Mere Anarchy is Loosed

This week I, much like—I hope—a surprisingly small number of other Americans—tuned in to watch both of the first two nights of the "Republican" National Convention. That is, the annual Convention of the Republican Party you might recall, except a Republican Party that now has no former presidents, no leaders of any previous Congress, no former nominees for high office, not even any significant members of prior Republican administrations (one of whom appeared last week instead over at the DNC). 

It is the "Republican" Party, that is, as hollowed out by a personalistic autocrat who has alienated everyone who still retained a shred of moral autonomy. A "Republican" convention with most of the headline speakers made up of members of Trump's immediate family, with the remaining slots filled by various bogus characters from MAGA-land (Pam Bondi, Matt Gaetz, etc.), right-wing culture war touchstones, and a handful of people (Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, e.g.) smart enough to know better and cynical enough not to care.

Errata and Marginalia 015: O'Hara

John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), originally published 1934.

It must be a near-universal adult fantasy, at least in places proximate to an open road, to imagine one day simply refusing to answer the phone or email, getting behind the wheel, disappearing and leaving the responsibility of one's life behind, and basically becoming an inebriated self-destructive wreck. As Karl Ove Knausgaard described it in a recent book, he would sometimes picture himself pursuing this itinerary in the following form: "Take the ferry to Poland and drive down through Europe, stay in cheap hotels in ever-changing towns, drink, drink, drink." (Burkey trans.) It is not necessary to ever come close to living out such a scenario—or even to have a taste for alcohol—to cherish it as an escapist fantasy; indeed, perhaps it is the greatest homebodies who are most likely to nurse it in their hearts. 

One turns to O'Hara's classic novel, Appointment in Samarra, on the assumption that it will offer one the vicarious pleasure of the kind of fantasy Knausgaard is describing. It is, by repute, the great novel of the "bender"—an account of the gratuitous self-destruction of an apparently successful adult male who decides one Christmas to shred his ties to human society through an escalating series of anti-social acts. And indeed, this is in summary roughly the plot of the novel. But the feel of the book's content is not quite in keeping with its subject matter. The story, the title of O'Hara's classic, and the Somerset Maugham fable from which it is derived—all lead one to expect an atmosphere of overhanging, inexorable fate. Instead, it skates along the surface of things.

Let It Not Come Near Me

 At around 10 pm Friday night, as I was washing up for bed, I heard the most bone-chilling scream coming from my sister a floor below me. With a newborn in the house, it was hard to hear it and not immediately assume the worst—any number of horrors shot through my mind—but the scream had more in it of surprise and disgust than of agony. Before I could even finish spitting the toothpaste from my mouth, my brother-in-law had called on the phone and I had my answer. A bat had been circling round the bedroom. 

There are people who will let out at this point a snort of anticlimax. Bats aren't so uncommon in New England—many people have stories of encountering one indoors. It is even politically correct in some circles to express a kind of affection for animals that creep and crawl and squeak and fly on leathery wings. Surely the progressive thing to do—a triumph of reason over instinct—is to appreciate the necessary role that verminous reptiles, rodents, insects, etc. play in our urban ecosystem. Still better to retort, when told a shudder-inducing story about meeting such a being, "But bats are cute!"

Emergency Powers

Remember when we saw Star Wars: Episode III, in the nadir of the "War on Terror" epoch, and we all immediately grasped the heavy-handed political point George Lucas was trying to make? 

As you recall, Lucas has Emperor Palpatine seize total power at the end of the prequel trilogy by invoking a sort of Carl Schmitt-ian "state of exception." "I will surrender these emergency powers when this crisis has abated," he falsely promises, in the very moment when the audience knows he is actually becoming emperor-for-life. Oh my God! we all thought. This is just like Bush and the PATRIOT Act!

And then years go by. Bush, while authorizing torture and thus committing war crimes, does not in fact become a dictator. We enjoy two democratic elections after his departure from office in which we witness a peaceful transfer of power. We start to think: huh, maybe all of that was a bit overstated. Nothing really terrible happened (so quickly we forget). 

The Deluge

People who have gone through cognitive behavioral treatment for an anxiety disorder—or some variant of the same—will have learned certain truths about the world that they can use to ground themselves in the moment and maintain their emotional equilibrium. 

When they feel the panic rising within them, chances are they repeat some inner mantra along the following lines: your anxiety does not reflect reality. It may be how you feel, but it doesn't tell you anything about the outside world. The mere fact that you are scared does not mean you are actually in danger. 

Collaboration

The Trump administration, in its mere 3.5 years in office, has of course already managed to chew through multiple rounds of senior officials, seeking to filter out anyone who shows the slightest flicker of moral independence or simply of interests at odds with the personal whims of the president. 

Moreover, since there are limits to how quickly they can transform our society into an authoritarian despotism, most of those people whom they have regurgitated are still at liberty, still hanging around, and now—increasingly—granting interviews to the press.