why don't you be stupid instead of smart: on unspelling

 

Does it help that Yeats was dyslexic?

The editors of his letters, where the texts are raw, have decided that Yeats’ spelling was idiosyncratic. That’s a good word. It doesn’t have the same word-injuring psychosis, the same serial killer among the letters, that is baked into dyslexia. Rather, it understands that spelling is a curious procedure, full of mirrors and disorientations.

A spell, as Yeats (who at one point belonged to the same organization as Aleister Crowley, the Golden Dawn) was always aware, was a matter of magical summoning. Spelling, too, is a magical summoning, made domestic by our schoolrooms and four hundred years of rules, so that the words appear under our pens. That the first words we learn to spell are often animal names makes complete sense from this point of view, for animals were, after all, the first things humans drew. But there’s a certain graffiti impulse that lies just outside the spelling book, under which we run away from the rules concerning what to write on and how to write it, and go cave man for real.

I grow old, I grow old. I am too old for emoticons. And graffiti spelling does sometimes assault my sense of the order of things. Yet I am helped by the thought that Yeats was as apt to spell “there” “their” as not. I really am.

A recent article by Rosenblitt and Siegel proposes that E.E. Cummings, too, was dyslexic. Plus, "it is interesting to note", Cummings was lefthanded - although being born in a time where witchburning had ceased but lefthandedness was disciplined against, his schoolteachers and parents tried to cure him of that. Perhaps Cummings work is a revenge on said anti-sinistralists. Perhaps the unlearning that is the mark of certain modernist poets - Rimbaud, Gottfried Benn - is unlearning the spell. Which is a spell in itself. As Michelet pointed out in La Sorciere, the first and primary act of the witch is to discover that backwards - as in saying the Lord's Prayer backwards - is an independent movement, not at all symmetric to forwards. Which is a good way of doing - and reading - poetry.

Or as James Chace put it in some song: "why doncha be stupid instead of smart?" My rallying cry too.

the twitter comedy

 

I like twitter. I get a lot of info from it. For instance, when Libgen fails, I always find somewhere on twitter how to access it again.

However, it has an exaggerated effect as a social media platform, since all the meat press – tv, magazines, papers – have an exaggerated sense of it, which they push on down the line. The racists who get their N word jones on twittering and trolling get a lot more attention than the cops apartheid style management of urban life and the systematic racism of the economic system, from job hiring to mortgage making, that does its best to insert a bit of misery into the day to day of  African-Americans.

So Elon Musk’s buying of Twitter has the downside that pretty surely he is going to run it into the ground. However, I am fascinated by the business aspect. I am fascinated by the way Musk is hopping down a path once hopped down by Forbes’ Magazine’s boy genius of 2004, Eddie Lampert.

For those who don’t remember: Eddie Lampert was one of the evil billionaires hatched by Goldman Sachs. After learning how rent-seeking, a totally useless and harmful enterprise, gets you warm praise in the press and among the country club set at the Hamptons, Lampert struck out on his own and eventually bought Sears Roebuck.

The youth of today probably don’t recognize that name – or the name of K-Mart. One has to reach for the references – Sears was the Amazon of its time, K-Mart the Walmart. Sears, when I was growing up, was the family store. This didn’t mean that we liked Sears: quite the contrary. We bought at Sears and bitched about Sears in equal measure. My Grandfather, in the 1950s, got so made at a Sears employee they had a fistfight – or so my Pop used to say. Sears, however, had sales people whoknew their products, and for my family, which tended to treasure power toolsand such, Sears was an Eldorado. Its Craftsman tool line had everything. And atreasonable prices! So I grew up among Craftsman power drills and Craftsman  Electric Hand Saws. Ah, I can hear, as I write those words, the agonizing whine of a blade going through a 4 x 4, the sawdust in a plume behind it. This , as much as rock n roll, was the music of my youth.

Even in 2006, one might be astonished to learn, the capital value of Sears was greater than that of Amazon. In the 90s, my introduction to the world wide web – and even discussion groups – was made via Prodigy, brought to you by Sears Roebuck. But at this point, even, the upper management had lost the thread. Which is what a predator like Lampert was looking for.

The usual buy with debt, dump, pay yourself cycle followed. Unlike Twitter, however, Lampert’s little accountants had noted that Sears had tremendous real estate holdings in cities. Sell those off! Fire half the staff, hire anybody, train nobody, sell of the product lines, create sightlines in stores that told the customer nothing,  let each expedition to Sears be a buying nightmare, take the pensions and, by legal tricks, sever it from the employees who had made the store prosper, and so on. A good recap of the Lampert story, the story of America in the age of Obama and Trump, appeared inInstitutional Investor here. https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1c33fqdnhf21s/Eddie-Lampert-Shattered-Sears-Sullied-His-Reputation-and-Lost-Billions-of-Dollars-Or-Did-He

 

Musk is no Eddie Lampert. He’s a super salesman, but as a businessman he sucks, and as an investor you could train a duckling to make better decisions. Thus, he has saddled himself with a company that is incapable of giving him a return on his money. He has no big pension fund to drain, he has no real estate to vend. He is paying more in interest on the debt he piled up on Twitter to buy it than twitter will ever pay out. In cases like this, the Sears formula – shit on an American capitalist institution, sit back and watch your fortune grow – will be difficult if not impossible to reproduce. Musk of course has a desire to be up there with the Tech legends (all of them disgusting in their own ways): Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg. I predict that in the future, he will be ranked, instead, with Murdoch, the man who spent 12 billion dollars for Myspace. Myspace, remember myspace?  In 2011, it was sold for 34 million dollars.

Ecce Twitter.

NOTES ON ENGLAND

Because France doesn’t understand the communist candy orgy that is Halloween, and because Adam is a boy who loves a monster mask like French boys love kicking a soccer ball, we resolved to go to England and give Adam a proper trick or treating.  A concocted a costume to Adam’s specifications, which consisted of orange long johns and a burlap bag face, as sported by Sam, the  killer child in Trick r Treat. If you don’t know Trick r Treat, join the majority of the world – normies which the fans of Fangoria heartily despise.

Thus, we awoke early, prepared our bags, and went to the Gare du Nord, there to take the train to London. It is a rather amazing thing, going to London from Paris on a train. There are people for whom the Chunnel is not a novelty. Who were born with the fact that there is a tunnel under the channel as one of the many facts, like Mount Everest being the highest mountain and the like. Me, I’m impressed and will always be.

So light, darkness, light, and we ended up at St. Pancras.

I last saw London nine years ago, when Adam was a crawling beastie with not a whisp of a thought about trick or treat or goth culture in his head. At the time, I have a confused memory that we stopped at another station. In the nine years we’ve been gone, the UK broke itself off from the EU, elected a series of clown P.M.s, imposed austerity as its plutocratic overlords asked, and ended up with a prime minister who threated to make the whole Island Argentina in the 80s. So I expected smoke and burned out buildings, rats in the street chased by wolves. But from St. Pancras to the City, which was roughly our trek, I saw a muscular stretch of contemporary architecture that said to the world: we are the world’s real Dubai. And it is true: milling trillions in securities and instruments that have no use, and that add a considerable portion of rentseeking and misery to the economy, is an excellent way to get rich. And so say all of I.

There’s no comparable stretch of Paris, which saddens Macron’s black heart. But I did rather like it. Plus, the music of English, which makes me want to imitate it. Although A. warns me not to. And means it. We had pizza, made it to the train for Cambridge at Liverpool station, and felt like we were navigating the country. On the train for Cambridge we heard the same recording, which advises people who “see something” to fink something to the cops, where they will “sort it.” This, if it weren’t so normal sinister, could be an outtake from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Brazil seems to be the film about the condition of England that is always relevant.

We got to Cambridge, where we are staying with A.’s sister. Her daughter led us around the dark streets and mews of Cambridge, giving Adam his first trick or treat experience since he was five and we’d go roving Brentwood for the Mansion-fare. The givers were so sweet to Adam, and all complimented the costume, though none had the vaguest idea who he was supposed to be. And Adam, well trained, thanked them every time. We are raising a boy who is much more polite than me!

Home, candy counting, and the parents got part of the loot. Then to an early bed. That ironcast English night.

Notes on Orwell's apocalypso

 

I binged on Orwell when I was seventeen. They forced 1984 down our throats in my Cold War era highschool – it was the golden age of warning the kiddies against Utopia, so Huxley’s … and Golding’s Lord of the Flies were thrown in for good measure – and I, little rebel, did not read these books. In fact, I’ve never read 1984 and Lord of the Flies. Chinks, no doubt, in the  armor of my reading. I read Zamyatin’s We instead.

But I binged on Orwell when I was seventeen, when I systematically checked out of the library the edition of his essays and letters in three volumes, edited by Sonia Orwell. The volumes were entitled – the last one bore the wonderful title In Front of Your Nose, underlining the touch Orwell, the truth teller, the prophet.

Orwell was an almost preternaturally bad prophet. In contrast to his ability to envision the past and the present – he had the gift for reducing the “mental atmosphere” of an era (or at least of his favored chronological unit, the decade) into ten or more rich pages, the great longform writer’s gift – Orwell’s sense of the future consisted of a rather mechanical extrapolation of the horrors of the interwar and World War II period. Orwell’s vision of totalitarianism was applied, like cheap paint, by Cold War intellectuals to Stalin, Khruschev, Brezhnev, etc. – thus missing the huge changes in the Soviet system.

I think I, as a seventeen year old, turned to the essays because of a remark of Kurt Vonnegut’s, who used one of Orwell’s sentences in his series of Letters from England for the Partisan Review as the very model and exemplar of how to begin an essay. As I remember it, the sentence was: As I write, highly trained men in  technologically sophisticated airplanes are trying to kill me with bombs. Something like that. The perspectival shift – which was, as well, Tolstoy’s great trope, per Skhlovsky – is admirable. One can see how Kurt Vonnegut learned from it. It is was absorbed into American literary culture more, perhaps, than British, where comfortably sliding into your subject is still the preferred intro. The violence of ordinary British life goes more into their popular music, in the Cold War period, than into the novel, with its easy relapse into realism.

I periodically re-read Orwell with the same appetite that I periodically re-read Raymond Chandler. It is not that I agree with Orwell about very much, but I think he is one of the true inheritors of the plain speech style. And, as is proven by such essays as Inside the Whale, he has a rare capacity to appreciate other, radically different prose styles – Henry Miller’s, for instance.

Inside the Whale was written in 1939. While Orwell was reading Miller, war broke out, and the sophisticated airmen started their bombing raids. Although not on the scale expected; that is, during the phoney war. And not gas bombs, finally. The great fear at the beginning of the war was of mustard gas. It is odd that Britain prepared for the mustard gas attack by stocking up on masks while leaving the question of Germany’s development and manufacture of gas warfare entirely off the table in the 30s. But of course, Britain was undecided if Germany was really an ally against the great Bolshevik Satan or an enemy itself. Hence, the treaty that Britain struck with Germany, behind France’s back, which allowed Germany vast leaway to rearm. A treaty that has, somehow, gotten much less of the spotlight than the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. And we know why…

Inside the Whale has a very fine analysis of the “mental atmosphere” of the modernist twenties, of which Henry Miller is definitely a product, even if Tropic of Cancer was published in the thirties. Orwell met Miller, and was astonished and fascinated by Miller’s theory, or rather attitude, that he would just accept what comes. Orwell rightly sees that the didactic leftist writers of the thirties failed to understand the ordinary forms of life under capitalism, fascism and Stalinism, which was to hide your head and eat your breakfast, if you had it. Miller, by contrast, with all his rebellion against the ”air conditioned nightmare”, saw his life and others as fluxes in a stream, the general course of which is far outside the powers of the individual to affect.

This attitude, Orwell implies, is necessary for literature as an object in its own right. Comfort, the protection of ordinary life, the essential liberalism – outside of these parameters, Orwell thought, literature as a modern institution couldn’t exist. The ending paragraphs of Inside the Whale are Orwell at his most apocalyptic, and compare with Adorno’s famous phrase that poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric.

But from now onwards the all-important fact for the creative writer is going to be that this is not a writer’s world. That does not mean that he cannot help to bring the new society into being, but he can take no part in the process as a writer. For as a writer he is a liberal, and what is happening is the destruction of liberalism. … It [Miller’s attitude] is a demonstration of the impossibility of any major literature until the world has shaken itself into a new shape.”

Two ugly men

 

Two of the great ancient sages were notoriously ugly: Aesop and Socrates.

In both cases, the ugliness was a disguise – the sage as a clown, the clown as omen. Gerard Mace, in his essay on Aesop in Vies anterieurs, begins by recounting his encounter with a streetcorner beggar and storyteller – his Aesop. “ The Aesop that I knew did not at all ressemble the big lipped Moor that La Fontaine evokes in one of his stories, but it is true that Aesop became ugly, because the legend needed it, many centuries after he lived. For posthumous life is as badly assured as the first one ; one continues to change masters and reputation as one changes face as one grows older.”

What was the « besoin » of legends that made Aesop ugly? Perhaps it was the same necessity that gave Socrates an ugly face – the fabulous proximity of the sage and the buffoon.

To my mind, there is something ominous, or omened, in the fact that the French revolution was, as it were, driven by ugly men. Danton, the awkward giant, Marat, the scabrous writer, perpetually in his bath, and Mirabeau. Mirabeau, the pockmarked pornographer, a man of the underground – literally if the legend is true that he hid in the sewers when he was being searched for by the police, caught some skin disease which ruined his youthful beauty, and emerged a different man. “No one knows the omnipotence of my ugliness, » Mirabeau said once. “When I shake my terrible mug, there is no one who would dare to interrupt me.”

Sade was attuned to that close proximity of the buffoon and the sage – and yet, it was, as well, an abyss.

Mirabeau's experience reminds me of the one philosophe who hid, as it were, behind the Revolution, ghostwriting speeches and chansons - Chamfort. The man who puzzled Nietzsche, that reactionary - how could Chamfort, one of the great writers of maxims, have been a revolutionary?

In the Hippias Minor, Socrates challenges Hippias, a vain sophist, over the matter of who is the better man: Achilles or Odysseus. Hippias holds that Achilles was the truest, strongest and best of the Greeks, while Odysseus was the wiliest – polytropos – or the falsest, the most cunning, the most deceptive. But Socrates, surprisingly enough, comes up with an argument to show that either both Achilles and Odysseus are mixtures of the good and the false, or that – if Achilles lies and deceptions come about involuntarily, whereas Odysseus voluntarily takes on the deceivers role, as Hippias maintains – that Odysseus must be the better man. This is the end of the dialogue:

Socrates: Is not justice either a sort of power or knowledge, or both ? Or must not justice inevitably be one or other of these ?

Hippias : Yes.

Socrates : Then injustice is a power of the soul, the more powerful soul is the more just, is it not ? For we found, my friend, that such a soul was better.

Hippias : Yes, we did.

Socrates : And what if it be knowledge ? Is not the wiser soul more just, and the more ignorant more unjust ?

Hippias : Yes.

Socrates : And what if it be both ? Is not the soul which has both, power and knowledge, more just, and the more ignorant more unjust ? Is that not inevitably the case ?

Hippias : It appears to be.

Socrates : This more powerful and wiser soul, then, was found to be better and to have more power to do both good and disgraceful acts in every kind of action was it not ?

[376a] Hippias : Yes.

Socrates : Whenever, then, it does disgraceful acts, it does them voluntarily, by reason of power and art ; and these, either one or both of them, are attributes of justice.

Hippias : So it seems.

Socrates : And doing injustice is doing evil acts, and not doing injustice is doing good acts.

Hippias : Yes.

Socrates : Will not, then, the more powerful and better soul, when it does injustice, do it voluntarily, and the bad soul involuntarily ?

Hippias : Apparently.

Socrates : Is not, then, a good man he who has a good soul, and a bad man he who has a bad one ?

Hippias : Yes.

Socrates : It is, then, in the nature of the good man to do injustice voluntarily, and of the bad man to do it involuntarily, that is, if the good man has a good soul.

Hippias : But surely he has.

Socrates : Then he who voluntarily errs and does disgraceful and unjust acts, Hippias, if there be such a man, would be no other than the good man.”

 Socrates pulls himself up short, here. How could he come to this conclusion? It is as if the Socratic method had revealed a little too distinctly its daemonic side. But out of this little snatch of dialogue, in a dialogue that never receives very much attention, we see the outlines of the philosophe buffoon. Who emerges in Sade, in the French revolution, and in our modernity: Bataille’s monster, the one’s who test the experience-limit heralded by Foucault.

Woolf as essayist

 

Few novelists have a great gift for the essay. Usually the essays of the professional novelist, the Martin Amis type, have a between-work air. Among the Brits, the great essayist-novelists are Lawrence, Woolf and Pritchett. I have been in love with Jimmy Joyce since highschool, and consider Ulysses the summit – but he was no essayist. Nor is this a gift distributed largely among great poets. Wallace Stevens’ essays are read only in as much as they refer to the real work. Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop wrote beaucoup prose, but it, similarly, is parasitic to the work.

 

 But even if you subtracted the fiction from  Lawrence, Woolf and Pritchett, their essays would enroll them among the great writers.

Woolf in her essays retains her novelist’s gift for describing the body – in fact, her description of, say, Hazlitt is of a more concentrated, pictorial strain than she usually devotes to the characters in her novels, who go from the voice to the body. Her Hazlitt (in her essay on Hazlitt in the Common Reader, series 2) comes out of his own works as a posture, a stance,  a character. He is a shoe-gazer, your typical emo, with a genius for his particular division of life, which inserts itself with some difficulty into the usual intellectual divisions of labor. For he is neither philosopher nor literary critic nor pamphleteer, although he has parts of all three.  Plus Woolf catches that something reminiscent of the incel. This is there in Hazlett, but there is something a touch, well, snobbish here,  Woolf passing on that class contempt from which Hazlitt suffered in his life and afterlife:

 

“We see him as Coleridge saw him, ‘brow- hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange’. He comes shuffling into the room, he looks nobody straight in the face, he shakes hands with the fin of a fish; occasionally he darts a malignant glance from his comer. ‘His manners are 99 in 100 singularly repulsive’, Coleridge said. Yet now and again his face lit up with intellectual beauty, and his manner became radiant with sympathy and understanding. Soon, too, as we read on, we become familiar with the whole gamut of his grudges and his grievances. He lived, one gathers, mostly at inns. No woman’s form graced his board.”

 

This is the kind of thing that reminds us that Virginia Woolf was, first and foremost, a Stephen, the daughter of Leslie Stephen of the National Biography,  the heiress of a line that incorporated  the collective memory of the whole tribe of allowable writers – a kind of noblesse de clercs. All of the romantics suffered, from the point of view of the  high bourgeois Victorian vision, from “unfortunate” sex lives – from the incestuous Byron to, what was worse, the declasse Hazlitt. The Hazlett of Liber Amoris, the closest English lit gets to Rousseau’s Confessions, damned him by describing a passion for a servant – the kind of thing no aspiring functionary in the literary world could tolerate. Byron, at least, ran off with women with titles, and Shelley with a wealthy man’s daughter. But a servant in a boarding house – well, it was all very well to do it, but then to write a book about one’s unsuccessful courtship of same – well, that went beyond scandal into tawdriness.

 

Leslie Stephen wrote his own essay on Hazlitt, which shares certain judgments with his daughter. Especially about Hazlitt’s penchant for indelicacy:

 

“Indeed he takes the public into his confidence with a facility which we cannot easily forgive. Biographers of late have been guilty of flagrant violations of the unwritten code which should protect the privacies of social life from the intrusions of public curiosity. But the most unscrupulous of biographers would hardly have dared to tear aside the veil so audaciously as Hazlitt, in one conspicuous instance at least, chose to do for himself. His idol Rousseau had indeed gone further ; but when Rousseau told the story of his youth, it was at least seen through a long perspective of years, and his own personality might seem to be scarcely interested. Hazlitt chose, in the strange book called the "New Pygmalion," or "Liber Amoris," to invite the British public at large to look on at a strange tragi- comedy, of which the last scene was scarcely finished.”

 

That Hazlitt must, indisputably, be included among the romantic generation’s worthies was a problem for those who wanted to merge literature and respectability.

 

Woolf did not – although a part of her was always returning to her father’s voice.  Interestingly, in Woolf’s essay, she mentions that Hazlitt was  the object of malignant persecution--Blackwood's reviewers called him "pimply Hazlitt", though his cheek was pale as alabaster.”

 

The pimple shows up in another of Woolf’s views, although one that was not put down in an essay. Rather, it first appears in her diary entry about reading Joyce’s Ulysses  which she had take up out of a certain duty to the modern novel – and a certain envy of the competition: “I . . . have been amused, stimulated, charmed interested by the first 2 or 3 chapters–to the end of the Cemetery scene; & then puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.” The pimples move from the undergraduate to a serving boy in her letter to Lytton Strachey: “Never did I read such tosh. As for the first 2 chapters we will let them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th–merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges.” In fact, all of Woolf’s criticisms about Joyce are swaddled in the kind of snobbishness that anti-Woolfians can’t forgive.

 

 Joyce’s origins – about which Woolf knew little, except that they were Irish and had never been mentioned in the National Biography series edited by her father – figure overwhelmingly in her response to the book.

 

I think that Yeats’ line about the art that arises from one’s struggle with one’s self applies in particular to Woolf, who struggled with the masculinist ideology of the Stephen type which was definitely in her head, an illness,  and with class feelings that were entangled with the masculinist ideology as well, which she worked out to her satisfaction (and mine – but I think I am in minority in that opinion) in Three Guineas.  It is what made her the most complete literatus of the canonical writers of the English 20th century.

looting and heroic failure: the Liz Truss episode

 

William Hazlitt, unlike Coleridge or Wordsworth, was not only an admirer, initially, of the French Revolution, but believed in its principles to his dying day. He saw the turn to the right of the Romantics – the intellectuals of his generation – as a betrayal. I look back at the first Cold War as the Burkian war – the war of the anicen regime powers against the French revolution – and in those terms Hazlett plays the role of the unreconstructed fellow traveller.

He had company. Byron was scathing about the rightwing British establishment – appealing to an earlier Whig notion of liberty. And of course Shelley was always there on the battlements. But Hazlitt was not a poet, but an essayist. In fact, one of the great English essayists, to the embarrassment of his Victorian posterity. John Stuart Mill could resurrect Coleridge, in search of a liberal consensus, but not Hazlitt. This is one of the reasons that the English universities, usually so meticulous in producing “collected works”, have been so late to take on Hazlitt.

Hazlitt’s Life of Napoleon is one of his more obscure works. It is true, too, that he saw Napoleon as perhaps too uninhibitedly the product of the Revolution. The Napoleon who sought to restart slavery in Sainte-Domingue is reactionary in the worst sense. But, at the same time, as Marx thought too, the Napoleon who occupied much of Germany and Italy brought with him an enlightened form of the state that was absolutely necessary for modernization – from regulations concerning abattoirs to modern policing.

In the Life, there’s a marvellous passage where Hazlitt goes after Southey, that tadpole eater, and foresees, in spite of himself, the economic backbone of Cold Wars:

“Mr. Southey somewhere accounts for the distress of the country in 1817 (and probably at present) by the prhase of “the transition from war to peace”, and emphatically observes, that the war was a customer to the manufacturers of Birmingham and Sheffeld alone, to the amount of twenty millions a year. Be it so: but if this were all, and this were really a benefit and source of riches to the country, why not continue to be a customer to these manufacturers of steel and brass in peace as well as war; and having bought and paid for so many cannon and so much gunpowder, fire the off in the air as well as against the French?”

In fact, in the Cold War economy in the twentieth century, the development of nuclear weapons allowed for a twofer – they were highly expensive, highly necessary, and their very presence mean that they were not to be fired off in the air on any account. From the economic point of view, they were almost perfect commodities – luxury and necessity in one.

One of the ways of looking at the Revolution and the wars that followed is to compare the financing of these wars with the wars of the 18^th century. One of the great advantages of Britain, in those world wars, was the state of its finances. Although British GDP was considerably less than France’s, it was France that was always teetering near backruptcy, since the profligency of the monarchy was paid for by recurrent bankruptcies of the state. Thus, the interest on loans to France had to be high – much higher than loans to Britain.

To pursue the Burkian Cold war into real war, Britain had to radically reorganize itself – which it did by taking itself off the gold standard. It helped that the financial world shifted from Amsterdam to London, after the French invaded the Netherlands. Although to an 18^th century mind like Hazlitt’s the English national debt seemed like a nation-crusher, it turned out that this debt was a great advantage to Britain.

From 1688 – the year that James II was deposed – onward, the British instituted a two tier system for paying for war – short term loans that would be repaid by long term loans. In this way, the British were able to get past the limits traditionally imposed by direct payment for war. Instead, the British steadily cultivated a national debt that was composed almost entirely of old loans, consolidated into long term ones, for an endless series of wars. But loans aren’t merely negative things – if they were, nobody would loan, and there would be no bond market. Rather, by producing a lively bond market, the English spread the debt for their wars around. To do this, the state had to perform a one/two step – on the one hand, centralizing organization enough to manage wars, and on the other hand, decentralizing finance to the extent of divvying its debts up among the upper bourgeoisie. Thus, when France, with its autocratic model of government and its dysfunctional parliamentary system, suffered untold misery trying to pay for its part in this series of wars, the British, whose debt to GDP ration was on some accounts worse than France, flourished.

Within that one-two step, Britain, where the financial center of the world was now located, made its debt a mainstay of the rentier lifestyle.

Here’s what  the Cambridge Economic History of Europe says: “Already in the eighteenth, more strongly in the nineteenth century, there existed among the British population a wealthy section capable and willing to invest part of its income in state bonds. Between 1761 and 1820, about 305 per cent of British public expenditure was financed from this source; between 1689 and 1820 the proportion did not fall as low as 29.5 per cent. This section of the population derived from these loans an income in the form of annual interest which grew to a substantial independent source of incomes within the total economy. Interest due to the wealthier section of the population was defrayed via the budget mainly from revenues derived from indirect taxes, paid overwhelmingly by sections of the population in receipt of lower incomes.”

Now, the proper name for this is looting. War, in Hazlitt’s imagination, was simply loss. This is the moral image of war. But another image of war is about gain. Gain, it should be said, or loot, is still something the established poohbahs are ashamed of. Thus, war is always about principle. When the anti-war peeps said that the war with Iraq was about blood, this was perceived by all the great poohbahs as laughably naïve. Of course, in the business press, there was a great excitement about the chance for profit, but this existed in another discursive universe. When that universe did obtrude itself on the vision of the poohbahs, it was dubbed something like free enterprise, to give it that secret ingredient “freedom” – Freedom, like the phrase No Women and Children Admitted, which the duke and the dauphin put on their playbills for the Royal Nonesuch, is a lure. “If that don’t draw em, I don’t know Arkansaw” – said the Duke. Freedom is in that same category.

The UK version of looting, with both its internal and external aspects, created a mighty power. But that power has vanished. As Finton O’Toole observed in his book on Brexit, Britain without an imperial project is slowly becoming prey to the nationalism – and in particular, English nationalism – that had been repressed under the British ideal. Also repressed, I would say, is the idea that the wars are looting expeditions. In that repression, the compromise image – which O’Toole captures well – is that of heroic failure. To which the Liz Truss fiasco aligns itself all too well.

“The grand balls-up is not new, and in English historical memory it is not shameful. Most of the modern English heroes, after all, are complete screw-ups. The exploits that have loomed largest in English consciousness since the nineteenth century are retreats or disasters: Sir John Moore’s evacuation of Corunna in the Peninsular War, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the doomed Franklin expedition, ‘Scott of the Antarctic’, the ‘last stand’ against the Zulus at Isandlwana, Gordon of Khartoum, the Somme, the flight from Dunkirk. This culture of heroic failure Barczewski defines as ‘a conscious sense of celebration of the striving for an object that was not attained’. She points, for example, to the ten memorial statues in Waterloo Place, a key site flanking the great processional route up the Mall towards Buckingham Palace: five relate to the disastrous Crimean War, one is of Franklin and one is of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who died with four of his men having failed to get to the South Pole before Roald Amundsen’s pragmatically planned and unromantic Norwegian expedition.  

Oddly, the leaders of the Leave movement often seem to relish the prospect of just such a failure. It is as if the entire enterprise was undertaken under the sign of a phrase of John Major’s, the former Tory PM, who when asked about some Thatcherite policy he was implementing replied: ‘if it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working.’”

Heroic failures past, heroic failures future – such seems to be the impulse under the surface of Brexit Britain. Combined with Truss’s open economics of looting by the very wealthy, things are going to plan – that is, going to hell in a handbasket. All hands stand by as we salute the coffins!