Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Underwood Tariff act of 1913

 Now is the time, Ladies and Germs, to think about... the Underwood Tariff act of 1913. When Trump insisted on renaming Mount Denali Mount McKinley, maybe he was being more than the Loony Tunes character he usually plays. Maybe it was a hint. The Underwood Act coupled tariff reductions and income tax. The income tax, brand spanking new from the 16th amendment, was not a mass tax. It was conceived as a class tax - the working and middle class was not the primary target. The wealthy were. It was the rare middle class worker who paid federal income tax up until the 50s. Government, in the pre-income tax days, ran on revenue from tariffs. There were other sources, but tariffs were the bulk of it. Now, consider a crazy person - lets name him Elon M. - who wants pretty much to abolish income tax on the wealthy. Well, how are you going to pay your soldiers, and more importantly, your defense contractors? How about - going back to the tried and true? The system of William McKinley.

Now, even as I type these words I can barely conceive of a person who thinks such a thing is possible in 2025, when we have run trade deficits since the Reagan years and every increase in value produced by technical innovation depends in the immediate aftermath on cheap manufacture in China or Mexico or Vietnam, etc.

But we are dealing with people whose views are cray cray, no matter how much the average NYT Op ed writer tries to respect them.

So anything is possible. However, the Democrats who supported lowering the tariff were dependent, at that time, on an all white South. The Rs who liked tariffs were business Yankee whites. I'm not sure how a policy that is favored by Rs under Trump is going to go over with a base that is now heavily Southern and midwestern white.

All of this history is returning like a nightmare just as we are going into the ring with the Democratic party in its worst shape in history - not an idea in site among the whitehaired millionaires who run it.

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For a future history of the United States: where are the oligarchs?

 

It would be an odd history of Britain, or France, or Spain, etc., which ignored the role of the aristocracy throughout the early modern period and on through the 19^th century.

But exactly that oddness is a keynote of the grand narrative of American history. Muckrakers, like Ferdinand Lundberg, the muckraking author of various books about the superrich, or Mathew Josephson, who wrote a memorable book about the Robber Barons, are definitely on the outskirts of American historiography. That historiography even lacks an anthropological account of American capital, something that would conceptualize the admixture of clan wealth and the corporate legal structure to get at the experience of power in the United States.

Myself, I take the term bratva, the Russian argot applying to criminal gangs as associations of “brothers”, as a good overall term that applies to American plutocracy.

Lately, of course, we have our mouths and eyes full of plutocracy. From Joe Biden giving a (choke) medal of freedom to the founder of the Carlyle Group (so much for the regulation of private equity on the Dem side of the equation) to the obvy influence of Musk, a billionaire, on our billionaire prez, Trump, they are here to tell us: we’ve always been here.

Yet though this headless heedless nuclear armed country is led by the most incestuous products of the boardroom and bedroom, I see few calls to go back to the muckraker classics. In the Neolib era, we are supposed to forget those embarrassing vulgarians, gawping at the felonious hijinks of those who made their piles in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

A pity. On the list of books about America that are taught in cultural studies classrooms, I imagine few have a place for the Superrich or The Robber Barons.

Lundberg did have some rightwing populist leanings – but Josephson was my angelic ideal, combining an acute literary sensibility (one of the twenties exiles in Paris, a litterateur who wrote a memoir entitled Life among the Surrealists) with a solid career at Fortune, back when Agee worked there and you could visit Whittacker Chambers in his office at the other Luce publication, Time Magazine, by taking the elevator.

Chambers, of course, was in a Manichean struggle with Communism. Josephson, though, had his eyes on the prize. The Vanderbilts. The Rockefellers. The Morgans.

The Robber Barons came out at the right time, when a combination of Republican populists from the West and Democratic New Dealers from the East were making robber barons quite uncomfortable with their questions and committees – for instance, the Nye committee and its questions about J.P. Morgan’s profiteering in WWI. In the Eisenhauer era and up to the present, the conservative counter-attack on the “robber baron” myth is very, very concerned that we see these “entrepreneurs” in a sober light as, well, geniuses and our heroes. Every bratva has its minstrel.

Josephson quotes the Beards, those permanently unfashionable populist historians, in the introduction to his book:

“These men were robber barons as were their medieval counterparts, the dominating figures of an aggressive economic age.

In any case, "to draw the American scene as it unfolded between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century, without these dominant figures looming in the foreground, is to make a shadow picture," as the Beards have written. "To put in the presidents and the leading senators . . . and leave out such prime actors in the drama is to show scant respect for the substance of life. Why, moreover, should anyone be interested in the beginnings of the House of a Howard or Burleigh and indifferent to the rise of a House of Morgan or Rockefeller?"

That these are “houses” or clans is a claim that, alas, has not taken root in a historiography that, no matter how Marxist or lefty the ideology of the historian, still takes no hint from the copious documentation of the anthropology of clan power in other societies. Those, of course, are “primitive” societies – not like our techno-powered secular scientific one of today and tomorrow! An essay by business historian Richard R. John, Robber Baron Redux, traces the phrase back to Charles and Henry Adams classic account of Jay Gould’s manipulation of railroad stock, Chapters of Eerie, another book on the outskirts of our American classics. John also attributes the disrepute of the “robber baron” thematic in business history to Alfred Chandler, whose influence on business history is much greater than that of Marx – at least in the U.S. Chandler preferred Industrial Statesman – not so feverish and ideological. About the same time, the term entrepreneur was revived by Joseph Schumpeter, and after a bit of a hiatus there – those crazy sixties and seventies – got take into the bosom of official speak in the Reaganite eighties. By now, of course, it is official – with the nineties cult of Jack Welch and the present cult of Elon Musk being the most celebrated images in the gallery – the rich are treated not as robbers but as artists.  The entrepreneurial myth – that value comes from the top, from management, rather than from the bottom, from workers – has been firmly set in place, liquidating the American rebellion that informed the counter-culture of unions, surrealists and Fortune journalists during the long period of American questioning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

to scold on the interwebs

 There is an etymological mystery about the word ‘scold”. In the great 0ED vol. 9, the etymology is not given – rather, the etymological theories that link the word to some original Scandinavian word are held up as unproven. Others relate the term to “skald”, a kind of satiric poet – the antithesis of bard. However the descent of the word goes, at some point it became contextually misogynistic – the scold and the shrew were stock figures of aggressive women. Scold occurs a number of times in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, where it possesses a certain figurative stature that is curiously attractive to Petruchio:

Sir, let me be so bold as ask you,

Did you yet ever see Baptista’s daughter?

TRANIO, as Lucentio

No, sir, but hear I do that he hath two,

The one as famous for a scolding tongue

As is the other for beauteous modesty.

PETRUCHIO

Sir, sir, the first’s for me; let her go by.

In Blackstone, one reads: “A common scold, communis rixatrix (for our law confines it to the female gender) is a public nuisance to her neighborhood.”

This background makes me wonder about my own reaction to scolding, which is negative. Perhaps, though, there is a reason that the rixatrixaty of political social media is both one of the notable tonal styles – the Democratic claque on bluesky responded to any complaint about the Dems by scolding, and took a scolding view of the people in general – and that this tone comes after the failure of Metoo to overturn the fundamentally misogynistic nature of our establishment. Perhaps, in the poetics of scolding, there is more than a contempt for the masses.

And yet… I think rixatrixaty is a terrible tactic to pursue. It traps one in a reactive circle, where outrage always gives the fascitudinal provocateur the advantage that the conversation is pursued in his terms. At the same time, used against the “left”, it proposes an asymmetric deal that every lefty can easily see through, of giving everything and getting nothing. Which is, come to think of it, the misogynist contract: I’ll “protect” you while you serve me. Not a deal the centrist would ever agree to.

What I lack, what I’d love to read, is a discourse analysis of scolding. It holds a place in the Neolib order that signifies something interesting about our political unconscious.

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5Eduardo Gonzalez, Christopher Norris and 3 others

Bye Bye Miss American Pie

 

In 1984, Andrew Kopkind and Alexander Cockburn wrote a terrific jeremiad in the Nation that began:

“With hardly a backward—or forward—look, the bulk of the surviving American left has blithely joined the Democratic Party center, without the will to inflect debate, the influence to inform policy or the leverage to share power. The capitulation of the left—a necessarily catchall word, here covering the spectrum of progressive politics from old socialism to recent radical activism—is almost without precedent. This time out there is no McCarthy of 1968, no McGovern of 1972, no Kennedy of 1980; not even a John Anderson or a Barry Commoner to raise a standard of dissent or develop an alternative vision against a Democratic Party whose project is overwhelmingly conservative in attitude and action. The excuse for submission is easy to discern: Anybody But Reagan. But the consequences are likely to be dire, and they are already taking shape. By accepting the premises and practices of party unity, the left has negated the reasons for its own existence.”

I think Kopkind and Cockburn were marking a moment – the moment when the term “leftist” became an honorific, rather like esquire. Roger Gathmann, Leftist is the equivalent to saying I will mouth certain slogans and ideas, knowing of course that they have absolutely no attachment to any political force on the horizon – at least for the U.S. and most of the “West”. In France, theoretically and absurdly, the “Left” does name a real thing, the New Popular Front, which has been absolutely unable to stop the Macronist drift to the ultra-right, as the French shambles of a government proceeds in a numbed sleepwalk.

I was living in New Orleans in 1984. I was trying to be a writer, of course, of course. Working in a university library. And, in my spare time, protesting against the Nicaraguan intervention shoulder to shoulder so to speak with members of the local CISPES group.

I remember being told by someone in the group that there was a Social Democratic activist who wanted to meet with a bunch of us. I thought that sounded great. Socialism – this was my politics!

We met in someone’s apartment. Chips, sodas, a couple of sofas, a bearded guy. Whose talk, astonishingly, was: let’s all go out and elect Mondale!

I had to laugh. I didn’t have a tv at the time, and have never really cared to watch tv news, but I had seen a few clips of Mondale and the one thing I knew, immediately, was that Mondale was a loser. I mean, he carried such a loser vibe that him running for president had the air of giving some faithful bank employee a gold watch for his service.

Given his obvy lose vibes, here I was, thinking that a serious Social Democrat would think, we’ve got nothing to lose by trying to make a real third party! Instead of which we were supposed to get fired up about a moderate gray Democrat who went around saying things like “Isolate Nicaragua if it won’t bend”. Shit like that.

I realized, vaguely, something that Cockburn and Kopkind were on about. American politics was captured by a two party system which excluded any real leftist program, tugged America inexorably to the right, and there was nothing I could do about it. So, I demonstrated. I didn’t vote, of course.

The Dems, in true loser fashion, then came up with Dukakis (it was like they were trying to lose) and then Clinton. Again, some lefty person really kept after me – at this time I was living in Atlanta – to vote Clinton. I think I actually did. And Clinton of course did what he did, which was screw up universal health care, his one issue, then “reformed” the Great Society welfare system so that it became the shit it is today.

The Democratic party gets worse and worse, older and older, its wheeler dealers richer and richer, and we are now meeting with true authoritarianism and they really, really don’t give a shit.

I suppose 1984 was one of the quiet turning points. One can holler, out in the far seats, for the Dems to do this or that. But it is like hollering at the actors in a play that has already been scripted. They are not going to deviate from their lines. Which is why the other audience members, on social media, the volunteer Dembots, adopt, predictably, a scolding tone. Shush! You are objectively helping the fascists by not supporting the retreating bulk of Dem politicos in their "resistance" - why many of them have put hearts under a Selena Gomez video!

It is as if they are finishing off the job of alienating the people that might, vaguely, vote Dem if it would do something.

Such a sad piece of history I ‘ve lived through in the States.

auden's New Year's Poem part two: trans- and the palimpsest subject

 last bit on Auden's New Year's Letter

In the beginning was the letter.

And the letter was a sorter, a lister, a control.

In the beginning was the letter. And the letter here was an element in a postal system, however named or organized. The alphabetical letter and the epistolary form called a letter, and finally literature as “letters” are layered on top of each other – this is the modernist insight. And the modernist subject is a palimpsest – a layering. While the lyrical subject might have two souls in its breast, the palimpsest subject has layers it is unaware of, tracing a destiny in letters that moves at different levels of history and myth.

Tiresias in the Wasteland, Bloom in Ulysses – these palimpsest subjects opened up a way in which the poetic form could absorb the collagist techniques of the tabloid, the daily, in which headlines and stories hang together in a community of contemporaneity. One learns to scan the newspaper and segregate topics. On January 1, 1940, The front page of the New York Times had five headlines. The headline with the largest font read: FINNS SMASH A RED DIVISION; HALT MOVE TO CUT COUNTRY;NAZI DRIVE ON BRITAIN SEEN. Next to it, on the left, is BOARD SANCTIONS SALE BY U.S. LINES OF EIGHT VESSELS, then LABOR HEADS WARN WAR ‘PROSPERITY’ WILL NOT END ILLS, then in smaller font 1940 Bornin Wild Revelry; Good Year for Nation Seen, and then, finally, REPUBLICAN FIGHT ON NEW DEAL LOOMS IN CONGRESS. The educated reader does not see this as a chaos, a confetti of wildly different topics. Down to the size of the font, this reader can follow the various stories, even as the headlines sometimes dissolve into telegraphy.

So, too, can the reader of the New Year’s Letter trace through its various stanzas a certain newspaper like flow of topic. According to Edward Mendelson’s Late Auden, the three parts were “mechanically” devoted to Kierkegaard’s divisions: the aesthetic, the religious and the ethical. But Mendelson doesn’t believe this is the deep structuring principle of the poem – rather, as a New Year’s resolution, it is a way of saying the poet’s way to acting and writing under a certain structure of belief – the belief being in the future. Talking himself into believing this belief – within the framework of a letter to Elizabeth May, who Mendelson portrays as “mother” figure to Auden.

“A German refugee” living with her psychiatrist husband on Long Island, who Auden was introduced to by Benjamin Britten.

But this isn’t a testimonial poem even if it encompasses the current news and the whole Decline of the West. It isn’t Muriel Rukeyser. It is distinctly a letter poem, subordinating the topical structure to the conversational, meditative flow of the epistle. As in Pope’s Epistle to Doctor Arbuthnot, or Donne’s verse letters. Donne’s letter to Henry Wotton lights up when contrasted with Auden’s New Year’s letter, and vice versa. So I pick from Donne this:

“For in best understandings sin began;

Angels sinned first, then devils, and then man.

Only perchance beasts sin not; wretched we

Are beasts in all but white integrity.

I think if men, which in these places live,

Durst look in themselves, and themselves retrieve,

They would like strangers greet themselves, seeing then

Utopian youth grown old Italian.”

Utopian youth – that’s a phrase for Auden, coming off the decade of the thirties!

The ultimate letters for a man turned Christian are, of course, Paul’s. Utopian youth here – the Jesus romance of the Gospels – is followed by didactic letter from one whose knowledge of what Jesus actually said and meant was, naturally, a little shaky, a little oral, a kind of gossip. Yet as Paul was convinced he had seen Jesus, had been physically blinded and then by further miracle given back his sight by Jesus, and so he winged it – choosing the letter form to mix news and doctrinal improvisation.

This is what the rhymes in Auden’s New Year’s Letter do – they make the doctrinal seem improv, and thus put it to another cadence.

If I am right about the palimpsest subject, than that subject naturally tends to the trans – trans-sexual, trans-historic, trans-Atlantic, trans-class – the latter being the privileged position of the clerks in the system of circulation. The trans figure is everywhere – Tiresias in the Wasteland, Bloom in Nighttown, the characters in Djuna Barnes Paris nightlife oratorio, Nightwood – with its shout out to Thelma Wood. And one might think that this is where Auden will end up.

He doesn’t, though, and one of the tales in the many tellings in the New Year’s Letter is a renunciation of this kind of modernist self, this kind of styling of the self’s transformative powers. He takes, instead, an Augustan turn – but unlike a Queer writer like Firbank, who also adored mixing an eighteenth century tone with cocktails, Auden ends up firmly on the side of identity, against the devil’s confusions of Meum and Tuum.

However, as Auden plays with the philosophical poem, his vocabulary and the music of the couplet rather lose an energy that Pope could summon in the eighteenth century. The second and third sections are exercises in the diminishing returns of an epistle poem that wants, as well, to be a conceptual summary. Auden seems to want to stand radically for some not at all radical blend of social responsibility and hedonism: the Cold War creed, in fact, elevated to abstractions that not only lose us, but weaken the muscle tone of the jaunty hard-boiled tone of the first section:

“Hell is the being of the lie

That we become if we deny

The laws of consciousness and claim

Becoming and Being are the same,

Being in time, and man discrete

In will, yet free and self-complete;

Its fire the pain to which we go

If we refuse to suffer, though

The one unnecessary grief

Is the vain craving for relief…”

This is a version of Hell that seems sprung more from late English utilitarianism, from the kind of philosophy undergraduate scene that begins Forster’s The Longest Journey, than from the peasant knowledge of torture: the shrinking from fire, the pain of knives and bullets and cudgels, the pain of starvation, the pain of being utterly unable to protect one’s nearest from the vilest violence. And in none of those hells, these bodily enacted horrors, do we shrink from Becoming and Being being the same. Neither the torturer nor the tortured would either understand that business or think it was somehow enacted in the theatre of concentration camp vioence.

There are moments in the movement from Utopian youth to Anglican casuistry that do make me think of the caricature of Auden and Isherwood in Put out more Flags as Parsnip and Pimpernell. Or like the college boys in The Longest Journey:

“The cow is there,” said Ansell, lighting a match and holding it out over the carpet. No one spoke. He waited till the end of the match fell off. Then he said again, “She is there, the cow. There, now.”

“You have not proved it,” said a voice.

“I have proved it to myself.”

“I have proved to myself that she isn’t,” said the voice. “The cow is not there.” Ansell frowned and lit another match.”

The poem is not damned by these weaker moments; within it there is a New Year’s message for this New Year, 2025, weird as I find that date, weird as I living in this century that has brought me, personally, much love, but in my perception of the community to which I once felt I belonged, just shame on shame, year after year. So much wealth and all of it just shit, just adding to disaster and the lifestyle of desperation from which no party, no movement promises a rescue.

Blah blah blah. That’s what the politics says.

“Whatever nonsense we believe,

”Whomever we can still deceive,

Whatever language angers us,

Whoever seems the poisonous

Old dragon to be killed if men

Are ever to be rich again,

We know no fuss or pain or lying

Can stop the moribund from dying,

That all the special tasks begun

By the Renaissance have been done.”

This is the Anglican turn with a vengeance, a tempting quietism that sits down by the Waters of Babylon and … dithers. Too broad a view can incorrigibly blur the particulars; an epistle poem must have the touch of the letter, of someone on the other end receiving it, to justify its form.

Still: this poem distils sentiments that will come into intellectual life only after the war. The Cold War liberal with his Popperian aversion to utopia and its misleading apostles, from Plato to Rousseau, sounds out in this poem from 1940 – and it would be easy to draw the line, here, from Auden to Hayek. In this sense, we are coming to a period when “the special tasks begun/by the New Deal have been done.”

auden's new years poem: part one

 

1.

“Auden and Isherwood arrived in New York on 26 January 1939. Ice blocks floating on the Hudson greeted them. The afternoon of their arrival brought news that Barcelona had fallen to Franco; two days later, news reached them that Yeats had died in the south of France. Taken together these two events resulted – as Richard Davenport-Hines says in his biography - in Auden' s mood being a mixture of apprehension and zest.” – Michael Murphy, Neoclassicism, Late Modernism, and W. H. Auden's 'New Year Letter'

I was prepared, as well as a human unit could be, for the worst this January. Living in Paris rather cushions me from the American shocks, but since I was born and bred a redneck, another Calibanish creole from the states, the shocks nevertheless tingle.

I decided to do a dry January. It was a surprisingly easy thing to do, and on the plus side, we have thrown out much fewer bottles this month. On the minus side, there is really something boring and platitudinous about no wine and no beer, the welcome guests who enter at evening and restore one’s faith in, well, whatever fuckery one has been engaged in during day.

I also decided to think of the onset, once again, of Trump in the U.S. – and the continuing decay in France, under the odious Macron – in conjunction with Auden’s New Year’s Letter, which was his sort of great spell to dispel the low, dirty decade of the 30s.

Apprehension and zest. Exactly.

2.

I have often tried to put my finger what I find disturbing about Auden’s poetry; I think it is the preach-y side of it. Inside the clever enjambments and post-Jazz age cocktails, there is a homily wanting to get out. Since a sermon is essay-adjacent, I should be more appreciative, I suppose. Yet the homily always seems to return us to wooly Anglican half-truths, etiolated since the age of piracy and territorial seizures, since the time that the English appetite took huge chunks out of the world, into a bunch of teatime truths, Fabian socialism.

Unfair. I know.

At the root of the evil, I think, is Auden’s growing conviction that poetry does nothing. Which is derived from the late romantic divide between art and life, one of those puzzles Auden shared with Yeats. But far from doing nothing, poetry in the largest sense – the newspapers, the movies, the radio, etc. etc. – moved the masses as never before. Poetry had moved out of the village, and out of the salon, via steam and electricity and Mr. Edison’s inventions.

Yeats was not being just a romantic when he wrote:

“Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?
Did words of mine put too great strain
On that woman's reeling brain?
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked?”

In the New Year’s Letter, Auden is still arguing this point.

“Art is not life and cannot be

A midwife to society,

For art is a. fait accompli.

What they should do, or how or when

Life-order comes to living men

It cannot say, for it presents

Already lived experience

Through a convention that creates

Autonomous completed states.”

In this, he is anticipating a Cold War order in which art – poetry, for instance – finds its place outside of politics, and can only be corrupted if it gets stuck in such small partisan doings. This division, on which the pathos of the poem depends, strikes me as simply wrong. But to an extent, I don’t care. That is, I think it is an incorrect map of the world that is necessary for the poem to work; and the poem does work.

3.

Looking at the small bore authoritarianism which is drifting out of D.C. – the authoritarianism of post-viagra Trump pitted against the nudgery of the technocratically smug Democrats – the New Year’s Letter has a certain timely vibe:

“Twelve months ago in Brussels, I

Heard the same wishful-thinking sigh

As round me, trembling on their beds,

Or taut with apprehensive dreads,

The sleepless guests of Europe lay

Wishing the centuries away,

And the low mutter of their vows

Went echoing through her haunted house,

As on the verge of happening

There crouched the presence of The Thing.

All formulas were tried to still

The scratching on the window-sill,

All bolts of custom made secure

Against the pressure on the door,

But up the staircase of events

Carrying his special instruments,

To every bedside all the same

The dreadful figure swiftly came.”

I love this, and I love that Auden’s filters authoritarianism through the stylistics of the Who dunnit, of the special English variety he loved: Agatha Christie at the Parsonage.  This should diminish our sense of the boot coming down – but instead, by domesticating horror, we see how horror has grown in the domestic space.  That it comes to our bedsides in bedsits; that exiles are our future.

4.

 

In Michael Murphey’s essay on the poem, there is, as one would expect, first a bit of situating. Is Auden late modernist? Post-modernist? Murphey quotes from Randall Jarrell’s review of the poem, which is already busy doing situation work:

“In April 1941, in a characteristically spirited review of Auden's recently published The Double Man, Randall Jarrell began by declaring: In 1931 Pope's ghost said to me, 'Ten years from now the leading young poet of the time will publish ... a didactic epistle of about nine hundred tetrameter couplets.' I answered absently, 'You are a fool'; and who on earth would have thought him anything else. But he was right: the decline and fall of modernist poetry . . . were nearer than anyone could have believed.”

I find that a rather vexing proposition: “the decline and fall of modernist poetry” was inscribed in the themes of modernist poetry, with its re-appropriation of the conversational – literally in some of Apollinaire’s poems and some bits of the Wasteland – and its strong citational bent make Auden’s poems, to my eyes, ultra modernist – which, thematically, means the kind of poetry that takes its reference points from World Literature, like good little Goethians, rather than from a narrow Anglophone, or at best cross-Channel, tradition. Auden, writing a poem that is dosed with the parsonage murder motif from New York City, about the world wide coming of fascism, has, contrary to Jarrell, put on his hundred mile modernist boots and gone a-walkin’. Or at least that is my reading.

5.

I’m one of those sad souls who expect, on the highest level, prophecy from the poem.

Prediction is science’s domain. The model smooths out the exceptions, operates on the theoretically largest scale – a million light years here, a million light years there. As Keynes said, and as all science agrees: in the long run we are all dead.

The prophetic poem has no model, but sees the future in the lurid light of a dream. And in the long run and the short, we all dream. We can’t help it, it is the REM feature in our neurology.

So, here I am, thinking about Auden’s New Year’s letter, and the New Year, 1940, and I read through the first couplets of the second part, and I think immediately, as anybody trained as I was in the University in the 1980s, about Walter Benjamin:

Tonight a scrambling decade ends,

And strangers, enemies and friends

Stand once more puzzled underneath

The signpost on the barren heath

Where the rough mountain track divides

To silent valleys on all sides,

Endeavouring to decipher what

Is written on it but cannot,

Nor guess in what direction lies

The overhanging precipice.

Of course, this route for Walter Benjamin, still alive in 1940, was to come, in September of that year, the 23rd: from Banyuls, France, taking the path through Pyrenees passes down to Spain. Lisa Fittko, the guide for his party, has published a memoir of that trip – the translation into French of part of it is published on the En attendant Nadeau site.

« Benjamin arrived that day from Marseille, where he had made a first unlucky attempt to escape by hiding on a cargo ship, disguised as a French sailer … An improbable gesture of despair. »

Auden, like many English leftists – including the Kim Philby – had enrolled in networks to help refugees from the Nazi menace. When Auden and Isherwood came to New York City in 1939, they were met by two high profile refugees – Erika and Klaus Mann. And they quickly connected with the refugee community in New York City. It was this year that he wrote Refugee blues:

“The consul banged the table and said,

"If you've got no passport you're officially dead":

But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.”

In the New Year’s Letter, the muse underneath it all is a Jewish woman – one without her own name – Lot’s wife.

“And now and then a nature turns

To look where her whole system burns

And with a last defiant groan

Shudders her future into stone.”

Interestingly, in Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days, the lynching of a Jewish couple in the beginning of the book – unplaced, a pogram that could have happened in 1905 in Galicia or could have happened in 1938 in the Austrian countryside – also reaches for Lot.

“Lot refused to surrender the angels who were his guests. Lot stood on the threshold, and the mob seized him by the arm, trying to pull him out into the street to be punished for the hospitality he extended, wanting to have at least him to strike at, spit on, trample and abuse; but the angels took hold of his other arm from inside the house with their angelic hands, and they were strong, they smote his attackers with blindness, pulled Lot back into the house, shut the door between him and the people, and those outside could no longer see one another, could no longer even see the door to Lot’s house, they groped their way along the walls and had no choice but to withdraw. Make no tarrying o my God. She doesn’t have the strength of angels, she doesn’t succeed in puller her husband up to where she is…”

Does the New Year’s Letter become more poignant as we place it next to this year, when the refugee is the target of orchestrated televisual/social media rage? Or does all poetry that works renew itself on the blood, for there is always blood, of the present?

 

 

 

 

Bloody thoughts: Take out some people

MOTHERLESS CHILD TAKE UP YOUR GUN 

Once, in my late twenties, I had a off and on again job as a hand in a construction crew (back then, I was a general Jack of all Unemployments). So we made this porch in North Austin, and this dock, cause the place was out on a lake. And we talked, hammered, measured, the usual shit. And I, who was taking what I thought was a year off from my graduate program at U.T., talked the usual routine of an Academic Marxist. Quite happily chirping along.

One afternoon, the contractor – a man of all trades, a peppery guy from New Orleans – gave me a ride home. We chirped along, and when he stopped, to let me out of the car, he said: so, don’t you think we should get some guns.

I said, whaaaat?

He said, take some shots, take out some people.

I wanted to keep the gig and I like the contractor, so I didn’t tell him don’t be ridiculous, I told him that I was definitely not the guy to take out some people with a gun. He helpfully offered to take me to a range where I could learn to adjust my opinion to practice, but I declined again.

Being then in the stage of academic Marxism where my idea of the class struggle was being perpetually sarcastic, I found the whole scenario howlingly funny.

Now, being an older gent who thinks it howlingly funny to call people “leftists” who have no connection to a unionized working class but are left in their head only, I am more than ever sure that I am not going to solve anything by practicing at the range.

Yet I also know that letting paramilitary ultra rightists out of jail, which Trump has done, means that surely some people are gonna get hurt. And I know that direct action, such as was allegedly the case with Luigi Mangione, might be thrust upon us by circs.

Take some shots, take out some people. I’m reconsidering that proposition.