Guns don't kill people -desperation kills people

 Sadly, the NRA mantra is right: guns don't kill people, people kill people. That doesn't mean we should not have gun control; it means that in a country with weak social insurance - no universal medicalcare, low wages, massive poverty, no national childcare program, continual threats of more cuts, etc. - and a floating island of guns, the mass of gun violence - the greater portion of which is suicides - will continue. When we compare other nations with gun control, what we leave out of the comparison is the stronger social insurance in these countries. The stronger emphasis, for instance, on equality. We have only to look at the shocking, enormous addiction and opiate overdose death rate to see how broken something large is in America. The mass killings are an extreme psychotic symptom of a deep problem we are not confronting, because we have entered a day by day lifestyle of not being able to do what needs to be done (because it is enormous)

So those who are rah rahing gun control and refuse to support medicare for all are, I think, being as hypocritical as the prayers and thoughts crowd.
Make America less desperate.

on not liking the term "postmodern"

 

I’ve never liked the term “postmodern”. Or, in fact, all its children and cousins – the posties. Post-truth, post-stucturalism, etc. It is the gang that couldn’t shoot straight in my book. Yet, I like Lyotard’s postmodern writing, even if I do not understand the slippery conceptual tegument that allows Lyotard to say: “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern.”

Why postmodern rather than, say, modern-less? If what is modern is outdated, indeed archaic – an affinity between which is, in Kenner’s The Pound Era, insisted upon – I’d suggest that the break, if there is one, is between the progressive idea of modernity and the contemporary, in which an engulfing simultaneity elevates accident and chance as the deities that watch over us. Nemesis has return to watch on the city walls, or at least in numerous Netflix series. The contemporary is not some sort of debasement and chaos – it can well engulf the past, much to the puzzling distress of those who are both 100 percent against moral relativism and 100 percent against “judging the past by our current standards”. 

I’d even posit that there is a history of the contemporary that goes from rumor to the printing press, the industrial basis for the newspaper and the “news”.

The hero cult in academia

 

I am fascinated to an unhealthy degree by academic gossip and the subtweeting of all those nesting high fliers. Since the appearance of the letter in support of Comaroff, signed by the Harvard stars, and the appearance of the oopsy letter of retraction signed by the same Harvard stars making clear that their only mistake was idealism and their belief in the higher things mind you, (rather than endorsing a sex pest and the system that protects him, cause that would be a too literal reading of their literal words), there’s been abundant spillover and a joyous run on vows to non-cite the likes of Jill Lepore and Henry Gates and Paul Farmer and other “heroes”. This was followed by Paula Chakravartty’s account of academic bullying by one of Comaroff’s supporters, Arjun Appadurai, which lends so much veracity to my prejudices against academic highfliers that it is almost a nightmare come true – really, these people are, in their lives, Profiles in Pecking Order Pecksniffery. I’ve known this from forever – I remember talking to a man who was leading a search committee at U.T. in the 1980s who told me that he simply tossed applications that were not from people from the big four universities, thus conveniently narrowing everything down.

Narrowing down – with “no alternative”, these are the slogans that ride mankind.

Anyway, in the hubbub, there is a certain charismatic gleam that is of interest to me. For there is a strong streak, in academia as in Hollywood, of looking for “heroes”. The citation of Appadurai or of x, y, or z is often not a monument to Weberian rationality, but a monument to Weberian charisma: the citation is a temple to a local hero.

The hero is a character type that has been on the upswing for some time. Its nemesis, the anti-hero, came out of the closet in the sixties and seventies, and seemed for a while to harsh everybody’s mellow. I have a very strong sense, from having experienced this a bit, that Derrida was so shocking to the old timers in the eighties by seeming to want to dispense with heroism all together – which of course turned out not to be the case, as Derrida was made into a hero himself, and so on and so forth. We know the terms of the contract.

The hero figure is inseparable from the roots of modernity - it is hard to see how the work of Enlightenment can be done without it. Which is why, contemplating this storm in a teacup among the whole pyramid of teacups and blood that lords it over us all, I’m thinking of Balasar Gracian.

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 18th 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 17th 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: Never 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.

The poor frozen fly, in contrast to the hero, “destroyes herself” – o that gendered fly – by having, as Chakravartty points out, the wrong pedigree. Or by existing as a “her” – in a higher education system that is much like the Democratic party, dominated at the top by old white men and women who depend on and despise the intersectional oppressed that vote for them. When the poor flies, however, start to give up the hero cult: then things get interesting.

 

 

 

a Karen Chamisso poem

 Nearer my God to thee

„An Bord der »Titanic« befanden sich fünfundzwanzig Millionäre, die zusammen mehr als 100 Millionen Pfund repräsentieren.“

I liked to look and not look

in Dad’s book at the picture

Of the iceberg that rammed the Titanic

A telltale smear of paint on its flank

- I had nightmares about that ship going down

My birthday cake with the candles lit

Enormously drowning In the dark North Atlantic

A liner’s hold scrawled over the blood freezing tide.

My friend John recently took me

To Rue des Ecoles to point out the crossing

Where the absent minded mythographer

was run down by a laundry truck

Nearer my God to me I sang out

Mixing up the chords and dischords of time

Born for collision and some final knackery

Iceberg, laundry truck or drowning colder

(“Le Cœur est un organe femelle » )

than the North Atlantic’s spasms

stripping away

our itty monkey manners.

- Karen Chamisso

on Kristin Stewart's Diana

 I saw Spencer last night, and a miracle happened: my heart opened up and I had a little sympathy, a trickle of blood or some other humour, for Diana.

I have a strong sense that the reactionary culture of the eighties began with the marriage of Charles and Diana. It was like rock n roll heaven for reactionaries. Of course, I am more of the school that the royals and the aristocrats are spongers who sit on piles of blood money exacted from the skins of millions of peasants by their horrific ancestors. So I am not exactly unbiased. I have more sympathy for Ulrike Meinhof than for Diana.

Until I saw Kristin Stewart's performance, and realized that Ulrike and Diana were closely akin.

Of course, being plunged into the Windsor family must have been like being thrust nightmarishly into one of those Goya portraits of the Bourbon family in Spain: all the awful faces, all the inbred attitude. I've read the reviews: of course, the movie takes reality on a joyride, and there are some - such as the once enjoyable and now completely petrified Anthony Lane, the review for the New Yorker - who are a bit upset that more isn't made of Queen Elizabeth's bountiful philanthropy. The usual plea for billionaires. However, the film definitely resists using philanthropy as a prop to celebrate gaudy and unaccountable wealth. Thank God. The dialogue is all Pinter laced with underlings out of Shakespeare.

I'd love to see Steward do Ulrike Meinhof next. About ten years ago, the Austrian writer wrote a play that collaged Meinhof to Schiller's version of Mary Queen of Scots. A collaging of Diana to Meinhof would work much better. Politics, so often, is temperament. As it should be, perhaps.

oh brother

 

If you look up the literature on jokes – which ranges from Bergson to Freud to analyses of the Gricean implicature of jokes, and so on – you will notice that the joke is always connected to laughter. Without laughter, it would seem, there is no joke. Even the feeblest joke is defined as such because it fails to provoke laughter.

Myself, I think jokes are often about laughter. But jokes are sometimes not about laughter at all. This seems to be a paradox from the mainstream point of view, but from ordinary converse it is obvious – at least to me, and I believe to almost everybody – that jokes are sometimes not meant to provoke laughter at all. There are many intentions packed into a joke. Sometimes they are meant to bother. Sometimes they are intentionally meant to waste time – to delay. Sometimes they are tics, like cracking your knuckles or stripping the cuticle from the side of your fingernails (a particularly bad habit in my opinion). You could say here that the laughter function is perverted, or diverted. Or you could say that negation and affirmation in the world of affects responds to a different logic than it does in the world of syllogisms. That the negation of laughter could be the motive of a joke is, from the world of affect, a logical result of the particularly enunciative situation of the joke.

Freud recognizes that there are different types of laughter – and that there is a pleasure in laughter that is sadistic. Sadism, however, throws the stage lights on too brightly to describe all kinds of jokes that are disattached from laughter. It is, however, true that laughter is, at some point, related to biting. In fact, satire is often described in terms of biting. Biting and sucking are, of course, some of our earliest intentional actions. The mouth is centered as an important organ for the newborn, who learns to use it to make sounds and then words and then when he is all grown up and a Dad, Dad jokes.

Lately, when I make a humoristic comment – something that is as related to a joke as an undershirt is related to a shirt – Adam tends to say ha ha. It is the typography of a laugh, or another way of not laughing at all. When he started doing this, it reminded me of something. A couple of days ago I remembered it: oh brother.

When I was about Adam’s age – nine – I started replying to jokes or things that were meant to be funny, offered by classmates and adults, with the phrase: oh brother. I must have used that phrase a lot, because at some point in the sixth grade I was dubbed “brother Gathmann”, and I retained that nickname for a long time. I’m not sure what I felt about it. When playing, it was shorted to Brother, so, say, in basketball it would be, “pass it to me, brother”, etc. etc.

Hearing this, I wonder if adults thought it had to do with religion (the Christian evangelical thing of sisters or brothers) or with white kids pretending to be black (brother, in the white mind, being what black men called each other – at least on tv). The one thing that wouldn’t occur is that the name derived from a conditioned refusal to laugh, or to enter the circuit of the joke.

I had not thought about that nickname for a long long time, until Adam started with the ha ha. And now I am curious how, unconsciously, I pass things down to my son. Or maybe he makes them up for himself. And maybe that is a role in the schoolyard – the oh brother role.

 

 

Nobody likes political correctness

 Nobody likes political correctness. Which puts us in the position that it isn’t correct to defend political correctness. It is like picking your nose or flashing in a park – not the kind of thing you want to be associated with.

I think the phrase – and its villainizing character – goes back to a Cold War liberal discourse, in which the Communist figures as an authoritarian personality and the Western liberal figures as a groovy dialoguer. However, it occurs in a few places before World War II. Arnold Bennett submitted a novel of his to Lord Beaverbrook, who looked it over for “political correctness” – as Bennett’s diary puts it. However, I think this simply meant that it was realistic with regards to the political processes and political characters that it described.

Political correctness jumped majorly into the major outlets of the media with the civil rights movements and the New Left. The media, which had subserviently gone through the anti-Communist 50s with nary an op ed by a communist or a reflection on the merger of American foreign and domestic policy with anti-communism was jolted by the New Left attack on that monolithic ideology. It was an attack that, as was quickly seen, had a weak spot: for how about the “line” that the New Lefties themselves followed? The inner attitudinal policing – which, as all groovy liberals knew, was all to reminiscent of Big Brother and Communism itself. This made political correctness a great and bountiful phrase. All good things could be reaped from it.

One of the good things is humor. The groovy liberal was ever liable to laugh and joke, while the political correct policeman only knew how to sulk and snarl. This is put well by Erica Jong (who, author’s note, I adore) in an interview in Cosmo in 1978, explaining the lesbian scenes in her novel, How to Save Your Own Life.

“The chapter is the broadest parody- a humous takeoff on that whole period in the women’s movement when everyone I knew felt compelled to have an affai rwith a woman because it was chic… And, as a satirist of my society (which I assuredly am), I have the right (possibly even the duty) to spoof the fads of my day. That doesn’t mean I’m antilesbian or antiwoman or that I don’t support the very legitimate demands of gay activists for equal rights. But as a writer and humorist, I refuse to toe a party line and to inhibit my satire because certain humorless, sullen people think political “correctness” is more important than laughter. The fact is, even if a writer wanted to be politically correct, she couldn’t be. What pleases one group alienates another. So a writer really has no choice but to write books to please herself… Laughter and poetry may, perhaps, transcend their time. Politics never do.”

I think that Erica Jong’s comment about political correctness hits all the buttons – it is encyclopedic and at the same time brief. It idealizes the writer’s desire – what she wants – as an expression of freedom that she is compelled to – since any expression will alienate some group. It is a defense of humor – which is given a transcendent cast (along with poetry) – against the political part of political correctness – we don’t, in other words, read the Divine Comedy to get our bearings on the Guelphs, and Swift’s sticking it to the Whigs is, as any Professor of English Lit in the 1950s could tell you, representative of questions about human nature itself and the perennial questions thereunto. And political correctness is attributed to a power that is based in public opinion in America, but that is merely a click away from becoming a totalitarian bureaucracy – of the left, of course.

It is the latter supposition that is curious. Feminists in the 1970s, like antifascists today, were a protesting minority. The majority and the vested power of the Establishment – the makers of laws, the runners of corporations, the judges and cops – were not enforcing politically correct rules about feminism, but were busy being almost all male and all white. Their allergy to being attacked for being all male and all white was to say that the attackers were authoritarians who, by some astonishing accident, had almost no power at all, and who were showing what they would do if they had power with their attitudinal policing, which makes it a good thing that power rest in the hands that hold it.

This is one way of looking at the picture. Another way is to see in, say, movement feminists a possible future – a political one. In fact, for the “everybody” that Jong knew, that future turned out to be bright. Upper middle class women have gone from triumph to triumph since 1978. They have broken glass ceilings – an interesting goal, not exactly aimed at by those leftist feminists who combined feminism with some Marx-y notion of working class power. Perhaps those were the very feminists who were most humorless. Humor among those who see a bright future is, perhaps, a different thing from humor among those who feel, with every instinct, that they are going into the garbage.