Obsequy for the Freak

 

When I was a high school boy, in the seventies, the term “nerd” had not gained the universal currency it now has. I was called a brain, or a bookworm, or an egghead – most likely. Only my Pops called me an egghead. In general, that I stuck my nose in a book a lot was, of course, seen, but it was simply one of my things; as, say, a tendency to a runny nose and nosepicking might be one of the things of some other boy.

However, there was one term that stood out in my highschool: freak.

The seventies was, in some ways, the era of the freak. A TV series I watched with Adam about that time, Freaks and Geeks, got the title right.

That I ended up, in 1981, dancing a lot at the Florentine in Shreveport to Rick James’s Such a Freaky Girl was, looking back, a suitable cap, or rather an underlining, of that strange era as we entered the colder world of the attack on social democracy.  That the Florentine, a gay club, existed in Shreveport was itself a freak – it was a large Victorianish mansion, which had once been a supper club. At the time, it was dedicated to the cult of Donna Summer, Goddess: “The last dance” was ritually played at the end of the night, rhyming of course with the last dance.

Ah, the American Freak. The pure products of America, contra WCW, go freakish.

According to the OED of 1913 – one of the treasures of the Internet is the digitalizing of this massive language glacier – “Not found before 16^th c; possibly introduced from dialects, and cognate with OE frician (Matt. Xi.17) to dance.” However, I feel that as the word crossed the Atlantic to America, it gained its real vulgate hold. In England, freak was a term one associates with whim, or with chance. In the OED listing of definitions, I would draw your attention to no. 4,b: “More fully freak of nature – lusus naturaeP: a monstrosity, an abnormally developed individual of any species; in recent use (esp. U.S.) a living curiosity exhibited in a show.”

The carny culture, the vaudeville routine, the moving picture – an odour of buttered popcorn surrounded the word. And its counterpart, geek. Yet the two went different paths, as the geek becomes an exhibition less for his individuality itself than for doing some unusual thing, such as biting off the head of chickens.

The Freak, though, is at a dead end of the individualistic creed. The freak is a kind of genius.

As Rick James notes, it is the kind of genius that goes into sex, a lot of sex. Or into drugs, a lot of drugs. The freak culture of the seventies, in the Metro Atlanta area, developed a twist on the Southern drawl and a goodly number of paraphernalia shops that were, unfortunately, shut down by the cops after laws were passed against them. The freak is always a scandal to the puritan.

I have a feeling – a feeling that is, perhaps, due to my living in France and having no contact with high school beyond the offerings of shows on Netflix that Adam insists on seeing – that the freak is at a low point in the culture. The nerd and the geek, or the alpha male and proud boy, seem more of this time.

I pity a time without freaks.

The synthetic progressive

I have been searching for a term to encompass one of the great features of capitalism – the non-necessary synthesis. I guess I will call it the synthetic synthesis.

A synthetic synthesis is the repeated putting together of two sets of concepts that are not necessarily joined together, creating a “discursive” necessity – or what I would call a mock necessity.

The third way, that ghostly nineties thing, corresponds very well to the synthetic synthesis model. A certain neo-classical economics is retrieved from the conservative opposition to social democracy, and is synthesized with an ideology that came out of the class struggles that brought about social democracy: that is, the struggle for civil rights of oppressed subjects in a liberal nation-state. So, for instance, the type of economic policies that favours a great increase in economic inequality, with its deregulation, its guarantees of support for the financial sector, its lower tax rate for the wealthy (in all its parts, including the blind eye turned to offshore money and the whole system of tax avoidance for the wealthy) is joined to an increasing concern with the legal equality of the oppressed subjects.

In the synthetic synthesis, the former left assumption – that class struggle is the shaping force of capitalist modernity – is simply dropped out.

Synthetic synthesis produces a certain type of managerial self. In corporations, in academia, in politics, in journalism this self is encountered over and over again. It is a self that is rhetorically virtuous, but anchored in every way in an economics of exploitation. The synthetic progressive.

That these syntheses are not grounded in necessity – that is, in any approximation of a total view of society – means that these managerial selves can easily adopt attitudes that go violently against the civil rights ideology that legitimates them.

In France, right now, we are seeing in real time how this works, as Macron – an almost ideal managerial self – and the  National Front (the RN, but I’m going to refuse to call them their new audience friendly name) are tentatively reaching out to each other. Last year, Le Pen’s party joined the left in its criticism of Macron’s reactionary attacks on Social Democratic institutions, symbolized by the fight over retirement. Symbolized, I should say, by the theft, by the political establishment, of years of the life of the employed classes, from clerks to mid-level managers to every employee of every public service. The last named have long been the target of Macronist contempt, contempt at the deepest level.

On the way to assuming power, the National Front, much like some Marxist caricature of fascism, erased its dispute with Macron over economics. And, indeed, in the turning of these wheels, the fragility of the synthetic synthesis comes into full view: why not attack social democracy and promote racism? It is as necessary, or non-necessary, as its opposite.

One of the great terms that has arisen in the social media is “gaslighting” – and gaslighting is symptomatic in late neoliberalism of the grinding sound at the base, as the money that flowed into the plutocracy due to neoliberal policies starts flowing to the reactionaries and fascists. The billionaire philanthropists, it turns out, are billionaires first, and philanthropists only as it gains them power and tax breaks.

It is hard to get one’s mind around a society that has so amply and fully adopted to synthetic syntheses – as it makes the life-world seem, ultimately, a sort of petty game, where nothing is serious if you don’t have serious money. Democracy can be cast aside because it empowers “non-serious” people. The serious buy their seriousness with serious money.

I should amplify this with six hundred pages of note on Adorno’s negative dialectics. But that is for later.

olivier blanchard and the free lunch: a comedy of errors

 The neolib economist Oliver Blanchard tweeted a very funny comedy bit, in which he played the part of “social democrat”. And he wrote:

“As a social democrat, I believe in equalizing chances, in improving education, in redistributing income from rich to poor. As an economist and someone sometimes involved in policy design, I also know there is a delicate balance between reducing inequality and maintaining strong growth. The NFP program simply ignores this balance, and can only, like many of its predecessors, lead to an economic catastrophe.”

Now, it takes some gall for Oliver Blanchard, one of the poohbahs of the worldwide collapse of 2008-2009, to instruct anybody about economic catastrophe. But the illness goes deep – for instance, that bit about redistributing income from rich to poor. It is a “butter is not I repeat not melting in my mouth” neolib phrase. In fact, what happens is that the original “re-distribution” is from the working class to the rich. To capital. But if you include this in your hip hop ecomix, peeps begin to wonder – what is that re-distribution about and does the state know about this?

In social democracy, the state knows about this. Among the neo-libs who cosplay social democrats, they don’t.

So, by popular demand – a little economics ditty I call:

On free Lunches Written first for Willetts Magazine. And still relevant!

I want to cull this from page 2 of Greg Mankiw’s popular Essentials of Economics – used by hundreds of Econ 101 classes, tucked under the arms of thousands of students, who paid a hefty price for it:

“You may have heard the old saying, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”. Grammar aside, there is much truth to this adage. To get something we like, we usually have to give up something else that we also like.”

I like to think of them, those thousands of scions of upper class households, products all of them of years of free lunches, nodding to this crackerbarrel truism. One of the great principles of education is to blind yourself to the self-evident. It is part of one’s self-fashioning, and it is especially useful as these scions go on to get positions in the upper ranks of management, investment, etc., and can look about them and say: I earned this.

By their truisms you shall catch them – this is the rhetorical ratcatcher’s faith. My faith, really. The crack in the neo-classical economics façade – the underpinning of that big neo-other, Neoliberalism – appears here. If one looks deeply enough, many of the ideological decisions that go into the neoclassical model congregate around the idea that there is no free lunch – or as Mankiw translates it, there are almost always trade-offs.

The first and most important of those decisions is that the local difference between the person who pays for and offers the lunch and the person who eats it, free, is of no concern to economics. Or to put this another way, they are fully symmetrical variables. Thus, all sociology is given the bum’s rush at this banquet. The economist’s truth stops at the fact that if there is a free lunch, someone is paying for it, and that in the end, we are all someone.

And it is true that if x is paying for y’s lunch, if we just move a level upward we can treat them as variables, so that y paying for x’s lunch is the very same thing. But what if that move up the level is missing an essential fact – which is that there is always somebody paying for the lunch, and somebody eating it free? And what if there is a whole class of x’s who offer a whole class of y’s free lunch? What if the x paying is, say, Mom, and the y eating is, say, baby?

Of course, the neo-c’s have dealt in some vague way with this by calling it all “investment”. So when x is the parent and y is the child, the x is really not giving y a free lunch, but preparing for the distant future when y has to decide whether to pay for the medical bills of x or let x die in the street.

This, it seems to me, however clever it seems to Gary Becker and his followers, is humanly as dumb as possible. Spell it out this way and there will only be a few of the 18 year olds who will nod sagely. These we can safely assign to the libertarian camp.

However, we are certainly not done with the free lunch model. For there are, of course, less benign examples of the free lunch relationship. One could say – if one was a classical, rather than a neo-classical, economist – that the most obvious one comes in the ability of Capital (that devourer of free lunches) to get its free lunches from the performance of Labor (that provider of profit) through exploitation. And if we grant this model, then free lunches abound, and one of their systematic forms is called Capitalism.

It is here that the ideological decision to treat x and y and variables on either side of the free lunch situation shows its genius, and demonstrates the dialectical position of “individualism” in Capitalism. For both y and x, in this model, are individuals – and nothing else. Their individuality is without content, which is all the better for founding a society based on individualism. Because content actually creates solidarity. Content would actually point to differences of all kinds between x and y. If x is the laborer and y is the corporation, for instance – but the corporation, per the Supreme Court, treated as a “person” – than we can ignore all power imbalances, and regard individuals as “earning their worth”, each and every one of them, as they cleverly engage in tradeoffs – for instance, allowing the free lunch set to fire all the surplus value giving workers and relocate the factory to some other pool of x-s, because in the end that means the corporation can produce goods cheaper, and won’t all x-s be happy with the endpoint: a world of cheap tat to which they will now have access? And put in these terms, hmm, it is almost as if it were the laborers living off the free lunches!

Which is why Oliver Blanchard is careful to put his redistribution model not in terms of labor, but in terms of “rich” and “poor” – two theological categories.

But the idea that not only does the “entrepreneur” earn all his billions, but that his ungrateful serfs are demanding free lunches, is an idea that has boldly occurred to many a neo-classical economist. Because while the billionaire – which, remember, in the humanly truer model of the world are living massively off free lunches piled one on top of the other until we can’t see the summit – is working and working, day and night, his little head full of inspirations that awe all the boys at the University of Chicago, labor is inclined, sadly, to laze around, and will only be encouraged if we tax the billionaire to build a system of social insurance for the labourer. It is so sad, the rough ride given the “rich”. During the Great downturn, in the years between 2009-2011, the NYT gave a column to a University of Chicago economist, Casey Mulligan, who invariably sounded this note. The worry expended by Casey Mulligan over some worker, somewhere, slacking because he or she didn’t need to worry about paying the monthly vig to the insurance company to get the terrible $10,000 deductible all fault health insurance policy was enough to make the angels on high weep – with laughter.

To wind this up: the free lunch is what civilization is built on, for good or ill. Limiting the free lunches of Capital is an excellent way to ensure better free lunches for the kids.

The Universal Beep

 

1.

“A letter was published in the Scots Magazine dated Renfrew, February 1, 1753, and signed " C. M."” proposed a machine that would employ some electrical conductor to create “the striking of a bell by the attraction of a charged ball.”

Nobody in Smollett, or Sterne, or Fielding rings an electrical doorbell. Nobody hears a phone. Nobody hears a beep. Yet during this period of picaresque plenty, this C.M. was plotting to change the world into the mass of beeping that it is today.

In the year 1831, Edgar Allan Poe was failing at West Point and writing his first tales. Meanwhile, north of West Point, an American natural philosopher and inventor was about to change the world from his perch in a school in Albany, New York, like some mad Poe hero. Joseph Henry, being impressed by the experiments with magnets and electricity performed in Europe, decided to try it out on his own. Insulating a bunch of wires in silk, which meant that he could bind more than one metal wire together in a chord, he ran lengths of wire around a classroom in Albany, New York, put a battery at one end and an electromagnet at the other end of the wire, and in a moment of fiendish inspiration, placed a steel rod and a bell near the electromagnetic end. He then sent an electrical charge through the wire, thereby ringing the bell and causing billions of innocents, 175 years later, to suffer through bells, rings, buzzes and a variety of unpleasant noises from every implement that involves, even remotely, electricity.

O the innocents of that time, out plowing in the fields, hunting the game, making up hymns or getting royally drunk in inns! Little did they know.

2.

While all this business with electricity was going on in America, in Northern Britain, another affair was afoot. I take these facts from M.B. Emanuel’s Hay fever, a post industrial revolution epidemic: a history of its growth during the 19th century (1988).

Oddly, until the nineteenth century, there were vanishingly few references in the medical literature to anything resembling pollen-caused allergy. In the 8th century A.D., a Persian doctor, Muhammad ibn Zakariya' al-Razi, wrote about a illness that came from sniffing roses, causing headache and runny nose. “Leonhardus Botallus of Pavia in 1565 referred to persons who held the smell of roses in deadly hatred because it gave rise to headache, sneezing and troublesome itching of the nose.” And there was a dude in France who referenced the Rose disease in the 17th century.

But it was not really a disease on the map until John Bostock in 1818 reported a seasonal “catarrh”, which he attributed to the rays of the sun. In 1828 he returned to this seasonal illness, writing that he had seen more of it in the past ten years. It had acquired a name – hay asthma or hay fever. But the connection between hay and the illness was still uncertain. But it was becoming fashionable:

“There is evidence that the Hanoverian monarchy suffered from allergic disease. William IV was rumoured to suffer from hay fever [21] and his brother the Duke of Sussex was flogged for having asthma as child. It is now known that childhood asthma is almost invariably of allergic origin. It is documented that William himself suffered from occasional asthmatic attacks and his death in June 1837 followed a particularly severe episode.”

It was another doctor from North Britain, Charles Blackley, who showed, via experiment, that the pollen of certain plants brought on the attack of runny nose, headache and fever. Blackley noticed something strange, though: the farming class, who had the most physical contact with pollen, seemed to have the fewest cases of hay fever.

Blackley’s observation has led to an abundance of literature on the complex ecological conditions that favour a disease or a syndrome. If this case, those most liable to the disease were, 1, in sedentary professions, and 2., outside of farming communities. But, importantly, they were also in the midst of a change in the uses of land. For farm land was disappearing under the spread of urban and suburban housing. It was not simply exposure to pollen, but the situated isolation from pollen that was important to the incidence of the disease.

3.

On December 1, 2014, the NYT had a small article entitled: When Everyday Noise becomes Unbearable. The journalist Joyce Cohen, dug up an extreme case – a man who found the “humming noise” of a refrigerator unbearable. The doctors in the article called these cases hyeracusis. In the usual medical way, they blamed loud noises, like heavy metal, which damaged the ear for smaller noises.

Indoor noises – rings, buzzes and beeps – are features of design and structure. Among people who are bothered to a greater degree than “normal” by rings, buzzes and beeps, this is a problem. I noticed, last year, when we were out shopping for a new dishwasher, refrigerator and stove, that the descriptions of the products in Darty and the other emporiums we went to all included a reference to the level of noise made by the product, helpfully illustrated by a graph which produced that pleasing, pseudocomprehension in the shopper. A visual! I was surprised. This consumer and design information was evidently responding to a need, but I had not been aware that other people were feeling the same as we were: that the noise of machines in motion in the living space can be rather annoying

I happen to be reading, while thinking about beeps and buzzes, Edward Tenner’s Why Things bite Back. This is a very affordances-centered book about the unintended consequences of technological innovation: it was published in the late nineties, when the post-Cold war fad was to question central planning under the aegis of “unintended consequences” – the Soviet Union being exhibit one.

Tenner develops a neat vocabulary to taxonomize unintended effects – for instance, the idea of revenge effects:

“Revenge effects happen because new structures, devices, and organisms

react with real people in real situations in ways we could not

foresee. There are occasional reverse revenge effects: unexpected benefits

of technology adopted for another reason. (Like revenge effects

themselves, reverse revenge effects are a rough but useful metaphor:

in one case, for the way reality seems to strike back at our efforts, and

in the other, for the equally unexpected ways in which we benefit

from the complexity of the world's mechanisms.)”

This is an insight that goes back to the Greeks and Egyptians, and is part of the cultural vocabulary of Nemesis. Although, in the 1990s, they were all pretending that we had just discovered this.

Applied to allergies, or the human geography of agriculture and industry, it is easy to see the revenge of the immune system in operation here. The human body, which is easily abstracted away from in sociology, is still the key variable, as every murder story reminds us.

In the case of hypersensitivity to noise and to light, what is interesting is that the urban environment in the developed economies – the post-industrial economies – was in many ways much noisier at the beginning of the twentieth century. When Theodor Lessing wrote his classic essay against noise and founded the anti-noise league in 1909, he was responding to a real, increased level of noise in the urban environment. John Goodyear’s essay on Lessing’s anti-noise league contains some good quotes, both from the pro-noise side and Lessing’s own colorful vocabulary of Klavierpest (the plague of pianos) and Gesangseuche (the pestilence of singing) to the various traffic noises, in which the hooting of car horns already figures.

If we were to do a complete, one thousand page book on the rise of the Universal Beep, which will happen only in the afterlife, when I have time - the hooting of car horns would have pride of place. This hooting involves the designed production of ugly noise, the ideology of safety (horns being necessary as signals to other drivers), and the collective phenomenon resulting from this. So much, as WCW could have said, depends upon the car resting in the driveway! And its sound possibilities.

This being so, the great industrial period, in which cities actually hosted giant factories and mid-range workshops, has come to an end in many countries. France and the U.S., for instance. The city is now a service node, a consumer spot, a building investment opportunity – but not a place where the terrific noises of smelting and congealing are going on.

The engineered ugly noise is now everywhere, from car alarms to fire alarms. When, during the reign of Good King Obama, we moved to Santa Monica California for a couple of years, we encountered the Cali required and always faulty fire alarm, with all its hijinx: the squack of it at one in the morning, the maddening attempt to turn it off, the replacement of the batteries, the leaving out of the batteries, etc. Burned toast or old batteries were suddenly occasions for riot.

At the moment, our universal beep problem concerns the new induction stovetop, replacing our old gas jet stove top. The beep sounds for a variety of reasons – a pot boiling over, or a pot being partly out of the induction heat circle, etc. – and we try to understand it while pressing various buttons. Its use to us is mostly in disproportion to its irritation of us.

This isn’t to say that safety features are not important – especially to the liability lawyers retained by corporations – so much as that the total gestalt of one’s living area doesn’t really figure into all these designed ugly noises. They are all shrill noises. None of them are organic – the ring or the buzz is the farthest thing from, say, the fart or the burp. They combine with changes in artificial light and changes in the ambient temperature to affect our inner organism, and our moods, and our well-being.

They are here, each buzz, ring and beep, to remind us that the machine is here. When we humans go – from disease, nuclear war, or zombie apocalypse – we will leave these beeps behind.

The ethics of integrity or the Baker at Dachau

 

 

Throughout the 19th and 20th century, one stumbles upon the lefthand heirs of Burke – Red Tories, as Orwell called them. Orwell’s instincts, at least, were close to theirs: Orwell, after all, wanted a law to make 20 mph the top speed limit in England, a pretty typical Red Tory gesture, gallantly futile. In England, the term would include Ruskin and Chesterton, and the spirit at least of William Morris. In France, you have Charles Peguy and Jacques Ellul. In German speaking countries, there are many more names to choose from – to mention four, Thomas Mann up to the late 20s, Karl Kraus, Georg Simmel and Max Weber.

 

The Red Tories, by inclination and conviction, were never systematizers. When Burke, in the Reflections, denounces “theorists and economists”, all the progressive planners, he spoke for the tribe. They form something more like a family resemblance than a party. They, too, are in revolt against capitalism, but not because it wounds their sense of equality – on the contrary, what it wounds is their sense of the just order, or the organic society. This comes out in their protest, all the way along the line, in honor something I’m going to call “integrity”. Against integrity, the sense of purposiveness and vocation in life, they saw arrayed two forces: capitalism, with its generation of alienation, its calculations that eat into the integrity of labor, seeing it only as another inter-substitutable commodity, and socialism. Socialism, from their perspective, is merely the bourgeois attitude for workers. The socialists basically want the workers to make more money – they don’t put in doubt the system of production that the workers are engaged in. Socialists are pro-industry.

From the economists viewpoint, whether a person works as a carpenter or sells bubble gum over the counter is a matter of indifference, the product of a labor “market”. Economists do recognize “human capital”, but like any capital, it is invested indifferently, and must be to be efficient. Maximizing profit on all fronts, such is the letter of the law for economists.

The Red Tories saw, as well as Marx, that this social maxim was in deathly struggle with the ethos of integrity. Integrity, the desire to do the best job possible because of the thing itself, its value in the doing, no doubt stems, as an ethical value, from the artisan class in the early modern period. Or even before, in the ancient urbs. It is significant that the first socialist organizations in France and Britain were composed of a largely artisanal membership – because these people instinctively felt that they were being symbolically degraded under capital. It is also significant that Marx decided, early on, that these were definitely not the people who would lead the advance guard against capitalism. Thus, the complex struggles against anarchists and other non-scientific socialists.

The programmatic example of the Red Tory exaltation of integrity is found in Charles Peguy’s Money (1913) Peguy never has had much of a following in the Anglophone world. He was an often disagreeable Catholic. Notoriously, his feud with Jaures resulted in some disciple of Peguy’s assassinating the great socialist leader. Peguy was all in for the war against Germany. He volunteered, even at his absurdly advanced age, and was ground up like so many others.

 

This is how Peguy, with some nostalgia (but also, with some insight), remembered the society of his youth – this would be around 1880.

We never thought about anything but working. We knew workers who in the morning only thought about working. They woke up in the morning, and so early, and they sang about the idea that they were going to work. At eleven o’clock they sang about going on lunchbreak. In all, it was always Hugo; and it is always to Hugo that we have to go back. “The went, they sang.” To work was their joy, even, and the deep root of their being. And the reason that they were who they were. There was an incredible honor in work, the most beautiful of honors, the most Christian, the only one perhaps that could still stand.

And, on the same subject, here:

"These workers didn’t serve. They worked. They had an honor, absolute, which is the real property of an honor. It was necessary that a chair leg was made well. It was understood. It was primary. It was not necessary to make it well because of the wages. It wasn’t necessary to make it well for the boss, nor for the connoisseurs, nor for the clients of the boss. It was necessary that it was well made in itself, for itself, in its being, even. A tradition, come, coming up from the deepest depths of the race, a history, an absolute, an honor willed that this chair leg be made well. Every part of the chair that couldn’t be seen was exactly as perfectly made as that which could be seen. It was the principle of the cathedrals."

This state of affairs was, without a doubt, not the bower of bliss that Peguy now remembers it to be – even he, in part, admits this. Certainly the singing is interesting. The French countryside, in a sense, learned French by singing – it was a standard part of the peasant’s laboring day. Factories, in the 1840s and 1850s, as Engels noticed, banned it. Singing was something that the factory supervisors came down on hard. And of course no group on earth cared so little for their pay packets. However, contra the capitalist mentality, this was not a complete truth, either then or now. The irrational hatred of Peguy for Jaures was poisonous, but I have to give Peguy some credit, here, for spotting the moment in which alienation drops out of the socialist attack on bourgeois society and assimilation becomes the goal. In this respect, Jaures was a great figure, which is one of the reasons that every goodsized town in France has a street named for him. Marx, on the wholly other side of Jaures, would perhaps have agreed with Peguy in his own dialectical way: as we know from his critique of the Gotha Program.

2.

Integrity is not really discussed in ethics classes. I taught them in a philosophy department a long long time ago, and I don’t recall any discussion of the integrity of labor for itself. America, one might think, is just the place where we cast off the principle of the cathedrals as a scandal to the pursuit of happy consumption. But I don’t think you’d hang around people who do things, or provide, horrible word, services very long before you’d run into this ethos. It has been attacked over and over, laughed at by neo-liberalism, disappeared utterly from the entertainment we feed ourselves and our kids on, yet there it is, every day. Every f-ing day, to write unlike Peguy, the principle of the cathedrals and goes to work in millions of offices, stores, and factories.

It is in many ways the contradiction that keeps capitalism moving, that bears up the almost unbearable stress of everyone becoming poorer in relation to the rich, atomized, more powerless. People in whatever field do not respect people who have no integrity in this crucial sense. They suspect that their bosses do not have this integrity, that the organizations they have built up are ultimately indifferent to them. To work is to see this sorting procedure. To work is to see the silent contempt that builds up for those who will do anything. Who work for pay, the boss, the clients of the boss, and not, on some level, for the thing itself that they are doing.

I’ll finish this riff on integrity with quite another story. This one comes from Nico Rost’s Goethe in Dachau.

3.

First a bit about Rost. Rost was a Dutch journalist who was stationed in Berlin in the Weimar era and became great friends with the most advanced artists and lefties. In 1933, to honor his work in making known Germany’s leftist culture, the Nazis sent him to the Orienberg KZ. He was released after a couple of months, and he saw enough, was beaten enough, that he bore no illusions about the Nazis. He translated exiled German authors in Dutch, and fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. When the Germans invaded Belgium in 1940, he was stuck in Brussels. Rost made his thoughts known about that in a newspaper he founded. It was shut down and he was shuffled between KZs until the end of the war. His last stop was Dachau. When he published this “journal” from Dachau in 1947, it received some attention, especially from German leftists. Then it was largely forgotten. It was never translated into English, so I am gonna translate this bit myself. It is an anecdote that helps to envision integrity as an actual life-value.

“In a neighboring bed [in the infirmary] lies a new one. A kind of Michael Kohlhaas, yet more good natured and sentimental than his classical model out of Kleist’s novella.

He is by profession a baker. He lives in the Kopenick near Berlin, and is now here, he tells me, for the second time. For the same offense.

“I baked cakes made out of flour that is better than that officially allowed, and with eggs. Not in order to earn more, but because they were being sent to the Front, and I couldn’t allow them to send bad cakes. I got a year for it. Then they wanted to release me, but they wanted me to pledge, in advance, to adhere strictly to the rules in the future. I couldn’t go for that. On the contrary, I explained to the Gestapo that I would certainly use good flour and eggs in the cakes, because I would not turn out mud for the women who came to me to send something good to their men on the front.

After I said this, they beat me all over again, and sent me back here.

He told this story very clearly and with many details. Modestly, even a little humbly, but before everything else satisfied in the feeling that he had done his duty, and that he couldn’t have done otherwise.

We sealed our friendship with each other, and he invited me to visit him after the war. I promised to do so.

“You just have to ask for the fat baker and even a child will lead you to me.”

Poor devil. He completely forgot that, in between, he had become as skinny as a piece of thread.”

Cake for cake’s sake. It is a revolutionary act.

 

At the manif

 

Nobody knows what to do with Bardella’s name.

We all hate Macron. Last year’s protests against Macron stealing the living time of future generations – otherwise known as the “reform” of the pension system – were joyous, a sort of political charivari. For one thing, everyone knew that the vast majority was against the “reform.”

So Macron just thrust it down our throats. And the left responded by – fighting over who would be the fearless leader. Or something. All that time, all that marching, all those strikes – an utter failure.

But Bardella is a new villain, and not even one that we care deeply about. Le Pen, yes. Macron, double yes. But though there were many tries to make fun of Bardella’s name, none came up with anything interesting. Adam, when I came back, said easy: Bardello. My son, the slogan genius.

What to do with the contempt Macron instills in the average French heart? Well, the extreme right knew what to do. As Macron’s card is neither one nor the other – a reactionary economic policy with all the right rhetoric to celebrate women’s rights for the “other” side – they just smacked him around. And because Macron, while insensitive to the point of blindness to the left, is as sensitive as an easily tickled goof to the Valeurs actuelles crowd, they got the immigration “reform” they wanted, melting away all of the supposed difference between our paper mache Jupiter and the right. The rage against Macron, the failure of the left, and the National Front’s refusal to quit combined to create a brown France. As brown as Mussolini’s mIlice uniform.

So I went out to the manif for the new united popular front. It was, as always this year, gray and drizzly. I have a sort of dream vision of the thirties as an overcast decade that became even rainier at the end of “Casablanca” and then went into full storm mode until a mushroom cloud stood over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This was not the joyous flex of last spring’s demos. Because it is all so sudden, the majority of the signs were scrawled on industrial cardboard torn from boxes. But there was a lot of people – the press and police will say 75,000, the organizers 150, as is usual for left wing demos. We all looked very Vitamin D deficient out there. We’d all filed down these streets before. But after a while, the spirit of the demo picked up. It is one of the great advantages of having gay and trans advocates in the march that the spirit of masquerade and music visits their parts of the crowd – and that infects other parts.

Hard, though, to dance in the streets this time.

All reactions:

3Anna Kornbluh, Nataša Bašić and 1 other

Elections in France

 I might be breathing the fumes. But for once, I think the Left is actually on the right track. Glucksmann joining the LFI and the other factions of the left for a united front is very good news. And making this about repairing the damage Macron has made to France's social democracy, starting with taxing the wealthy and restoring the pension that was arbitrarily stolen from the people last year is an excellent platform. 

One suggestion, though. Everybody sees with their own eyes what investment in public services does. But they also see with their own eyes what they are taxed. I think it is time to send around, yearly, public audits telling the individual family what they have gotten from public services - and to make this very plan, per income group. It will turn out, always, that the state has given the most to the wealthiest. But the state, given the right administration, should give the most to the low and middle income groups. This should of course be sent out with tax information. It helps people decide where the holes in the system are. 

So, here we are. What are we gonna do about it.