academics, charlatans, and the mystery of what we learn

In the 2000s, while I wasn’t looking, a lot of work was done on Bakhtin’s life. And that work crashed down one sancrosanct image after another, since it turned out that Bakhtin was quiet a creative liar about his own life. For instance, he gave a couple of stories to interviewers about his education, tracing his path from the University of Odessa to the University at St. Petersburg. Alas, it turns out this path was taken by another Bakhtin, his brother. Nikolai. Mikhail Bakhtin also alluded to stints at German univesities, borrowing the C.V., this time, of his friend Kagan Matvei Kagan.

More substantially, Bakhtin sometimes seemed to indicate that he had written certain works by certain of his friends, notably Voloshinov’s Marxism and and the Philosophy of Language and Medvedev’s The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. Such was the hype about Bakhtin in the late seventies and eighties that Bakhtin’s name was actually put on some editions of these books. Brian Poole, who made the most thorough study of the matter, unequivocally denies Bakhtin authorship. Poole also discovered that Bakthin sometimes incorporated pages of other texts, notably Cassirer’s, into some of his writing without acknowledging the source – or, in other words, plagiarizing him.  Brian Poole, for instance, finds a whole page of Cassirer’s book about Renaissance philosophy incorporated into Bakhtin’s Rabelais book, where Cassirer is not even cited. Wierdly enough, nobody seemed to notice this until the later nineties. These issues are confused partly by the fact that Bakhtin inspired a cult – a cult so powerful that one Russian critic closed to him mocked the very idea that we could or could not prove Bakhtin’s authorship of Voloshinov and Medvedev’s works by comparing it to trying to scientifically prove that God exists. The cult definitely extended to the U.S. – the first wave of Bakhtin’s reception in the U.S. was urged on by scholars like Michael Holquist, who practically made Bakhtin out to be a saint.  By the end of the nineties, as Bakhtin’s papers and those of his circle became available, you have people like the man in charge of the Bakhtin center, David Shepherd, saying, well, we have to allow for the fact that Bakhtin may have been a charlatan.

I’m not sure what I think about the new Bakhtin. He is certainly different from the answer to all critical problems enthusiastically wheeled out for me by some UT professors in the 1980s. On the one hand, I feel for the descendents of  Voloshinov and Medvedev, who have not appreciated at all the idea that some of the most creative works of their ancestor are included in an edition of “masked”  works by Bakhtin. On the other hand, scoundrel scholars, brilliant ones, are always more interesting once the myths come down. If Paul de Man had been a brilliant little Belgian nerd who’d gone up the same scholarly ladder as everyone else, he would certainly never have received the biography treatment – it was that he wrote opportunistically anti-semitic things for a Nazi leaning paper in occupied Belgian, defrauded a publishing house and fled to Argentina, apparently committed bigamy by marrying in the U.S. and did not pass any examinations at all on his way to tenure – he apparently had a neuroses that made him fail all exams – that attracts our attention. Bakhtin has often been used to construct a rosy utopia that we can all believe in without thinkin’ about the nasty class struggle, and I’m not too down with that – but he was undoubtedly brilliant. That he borrowed a lot of his scholarship from German sources that he never acknowledged would be a pretty damning thing if he hadn’t done more with those borrowings.

Still, it is worth considering that the texts that are both taught to students in colleges and asked about on their exams are often by fakers, moochers, plagiarists, and people who, themselves, froze up at the thought of exams. It is a sign of something. A mystery. 

kaelism and grand budapest hotel

I went to the see the Grand Budapest Hotel last year. I liked it, but I can’t say that the pleasure of the experience induced any kind of critical afterlife in me – I forgot it almost immediately. Except for the Royal Tennenbaums, all of Wes Anderson’s films have this effect on me.

So I was surprised by the virulent criticism of The Grand Budapest Hotel and Wes Anderson in general that was published in the Jacobin a couple weeks ago. Although the film left me without any compulsion to think about it after I walked out of the the rancid butter smell of the lobby, turned to A., and asked her where she wanted to go to dinner, the screed against Anderson did make me think an old thought, which I could entitle the problem with Kaelism.

Kaelism, as Pauline Kael, the movie critic, practiced it, is a critical form that concentrates firstly on the audience that one imagines is being enticed to a movie, or enjoys it; secondly, on what other critics have said about the movie; and only thirdly on the thing itself. It is envious of those pleasures it cannot participate in. It is exclusive about those pleasures it does experience. It is an amalgam of uninformed sociology and prejudice, and at its best creating negative images of what it dislikes. 

Of course, seeing a film or reading a book or any entertainment experience will have a moment of distinction – a moment in which the experience becomes more important for what it says about the audience for the entertainment. What it says, here, is very much refracted by the person making the judgment. To give an example: one of my worst movie experiences ever was seeing Horrible Bosses 1, or I think it was !. The film was so bad, to me, that it really embarrassed me. I could hardly bear to see what was happening on the screen. Because I’d come to see it with a group of people, I couldn’t just walk out. So I concentrated on hating the audience, because clearly, the audience, in the great majority, was loving it. They were howling with laughter.

Now, I had no intention or desire to review that movie. But if I did, according to my reviewer’s creed, I’d have to give up my notion that the audience was a buncha idiots. In fact, they were having fun and I wasn’t – but I can’t really hold that against them. Kaelism, however, allows me to wreak my revenge on them by triangulating from the film to the audience, and review the audience into the film.

The problem is, of course, that I don’t know that audience, except through some drive by sociological generalisations.  I can’t go all formalist and pretend that there isn’t an audience, but if I am going to talk about the audience, if it is the medium to the medium I am supposedly reviewing, I should make an effort to see them without falling prey to cliché.

So onto the review, by Eileen Jones, in the Jacobin.

Jones begins her review by saying that death is central to Anderson’s work. What central means, however, is pretty unclear. She says there a lot of death, or death becomes the motivation for certain action sequences, or wraps up the film – but I am not sure that this makes death central, as, for instance you could say it was central in many Bergman films.

On this death trip, she plunges into her cry against the whole Wes Anderson thing:

“Consider that Anderson kills a beloved animal for laughs in almost every film. Usually it’s a dog, but in The Grand Budapest Hotel he switches it up and kills a cat. The corpse is carried away by his loving owner inside an impromptu bag made out of fine-looking cloth marred by a single, artful blotch of blood. Then the owner, played by Jeff Goldblum with his usual self-amused irony, passes a garbage can on the street and abruptly tosses the bag into it with a slapstick comedy thump.

It was at that moment that I became officially sick of Wes Anderson, and of the gleeful laughter in the theater that accompanies every Wes Anderson-ish move he makes. The audience even anticipates the move he’s going to make and begins guffawing ahead of time, just to be sure to appear maximally Wes-savvy.”

It is that last sentence that rubbed me the wrong way. It seems to me that every comedy exists by creating the anticipation of mirth. It is the rhythm of comedy – a comedy that made you laugh thoughtfully, and only when the joke or gag was finished, would not be a funny film at all. That the audience was gleeful, and began guffawing ahead of time, means, simply, that the audience took the film to be a comedy. I could say the same thing of Horrible Bosses, or Duck Soup, or Medicin malgre lui, or Midsummer Night’s Dream.

What  is really happening here is revealed by the term Wes-savvy. The audience is being reviewed through the film. And the audience is unbearably hip. They are hipsters. They think they are cool. They are the type of people who think disposing of a beloved animal in a trash can is funny, except perhaps not in real life, perhaps, because there it probably isn’t cool. 

I’ve mentioned the sociological problem with reviewing the audience – the aesthetic problem is that audiences are pretty, well, reactive. They laugh, or they don’t, they are silent, or they aren’t, but my bet is that anybody watching a film of an audience watching a film (in this thought experiment, the sound track of the film being watched would have to be muffled) would have a hard time knowing what film the audience was watching. Audiences, in other words, aren’t mirrors of films.

Jones ostensibly larger point is that the poisoned political motive of Anderson’s films comes out in the way that fascism is defanged, de-historicized and miniaturized in the film. Which is all true. But this is almost always true, in one way or another, of American films featuring fascist bad guys.  Jones scores one fair hit, which is a genuine piece of non-Kaelism:

“Anderson’s film evokes several classic ones by talented writer/directors trained in the pre-Fascist German film industry who managed to get out in time, such as Ernst Lubitsch (Trouble in Paradise,To Be Or Not to Be), Max Ophuls (Letter From an Unknown Woman,Earrings of Madame D. . .) and Emeric Pressburger (working with British partner Michael Powell on The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp).

All created characters featuring a remarkable zest for life in the form of fine food, broad-minded sex, and witty conversation combined with excellent manners and admirable toughness. Lubitsch and Pressburger engaged directly in anti-fascist film propaganda by presenting fond portraits of such endangered Good Europeans. M. Gustave is clearly meant to join this pantheon, announcing himself as the last vestige of civilization in “this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.

Only here’s the problem: Wes Anderson’s Old Europe is just like a modern Andersonian world we know so well, mannered, decorative and nostalgic, with slight additional flourishes in the form of fancier pastries and adorable funiculars for traveling up and down cartoon-cute mountains. Newly fascist Europe on the rise looks to be wonderfully Wes-like, only with slightly severer uniforms.”

Undoubtedly it is true that  fascist Europe is wonderfully Wes-like – that is, that it is buffoonishly stylized. But is it a criticism of the  films she mentions that they look wonderfully Lubitsch-ish, or Pressburgerish, or Ophuls-ish? Sure, they have an extra authenticity, but this is  because, after all, they were dealing with fascism as a contemporary and dangerous event. Anderson isn’t; in fact, the villains exist to topple the doll house, or at least threaten to. In as much as fascism is a much bigger and nastier thing than this, Anderson’s film is totally inadequate to portray it. In fact, the aesthetic of fascim has a way of tripping up directors who try to confront it, from Visconti’s the Damned to Cavani’s The Night Porter to, even, Fosse’s Caberet (although Caberet does have its great moments). Anderson simply decided to avoid the whole issue by making fascism a Ruritanian farce. I’m not sure whether using this bat upside Anderson’s head is the damning criticism that Jones takes it to be – from another point of view, the creation of these toy boxes is a way of disclaiming, rightly,  any attempt to understand fascism on a deeper level. American directors, with their fetish for WWII, don’t often display this humility.

Still, I don’t think Jones’s hatred for Wes’s work, which the review officially proclaims, is due to his insufficient or ever reactionary politics so much as for the Wes-savvy audience she associates with him, and that seems, by association, to be the type of people who giggle at easy ironies. The Indie film audience, in other words.

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for that audience, I’ll admit. For one thing, I, too, am not into easy ironies. I want massive, upfront tedium in a film, ironclad boredom, minutes dripping by as the camera slowly pans, say, a white wall, or a rain puddle. I want things to be hard, goddamn it! But I’m not a monk. I don’t mind things that are easy. I do mind not wrestling a bit with how one’s feeling about an audience effects or should effect one’s feeling for the film. I am not a fan of Kaelism.

Adam, Beckett and superfluity

adam and economics

Our basest beggars, King Lear said, are in the poorest thing superfluous. This is a truth that is often bent about to show how true communism goes against the human instinct for acquisition. I don’t think it works like that – in fact, it is only under the system of unlimited private enterprise that the population is truly stripped of its assets, so that, at the end of the day, in many of the most advanced economies in the world, the vast majority really owns nothing after you tally up assets versus debts. This is very much true of the U.S. But if you let the truth point to its own meaning, it does show something about human expansiveness – which takes a shitload of history to turn into acquisition. Human breadth does require superfluidity, repetition, margins. Molloy, Beckett’s beggar, runs perhaps the most famous riff on the beggar’s possessions:

“I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of
sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on
this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them
equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn
about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following
way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these
being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my
greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and
putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my
greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I
replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I
replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I
replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had
finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my
four pockets, but not quite the same stones. “

Adam doesn’t do sucking stones, although he probably would if his ever vigilant parents didn't pluck pebbles, or coins, or other small objects from his mouth as soon as he had slyly hiked one of them up there. But he does have his system with what we call “sucettes” – pacifiers. When he is seated comfortably, say, in his chair in the back seat of the car, he will take one sucette and put it in his mouth while keeping the fingers of one hand laced through the ring of another sucette. Sometimes, he will raise the sucette not in use above his head. He’ll entangle it moodily in his hair, whilst sucking on the first sucette. At these moments I think Adam is balanced between the exaltation of having extra sucettes and the peace induced by the first sucette, which is bobbing up and down in his mouth as he gets the most exact flavor from it. I say exaltation, and not a sense of extra property, because in the mood of feeling that he has extra sucettes, he tends to throw them about. Here, he differs from Molloy, whose pockets are part of the whole system of sucking stones. Adam doesn’t have the notion of storing his sucettes on his person. When he wants a sucette kept safe, he will hand it to me or Antonia. This is done with the kind of gesture that must reproduce, in miniature, a King giving the sceptre to some trusted bystanding official. The King is still King, and maybe even more King, in giving away for the moment one of the usufructs of the office – and Adam is still Adam even without the extra sucette. However, the flaw in the system is that the world does not spontaneously generate sucette, meaning that they can get lost, somehow.
Molloy’s system too had its flaws, and he himself, after elaborate meditations and changes of numbers of stones among his four pockets, admits it:
“And deep down it was all the same to me whether I sucked a different stone each time or always the same stone, until the end of time. For they all tasted exactly the same. And if I had collected six teen, it was not in order to ballast my self in such and such a way, or to suck them turn about, but simply to have a little store, so as never to be with¬out. But deep down I didn’t give a fid dler’s curse about being with out, when they were all gone they would be all gone, I wouldn’t be any the worse off, or hardly any. And the so¬lu tion to which I ral lied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in an other…”

I think Molloy’s greater experience speaks here – as for Adam, it is by no means clear that they would taste exactly the same, his sucette, and certainly they have different colors and some of them you manipulate through the little plastic ring attached to them and others, which are most often the least valuable, although sometimes, just to spring a surprise on the world, are the ones you cry for most and won’t settle until you have, these others have no little plastic ring adorning them and you have to hold them and turn them around by the little brace to which the rubber nipple is attached. But with this difference – between the infinite hopefulness of Adam and the infinite resignation of Molloy – this is how the logic of superfluity comes about. 

goodbye as morality

Philosophers have a tendency that we get a handle on the world through quantification – if we can number it, it exists. All, every, each, some, and none ride mankind.  

Adam has a different idea. For each word, each thing, he has a goodbye. He has an essentially valedictory theory of reference: the referent is something you can farewell. You can say goodbye to green lights, blue buses, iceskaters, iceskating, basketball, sky, moon, doggie, pumpkin pants, and everything in between.

I’m not quite sure of the deeper meaning here. There are certain objects, for instance, like the trees near the school, which, even in approaching, require a goodbye: goodbye trees. Green, as in green light, is also only goodbyeable. On the other hand, pumpkin pants only receive the valedictory benediction when they are taken off. They fit properly in the sequence of possession and mourning that pretty much makes up our lives. Hello, on the other hand, is something that comes less spontaneously. We have to encourage Adam to say hello. I have encouraged him to say hiya, as in hiya guys, but this is something that I have to pull out of him too.

This makes the world a bit asymmetrical; however, it must be said, though goodbye is said softly and with feeling, it isn’t really sad. Especially for those objects that are only goodbye-able. Rather, there is something like, dare I say it, respect in the goodbye.

It is true, too, that goodbye is ultimately one of the most respectful things one can say to a tree one is passing. There’s a whole morality in goodbye. If Kant had only written the Critique of Practical Reason when he was two years old, I think it would have been a, a much shorter work, and b., a much more convincing one vis a vis the treatment of objects, which is just another way of saying, the moral way to be in the world. 

Strauss II: esotericism and carnival

Leo Strauss can be credited as a definite influence in the advance of philological and rhetorical sensitivity towards philosophical texts within an academic discipline, philosophy, that, in America at least, has all too often rewarded philological and rhetorical insensitivity, which is another way of saying systematic wiseassness.
In particular, Strauss was sensitive to the citational situation set up, so often, in major philosophical texts. A passage in, say, the Preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit can be read exoterically by trying to connect its themes and arguments without ever putting it in relation to the complex figurations of knowledge that are presented in the main text – but from the point of view of the main text, the preface must itself be in there – it exists as text as a sort of quasi-indirect discourse, a citation within the dynamic creating the figures of reason. The sensitivity to what I am calling the citational moment motivates the notion of the esoteric side. We cannot directly say that in a text, the author is “just saying” .
But Strauss’s recovery of rhetoric is, unfortunately, bent to a larger set of principles that are generalized ahistorically and that simply leap over the moment in which they are, well, argued for. Here, esotericism becomes less a method than an ideology. This is Strauss’s argument about what the ancient philosophers were doing, and the persecution they feared:

“ They believed that the gulf separating "the wise" and "the vulgar" was a basic fact of human nature which could not be influenced by any progress of popular education: philosophy, or science, was essentially a privilege of "the few:' They were convinced that
philosophy as such was suspect to, and hated by, the majority of men.1G Even if they had had nothing to fear from any particular political quarter, those who started from that assumption would have been driven to the conclusion that public communication
of the philosophic or scientific truth was impossible or undesirable, not only for the time being but for all times. They must conceal their opinions from all but philosophers, either by limiting themselves to oral instruction of a carefully selected group…”

I want to get back to “philosophy as such”, since it isn’t clear here, or anywhere in Strauss, just what exactly separates philosophy as such from other forms of reflection. But taking this passage as a whole, it is hard not to goggle at the sheer implausibility of it. The supposed creed of the philosophers is that there is a hierarchy in nature that separates the low from the high? And, in the tyrannic, militaristic, slaveholding societies that sprang up all around the eastern meditteranean, this was a esoteric secret? It is like being told that philosophers in the Confederate states had to hide the fact that they thought blacks inferior. On the contrary, persecution, historically, was directed at those ‘non’-philosophers who urged the opposite: that the high did not have any right, in nature, to rule over the low. That man is the measure of things – as Protagoras would have it.

The problem here is, I think, that Strauss takes the doctrines that he attributes to philosophers as definitional of philosophers. Which is why conflicting textual evidence is no problem for him:

An exoteric book contains then two teachings: a popular
teaching of an edifying character, which is in the foreground;
and a philosophic teaching concerning the most important subject,
which is indicated only between the lines. This is not to
deny that some great writers might have stated certain important
truths quite openly by using as mouthpiece some disreputable
character: they would thus show how much they disapproved
of pronouncing the truths in question. There would then be
good reason for our finding in the greatest literature of the past
so many interesting devils, madmen, beggars, sophists, drunkards,
epicureans and buffoons. Those to whom such books are
truly addressed are, however, neither the unphilosophic majority
nor the perfect philosopher as such, but the young men who
might become philosophers: the potential philosophers are to
be led step by step from the popular views which are indispensable
for all practical and political purposes to the truth which is
merely and purely theoretical, guided by certain obtrusively enigmatic features in the presentation of the popular teachingobscurity
of the plan, contradictions, pseudonyms, inexact repetitions
of earlier statements, strange expressions, etc. Such fea- .
tures do not disturb the slumber of those who cannot see the
wood for the trees…

Strauss’s refusal to see, himself, the trees for the woody he has for the “intelligent young gentlemen” is what strikes me in this passage. I would argue that taking philosophy as such in too narrow and cultic a sense has put Strauss in a corner – when the texts in question seem citationally to undermine the high-low distinction that is so important to his definition of philosophy, he in essence ceases to take their rhetoric seriously. A more plausible theory of those range of abject and sublime figures would appeal to the by now very compendious anthropology of what Bakhtin called the carnivalesque. But this is an appeal that Strauss can’t contenance, because it goes outside of the discipline of philosophy to talk about philosophy. This violates the principle that the low don’t really think “philosophically” and resent it when others do so.

In essence, Strauss is sacrificing everything to preserve the romantic image of those young intelligent gentlemen. 

a note on strauss and esotericism 1

A note on strauss 1

The key Leo Strauss’s scholarly work is based on his recovery of esotericism, which he fully developed in the late 1930s, and which he took to be the key to understanding the ancients as well as understanding how the ancients were misunderstood by the moderns – how in fact modernity defines itself through that misunderstanding. Among the deepest pre-modern writers stretching back to the ancients, all writing had two sides: one is a surface of exoteric writing, in which meaning, theme and style is subordinate to the norms of the masses, while the other, deeper side esoteric, presenting truths in a suitably obscure manner that are not meant for the vulgar. In the golden liberal era of the 19th century (about which Strauss, like Hayek, had the most romantic notions), the urgency of the threat of persecution vanished, and made it harder for researchers to understand this two faced structure in older texts.
Although Straussians like to paint Strauss as an intellectual hero struggling against the positivism and behaviorism of the time, in actuality, esotericism was not so far out of line with many of the intellectual currents of the post war era. In literary criticism, for instance, Northrop Frye was not alone in turning to medieval rhetoric to create an ontology of reading within which there was a hierarchy of levels, from the literal to the anagogic. Psychoanalysis had spread a general cultural feeling for codes in everyday behavior, seeing surface and ostensive behaviors as the results of complicated and unconscious developments, in which, most grandly, thanatos wrestled with eros, and most trivially, Oedipus killed his father and slept with his mother. This kind of psychology was bundled up with the whole set of “strategic” sciences, from game theory to anthropology, which provided the paradigm for defense policy wonks in the fifties.
It was in the early forties that Strauss gave the lecture which became the first chapter of Persecutiona and the Art of Writing. The book begins with a plea for understanding the idea of “writing between the lines.” To make this plausible to a contemporary American audience, he imagines the following scenario:

“We can easily imagine that a historian living in a totalitarian country, a generally respected and unsuspected member of the only party in existence, might be led by his investigations to doubt the soundness of the government-sponsored interpretation of the history of religion. Nobody would prevent him from publishing a passionate attack on what he would call the liberal view. He would of course have to state
the liberal view before attacking it; he would make that statement
in the quiet, unspectacular and somewhat boring manner which would seem to be but natural; he would use many technical terms, give many'quotations and attach undue importance to insignificant details; he would seem to forget the holy war of
mankind in the petty squabbles of pedants. Only when he reached the core of the argument would he write three or four sentences in that terse and lively style which is apt to arrest the attention of young men who love to think. That central passage would state the case of the adversaries more clearly, compellingly and mercilessly than it had ever been stated in the heyday of liberalism, for he would silently drop all the foolish excrescences of the liberal creed which were allowed to grow up during the time when liberalism had succeeded and therefore was approaching dormancy. His reasonable young reader would for the first time catch a glimpse of the forbidden fruit. The attack, the bulk of the work, would consist of virulent expansions of the worst virulent utterances in the holy book or books of the ruling party. The intelligent young man who, being young, had until then been somehow attracted by those• immoderate utterances,
would now be merely disgusted and, after having tasted the forbidden fruit, even bored by them. Reading the book for the second and third time, he would detect in the very arrangement of the quotations from the authoritative books significant additions
to those few terse statements which occur in the center of the rather short first part.”

Although I’d like to separate out and analyze three moments in this scenario, it is necessary to pause for a moment and observe its type. Philosopher’s often pretend that their examples come out of a moment of chair bound thought, but in fact they are not immune to the types and tones current in the world of stories. What is this one, after all, but a sort of thriller in the high, between the war style of the Tory adventurer? The threat to the British empire is, in writers like John Buchan, warded off by intelligent ‘gentlemen’ – the cool type who do not make too much heavy weather out of the evilness of the villains they face, but know it is evil nonetheless, and that everything depends on getting the message through the screens they throw up. Headquarters must know the name of the spy, or they must change the placement of the troops – the show must be saved. It is in moments like these that one hears the dogwhistle of the cultist, where the sense is given that one is not simply decoding a way of writing from the past, but that one is in the center of an imperial thriller. Even sensible students of Strauss are liable to go off the tracks when this theme is near. Stanley Rosen, who seems have his feet on the ground as far as applying Strauss’s hermeneutic principles to philosophical texts, compared Strauss, in one essay, to Churchill. Churchill? He was making a political point that Strauss, like Churchill, was really a defender of “western style liberalism.” Not, mind you, Roosevelt, who was president of the country in which Strauss actually resided in World War II. Rosen even feels entitled to make a jab, here, at Nietzsche, whose image of a hero was more “Attila the Hun.” Of course, this is absurd – Nietzsche admired Napoleon, not Atilla the Hun. Even so, Rosen doesn’t even pause to ponder who ordered the massacre of more lives, and decimated more cities, in the “West”: Attila the Hun or Churchill?

Such, then, is the tone and style of Strauss’s scenario. One notices that it is a scenario about delivering a message. The message is one of the components of the esoteric writing scene. The threat of persecution is the context in which the message is encrypted in a larger, more harmless text. The transmitter, in this case, is a historian, and is more commonly a thinker. And the receiver of the message? Intelligent young men. The intelligent young men, or gentlemen, are the boyscouts of Strauss’s philosophical world. Always male, always from the class of “gentlemen”

Sony vs. North Korea - fun for the whole family!

I’m enjoying the hell out of the dispute between Sony and Kim Il jong.  On the one hand, you have a megalomaniac dictator, on the other, a clueless corporation that got its start distributing propaganda films for the Japanese army in WWII. The movie sounds like a gross out version of  Rambo, with American secret agents hilariously shattering the skull of the evil dictator – cause America can! A great movie to show in the torture season. Throw in Obama’s impassioned plea for freedom of speech (which of course doesn’t include Wikileaks or Edward Snowden, and doesn’t address the fact that we haven’t had a Presidency that so aggressively pursued leakers and journalists since Richard Nixon) and the exposed emails revealing that the head honchos are as stupid as you think they are, and it is a Christmas gift that keeps on giving! It isn’t the best Christmas gift from Hollywood – that’s Kim’s butt – but it will do.