For a democratic, rather than autocratic, Senate

I have long been an advocate of radically reforming the senate by making it a trans-state office. Every ten million people should elect a senator - which means that, starting from Maine, there would have to be districts drawn that would swallow some states. The House of Representatives, I think, is the proper place for state-based representation.

However, the issue has been debated before. In the run-up to the 17th amendment, North American Review published an article surveying the many attempts to constitutionally reform the Senate that had been debated by states and Congress. The author of the survey, John William Perrin, was not an advocate, but a historian. This part of the article caught my eye:

"Two others of still different type have been proposed. On January 9th, 1882, Mr. Bayne, a member of the House from Pennsylvania, introduced a resolution for an amendment having the principle of representation found in the " plan of government " offered by Governor Edmund Randolph in the Convention of 1787. It favored doing away with the present basis of representation in the Senate and substituted a proportional one instead. Each State was to have two Senators as now, but for " each million of inhabitants in any State in excess of two million " an additional Senator was to be allowed. 

On January 17th, 1892, Mr. Miller, of Wisconsin, introduced a resolution which also provided for proportional representation. It differed from the Bayne resolution in that each State was to have
but one Senator, unless its population exceeded a million of  inhabitants. For each additional million in any State an additional Senator was to be allowed. "

What is interesting here is that the idea of the direct election of Senators, which finally resulted in the 17th amendment, was logically driven by the notion that no minority should hold governing power in the Congress, whether that minority was the state legislature that selected the Senator or the less populated state that exerted outsized power by putting two senators in the Senate. 

Conservatives, who take their Constitutional studies by listening to Rush Limbaugh, will insist that the U.S. is a republic. But any study of the constitution, which is an open and amendable document, will tell you that the U.S. is a democratic republic, and the logic of its evolution has been in the direction of greater, rather than less, democracy in its governance. Democracy doesn't mean majority rules - democratic culture, in order to make its process of election authentic, has to guard the rights of all, even minorities. There is a dialectical connection between the bill of rights and the democratization of the governing process. 

The senate as it is constituted now will fall. The only question is when. 

Apollinaire

Apollinaire died from the Spanish flu on November 8, 1918. I've been meaning to do a series on Apollinaire's Paris. In the meantime, a translation of Tree from Calligrammes.

Tree

to Frederic Boutet
You sing with the others while the gramophone plays
Where are the blind men where have the blind men gone
I plucked a single leaf It turned into a deck of mirages
Don’t leave me here alone among the women in the marketplace
Isfahan exudes a blue tile sky
And I hitchhike with you to the outskirts of Lyon

I’m not going to forget the coco man ringing his little bell
I can already hear the future vocal fry of his voice
From the dude who roadtrips with you in Europe
While never leaving America

A child
A skinned calf hanging from a hook
A child
And this sandy suburb around this central Asian ville
A border guard stands like an angel
At the gates of this miserable paradise
And the epileptic traveler in the first class waiting area foams.

Finger-licking Badger
Ariane the Hooker

For more, go here. 

a geneology of "the worse, the better"

The famous phrase, “the worse the better”, is often attributed to Lenin. Supposedly, this is Lenin’s addition to the black book of political strategy, and no doubt in Hell he is discussing it over chess with Old Nick Machiavelli himself.

As far as I can tell, however, the phrase appears in Lenin’s works as a quotation from Plekhanov. In Three Crises, writing in 1917, Lenin sets himself the task of analyzing the revolution thus far – after the fall of the Czar. He remarks that so far, the demonstration, as a political form, has accrued a peculiar importance. And he backs away from the situation to analyze it:

The last, and perhaps the most instructive, conclusion to be drawn from considering the events in their interconnection is that all three crises manifested some form of demonstration that is new in the history of our revolution, a demonstration of a more complicated type in which the movement proceeds in waves, a sudden drop following a rapid rise, revolution and counter-revolution becoming more acute, and the middle elements being eliminated for a more or less extensive period.

In all three crises, the movement took the form of a demonstration. An anti-government demonstration — that would be the most exact, formal description of events. But the fact of the matter is that it was not an ordinary demonstration; it was something considerably more than a demonstration, but less than a revolution. It was an outburst of revolution and counter-revolution together, a sharp, sometimes almost sudden elimination of the middle elements, while the proletarian and bourgeois elements made a stormy appearance.

As an aside: I think this is a very wonderful passage, which surely earned Nick Machiavelli’s other-world applause. It projects a light upon a feature that occurs consistently in our contemporary history, even if the various forms of demonstration are tied to class in more complex, that is, mediated ways than could be admitted by Lenin, that great simplifier. I am thinking of the #metoo movement, for instance. Here, again, what rose up traversed the class scale, mixing up an issue of gender with one of the workspace. I would call it an abuse of emotional labor, which is itself an exploitation founded on the body of the worker. The connecting links from the coerced smile to rape are both gendered and based in an economy of exploitation. But to return to the form of Lenin’s analysis… See the rest at Willett's

Oana Mateescu: The Romanian family referendum: Or, how I became a sexo-Marxist

This is my day not to read the news, since all the forces in play in the election in the U.S. are now immovably set, and there is nothing I can do but stress. I learned my lesson in 2016, when I kept assuring A. that there was no way Donald Trump was winning, since at the last minute vote counts would adjust to what everybody knew. That was a year after, I believe, I grandly predicted that Brexit was a flash in the pan, no way the UK was going to break away from the EU. So my predictor of what the masses - at least the masses of voters - will decide is somewhat out of synch with what they, after being sorted out by racist laws and administrators who go the extra mile to preserve Jim Crow, decide. And as to the Jim Crow, the lack of urgency on this issue by the Democratic party is an astonishment that -- I won't go on about.

Rather, today I am going to read analyses of the Romanian referendum on marriage. I was unaware that rightwing groups - the usual drooling orthodox churches, the evangelicals, the fascists - had worked long and hard, in conjunction with the ruling party, to put the anti-gay legislation to a vote. I was heartened that they lost, since less than 30 percent voted. I was also heartened that the new denigratory term in Romania is Sexo-Marxism - that is, any questioning of the "natural" Christian order. This long reort by Oana Mateescu is definitely worth a read. Lately, I've been reading Jeff Love's book about Alexandre Kojeve, The Black Circle, and thinking about Kojeve's crazy view of History as a sort of real force, which closes on itself at some point (after Jena? After Stalin?) and leaves us all outside of history - in post-history. I'm going to review that book for Willett's. Though I don't agree with it, the Viconian idea of historical cycles has always fascinated me. If we are in a cycle now, it is hard not to think that it is a vast cycle of imbecility, in which we - that is, a goodly number of human beings - have deliberately turned against what we know, or have learned, in every field, from the humanities to the hardcore sciences. This hypothesis depends, however, on a silly assumption - that to know is a listing function, so that x becomes the object known, in no relation to y, another object known, and so on. Epistemic listing is a misleading way of accounting for that always philosophical modal verb, to know. Still, to remain with this pov for a second, one of the great beliefs of the liberal era was that once we know something, we can't go on denying it. The crime against the intellect is a crime against the very self, which is bound to knowledge the way Odysseus was bound by ropes to the mast of his ship so he could withstand the song of the sirens. The liberal era could countenance every perversity, it could even countenance sacrifice - that ultimate act against self-interest - but not the deliberate choosing of ignorance. And then, here we are...
Read Oana Mateescu's article. Here:

Oana Mateescu: The Romanian family referendum: Or, how I became a sexo-Marxist: “By the way, Russia had the first sexual revolution. Lenin was a big homosexual; as for Karl and Marx, I think they were together. But they realized on their own it was going nowhere.” — 3 milioane1 On 6 and 7 October 2018, in what has become known as the family referendum, some Romanians voted on changing the definition of…

When American Conservatives met Russian Nationalists: a love story from the Cold War

The two dominant factions among the country clubbers who lord it over the morlocks in the United States of Dreamland consist, on the one hand, of a rightwing group who spend a lot of time producing and decrying fake news, and a center-right group of Eloi who have produced a fake consensus history and spend a lot of time contrasting the present barbarians with the beautiful normality of once upon a time.

The murder of 11 mostly elderly Jews in Pittsburgh has produced a lot of articles about how anti-semitism could be happening in Dreamland, of all places. But anti-semitism is, as Rap Brown might put it, as American as apple pie. A minor story this week about Trump sponsored anti-semitism gained some attention: Radio Marti, a government funded propagandastation that broadcasts to Cuba, took up the cudgels of American whitenationalists (and Hungarian anti-semites and the rightwing government of Israel) against George Soros. Soros is a billionaire with liberal leanings, and hence must be thoroughly scourged as a cosmopolitan, a secret Nazi accomplice when he was 12, etc., etc. He’s today’s Rothschild, with the difference that in the 19^th century a Zionist country with a total contempt for liberal Jewish culture did not yet exist to add its noise to the moronic inferno.

This news story, however, pinged my memory of the good old days, specifically, the old entanglement of American propaganda outlets and anti-semitism during the Cold War. So I went into the archive and looked up some of the material, and I thought, wow, here’s an unexpected predecessor of exactly those gang colors worn by members of the Trump gov today!

For the rest, go here.

The Great Disenchantment

I have given much thought, in my life, to a certain intellectual history that characterizes the stages from the early modern age until now in terms of increasing rationality and the dis-enchantment of the world. This story seemed wrong to me – wrong on the level of ordinary life, at least, and probably wrong on the level of intellectual life within the epoch of capitalism – or more broadly, the epoch of industrial production. Just as the money-nexus did not replace the gift economy, but rather relies upon it, so, too, did the collapse of the belief in an enchanted realm, a realm in which the rules of causality are bent to the charisma of certain figures, happen only partially, with the forms of it still in use as a support for the administered world, the world of parity products and neo-liberalism. Read a fairy tale and watch a police series on Netflix and you will see causality bend in both cases, adhering in both cases to our greater belief in charisma than in contingency. Cause and effect, deduction and inference, obey rules that were discovered at least in part long before the Great Disenchantment of the world happened, but they go against elements of the human grain as it has adapted to thousands of years of agricultural community to be repressed too absolutely as we bid goodbye to peasant cultures. What is culturally dominant is a compromise. This is not to say nothing has happened since 1499 – it would be sheer blindness to insert “universal human behavior” directly into history like it was some lego piece in a toy construction. Rather, there is a surprising elasticity in collective belief systems, which allow parallel and bifurcating systems to flourish and remain at once as distant from each other as the hot tip and the rabbit’s foot.  This is why I liked and disagreed with Doug Sikkema’s article for the New Atlantis, “Disenchantment, Actually: Modern disenchantment may be a myth, but it is still the water in which we swim.” It is a review of The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences by Williams College religion professor Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm.  More here

choleric in the time of writing

Salmagundi (the Summer issue) features an essay by Dubravka Ugresic, entitled Artists and Murderers, that is right up my alley in terms of being a scathing and total denunciation of the world of art and culture in the time of genocidaires and businessmen (the two types often trading positions, now collecting civilians in camps and massacring them, now setting up chains of folky fast food restaurants). It seems that in Croatia, where Ugresic hails from, the writing, artmaking and artcollecting fields, which were once overflowing with the botched, the bewildered and the bohemian, the eccentric heiress and the surrealist poet,  are now booming thanks to the participation of the usual masses of  scum: politicians, celebrities, and the whole herd of tv talk show guests who at one point or another stole, killed, defrauded, scored, screwed, lied, and otherwise made their heap out of an almost transcendental assholery. You see them in the glam magazines, they roost in the lists of the 100 most influential. Or, more innocently, they are heirs of the heap, children of the rich, having traded in Daddy’s very real semi-automatic for a goldplated squirt gun. Croatia, in other words, sounds much like the United States. Here’s a couple of grafs:

“All that would be fine. Why not let a thousand flowers bloom? Each of us can be nourishment for the mind of a child, in the words of a Croatian amateur poet in celebration of literature. Murderers and criminals are, however, remarkably ambitious, their appetite is growing, it is not enough for them that they have published their own books, have had their own solo and group shows, garnered media attention; they want acclaim, they want the society which they have bestrewn with their artworks to bow down before them. Front and center at every theater's opening night, at every new show, they pontificate on the aesthetic values of each movie, book, performance. But even that is not enough, they aspire to wield total control over any realm of art inhabited by their hobby. They are more than happy to join committees, editorial boards, councils, they become members of juries, elbow their way onto school curricula, into primers, textbooks, anthologies. Their hunger is insatiable.”

And this, after Ugrasic receives an email from a friend explaining at length who were the drowned and who the saved in the current cultural industry in Croatia, lamenting that she is the only person in the world who can’t get her book published because – well, she really is a writer:

“The email from my friend sparked my imagination. Chilled by the nightmare vision of millions of people worldwide from an array of occupations clutching their books, and millions more adamant that it was only a matter of time before they, too, had their book in hand, and inspired by the movie Fifty Shades of Gray, which I watched along with millions of other earthlings, I went off to a store that sold practical merchandise. There I purchased the strongest rope I could find, sturdy iron stakes (as if off to scale a mountain), a drill. The salespeople jollied me into buying it all and as a bonus they threw in adhesive strips. The usually snarky salespeople proved unexpectedly solicitous in my case.

I'd decided to end it all. As far as suicidal practices and strategies go I may be an amateur, but I am well-read. Recent statistics suggest that women who commit suicide no longer rely on pills nor do they lean toward the good-old technique of slitting wrists; instead they tend to embrace the Bye-bye World! trajectory of the "male" technique of - hanging. This, then, was why a key item on my shopping list was the rope. Only a few months later we learned that hanging is not a man's preference; General Slobodan Praljak, having heard his sentence read out in The Hague, downed a little flask of poison before the "cameras of the world." One might say that his theatrical instinct had the upper hand; he did die. On television screens lingers his grimly frozen head, his gaping mouth, looking more like an immense fish than a human being.”

This is my kind of stuff, served piping hot. My pantheon leans towards the critics of the grotesque who through a sheer hatred of vice (and a entropic decline in the love of virtue) became grotesques themselves: Swift, Leon Bloy, Karl Krauss, Pasolini.

So read the essay – it is very funny, very sick – and look around you.