On the critical rhetoric typically deployed in defense of Griffith's Birth of a Nation and the films of Leni Riefenstahl:
When content is utterly repulsive, formalism will always be the first stop on the justification train.
Monday, March 7, 2016
Fifteen Underrated Films
We all have a mental list of overrated movies (mine includes Raging Bull, the Star Wars franchise, Eisenstein's October, all Biblical films (even Pasolini's and Nicholas Ray's), and pretty much everything Steven Spielberg has ever done; your list surely differs). Such lists are harmless exercises in healthy contrarianism--no big deal, and rarely of interest to others, who have their own lists. More interesting are those films that didn't get the recognition they deserved from audiences and critics, great films in danger of slipping into oblivion, movies that got no respect. Here's my list of 15 that deserve to be lifted out of the Dangerfield zone.
1. Theatre of Blood (1973). One of the most literate horror films ever made, this bit of macabre, gruesome, campy fun stars Vincent Price as a Shakespearean actor who avenges himself on his critics by murdering them in elaborate scenarios inspired by the murder scenes in Shakespeare's plays. The Richard III episode is a delightful Pricean lampoon of Larry Olivier.
2. Lost Highway (1997). David Lynch lost most viewers about halfway down this weirdly twisting highway, a film that stands alongside Dune and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me as one of Lynch's most underrated works. A film more interested in opening mysteries than closing them, this is Lynch's very modern, very American rewriting of Kafka's Metamorphosis.
3. The Trial (1962). Speaking of Kafka, Orson Welles's adaptation of The Trial is, along with F For Fake, one of the Whoreson Round Man's unknown masterpieces. Starring a perfectly-cast Anthony Perkins as Joseph K, this is a visually stunning work of high cinematic art.
4. Marnie (1964). Long derided for its transparent artifice, Marnie deserves instead to be celebrated both as an early landmark of postmodern self-conscious cinema (aligning the Old Master with the contemporaneous works of his French sons, Godard and Truffaut) and as Hitchcock's most psychologically complex portrait of a female character.
5. Secret Honor (1984). Philip Baker Hall's amazing performance as Richard Nixon in Robert Altman's film is, in my opinion, the best performance by an American actor in the entire decade of the 1980s. This film is proof that cinematic greatness has nothing to do with budget size.
6. Bulworth (1998). Even I underrated Bulworth the first time I saw it. I noticed its warts but none of its worth, and I thought its proponents were reviewing the message instead of the movie. When I watched it a decade later, I thought it was the most fearless political film ever made by an American director. Beatty takes more chances here than Oliver Stone has taken in his entire career, and most of the risks pay off.
7. Silent Bob and Jay Strike Back (2001). I never expected Kevin Smith to produce a film replete with Brechtian alienation devices and Godardian self-conscious irony, but in 2001 he did just that. Viewers who saw a stupid stoner exploitation comedy failed to realize that they were watching a David Foster Wallace-like ironic deconstruction of stupid stoner exploitation comedies. Judd Apatow's entire subsequent career seems to have been born out of this movie's butt.
8. Disgrace (2008). John Malkovich delivered the performance of his career in this near-perfect adaptation of J. M. Coetzee's great and haunting novel of life in the post-Apartheid South African countryside. This is one of those rare cases in which a great novel has become a great film.
9. The Grey Zone (2001). Barely noticed upon its release in 2001, this is one of the greatest films ever made about the Holocaust. The Grey Zone is the searing, unforgettable, unsentimental, almost unwatchably brutal film that Schindler's List should have been. I doubt if any fictional treatment of this subject has ever come closer to the daily reality of the death camps.
10. A Serious Man (2009). Between No Country for Old Men and their remake of True Grit, the Coen Brothers turned in this modern retelling of the Book of Job in the guise of an entirely enjoyable 1960s social comedy set in the suburbs of the American Midwest. Unlikely as it may seem, this Minnesotan Job is also the Coens' Call It Sleep melded with their version of Updike's Couples. And, unlikeliest of all, it works.
11. Daniel (1983). Sidney Lumet's almost forgotten adaptation of E. L. Doctorow's Rosenberg-inspired novel deserves to be rediscovered both for its recreation of a lost world of American radicalism and for its status as a first-rate primer on book-to-film adaptation.
12. The American (2010). Seemingly dismissed by most audiences as yet another George Clooney vehicle, Anton Corbijn's taut thriller owes more to Louis Malle and the Truffaut of Shoot the Piano Player than Robert Ludlum. It's a European art film into which Clooney seamlessly inserts his starpower. It should've been huge.
13. Julia (2008). If you want to know just how good an actor Tilda Swinton can be, check out her performance in this twisty crime drama cum psychological portrait. This is the job that should've won her the Oscar.
14. Margaret (2011). Notoriously stalled for years in post-production hell while everyone involved sued everyone else, Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret is the unknown masterpiece of contemporary American cinema. A novelistically rich slice of New York life, Margaret goes miles beyond the usual NYC fare and dives directly into the biggest topics: life, death, art, sex, family, and the meanings of it all in post-Sept.11 America.
15. Bloom (2003). Not so much underrated as unknown, Sean Walsh's valiant attempt at an adaptation of Joyce's Ulysses is, overall, superior to Joseph Strick's earlier effort at this foredoomed endeavor. Wisely forgoing the impossible task of filming the entire novel, Walsh makes huge cuts to extract the book's spinal 1904 narrative and brings it to film with the great Stephen Rea as Leopold Bloom. The ''Nighttown" sequence of the movie is almost as outrageous as the book.
1. Theatre of Blood (1973). One of the most literate horror films ever made, this bit of macabre, gruesome, campy fun stars Vincent Price as a Shakespearean actor who avenges himself on his critics by murdering them in elaborate scenarios inspired by the murder scenes in Shakespeare's plays. The Richard III episode is a delightful Pricean lampoon of Larry Olivier.
2. Lost Highway (1997). David Lynch lost most viewers about halfway down this weirdly twisting highway, a film that stands alongside Dune and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me as one of Lynch's most underrated works. A film more interested in opening mysteries than closing them, this is Lynch's very modern, very American rewriting of Kafka's Metamorphosis.
3. The Trial (1962). Speaking of Kafka, Orson Welles's adaptation of The Trial is, along with F For Fake, one of the Whoreson Round Man's unknown masterpieces. Starring a perfectly-cast Anthony Perkins as Joseph K, this is a visually stunning work of high cinematic art.
4. Marnie (1964). Long derided for its transparent artifice, Marnie deserves instead to be celebrated both as an early landmark of postmodern self-conscious cinema (aligning the Old Master with the contemporaneous works of his French sons, Godard and Truffaut) and as Hitchcock's most psychologically complex portrait of a female character.
5. Secret Honor (1984). Philip Baker Hall's amazing performance as Richard Nixon in Robert Altman's film is, in my opinion, the best performance by an American actor in the entire decade of the 1980s. This film is proof that cinematic greatness has nothing to do with budget size.
6. Bulworth (1998). Even I underrated Bulworth the first time I saw it. I noticed its warts but none of its worth, and I thought its proponents were reviewing the message instead of the movie. When I watched it a decade later, I thought it was the most fearless political film ever made by an American director. Beatty takes more chances here than Oliver Stone has taken in his entire career, and most of the risks pay off.
7. Silent Bob and Jay Strike Back (2001). I never expected Kevin Smith to produce a film replete with Brechtian alienation devices and Godardian self-conscious irony, but in 2001 he did just that. Viewers who saw a stupid stoner exploitation comedy failed to realize that they were watching a David Foster Wallace-like ironic deconstruction of stupid stoner exploitation comedies. Judd Apatow's entire subsequent career seems to have been born out of this movie's butt.
8. Disgrace (2008). John Malkovich delivered the performance of his career in this near-perfect adaptation of J. M. Coetzee's great and haunting novel of life in the post-Apartheid South African countryside. This is one of those rare cases in which a great novel has become a great film.
9. The Grey Zone (2001). Barely noticed upon its release in 2001, this is one of the greatest films ever made about the Holocaust. The Grey Zone is the searing, unforgettable, unsentimental, almost unwatchably brutal film that Schindler's List should have been. I doubt if any fictional treatment of this subject has ever come closer to the daily reality of the death camps.
10. A Serious Man (2009). Between No Country for Old Men and their remake of True Grit, the Coen Brothers turned in this modern retelling of the Book of Job in the guise of an entirely enjoyable 1960s social comedy set in the suburbs of the American Midwest. Unlikely as it may seem, this Minnesotan Job is also the Coens' Call It Sleep melded with their version of Updike's Couples. And, unlikeliest of all, it works.
11. Daniel (1983). Sidney Lumet's almost forgotten adaptation of E. L. Doctorow's Rosenberg-inspired novel deserves to be rediscovered both for its recreation of a lost world of American radicalism and for its status as a first-rate primer on book-to-film adaptation.
12. The American (2010). Seemingly dismissed by most audiences as yet another George Clooney vehicle, Anton Corbijn's taut thriller owes more to Louis Malle and the Truffaut of Shoot the Piano Player than Robert Ludlum. It's a European art film into which Clooney seamlessly inserts his starpower. It should've been huge.
13. Julia (2008). If you want to know just how good an actor Tilda Swinton can be, check out her performance in this twisty crime drama cum psychological portrait. This is the job that should've won her the Oscar.
14. Margaret (2011). Notoriously stalled for years in post-production hell while everyone involved sued everyone else, Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret is the unknown masterpiece of contemporary American cinema. A novelistically rich slice of New York life, Margaret goes miles beyond the usual NYC fare and dives directly into the biggest topics: life, death, art, sex, family, and the meanings of it all in post-Sept.11 America.
15. Bloom (2003). Not so much underrated as unknown, Sean Walsh's valiant attempt at an adaptation of Joyce's Ulysses is, overall, superior to Joseph Strick's earlier effort at this foredoomed endeavor. Wisely forgoing the impossible task of filming the entire novel, Walsh makes huge cuts to extract the book's spinal 1904 narrative and brings it to film with the great Stephen Rea as Leopold Bloom. The ''Nighttown" sequence of the movie is almost as outrageous as the book.
To Trump: An Alphabetical Exercise in Invective
Memo to the Trumpster:
You, sir, are, alphabetically, an absolute asshole; a bigoted, blathering bastard; a cretinous, contemptible corporate creep; a dumb, deranged, despicable dumpster of doltishness; an eel-brained exciter of excrement-eating extremists; a fatuous, fraudulent fuckwit fascist; a gushing gutter of glutinous grime; a halfwit Hitler; an infuriatingly ignorant imbecile; a jerrybuilt jingoistic jerk; a Ku Klux Krap-artist; a lowdown, lily-livered, lamebrained lying loser; a manically moronic mental midget; a nutty Nixonian nitwit; an obstreperous objectification of octopoid Organizations; a prickish personification of political puke; a quirky Quisling quesadilla of quotidian querulousness; a rotted ruin of rancid Republicanism; a slashing scimitar of stupidity; a turgid, talking tube of tripe; a univocal universe of urine; a visionary of vicarious violence; a whiny, witless wacko; a xenophobic xylophone; a yammering yahoo of the yachtsman class; and a zany, zoophilic zero.
O Trump, you shithead charlatan, you trumped-up twit, you orange-lidded barrel of toxic waste, you bottle of bile with Boehner-tinted hair, you wedge of stinking bishop, you loser, you lunatic, you crude, crass, cynical corpse of capitalist corruption; you cut-rate Mussolini, you K-Mart Hitler, you infantile, slobbering fool...
...with luck, in a few months, you will be so over...
You, sir, are, alphabetically, an absolute asshole; a bigoted, blathering bastard; a cretinous, contemptible corporate creep; a dumb, deranged, despicable dumpster of doltishness; an eel-brained exciter of excrement-eating extremists; a fatuous, fraudulent fuckwit fascist; a gushing gutter of glutinous grime; a halfwit Hitler; an infuriatingly ignorant imbecile; a jerrybuilt jingoistic jerk; a Ku Klux Krap-artist; a lowdown, lily-livered, lamebrained lying loser; a manically moronic mental midget; a nutty Nixonian nitwit; an obstreperous objectification of octopoid Organizations; a prickish personification of political puke; a quirky Quisling quesadilla of quotidian querulousness; a rotted ruin of rancid Republicanism; a slashing scimitar of stupidity; a turgid, talking tube of tripe; a univocal universe of urine; a visionary of vicarious violence; a whiny, witless wacko; a xenophobic xylophone; a yammering yahoo of the yachtsman class; and a zany, zoophilic zero.
O Trump, you shithead charlatan, you trumped-up twit, you orange-lidded barrel of toxic waste, you bottle of bile with Boehner-tinted hair, you wedge of stinking bishop, you loser, you lunatic, you crude, crass, cynical corpse of capitalist corruption; you cut-rate Mussolini, you K-Mart Hitler, you infantile, slobbering fool...
...with luck, in a few months, you will be so over...
Thursday, March 3, 2016
Where is the 21st-Century Novel?
A 21st-century novel. Sixteen years into this century, we have yet to see one. This fact (and I think it is a fact) seems odd but it probably shouldn't, given that most of the canon's distinctively '20th-century' novels didn't appear until after 1920. The Great Gatsby, Ulysses, The Trial, Mrs. Dalloway, the complete Recherche, The Magic Mountain, The Sun Also Rises, The Sound and the Fury, The Master and Margarita--none of them was published in book form until the twentieth century was already old enough to drink and drive as recklessly as Daisy Buchanan. Centuries take a couple of decades to get going, to know themselves, to become self-conscious as centuries. In the 19th-century--the earliest one, perhaps, for which this kind of self-consciousness was really an issue--Romanticism didn't become a dominant, defining force until after the fall of Napoleon, and Balzac didn't get seriously to work originating realism until after 1830. Maybe our current century is a new leather jacket that we're still breaking in, feeling the air pockets in its sleeves, hearing the fabric creak when we flex our arms. And meanwhile, as in earlier centuries, our most prominent writers continue producing novels of an earlier time: social realist and postmodernist books that look increasing, as the century matures, like acts of nostalgia disguised as artistic breakthroughs. On the American scene, we see a highly structured and conformist literature, whether traditionally realist or experimentally postmodern, a literature often at its most conventional in its studied 'unconventionality' (as in the works of those numerous but very minor literary celebrities of recent years who made their already-ephemeral names under the umbrellas of overwhelming influences, most often David Foster Wallace or W. G. Sebald). Literary realism is, of course, an old, old story, sepia-tinted and crinoline-clad, and social realism is an artifact of the Modernism-diluting leftism of the 1930s, another old, old story that looks as moribund as Aschenbach even when tarted up in the cosmetics of fashionable identity politics. These are truisms barely worth repeating, the kind of rhetorical clubs long used by postmodernist partisans to clobber admirers of Joyce Carol Oates and St. John the Updike. Less obvious is the realization that even postmodernism, which once seemed a likely site for an outbreak of the truly new, today looks more like a closed genre, hardly more relevant to current concerns than, say, the sonnet sequence or the epic poem. The last significant and original postmodern novels were published in the 1990s (The Tunnel, Infinite Jest, Mason & Dixon, Underworld), and today, in the retrospect of two decades, that rush of massive novels appears an impressive finale to the fireworks display opened thirty-odd (exceedingly odd) years earlier by Barth's sot-weed, Heller's soldiers, and Pynchon's bennie-fueled profanities. As the old song almost said, We used to love it, but it's all over now... What's next? What's new? Where are we going from here?
On first looking into Derrida's Glas
It came in a pizza box.. When my copy of Jacques Derrida's Glas arrived in the mail a few years ago, it was packed in a heavily taped, plastic-wrapped, square cardboard box, the lid decorated with a disembodied hand presenting a stylized thick-crust pizza and the words Gino's Pizzeria in a semicircle over the pie. I cut the tape, lifted the lid, and saw inside not the half-expected, unordered, steaming, cheesy, pepperoni-studded twelve-inch, but a sealed and factory shrink-wrapped copy of Derrida's large, square book, overprotectively bubble-wrapped and nestled amidst a cinema tub's worth of white Styrofoam popcorn.
It was a quirky, Warholian, Pop Art packing choice, and as such it was entirely appropriate for the book, because Glas is, if not more, at least other, than a work of philosophy or literary criticism. It is a piece of literary performance art, a thoroughly avant-garde work of late, late Modernism (so late some call it post-), and, I am increasingly convinced, the strangest of all masterpieces of twentieth-century French literature.
That last judgment is necessarily hedged and hesitant because although I do consider Glas a literary artwork, I recognize that it comfortably fits none of the existing templates for that art. It is neither fiction nor nonfiction, neither philosophy nor criticism. Instead, it contains elements of all of these categories in a single work that refuses any singularity (of structure, form, voice, genre) and radically problematizes the very act of its own reading. In a very real sense, Glas is a book that is almost impossible to read.
Taking a structural cue from an obscure essay by Jean Genet bearing the incomparably Genetian title "What remained of a Rembrandt torn into small, very regular squares and rammed down the shithole," Derrida arranges his book into two parallel columns of text, the left column on each page a (more or less) sustained commentary on Hegelian philosophy and the right column a more fragmented, stream of consciousness, impressionistic consideration of the works of Genet. (This assignment of sides is itself a pretty good Derridean joke, the rightist Hegel (whom Marx had to turn inside-out to found the most influential modern leftism) is here always on the left, while the ultra-radical Genet (whose politics encompassed both fascistic fantasies and leftist action, thus resisting easy categorization) is here always to the right of Hegel.) Opening the book to page one, we see two broken columns of text, a Roman ruin of a page. Both columns begin (seemingly) in midsentence (like Finnegans Wake or Samuel Delany's Dhalgren) and (seemingly) with a question signaled by the same first word, what. We quickly notice, however, that while the Hegel column does indeed resolve the initial word into the signaled question (sort of), the Genet column leaves its what suspended within the quoted title of the original essay by Genet. But even before we ponder this difficulty, we must face a difficulty even more fundamental, perhaps insuperable: how are we to read this...thing? That is the most pressing question.
Do we begin on page 1 and read the Hegel column straight through to page 262's nonconclusion, then return to the beginning and read the Genet column straight through? (This I call the 'traditional, or anal retentive, reading.') Or do we read the Hegel column on page 1 and then read the Genet column (or vice versa), then move on to read page 2 likewise, and so on? (This I call the 'Apollonian reading.') Or do we begin at any given point on any page from 1 to 262 and read across the central border, barely pausing at the end of each line of Hegeltext before beginning the nearest line of Genettext and continuing to read line-by-line across every page until the bottom of page 262 sends us back Joyceanly to the top of page 1 where we continue reading until reaching the point where we randomly began? (This I call 'Dionysian, or anal expulsive, reading,' and it is my preference.) There are many other possibilities, of course (including closing the book and not reading it at all, probably the most popular option), but let these three stand as the most obvious options for a complete reading of Derrida's text. Which do we choose?
It may seem that Glas thus casts us immediately into a classic deconstructive aporia, an abyss of indecidability in which we are assailed by countless equally valid options. I would like to argue, however, that this is only an apparent aporia, that in fact the text itself solicits what I have called a 'Dionysian reading.' While my 'traditional' and 'Apollonian' readings both normalize the book's form into that of, respectively, two consecutive, self-contained, book-length essays and two separate columns on a single page, the 'Dionysian' reading respects Derrida's deliberate formal decisions and attempts to read the book through them. Read line-by-line across the central margin, Glas becomes less a book of postmodern philosophy and more a Late Modernist prose poem, a vast John Ashbery-like invention on Hegelian and Genetian themes. Furthermore, only this reading technique maximizes what I consider the point of the entire book: the mutually deconstructive interpenetration of Hegelian high abstraction and Genetian bodily filth. Derrida's perfectly surrealist juxtapositions, the repeated encounters on the white dissecting table of the page between Hegel's dialectical sewing machine and Genet's tightly rolled phallic umbrella, achieve maximum effect only in a Dionysian reading. On page 38, for example, where an abstract Hegelian discourse on the myth of the Flood is juxtaposed to, slammed up against, sewn together with, Genet's description of a man taking a shit in a noxious prison toilet, the shocking juxtaposition retains its full effect only in a reading that ignores traditional boundaries of margin and column and page, reason and rhetoric and voice. Genet's long Modernist philosophical poem--a late, late entry in a genre that stretches back past Lucretius--a work that playfully dissolves the Platonic distinction between poetry and philosophy (among many other distinctions) demands a reading that is equally disruptive of arbitrary boundaries. A radical text demands to be answered with a radical reading. Glas is thus a transformative book, turning its readers into Dionysus, if only for the duration of their readings. (And isn't that the final bathos of Derrida? He was an incomparable radical, but his radicalism was restricted to the page.)
It was a quirky, Warholian, Pop Art packing choice, and as such it was entirely appropriate for the book, because Glas is, if not more, at least other, than a work of philosophy or literary criticism. It is a piece of literary performance art, a thoroughly avant-garde work of late, late Modernism (so late some call it post-), and, I am increasingly convinced, the strangest of all masterpieces of twentieth-century French literature.
That last judgment is necessarily hedged and hesitant because although I do consider Glas a literary artwork, I recognize that it comfortably fits none of the existing templates for that art. It is neither fiction nor nonfiction, neither philosophy nor criticism. Instead, it contains elements of all of these categories in a single work that refuses any singularity (of structure, form, voice, genre) and radically problematizes the very act of its own reading. In a very real sense, Glas is a book that is almost impossible to read.
Taking a structural cue from an obscure essay by Jean Genet bearing the incomparably Genetian title "What remained of a Rembrandt torn into small, very regular squares and rammed down the shithole," Derrida arranges his book into two parallel columns of text, the left column on each page a (more or less) sustained commentary on Hegelian philosophy and the right column a more fragmented, stream of consciousness, impressionistic consideration of the works of Genet. (This assignment of sides is itself a pretty good Derridean joke, the rightist Hegel (whom Marx had to turn inside-out to found the most influential modern leftism) is here always on the left, while the ultra-radical Genet (whose politics encompassed both fascistic fantasies and leftist action, thus resisting easy categorization) is here always to the right of Hegel.) Opening the book to page one, we see two broken columns of text, a Roman ruin of a page. Both columns begin (seemingly) in midsentence (like Finnegans Wake or Samuel Delany's Dhalgren) and (seemingly) with a question signaled by the same first word, what. We quickly notice, however, that while the Hegel column does indeed resolve the initial word into the signaled question (sort of), the Genet column leaves its what suspended within the quoted title of the original essay by Genet. But even before we ponder this difficulty, we must face a difficulty even more fundamental, perhaps insuperable: how are we to read this...thing? That is the most pressing question.
Do we begin on page 1 and read the Hegel column straight through to page 262's nonconclusion, then return to the beginning and read the Genet column straight through? (This I call the 'traditional, or anal retentive, reading.') Or do we read the Hegel column on page 1 and then read the Genet column (or vice versa), then move on to read page 2 likewise, and so on? (This I call the 'Apollonian reading.') Or do we begin at any given point on any page from 1 to 262 and read across the central border, barely pausing at the end of each line of Hegeltext before beginning the nearest line of Genettext and continuing to read line-by-line across every page until the bottom of page 262 sends us back Joyceanly to the top of page 1 where we continue reading until reaching the point where we randomly began? (This I call 'Dionysian, or anal expulsive, reading,' and it is my preference.) There are many other possibilities, of course (including closing the book and not reading it at all, probably the most popular option), but let these three stand as the most obvious options for a complete reading of Derrida's text. Which do we choose?
It may seem that Glas thus casts us immediately into a classic deconstructive aporia, an abyss of indecidability in which we are assailed by countless equally valid options. I would like to argue, however, that this is only an apparent aporia, that in fact the text itself solicits what I have called a 'Dionysian reading.' While my 'traditional' and 'Apollonian' readings both normalize the book's form into that of, respectively, two consecutive, self-contained, book-length essays and two separate columns on a single page, the 'Dionysian' reading respects Derrida's deliberate formal decisions and attempts to read the book through them. Read line-by-line across the central margin, Glas becomes less a book of postmodern philosophy and more a Late Modernist prose poem, a vast John Ashbery-like invention on Hegelian and Genetian themes. Furthermore, only this reading technique maximizes what I consider the point of the entire book: the mutually deconstructive interpenetration of Hegelian high abstraction and Genetian bodily filth. Derrida's perfectly surrealist juxtapositions, the repeated encounters on the white dissecting table of the page between Hegel's dialectical sewing machine and Genet's tightly rolled phallic umbrella, achieve maximum effect only in a Dionysian reading. On page 38, for example, where an abstract Hegelian discourse on the myth of the Flood is juxtaposed to, slammed up against, sewn together with, Genet's description of a man taking a shit in a noxious prison toilet, the shocking juxtaposition retains its full effect only in a reading that ignores traditional boundaries of margin and column and page, reason and rhetoric and voice. Genet's long Modernist philosophical poem--a late, late entry in a genre that stretches back past Lucretius--a work that playfully dissolves the Platonic distinction between poetry and philosophy (among many other distinctions) demands a reading that is equally disruptive of arbitrary boundaries. A radical text demands to be answered with a radical reading. Glas is thus a transformative book, turning its readers into Dionysus, if only for the duration of their readings. (And isn't that the final bathos of Derrida? He was an incomparable radical, but his radicalism was restricted to the page.)
Thirteen Unspeakable Ideas
Roland Barthes says somewhere that ideology is what goes without saying in a given culture. Ideology can also be defined as that set of ideas that renders counter-ideas unspeakable, even unthinkable. Here are six eminently arguable ideas that you will not hear debated by any of this year's political candidates.
1. Given that the United States no longer relies on "well-regulated militias" for defense against British invasion, the second amendment is as meaningless today as those clauses of the constitution relating to slavery. The second amendment specifically and explicitly applies to an institution no longer in existence, and therefore guarantees no citizen the right to "keep and bear" anything. There is no right to bear arms. Furthermore, this interpretation is so 'originalist' that even Antonin Scalia, if he really had the courage of his supposed hermeneutic and wasn't just a political hack, would have been intellectually compelled to agree with it.
2. That murdering psycho who shot up the abortion clinic in Colorado Springs late last year was a radical Christian terrorist inspired by radical Christian propaganda. (So Trump, if he really has the courage of his bluster and isn't just a political hack, should be demanding a ban on Christians, whatever that's supposed to mean.)
3. Given that there is not a single government in the Middle East that is not a barbaric, horrendous abuser of basic human rights, the United States should wipe its hands of the entire region (including Israel, a country rich enough and strong enough not to need our help) until the region works its way into the 18th century and gets Enlightened. Removal of American military power will force the Saudis to fight and defeat Isis, something those lazy, kleptocratic assholes will never do as long as the US fights their wars for them.
4. Every overseas American military base should be shut down ASAP. The 'empire of bases' is a Cold War anachronism and a drain on public funds. The money saved can be used to rebuild roads and bridges and construct high speed rail lines in the US. This true 'peace dividend' could also be used to fund a Sanders-style socialized health care system.
5. To quote Warren Beatty in Bulworth: If you want an actual solution to racism, here it is: "Everybody fucks everybody else until we're all the same color." Alternatively, we could simply teach in public schools the meaninglessness of racial categories, but since that would involve teaching Darwinian evolution (because racial variations are evolved superficial adaptations to different environments), such a policy would be nixed by the religious right. So I guess Beatty's Dionysian vision of multiracial orgy is probably our best bet.
6. Corporations and governments are two radically different and essentially antagonistic entities. Anyone who thinks that governments can or should be operated like corporations probably doesn't understand either type of organization.
7. Patriotism, love of country, is a neurotic fetishism. Psychologically, there's not much difference between investing your libido in a flag and investing it in a black high-heeled patent leather shoe.
8. Evolution is a fact. It happened. It's happening right now. The science is clear and fact-based, and the theory is elegant. (And let us not forget the necessary corollaries of these statements: Religion is fictional; its stories did not actually happen and are not happening now; its narratives are vague and contradictory, and its moralities profoundly inhumane.)
9. The United States of America is not a 'Christian nation.' Don't take my word for it; read Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli, ratified by Congress in 1897 and signed by President John Adams. The article begins, "As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion..."
10. There is nothing 'conservative' about contemporary American conservatism. It is an ideology that promises sweeping cultural and political change, an ideology of reactionary revolution. Edmund Burke would surely not approve.
11. So-called 'conservative' propagandists like to repeat that American liberals 'hate America.' This is a classic case of psychological projection. These self-misdescribed 'conservatives' project upon imagined 'liberals' their own unacknowledged hatred of the pluralistic, officially secular, civil libertarian America in which they feel themselves entrapped. These 'conservatives'--the Limbaughs, Becks, Gingriches, Gomerts, Palins and Buchanans of the world--clearly and obviously hate America.
12. War is not a counter-terrorism strategy. America's war in Afghanistan is as wrong-headed as our criminal invasion of Iraq. We could have decimated Al Qaeda in Afghanistan with special forces assaults and airstrikes. That would have been greatly preferable to bogging the U.S. down in an endless war over the same wasteland terrain that defeated the Red Army.
13. There is no such thing as a secure land border. Even the Berlin Wall was so frequently breached--most often by people who traveled legally by car or plane to the other side and refused to return (remember 'defectors'?)--that East Berliners told jokes about it. As long as North America is relatively rich and Central and South America relatively poor, people will continue to cross from south to north. If the United States truly wishes to limit the human flow, we need to focus all of our foreign policy skills on making the southern part of this hemisphere as free and peaceful and affluent as el norte.
12. War is not a counter-terrorism strategy. America's war in Afghanistan is as wrong-headed as our criminal invasion of Iraq. We could have decimated Al Qaeda in Afghanistan with special forces assaults and airstrikes. That would have been greatly preferable to bogging the U.S. down in an endless war over the same wasteland terrain that defeated the Red Army.
13. There is no such thing as a secure land border. Even the Berlin Wall was so frequently breached--most often by people who traveled legally by car or plane to the other side and refused to return (remember 'defectors'?)--that East Berliners told jokes about it. As long as North America is relatively rich and Central and South America relatively poor, people will continue to cross from south to north. If the United States truly wishes to limit the human flow, we need to focus all of our foreign policy skills on making the southern part of this hemisphere as free and peaceful and affluent as el norte.
Wednesday, March 2, 2016
Shitemonster Donald; or, Trump, Trump, Trump...The Fools are Marching...
More than half a century ago, the sage William Seward Burroughs (noted novelist and Nike salesman) asked his fellow Americans the immortal question, "Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk?"
Well, yes, Bill, you did--about halfway through Naked Lunch, as I recall. And that great monologue from the junksick Fifties perfectly prophesied the current front runner for the Republican party's presidential nomination. Donald Trump, talking asshole. We've been listening to his egomaniacal rectal soliloquies for so long now--since he was the poster boy for 1980s greed and one of the originals of Gordon Gekko and Patrick Bateman--that we've ceased to take his rantings seriously. We've become immune to the Trumpian rhetoric of narcissistic self-display, that turgid, sewer-ripe soup of verbiage in which everything Trump does is ''the greatest" and everything else is "the worst," in which the entire world is divided into two Manichean camps not of theological good and evil, but of Ayn Randian capitalist "winners" (Trump and his billionaire buddies) and "losers" (the rest of the human race); in which empty superlatives substitute for facts and ad hominem insults for argument; in which the entire world is likened to a single vast corporation with Donald J. Trump as its cantaloupe-haired CEO; in which the all-powerful 'Donald' can solve any problem, micro to macro, by uttering two magic syllables: you're fired. We've known this guy a long time: Donald Trump, bullshit artist. As long as he limited himself to reality TV (most of us have better things to watch) or New York real estate (most of us don't live there) or right-wing media (most of us have better things to do than spend our days Fox-watching and Limbaugh-listening), Trump was little more than a ridiculous self-inflating gasbag, a Barthelme balloon hovering like a sky-mirror over midtown Manhattan--potentially harmful to those unlucky enough to come within his orbit, but to the rest of us a harmlessly distant billionaire buffoon. Bozo the Superrich Clown. He was good for laughs, nothing more, certainly nothing dangerous...
But now that Bozo the Bullshitter, Don the Con, the New Sheriff of the Insane Clown Posse, prepares to stand one election away from the Oval Office and the nuclear trigger, it's time for the rest of us to start taking him seriously, to recognize the singular and terrifying danger he truly represents. For the first time in American history one of our major political parties is set to nominate-- albeit against the will of most of its elites--a perfectly cynical, unapologetic fascist demagogue. Trump as Republican nominee would be a frighteningly unprecedented event in our political history, something akin to George Wallace beating Nixon in the '68 primaries, or Lyndon Larouche grabbing the 1980 Republican nomination from Ronald Reagan. Democrats and leftists like me can continue to tell ourselves that the danger is still unreal, that even if Trump wins the nomination, Clinton will clean his clock in November, that a candidate Trump will mortally split the Republican Party, kill it as a national force, and usher in a new century of American liberalism. (This is certainly the unspoken fear that has Republican elites currently scrambling for some way, any way, to deny their own front runner the nomination.) I have my doubts about these rosy scenarios, and those doubts largely rest on the unprecedented nature of the Trump phenomenon. Yes, as a media celebrity turned politician, he can be understood as an especially moronic example of that aestheticization of politics that Walter Benjamin identified as one of the defining characteristics of fascism, but old European ideological models don't really capture the specifically 21st-century, specifically American aspects of the Trump problem. A few sentences ago, I called him a cynical unapologetic fascist demagogue, and in so doing I was not engaging in a feat of Trump-like empty verbiage. I chose those four words carefully, and I think we can better understand Trump and his danger if we think about them one at a time.
Cynical. Cynicism may be the most often misused word in current American cultural discourse. Deriving from the original Cynics, a rather attractively nonconformist and cosmopolitan philosophical tendency in the ancient world, the word has come to be commonly used as a generalized synonym for skepticism, pessimism and nihilism. Webster's Ninth tells us in a usage note that "cynical implies having a sneering disbelief in sincerity or integrity," and this is close to the (mis-)use of the word that best describes Trump (a meaning that is, interestingly, more applicable to another ancient philosophical tendency, Skepticism). Trumpian cynicism describes the gaping intellectual void between his orange-haired ears, the lack of any ideological foundation for his statements and his consequent ability to blatantly contradict himself, even in consecutive sentences, while exhibiting not a hint of cognitive dissonance. Trump can say one thing one moment, the opposite thing the next, and say them both with the same vapid grin, secure in the knowledge that either he is too powerful to be caught or his listeners too dumb to catch him. By importing this trait that has served him well in business (Trump will say anything to 'make a deal' regardless of its truth or falsity, regardless of whether or not he believes it) into mainstream politics, Trump demonstrates a contempt for his audience--and for the American people--that should be much more shocking than it apparently is. The fact that Trump can blithely succeed at this sort of bullshitting even while being interviewed by professional journalists reflects terribly on the state of political journalism in America.
Unapologetic. Trump is a legend in his own mind. He is the greatest, the best, the most wonderful, the most brilliant, the most successful, the most super-superlative superman ever to run for president. And did he mention that he's rich? Wait a few seconds, he'll get to that. And because he's the most honest businessman and the best human being on the planet, there's no need for Donald to ever apologize, for anything. Trump has taken to heart the old John Wayne ''never apologize, never explain" motto without noticing that in many of his movies John Wayne's characters were total dickheads: bullies, racists and murderers. (In The Searchers, by general consensus his greatest film, he's all three.) Or maybe Trump and his supporters did notice this--and they liked it. There may be a large amount of 'identification with the aggressor,' a kind of political 'Stockholm syndrome,' among Trump supporters. They're like a bunch of victimized children eagerly kissing the playground bully's ass so he won't kick theirs. This psychopathology might be the thing that makes Trump's support so solid: he appeals not to minds or even hearts but to nearly forgotten childhood traumas that determine adult behavior even more powerfully than conscious reason or emotion. Trump is the strong man who doesn't apologize. Apologies are for weaklings. Like all asshole revenants from the 1980s, Trump, despite a lifetime in the cutthroat business world, has absolutely no regrets. No regrets. Psychologists have a word for people who truly have no regrets: sociopaths. (Back in the '80s, that obscene decade that gave us the three-headed plague of Trump, Reagan and AIDS, there was even a brand of designer jeans called "No Regrets." If you could afford them, you could advertise your sociopathy on your ass.)
Fascist. In place of ideological commitment, Trump has a worldview, and that infantile weltanschauung (stupidly jingoistic, moronically militaristic, culturally kitschy, anti-intellectual, scapegoat-dependent, xenophobic, etc.) can best be described as fascist. The vision adumbrated in his public statements goes something like this. Trump sees the world as akin to a conglomeration of corporations. As president of the United States he will act as World CEO, ordering other countries around and 'firing them' (with missiles, perhaps) if they fail to obey his commands. It's a dark, Hitlerian vision, the stuff of bunker fantasies, the sort of thing sad, lonely white supremacists fantasize about in their mother's basements. When Trump is in somewhat less of an authoritarian mood, he speaks as if international politics consists entirely of businesslike deal-making, a view that might sound almost convincing until you ask yourself what kind of deal might have stopped the Rwandan genocide. Even the 'pragmatic,' deal-making side of Trump's worldview is deeply implicated in fascism, for it assumes that strongman Trump will be a magically efficacious dealmaker, always perfectly successful, a world-fuhrer to whose tune we can all smilingly goosestep. If Trump weren't so successful in electoral politics, this childish fantasy might be dismissed with a chuckle. The longer he keeps winning, the more frightened we should be. For Sylvia Plath was more right than she could know: millions of Americans, men and women, adore a fascist.
Demagogue. And that adoration is the self-destructive whirlwind the Republican Party has reaped. For fifty years, the Republicans have demonized liberals. (Liberals, for pete's sake! Next to democratic socialists and (maybe) Quakers, American liberals are probably the nicest, most ethical, most decent people on the planet. And when they were in power in America (1932-1980) America worked better than it had before or has since.) And for the past eight years, the party has worked overtime to convince millions of Americans that their country has been taken over by a Stalinist (or maybe fascist), Kenyan-born, illegitimate, secretly Muslim, terrorist-loving, anti-American antichrist. The hate campaign was hysterical, comic, laughable--and it worked. The Republicans used these asinine lies to motivate midterm voters who obediently delivered to their control first the House of Representatives and then the Senate. It was only a matter of time before there arose out of the ocean of rightwing media shite a shitemonster who personified the demagogic style of anti-Obama rhetoric. Beginning in the looney tunes land of birtherism, Trump leveraged his reality TV celebrity and Fox News commentating credentials (both being the media equivalent of junk bonds) into a political persona that has by now metastasized beyond Obama-hating to become a giant cancerous tumor on the brain of American politics. Rhetorically he has become an anti-Obama, appealing to all the 'darker angels' of his listeners' natures, their prejudices, paranoias, resentments, bigotries, their emotionally powerful, religion-fueled suspicions that they are living at the cusp of apocalypse and require not a president but a savior. As with all demagogues, Trump's appeal, like his rhetorical style, is profoundly irrational. Thus, it cannot be argued away. (You can't reason with a lunatic or, more to the point, a brainwashed cult-follower.) And Trump himself cannot really be debated; he can only be defeated. For the sake of America and the world, I hope November brings him a defeat, and I hope that defeat is crushing. Goldwater-level crushing; McGovern-level crushing. Antigone Bezzerides was right: "We deserve a better world."
Well, yes, Bill, you did--about halfway through Naked Lunch, as I recall. And that great monologue from the junksick Fifties perfectly prophesied the current front runner for the Republican party's presidential nomination. Donald Trump, talking asshole. We've been listening to his egomaniacal rectal soliloquies for so long now--since he was the poster boy for 1980s greed and one of the originals of Gordon Gekko and Patrick Bateman--that we've ceased to take his rantings seriously. We've become immune to the Trumpian rhetoric of narcissistic self-display, that turgid, sewer-ripe soup of verbiage in which everything Trump does is ''the greatest" and everything else is "the worst," in which the entire world is divided into two Manichean camps not of theological good and evil, but of Ayn Randian capitalist "winners" (Trump and his billionaire buddies) and "losers" (the rest of the human race); in which empty superlatives substitute for facts and ad hominem insults for argument; in which the entire world is likened to a single vast corporation with Donald J. Trump as its cantaloupe-haired CEO; in which the all-powerful 'Donald' can solve any problem, micro to macro, by uttering two magic syllables: you're fired. We've known this guy a long time: Donald Trump, bullshit artist. As long as he limited himself to reality TV (most of us have better things to watch) or New York real estate (most of us don't live there) or right-wing media (most of us have better things to do than spend our days Fox-watching and Limbaugh-listening), Trump was little more than a ridiculous self-inflating gasbag, a Barthelme balloon hovering like a sky-mirror over midtown Manhattan--potentially harmful to those unlucky enough to come within his orbit, but to the rest of us a harmlessly distant billionaire buffoon. Bozo the Superrich Clown. He was good for laughs, nothing more, certainly nothing dangerous...
But now that Bozo the Bullshitter, Don the Con, the New Sheriff of the Insane Clown Posse, prepares to stand one election away from the Oval Office and the nuclear trigger, it's time for the rest of us to start taking him seriously, to recognize the singular and terrifying danger he truly represents. For the first time in American history one of our major political parties is set to nominate-- albeit against the will of most of its elites--a perfectly cynical, unapologetic fascist demagogue. Trump as Republican nominee would be a frighteningly unprecedented event in our political history, something akin to George Wallace beating Nixon in the '68 primaries, or Lyndon Larouche grabbing the 1980 Republican nomination from Ronald Reagan. Democrats and leftists like me can continue to tell ourselves that the danger is still unreal, that even if Trump wins the nomination, Clinton will clean his clock in November, that a candidate Trump will mortally split the Republican Party, kill it as a national force, and usher in a new century of American liberalism. (This is certainly the unspoken fear that has Republican elites currently scrambling for some way, any way, to deny their own front runner the nomination.) I have my doubts about these rosy scenarios, and those doubts largely rest on the unprecedented nature of the Trump phenomenon. Yes, as a media celebrity turned politician, he can be understood as an especially moronic example of that aestheticization of politics that Walter Benjamin identified as one of the defining characteristics of fascism, but old European ideological models don't really capture the specifically 21st-century, specifically American aspects of the Trump problem. A few sentences ago, I called him a cynical unapologetic fascist demagogue, and in so doing I was not engaging in a feat of Trump-like empty verbiage. I chose those four words carefully, and I think we can better understand Trump and his danger if we think about them one at a time.
Cynical. Cynicism may be the most often misused word in current American cultural discourse. Deriving from the original Cynics, a rather attractively nonconformist and cosmopolitan philosophical tendency in the ancient world, the word has come to be commonly used as a generalized synonym for skepticism, pessimism and nihilism. Webster's Ninth tells us in a usage note that "cynical implies having a sneering disbelief in sincerity or integrity," and this is close to the (mis-)use of the word that best describes Trump (a meaning that is, interestingly, more applicable to another ancient philosophical tendency, Skepticism). Trumpian cynicism describes the gaping intellectual void between his orange-haired ears, the lack of any ideological foundation for his statements and his consequent ability to blatantly contradict himself, even in consecutive sentences, while exhibiting not a hint of cognitive dissonance. Trump can say one thing one moment, the opposite thing the next, and say them both with the same vapid grin, secure in the knowledge that either he is too powerful to be caught or his listeners too dumb to catch him. By importing this trait that has served him well in business (Trump will say anything to 'make a deal' regardless of its truth or falsity, regardless of whether or not he believes it) into mainstream politics, Trump demonstrates a contempt for his audience--and for the American people--that should be much more shocking than it apparently is. The fact that Trump can blithely succeed at this sort of bullshitting even while being interviewed by professional journalists reflects terribly on the state of political journalism in America.
Unapologetic. Trump is a legend in his own mind. He is the greatest, the best, the most wonderful, the most brilliant, the most successful, the most super-superlative superman ever to run for president. And did he mention that he's rich? Wait a few seconds, he'll get to that. And because he's the most honest businessman and the best human being on the planet, there's no need for Donald to ever apologize, for anything. Trump has taken to heart the old John Wayne ''never apologize, never explain" motto without noticing that in many of his movies John Wayne's characters were total dickheads: bullies, racists and murderers. (In The Searchers, by general consensus his greatest film, he's all three.) Or maybe Trump and his supporters did notice this--and they liked it. There may be a large amount of 'identification with the aggressor,' a kind of political 'Stockholm syndrome,' among Trump supporters. They're like a bunch of victimized children eagerly kissing the playground bully's ass so he won't kick theirs. This psychopathology might be the thing that makes Trump's support so solid: he appeals not to minds or even hearts but to nearly forgotten childhood traumas that determine adult behavior even more powerfully than conscious reason or emotion. Trump is the strong man who doesn't apologize. Apologies are for weaklings. Like all asshole revenants from the 1980s, Trump, despite a lifetime in the cutthroat business world, has absolutely no regrets. No regrets. Psychologists have a word for people who truly have no regrets: sociopaths. (Back in the '80s, that obscene decade that gave us the three-headed plague of Trump, Reagan and AIDS, there was even a brand of designer jeans called "No Regrets." If you could afford them, you could advertise your sociopathy on your ass.)
Fascist. In place of ideological commitment, Trump has a worldview, and that infantile weltanschauung (stupidly jingoistic, moronically militaristic, culturally kitschy, anti-intellectual, scapegoat-dependent, xenophobic, etc.) can best be described as fascist. The vision adumbrated in his public statements goes something like this. Trump sees the world as akin to a conglomeration of corporations. As president of the United States he will act as World CEO, ordering other countries around and 'firing them' (with missiles, perhaps) if they fail to obey his commands. It's a dark, Hitlerian vision, the stuff of bunker fantasies, the sort of thing sad, lonely white supremacists fantasize about in their mother's basements. When Trump is in somewhat less of an authoritarian mood, he speaks as if international politics consists entirely of businesslike deal-making, a view that might sound almost convincing until you ask yourself what kind of deal might have stopped the Rwandan genocide. Even the 'pragmatic,' deal-making side of Trump's worldview is deeply implicated in fascism, for it assumes that strongman Trump will be a magically efficacious dealmaker, always perfectly successful, a world-fuhrer to whose tune we can all smilingly goosestep. If Trump weren't so successful in electoral politics, this childish fantasy might be dismissed with a chuckle. The longer he keeps winning, the more frightened we should be. For Sylvia Plath was more right than she could know: millions of Americans, men and women, adore a fascist.
Demagogue. And that adoration is the self-destructive whirlwind the Republican Party has reaped. For fifty years, the Republicans have demonized liberals. (Liberals, for pete's sake! Next to democratic socialists and (maybe) Quakers, American liberals are probably the nicest, most ethical, most decent people on the planet. And when they were in power in America (1932-1980) America worked better than it had before or has since.) And for the past eight years, the party has worked overtime to convince millions of Americans that their country has been taken over by a Stalinist (or maybe fascist), Kenyan-born, illegitimate, secretly Muslim, terrorist-loving, anti-American antichrist. The hate campaign was hysterical, comic, laughable--and it worked. The Republicans used these asinine lies to motivate midterm voters who obediently delivered to their control first the House of Representatives and then the Senate. It was only a matter of time before there arose out of the ocean of rightwing media shite a shitemonster who personified the demagogic style of anti-Obama rhetoric. Beginning in the looney tunes land of birtherism, Trump leveraged his reality TV celebrity and Fox News commentating credentials (both being the media equivalent of junk bonds) into a political persona that has by now metastasized beyond Obama-hating to become a giant cancerous tumor on the brain of American politics. Rhetorically he has become an anti-Obama, appealing to all the 'darker angels' of his listeners' natures, their prejudices, paranoias, resentments, bigotries, their emotionally powerful, religion-fueled suspicions that they are living at the cusp of apocalypse and require not a president but a savior. As with all demagogues, Trump's appeal, like his rhetorical style, is profoundly irrational. Thus, it cannot be argued away. (You can't reason with a lunatic or, more to the point, a brainwashed cult-follower.) And Trump himself cannot really be debated; he can only be defeated. For the sake of America and the world, I hope November brings him a defeat, and I hope that defeat is crushing. Goldwater-level crushing; McGovern-level crushing. Antigone Bezzerides was right: "We deserve a better world."
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