Thank God Amy Chua’s memoir on Chinese tiger-mothering was so reviled by
so many who either don’t know how to read or just didn’t read the book:
I would not have picked it up if not to see what the fuss was about.
But I did pick it up, always curious to see what the moronic
literal-minded reading of some complicated event the media is in the
midst of perpetrating, and I devoured it in one sitting – it was a funny
hyper-achieving mom story of trying to carry the traditions of the old
country into the new and meeting with mixed success, narrated by an
insanely energetic, hyperbolic and studiedly “unself-conscious” voice.
As one trained in literature, I approach a memoir or autobiography as a
piece of fiction, or at least I judge it by the same sort of standards,
and this one was really pretty entertaining, like Mary Karr’s Lit. Both
Chua and Karr’s narrators are people I love to hate, self-destructive
but talented beings in love with themselves whose boundless sense of
entitlement (we should want to hear their stories why exactly?) I can
only envy and, bizarrely, admire.
But as is so often the case with American reviewers, the references
floating around the blogosphere demonstrate almost no understanding of
the actual genre of the book. If someone wants to say that this is a
lame memoir, okay, I’ll listen. But somehow it got turned into a guide
to parenting and was attacked on that basis, this after one of the
epigraphs states that “it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting
taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.” Sounds
like a memoir to me.
I responded to her immediately, this first generation Chinese woman who
worked “psychotically” hard and achieved and then tried to apply the
same techniques to her daughters that her parents had applied to her.
Her dad, immigrant, was a prof; she did Harvard/Harvard law school; her
first sister did Yale/Yale law school; second sister did Yale/Yale med
school. The last sister, who has Downs Syndrome, won two swimming
medals in the Special Olympics. Much of the story is in that poignant
detail, I think; the rest is just the development of it: each daughter
is encouraged to achieve and achieves according to her ability. The
rest of the story is in the way Chua's mother coped with her last
daughter. We are told that the Chinese generally reject disabled
children. But Chua’s mother, having absorbed some of the compassion of
her new home, devoted all her time to that fourth daughter. This the
rest of the story: one keeps the best of the old country and but
modifies it to include the good that American culture has to offer, in
this case, the value of compassion.
The book has been read as a harangue against western parenting, but this
is not the case. It is a harangue against the same elements of
American culture that we all harangue against: junk food, facebook. But
Chua's experience with parenting has been from an extremely privileged
perspective, both as a receiver and a giver of parenting, and her memoir
is not simply critical: it is an interrogation of herself as a person
trying to carry the torch to the next generation. She was very very
fortunate. First to have parents that promote a tradition of
intellectualism and achievement. That is hard to find – what I wouldn’t
give to have been born into such a situation. All my life I have
struggled to overcome my own backwards education: I still have not. And
I certainly have never overcome my sense of inferiority beside those
who were lucky enough to be properly educated. Second, to have married
even further up, cerebrally speaking. Of course she wanted to pass this
gift on.
The rest is just hyperbole, funny. She was pushy; most of us are lax.
We are all good enough at being mothers. But her kids have the huge
advantage of growing up in a tradition of overachieving, which is a
tradition that one can reject later, but that one cannot take on later
if one has missed it.
Monday, April 30, 2012
Certified Copy (Copie conforme)
“Certified Copy” (2010) begins with a bit of banal dialoguing on the
relationship between copy and original, so banal that all you can think
is that the characters need to read Walter Benjamin and bring the level
of the discussion up a few notches. But then suddenly the film starts to
act out the relationship that the characters have been discussing in
their stilted ways. And that is really pretty stunning.
The transformation originates in a game that they characters suddenly begin to play – that they are married. He dashes out of a café to take a phone call, while she (although he, an English writer called James Miller, has a name, she does not: the point is that this is how marriages work) remains behind discussing her “husband” and his shortcomings with the café owner. The problem is that they are not in fact married; they have just met the day before when he arrived in Florence to promote his latest book on copies and originals. She has taken him out sightseeing in the Italian countryside. He returns to his coffee, and when she tells him that the cafe owner thought they were married and that she did not correct the mistake, he plays along with the game. Why? The game feels natural, a way of flirting, pushing the bounds, trying on an alternative life. It is a game we all play in a new but intense relationship.
But as the story progresses, we forget that the two really aren’t married, becoming engrossed in the details that feel so mundane and yet tragic. The actors, who at the outset feel their ways through the roles, watching the other for clues to see how they should react, settle in and become the husband and wife they are pretending to be. Their argument is the same one that all married couples have – he is too remote, she is too demanding. We know the lines before they are uttered. As they wander through the village, watch a wedding, stop in a restaurant and finally visit the hotel they stayed in during their “honeymoon,” we are torn between the hope that they will stay together, preposterous as it seems, and the knowledge that he has to catch his train at nine o’clock. She asks him to stay, he reminds her that he told her at the beginning that he had to leave. There is the whole universal story of male/female relationships condensed into two sad little lines, at least as we have learned them through literature and film.
Ultimately the question of the copy in this context is not philosophical but behavioral. The film is not about metaphysics but performance theory. This is how love works: we say the words that our culture offers us, play out the scenarios we all know by heart, and in the act we feel love. Marriage is a script.
Amazingly, a number of the critics reviewing the film didn’t realize that they were watching two people in a film pretending to be married – although the film sets up the game very precisely. A tendency that we Americans can’t seem to kick is to read films literally. And yet if we miss the point that the couple is not in fact married but playing out a marriage according to a well-rehearsed screenplay the film has no meaning, the central question of “what is the difference between copy and original” loses its coherence. The answer to the question is that there is no difference – you can’t tell between the performance and the real thing because there is no difference. At least in human relationships.
Juliette Binoche as the woman
William Shimell as the husband, writer James Miller
The transformation originates in a game that they characters suddenly begin to play – that they are married. He dashes out of a café to take a phone call, while she (although he, an English writer called James Miller, has a name, she does not: the point is that this is how marriages work) remains behind discussing her “husband” and his shortcomings with the café owner. The problem is that they are not in fact married; they have just met the day before when he arrived in Florence to promote his latest book on copies and originals. She has taken him out sightseeing in the Italian countryside. He returns to his coffee, and when she tells him that the cafe owner thought they were married and that she did not correct the mistake, he plays along with the game. Why? The game feels natural, a way of flirting, pushing the bounds, trying on an alternative life. It is a game we all play in a new but intense relationship.
But as the story progresses, we forget that the two really aren’t married, becoming engrossed in the details that feel so mundane and yet tragic. The actors, who at the outset feel their ways through the roles, watching the other for clues to see how they should react, settle in and become the husband and wife they are pretending to be. Their argument is the same one that all married couples have – he is too remote, she is too demanding. We know the lines before they are uttered. As they wander through the village, watch a wedding, stop in a restaurant and finally visit the hotel they stayed in during their “honeymoon,” we are torn between the hope that they will stay together, preposterous as it seems, and the knowledge that he has to catch his train at nine o’clock. She asks him to stay, he reminds her that he told her at the beginning that he had to leave. There is the whole universal story of male/female relationships condensed into two sad little lines, at least as we have learned them through literature and film.
Ultimately the question of the copy in this context is not philosophical but behavioral. The film is not about metaphysics but performance theory. This is how love works: we say the words that our culture offers us, play out the scenarios we all know by heart, and in the act we feel love. Marriage is a script.
Amazingly, a number of the critics reviewing the film didn’t realize that they were watching two people in a film pretending to be married – although the film sets up the game very precisely. A tendency that we Americans can’t seem to kick is to read films literally. And yet if we miss the point that the couple is not in fact married but playing out a marriage according to a well-rehearsed screenplay the film has no meaning, the central question of “what is the difference between copy and original” loses its coherence. The answer to the question is that there is no difference – you can’t tell between the performance and the real thing because there is no difference. At least in human relationships.
Juliette Binoche as the woman
William Shimell as the husband, writer James Miller
Roma Città Aperta (1945)
Before viewing “Roma Città Aperta” I watched Martin Scorsese, narrating
“My Voyage to Italy,” laud this exemplar of neo-realism to the heavens.
Over and over, he marvelled at the way it presented a piece of real
life. Cut to more sophisticated takes on the film – of course these harp
on the film’s melodramatic aspects.
Furthermore the film is criticized for being a long bit of propaganda, a tribute to Stalin and the Catholic Church.
The film has also been compared to “The Birth of a Nation,” except that the group ludicrously caricatured is the Nazis, not slaves. The reviewers chastise the film’s cheerful application of every sorry old homosexual stereotype in the book. The mincing Bergmann, the campy but sinister lesbian Ingrid. The Nazis in general are portrayed as a godless hegemony of homosexuals, according to this reading. One reviewer sternly points out that the German watchword, Kinder, Küche, Kirche, shows that the film is gratuitously conservative. No, the Nazis were not really homosexuals, he argues, as if the argument is important.
The first two criticisms must be grouped. Of course the film is propagandistic. It was hardly created to offer a “slice” of everyday life in occupied Rome – not that any work of “realism” is ever offered without an agenda, simply to offer a picture of the real world. Such an intent would be doomed to failure, even if anyway were unsophisticated to have such an intent. The stunning thing about the comparison between Scorsese’s take and that of the more recent supposedly serious film critics is that they are equally convinced that “realism” is a style that should be employed exclusively within a film, independent of any other style. But why on earth would a neo-realistic film not also be melodramatic? Neo-realism in this context is, after all, a style. It is not an ideology. Melodrama is a style. Any decent artist systematically mixes styles. The assumption can only be that neo-realism is somehow genuinely “realistic,” an authentic ideology, and that adding “unrealistic” elements to it somehow damages it. Certainly realism can be an ideology, but it isn't here - this is a film that creates memories, a film of propaganda. It is not the exposition of a theory.
The argument that the homosexual allusions are unworthy ignores the joke. The Nazis were the most excessive imaginable variety of tough guys – the ultimate gay bashers. Remember, they did send gays to concentration camps. Who could resist taunting them as sad repressed versions of their deep anxieties? The mockery has nothing to say about gays and certainly nothing about gay stereotypes. It has a lot to say about Nazi ideas of homosexuality. No, of course the Nazis were not more or less inclined to homosexuality than any group of people. No one thinks that they were, least of all Rossellini. The point is to turn their insult back on them.
A strange to thing to enter into a film so alien from our mentality of unbridled consumerism , but, on second thought, not so strange. Because that society as it is given to us is filled with a constant excitement that far surpasses our current level – there is enough buzz to satisfy even people who spend the day surfing political blogs. War, one hears, is in fact generally long stretches of mind-numbing boredom with rare rare flashes of mortal danger. And yet the war we get here is heavy with meaning and heroism. Living through it is represented as interesting as reading breaking news reports all day long. But this of course is what a movie does – it condenses, and it attributes meaning. It does not really create knowledge, or, if it does, it is a very particular type of knowledge, a knowledge of what it means to have meaning in one’s life.
For modern viewers who have no need to redeem the Italians, the Catholic Church, or Stalin, the common criticisms of the film are simply trite. Does someone really think that the film is a realistic portrayal of life during the German occupation? I’m not sure why the point would even need to be made. What we do get from the film is a front row seat at a demonstration of meaning in the making – we witness the memory of the resistance as it is being created. We are accomplices. We enter into that suspension of disbelief, we cry, we let ourselves be entirely duped, watch while we are duped, and, in the process, we begin to understand why people need to create memories. This is the very essence of neo-realism. This is similar to the impulse that motors reality tv, which is of course no more realistic than any other tv show. But we are fully engaged in our own duping. We watch ourselves crying in a mirror, loving the sight of our own tears in the reflection, and, filled with self-pity, cry all the harder.
Furthermore the film is criticized for being a long bit of propaganda, a tribute to Stalin and the Catholic Church.
The film has also been compared to “The Birth of a Nation,” except that the group ludicrously caricatured is the Nazis, not slaves. The reviewers chastise the film’s cheerful application of every sorry old homosexual stereotype in the book. The mincing Bergmann, the campy but sinister lesbian Ingrid. The Nazis in general are portrayed as a godless hegemony of homosexuals, according to this reading. One reviewer sternly points out that the German watchword, Kinder, Küche, Kirche, shows that the film is gratuitously conservative. No, the Nazis were not really homosexuals, he argues, as if the argument is important.
The first two criticisms must be grouped. Of course the film is propagandistic. It was hardly created to offer a “slice” of everyday life in occupied Rome – not that any work of “realism” is ever offered without an agenda, simply to offer a picture of the real world. Such an intent would be doomed to failure, even if anyway were unsophisticated to have such an intent. The stunning thing about the comparison between Scorsese’s take and that of the more recent supposedly serious film critics is that they are equally convinced that “realism” is a style that should be employed exclusively within a film, independent of any other style. But why on earth would a neo-realistic film not also be melodramatic? Neo-realism in this context is, after all, a style. It is not an ideology. Melodrama is a style. Any decent artist systematically mixes styles. The assumption can only be that neo-realism is somehow genuinely “realistic,” an authentic ideology, and that adding “unrealistic” elements to it somehow damages it. Certainly realism can be an ideology, but it isn't here - this is a film that creates memories, a film of propaganda. It is not the exposition of a theory.
The argument that the homosexual allusions are unworthy ignores the joke. The Nazis were the most excessive imaginable variety of tough guys – the ultimate gay bashers. Remember, they did send gays to concentration camps. Who could resist taunting them as sad repressed versions of their deep anxieties? The mockery has nothing to say about gays and certainly nothing about gay stereotypes. It has a lot to say about Nazi ideas of homosexuality. No, of course the Nazis were not more or less inclined to homosexuality than any group of people. No one thinks that they were, least of all Rossellini. The point is to turn their insult back on them.
A strange to thing to enter into a film so alien from our mentality of unbridled consumerism , but, on second thought, not so strange. Because that society as it is given to us is filled with a constant excitement that far surpasses our current level – there is enough buzz to satisfy even people who spend the day surfing political blogs. War, one hears, is in fact generally long stretches of mind-numbing boredom with rare rare flashes of mortal danger. And yet the war we get here is heavy with meaning and heroism. Living through it is represented as interesting as reading breaking news reports all day long. But this of course is what a movie does – it condenses, and it attributes meaning. It does not really create knowledge, or, if it does, it is a very particular type of knowledge, a knowledge of what it means to have meaning in one’s life.
For modern viewers who have no need to redeem the Italians, the Catholic Church, or Stalin, the common criticisms of the film are simply trite. Does someone really think that the film is a realistic portrayal of life during the German occupation? I’m not sure why the point would even need to be made. What we do get from the film is a front row seat at a demonstration of meaning in the making – we witness the memory of the resistance as it is being created. We are accomplices. We enter into that suspension of disbelief, we cry, we let ourselves be entirely duped, watch while we are duped, and, in the process, we begin to understand why people need to create memories. This is the very essence of neo-realism. This is similar to the impulse that motors reality tv, which is of course no more realistic than any other tv show. But we are fully engaged in our own duping. We watch ourselves crying in a mirror, loving the sight of our own tears in the reflection, and, filled with self-pity, cry all the harder.
Just Melvin, Just Evil, 2000
During my first attempt at this documentary I made it through about
forty minutes, finally too uncomfortable with the sleazy sort of free
for all of social misfits, most of whom appeared to be semi-literate.
Their living conditions were appalling, filthy and unsavory like the
family in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” or “Deliverance.” I knew of
course that the documentary was about incest, but I had imagined that it
would be a complicated and wrenching story about a family’s long and
difficult journey to enlightenment and justice: that it would consider
incest as a social problem and offer some kind of coherent reaction to
this atrocity. Instead, the documentary presented a family of visibly
unwell, both physically and mentally, forty or fifty-something people,
accusing not only the bizarre lunatic patriarch of the family of incest,
but also each other. Furthermore, the only male in the large group
(besides the ludicrous, cud-chewing Melvin) asked two of his half
sisters to marry him, and then expounded on why he thought that there
was nothing wrong with loving your sisters. The documentary played into
every sad stereotype about small towns wherein everyone is related to
everyone else, presenting us with a freak show rather than a serious
consideration of this very serious issue. This is why I initially
refused to continue watching – I felt exploited, I felt like a voyeur.
I could not imagine what to make out of this documentary that first time around. But I eventually returned because I wanted to see how the director finally set the material up as a social critique. Where would the fault lie? With society? I should have known better. The director, who during the documentary pretends that his purpose was to bring Melvin to justice or see him dead and help his family heal, intersperses the odd carnevalesque family scenes with clips of himself taking part in a series of be-sequined tv dancing contests, he and his partner flying through the air in back handsprings. We even saw a video of his wedding, with his bride back flipping her way down the aisle. If people don’t get us, the director notes defensively, that’s okay.
No, it's not really okay if people don't get you. The documentary is supposed to be about incest. We didn't tune in to form an opinion on the director’s wedding – who cares? So, one assumes, the comment applies to the family in general – the film is supposed to be about them, after all. And if the director doesn't care if we get them, why does he want us to watch them?
More fundamental, in addition to being asked to rely upon this wannabe tv entertainer for a serious exposé on incest, we are asked to believe that the charges being flung around by the family members are true, without any evidence whatsoever. As a viewer I have no reason either to believe or disbelieve that these wildly gesticulating very large people were the victims of the grotesque Melvin. Why not? But, on the other hand, why should I believe it? Much later in the film we learn that Melvin was in fact convicted of incest and served eight years (which raises the question of why the director wanted to bring Melvin to justice when society had already exacted its justice – did he think that Melvin should have served longer? If so, he doesn’t tell us that). So it appears that the incest story must have been true. But a murder charge is also flung about, without a shred of evidence. The children claim to have witnessed Melvin pound a nurse on the head with an andiron. But why was the case never brought to trial if a group of about eight witnesses saw the old bugger beating a woman to death in the living room? The film is filled with frustrating innuendo and no conclusions, no guidance as to what we are meant to understand.
Most frustrating of all, we are told that one of the many sisters, fed up with forced sex with Melvin, turned him in to the police. The police showed up, questioned everyone, went to their school, questioned, questioned, and the children all denied the charges. The police, therefore, had no case. Many years later, several of the girls corroborated the story, and this time he was flung in the slammer. But what are we meant to understand? Is this a critique of the police? If so, how? Should they have pressed forward without any witnesses? If so, the director does not tell us this.
Truly disturbing are the accusations of one of the sisters, this one with terribly deformed legs (we are shown many detailed pictures of the problem), accusing the now wheel-chair bound Melvin of recently having paid her a dollar to have sex with him. This is clearly a fantasy, given that Melvin is immobile. Or, if it is true, why did she comply? It isn’t as if he could have forced her. Once again, what are we to understand? Equally stomach turning is the shot of the group of large middle-aged women visiting Melvin in his rest home. They dash down the hall, squealing with excitement to see him. And these are the women upon whom he perpetrating decades of sexual abuse? Why are they visiting him, telling him how good it is to see him?
Bizarre showcase for the handspringing director, this documentary does a disservice to efforts to bring incest to the light of day. Without any context for understanding the visible instability of this family – are they insane because of the incest, or did they cook up the incest because they are insane – we cannot reasonably be expected to separate truth from fantasy.
I could not imagine what to make out of this documentary that first time around. But I eventually returned because I wanted to see how the director finally set the material up as a social critique. Where would the fault lie? With society? I should have known better. The director, who during the documentary pretends that his purpose was to bring Melvin to justice or see him dead and help his family heal, intersperses the odd carnevalesque family scenes with clips of himself taking part in a series of be-sequined tv dancing contests, he and his partner flying through the air in back handsprings. We even saw a video of his wedding, with his bride back flipping her way down the aisle. If people don’t get us, the director notes defensively, that’s okay.
No, it's not really okay if people don't get you. The documentary is supposed to be about incest. We didn't tune in to form an opinion on the director’s wedding – who cares? So, one assumes, the comment applies to the family in general – the film is supposed to be about them, after all. And if the director doesn't care if we get them, why does he want us to watch them?
More fundamental, in addition to being asked to rely upon this wannabe tv entertainer for a serious exposé on incest, we are asked to believe that the charges being flung around by the family members are true, without any evidence whatsoever. As a viewer I have no reason either to believe or disbelieve that these wildly gesticulating very large people were the victims of the grotesque Melvin. Why not? But, on the other hand, why should I believe it? Much later in the film we learn that Melvin was in fact convicted of incest and served eight years (which raises the question of why the director wanted to bring Melvin to justice when society had already exacted its justice – did he think that Melvin should have served longer? If so, he doesn’t tell us that). So it appears that the incest story must have been true. But a murder charge is also flung about, without a shred of evidence. The children claim to have witnessed Melvin pound a nurse on the head with an andiron. But why was the case never brought to trial if a group of about eight witnesses saw the old bugger beating a woman to death in the living room? The film is filled with frustrating innuendo and no conclusions, no guidance as to what we are meant to understand.
Most frustrating of all, we are told that one of the many sisters, fed up with forced sex with Melvin, turned him in to the police. The police showed up, questioned everyone, went to their school, questioned, questioned, and the children all denied the charges. The police, therefore, had no case. Many years later, several of the girls corroborated the story, and this time he was flung in the slammer. But what are we meant to understand? Is this a critique of the police? If so, how? Should they have pressed forward without any witnesses? If so, the director does not tell us this.
Truly disturbing are the accusations of one of the sisters, this one with terribly deformed legs (we are shown many detailed pictures of the problem), accusing the now wheel-chair bound Melvin of recently having paid her a dollar to have sex with him. This is clearly a fantasy, given that Melvin is immobile. Or, if it is true, why did she comply? It isn’t as if he could have forced her. Once again, what are we to understand? Equally stomach turning is the shot of the group of large middle-aged women visiting Melvin in his rest home. They dash down the hall, squealing with excitement to see him. And these are the women upon whom he perpetrating decades of sexual abuse? Why are they visiting him, telling him how good it is to see him?
Bizarre showcase for the handspringing director, this documentary does a disservice to efforts to bring incest to the light of day. Without any context for understanding the visible instability of this family – are they insane because of the incest, or did they cook up the incest because they are insane – we cannot reasonably be expected to separate truth from fantasy.
The Godfather, 1972
The most startling scene in movie history, I believe, is the final shot
of "The Godfather," part I. Michael Corleone, separated from us by the
doorframe of his office, is having his hand kissed by his apostles.
Perverted version of the Pope (or is it perverted? Maybe just a
straightforward analogue), he takes our breath away: we are completely
seduced and absolutely terrified by his immense power. He can do
anything; he is our black Father.
"The Godfather" pulls off an amazing feat. It shines a light on the violence that lies at the heart of the Mafia. It revels in introducing us to the sickening underworkings of the clan. Traitors are ruthlessly blown away, hunks of their brains spatter the sidewalk. The film kicks us in the face. But at the end we kiss Michael’s ring. We are willing accomplices in our own seduction.
It isn’t just the Mafia whose violence we collaborate in. It is an entire ideology of violence. At the top is the US government. But we are given to know that even though the Feds stride around with their big guns, they can’t control criminals. We are not safe from predatory males: the undertaker Amerigo Bonasera pours his heart out to Don Corleone, explaining that his daughter has been brutally raped by her boyfriend and his mates. But they are given suspended sentences. Justice fails.
Thus we turn to the “family.” Father will take care of us; all we have to do is subject ourselves, body and soul, to his way of life. No mention of Mafia or even "Cosa Nostra;" we are talking here about traditional family values and what it means that this social grouping lies at the foundation of all society. We try to create rules of law that supersede those of the family, but we can’t do it, because ultimately even the purveyors of justice in our supersystems are beholden to the family. The father is everywhere, everywhere,everywhere. There is no getting away from him.
How does he do it? Why don’t we run away? Ask Connie, the pathetic daughter of the Don. She screams around the house in a pink satin negligee, heavily pregnant, because her husband, sick of her, has taken a mistress. She throws plates, rips curtains, he beats her up. She tells her brothers on him. But when the family finally springs to action and rubs the joker out (although not because he beats their sister up, but because he betrayed the biggest brother – after all, this is a man’s world), she collapses, grief-stricken. She loved her tormentor! She craves that boot in the face. That’s how the family works. It gets us addicted to getting kicked.
Law, religion, and family - all collapsed into the figure of Michael, from whom we ask nothing but the chance to prostrate ourselves before him, naked, begging him to take our virginity, Michael, from whom we ask for reassurances and then smile with relief when he lies to us. “No, I did not have Connie’s son murdered,” he intones. Kay thinks, “Just let me bear your child, Michael – that’ all I ask. I degrade myself willingly to your slightest whim, just let me live in your light.”
In other words, the film hands us the reality of family and religious values, and we see only the beauty of Michael’s eyes, savor the timbre of his voice. He is Satan, perfectly beautiful, tempter, seducer, the Father, building his fallen empire on earth.
"The Godfather" pulls off an amazing feat. It shines a light on the violence that lies at the heart of the Mafia. It revels in introducing us to the sickening underworkings of the clan. Traitors are ruthlessly blown away, hunks of their brains spatter the sidewalk. The film kicks us in the face. But at the end we kiss Michael’s ring. We are willing accomplices in our own seduction.
It isn’t just the Mafia whose violence we collaborate in. It is an entire ideology of violence. At the top is the US government. But we are given to know that even though the Feds stride around with their big guns, they can’t control criminals. We are not safe from predatory males: the undertaker Amerigo Bonasera pours his heart out to Don Corleone, explaining that his daughter has been brutally raped by her boyfriend and his mates. But they are given suspended sentences. Justice fails.
Thus we turn to the “family.” Father will take care of us; all we have to do is subject ourselves, body and soul, to his way of life. No mention of Mafia or even "Cosa Nostra;" we are talking here about traditional family values and what it means that this social grouping lies at the foundation of all society. We try to create rules of law that supersede those of the family, but we can’t do it, because ultimately even the purveyors of justice in our supersystems are beholden to the family. The father is everywhere, everywhere,everywhere. There is no getting away from him.
How does he do it? Why don’t we run away? Ask Connie, the pathetic daughter of the Don. She screams around the house in a pink satin negligee, heavily pregnant, because her husband, sick of her, has taken a mistress. She throws plates, rips curtains, he beats her up. She tells her brothers on him. But when the family finally springs to action and rubs the joker out (although not because he beats their sister up, but because he betrayed the biggest brother – after all, this is a man’s world), she collapses, grief-stricken. She loved her tormentor! She craves that boot in the face. That’s how the family works. It gets us addicted to getting kicked.
Law, religion, and family - all collapsed into the figure of Michael, from whom we ask nothing but the chance to prostrate ourselves before him, naked, begging him to take our virginity, Michael, from whom we ask for reassurances and then smile with relief when he lies to us. “No, I did not have Connie’s son murdered,” he intones. Kay thinks, “Just let me bear your child, Michael – that’ all I ask. I degrade myself willingly to your slightest whim, just let me live in your light.”
In other words, the film hands us the reality of family and religious values, and we see only the beauty of Michael’s eyes, savor the timbre of his voice. He is Satan, perfectly beautiful, tempter, seducer, the Father, building his fallen empire on earth.
Red-Headed Woman, 1932
I had always believed, naively, that the Hays Code came about because of
a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of film: Hollywood
censors, stupidly assuming that film’s purpose was to entertain the
masses, failed to accord the medium the liberty accorded to art. In
fact, the issue was never about art at all. It was much simpler and
stupider – instigated by a movie company, Mutual Film Corporation, that
sued the state of Ohio for its censorship which the company felt kept it
from making the kind of sexy movies that would make serious money. The
1915 Supreme Court decision, Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial
Commission of Ohio, was based on whether movies were a “business” UNLIKE
the press, which was free under the first amendment. Yes, movies were a
mere business and therefor not entitled to the protection that the
media enjoyed: “the exhibition of moving pictures is a business, pure
and simple, originated and conducted for profit … not to be regarded,
nor intended to be regarded by the Ohio Constitution, we think, as part
of the press of the country, or as organs of public opinion.” This
decision forced Hollywood to pursue the lesser of two evils and create
its own code to keep the serious oppressor at bay.
On what planet are newspapers not also businesses? The truly sinister thing, of course, is that this early collusion of filmmakers and the courts by pretending that film was a business and therefore not new media quietly made the industry into a political arm, a silent purveyor of perverted values (racist, sexist, classist). The Motion Picture Commission created a code in 1921, but it was fairly ineffectual – Hollywood, after all, had a lot to lose. However, in June, 1934, supported by the “Catholic Legion of Decency,” invented just for the occasion, an amendment to the Code required all films released after July 1, 1934 to be approved. This time the Code was applied with the brutal precision under the direction of Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code Administration (PCA). Benjamin had not yet alerted the world to the dangers of the aestheticized politics – not that America would have listened! The ludicrous state of affairs continued until 1952, when in Joseph Burstyn, Inc., versus Wilson, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overruled its 1915 decision. Film was now entitled to First Amendment protection, and the New York State Board of Regents was not permitted to ban The Miracle.
So I have been watching films that slipped in before the code went brutal, wondering what Hollywood might have been. The answer is violent earlier on with bad gangsters coming out on top. And bizarrely obsessively interested in prostitution.
Why all the interest in the murky boundary between legitimate relationships and prostitution? The 1932 Jean Harlow vehicle Red-Headed Woman (where her hair looks like Barbie doll hair) has Lil pimping herself to move ever higher on the income scale. First she steals an incredibly stolid rich young guy away from his wife, then after they get married, she bags the guy’s father-in-law. Much humiliation for poor Lil from the New Yorkers who won’t accept her as part of their crowd, then the whole things ends in Paris where we are given to know that she has nabbed an even richer guy.
Irving Thalberg, apparently worried that the screenplay as originally written by F. Scott Fitzgerald (what??) was too ponderous, had Anita Loos re-do the thing into a punchier, more playful version. One assumes that this accounts for the insane careens of tone – are we meant to laugh or cry at Lil’s ability to snap her fingers and make men grovel? Is her sexual power a joke or the product of male phantasmagoria? An effort to contain the danger of female sexuality through ridicule or demystification? Apparently the censoring powers were nervous that Lil got away with her astonishing social climb, and the film led directly to greater control even though it was a big box office success because of the controversy that it generated.
Watching this and a series of other films from before the big crackdown makes one wonder if we really missed anything, anyway? How much musing over the immediate and uncontrollable male attraction to prostitutes do we need? And if we slip over to consider what the women in the audience were watching, how many times do we need be told that it’s a tough life – the only way up is to sell yourself? The themes continued just slightly less obviously (it is after all the big Hollywood story that a beautiful young woman snags a big rich guy). As far as I can see, pre-censorship Hollywood was not producing serious meditations on these issues – or any other social issues – anyway. Had Hollywood remained uncensored we would have seen more beautiful young women lying around in obvious post-coital positions, but their stories would have been no more probing than they turned out to be in post-code Hollywood.
On what planet are newspapers not also businesses? The truly sinister thing, of course, is that this early collusion of filmmakers and the courts by pretending that film was a business and therefore not new media quietly made the industry into a political arm, a silent purveyor of perverted values (racist, sexist, classist). The Motion Picture Commission created a code in 1921, but it was fairly ineffectual – Hollywood, after all, had a lot to lose. However, in June, 1934, supported by the “Catholic Legion of Decency,” invented just for the occasion, an amendment to the Code required all films released after July 1, 1934 to be approved. This time the Code was applied with the brutal precision under the direction of Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code Administration (PCA). Benjamin had not yet alerted the world to the dangers of the aestheticized politics – not that America would have listened! The ludicrous state of affairs continued until 1952, when in Joseph Burstyn, Inc., versus Wilson, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overruled its 1915 decision. Film was now entitled to First Amendment protection, and the New York State Board of Regents was not permitted to ban The Miracle.
So I have been watching films that slipped in before the code went brutal, wondering what Hollywood might have been. The answer is violent earlier on with bad gangsters coming out on top. And bizarrely obsessively interested in prostitution.
Why all the interest in the murky boundary between legitimate relationships and prostitution? The 1932 Jean Harlow vehicle Red-Headed Woman (where her hair looks like Barbie doll hair) has Lil pimping herself to move ever higher on the income scale. First she steals an incredibly stolid rich young guy away from his wife, then after they get married, she bags the guy’s father-in-law. Much humiliation for poor Lil from the New Yorkers who won’t accept her as part of their crowd, then the whole things ends in Paris where we are given to know that she has nabbed an even richer guy.
Irving Thalberg, apparently worried that the screenplay as originally written by F. Scott Fitzgerald (what??) was too ponderous, had Anita Loos re-do the thing into a punchier, more playful version. One assumes that this accounts for the insane careens of tone – are we meant to laugh or cry at Lil’s ability to snap her fingers and make men grovel? Is her sexual power a joke or the product of male phantasmagoria? An effort to contain the danger of female sexuality through ridicule or demystification? Apparently the censoring powers were nervous that Lil got away with her astonishing social climb, and the film led directly to greater control even though it was a big box office success because of the controversy that it generated.
Watching this and a series of other films from before the big crackdown makes one wonder if we really missed anything, anyway? How much musing over the immediate and uncontrollable male attraction to prostitutes do we need? And if we slip over to consider what the women in the audience were watching, how many times do we need be told that it’s a tough life – the only way up is to sell yourself? The themes continued just slightly less obviously (it is after all the big Hollywood story that a beautiful young woman snags a big rich guy). As far as I can see, pre-censorship Hollywood was not producing serious meditations on these issues – or any other social issues – anyway. Had Hollywood remained uncensored we would have seen more beautiful young women lying around in obvious post-coital positions, but their stories would have been no more probing than they turned out to be in post-code Hollywood.
Solitary Man, 2009
As a medievalist, I have been trained to accept a work on its own terms.
I don’t like to imagine what a work could have been, criticize it for
what it is not. I take the work as it is given to me and think about
what it is, its advantages and its limitations.
“Solitary Man” is Hollywood’s version of an aging playboy confronted with reality. Only in Hollywood can a man in his mid-sixties (actually the film pretends that Ben Kalmen is in his late fifties, but we are not blind) hit on an 18-year-old and be successful. We all know that in Hollywood or the entertainment industry more generally very young women really do sleep with old men whom they have reason to believe have some connection to the business. We have seen the Girls of the Playboy Mansion. But in New York, an aging failed car salesman simply cannot have any teenager he wants. And he certainly cannot show up at a university party with a beer in his hand and start propositioning the students. Security would be on to him before he knew what was happening.
What we have, then, is a film whose premise, that a broke guy in his mid-sixties who used to be a car salesman can have pretty much any woman he wants no matter what her age, is, on the surface, ludicrous. We can either accept the film as a displaced story of the Hollywood version of aging, in which case we wonder why the directors bothered to set the film in New York instead of just letting it be what it was meant to be, or we can puzzle over what the premise really means, figure out a way to make the incredible credible.
How to explain Ben Kalmen’s success with every woman he hits on? I am going to opt for this: the film is actually meant to depict the interior fantasy life of Ben Kalmen, who is in REALITY just an ordinary failed car salesman – probably undone by the recession – who would really enjoy slutting around, if he could ever find any takers. In his fantasy he becomes the most successful car salesman in New York history, wildly rich, sought after by women. He re-imagines his current situation as a the result of a spectacular fall from money and power due to his own fraud, dreaming himself up a fantasy version of going out of business (after all, we all incorporate realistic detail in our fantasies – we don’t reinvent ourselves wholesale). In his dreams he accompanies his girlfriend’s beautiful daughter to a university interview where he gets invited to a dorm party and sleeps with the daughter. Then we follow Ben's meandering fantasy through other women, growing money problems, all excuses for his real-life failure.
One of the most astonishing elements of the film - if one takes it as a straightforward story of aging - is the information given by Ben’s wife in the last few minutes: that Ben’s sexual escapades only began about six years ago when he discovered that he had some unspecified heart condition. In addition to being asked to believe that this sagging ordinary man before us is a sexual god of infinite charisma we are now asked to believe that he suddenly transformed from a family man into a ho overnight and has been working women only since his late fifties? But let’s imagine this bombshell as part of Ben’s fantasy – it gives him a justification for his guilty daydreams.
This film received generally very positive reviews, praised as authentic, etc. Those reviews were written by men. It seems that men have an emotional investment in this fantasy, the fantasy that 18-year-olds are ready to sleep with really old guys. Maybe the same need that drove the films’ directors to spin this tale out fuels the male film-going audience in general. But as a female I have to say that I am getting a little tired of this narrative, of sexually potent old guys with nice aging wives successfully putting the moves on gorgeous young women.
“Solitary Man” is Hollywood’s version of an aging playboy confronted with reality. Only in Hollywood can a man in his mid-sixties (actually the film pretends that Ben Kalmen is in his late fifties, but we are not blind) hit on an 18-year-old and be successful. We all know that in Hollywood or the entertainment industry more generally very young women really do sleep with old men whom they have reason to believe have some connection to the business. We have seen the Girls of the Playboy Mansion. But in New York, an aging failed car salesman simply cannot have any teenager he wants. And he certainly cannot show up at a university party with a beer in his hand and start propositioning the students. Security would be on to him before he knew what was happening.
What we have, then, is a film whose premise, that a broke guy in his mid-sixties who used to be a car salesman can have pretty much any woman he wants no matter what her age, is, on the surface, ludicrous. We can either accept the film as a displaced story of the Hollywood version of aging, in which case we wonder why the directors bothered to set the film in New York instead of just letting it be what it was meant to be, or we can puzzle over what the premise really means, figure out a way to make the incredible credible.
How to explain Ben Kalmen’s success with every woman he hits on? I am going to opt for this: the film is actually meant to depict the interior fantasy life of Ben Kalmen, who is in REALITY just an ordinary failed car salesman – probably undone by the recession – who would really enjoy slutting around, if he could ever find any takers. In his fantasy he becomes the most successful car salesman in New York history, wildly rich, sought after by women. He re-imagines his current situation as a the result of a spectacular fall from money and power due to his own fraud, dreaming himself up a fantasy version of going out of business (after all, we all incorporate realistic detail in our fantasies – we don’t reinvent ourselves wholesale). In his dreams he accompanies his girlfriend’s beautiful daughter to a university interview where he gets invited to a dorm party and sleeps with the daughter. Then we follow Ben's meandering fantasy through other women, growing money problems, all excuses for his real-life failure.
One of the most astonishing elements of the film - if one takes it as a straightforward story of aging - is the information given by Ben’s wife in the last few minutes: that Ben’s sexual escapades only began about six years ago when he discovered that he had some unspecified heart condition. In addition to being asked to believe that this sagging ordinary man before us is a sexual god of infinite charisma we are now asked to believe that he suddenly transformed from a family man into a ho overnight and has been working women only since his late fifties? But let’s imagine this bombshell as part of Ben’s fantasy – it gives him a justification for his guilty daydreams.
This film received generally very positive reviews, praised as authentic, etc. Those reviews were written by men. It seems that men have an emotional investment in this fantasy, the fantasy that 18-year-olds are ready to sleep with really old guys. Maybe the same need that drove the films’ directors to spin this tale out fuels the male film-going audience in general. But as a female I have to say that I am getting a little tired of this narrative, of sexually potent old guys with nice aging wives successfully putting the moves on gorgeous young women.
Hollywood occupies New Zealand
Warner Brothers comes swinging its massive male member (yes, a vulgar
metaphor, but nothing else quite does it) into New Zealand, growling,
“Hey, wankers, suck this.” New Zealand falls to its knees, goes, “Okay,
sir. What else can we do for you?” “Give us $25 million, and we’ll
call it even.” So the kiwis do that, too.
Can it be? Hollywood is now calling the legislation in New Zealand? Labor laws have changed to accommodate Peter Jackson who did not want to negotiate with a union? And some of the business community is approving?
New Zealand is not an especially obvious consumer society. Close beneath the veneer of their friendly surface roils that surliness characteristic of a massive national inferiority complex. People and cultures with inferiority complexes are dangerous. So they sort of pretend to value your business until you ask them for something and suddenly they flip out, as if you have somehow questioned their manhood. They can’t quite figure out how to do sales. They never caught on to the idea that it shouldn’t cost you MORE to buy the large economy size than two of the small sizes. They consistently screw up at the cash register. No, this is not a society that values consumers. Modern life is not quite under control in New Zealand.
If you deplore the creation of the consumer, the society seems more authentic, more serious, at first, than flagrantly client-oriented societies. But then you start to recognize that the only difference between New Zealand and the civilized world is that these people are poorer. Their income is about half of what it is in Australia, western Europe, and North America. If they could figure out how to be consumers on the scale of the rest of the western world they WOULD do it. There is no virtue in their lack of possession or inability to sell things. They just don’t know how to be otherwise.
This is why the sight of John Keyes forcing legislation through the Parliament at the demand of Hollywood is so appalling. It lays bare the myth that New Zealand is a nice little place where people are poor but happy and genuine. For a few dollars they are ready to prostrate themselves before the Hollywood icon, which is something you aren’t going to see, even in the US. Especially in the US. Is this democracy?? The US is screwed up, but at least directors don’t decide the law.
There just isn’t any safe place in the whole world. The universe if run by business, and the desires of business are by definition good. No questioning of that basic premise. This is Nietzsche and Beyond Good and Evil, part 2. "The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judges, 'what is harmful to me is harmful in itself'." New Zealand sometimes pretends to disdain the vile exploitation, moral and physical, perpetrated by the masters of the universe, but it has shown once and for all that it wants to play. When the little guy stands up to the big guy it is touching. But when it trails the big guy around asking for a couple of scattered crumbs, it is just pathetic.
Can it be? Hollywood is now calling the legislation in New Zealand? Labor laws have changed to accommodate Peter Jackson who did not want to negotiate with a union? And some of the business community is approving?
New Zealand is not an especially obvious consumer society. Close beneath the veneer of their friendly surface roils that surliness characteristic of a massive national inferiority complex. People and cultures with inferiority complexes are dangerous. So they sort of pretend to value your business until you ask them for something and suddenly they flip out, as if you have somehow questioned their manhood. They can’t quite figure out how to do sales. They never caught on to the idea that it shouldn’t cost you MORE to buy the large economy size than two of the small sizes. They consistently screw up at the cash register. No, this is not a society that values consumers. Modern life is not quite under control in New Zealand.
If you deplore the creation of the consumer, the society seems more authentic, more serious, at first, than flagrantly client-oriented societies. But then you start to recognize that the only difference between New Zealand and the civilized world is that these people are poorer. Their income is about half of what it is in Australia, western Europe, and North America. If they could figure out how to be consumers on the scale of the rest of the western world they WOULD do it. There is no virtue in their lack of possession or inability to sell things. They just don’t know how to be otherwise.
This is why the sight of John Keyes forcing legislation through the Parliament at the demand of Hollywood is so appalling. It lays bare the myth that New Zealand is a nice little place where people are poor but happy and genuine. For a few dollars they are ready to prostrate themselves before the Hollywood icon, which is something you aren’t going to see, even in the US. Especially in the US. Is this democracy?? The US is screwed up, but at least directors don’t decide the law.
There just isn’t any safe place in the whole world. The universe if run by business, and the desires of business are by definition good. No questioning of that basic premise. This is Nietzsche and Beyond Good and Evil, part 2. "The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judges, 'what is harmful to me is harmful in itself'." New Zealand sometimes pretends to disdain the vile exploitation, moral and physical, perpetrated by the masters of the universe, but it has shown once and for all that it wants to play. When the little guy stands up to the big guy it is touching. But when it trails the big guy around asking for a couple of scattered crumbs, it is just pathetic.
The reason for their hatred
The outrage of the Tea Party has suddenly become accessible to me. Went
to a film that was part of the Italian Film Festival. I already have a
little trouble with the film festival, because in a manner
characteristic of this society into which I have been exiled, the
organizer, a cheap faux culture nouveau riche swindler, charges way too
much for things that if he charged less he would actually make a profit
on. It’s a serious failing of this culture – they can’t get anything
right, but in business they are especially boneheaded. For example, he
used to have an opening lecture on one of the films, which is a great
idea in this university city, but he greedily charged $25. Nobody is
going to pay that much to hear a lecture on an Italian film, whereas
they would have gone in great numbers had the lecture been thrown in for
free. So the attendance was so low that he dropped the idea – never
occurred to him to offer the lecture for free as a way of drawing
crowds. Believe me, there are plenty of university lecturers who would
have given the lecture happily as a public service, a way of creating
ties between town and gown.
Anyway, back to the outrage and the eventual link to the Tea Party. So this buffoon who runs the film festival charges way too much for his films. In a normal festival you can buy packets of tickets as a discount. Not here. Not only that – I went to see a film on Tuesday, especially because Tuesday at the theatre has a discount. But NOT it turns out for the festival films.
The helpless fury I felt gave me access to the Tea Party anger. It comes from the deep sense of injustice at a system – a system that you can’t really fathom but to which you can attach a dopey face, in this case the foolish festival organizer.
I knew then that if there existed a group of disgruntled people similarly stuck in this benighted country who wanted to throw a manifestation, carry signs, shriek against the cheats, hoodlums, and scoundrels running the film festival that I would be out there with them, screaming my hatred. Throw in the university and there is nothing that I wouldn’t say about this place, no lie so absurd that I wouldn’t believe it if it were to its discredit; there is NOTHING that I would not say about the people in charge and the mindless idiocy with which they bungle their jobs. Nothing can adequately express my loathing of this place – all I could do if asked what I think about things here is bellow like an enraged bull.
This is the emotion that motivates the Tea Party. I get dizzy with delight imagining how I would love to pile on a bus to be barfed out on the Mall and shriek my hatred of the Italian film festival, the university here, along with similarly irate people. The Tea Partiers, pissed off that they have lost their jobs and that a system to which they have no access seems not to be paying them any heed, want to howl at the world. I would howl along with them if my agenda matched theirs.
Anyway, back to the outrage and the eventual link to the Tea Party. So this buffoon who runs the film festival charges way too much for his films. In a normal festival you can buy packets of tickets as a discount. Not here. Not only that – I went to see a film on Tuesday, especially because Tuesday at the theatre has a discount. But NOT it turns out for the festival films.
The helpless fury I felt gave me access to the Tea Party anger. It comes from the deep sense of injustice at a system – a system that you can’t really fathom but to which you can attach a dopey face, in this case the foolish festival organizer.
I knew then that if there existed a group of disgruntled people similarly stuck in this benighted country who wanted to throw a manifestation, carry signs, shriek against the cheats, hoodlums, and scoundrels running the film festival that I would be out there with them, screaming my hatred. Throw in the university and there is nothing that I wouldn’t say about this place, no lie so absurd that I wouldn’t believe it if it were to its discredit; there is NOTHING that I would not say about the people in charge and the mindless idiocy with which they bungle their jobs. Nothing can adequately express my loathing of this place – all I could do if asked what I think about things here is bellow like an enraged bull.
This is the emotion that motivates the Tea Party. I get dizzy with delight imagining how I would love to pile on a bus to be barfed out on the Mall and shriek my hatred of the Italian film festival, the university here, along with similarly irate people. The Tea Partiers, pissed off that they have lost their jobs and that a system to which they have no access seems not to be paying them any heed, want to howl at the world. I would howl along with them if my agenda matched theirs.
Rejoice twenty-somethings!
The New York Times article on the new stage of adolescence – the period
that covers the twenties, approximately – is still making the rounds.
Twenty-somethings graduate, but they do not go immediately into the work
force. They remain in a sort of twilight adolescence, seem dependent,
try on different sorts of lives. Life is longer; this is a luxury we
can now afford. Strange how people are reacting as it the piece were
somehow a criticism. But not at all – an observation. Things have
changed. Different theories might explain it, but they don’t matter.
All social change comes about through a strange nexus of events – change
is very rarely good or bad or even intentional. It just is. People
have protested that twenty-somethings don’t want to hang out for several
years in what is essentially a state of animated suspension. They have
been forced into the status by the economic climate, by the dismal job
outlook. They have complained that it simply isn’t true, that young
people are more pressured than ever to accomplish great things, build up
their CV.
I say that none of this matters; the essential thing is that we now have yet another model for plotting out a life. The more numerous and the more flexible the options for creating a life happen to be, the greater the number of potentially satisfied people. Whatever the reason twenty-somethings happen to find themselves in an in-between place, they can now profit from the position. You take the hand life deals you and you play it. Now we have been handed one more way of making sense out of the play, another option for winning.
I rejoice. I have a lost decade, a period that I have always looked back upon with shame. Now I have the means to reclaim that time. So many horrors – too many and too deep to speak of. And then I grew. It took me a long time to break away from home, to realize that I was just reproducing my own miserable situation. Little by little I clawed my way out, started to make decisions. It took a lot of time to get educated, to see through the fog. But I did. And I want to take back those years as a victory rather than a loss. It was a time of voyage and sorrow. There were many adventures.
I have a distressing image from that time – a young woman on her knees praying in a house that was not hers. Begging God to deliver her from the prison of her life. God of course did not listen – and, indeed, there were many Gods colliding in that house. Big blown up deities making all the decisions, creating reality, brewing the very air that she breathed. Did God deliver her from that place? Of course not. It was in God’s interest that she stay there. But as round-faced, helpless, and earnest as she was, she finally developed a tiny bit of any edge. It got sharper. She began to carve her way out, cut the God stuff away, excise a life that was still animate from a clump of fat. Then she got on a plane and it was off to find a new day.
Yes, twenty-somethings! Rejoice in this new possibility! Take your time and think. Experience. Remember that it is only in the past thirty years of so that we have even been able to conceive of self-fulfillment as a serious life’s goal.
I say that none of this matters; the essential thing is that we now have yet another model for plotting out a life. The more numerous and the more flexible the options for creating a life happen to be, the greater the number of potentially satisfied people. Whatever the reason twenty-somethings happen to find themselves in an in-between place, they can now profit from the position. You take the hand life deals you and you play it. Now we have been handed one more way of making sense out of the play, another option for winning.
I rejoice. I have a lost decade, a period that I have always looked back upon with shame. Now I have the means to reclaim that time. So many horrors – too many and too deep to speak of. And then I grew. It took me a long time to break away from home, to realize that I was just reproducing my own miserable situation. Little by little I clawed my way out, started to make decisions. It took a lot of time to get educated, to see through the fog. But I did. And I want to take back those years as a victory rather than a loss. It was a time of voyage and sorrow. There were many adventures.
I have a distressing image from that time – a young woman on her knees praying in a house that was not hers. Begging God to deliver her from the prison of her life. God of course did not listen – and, indeed, there were many Gods colliding in that house. Big blown up deities making all the decisions, creating reality, brewing the very air that she breathed. Did God deliver her from that place? Of course not. It was in God’s interest that she stay there. But as round-faced, helpless, and earnest as she was, she finally developed a tiny bit of any edge. It got sharper. She began to carve her way out, cut the God stuff away, excise a life that was still animate from a clump of fat. Then she got on a plane and it was off to find a new day.
Yes, twenty-somethings! Rejoice in this new possibility! Take your time and think. Experience. Remember that it is only in the past thirty years of so that we have even been able to conceive of self-fulfillment as a serious life’s goal.
An exiled Catholic woman
Since reading Colm Tóibín’s “Among the Flutterers” in the August 19 LRB I
have felt a measure of comfort in my usually anguished meditations on
being exiled from the Catholic Church. Here it is: the Catholic
hierarchy is composed of gay men, probably celibate, but gay. Let’s
turn the proposition around and imagine an institution owned by lesbian
women, celibate, but self-identified lesbians. Would men feel that they
had a place in that institution? Of course not. No wonder, then, that I
feel exiled; it is always comforting to me to realize that my feelings
are justified.
In fact, this is not really what Tóibín is writing about. But in bringing to our attention how much of the being part of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy, is, for men, wrapped up with their sexuality, we have to acknowledge that gayness, dealing with it, accepting it, is the central life issue for most of the Church hierarchy, its mission. I have never NOT accepted gayness, I recognize it as central to the identity of a sizable proportion of the population. But I want to belong to a Catholic Church whose hierarchy represents a diversity of identity issues, including mine.
It ‘s fine if as Tóibín writes that
"Some of the reasons why gay men became priests are obvious and simple; others are not. Becoming a priest, first of all, seemed to solve the problem of not wanting others to know that you were queer. As a priest, you could be celibate, or unmarried, and everyone would understand the reasons. It was because you had a vocation; you had been called by God, had been specially chosen by him. For other boys, the idea of never having sex with a woman was something they could not even entertain. For you, such sex was problematic; thus you had no blueprint for an easy future. The prospect, on the other hand, of making a vow in holiness never to have sex with a woman offered you relief. The idea that you might want to have sex with men, that you might be ‘that way inclined’, as they used to say, was not even mentioned, not once, during that workshop in which everything under the sun was discussed."
I want all young men to have the opportunity to find a place where they can work out who they are.
But when I stop by to pick up gay friends, I find them in front of the computer chatting with potential dates, the most fleeting random message more important than anything I could possibly have to say, when I go out with them I know that they are looking over my head for guys, I know that for them I represent a sounding board against which to try their ideas, I don’t really exist for them except as, sometimes, a front, or a sympathetic ear. The minute a man in whom they are interested comes along, I am OUT. I exist only to buoy them up.
Of course I have no objection to gay men being priests. But I do have the strongest objection possible to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church being entirely gay. For too long Catholics have gotten away with pretending that celibate is celibate, that gayness is not inherent. But since the late nineteenth century at least, this has not been the case. Gay men live together in sufficient intellectual (and sometimes sexual) relationships. Being gay is not really about sex, although it is about that. But sex is not the important part. What is important it that “they” do not need “us.” That’s fine in the context of my many relationships. I take what each has to offer. It’s just that I don’t want to belong to a Church that views me in the way that gay men view me, as an ear, as a confidence booster, as a spectator to their show. As a nun.
Terrific for the Pope if he likes to dress up in red taffeta:
"When I listed the reasons homosexuals might be attracted to the Church and might want to become priests, I did not mention the most obvious one: you get to wear funny bright clothes; you get to dress up all the time in what are essentially women’s clothes. As part of the training to be an altar boy I had to learn, and still remember, what a priest puts on to say Mass: the amice, the alb, the girdle, the stole, the maniple and the chasuble. Watching them robing themselves was like watching Mary Queen of Scots getting ready for her execution.
Priests prance around in elaborately fashioned costumes. Bishops and cardinals have even more colourful vestments. This ‘overt behaviour’ on their part has to be examined carefully. Since it is part of the rule of the Church, part of the norm, it has to be emphasised that many of them do not dress up as a matter of choice. Indeed, the vestments in all their glory might make some of them wince. But others seem to enjoy it. Among those who seem to enjoy it is Ratzinger. Quattrocchi draws our attention to the amount of care, since his election, Ratzinger has taken with his accessories, wearing designer sunglasses, for example, or gold cufflinks, and different sorts of funny hats and a pair of red shoes from Prada that would take the eyes out of you. He has also been having fun with his robes. On Ash Wednesday 2006, for example, he wore a robe of ‘Valentino red’ – called after the fashion designer – with ‘showy gold embroidery’ and soon afterwards changed into a blue associated with another fashion designer, Renato Balestra. In March 2007, for a visit to the juvenile prison at Casal del Marno, he wore an extraordinary tea-rose-coloured costume."
I have watched the gay-pride parades in Provincetown, cheering and urging them on. But the men who march in those are my friends, they are external to me, they have no interest in me, because their issues are so much more significant than mine. I love them, but I do not want them to have the sort of intimate power over me that the Catholic hierarchy does. They have no time for the likes of me. The Church, on the other hand, should have time for all of us. It should not be a boys’ club, forever excluding the girls.
In fact, this is not really what Tóibín is writing about. But in bringing to our attention how much of the being part of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy, is, for men, wrapped up with their sexuality, we have to acknowledge that gayness, dealing with it, accepting it, is the central life issue for most of the Church hierarchy, its mission. I have never NOT accepted gayness, I recognize it as central to the identity of a sizable proportion of the population. But I want to belong to a Catholic Church whose hierarchy represents a diversity of identity issues, including mine.
It ‘s fine if as Tóibín writes that
"Some of the reasons why gay men became priests are obvious and simple; others are not. Becoming a priest, first of all, seemed to solve the problem of not wanting others to know that you were queer. As a priest, you could be celibate, or unmarried, and everyone would understand the reasons. It was because you had a vocation; you had been called by God, had been specially chosen by him. For other boys, the idea of never having sex with a woman was something they could not even entertain. For you, such sex was problematic; thus you had no blueprint for an easy future. The prospect, on the other hand, of making a vow in holiness never to have sex with a woman offered you relief. The idea that you might want to have sex with men, that you might be ‘that way inclined’, as they used to say, was not even mentioned, not once, during that workshop in which everything under the sun was discussed."
I want all young men to have the opportunity to find a place where they can work out who they are.
But when I stop by to pick up gay friends, I find them in front of the computer chatting with potential dates, the most fleeting random message more important than anything I could possibly have to say, when I go out with them I know that they are looking over my head for guys, I know that for them I represent a sounding board against which to try their ideas, I don’t really exist for them except as, sometimes, a front, or a sympathetic ear. The minute a man in whom they are interested comes along, I am OUT. I exist only to buoy them up.
Of course I have no objection to gay men being priests. But I do have the strongest objection possible to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church being entirely gay. For too long Catholics have gotten away with pretending that celibate is celibate, that gayness is not inherent. But since the late nineteenth century at least, this has not been the case. Gay men live together in sufficient intellectual (and sometimes sexual) relationships. Being gay is not really about sex, although it is about that. But sex is not the important part. What is important it that “they” do not need “us.” That’s fine in the context of my many relationships. I take what each has to offer. It’s just that I don’t want to belong to a Church that views me in the way that gay men view me, as an ear, as a confidence booster, as a spectator to their show. As a nun.
Terrific for the Pope if he likes to dress up in red taffeta:
"When I listed the reasons homosexuals might be attracted to the Church and might want to become priests, I did not mention the most obvious one: you get to wear funny bright clothes; you get to dress up all the time in what are essentially women’s clothes. As part of the training to be an altar boy I had to learn, and still remember, what a priest puts on to say Mass: the amice, the alb, the girdle, the stole, the maniple and the chasuble. Watching them robing themselves was like watching Mary Queen of Scots getting ready for her execution.
Priests prance around in elaborately fashioned costumes. Bishops and cardinals have even more colourful vestments. This ‘overt behaviour’ on their part has to be examined carefully. Since it is part of the rule of the Church, part of the norm, it has to be emphasised that many of them do not dress up as a matter of choice. Indeed, the vestments in all their glory might make some of them wince. But others seem to enjoy it. Among those who seem to enjoy it is Ratzinger. Quattrocchi draws our attention to the amount of care, since his election, Ratzinger has taken with his accessories, wearing designer sunglasses, for example, or gold cufflinks, and different sorts of funny hats and a pair of red shoes from Prada that would take the eyes out of you. He has also been having fun with his robes. On Ash Wednesday 2006, for example, he wore a robe of ‘Valentino red’ – called after the fashion designer – with ‘showy gold embroidery’ and soon afterwards changed into a blue associated with another fashion designer, Renato Balestra. In March 2007, for a visit to the juvenile prison at Casal del Marno, he wore an extraordinary tea-rose-coloured costume."
I have watched the gay-pride parades in Provincetown, cheering and urging them on. But the men who march in those are my friends, they are external to me, they have no interest in me, because their issues are so much more significant than mine. I love them, but I do not want them to have the sort of intimate power over me that the Catholic hierarchy does. They have no time for the likes of me. The Church, on the other hand, should have time for all of us. It should not be a boys’ club, forever excluding the girls.
Now I understand
I imagine myself a person of limited education with one of those jobs
requiring a couple of years training – that is, a job that requires a
very specific knowledge but no larger sense of a system, a set of skills
that is not transferable, a set of skills that creates a mini-dictator
insufficiently knowledgeable to move past the little box – making, say,
$40,000 a year.
I then imagine that I have lost the job.
I further imagine that I get my news from Fox; I do not read, so make no effort to keep up on serious news. I watch football while drinking enormous soft drinks on Sunday afternoons with large groups of middle-aged friends who are quite overweight, many of whom have also lost their jobs. I go to church. We joke. The weeks pass. The savings go. I panic.
I cannot distinguish between the two parties. I have no job and the Democrats don’t have any plans to get me one. I don’t know anything about the obstructionism perpetrated by the Republicans because I only watch Fox. All politicians are equally bad in my opinion. I want to throw the scoundrels out, so I start to scream with the Tea Party. I don’t know who they are or what they stand for: I just want a job. I want things to be the way they used to me.
I just want a job. I want an income. I want a job. I want an income….
The very essence of making a pact with the devil is that we don’t know that we are doing it. Faustus is an exception, or maybe a metaphor – he represents that semi-conscious striking of a bargain. But the real horror is that we don’t recognize what we have done. Living in a world created by Fox news, we agree with the Republicans that freedom exists and that it means leaving the Bush tax cuts for the rich in place. We scream about activist liberal judges, Obama’s birth certificate, and we don’t notice that we have signed onto a world divided between the wealth and moderately wealthy on the one hand, and a mass of semi-educated, massively unemployed, un- or underinsured , sometimes homeless people. We have been turned into a perpetual underclass, easily controllable through religious platitudes, pulled into friendly complicity through gay-bashing, fear of immigrants. We can no longer pay for higher education; the lines are drawn forever.
This person I imagine is the person I would have been had I been born about a generation later, had my dad been born in 1960 where I was born, myself then pushed up later. My dad comes from a farm family of eight children. He never would have gone to university, which means that he would not have worked his way up into the middle class in my generation as he did in his. He would have been a foreman or some such thing, itinerant. His success is purely aleatory, nothing that he deserves. He worked hard, but that is not a trait that is valued. He works patiently within a box, dependent on the large father up there in charge, and the large father has no interest in him, no matter what a busy bee he is. My dad could not make it in this world.
I wonder if he grasps this in some primal way, and if this is why he is so furious at the usual imaginary suspects? In his old age, guided by Rush Limbaugh, he has turned into a raging anti-intellectual, a moronic repeater of the cyclical messages of hate towards the bogeymen against which the Right’s campaigns are directed. He is undoubtedly in love with Sarah Palin; he has no more ability to pick out a charlatan than he has to fly to the moon.
If his spuming anger is a latent recognition of his own helplessness before the forces that have overtaken the country, marginalizing him and his (our) kind, I feel a little better about it. I generally find it agonizingly embarrassing that my family so eagerly colludes with the Republican demagogues in their own destruction instead of just getting an education and trying to hold back the division of the country into a permanently divided over and underclass.
On the other hand, I have moved out of the underclass and am now firmly established in the upper one. Why do I care? Why should I pull my hair out worrying about the masses who will lose their savings to greedy purveyors of health care? It isn’t my problem – I have a job, I have health care. I don’t have to leave this place. And even if I do, it will be for an admin job with good health care. Philosophically, I do not spontaneously the position of “let them eat cake.” But they have acquiesced in their own annihilation. They needed to think a little and they punted. So this is not my problem. I quit anguishing about my lack of statehood and embrace my stats as cosmopolitan.
I then imagine that I have lost the job.
I further imagine that I get my news from Fox; I do not read, so make no effort to keep up on serious news. I watch football while drinking enormous soft drinks on Sunday afternoons with large groups of middle-aged friends who are quite overweight, many of whom have also lost their jobs. I go to church. We joke. The weeks pass. The savings go. I panic.
I cannot distinguish between the two parties. I have no job and the Democrats don’t have any plans to get me one. I don’t know anything about the obstructionism perpetrated by the Republicans because I only watch Fox. All politicians are equally bad in my opinion. I want to throw the scoundrels out, so I start to scream with the Tea Party. I don’t know who they are or what they stand for: I just want a job. I want things to be the way they used to me.
I just want a job. I want an income. I want a job. I want an income….
The very essence of making a pact with the devil is that we don’t know that we are doing it. Faustus is an exception, or maybe a metaphor – he represents that semi-conscious striking of a bargain. But the real horror is that we don’t recognize what we have done. Living in a world created by Fox news, we agree with the Republicans that freedom exists and that it means leaving the Bush tax cuts for the rich in place. We scream about activist liberal judges, Obama’s birth certificate, and we don’t notice that we have signed onto a world divided between the wealth and moderately wealthy on the one hand, and a mass of semi-educated, massively unemployed, un- or underinsured , sometimes homeless people. We have been turned into a perpetual underclass, easily controllable through religious platitudes, pulled into friendly complicity through gay-bashing, fear of immigrants. We can no longer pay for higher education; the lines are drawn forever.
This person I imagine is the person I would have been had I been born about a generation later, had my dad been born in 1960 where I was born, myself then pushed up later. My dad comes from a farm family of eight children. He never would have gone to university, which means that he would not have worked his way up into the middle class in my generation as he did in his. He would have been a foreman or some such thing, itinerant. His success is purely aleatory, nothing that he deserves. He worked hard, but that is not a trait that is valued. He works patiently within a box, dependent on the large father up there in charge, and the large father has no interest in him, no matter what a busy bee he is. My dad could not make it in this world.
I wonder if he grasps this in some primal way, and if this is why he is so furious at the usual imaginary suspects? In his old age, guided by Rush Limbaugh, he has turned into a raging anti-intellectual, a moronic repeater of the cyclical messages of hate towards the bogeymen against which the Right’s campaigns are directed. He is undoubtedly in love with Sarah Palin; he has no more ability to pick out a charlatan than he has to fly to the moon.
If his spuming anger is a latent recognition of his own helplessness before the forces that have overtaken the country, marginalizing him and his (our) kind, I feel a little better about it. I generally find it agonizingly embarrassing that my family so eagerly colludes with the Republican demagogues in their own destruction instead of just getting an education and trying to hold back the division of the country into a permanently divided over and underclass.
On the other hand, I have moved out of the underclass and am now firmly established in the upper one. Why do I care? Why should I pull my hair out worrying about the masses who will lose their savings to greedy purveyors of health care? It isn’t my problem – I have a job, I have health care. I don’t have to leave this place. And even if I do, it will be for an admin job with good health care. Philosophically, I do not spontaneously the position of “let them eat cake.” But they have acquiesced in their own annihilation. They needed to think a little and they punted. So this is not my problem. I quit anguishing about my lack of statehood and embrace my stats as cosmopolitan.
Our leader
Bright as a little button, huge head perched on a wiry little girl’s
body. Slightly wall-eyed. Unfailingly chipper. Can’t help but like
her, want to pat her on the head.
But she is one of those kiwis enraptured with the intricacies of form. Utter indifference to substance; for her, the university is a dazzling maze of arcana, a series of secrets penetrable only by druids. To have a prosperous academic career means purely and simply to be initiated into the code. Success bears no relation to good deeds; hers is the fundamentalism of academic ideologies. One learns to decipher the kabbala, progressing through promotion not by doing promotable things but by reciting the magical words in the correct order – by getting the form filled out just so. But the catch is that one cannot know how to fill out the form. No one can know but the initiated, that is, those with access to the Faculty of Arts committees. Hence her reason for being. Whatever she suggests, we must needs follow, because only she among us knows how to utter the charms correctly. She possesses the magic. She crossed out all of my “second semester” and replaced them with “semester 2.” She diligently changed my lower case names of department (history department, politics department) to upper case. Not a single change of substance, not one. And yet my copy was black with her little changes.
Cute as a gamine. But look more closely and suddenly you realize that she is coiled up inside tight as an old fashioned alarms clock ready to snap and unwind, lightning fast, reverse reverse. If she started spinning she would never stop, but go careening into the ethersphere. She must control the crossing of every t, the dotting of every i that she touches; her hold on sanity depends upon it.
(Can you imagine her putting her feet up with a beer in her hands?)
She is the quintessential teachers’ pet, perky little brown-noser, the ultimate goody-goody, the administration’s little toady. She breathes utter submission, devotion, to her higher cause, the bright shining beacon of the Faculty of Arts. She worships at that altar. And therefore as a leader she is an embarrassment, one who cringes rather than advocates. A sad little quisling, a ludicrous little party member. She would be Hitler’s secretary, the Pope’s housekeeper, Cody Jarrett’s mother. Top of the world, Ma.
But she is one of those kiwis enraptured with the intricacies of form. Utter indifference to substance; for her, the university is a dazzling maze of arcana, a series of secrets penetrable only by druids. To have a prosperous academic career means purely and simply to be initiated into the code. Success bears no relation to good deeds; hers is the fundamentalism of academic ideologies. One learns to decipher the kabbala, progressing through promotion not by doing promotable things but by reciting the magical words in the correct order – by getting the form filled out just so. But the catch is that one cannot know how to fill out the form. No one can know but the initiated, that is, those with access to the Faculty of Arts committees. Hence her reason for being. Whatever she suggests, we must needs follow, because only she among us knows how to utter the charms correctly. She possesses the magic. She crossed out all of my “second semester” and replaced them with “semester 2.” She diligently changed my lower case names of department (history department, politics department) to upper case. Not a single change of substance, not one. And yet my copy was black with her little changes.
Cute as a gamine. But look more closely and suddenly you realize that she is coiled up inside tight as an old fashioned alarms clock ready to snap and unwind, lightning fast, reverse reverse. If she started spinning she would never stop, but go careening into the ethersphere. She must control the crossing of every t, the dotting of every i that she touches; her hold on sanity depends upon it.
(Can you imagine her putting her feet up with a beer in her hands?)
She is the quintessential teachers’ pet, perky little brown-noser, the ultimate goody-goody, the administration’s little toady. She breathes utter submission, devotion, to her higher cause, the bright shining beacon of the Faculty of Arts. She worships at that altar. And therefore as a leader she is an embarrassment, one who cringes rather than advocates. A sad little quisling, a ludicrous little party member. She would be Hitler’s secretary, the Pope’s housekeeper, Cody Jarrett’s mother. Top of the world, Ma.
It might have been otherwise....
She has a fuzzy golden-brown perm, a kinky halo that she has worn since
at least 1984. In her overdetermined world, a woman with straight hair
must have a perm – keeping straight flat hair is not a matter of taste,
but a crime against common sense. And someone told her once that a
woman with a high forehead must wear a fringe. This rule too has been
incorporated into her world view. There are no exceptions. She once
said to me that it is a fact of nature that I must wear a fringe
(actually, she called them “bangs,” our Midwestern word).
That certain things were inevitably right and others wrong was part of my life from the very beginning. I experienced this triage with desperation: I could only be good by agreeing fully and in every case. There was no agreeing to disagree. There is the seed of future sorrow and ambivalence. It is a heavy burden to live in a world wherein you can only be good by accepting without question a list of rules that are, on the face of it, so arbitrary that any person with the least amount of common sense would go, “What?” Why is chocolate cake with white frosting bad? Why are only braids, not two ponytails, called pigtails? Why does the Pope decide which movies can be watched? (Even she said sadly that it seemed unfair that Catholics could not watch “The Greatest Show on Earth,” a movie she longed to see when it came out.) Why were boys dumb and girls who liked them crazy? Why does a person who divorces and remarries go to hell?
I had a game when I was a teenager – on the rare occasion I went to a restaurant, I would sometimes order the last thing I would normally choose. So if I went to the Sirloin Stockade, I would chose a steak, a baked potato, and jello cubes for dessert. The idea, I guess, was to prove to myself that things could be otherwise. I still do the game with myself, in my head, imagining my life with no children. My children are central to my identity – they are who I am. I have always wanted them, always dreamed about them, always knew that I would have them. So the hardest leap of imagination for me is to reinvent my life without them. I force myself to do it. Because I do believe that things could be otherwise. The rules that she laid out as natural law simply are not. I do not have to wear a fringe.
Living in exile has a logic. It is proof that I did not have to live anywhere in particular. It is proof that I do not have to live according to those rules. It means that we Americans are not naturally right, but rather irrational Lockeans, that our most fundamental beliefs are grounded in easily-identifiable myths, just as are those of all cultures, and that they can be deconstructed, de-chunked, reduced to a series of primal reactions to a philosopher over-relied upon. Things could be otherwise in the US; they could be much better. We don’t even need to go back and change the reading programs of our founding fathers: we could require high school students to study political philosophers and think about what they best sort of society would be. We could force them to write essays at the age of, say, fourteen, reacting to Locke, and then ask them to read Rousseau and respond to him. We could demystify our political discourse. We could train people to think, to be responsible for their ideas. Then things would be better.
These are the complaints of one in exile: looking over there and picking out the problems. Slowly training myself for what I have now begun to realize as inevitable, that there is just too much that is toxic in that society for me to accept it in the way I used, too, with full-hearted ease and a sense of belonging, of being at home. I no longer have the urge to kiss the soil when I land at LAX. I used to be so willing to embrace the fuzzy golden-brown perm. Usually we become more tolerant of what is our own as we get older. For me the process is just the opposite, slowly approaching the point where I can begin to contemplate without grief finally letting go. Where I can hear criticisms about us and shrug them off, because I am, after all, a cosmopolitan.
Christopher Hitchens has cancer of the esophagus. If ever there was a person who manifested in his very being the proposition that it might be otherwise, it is he. He is infuriating, self-centered, vain, and smart, smart, smart and thoughtful. Half of the time I want to throw what he writes out the window; but whatever he writes is interesting. If I prayed I would pray for his recovery, even though he of course would not appreciate that. I will hope actively for his recovery.
That certain things were inevitably right and others wrong was part of my life from the very beginning. I experienced this triage with desperation: I could only be good by agreeing fully and in every case. There was no agreeing to disagree. There is the seed of future sorrow and ambivalence. It is a heavy burden to live in a world wherein you can only be good by accepting without question a list of rules that are, on the face of it, so arbitrary that any person with the least amount of common sense would go, “What?” Why is chocolate cake with white frosting bad? Why are only braids, not two ponytails, called pigtails? Why does the Pope decide which movies can be watched? (Even she said sadly that it seemed unfair that Catholics could not watch “The Greatest Show on Earth,” a movie she longed to see when it came out.) Why were boys dumb and girls who liked them crazy? Why does a person who divorces and remarries go to hell?
I had a game when I was a teenager – on the rare occasion I went to a restaurant, I would sometimes order the last thing I would normally choose. So if I went to the Sirloin Stockade, I would chose a steak, a baked potato, and jello cubes for dessert. The idea, I guess, was to prove to myself that things could be otherwise. I still do the game with myself, in my head, imagining my life with no children. My children are central to my identity – they are who I am. I have always wanted them, always dreamed about them, always knew that I would have them. So the hardest leap of imagination for me is to reinvent my life without them. I force myself to do it. Because I do believe that things could be otherwise. The rules that she laid out as natural law simply are not. I do not have to wear a fringe.
Living in exile has a logic. It is proof that I did not have to live anywhere in particular. It is proof that I do not have to live according to those rules. It means that we Americans are not naturally right, but rather irrational Lockeans, that our most fundamental beliefs are grounded in easily-identifiable myths, just as are those of all cultures, and that they can be deconstructed, de-chunked, reduced to a series of primal reactions to a philosopher over-relied upon. Things could be otherwise in the US; they could be much better. We don’t even need to go back and change the reading programs of our founding fathers: we could require high school students to study political philosophers and think about what they best sort of society would be. We could force them to write essays at the age of, say, fourteen, reacting to Locke, and then ask them to read Rousseau and respond to him. We could demystify our political discourse. We could train people to think, to be responsible for their ideas. Then things would be better.
These are the complaints of one in exile: looking over there and picking out the problems. Slowly training myself for what I have now begun to realize as inevitable, that there is just too much that is toxic in that society for me to accept it in the way I used, too, with full-hearted ease and a sense of belonging, of being at home. I no longer have the urge to kiss the soil when I land at LAX. I used to be so willing to embrace the fuzzy golden-brown perm. Usually we become more tolerant of what is our own as we get older. For me the process is just the opposite, slowly approaching the point where I can begin to contemplate without grief finally letting go. Where I can hear criticisms about us and shrug them off, because I am, after all, a cosmopolitan.
Christopher Hitchens has cancer of the esophagus. If ever there was a person who manifested in his very being the proposition that it might be otherwise, it is he. He is infuriating, self-centered, vain, and smart, smart, smart and thoughtful. Half of the time I want to throw what he writes out the window; but whatever he writes is interesting. If I prayed I would pray for his recovery, even though he of course would not appreciate that. I will hope actively for his recovery.
Sunday, April 29, 2012
The Great Hatred
I had been blaming Rush Limbaugh for alienating me from country and family, and
then I discovered that our great hatred actually took form already during the
1828 presidential campaign during Andrew Jackson, the source to which all that
is mean and evil in America can be traced, and John Quincy Adams, avatar of
European-friendly intellectualism. Our great hatred is bigger than any of us;
Rush only tapped into a hideous sewer that has been roiling for a very long
time. I had already discovered the nastiness of the Jefferson campaign, but that
was just the newspapers. In 1828 that vicious rhetoric became part of
campaigning in general. During that election the parties turned into propaganda
machines completely uninterested in spreading the truth about their own
candidate and focused entirely upon destroying the other.
Why is it that even when we can all read the history we are still swayed by what people say during campaigns? The lying was there in 1828 working its magic – John Quincy Adams accused of spending tax payer money to buy a billiard table. His family produced the receipts to show that he had bought it with his own money, and they said no more about it. But that wasn’t enough – the lie continued to circulate. Adams refused to “electioneer,” get out in public and defend himself. Of course he was gobbled up by the Jackson lying machine. If you didn’t respond fast and loud you lost the narrative, you lose the narrative, you will forever lose the narrative. The truth held no interest, it holds no interest, will never hold interest. Is this comforting or horrifying? Is it comforting or horrifying that that election of 1828 was, like recent elections, interested only in brandishing fake ideologies (fake because winning is the only ideology, and winning in this context is only vile because the winners use their victory to prove their masculinity), that it was the first in a genealogy that leads eventually to Lee Atwater and Karl Rove? Is it comforting or horrifying to realize that the divisions of my own family and my own exile are not my fault but that of an ancient cesspool of implacable hatred between advocates of states’ rights and advocates of centralization? We are enemies despite ourselves, victims of a fight into which we were born.
Andrew Jackson represents everything most despicable about American politics. A military general supremely indifferent to the rule of law, racist, imperialist, folksy, illiterate, choleric – but apparently radiating that aura of being able to pee long distances and spread sperm all over the rest of us, that stupid swaggering certainty that passes for virility in the backwaters of our divided country. His type is monotonously familiar, and the dregs of society continue to rise up ready to support him and his avatars, cheering him on in the half-witted language of Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin.
I am moderate by nature. I wouldn’t read a book about Andrew Jackson and spontaneously hate him under normal circumstances. I wouldn’t care – he has been dead for almost two hundred years. But exiled as I am, separated from my country and alienated from my family by this systemic divide between Republicans and Democrats, or, I guess by a deeper difference between authoritarians and people who just really don’t care what other people do, I feel am angry. I am furious at Rush for having turned my family against me and furious at Andrew Jackson and his machine, who turns out to have been responsible for the likes of Rush.
Why is it that even when we can all read the history we are still swayed by what people say during campaigns? The lying was there in 1828 working its magic – John Quincy Adams accused of spending tax payer money to buy a billiard table. His family produced the receipts to show that he had bought it with his own money, and they said no more about it. But that wasn’t enough – the lie continued to circulate. Adams refused to “electioneer,” get out in public and defend himself. Of course he was gobbled up by the Jackson lying machine. If you didn’t respond fast and loud you lost the narrative, you lose the narrative, you will forever lose the narrative. The truth held no interest, it holds no interest, will never hold interest. Is this comforting or horrifying? Is it comforting or horrifying that that election of 1828 was, like recent elections, interested only in brandishing fake ideologies (fake because winning is the only ideology, and winning in this context is only vile because the winners use their victory to prove their masculinity), that it was the first in a genealogy that leads eventually to Lee Atwater and Karl Rove? Is it comforting or horrifying to realize that the divisions of my own family and my own exile are not my fault but that of an ancient cesspool of implacable hatred between advocates of states’ rights and advocates of centralization? We are enemies despite ourselves, victims of a fight into which we were born.
Andrew Jackson represents everything most despicable about American politics. A military general supremely indifferent to the rule of law, racist, imperialist, folksy, illiterate, choleric – but apparently radiating that aura of being able to pee long distances and spread sperm all over the rest of us, that stupid swaggering certainty that passes for virility in the backwaters of our divided country. His type is monotonously familiar, and the dregs of society continue to rise up ready to support him and his avatars, cheering him on in the half-witted language of Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin.
I am moderate by nature. I wouldn’t read a book about Andrew Jackson and spontaneously hate him under normal circumstances. I wouldn’t care – he has been dead for almost two hundred years. But exiled as I am, separated from my country and alienated from my family by this systemic divide between Republicans and Democrats, or, I guess by a deeper difference between authoritarians and people who just really don’t care what other people do, I feel am angry. I am furious at Rush for having turned my family against me and furious at Andrew Jackson and his machine, who turns out to have been responsible for the likes of Rush.
Approaching resignation
Approaching resignation – beginning to accept that the reality of home includes
all the semi-literate haters, the obstructionists spawned by God knows how many
repeats of the Andrew Jackson election back in 1828 (I still can’t move on from
that book). That demographic is supposed to be dying out, but in the meantime it
is still around and still really really loud.
And in the meantime they have created a world wherein in makes sense to blast Obama for not being angry enough about the oil spill. Worse, wherein in makes sense to acknowledge fully that there was nothing on earth that he could do about it (unless as Bob Scheer points out he had spoken out belligerently against drilling in the first place and routed Interior for not enforcing regulations, BEFORE the disaster – and yet of course he couldn’t because he was and is still trying to keep Republicans in the game), all the while excoriating him for not manifesting sufficient rhetorical upset. It is simply grotesque. I cannot be part of a society that has so easily given up on reality.
This does not mean that I like the benighted country in which I am exiled, only that I am beginning to accept that I truly am exiled. This is not a temporary state. I have no home. I mean, what I am supposed to do with Maureen Dowd, Emily Bazelon? People who encourage all the blither and emotion, encourage us to give vent to the worst aspects of ourselves because the atmosphere now gives us license to do that? Nothing. I have nothing to do with them. They should be speaking out against the idiocy instead of stoking it.
Another related reason to deplore my former homeland is the appalling quality of movie reviews in its major publications. I cannot live in a land where David Denby can be taken seriously as a movie critic. I have long been dismayed by what passes for reviews at home – long plot summaries with discussions of whether the characters are “realistic” or compelling. Our reviewers, never maturing beyond a third grade conception of film as an exposition of a literal reality, are blind to anything but the stupidest most fundamental meaning. Denby’s latest ridiculous review of a gorgeous Argentinian film, “El Secreto de sus ojos,” completely misses its point, the problem and importance of memory to Argentianians trying to deal with the past. Not that an analysis would have to spend much time on the political implications of memory – individual memory in that context would do the trick. But my God – the character of Morales does after all stick his wife’s murder in a little cachot in his own house for thirty years, and Denby acts as if the literal level is adequate to explain the significance. And that was in the New Yorker! What’s wrong with us?
How is our literal mindedness in the world of thought related to our privileging of emotion over fact? Manifestations of the same distaste for thinking. Who wouldn’t rather just get furious and bellow than actually think through a problem? And who wouldn’t rather just melt into a thoughtless two hours than actually grapple with a problem? But surely we could manage our natural desire not to think a little better – and at least admit that it is better to think than not to think.
And in the meantime they have created a world wherein in makes sense to blast Obama for not being angry enough about the oil spill. Worse, wherein in makes sense to acknowledge fully that there was nothing on earth that he could do about it (unless as Bob Scheer points out he had spoken out belligerently against drilling in the first place and routed Interior for not enforcing regulations, BEFORE the disaster – and yet of course he couldn’t because he was and is still trying to keep Republicans in the game), all the while excoriating him for not manifesting sufficient rhetorical upset. It is simply grotesque. I cannot be part of a society that has so easily given up on reality.
This does not mean that I like the benighted country in which I am exiled, only that I am beginning to accept that I truly am exiled. This is not a temporary state. I have no home. I mean, what I am supposed to do with Maureen Dowd, Emily Bazelon? People who encourage all the blither and emotion, encourage us to give vent to the worst aspects of ourselves because the atmosphere now gives us license to do that? Nothing. I have nothing to do with them. They should be speaking out against the idiocy instead of stoking it.
Another related reason to deplore my former homeland is the appalling quality of movie reviews in its major publications. I cannot live in a land where David Denby can be taken seriously as a movie critic. I have long been dismayed by what passes for reviews at home – long plot summaries with discussions of whether the characters are “realistic” or compelling. Our reviewers, never maturing beyond a third grade conception of film as an exposition of a literal reality, are blind to anything but the stupidest most fundamental meaning. Denby’s latest ridiculous review of a gorgeous Argentinian film, “El Secreto de sus ojos,” completely misses its point, the problem and importance of memory to Argentianians trying to deal with the past. Not that an analysis would have to spend much time on the political implications of memory – individual memory in that context would do the trick. But my God – the character of Morales does after all stick his wife’s murder in a little cachot in his own house for thirty years, and Denby acts as if the literal level is adequate to explain the significance. And that was in the New Yorker! What’s wrong with us?
How is our literal mindedness in the world of thought related to our privileging of emotion over fact? Manifestations of the same distaste for thinking. Who wouldn’t rather just get furious and bellow than actually think through a problem? And who wouldn’t rather just melt into a thoughtless two hours than actually grapple with a problem? But surely we could manage our natural desire not to think a little better – and at least admit that it is better to think than not to think.
Augustine's Confession and Mary Karr
Mary Karr’s Lit, it turns out, is the story of an Augustinian conversion. I was
more than a little surprised when we began to move from drunken rage at life's
unfairness and general rowdiness into Catholic spirituality. She notes that many
of her lapsed Catholic friends were horrified when she started to turn in that
direction, demanding to how such an intelligent person as she could take on
Catholicism with all of its misogynistic superstition and baggage. I don’t have
any trouble understanding her attraction – how can you not love the incense and
the rustling of the satin as they parade down the aisle holding those great big
crucifixes. But what I do want to know is why Mary Karr, a woman who at the time
she begins her instruction is divorced and has no intention of remaining single
forever and who is even enjoying a sex life, why she gets to waltz into
Catholicism and partake of all the consolation it has to offer, while I, a
person who was raised in the Church, who left the Church with the greatest
imaginable sorrow because I couldn’t adhere to the fundamental law not to
remarry after a divorce (a decision that took me years to final make reluctant
as I was to leave the Church; indeed, for several years I imagined living like
the Sebastian’s already-married sister Julia whom Charles Ryder in Brideshead
Revisited wants to marry, but who finally refuses him because as a Catholic she
cannot face the idea of remarriage after a divorce); who has not taken communion
since my remarriage; who lives outside the Church because I cannot in good
conscience live within it, lives excluded forever? I run around in circles like
a hopeful little dog begging to be let back in and being kicked in the face,
while Mary Karr just bursts right in. My first instinct is to ask myself what
possible difference it could make to me that she is welcomed in – that she finds
spiritual guides who teach her to pray and that God actually ANSWERS her. Her
inclusion in the Church has nothing to do with my exclusion. That is always my
first instinct. What’s it to me?
And yet, in this case, as I grow more distant from the book, achieve critical distance, I feel a righteous anger brewing. The positive thing is that it helps me to consolidate my own position, which is that I will not sneak through the backdoor into an institution according to whose rules, rules recently reiterated by the pedophile-friendly Pope, I am not allowed to receive the greatest gift the Church has to offer, the sacraments. I do not regret my decision. I regret the Pope’s decision. But not mine. I would rather not be Catholic than a half-assed one who really isn’t supposed to be there, who will never be accepted fully by the boys in charge. But the thing that drives me crazy it that it doesn’t bother Mary Karr that the Pope doesn't want her there, or, at least that he wouldn't if she bothered to ask. And why doesn't she ask? Because she doesn't accept the Pope as the head of the Church. What? So how in the name of sense is she Catholic? The best the rest of us would get if we rejected the Pope would be Anglican. Still, there she is typing away about her Augustinian-style conversion. Who is this woman? Why doesn't she have to lie awake at night wracked with guilt? Why does she just get to fall to her knees, have a chat with God, and then GET things from Him? This after she has gotten to be an alcoholic, squandering years of talent, self-indulgent, mean, furious, ungrateful, and self-pitying, who finally decides to be Catholic and instantly sets up direct communication with God. I want to know why. I want to know exactly what I’ve done that is so monstrous that I get banished to a desert island from God maliciously tempts me from time to time with promises of return only to throw them, cackling, back in my face. All of the praying in the world has not only not gotten me a reprieve, it’s gotten me shattering refusal after shattering refusal. After reading Lit I tried Thomas Merton, whom Karr found a sympathetic guide for her spiritual journey. I’m trying, but the distance between the sympathetic God whom Merton desires to please and the mocking God who enjoys refusing my every request and then sending bad luck on top of it is so great that I’m baffled.
On what planet does this Catholicism that she has discovered exist? This institution that comforts and accepts? I’m sure it’s easy to convert to a gorgeous ritual-based institution that offers the love of a genuinely kind God. But that Church is a figment of Mary Karr's imagination. The real Church sets a couple of bars that many of us can’t manage to clear and then cheerfully kicks us out without appeal when we don’t make it. It blithers against girls who tempt boys to lust. It publishes the names of parishioners with the sum of their yearly contributions to the Church. It holds itself up as the supreme male arbitrator over all of our silly female lives, quietly embracing pedophiles, while ignoring women. It is bursting at the seams with fathers, fathers, fathers, far as the eye can see, who can do no wrong, who can smoke in the cars with the window up, who can order the girls to clean the kitchen while they watch football and call for a beer. That’s that Church I get, anyway, and it has booted me. Where did she get hers? And why can’t I have some of it?
And yet, in this case, as I grow more distant from the book, achieve critical distance, I feel a righteous anger brewing. The positive thing is that it helps me to consolidate my own position, which is that I will not sneak through the backdoor into an institution according to whose rules, rules recently reiterated by the pedophile-friendly Pope, I am not allowed to receive the greatest gift the Church has to offer, the sacraments. I do not regret my decision. I regret the Pope’s decision. But not mine. I would rather not be Catholic than a half-assed one who really isn’t supposed to be there, who will never be accepted fully by the boys in charge. But the thing that drives me crazy it that it doesn’t bother Mary Karr that the Pope doesn't want her there, or, at least that he wouldn't if she bothered to ask. And why doesn't she ask? Because she doesn't accept the Pope as the head of the Church. What? So how in the name of sense is she Catholic? The best the rest of us would get if we rejected the Pope would be Anglican. Still, there she is typing away about her Augustinian-style conversion. Who is this woman? Why doesn't she have to lie awake at night wracked with guilt? Why does she just get to fall to her knees, have a chat with God, and then GET things from Him? This after she has gotten to be an alcoholic, squandering years of talent, self-indulgent, mean, furious, ungrateful, and self-pitying, who finally decides to be Catholic and instantly sets up direct communication with God. I want to know why. I want to know exactly what I’ve done that is so monstrous that I get banished to a desert island from God maliciously tempts me from time to time with promises of return only to throw them, cackling, back in my face. All of the praying in the world has not only not gotten me a reprieve, it’s gotten me shattering refusal after shattering refusal. After reading Lit I tried Thomas Merton, whom Karr found a sympathetic guide for her spiritual journey. I’m trying, but the distance between the sympathetic God whom Merton desires to please and the mocking God who enjoys refusing my every request and then sending bad luck on top of it is so great that I’m baffled.
On what planet does this Catholicism that she has discovered exist? This institution that comforts and accepts? I’m sure it’s easy to convert to a gorgeous ritual-based institution that offers the love of a genuinely kind God. But that Church is a figment of Mary Karr's imagination. The real Church sets a couple of bars that many of us can’t manage to clear and then cheerfully kicks us out without appeal when we don’t make it. It blithers against girls who tempt boys to lust. It publishes the names of parishioners with the sum of their yearly contributions to the Church. It holds itself up as the supreme male arbitrator over all of our silly female lives, quietly embracing pedophiles, while ignoring women. It is bursting at the seams with fathers, fathers, fathers, far as the eye can see, who can do no wrong, who can smoke in the cars with the window up, who can order the girls to clean the kitchen while they watch football and call for a beer. That’s that Church I get, anyway, and it has booted me. Where did she get hers? And why can’t I have some of it?
Exiled between the middle class and the trailer court crowd
Reading Mary Karr’s Lit and thinking again that my problem is as much
that I was never trashy enough as that I was never middle-class enough. I have
no long tale of insane mothers, strings of divorce, fathers coming home at dawn
from the night shift with flaccid white skin peeking out below their farmer
tans. This means that I am abject, stretched between those two categories, those
two known identities of doctor’s daughter and alcoholic night-worker at packing
plant’s daughter, but alienated from both. Trashy picaresque at least is
interesting; but I was too garbagey for the one, too chicken-livered for the
other. That’s the source of my malady. If I reach deep into my gut all I pull
out is a limp, detached set of testicles that, never having descended, simply
shrivelled up and died. I have never been a man in any form at all. Men come in
all sorts, from the carefully groomed Wasp to the dock-working Marlon Brando.
But they do not come in abject, which is what I am.
I didn’t even have the courage to launch myself into a life of drugs and alcohol. I, descendant of a long line of Irish alcoholics, and I mean serious alcoholics, the kinds that drink themselves to death, could manage no better than an eating disorder. It was a pretty good eating disorder, complete with the firecracker shed full of blow ups. But all the drama took place behind locked doors. The whole force of my pain and outrage was directed at imaginary beings, God, mostly, because I never would have had the guts to explode in public or even in private at a lover. I was a pathologically normal cut-out figure leading a wacky drama inside my own creepy head and acting it out on my own grotesque form. I got the whole dismal load of self-loathing without the drugged-out lit-up coolness of being out of control.
No, and the whole time I was leading that midnight game of chicken all by myself I was practicing a bizarre game of passive Midwestern congeniality that somehow kept getting me chosen. In those days, we girls were chosen, asked to dance, asked out on dates. My practice, so natural to me, was to be nice. I had a sort of pliant thing going that attracted a certain kind of dweeb who, relative to me, would see himself for the first time able to take the initiative, and thus he would choose me. They too were abject but too horrified at myself I could not feel any sympathy; all I saw in them was what I was trying to escape in myself, that is, the lack of belonging, the weirdness, the inability to fit my square gawky form into any known shape. It always blew up. Because I could never hold the façade of nice girl together; something always didn’t work. How could it when I all I felt was imposed upon for having been chosen by another abject being, and I wanted out, wanted out, wanted out, wanted to get in a car, hit the road, and keep on going. I wanted Paris, I wanted Berlin.
I was such a pusswad. Remember going to Paris as an au pair and lasting exactly one night? I woke up, crying, unable to pull it off. Let someone like Tiger Woods’ magnificent wife, Elin, pull off an au pair stint. She can, because of her privileged background. But I crumbled. Being a servant in a rich person’s house feels like being part of the family for someone like Elin. But for me it cut too close to the bone; it reminded me that in a profound way I was a servant, taking up a job that I’m sure my ancestors must have taken when they came off the boat, in the homes of wealthy New Yorkers, before they hit the road for the Midwest and a farm. We servants know that we are servants, and, unlike the privileged, we cannot really play at being one. I did not have the courage to be a servant even in the most benevolent of families.
So I told the very nice lady of the manor that because of my own easy background I found myself unable to act as someone else’s servant. I could hardly tell her the truth, that I couldn’t be her au pair because the position activated a lifetime of dormant knowledge of my family’s servitude. And she graciously called me a cab which I took to the airport, a luxury that I would not allow myself even now, when I have a 6-figure (barely) income. Needed to do that, though, to show myself that I was NOT a servant, to re-establish the boundaries that had been so abruptly rubbed out when I entered into au pairdom.
So I have worked hard without any boundaries, the kind that we need to know who we are, to find who we are, which is the first step before we can do anything. My God, what a job. As Mary Karr writes, sort of, can’t remember quite what her exact words are, “It’s taken me so much effort to do as medium shitty as I’ve heretofore done....” I applaud you, Mary Karr. You are brilliant, funny, and, besides, you are skinny and beautiful and dressed in black. But I submit that it is even harder to find your way when you emerge out of the dirty soup of dreams of middle-class without the mordant edginess of the trailer court. That slice of protoplasm you see slipping around the margins, that’s me.
I didn’t even have the courage to launch myself into a life of drugs and alcohol. I, descendant of a long line of Irish alcoholics, and I mean serious alcoholics, the kinds that drink themselves to death, could manage no better than an eating disorder. It was a pretty good eating disorder, complete with the firecracker shed full of blow ups. But all the drama took place behind locked doors. The whole force of my pain and outrage was directed at imaginary beings, God, mostly, because I never would have had the guts to explode in public or even in private at a lover. I was a pathologically normal cut-out figure leading a wacky drama inside my own creepy head and acting it out on my own grotesque form. I got the whole dismal load of self-loathing without the drugged-out lit-up coolness of being out of control.
No, and the whole time I was leading that midnight game of chicken all by myself I was practicing a bizarre game of passive Midwestern congeniality that somehow kept getting me chosen. In those days, we girls were chosen, asked to dance, asked out on dates. My practice, so natural to me, was to be nice. I had a sort of pliant thing going that attracted a certain kind of dweeb who, relative to me, would see himself for the first time able to take the initiative, and thus he would choose me. They too were abject but too horrified at myself I could not feel any sympathy; all I saw in them was what I was trying to escape in myself, that is, the lack of belonging, the weirdness, the inability to fit my square gawky form into any known shape. It always blew up. Because I could never hold the façade of nice girl together; something always didn’t work. How could it when I all I felt was imposed upon for having been chosen by another abject being, and I wanted out, wanted out, wanted out, wanted to get in a car, hit the road, and keep on going. I wanted Paris, I wanted Berlin.
I was such a pusswad. Remember going to Paris as an au pair and lasting exactly one night? I woke up, crying, unable to pull it off. Let someone like Tiger Woods’ magnificent wife, Elin, pull off an au pair stint. She can, because of her privileged background. But I crumbled. Being a servant in a rich person’s house feels like being part of the family for someone like Elin. But for me it cut too close to the bone; it reminded me that in a profound way I was a servant, taking up a job that I’m sure my ancestors must have taken when they came off the boat, in the homes of wealthy New Yorkers, before they hit the road for the Midwest and a farm. We servants know that we are servants, and, unlike the privileged, we cannot really play at being one. I did not have the courage to be a servant even in the most benevolent of families.
So I told the very nice lady of the manor that because of my own easy background I found myself unable to act as someone else’s servant. I could hardly tell her the truth, that I couldn’t be her au pair because the position activated a lifetime of dormant knowledge of my family’s servitude. And she graciously called me a cab which I took to the airport, a luxury that I would not allow myself even now, when I have a 6-figure (barely) income. Needed to do that, though, to show myself that I was NOT a servant, to re-establish the boundaries that had been so abruptly rubbed out when I entered into au pairdom.
So I have worked hard without any boundaries, the kind that we need to know who we are, to find who we are, which is the first step before we can do anything. My God, what a job. As Mary Karr writes, sort of, can’t remember quite what her exact words are, “It’s taken me so much effort to do as medium shitty as I’ve heretofore done....” I applaud you, Mary Karr. You are brilliant, funny, and, besides, you are skinny and beautiful and dressed in black. But I submit that it is even harder to find your way when you emerge out of the dirty soup of dreams of middle-class without the mordant edginess of the trailer court. That slice of protoplasm you see slipping around the margins, that’s me.
L'essentiel c'est la contingence
La nausée struck me first, at least as far as I can remember, when I was in
kindergarten, in Watertown, South Dakota, on a dreary grey day, as were all days
in the winter during that time of my life (or, should I say, as were all days
with a few brilliant exceptions during that time of my life; or should I say on
a dreary grey day during the winter of my life), and, inside, we were all
shepherded into some circle game that involved skipping around the outside of
the circle. I’m quite sure that even at that age I was painfully self-conscious,
aware of myself as a ludicrous bundle of bones and knobs with a cap of boy’s
hair that I never felt to belong to me on top of my head. But the feeling became
overwhelming as I took my turn skipping around the circle, heels clicking on the
dark green tiles, yes, clicking, because my mom always bought me shoes with
funny little heels, and suddenly recognized my own knees flying up at me, bony,
covered with my weird spectral mottled skin, and experienced them as completely
alien to me. I was undone.
I have never come to peace with the bizarre sack of flesh that I am. But it was worse as a child, when at night the idea that that was NOW that this was happening to a me to whom I had no access whatsoever of whom I had absolutely no knowledge, levelled me. I used to dread that onslaught, trying to ward it off by thinking of other things. But it slipped in and took hold. Which left me speechless throughout my childhood and into my early adulthood, espeically when I had to listen respectfully to my aunts’ postulations about morality. How on earth could they be so sure of their own righteousness? Didn’t they know that we are just bags of bones?
I certainly knew and I suffered the knowledge in solitude and silence. But adulthood brought relief. For as an adult I discovered La Nausée and learned that “L'essentiel c'est la contingence.” It was a brief step out of exile, a homecoming, straight into the arms of Antoine Roquentin. He explained to me that in fact my fear was shared by others, that I was not the freak I had imagined myself to be. My terror was rational because, “par définition, l'existence n'est pas la nécessité. Exister, c'est être là, simplement; les existants apparaissent, se laissent rencontrer, mais on ne peut jamais les déduire. Il y a des gens, je crois, qui ont compris ça. Seulement ils ont essayé de surmonter cette contingence en inventant un être nécessaire et cause de soi. Or, aucun être nécessaire ne peut expliquer l'existence: la contingence n'est pas un faux-semblant, une apparence qu'on peut dissiper; c'est l'absolu, par conséquent la gratuité parfaite. Tout est gratuit, ce jardin, cette ville et moi-même. Quand il arrive qu'on s'en rende compte, ça vous tourne le coeur et tout se met à flotter.” The creepiness that my own body provoked in me was the inevitable result of my intuitive knowledge that it was wholly arbitrary, that I was not really myself, or that if I was myself it was only by the purest chance and that I could be anything else. All was perfectly gratuitous. Hence my shame at hearing my own name and at the sound of my own raspy voice. It was alien: alien by necessity because there was no me, or, at least, I might be someone else.
What I don’t quite remember today is how Roquentin resolves his malaise. I have not solved mine. For a long time, just knowing that I did not live completely alone in this universe was enough. But suddenly today, also a dreay grey day, I have the feeling that if I get hold of La Nausée and read the ending I will have the answer. I have had that book in my hands many times, but I have never been ready to receive the answer. Maybe because I never really believed in Sartre, distressed from the very beginning by his apparent hypocrisy, the yawning gap between his pontificating on authenticity and what looks to me very much like a life based on duplicity and self-delusion. But I have come around to a new place in my own life and understand finally that our very consciousness of ourselves as human actors is grounded in a sort of double vision. If we deny that, we deny the capacity to philosophize. I have decided to limit my nervousness about hypocrisy to political hypocrisy, that is, to a clear discrepancy between the morals one preaches and one’s own life in a politician. Other hypocrites I will embrace to the extent that they have wisdom to offer.
In any case, I am a nauseated person, and I believe that I will find my own cure in this one book. And if that does not work I will have to go back and read Sartre, but really read him this time, not just pillage the little accessible bits, like Huis Clos and select paragraphs from L’Etre et le Néant. Rather than turning my gaze from the horrifying spectre of my sagging jaw skin and the stripe of grey hair on the top of my head, the lizard-like skin on the backs of my hands, and my horny calloused heels, I will run joyfully after these sad little ghosts, throw my arms around them, and accept them as the signs of my radical responsibility to create an essence. An essence that has nothing to do with my aunts’ mean little discourses.
In other words, I will embrace the exile of living in my body and create an essence out of my existence.
Post script:
Here is the resolution that Roquentin finds to his problem. Write a book, in other words, write your own destiny. I feel very open to this. Satisfying answer, the only one, in fact.
Un livre. Naturellement, ça ne serait d’abord qu’un travail ennuyeux et fatiguant, ça ne m’empêcherait pas d’exister ni de sentir que j’existe. Mais il viendrait bien un moment où le livre serait écrit, serait derrière moi et je pense qu’un peu de clarté tomberait sur mon passé. Alors peut-être que je pourrais, à travers lui, me rappeler ma vie sans répugnance. Peut-être qu’eun jour, en pensant précisément à cette heure-ci, à cette-heure morne où j’attends, le dos raid, qu’il soit temps de monter dans le train, peut-être que je sentirais mon coeur battre plus vite et que je ne dirais “C’est ce jour-là, à cette heure-là, que tout a commencé.” Et j’arriverais – au passé, rien qu’au passé – à m’accepter.
There it is. The answer. The only possible answer. And now to integrate this (impossible?) somehow with my intuition of natural law, of human rights.
I have never come to peace with the bizarre sack of flesh that I am. But it was worse as a child, when at night the idea that that was NOW that this was happening to a me to whom I had no access whatsoever of whom I had absolutely no knowledge, levelled me. I used to dread that onslaught, trying to ward it off by thinking of other things. But it slipped in and took hold. Which left me speechless throughout my childhood and into my early adulthood, espeically when I had to listen respectfully to my aunts’ postulations about morality. How on earth could they be so sure of their own righteousness? Didn’t they know that we are just bags of bones?
I certainly knew and I suffered the knowledge in solitude and silence. But adulthood brought relief. For as an adult I discovered La Nausée and learned that “L'essentiel c'est la contingence.” It was a brief step out of exile, a homecoming, straight into the arms of Antoine Roquentin. He explained to me that in fact my fear was shared by others, that I was not the freak I had imagined myself to be. My terror was rational because, “par définition, l'existence n'est pas la nécessité. Exister, c'est être là, simplement; les existants apparaissent, se laissent rencontrer, mais on ne peut jamais les déduire. Il y a des gens, je crois, qui ont compris ça. Seulement ils ont essayé de surmonter cette contingence en inventant un être nécessaire et cause de soi. Or, aucun être nécessaire ne peut expliquer l'existence: la contingence n'est pas un faux-semblant, une apparence qu'on peut dissiper; c'est l'absolu, par conséquent la gratuité parfaite. Tout est gratuit, ce jardin, cette ville et moi-même. Quand il arrive qu'on s'en rende compte, ça vous tourne le coeur et tout se met à flotter.” The creepiness that my own body provoked in me was the inevitable result of my intuitive knowledge that it was wholly arbitrary, that I was not really myself, or that if I was myself it was only by the purest chance and that I could be anything else. All was perfectly gratuitous. Hence my shame at hearing my own name and at the sound of my own raspy voice. It was alien: alien by necessity because there was no me, or, at least, I might be someone else.
What I don’t quite remember today is how Roquentin resolves his malaise. I have not solved mine. For a long time, just knowing that I did not live completely alone in this universe was enough. But suddenly today, also a dreay grey day, I have the feeling that if I get hold of La Nausée and read the ending I will have the answer. I have had that book in my hands many times, but I have never been ready to receive the answer. Maybe because I never really believed in Sartre, distressed from the very beginning by his apparent hypocrisy, the yawning gap between his pontificating on authenticity and what looks to me very much like a life based on duplicity and self-delusion. But I have come around to a new place in my own life and understand finally that our very consciousness of ourselves as human actors is grounded in a sort of double vision. If we deny that, we deny the capacity to philosophize. I have decided to limit my nervousness about hypocrisy to political hypocrisy, that is, to a clear discrepancy between the morals one preaches and one’s own life in a politician. Other hypocrites I will embrace to the extent that they have wisdom to offer.
In any case, I am a nauseated person, and I believe that I will find my own cure in this one book. And if that does not work I will have to go back and read Sartre, but really read him this time, not just pillage the little accessible bits, like Huis Clos and select paragraphs from L’Etre et le Néant. Rather than turning my gaze from the horrifying spectre of my sagging jaw skin and the stripe of grey hair on the top of my head, the lizard-like skin on the backs of my hands, and my horny calloused heels, I will run joyfully after these sad little ghosts, throw my arms around them, and accept them as the signs of my radical responsibility to create an essence. An essence that has nothing to do with my aunts’ mean little discourses.
In other words, I will embrace the exile of living in my body and create an essence out of my existence.
Post script:
Here is the resolution that Roquentin finds to his problem. Write a book, in other words, write your own destiny. I feel very open to this. Satisfying answer, the only one, in fact.
Un livre. Naturellement, ça ne serait d’abord qu’un travail ennuyeux et fatiguant, ça ne m’empêcherait pas d’exister ni de sentir que j’existe. Mais il viendrait bien un moment où le livre serait écrit, serait derrière moi et je pense qu’un peu de clarté tomberait sur mon passé. Alors peut-être que je pourrais, à travers lui, me rappeler ma vie sans répugnance. Peut-être qu’eun jour, en pensant précisément à cette heure-ci, à cette-heure morne où j’attends, le dos raid, qu’il soit temps de monter dans le train, peut-être que je sentirais mon coeur battre plus vite et que je ne dirais “C’est ce jour-là, à cette heure-là, que tout a commencé.” Et j’arriverais – au passé, rien qu’au passé – à m’accepter.
There it is. The answer. The only possible answer. And now to integrate this (impossible?) somehow with my intuition of natural law, of human rights.
Float above the fray
It seems that the one benefit I should be able to expect from living in exile
would be some distance regarding my country, the one gift the ability to watch
politics with interest but without the pain. This is not the case so far. I am
as passionately attached to what happens here as would have been had I lived
here physically. New Year’s resolution: to float above the fray, like a large
Buddha statue, with a large benevolent smile on my face, loving, but remote. To
embrace both sides of my country. Let’s try with the election of Scott Brown to
the US senate, one of the greatest disappointments I have experienced in months,
and I’m not even from Massachusetts. I may be too sensitive to live in this
world, and this is a serious problem. Let’s get to the bottom of
this.
The emotion, heartache, – as opposed to a rational reaction about what is happening in my country - I suppose is inevitable because as we all now know, we choose our political affiliation based the identities we are trying to cobble together rather than the actual policies that we support. Our political party represents ourselves, our self-image. Hence all those people voting against their self-interest because to call themselves Republican makes them pure and virile rather than muddled and girl-ish. Hence those ridiculous statements that came out during the interviews with “independents” during the last presidential elections. Remember that bizarre real-time monitor of the independents’ reactions as they listened to the candidates? How they would explain their reactions in terms of how they were perceiving the candidate’s toughness on national security? Or whether he had given the interviewee an impression of trustworthiness, whatever that means? The last thing on earth we should be valorizing is emotional reaction to a debate. And yet there we were pretending that it was a legitimate way to decide how to vote, proposing that voters listen to their instincts to choose the president. At least people who declare a party have some consistent set of principles, however nebulous and emotional, attached to the party. They are not just blowing in some wind tunnel of spontaneous reactions.
But let’s admit and look beyond the disappointment. I am disappointed because it is humiliating to be a citizen of a country that responds positively to a pick up truck. This is pure elitism on my part. Let’s get beyond it. More specifically, I am embarrassed to be part of a national narrative that promotes itself as a society of freedom-seeking, independent-minded pioneers who just want the government to leave them alone when the story is so patently false. The story gives us an excuse not to read through the information that is available, which would make it clear to us what every other civilized nation on earth can see and what we ignore, that we are all governed by the immensely powerful healthcare industry, which we have not elected. And an excuse to facilely embrace a handsome guy who looks like a movie star playing a military officer because he riles us up with more of the story, posing us as hero fighting those corrupt politicians.
I am tired of analyses of competing narratives: if we attach our current division to the tale of implacable hatred that has divided us since before the Civil War, since the pact with the devil, that "compromise" with southern slave owners when the country was founded, there is no way out. But for the moment I see no other way to explain our apparrently instinctive dislike of each other. (Or to be clear, I should say their dislike of me. I don't care about them. I do not send the red side of my family spam promoting my political ideas. They do that to me, apparently eager to pile on me, the way bullies persecute kids who like to read.) Yet surely there must be some interesting nuances. And surely I can examine these without pain. Here is my solution: displace the too-raw story of today into our horrible and beautiful history. Look harder at Thomas Jefferson and try to understand him, sympathize with him, rather than disdain him. And once I’ve done this, maybe I will be able to accept without cringing this kid-like group of compatriots who think they are tough when they are just deluded. And maybe love them some day.
Sounds like the beginning of an important odyssey to me. Important because at the end lies freedom from embarrassment, the possibility of watching the political show with equanimity.
I will begin by accepting with resigned but genuine affection Obama’s decision not to do what all other majority parties in all other civilized nations do as a matter of course – push his legislation through. The ninnies who love pick up trucks have spoken, and because Democrats are the default marginals even when they are the majority, we will defer. It cannot be otherwise. It is in the very nature of the American character that they are loud and strong, even though a minority, and I have to accept it, just as I accept the monotonous bullying spam from my family without protest. I don't have it in me to do otherwise, and I would not want to have that in me.
The emotion, heartache, – as opposed to a rational reaction about what is happening in my country - I suppose is inevitable because as we all now know, we choose our political affiliation based the identities we are trying to cobble together rather than the actual policies that we support. Our political party represents ourselves, our self-image. Hence all those people voting against their self-interest because to call themselves Republican makes them pure and virile rather than muddled and girl-ish. Hence those ridiculous statements that came out during the interviews with “independents” during the last presidential elections. Remember that bizarre real-time monitor of the independents’ reactions as they listened to the candidates? How they would explain their reactions in terms of how they were perceiving the candidate’s toughness on national security? Or whether he had given the interviewee an impression of trustworthiness, whatever that means? The last thing on earth we should be valorizing is emotional reaction to a debate. And yet there we were pretending that it was a legitimate way to decide how to vote, proposing that voters listen to their instincts to choose the president. At least people who declare a party have some consistent set of principles, however nebulous and emotional, attached to the party. They are not just blowing in some wind tunnel of spontaneous reactions.
But let’s admit and look beyond the disappointment. I am disappointed because it is humiliating to be a citizen of a country that responds positively to a pick up truck. This is pure elitism on my part. Let’s get beyond it. More specifically, I am embarrassed to be part of a national narrative that promotes itself as a society of freedom-seeking, independent-minded pioneers who just want the government to leave them alone when the story is so patently false. The story gives us an excuse not to read through the information that is available, which would make it clear to us what every other civilized nation on earth can see and what we ignore, that we are all governed by the immensely powerful healthcare industry, which we have not elected. And an excuse to facilely embrace a handsome guy who looks like a movie star playing a military officer because he riles us up with more of the story, posing us as hero fighting those corrupt politicians.
I am tired of analyses of competing narratives: if we attach our current division to the tale of implacable hatred that has divided us since before the Civil War, since the pact with the devil, that "compromise" with southern slave owners when the country was founded, there is no way out. But for the moment I see no other way to explain our apparrently instinctive dislike of each other. (Or to be clear, I should say their dislike of me. I don't care about them. I do not send the red side of my family spam promoting my political ideas. They do that to me, apparently eager to pile on me, the way bullies persecute kids who like to read.) Yet surely there must be some interesting nuances. And surely I can examine these without pain. Here is my solution: displace the too-raw story of today into our horrible and beautiful history. Look harder at Thomas Jefferson and try to understand him, sympathize with him, rather than disdain him. And once I’ve done this, maybe I will be able to accept without cringing this kid-like group of compatriots who think they are tough when they are just deluded. And maybe love them some day.
Sounds like the beginning of an important odyssey to me. Important because at the end lies freedom from embarrassment, the possibility of watching the political show with equanimity.
I will begin by accepting with resigned but genuine affection Obama’s decision not to do what all other majority parties in all other civilized nations do as a matter of course – push his legislation through. The ninnies who love pick up trucks have spoken, and because Democrats are the default marginals even when they are the majority, we will defer. It cannot be otherwise. It is in the very nature of the American character that they are loud and strong, even though a minority, and I have to accept it, just as I accept the monotonous bullying spam from my family without protest. I don't have it in me to do otherwise, and I would not want to have that in me.
et si domus super semet ipsam dispertiatur non poterit domus illa stare – or??
It’s been a difficult few days. All of the hope of the past year has gone,
vanished with the frightening realization that our division is implacable.
Rationality has no purchase here in the land of religious conversion and
rebirth. As far as I can see there is nothing to look forward to, there never
will be anything to look forward to, all that there is or ever will be is
obstruction. Maybe I will feel optimistic again someday, but it has been a long
time now that our point of stasis is virulent populism; any little deviation
towards decency and intelligence is quickly pushed back.
And yet, I’ve always felt that nothing can be that depressing as long as it is not unprecedented. And there is nothing but precedent for bitterly divided populations. It must be ingrained in our nature, although I can’t quite see which evolutionary aim hating our brothers would have served. I try to drift above all of it, look down, and see us as a squabbling family. The kids form two groups, always fighting with each other. Certainly my own family divides into two groups. Which comes first? Does it start at the micro or macrocosmic level? Do we hate each other by nature or do we hate each other because of politics?
Should we just be two separate countries? Why did Lincoln fight so hard to save the Union? What would he say today? If our goal was to keep a poor country from our border, what did we gain? There is Mexico, in any case. Is it self-evident that a house divided against itself cannot stand?
I will at some point try to reach beyond the divide and recover the intelligence of conservative thought in the U.S. Nothing can hurt you too much if you understand it. But not quite yet. For the moment I will just take comfort in knowing that the divided house is a historical constant: the Armagnacs and the Burgundians; Catholics and Huguenots; Catholics and Anglicans; Gibellines and Guelfs; Roundheads and Cavaliers; Jacobins and Girondins: Irish Catholics and Protestants; Sunnis and Shiites. And the U.S. of course has always divided into Red and Blue, the slave and the free states. I don’t know that it makes it any easier to stand, but maybe the road to hope leads through resignation.
And yet, I’ve always felt that nothing can be that depressing as long as it is not unprecedented. And there is nothing but precedent for bitterly divided populations. It must be ingrained in our nature, although I can’t quite see which evolutionary aim hating our brothers would have served. I try to drift above all of it, look down, and see us as a squabbling family. The kids form two groups, always fighting with each other. Certainly my own family divides into two groups. Which comes first? Does it start at the micro or macrocosmic level? Do we hate each other by nature or do we hate each other because of politics?
Should we just be two separate countries? Why did Lincoln fight so hard to save the Union? What would he say today? If our goal was to keep a poor country from our border, what did we gain? There is Mexico, in any case. Is it self-evident that a house divided against itself cannot stand?
I will at some point try to reach beyond the divide and recover the intelligence of conservative thought in the U.S. Nothing can hurt you too much if you understand it. But not quite yet. For the moment I will just take comfort in knowing that the divided house is a historical constant: the Armagnacs and the Burgundians; Catholics and Huguenots; Catholics and Anglicans; Gibellines and Guelfs; Roundheads and Cavaliers; Jacobins and Girondins: Irish Catholics and Protestants; Sunnis and Shiites. And the U.S. of course has always divided into Red and Blue, the slave and the free states. I don’t know that it makes it any easier to stand, but maybe the road to hope leads through resignation.
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Demosclerosis and the Armagnac-Burgundian feud
My research specialty, fifteenth-century France, rarely offers examples pertinent to modern American life. But in this recent period of “demosclerosis” the story of the relentless feud between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians sheds light on our impasse.
The idea of the day is that our congress is an obsolete mess, excruciatingly ineffective compared to the parliamentary systems of our benchmark nations. Journalists like James Fallows undoubtedly are right that the problem is systemic. As Fallows notes in his recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, our only realistic hope of a way out to start shifting incrementally towards cooperation. Because after all, we are not going to suddenly trash the constitution and develop a parliamentary system wherein one side rams through its legislation. This is where the lesson of the Armagnac-Burgundian feud becomes instructive, and, I believe, offers some hope.
Feuds seem chaotic to modern eyes, but they follow a logic, serving as a form of government in periods where a central power capable of enforcement is lacking. Feuding was a fundamental part of politics in early modern France, a means of assuming and challenging power. If someone wanted to defend against an incursion, he appealed to his lord for military support. A small armed group attacked the aggressor. If one side was stronger, the conflict ended. If the sides were of equal power, however, the conflict would devolve into a long series of attacks and retaliations. Worse, seeing the central conflict, smaller players would settle their own unrelated quarrels by attaching them to the central one, hoping to resolve in this way problems that they did not have the strength to handle on their own. The Armagnac-Burgundian feud got rolling when the King Charles VI began to suffer episodic madness. His male relatives attempted to seize power during his periods of insanity, entering into a rivalry that produced various murders, constant warfare and pillaging, and enable the conquest and occupation of France by Henry V of England. The feud stretched from about 1405 until 1435.
And yet it ended eventually. Our current situation bears the hallmarks of a feud. No single enforcer is capable of bringing the recalcitrant parties to heel, and the parties are of roughly equal strength. One attacks and withdraws; the other retaliates and withdraws. The conflict cannot end because neither party is powerful enough to annihilate the other. In the meantime, special interest groups hook their causes to the central conflict, hoping to resolve problems they cannot settle on their own. But in the case of the Armagnacs and Burgundians, after years of warring and misery, the two sides finally ganged up to get rid of the English. Yes, in our case, the eternal conflict between the Democrats the Republicans is caused to a large extent by the representational abnormalities that are the fault of a decrepit system put in place over two hundred years ago. Huge swathes of the population are under or over represented, leaving business to be carried out by small groups of interested parties rather than by the people through elected representatives. Yes, progress is rendered impossible by the Republicans refusal to play ball at all. Still, it is only our feuding mentality that has brought the system to a complete halt.
But history shows that sooner or later feuds tend to run out of steam. One side either become stronger than the other (this could happen over the next several years as the demographics shift) or the feuding mentality simply runs out of steam as the generations change. It takes a lot of energy to keep up a level of hatred sufficient to fuel a feud. Do we really need to jettison the constitution? Probably not. Let’s just demystify the feuding mentality, long and loudly: let’s make medieval French history a mandatory course in high school and again at university.
The idea of the day is that our congress is an obsolete mess, excruciatingly ineffective compared to the parliamentary systems of our benchmark nations. Journalists like James Fallows undoubtedly are right that the problem is systemic. As Fallows notes in his recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, our only realistic hope of a way out to start shifting incrementally towards cooperation. Because after all, we are not going to suddenly trash the constitution and develop a parliamentary system wherein one side rams through its legislation. This is where the lesson of the Armagnac-Burgundian feud becomes instructive, and, I believe, offers some hope.
Feuds seem chaotic to modern eyes, but they follow a logic, serving as a form of government in periods where a central power capable of enforcement is lacking. Feuding was a fundamental part of politics in early modern France, a means of assuming and challenging power. If someone wanted to defend against an incursion, he appealed to his lord for military support. A small armed group attacked the aggressor. If one side was stronger, the conflict ended. If the sides were of equal power, however, the conflict would devolve into a long series of attacks and retaliations. Worse, seeing the central conflict, smaller players would settle their own unrelated quarrels by attaching them to the central one, hoping to resolve in this way problems that they did not have the strength to handle on their own. The Armagnac-Burgundian feud got rolling when the King Charles VI began to suffer episodic madness. His male relatives attempted to seize power during his periods of insanity, entering into a rivalry that produced various murders, constant warfare and pillaging, and enable the conquest and occupation of France by Henry V of England. The feud stretched from about 1405 until 1435.
And yet it ended eventually. Our current situation bears the hallmarks of a feud. No single enforcer is capable of bringing the recalcitrant parties to heel, and the parties are of roughly equal strength. One attacks and withdraws; the other retaliates and withdraws. The conflict cannot end because neither party is powerful enough to annihilate the other. In the meantime, special interest groups hook their causes to the central conflict, hoping to resolve problems they cannot settle on their own. But in the case of the Armagnacs and Burgundians, after years of warring and misery, the two sides finally ganged up to get rid of the English. Yes, in our case, the eternal conflict between the Democrats the Republicans is caused to a large extent by the representational abnormalities that are the fault of a decrepit system put in place over two hundred years ago. Huge swathes of the population are under or over represented, leaving business to be carried out by small groups of interested parties rather than by the people through elected representatives. Yes, progress is rendered impossible by the Republicans refusal to play ball at all. Still, it is only our feuding mentality that has brought the system to a complete halt.
But history shows that sooner or later feuds tend to run out of steam. One side either become stronger than the other (this could happen over the next several years as the demographics shift) or the feuding mentality simply runs out of steam as the generations change. It takes a lot of energy to keep up a level of hatred sufficient to fuel a feud. Do we really need to jettison the constitution? Probably not. Let’s just demystify the feuding mentality, long and loudly: let’s make medieval French history a mandatory course in high school and again at university.
Bella detesta matribus
My son is threatening to join the military. I hear those mothers and wives singing “Johnny has gone for a soldier,” but their men had no choice. Can he truly go off to war simply because he needs more structure in his life? Surely there are alternate ways to find structure.
My heart is broken, because they will deploy him to Afghanistan to take part in a war that has been going on forever and that depends upon issues buried in the sand itself, old as life itself, but that have nothing to do with us. Obama told us that we have specific goals there; maybe his, but they are not mine. John Dickerson pontificated the nonsense that we, the people, should not be involved in deciding which wars we will fight because we are not the best informed. We are precisely the ones who should decide whether we send our boys to war. If we decided, if Congress could not simply back the President’s request for troops without our consent. And that would be a good thing.
The burden of war is not distributed equally, and that is wrong, but it is not. And therefore I have spent my life insuring that my children would never be part of the classes that are forced to join the military to get an education, to acquire a bit of prestige, to land a steady job. We are not they! My dad was, but I went to university to avoid living in that world. And now we are falling back into that class, in the space of one generation.
Beyond the pain of seeing him ready to slip us back into the working class, there is the ideological problem. The military is an alien culture. In exchange for a small income, you agree to die or become maimed if asked. Once inside the framework, you have to believe that war is a glorious business. You have to see U.S. interventions as necessary, whatever their motivation. I understand the need for a defensive military – the one down here, for example. But ours runs around invading at will. How does one accept that?
I know that he craves a framework – I too have been terrified of empty space. But had my parents handed me the opportunities we have handed him, I would have flown. If you need order, why not master Latin and Greek, I ask him. I’m afraid that the horrible truth is that he is comfortable in a blokish, non-self-reflective environment. And therefore he will do whatever they want him to do.
He needs a shape that I was not able to provide, I thinking that freedom to choose one’s own life mattered above all. But he is failing. I was so sure that exposing him to the joy of study would turn him into a scholar, but he doesn’t have it in him, at least not now.
In the meantime he is off to university for a year in Canada, study abroad. Let him come back happy, disciplined, poised for success. Or maybe he will find a way to stay and not come back. May he find what he needs; let it not be the military.
I am crying. The military and its world view, its arrogant assurance that we need to safeguard the world - without reflection or measure – is responsible for the evils of the earth. It is an organization created by boys who need excitement and authority beyond what ordinary life offers. They would be comical with their silly little salutes and their playing at glory if they weren’t carrying machine guns and dropping bombs. Once inside the house of mirrors, they start to believe that it’s all real. It’s their faulty, the ones who get old and still don’t grow up. They perpetuate this insanity by recruiting hot blooded little guys, getting them while they are still gullible and out of control, before any philosophy has taken hold in their heads, before they have the resources to say no.
They world is filled with enemies and evil because they are in charge, those little big guys, allowed to play with guns, when they should be locked up.
My heart is broken, because they will deploy him to Afghanistan to take part in a war that has been going on forever and that depends upon issues buried in the sand itself, old as life itself, but that have nothing to do with us. Obama told us that we have specific goals there; maybe his, but they are not mine. John Dickerson pontificated the nonsense that we, the people, should not be involved in deciding which wars we will fight because we are not the best informed. We are precisely the ones who should decide whether we send our boys to war. If we decided, if Congress could not simply back the President’s request for troops without our consent. And that would be a good thing.
The burden of war is not distributed equally, and that is wrong, but it is not. And therefore I have spent my life insuring that my children would never be part of the classes that are forced to join the military to get an education, to acquire a bit of prestige, to land a steady job. We are not they! My dad was, but I went to university to avoid living in that world. And now we are falling back into that class, in the space of one generation.
Beyond the pain of seeing him ready to slip us back into the working class, there is the ideological problem. The military is an alien culture. In exchange for a small income, you agree to die or become maimed if asked. Once inside the framework, you have to believe that war is a glorious business. You have to see U.S. interventions as necessary, whatever their motivation. I understand the need for a defensive military – the one down here, for example. But ours runs around invading at will. How does one accept that?
I know that he craves a framework – I too have been terrified of empty space. But had my parents handed me the opportunities we have handed him, I would have flown. If you need order, why not master Latin and Greek, I ask him. I’m afraid that the horrible truth is that he is comfortable in a blokish, non-self-reflective environment. And therefore he will do whatever they want him to do.
He needs a shape that I was not able to provide, I thinking that freedom to choose one’s own life mattered above all. But he is failing. I was so sure that exposing him to the joy of study would turn him into a scholar, but he doesn’t have it in him, at least not now.
In the meantime he is off to university for a year in Canada, study abroad. Let him come back happy, disciplined, poised for success. Or maybe he will find a way to stay and not come back. May he find what he needs; let it not be the military.
I am crying. The military and its world view, its arrogant assurance that we need to safeguard the world - without reflection or measure – is responsible for the evils of the earth. It is an organization created by boys who need excitement and authority beyond what ordinary life offers. They would be comical with their silly little salutes and their playing at glory if they weren’t carrying machine guns and dropping bombs. Once inside the house of mirrors, they start to believe that it’s all real. It’s their faulty, the ones who get old and still don’t grow up. They perpetuate this insanity by recruiting hot blooded little guys, getting them while they are still gullible and out of control, before any philosophy has taken hold in their heads, before they have the resources to say no.
They world is filled with enemies and evil because they are in charge, those little big guys, allowed to play with guns, when they should be locked up.
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