it means:

The other murderers troop in yawning;

Three of them play Pitch, one sleps, and one

Lies counting missions, lies there sweating

Till even his heart beats: One; One; One.

O murderers!... still this is how its done:

This is a war…

I hope the family luck continues. Never to be a soldier, always a protester … oh what bliss.

the death of Candide

I’m here to tell you that Candide is dead. Deader than Buffalo Bill. Deader than God.
This point was borne home to me Saturday night.
The plan was the babysitter, a movie, dinner. Going through the offerings, we decided that the Aero theater on Montana, being close and being sorta arty, was the place to go. There was a Diablo Cody premier there – her movie, Paradise. Diablo Cody rang a distant bell in a dusty part of my memory, which I refreshed with Wikipedia. We’d seen her last movie, or the movie she wrote, in Paris – a good night!
She was supposed  to do the Q and A at the Aero after the movie was over. We figured we’d duck out of that, go sneaking off to some restaurant that would surely be open on Montana.
In fact, we ended up sneaking out at about the point the movie, after its experiment with satire blew up in its face, made a turn towards sentiment. I believe at this point our heroine was getting in a taxi cab after telling her two new friends that she did not come to Vegas to be coddled.
No, as those who hadn’t ducked out at this point knew all too well, she had come to Vegas to Sin! The variation of the Candide plot as it played out here was that simple or even, I’d say, simpleminded. As opposed to Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, which sought to  “Laugh where we must, be candid where we can;.
But vindicate the ways of God to man”, the Candide plot is meant to be “candid” about the laughability of the vindicative ways of God to man. Leading us to reject the Enlightenment apologetic for the Christian God constructed by Leibniz. The local circumstances with which Voltaire worked can be, in the anti-Christian genre, reworked, but the point is supposed to be the same. The ways of God to man are really nature red in tooth and claw.  In the negation of the premise that God is a loving God, we negate the principle of Christianity, and we can then hang other ornaments on that anti-Christmas tree, kicking it for this or that moral precept.
Paradise, from its very title, is certainly an entry into this tradition. But what it shows is how dead and dead and dead the tradition is. The plot goes like this: some 19 year old blonde Barbie, raised in a fundamentalist community in Montana, undergoes some horrible – but never really very clear – accident involving a jet, as a result of which she suffers from burns on 80 percent of her body and generally has to be reconstructed. Oddly, since one of the great points of Cody’s film is that the fundamentalist community is bigoted and reactionary, the essential plot point here accepts without question an old Republican fantasy: that the victims of accidents all get showered with money from insurance companies and from corporations fearing huge losses in court. This is of course nonsense – for the most part, victims of accidents in the states face the bankruptcy of their near and dear as the medical bills mount, insurance companies that bridle at showering money and don’t, and a court system that has long been scewed to reflect the desires of the monied in re: liability for those not rich enough to be entitled to every jot and tittle of it. Anyway, our Barbie/Candide is rich, and begins by getting up in Church and announcing there is no God to a fundamentalist congregation that is, of course, supposed to be shocked by this kind of thing. It is a Hollywood fundamentalist congregation, which means that it is essentially sketched in by people saying amen to the preacher from the pews. The sign system here couldn’t be clearer: the viewer is definitely not one of “those” people. From the start, in other words, the viewer is invited to wallow in his or her own presumed superiority. This is always a bad start for a satire. And the level of the laughs is about at the level that you would suspect. For instance, laugh one is supposed to be generated when Barbie tells the congregation that she is even going to vote Democratic. In fact, all the jokes are this kind of fluff. This is the kind of movie that thinks has caught a real howler when it has the heroine refer to gays as Sodomites. And if you think that is a howler, this movie is for you!
Which seemed to be the case with the California audience, although I think, maybe, that we are talking friends of the director here. Still, the chuckling over such inanities struck me as genuine enough. This was sad, as it made me feel much superior to the audience. Having a superiority complex anyway, I quickly realized this movie was not only stupid – of that variety of stupidity that comes with groupthink - but bad for me.
So, to make it better for me, I tried to reflect on Paradise as another proof that anti-Christian mockery, as a genre and theme, is past its prime. In fact dead – and you can’t be more past your prime than that.
The question is: why?
Perhaps it is because Christianity, as Pope and Voltaire knew it, is dead. That is, the ideology of the clerks – the ideology of what James Scott calls the Great tradition – has moved on. It is no longer about glory and redemption. It is about commerce and science. Religion, in the Great Tradition culture, is now something to oratorically affirm on set occasions. Meanwhile, in the little tradition, in the daily life of the masses, belief has gone back to the wild. Thoughts are free – meaning it is all syncretic, a little astrology here, a little pop science there, a little Jesus, a little Oprah, a little politics.
In these circumstances, the great biting ferocity of the old Candide tradition is simply out of place.
Of course, there are fundamentalists, but they, too, are for the most part more moved by politics and commerce than anything like Christianity. Of course, my own stance on fundamentalists is that they are misnamed, since any literal reading of the Bible will tell you a number of things: that wealth is evil, that princes and nations are misguided, that primitive communism is the way to go, that thoughts aren’t free. The prophets are invariably – without exception – traitors. The messiah in the Gospels is serious that the first are last and the last are first in the kingdom of heaven. He is also serious about taking up your cross.
But that is a mere aside. I think the Candide genre died in The Master and the Margarita. Perhaps I should say, the death is explained in The Master and the Margarita. At the beginning of the book, there is a conversation between a poet and an editor. The latter, Berlioz, commissioned the poet, Ivan Ponyrev – or “Homeless” – to write an anti-Christian poem, but as he explains to Homeless, he is not satisfied with the result. The poem attributes dark motives and actions to Jesus – but the point, Berlioz says, is to bring out the fact that Jesus is a myth. He never existed.
Now, Bulgakov is having some fun here, because as both are soon to find out, the Devil not only exists but has come to Moscow for an event. Berlioz’s rational world is swept away before the first chapter is over, in fact. But his theory about Jesus as a myth is a pretty good way of getting at why Candide is dead. In fact, in the current culture, whether Jesus existed or not doesn’t matter. Which is why some nice, no holds barred assault on Jesus would not go over in film, nor evoke chuckles from the feeble minded audience that thinks the word “sodomite” is a hoot. Our sentiments would be offended not because of belief in Jesus, but because of the belief that we should be tolerant of the belief in Jesus.
Such is the current state of explaining the ways of God to man

anger and reading 2

So yesterday I tried to approach an experience I have – an experience I have on both ends, actually. One is the experience of reading something that made me angry, and that I felt was designed to make me – as a certain type of person – angry. The other is the experience of writing to anger.

If we take Aristotle as giving us a social definition of anger, and Marcus Aurelius as giving us a description of the cosmic damage anger does, what are we to make of the modern character of provocation?

Why would an author want to provoke his readers?

In a sense, I’d argue that modernity is tied to provocation – or I should say the aesthetics of modernity. If one way of writing is to lure the reader to an act of identification, another way is to lure the reader by the rather strange via negativa of alienating him – but attaching him nevertheless to what reading has to be, an act of following. William Gass talks about the sort of visual ‘wind” that blows through the written page – the invisible movement of the eye, which is called upon to deliver an image that immediately transcends itself in a concept. The image, then, of the written word is not exactly like our tradition of the idea – which in the empirical tradition is simply a sort of copy of a sense impression – since the written word exists as a meaning, first. Its shape is meaning laden and led. And not only is this so for the bare atom of the word, but for the way the eye follows in some line or another the accumulation of words. Left to right, right to left, up to down, down to up – it is all a matter of following in some direction. To pull away is to break that movement, and this is what one would expect when the movement is directed towards slighting or insulting.

That instinctive pulling away is, in fact, part of the reason that giving offense is a high stylistic challenge. I began thinking about anger and reading when I was going over what was written in 2002 and 2003, mainly about politics, so let’s take an example from that set.  When I read, for example, some article by Christopher Hitchens from 2002, arguing – ostensibly – for the war in Iraq, but really committed simply to slagging those who are against the war, I break off contact. I was against the war, so what is the point? It is not that I am unpersuaded as much as persuasion is  not the issue. The issue is whether or not I am going to participate in my own lynching. And yet... if the savagery that I was subjected to had something fascinating in it, would I have stayed, would I have followed?

It is, perhaps, more understandable that a writer would want to offend. Or at least that one might write something to offend in order to project one’s own anger. But the writer who actually wants a reader who is among those whom one wants to offend has to think for a bit about what he is doing. Oftentimes, this second thought sublimates the insult in the prose, turns it into an accusation, and the text into something vaguely like a courtroom. Anger favors the courtroom as much as love favors the bedroom. In the courtroom, the defendent has no choice but to undergo the injury of the charge.The angry writer tends naturally to make a courtroom out of his text. This still poses the problem of what the reader is supposed to get out of it. Perhaps the reader is caught by a spell – or by a curse.  Josef K. never attempts to flee, although the system of the courts and the police seem incomprehensible to him, and the charge against him is never pronounced. Perhaps if it had been, perhaps if he’d known the charge, the spell would have broken and he would have fled. But the difference between The Trial and the trial one might seek to impose in a text is that the reader can flee. It is, after all, a kangaroo court. But even a kangaroo court stages a mock exection, a symbolic death, and perhaps it is this that both angers the reader and keeps him from breaking off contact. He revolts at his mock effigy, he revolts at being hustled towards a final condemnation, and in his anger he stays.   

This is, of course, the hope of the writer whose texts derive ultimately, secretly, perhaps without his even knowing it, from the village talent for cursing. .