The strange birth story of the Empire

 

Plutarch, in the life of Romulus, lists several different stories about the founding of Rome. Each of the stories is a variant on the strangeness of birth itself.

1. The first story is that Rome was founded in the wake of the exhaustion of a woman named Roma. Roma was a Trojan noblewoman who became tired of the strategies of the men leading the Trojans into exile. They never stopped anywhere long. Roma got the women to burn the boats.  “When this was done, the men were angry at first, but afterwards, when they had settled of necessity on the Palatine, seeing themselves in a little while more prosperous than they had hoped, since they found the country good and the neighbours made them welcome, they paid high honours to Roma, and actually named the city after her, since she had been the occasion of their founding it. And from that time on, they say, it has been   customary for the women to salute their kinsmen and husbands with a kiss; for those women, after they had burned the ships, made use of such tender salutation as they supplicated their husbands and sought to appease their wrath.” This is a founding worthy of Fellini – or Lisa Wertmuller.

2. The second story is that Romanus, the son of Odyseus and Circe, colonized the city.

3. Others say it was Romus, sent by Diomedes from Troy, or Romis, tyrant of the Latins.

4. Plutarch writes that the most authentic tradition is that it was founded by Romulus. But writers “don’t agree about his lineage.” Some say he was the son of Aeneas and Dexithea.  Others say Roma was wedded to Latinus, the son of Telemachus, who gave birth to Romulus.

5. But another account, which is “altogether fabulous”, goes like this. Tarchetus was a cruel king of the Albans. Whether it was due to his cruelty or for another reason, a strange phantom haunted his house: a penis rose out of his hearth and remained there for several days. A king with a penis in his chimney is bound to lose face, sooner or later. So Tarchetus sent to the oracle of Tethys, who responded that a virgin must have intercourse with the penis. As Chekhov observed, if there is a pistol in the first act, it must go off in the fifth. Similarly, if a phantom penis haunts your hearth, a virgin must copulate with it. Because the oracle promised that the fruit of the virgin and the phantom dick would be an illustrious son, Tarchetius told one of his daughters to do the deed. But she felt that Tarchetius was abusing his patriarchal powers here, so she secretly sent a handmaid in her place. When Tarchetius learned who fucked the phantom phallus, he seized both maidens, and was going to put them to death when the goddess Hestia appeared to him in a dream and told him no. So he locked them up and told them to weave a web. When they finished the web, he would give them in marriage. By day they weaved the web. At night, though, other maidens, under the King’s orders, unwove it. The handmaid soon showed that she was pregnant – pregnant with twins. Tarchetius had been forbidden by the Goddess to kill both of them, but when the handmaiden had the twins, Tarchetius revisited the divine dream and decided that at least he could kill the twins, who he entrusted to a certain Teratius. As in James Bond movies, so in myth: just as the baddie never kills James outright, but always gives orders to have him killed in some  unusual and outrageous way, so too these oracle-ridden kings have threatening boy-childs taken care of by henchman, which never tricks the gods and demons. 

6. Teratius sounds like a name born out of the name Tarchetius.

7. This is the part of the story everyone remembers. “This man, however, carried them to the river-side and laid them down there. Then a she-wolf visited the babes and gave them suck, while all sorts of birds brought morsels of food and put them into their mouths, until a cow-herd spied them, conquered his amazement, ventured to come to them, and took the children home with him. Thus they were saved, and when they were grown up, they set upon Tarchetius and overcame him.  At any rate, this is what a certain Promathion says, who compiled a history of Italy.”

8. But Plutarch gives a longer variant, which he likes better. The material here is slightly transformed – it has the malleability of dreams, such dreams as Freud interpreted: the compromise between the fear of castration and male marvel at his unlikely equipment produces another quasi-virgin birth, this one happening to a Vestal virgin who evidently disobeyed the rules. The twins born to this virgin were to be killed, again, by a servant, who through a bunch of incidences lost the little basket they were in. “They floated down the river a fairly smooth spot which is now called Kermalus”.  And once again, in this scrambled egg of a story, body parts get mixed with philology: “Now there was a wild fig-tree hard by, which they called Ruminalis, either from Romulus, as is generally thought, or because cud-chewing, or ruminating, animals spent the noon-tide there for the sake of the shade, or best of all, from the suckling of the babes there; for the ancient Romans called the teat "ruma," and a certain goddess, who is thought to preside over the rearing of young children, is still called Rumilia, in sacrificing to whom no wine is used, and libations of milk are poured over her victims. 2 Here, then, the babes lay, and the she-wolf of story here gave them suck..”

9. But Plutarch is not satisfied yet with this account, because, frankly, it seems fantastic, and not in that good way that has been authorized by ancient Greek writers. “But some say that the name of the children's nurse, by its ambiguity, deflected the story into the fabulous. For the Latins not only called she-wolves "lupae," but also women of loose character, and such a woman was the wife of Faustulus, the foster-father of the infants…”

10. The founding of Rome, then, involves every kind of Oedipal confabulation. Perhaps this is appropriate for the violently predatory state that grew out of phantom penises, handmaidens and  Vestal virgins. The imperial question is not: is the state legitimate? Rather, it is: who is my mother?

Godzilla, the season's most politically interesting film!

 

So the Force of Nature said, Dad, after Yoga, let’s go see Godzilla. He’d already explained that it was a special showing at the Rex. We’d been there before, when he was nine, to see Pokemon. I said, fine. Monster movies were a staple of my childhood, and it gave me a kick that the force of nature wanted to see the new Godzilla.

And being a cinephile, the FON told me, as we walked to the metro stop to take us on the 8 to Bonne Nouvelle, that it was nominated for an Oscar. Best picture? I asked sceptically. No, best special effects.

The Rex theatre is a big structure that has obviously seen better times. Paris is a cinephile paradise, but the cost of running a movie theatre, even for a chain, means that outside some Gaumonts in Malls, the screens are comparatively small. I love me the MK2 willingness to show the obscurest foreign films, but their theatre spaces aren’t exactly fit for cinemascope.

Well, it turns out that Godzilla matinees hold no charm for the Parisian – only five other people saw the film with us. Their loss. For it was, oddly, one of the most political films of the year.

When I saw Godzilla back in the day, as a kid, I saw it on tv – I have a flickering memory that it might even have been in black and white. As a kid, the concept made me a bit queasy. I knew that atom bombs burned off your skin and did something so that women gave birth to deformed children – or so I had been told. In contrast, this monster born out of radioactivity seemed toylike, and the moviemakers seemed to have a good time destroying the movie sets of the city and having crowds run screaming hither and thither.

Perhaps casting a maturer eye on those first Godzilla’s would reveal the political subtext,

In the case of the new Godzilla, the political subtext was also the text. And an interesting text it was? It combined the pacifism that was the official Japanese doctrine until the U.S. forced the government to change course in the late fifties, against the majority opinion of the nation, with the formation of a revolutionary force. From the liberal point of view, this force was vigilantism. From the point of view of a leftist politics, it was something much more interesting, a sort of Soviet that forms in the interstices of government action – or rather inaction. In thrall to the Americans, and not wanting to provoke the Soviets, the Japanese government does nothing. So the Japanese people arm themselves and overthrow Godzilla.

The nuclear shadow over this film is, evidently, Fukushima – a symptom of the government’s bondage to corporations. The truth about Fukushima is, even now, an uncertain thing. The extent of the longterm damage from that collapsed nuclear power plant is hard to gauge, as the government stands as an impediment to any clarity on the subject.

Adam and I talked about Fukushima and Chernobyl on the walk home. I mentioned the wild divergence between the Greenpeace estimate of the death toll from Chernobyl and the Soviet estimate, which was soon adopted by the International Atomic Energy Agency. It is the one Soviet data set that, magically, is accepted by even Cold Warriors in the West.

And we know why.

Anyway, the redemption of the ex kamikaze pilot, who is guilty for not fulfilling his mission, is a nice life affirming thread that is all about what politics should be about, and rarely are about: making for a life more abundant.

claire poems

 

Claire poems

------ Karen Chamisso

 

1.

Claire giving tremendous blank looks

All that slut hauteur

Dior Red Vinyl on her lips

Claire in her bodycon bandage dress

15 year old Claire.

 

Up in the entertainment crib

She danced me around

“You’re gonna have to face it

you’re addicted to Claire”

- I’ve got the look.

 

It’s school rule time, she tells me.

We both study intently

The timeless timely things

Prince’s blue sky (avec nuages) frock coat

Annie Lennox’s quasi-tonte allure

 

And the models fakeplaying guitar

Behind Robert Palmer.

Put your gaze in the air like you just don’t care

And don’t care: it’s the most important part.

Darling, she would say,

 

we’re going to live in Berlin

where Claire had flown with her Mama

just last year. Darling, we called each other.

C’est chic, we would say

Excluding, say, some Gwinnet county import

 

Whose bouffant blonde above the pom-poms

Was just too rich a joke.

The entertainment crib – channel 69

From four to six. The pony pound you could see

From Claire’s windows.

 

The go-arounds of spring have left us all behind

Claire, darling, ghost, so kind, so unkind.

 

2.

Claire taught me the larger gestures

The kabuki theater of entrances and exits

In sky high boots at the Killer club

Sweeping into the backseat of the taxi at 2 a.m.

The seriousness at the center of silliness

A moral position, stoic,

Enduring the battering of ten thousand bragging boys.

Claire taught me the larger gestures but

Claire died. They dragged her body from the river.

She chose the largest exit. And though I see and feel

The moral position, I can only visit, stricken.

They buried her in Alpharetta.

Oh Claire. Honeychild.

 

 

the end of the european pastoral

 

When I was an adolescent, embedded in metro Atlanta, I dreamed of Europe. The Europe I saw in movies. The Europe I read about in books. The Europe I saw in paintings, or to be more specific, reproductions of paintings in books.

In this Europe, people strolled in meadows. Hell, sometimes they lounged naked in meadows. And, significantly for a child of suburban development in land that was once half junkyard, half forest, these Europeans never seemed to worry about being bitten. They swam in streams and didn’t think about water moccasins, they skipped about in meadows without slapping down mosquitos and gnats, and, significantly, they could plop themselves down anywhere without inspecting the area for ant mounds – that is, for fire ants.

I have plenty personal experience of fire ants, and they do disturb the pastoral mood. And o my droogs, they are always on for a skorry up the legs and a little collective stinging. This they are amazingly good at. I remember, once, doing a landscaping job in Louisiana, when I was out of my pissant teens, and somehow rummaging up a metro of the fuckers. It was not a good time to be me.

So imagine my horrors when I read in Liberation that pastoral Europe, the Europe of picnics, prime vacation and retirement spot for cavemen in the paleolithic, the Europe of my teendreams, is going going gone. Fire ants have landed. In fact, there are now metros of them in Sicily.  

“In September, an article in Current Biology revealed the presence of 88 nests near Syracuse. Monday, the same researchers in the same journal confirmed that the species, an especially invasive one, has in reality put down its hooves in the southwest of the island since at least 2017.”

Of mosquitos, the turn of the climate has delivered a nice soupy warm niche for them in Paris and all over France and one gets bitten even in the winter, now. But this dread footfall of the fireant on Sicily is truly the forenote of bitterer things. The last time the order of nature was broken up by some underground force in Sicily was when Proserpine was raped by Hades.

“Neare Enna walles there standes a Lake, Pergusa is the name.

 Cayster heareth not mo songs of Swannes than doth the same.

A wood environs everie side the water round about,

And with his leaves as with a veyle doth keepe the Sunne heate out.

The boughes do yeelde a coole fresh Ayre : the moystnesse of the grounde

 Yeeldes sundrie flowres : continuall spring is all the yeare there founde.

 While in this garden Proserpine was taking hir pastime.

 

In gathering eyther Violets blew, or Lillies white as Lime,

And while of Maidenly desire she fillde hir Maund and Lap,

Endevoring to outgather hir companions there.”

 

The end of that rape story was the start of the seasons – which, as we know, we are now seeing the end of, seemingly frozen in shock. It was another fiery insect – the fire fly – that was lamented in a prophetic essay by Pasolini: Where have all the fireflies gone? This was written in 1975.

“In the early sixties, because of air pollution, and water pollution in the countryside (our blue rivers and limpid irrigation ditches) fireflies began to disappear. The phenomenon was swift and terrible. After a few years the fireflies were not longer there. (They are now a painful memory from the past; and an older man with yet such a memory can no longer see himself in the face of today's youngsters, as he once was, because they have no store of such memories.)”

We all know that extinction is the price of prosperity. But what happens when the prosperity turns, finally, on us? For are we really more useful than the fireflies? A question that the fire ants can answer – we’ve been o so useful to them. Ring down the curtain on a world that endured from Ovid to Pasolini, then. It brings juice to me glazzies, it really does. Finis.

Renata Adler on pre-totalitarianism

 

In 1977, Renata Adler inaugurated a piece for the New York Review of Books with two great, dire paragraphs that seem like banners for that post-Watergate, post-Vietnam War decade:

“When too many scandals have gone on for too long, uninterrupted and inadequately investigated, they tend to merge. What began as isolated instances of corruption grow toward each other and finally interlock. The nursing home operators, and private garbage collectors, and parking lot owners, and film industry executives, and cable television interests, and vending machine distributors, and recording companies, and casino operators, the teamsters, the Mafia, and defense contractors, and finally the investigative agencies of government and elected officials up to the highest level begin to have in common not just a general corruption but joint ventures and even personnel.

That is an extremely dangerous moment in public life. It is almost impossible to understand. People with an abstract turn of mind adopt conspiracy theories—when the problem is not a conspiracy but some other link. Investigative reporters, meanwhile, find sources, gather facts. There is a lot of news. But the meaning, the most obvious inferences, in a time of high scandal, are lost in a deluge of trivially depressing information.|

Those two graphs still give me a contact high. Adler had been a speechwriter for the chairman of the House committee that investigated Nixon in 1973. She was then a self-proclaimed liberal Republican – a species even then suffering a drastic decline in the popular base. The line from Teddy Roosevelt to Teddy Lindsey had been annexed by the Southern strategy, which proved fatal to anything like the centrist politics Adler affected. She located herself in a niche outside of “ideology”, when such positioning seemed viable after the ideological forays of the New Left.

Reading the essay now, one notices that, after beginning with two quotes from Henry and Charles Adam’s great essay on the Eerie Railroad, a prescient warning against corporate power, Adler dismisses the problem of the corporation as an entity in a democratic republic and turns to the corruption of the Teamsters Union.

“What the Adams brothers feared never quite happened; the republic survived its corporate threat. But that threat had all the elements—in particular, the collaboration of the morally and intellectually disoriented victim—which we have recognized, since Hannah Arendt,  as pre-totalitarian. The threat recurs, in other times, in other forms. How close, after all, is the analogy between the present member of any notoriously corrupt union and the Adams brothers’ small investor. Every teamster has for decades had reason to know that his leaders are not only, in some way remote from his own interest, criminal. They are stealing his pension. Still, it is “his” union—in precisely the sense in which the robber barons’ rail-roads were the small investor’s corporation.”

The seventies was the age of de-regulation, a strategy lead – and this has gone down memory hole – by Senator Ted Kennedy. A liberal of the type that doubled down on capitalist competition as the solution to our woes. It was Kennedy that led the fight to deregulate airline travel, resulting eventually in the destruction of the FAA. Out of this fight we get our current airline monopolies and the inability to get to medium sized cities in America as we no longer subvent those flights.

A long-term Kennedy enemy was Jimmy Hoffa. Adler’s shot at the Teamsters was standard for the time. It was also true, to the extent that the Teamsters were in cahoots with the Mafia. Jackie Presser, the Teamsters president, was on everybody’s payroll – including the FBI.

However, a little thing happened on the way to the Union’s “reform.” The Teamster member whose dues were being stolen, much to Adler’s dismay, saw his union taken over by a government oversight committee. A headline from 2016 sums up the result: “How the Teamsters pension disappeared more quickly under Wall Street than the mob.” In fact, what the Adams brothers feared happened just as they imagined it. The learned inability of the state to act as a social democratic entity has given us a far right Court system, deregulation on every level, massive wealth inequality, and a lifestyle only supported by massive household debt. The democratic deficit we are struggling with has nothing to do with the corruptions of unions, and everything to do with legalizing the corruption of corporations.

That said, one does admire the icy clarity of Adler’s prose – even if that clarity is purchased at the expense of pre-suppositions that are not clearly argued for. So here’s a bit about Watergate that is all about our present:

“What we had for a time at the heart of government was not what Ron Ziegler, in the tapes, so memorably called a Rashomon situation, but a scenario from an earlier work. In Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, the hero is a man who has been recruited as a police agent in a group of seven anarchists, each of whom has adopted the name of a day of the week. At meeting after meeting, a member of the group is exposed as such an agent. As Friday, Wednesday, and several others are discovered, Thursday fears each time that it is he who has been found out. By the end of the book, it turns out that every single anarchist was really a police agent in disguise. It is, in real life, normal for police and outlaws to be mutually dependent and to share an interest—as prison guards require, for their continued employment, the continued existence of prisoners, and therefore, of crimes. But when they share an identity, when the enforcers of narcotics laws are the sellers of narcotics, when the cops are the robbers, and the investigators the coverers-up, the foundations of common truth and honesty are shattered altogether, and society requires a subtle (and lucky) combination of forces to dig itself out.”

We have long passed the point where this combination of forces is marginal. It is as central to our functioning as flows of untaxed black money from unspecified sources are to the functioning of banks and private equity firms.  We are all Panama, now, Jake.

Tasting with your eye: on the too much of reality

 

« Savoir  être  superficiel par profondeur. » I extract this maxim from Georges Salles “Le regard” – The look. The deep know how to be superficial – the English explains too much, decompresses the spring, here. English is a good language for punchlines, while French is one for epigrams.

I came upon the name Georges Salles in Adrienne Monnier’s essay about her late friend, Walter Benjamin, published by Mercure de France in 1952. Monnier was Sylvia Beach’s lover – two real live muses, Beach, of course, of James Joyce, and Monnier of a number of writers, including Walter Benjamin, who she first met in 1930 at her famous bookstore/salon. He wrote Monnier a letter when he was on his final flight from the Nazis out of Paris to Marseilles, and then, by a fatal misstep, by way of the Pyrenees to Spain.  

“I keep thinking of you not only in dreaming of Paris and rue de L’Odeon, for which I wish the most powerful and least solicited protective divinities – but also a many of the intersections of my thought.”

A muse in need of a muse.

Georges Salles’  Le Regard was a shared enthusiasm of Monnier and Benjamin. Salles was, officially, an expert on “Asian” art. He was also a great defender of the art of the connoisseur, an art founded not, for him, on signatures, on attribution, but on the ocular enjoyment – like the tongue, the eye has its pure pleasures. Salles was the grandchild of Gustave Eiffel, and the collaborator of Andre Malraux. However, a book about the sensual delight of the visible, published in 1939, was not likely to survive the sensual horror of the war.

«  The certainty of the amateur’s glance is neither more intellectual nor less organic than the selection of a gourmet. Everything happens in the shokc of an impression, confusing to our mind but distinct to our senses.”  Here was a man of a certain radical empiricism: thought follows the senses at a distance, as the kite, as spectacular as it may be, follows the string held by the child. The child determines, in the last instance, whether to bring the kite down or to let it go.

It is the last chapter of The Look that might have truly fired up Benjamin: the day. The author goes out of the museum, away from the paintings and sculptures, and into the streets of Paris to use his heightened optical sense. This return to life is I think something we have all experienced – although for me the experience is going from a movie that has really delighted me or moved me out of the theatre into the streets. Ideally, the movie ends at, say, eight o’clock p.m. on an early spring day. Ideally, the city is New Orleans or Atlanta – and I am in my twenties. The transfer from one realm of fascination to another is a curiously delayed passage – the streets “look” cinematic. This experience is described by no one better than Walker Percy in The Movie Goer. I know the streets that Percy’s character, Binx, walked around. I have a distinct memory of coming out of Prytania theatre dazzled by one movie or another, and walking back across Audobon Park to the apartment in the upper floor of one of the big houses that I shared with Frank. Frank is long gone in my life, a boat that has drifted away, but I do remember the elevation of common life that succeeded seeing some movies, that little extra around things – as Nietzsche puts it in the intro to the Twilight of the Idols, “nothing succeeds without some measure of exaggeration. The too much of force is proof of force.”

This is named, approximately, the “Search” in the Moviegoer. Binx, the narrator, calls it waking up and finding one is in a strange place. “The movies are onto the search but they screw it up.” Or sometimes, when you are young, they give you the impulse. Even movies shown on TV gave me that moment, sometimes.

It isn’t such a long distance from Georges Salles in 1939 in Paris (to whom Benjamin dedicated his last published bit of writing when he was still alive) and me in 1982, walking home from the Prytania movie theatre. An almost equal distance separates me from 1982 and 1982 from 1939. In Seven league boots, I go backwards.

Non-agression pacts: from Molotov-Ribbentrop to James Angleton

 

The Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact has been burned into our intellectual history: here, at last, Stalin cast off the mask and Soviet Communism was revealed as a reactionary force. It has become a trope in the literature: how violent anti-Nazi communists, overnight, turned into pacifists.

However, a secret and parallel non-aggression pact was made after the war – this time, between the American military and intelligence services and various talented anti-communist Nazis. This pact was not officialized with any pomp – rather, it was the object of various “programs”, codenamed Dustbin, or Paperclip, or simply acted upon by various American intelligence agents who carried into the field America’s enduring racism and a hefty backwoods or Yale educated anti-communism.

The products of the later pact sometimes emerged in trials, and sometimes emerged in memoirs. The entire West German intelligence service began under Gehlen, a highranking Nazi Abwehr officer, pretty much where it left off in 1944, when Gehlen’s army – Hitler’s Army – was in mass retreat from Russia.

In Italy, the non-aggression pact was operationalized by the leading intelligence officer in Italy at that time, James Angleton, who had family connections in Italy who had connections to various highranking fascists. These fascists included many who, later on in Italian history, subvented neo-fascists groups, created various behind the scenes groups, and occasionally broke out into outright attempts at coups. Angleton’s friend, the “Black Prince”, Junio Valerio Borghese, famously plotted one of those coup, which failed in 1970, forcing Borghese to flee to friendly Franco’s Spain.

Another result of what one might want to call the Angleton-Borghese non-aggression pact was the American support for Nazi collaborators in Eastern Europe, the effects of which have ramified over the decades. Violen Trifa, a Romanian Iron Gardist,  lead the youth wing of the Iron Gard in a merciless rebellion in Bucharest against the government in 1941. The Iron Gardists were ecstatically sadistic: Jewish prisoners were taken by the Iron Guard to the municipal  slaughterhouse. "There," White [an American correspondant] wrote, "in a fiendish parody of kosher methods of butchering, they hung many of the Jews on meat hooks and slit their throats; others they forced to kneel at chopping blocks while they [Iron Guardists] beheaded them with cleavers." Fourteen years later, after Trifa had found his way by various backroutes to America and become a bishop in the Romanian Orthodox Church and a standup anti-communist, he was invited by Richard Nixon to give the opening prayer at the U.S. Senate. Trifa’s is an extreme case – he denied for a long time being part of the Iron Guard - but the American military and intelligence forces in Germany and Austria after the war soon put into practice their own form of Ribbentrop - Molotov. And they kept their bargain with their former Nazi factotums. Walter Schreiber, who apparently gave good data from his biowar experiments on concentration camp inmates, was imported to the US and found employment with the Air Force. Unfortunately for Schreiber, the press got ahold of his past – a rare case in the fifties – and so the U.S. arranged for him to slip away to Argentina. Eventually, he ended up working for Paraguay’s fiercely anti-communist dictator, Alfredo Stroessner. A memo from the Pentagon showed the military exasperation with the pettifogging around such as Schreiber: “an organized medical movement against [Schreiber], emanating from Boston, by medical men of Jewish ancestry, I would suspect.”

 

These stories have been around since the late seventies – from John Loftus’s The Belarus Secret in 1982 to Ann Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip in 2014. The books are not, it should be noted, by academics, nor is there an academic sub-department dedicated to what happened to the Nazis, fascists and collaborators after WWII – in the popular imagination and in academic studies, what happened was the Nuremberg Trial. And, in particular, while Yale University, for instance, publishes a whole series on Communist spies in America, nobody mixes these studies with the study of the use, by an unelected American establishment, of Nazis in America, and elsewhere. This is no small blind spot – if we had a good, contextually rich sense of how the extreme right was supported after the war by its former enemies – the U.S., the U.K., France and the U.S.S.R – we would have a morally clarified image of the history of the last 75 years. We don’t have that.

 

But even from what we do have, we know that an American establishment long identified anti-communism as the guiding star of American foreign and domestic policy, much more so than democracy of “freedom”. As a result, Americans – liberals and conservatives – have a very distorted view of America’s “exceptionalism.”