Desperate Cases

 My sister and I were talking the other week about beloved movies, and we were struck all over again by the number of creative people in the world who seem to have made one beautiful and interesting thing, only to follow it up with a parade of mediocre and boring things. There was the Star Wars trilogy, but then it was followed by... the other Star Wars trilogies. There were the Lord of the Rings movies; but then there was King Kong, and then the Hobbit trilogy that no one asked for. There were the Harry Potter books; but then there were a bunch of raunchy detective novels, yawn-inducing films, and transphobic screeds. 

And as if we hadn't enough examples of this phenomenon already on our hands, the world threw another in my path just a few nights after our conversation. A friend and I logged onto HBO Max to watch the new Matrix sequel, which follows up with our main characters twenty years after the first movie. It... did not break the pattern we have established above. 

Combinational Delight

I have a friend who—in all kindness—accuses this blog of being at times rather pointlessly agglutinative. My usual procedure, he says, is to take a bunch of seemingly disparate things—usually quotations or literary exempla—and line them up next to one another and say "see, this one is like that one; and that one is like this one."

I don't deny the charge. Indeed, the only way in which I know a Six Foot Turkey blog post has formed in my brain is when I suddenly (and this usually only happens when I am in the shower or driving) see illuminated, as if by flaring lanterns, the path leading me from one passage to another of seemingly diverse material. 

Autodidacts

 A friend and I were swapping tales of the minor intellectual humiliations in life that stem from trying to pronounce words that one has previously only ever encountered in print (a topic subconsciously prompted, perhaps, by my having just gotten to the part in Nabokov's Pale Fire in which his narrator/commentator, Charles Kinbote, observes that Baudelaire is a two-syllable name, the middle "e" having no metrical weight, and suddenly feeling like I had to reevaluate my whole life). 

I forwarded my friend a poem I had written on this very subject over a year ago. Noting the dangers of things like the silent "l" in Ralph Vaughan Williams, I observed "These are the things/You can’t get/Just from reading/Unless, that is,/You know/The pronunciation code," referring to the international phonetic alphabet (to which even the most solitary autodidact has recourse in principle). 

Irony font

 I talked last time on this blog about Keith Houston's book on the history of typographical marks, Shady Characters; but it has inspired another thought I wished to impart. 

In his final chapter, Houston recounts the appalling number of times people have proposed creating some sort of special typographical or punctuation mark to distinguish irony and sarcasm from straightforwardly-intended prose. It appears the same idea has been floated—and even some of the same designs for the hypothetical mark put forward—so many times that the whole subject has become almost as tired as the debate around whether or not the incidents described in Alanis Morissette's "Ironic" are actually ironic. 

!?

In his entertaining book Shady Characters—a series of capsule "biographies," if you will, of various punctuation and typographical marks throughout history—Keith Houston devotes a chapter to the ill-fated mid–twentieth century campaign to promulgate and adopt a new punctuation mark—the "interrobang." It came about because strings of punctuation had begun to appear at the ends of sentences—"?!" and the like—particularly in the more informal idiom of advertising copy, and so the idea was to combine the two symbols into one.

Closing a sentence with a "?!" defied traditional grammatical practice, after all. Yet, there was a particular feeling and intonation these strings of characters conveyed that was not fully captured by either the question or the exclamation mark in isolation. The proposed way out of this dilemma was to invent a new character that could serve double-duty. The interrobang—a combination of question mark and exclamation—could convey the sense of a question being asked with incredulity and a rising tone of outrage—consternation is one of the apt words for it that appears in Houston's text. 

Errata and Marginalia 019: Coover

Robert Coover, The Public Burning (New York: The Viking Press, 1977)

It turns out, all these years later, that Coover's one-of-a-kind postmodern phantasmagoria The Public Burning still has the capacity to surprise. 

For one thing, the book is perhaps more readable than anticipated. As a teenager—the age when I first began to marshal the list of books I would read over the rest of my life—I taught myself to regard all heavy tomes produced by postmodern luminaries as notoriously "difficult" and extravagantly highbrow. I therefore beheld all the longer works of Pynchon, Gaddis, Coover, Barth and company with so much reverence that I could scarcely make an attempt upon them. 

To R or to A? That is the question.

 A friend sent me a cartoon this morning by email that showcased a familiar solution to the problem of absurdity. The panels of the strip depict a pig climbing onto a stump of "deep thoughts," whence he proceeds to contemplate the futility and hollowness of existence. We try to distract ourselves from it through seeking money and power, he observes, or through achieving immortality via the works we leave behind, or by losing ourselves in daily routines; but ultimately we confront the fact that all these things must end. And so must we. Thus, he decides at last, the best we can do is to laugh and love each other while we're here. 

No doubt such a solution will seem satisfactory and familiar to many of us; it is the kind of humanism that gains ready and widespread assent in our present society. It strikes me, however, that it makes a couple logical leaps that may not be fully justified. 

Value Systems

 There is a scene in Jack London's memoir of vagabondage, The Road, in which he recalls a time he was cadging money from a businessman. The latter was willing to offer him work tossing bricks, but only at the price of having to listen to one of his sermons. He proceeded to lecture London on how he too could one day be prosperous and successful, if only he and the other tramps would apply the same bourgeois virtues the businessman embodied: prudence, diligence, temperance, and the rest.

London recalls that he listened to this for a good while, then couldn't refrain from pointing out a logical flaw in the businessman's advice. "[I]f we all became like you," he said, "[...] there'd be nobody to toss bricks for you." This fair point promptly sent the businessman into a rage. "Get out of here, you ungrateful whelp!" he roared.

Resentment

As I've mentioned before on this blog: despite not being resident in the state of Florida for more than a decade now, I still receive periodic e-blasts from the crudely right-wing member of Congress who represents the district where I was raised. Most of these mailings come in the form of ludicrously tendentious "polls," which purport to be a neutral way to gather information on his constituents' views, but always display the author's bias in their choice of wording—especially when it comes to matters of immigration. 

I had come to be inured, or so I thought, to most of this language; yet the last one left me baffled. The subject line read: "Payouts to Illegals?" In essence, the congressman was asking whether we supported a legal settlement that the Justice Department was apparently contemplating to families separated under Trump's "zero tolerance" policy. 

What surprised me wasn't that the congressman opposed paying these damages (that went without saying) but rather that so many people seemed to agree with him. Once I clicked through to the results page, more than 80% of the reading public apparently thought the same as him. 

Fooled

In his memoir Hand to Mouth, the writer Paul Auster recounts a time in his late twenties and early thirties when—as a freelance translator and critic—he was struggling to make ends meet. At last, in his desperation to make a quick buck, he hit upon a particularly bizarre scheme to market a children's board game that involved playing virtual baseball with playing cards. He drew up his own version of the cards, then began marketing them around various toy conventions where the makers and distributors of such games could be found. 

After several discouraging attempts, he describes one seemingly promising encounter with a pair of toymakers from Illinois. Two brothers who ran the business together, they agreed to sit down with him and play through a round of the game he had invented. They seemed to enjoy it profoundly, and sent him many encouraging signals. They gave him their contact information, and told him to get in touch soon so they could make a decision as to whether or not to market the game. He sent them a letter after he left and waited. And waited. 

Lists

 Back when I was a freshman in high school, I didn't care where I landed on any list. I had no notion of relative rank, order, hierarchy, or prestige. To the extent that I imagined a future for myself, it didn't involve what could be described as a career or a formal education. I knew I'd have to pay for food somehow, but I also knew that whatever said day-job might be, it could not touch my true vocation—that of novelist. I figured I'd pay the bills washing dishes and waiting tables, and then retire to my garret somewhere in noble squalor and spend the night penning works of genius. 

In short, the Paul Auster approach.

"Gucci Bags"

In Pär Lagerkvist's The Dwarf—a haunting meditation on the nature of evil, penned by the Nobel Prize–winning Swedish author in the midst of World War II—there occurs a scene late in the novel when a group of refugees from the surrounding countryside flees a marauding mercenary army, seeking sanctuary behind the walls of the prince's capital city. There, they receive a frosty welcome and eventually the outright hostility of the inhabitants.

After the enemy's army lays siege to the capital, Lagerkvist's narrator recounts how the citizenry begin to blame the refugees for everything that has gone wrong with the war effort. They say the refugees have brought vermin with them, that they caused a food shortage, and ultimately that they triggered the plague that starts to beset the capital, due to the unsanitary siege conditions. 

Happiness Quotient

 For years a friend has been telling me I ought to go to law school, and for years I replied that I was not ready. "But don't you think you could be achieving much more with your life?" he would ask; "Don't you think you're destined for greatness?" "Well yes," I would reply; "but, greatness is best achieved not through radical changes of course and introducing upheavals into one's plans, but through conscientiously doing the best one can at the task immediately before one." 

All of which saw me through several years of my adult professional life without heeding the siren call of a legal education. But there came a point, this fall, when all that suddenly broke down. I felt the need for an upheaval. A new beginning. "You must change your life!" as the poet says. I decided law school needed to happen. And not just eventually, but this year; as soon as possible. But what about my own prior advice to myself? No matter, chuck it out the window!

Anne Hedonia

"O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall," wrote G.M. Hopkins. Which is true enough. But what he didn't say is that the mind also has plains: long stretches of blank flatness. For these periods of depressing sameness—marked by neither highs nor lows—psychology has given us the apt term "anhedonia." The absence of pleasure. The absence of joy. 

I was feeling that way lately. It was a spell of melancholia connected to restlessness in my job and—who woulda thought?—seems to have been worsened rather than improved by reading Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea. Turns out, that is a dangerous novel to pick up when one is in one's early thirties and doesn't know what to do next with one's career. 

Angry Old Men

 Earlier this weekend, a neighbor family set up a live band in their driveway, at the end of our small and narrow dead-end street. They proceeded to blast their well-amplified self-created music straight in the direction of my first-floor accommodations, as I am in the next house up from them on the opposite side facing. The music wasn't bad—actually it was well-performed—but that was not the point.

The point is this assault of beats and chord progressions came at an inconvenient time. I was trying to read and then blog, and I felt that I had not consented ahead of time to this added wrinkle to both plans. I would find myself staring at the blog post, unable to come up with the next line, unable to complete a thought at all, because just as it was coming into being, the next song would start. 

The Means Test

I spent much of the past weekend reading Walter Greenwood's classic working-class novel Love on the Dole—a portrait of proletarian life in England's industrial north during the trough of the Great Depression. The novel depicts the aspirations of young people starting their lives at a time when there is no stable work to be had, and public sympathy is drying up. 

The novel's protagonist, Harry Hardcastle, is lured into life as a factor engineer's apprentice on the assurance that he just needs to complete a seven-year indenture with the firm, then he will be qualified to seek employment as a full-fledged engineer on good wages. Throughout his time as an apprentice, however, he sees warning signs that this promise may be a trap. 

Skin in the Game

 I've talked about this before on this blog, but one of my glaring deficiencies in my current line of work is my lack of what's known as "direct experience." Periodically when opining or giving a presentation on some dimension of immigration or asylum law, I will be asked "what brought you to this work"—and I never have a good answer. I don't have a particularly recent immigration history or experience in my family. I don't have a partner or best friend or immediate family member who has had to navigate that system and seen its flaws. I don't have anything, in short, that could be described as "first-hand experience," apart from what I gleaned after I was already working on these issues in a professional capacity. 

A friend of mine tells me this is precisely why people are suspicious of "white liberals." It's completely unclear why they seem to care or feel passionate about progressive causes, because they have no "skin in the game." Worse, they may actively have an interest in maintaining the existing distribution of power and resources in our society. So why should they be trusted to actually want to change things? Is there some hidden motive beneath the surface? And is the fundamental hypocrisy of their position not the root of all the behaviors people complain about with respect to them: the savior complex, the "holy renunciate" routine, the Jekyll and Hyde pattern whereby an "ally" transforms into an enemy under the wrong conditions?

Wages

 Like millions of other Americans, I have survived 18 months of a global public health emergency that might easily have tanked the entire U.S. economy, only to find myself with a weird and unexpected surplus of cash in my bank account. The mechanism by which it got there is still not really clear to me. All I was doing was working my regular job. My stimulus checks were chiefly sent right back in the form of donations. But somehow, the lack of travel and a pattern of sponging off my immediate family had evidently trimmed my living expenses so much that—far from facing the economic collapse we all feared at the start of this pandemic—I was flush. 

Add to that a small investment account and a trust, and I had started to regard my job as a kind of voluntary gesture. "I'll work because it's a way to help others," I loftily informed myself, "But I could leave it any time." And lo, earlier today, I decided that time had come. I was ready for the next chapter. Time to move on, maybe go back to school. Or just experiment with living for a while, free of the self-imposed burden of remunerative employment. Oh, to be sure, I knew that health insurance is costly, and I'd have other expenses. But I just looked at that unprecedentedly fat bank balance and knew I was in the clear. 

Pale Vienna

From Jack London's The Road: 

Easter Eggs 005: Williams

A series dedicated to the strange and interesting things that can be uncovered by closely reading books. 

From John Williams, Butcher's Crossing: 

Voting for Kindness

I just got back from casting a ballot in my local precinct election. It's probably the first time I've ever voted for a city council position in my life, but a couple days ago, I received a visit on my doorstep from my Massachusetts state rep, who was out canvassing for one of the people running, and I felt like that was the sort of hustle and personalized outreach that ought to be rewarded. 

Also among my motives, though, it must be said, was a certain desire for absolution. The candidate she favored is running on the DSA ticket, and I thought: "Here is my chance!" Not only can I fulfill my teenage dream of voting socialist (though the chance came around "rather late for me," to borrow a phrase from Philip Larkin), but also I can offer my ballot as a sort of indulgence, hedging against my otherwise guilty complicity in the problems besetting my home town. 

After Böcklin

Photo after Arnold Böcklin, The Isle of the Dead

Inflation Hawks

 Well, the inflation hawks have swooped in full force now, and they are only gaining in number and strength. The first whisper I heard of this line of attack came from an occasionally-Republican friend of mine, who serves as a sometime-informant as to what is going on in the larger conservative hive-mind. Back in that early week in May, when the Colonial Pipeline was hacked and a temporary gas shortage resulted, my friend told me the following: "People [in Republican circles] are already saying it's like the 1970s all over again. The Democrats have only been in office for a couple months and we're basically back to the Carter administration." "How so?" I asked, not getting his drift. "Well," he replied, "People are waiting in line for gas, and inflation is already out of control."

Inflation... out of control? But then I started to see this talking point everywhere. In newspaper headlines. In the op-ed pages. And now, it has even become a line used by the self-declared "moderate Democrats" to torpedo their own party's legislative ambitions. Joe Manchin took to the Wall Street Journal opinion pages this week to pen what reads very much like, but which I earnestly pray is not, the death knell for the Biden legislative agenda—specifically, the diverse set of social policy, climate, and immigration initiatives set to be included in the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package the Democrats still want to get through the Senate on a party-line vote. "An overheating economy has imposed a costly 'inflation tax' on every middle- and working-class American," Manchin wrote—hence, he argued, Dems should "pause" for a time on further spending. 

Oops

 Two vivid images from my personal memory: One, I am standing in the kitchen of my apartment in Medford, a couple years back. I have finished a long day and an even longer commute from Boston's north suburbs. I am desperately hungry, having ordered some Thai food several hours ago. After a long wait, the food has finally arrived. I have dished out the entire steaming pile onto a plate. Then, I spin around, intending to carry the dish to the table, where I will finally and gratefully snarf it down. 

Instead, the plate falls through my fingers. It shatters on the ground. In a flash, in a twinkling, the entire heaping, steaming pile of noodle deliciousness is scattered across my dirty kitchen floor. Rendered instantaneously inedible. And as I stare down at the shattered plate, its shards mixed in with the clear strings of pad-woon-sen, I can picture in my mind's eye the plate reassembling itself. Like, it should be possible to rewind time slightly. Don't I get a do-over? 

Richard Simmons' Ministry

There's a podcast I listened to years ago, when it first aired, and convinced myself at the time I didn't like. In the years since, though, I've found myself thinking back to it off-and-on, and if the measure of a show's quality is the extent to which it stays with you, this one clearly managed to make an impression. 

The pod in question is Stitcher's Missing Richard Simmons, produced in 2017, and I suspect my feeling of disappointment with it when it first aired had something to do with a sense of false advertising. In those days, we weren't yet so familiar with the concept of the "literary" podcast, which S-Town and the like were about to perfect and make famous, just a few months later. When we turned to that voice in the ear, back then, we weren't expecting profound insight; many of us were looking for sheer comedy or escapism. 

New blog

 Attention Turkey fans! I am now officially also blogging on Substack: please check it out here and feel free to subscribe if you like what you see! I'm still feeling out as I go what kinds of content I intend to publish there versus here. My initial thought is that the Substack account will be more narrowly focused on politics and human rights advocacy—in short, more strictly in keeping with my professional identity. Personal reflections, by contrast, may continue to show up here. 

My thought was also to keep the Substack geared more toward a general audience. So I'm trying to cut back on the extraneous allusiveness and pretension. Probably failing. Judge for yourselves:

https://propensity4selfsubversion.substack.com 

Productivity

 My sister has recently been telling me about the idea of the "laziness myth"—that is, the argument that, in the ultimate scheme of things, there is no such thing as "laziness"—and I think I'm starting to see the point. 

Now, admittedly, I have made my feelings plain on this blog before about the emergent cult of "doing nothing"—the new movement that seeks to bust what is known as "productivity culture"—as promulgated in New York Times op-eds and think pieces over the past two years, and as shared over a thousand Teams and Slack channels by colleagues whom one fears may have already taken its lessons too much to heart. 

To put it simply, I'm against it. And not just for knee-jerk cultural reactionary reasons (though these no doubt play a role)—but more seriously because it seems to be at odds with what we know about the psychology of human happiness, which consists—at least in part—in setting oneself achievable goals and meeting them on a daily basis; not just in lounging about and doing whatever one wants all the time. 

Too Late

No one can say Biden wasn’t warned. As soon as the administration announced in April that U.S. forces would imminently depart Afghanistan, human rights advocates—including those who opposed the war from the start, and the U.S. crimes perpetrated in the course of it—expressed fear for what would happen to Afghan allies of the U.S. war effort if left behind. They laid out comprehensive recommendations to the administration, calling on them to evacuate at-risk civilians to U.S. territory, using emergency parole until a path to permanent status could be found. 

The administration delayed. The result is that today Kabul has fallen to the Taliban, and only around 2,000 Afghan interpreters and other U.S. partners have so far been successfully evacuated. Untold thousands of others remain behind in desperate peril. 

"Scary, dangerous stuff"

 Today, I received a fundraising email from one of the innumerable progressive advocacy and Democratic Party-aligned mailing lists that I never directly signed up for, but who possess my information nonetheless through some web on online connections. In only three words, the message's subject line managed to encapsulate everything that is flawed and vaguely annoying about nonprofit marketing communications. It read simply: "Scary, dangerous stuff."

Did it "work"? Yes, I suppose I clicked on it. Did I want to know what this dangerous and scary stuff might be? Okay, sure, I read through it enough to find out. And did it live up to the hype? Did its subject matter really amount to "scary, dangerous stuff" after all? Yes, I suppose I would have to say so again. It was talking about unprecedented voter suppression measures being enacted by right-wing state legislatures around the country, which surely are both scary and dangerous. 

Byrd-Brained

As you may have heard, immigration advocates—including even such peripheral ones as myself—are currently engaged in a glacially-paced legislative struggle to try to attach path to citizenship provisions to Congress's budget reconciliation process. After years of focusing on abrupt and startling executive branch decisions (coming not only from Trump, alas, but also his successor), in which some horrible yet fast-developing news item would reliably break every Friday evening, just as we were ready to sign off, it has been strange to rediscover that there are still some policy-related news cycles that do not exhaust themselves within a 24-hour timeframe. The ones that drag on longer, we're re-discovering, tend to be those that depend on the two chambers of Congress to conduct the people's business. 

This particular slog involves the question of whether or not including path-to-citizenship provisions in the reconciliation deal will be approved under Senate rules. This ought not to be a problem; precedent exists for featuring immigration-related items in reconciliation, when the Republicans were in power. But there remains the possibility that the Senate parliamentarian may—for whatever reason—advise against these measures, under a Senate provision known as the "Byrd rule" (originally designed to limit the range of policy measures that can be enacted through reconciliation). If the parliamentarian does recommend against it, of course, all is not lost. But we would then face the much harder task of trying to convince the narrow Democratic majority and Vice President Harris (as the Senate's presiding officer) to overrule her decision. 

Rhinocerization

 It is a great irony that fanatical Trump and GOP supporters should choose—as their term of abuse for those they see as insufficiently zealous—the word: RINO ["Republican-in-Name-Only"]. Because it is really they, the loyalists, and not their adversaries, the waverers, who have been turned into rhinoceroses. 

I am referring of course to the process of transformation due to "rhinoceritis" laid out in Eugène Ionesco's 1959 absurdist drama, Rhinoceros. Here, the inhabitants of a French provincial town witness the arrival of one, or possibly two rhinoceroses on a Sunday morning. In the days that follow, they gradually succumb to the urge to become rhinoceroses themselves, until only our laggardly antihero, Berenger, is left standing on two feet. 

We want out/We're staying put

 In the opening essay of his collection A Propensity to Self-Subversion, social scientist Albert O. Hirschman offers a variation on his famous theory of "exit" and "voice." These terms, for Hirschman, refer (perhaps self-explanatorily) to two different methods of responding to dysfunction in an organizational setting. The first, "exit," means picking up and leaving. The second, "voice," means staying put and protesting. Both are ways to register discontent with an existing state of affairs. But the two are not necessarily complementary. In fact, they can undermine one another. As Hirschman summarizes the original, "hydraulic" model of his theory, "exit" can operate as a "safety valve" that "lets off steam" that would otherwise find expression in voice. In other words, if people can simply leave, they may be less motivated to stay and try to improve conditions where they currently are. 

In turning to the example of the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, however, and the country's 1989 reunification, Hirschman sees a far more complex dynamic at work. Here, exit or the threat of exit served to delegitimize the regime, while also providing a sense of "empowerment" to others to make freer use of their "voice." Ultimately, in Hirschman's telling, the two demands—for free movement and free expression—coalesced into two kindred chants of the East German protest movement. Wir wollen raus ["We want out"]—a call for the GDR authorities to let discontented citizens "vote with their feet"—was heard alongside chants of Wir bleiben hier ["We're staying put"]—connoting something like: "you can't get rid of us so easily." While the two messages may appear opposite and contradictory, they often came from the same dissenters at the same rallies.

"To break earth's sleep at all"

A thought has been circling around the outskirts of my mind and taunting me for the last few weeks: what if, for all our fear of extra-human events, the most dangerous natural hazard is really ourselves; our fellow human beings? This is, of course, not a new idea. It has been the stuff of eco-romanticism for generations; but I have in the past usually rejected it for just this reason. It seemed to me stale; overly simplistic in its dichotomy between humankind and nature, when in fact both are human concepts; to be founded more in the hangover of human mythology (hubris and nemesis; the wrath of the Old Testament Jehovah who floods the Earth) than in scientific analysis of our plight. 

But now... even given all that, a series of recent events has made me wonder whether there isn't something to it after all. And yes, this is partly about that COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis that I keep talking about. And look, I wish as much as anyone I could stop obsessing over that theory. And I recognize too that it remains unproven, and the precise pathway of how the virus came into being among us remains a mystery. But still, once admitted to consciousness as at least a possibility, I have found myself on the precipice of a paradigm shift. Up to now, I had understood the pandemic to be a tragic but fundamentally heroic story of humankind confronting a natural hazard, and having to band together to fight it... 

American Assassin (2017)

 In the never-ending self-imposed task of trying to find and watch the worst films ever made, a friend and I lingered the other night over an entry in the Netflix library that the platform's algorithm knew to recommend to us, based no doubt on our viewing of Jason Statham movies and similar atrocities. 2017's American Assassin caught our eye, because it seemed such a late date for a film to appear that was seemingly so lacking in self-awareness or any higher aspirations. In this day and age, after all—despite the heckling Hollywood receives from people who rarely go to the movies—it is actually verging on rare to find a movie that relies exclusively on the most tired tropes imaginable, that does not in any way attempt to subvert expectations or stereotypes, that makes no move whatsoever to reverse conventional roles, make a larger point, or at least put its tongue mercifully in its cheek. American Assassin, therefore, in its very utter conventionality, was sui generis. 

Observe: our film opens on a stretch of indifferent beach, where sunbathers loll on the sands and attractive young couples sport in the waves. A generic white guy approaches his blonde girlfriend with a camera. He pulls out a ring. "Will you marry me?" he asks. She smiles and sighs amidst happy tears, "Yes, yes I will marry you—" and then addresses him by both first and last name, because films have instructed us that this is how all people accept marriage proposals. Then, he leaves to go get drinks. Then, a bunch of terrorists storm the beach and slaughter various people for no reason, including his now-fiancée. Our main character is tormented by lifelong rage and a hunger for vengeance as a result. He trains in all the dark arts of espionage, combat, stealth, and murder. He is recruited by the U.S. government, who apparently long to work with a person of this description. We have our premise. 

Fetters

 The Guardian ran a piece yesterday on the increasingly widespread practice of requiring asylum-seekers in the United States to wear electronic ankle monitors—aptly described by advocates as "shackles"—as an alternative to being detained within four walls. As the Biden administration promises eventually to wind down the "Title 42" policy—which involves the summary expulsion of asylum-seekers without a screening, in violation of international refugee covenants—fears were they might turn to arbitrary long-term detention instead. Faced with this prospect, the growing use of a mobile app to monitor asylum-seekers' movements inside the United States, and increased reliance on electronic surveillance via ankle shackles, may seem like relatively humane alternatives. 

Yesterday's report calls this into question. Let us leave untested and unchallenged for today the assumption that the movement of people across borders needs to be policed at all; the idea that asylum-seekers should be presumptively constrained in their movements; that states can legitimately interfere with the physical liberty of people who have done nothing wrong, simply presenting themselves for an asylum hearing in accordance with their rights under international law. (If we think it odd the French government held refugees fleeing fascist persecution in concentration camps in the 1930s, as depicted in Anna Seghers' Transit, why should we tolerate the same practice today, from the U.S. immigration detention system, to Australian offshore detention camps... but enough! enough!)

The Professionals

 I discussed at length last time the writings of Ivan Illich and his critique of the professions; and it occurred to me afterward that—particularly in light of the fact that he was specifically discussing the health care sector—this might seem like poor timing. After all, nurses, doctors, and other medical professionals around the world have spent the last year and a half putting themselves at heightened risk—and, in many cases, dying—in order to save lives during the pandemic. By what remote logic do they merit anyone's criticism? 

This is why it is important to add at this point that the widely-felt human suspicion of professionals does not rest on the assumption that any particular person is bad at their job or insufficiently committed to their calling. Rather, it has to do with the simple fact that, even with the best of intentions, the outcome of a particular case will always matter somewhat less to the professional than to the client who engages their services. (Just to show I am casting no stones, I will observe that this same objection is frequently raised against people who work at advocacy NGOs, and with equal justice, as we'll see below.)

What's at Stake in the COVID Origins Controversy?

 In the last piece I wrote on the controversy surrounding the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, I tried mightily not to exceed the range of what we can positively assert at this stage (which is very little, since the one thing seemingly everyone can agree on is that much of the salient evidence that would help us resolve the matter has likely been lost or suppressed by this point). To the extent I came down on anyone's side, however, it was to plump for what I dubbed the "weak" version of the lab leak hypothesis: namely, the thought that SARS-CoV-2 emerged in the wild, but may nonetheless have made the jump to human-to-human transmission through contact with scientific field researchers, or within a lab where bat populations were brought in from the field to be studied. 

This remains one available theory of the case; but I no longer feel as confident as I did earlier this week in rejecting the "strong" version of the hypothesis out of hand. (Indeed, I would challenge anyone to read this piece by Nicholson Baker, this one by Nicholas Wade, and this one by Milton Leitenberg, and emerge from them without a new—if discomfiting—openness to the "strong" lab leak scenario). According to this version of events, recall, SARS-CoV-2 never existed in the wild—and may not even have been inside a bat—but rather was engineered in a lab through gain-of-function research conducted with "humanized" mice (that is, research animals genetically altered to more closely resemble human susceptibility to viruses). 

Lab Leak—Strong or Weak

 As others more competent than I to judge have noted elsewhere, the last few months have brought a sea change in the media coverage on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. The previously-stigmatized "lab leak hypothesis" has gained increased credibility among politicians, journalists, and some scientists, though it also continues to have its vocal critics. As a layperson with minimal understanding of genetics or infectious disease, I feel unequipped to address the scientific issues at the center of the controversy. I will state, however, that an excellent recent write-up of the available evidence by Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times has convinced me of at least one thing: there are more options available to us than the simple binary form of the question (was it a lab leak? or not?) often leads us to believe. 

As I understand from reading Tufekci's article, speaking of "the lab leak hypothesis" in the singular is somewhat of a misnomer; we really are talking about a cluster of different possibilities. I propose we divide these in two: the "strong" and the "weak" versions of the lab leak hypothesis. The strong holds that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was engineered in a lab—most likely one housed in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) or the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—through gain-of-function research. The weak version, by contrast, is agnostic on the question of whether SARS-CoV-2 was created through human genetic tampering or evolved via natural selection; it posits merely that the virus—however it came into being—was stored in one of these facilities and accidentally escaped, causing the first detectable human outbreak.

Fatalism

 In his renowned study of the role of pestilence in global history, Plagues and Peoples, William H. McNeill cites a hadith, or saying, of the Prophet Muhammed that seems rather salient to our present situation. It reads: "When you learn that epidemic disease exists in a country, do not go there; but if it breaks out in the country where you are, do not leave." 

I felt called out. In the days following the expiration of my two-week post-vax period, after all, I had at first felt a sense of freedom. The long confinement is over! The world is my oyster! I can travel again! A friend and I almost instantly joined what seems like the majority of newly-immunized Americans in booking plane tickets to fly overseas. 

Nature's Social Union

 Driving through Providence tonight I took an unnecessarily round-about way home, just because I knew the way and it would save me having to plug directions into my phone. This familiar course took me down Blackstone Boulevard—a highfalutin tree-lined avenue bisected by a long island of park-like foliage. As I was carefully picking my way, trying to keep my speedometer within reasonable distance of the allotted 25 mph (a restriction they enforce in this spot with exceptional zeal), I was suddenly beset by the kind of frumpy dismay the squares must have felt when Marlon Brando's The Wild One came to town. 

You see, I was suddenly and unwillingly surrounded on all sides by men on ATVs. And I mean literally all sides! Several of them were gunning the motor while racing through the middle of the island that runs between the two sides of the street. Another was directly behind me, popping a prolonged wheelie. I harrumphed and continued to putter along, as I had been doing, trying not to go too fast and risk being flagged by the cameras that surveil the street. But due to the noise of the ATVs, I soon no longer had the road to myself. 

Atrocities

 In a luminous book of essays, Marguerite Yourcenar turns at one point to the work of a partisan of the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion, who depicted with unequalled zeal and outrage the martyrdom and persecution of the Huguenot Protestants in the age of the Counter-Reformation. Yourcenar—an incredibly gifted essayist, it turns out, though she is better known for her novels—cites a number of the well-chosen images the poet used to stir the indignation and awaken the pity of his readers. 

In depicting an auto-da-fé, for instance, of which his fellow Protestants or like heretics were the presumed victims, he dwells on the resemblance between the victims' ordeals and that of Calvary—of the humiliations and tortures to which they were subject, so like the crown of thorns, even as they are persecuted in the supposed name of the Christian faith. He culminates in a depiction of the callous hypocrisy of the executioners, who—in a final parody of official "mercy"—offer their victims a choice between craven submission—which earns them the prize of instantaneous strangulation—or continued resistance, for which the penalty is the far more painful death by burning at the stake.

Friend Juice

 At the severe risk of sounding self-congratulatory, I have to say it: people seem to like my company. For all that I've managed to construct an adult life for myself as an affirmed single, it turns out this does not necessarily prevent one's daily life from becoming a ceaseless struggle against the tide of various platonic entanglements. My phone lights up each day with whatever one would term the non-romantic equivalent of billets-doux. The importuning of amicatory suitors. Tonight, at 11:30 PM, a text message arrives for instance. "I'm low on friend juice," says a friend whose last few calls I'd ignored. "I need a refill." The good-natured guilt-trip worked. I phoned him up at last. 

When asked to account for this need of my company, my friends and family all give versions of the same answer. "Why does everyone want a piece of Josh?" I asked recently to my best friend from high school, my well of humility having run dry. He came out with the ready answer: "Because you're fun!" My sister and I, more recently still, got into an argument during COVID, because there was a time when I wanted to barricade myself in my own home, eliminate all possible sources of outside contagion, and experience a week of monk-like seclusion. When she objected, I got angry: "Why can't you let me live my own life?" I demanded. "Because I want to hang out with you and watch Drag Race!" she replied. 

Krishnapur/Kabul

 It is rare to find a work of literary fiction that denies itself none of the pleasures of swashbuckling adventure, the full range of comedy from mordant irony to outright slapstick, the grand tragedy inherent in a protracted human disaster, all while making a serious thematic point. J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur must be one of the very few such works in existence. I picked it up over the weekend with little expectation that it would become such a consuming passion over the next few days. It is all of the things I named above in one; though if one has to ask the novel to present itself in only one of its roles for our purposes today, let us settle on reading it as a satire on the pretensions of Empire and Victorian civilization. 

Seen in this aspect, the novel is primarily the tale of one senior British official, Mr. Hopkins (the "Collector" of Krishnapur) —charged with overseeing the defense of a Company-controlled town in the midst of the 19th-century Sepoy Rebellion—as he gradually loses his faith, not only in the God of the Anglican Communion, but in the full roster of Victorian pieties. These include, as the Collector himself lists them in the course of one excited interior monologue: "Faith, Science, Respectability, Geology, Mechanical Invention, Ventilation and Rotation of Crops!" 

Adjustment, or Complacency?

 The late twenties of one's lifespan—the time when one has, perhaps, obtained and settled into what one considers to be one's first "career job"—are marked by a nagging fear: What if I'm not living up to my potential? At some point after thirty, this is replaced by another, superficially similar, but really quite different fear: What if I am living up to my potential?

A friend asks me: "didn't you always assume that you were going to be great; that you were destined for greatness?" I agree that yes, I did always assume that. But then I settle into what has become my more comfortable thirty-one-year-old view-point. "But you know," I say, "greatness is a spectrum, not a binary. One doesn't wake up one day and discover one is great. One can gradually make greater incremental progress toward greatness." 

Excuses

No sooner did the firing commence in the latest escalation of the Hamas-Israel confrontation than the familiar excuses on both sides started to rain down. There is of course no sound way to justify any party's violations of the laws of war: neither Hamas' indiscriminate rocket launches into Israeli territory, endangering civilian lives, nor the Israeli Defense Forces' disproportionate air strikes frequently seeming to target—or at the very least, foreseeably jeopardize—civilian infrastructure and the lives of innocent people. But the very impossibility of the task of making excuses for such things seems to have incited some to make the attempt. Perhaps they are just eager for a challenge.

Indeed, the contortions they have come up with are often quite ingenious. First, the apologists of each side urge us to note the "provocations" that allegedly forced their favored party's hand. Israel's comprehensive blockade of Gaza, we are told, and ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem, left Hamas no choice but to fire its rockets. So too, we are informed, the IDF has no alternative but to retaliate in the face of Hamas' attacks, and the densely-populated areas where their militants operate will inevitably become military targets, leading to the collateral loss of civilian life. 

The Gangrene

If you are in my generation or one close to it, chances are you had an opinion on the CIA torture program, at least at some point in the past. Maybe opposing it was even a formative political issue for you—one of the first times you exercised a nascent political conscience. But, chances are no less good, you have not thought about it a great deal since, and when you do, it is exclusively in the past tense. One sees it as an historical episode that should stand as a warning to the future, perhaps, but not one that is still with us. 

After all, the program itself ended at Obama's order more than a decade ago, in 2009. And many of its victims have over time achieved greater recognition of their legal rights. While several have been held extra-territorially in Guantanamo Bay, they are no longer deemed for that reason entirely beyond the reach of the rule of law. A series of landmark Supreme Court rulings from around that same period established that an offshore detention facility cannot be treated—simply because it is not on U.S. soil—as a total legal black hole. 

Errata and Marginalia 018: Bernays

Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York, Ig Publishing, 2005), originally published 1928. 

There is a certain perennial (if also perilous) appeal to the idea of studying some of the dark arts of social science, only to use them for some enlightened and beneficent purpose for which they were not intended. The image of the revolutionary egalitarian democrat by day who spends their night reading Machiavelli's The Prince is an old one. So too, if one is a communications professional of sorts in some non-profit or public-spirited enterprise, one may desire to taste of the literature on propaganda and public relations in much the same way the higher echelons of Opus Dei will permit themselves from time to time to read books that are on the banned list—"I alone can be trusted with this!"

Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year

Since the start of the COVID-19 emergency last year, I have largely avoided the great literature of plague and epidemic—a break with my frequent practice of letting current events somewhat guide my instinct as to what to read next. Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year certainly came to my mind early on in this crisis. I even used it as the title of a post I wrote back in the first week or so of the pandemic lock-down. The ready-made phrase seemed to lend itself too obviously to the stuff of journalistic cliché and punning headlines to resist (this was the same season in which a million variations on "love in the time of cholera" began to appear, for instance, with "covid" swapped in, and in which copies of the Decameron were, possibly for the first time, in hot demand). 

But we must recall that there was a gruesome several-week period when books, though thought of, were not therefore within reach. Deliveries ground to a halt, and in-person book stores were shut down. To wish to read a title in hard copy, therefore, did not mean it would be possible to do so. 

Čapek's Prophecy (Not the Robot One)

I have an established history at this point of thinking I'm the first person to note a resonance between a literary work and contemporary events, only to find out later that I'm actually relatively late to the discovery, and have long since been scooped. 

In the terror of the few days before the last presidential election, I poured over Brecht's Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, and thought I discerned in its study of demagogy and personalistic autocracy unmistakable resemblances to the tactics and propaganda of our then-commander-in-chief. I dashed this off in a hurry, hoping to register it in print before anyone else got ahold of the insight. Only later did I realize that in the first year of Trump's presidency, a production of the play had already been staged in London that had the main character in telltale orange hair, and the set littered with MAGA placards. 

Coronavirus as Metaphor

 It might have occurred to me at some earlier stage of this pandemic that Susan Sontag's twinned essays, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, would repay a visit in our present historical moment, but I didn't get around to it until this week. And I did find that these essays shed light on some of our present tendencies to moralize the lessons of COVID-19 (not exclusively in ways that are harmful or bad); but more on that below. Sontag's analysis, particularly in the latter of the two pieces, also proved helpful to understanding something of a conundrum that has puzzled me since our national leaders first started to react to this crisis in March of last year. 

Sontag's central idea is that human societies are never content to just let illness be what it is. We always must have it be something else. And partly, as she acknowledges, this is due to the metaphoric imagination that is all-but-inherent in the act of thinking itself, and is therefore hardly to be escaped. However, she notes that many of the dominant metaphors we use to conceive of illness are decidedly unhelpful to the sick and quite likely detrimental to the goals of human freedom and wellbeing in our larger society. 

Mank (2020): A Review

In 2018, our culture suddenly decided it cared about Orson Welles again—for something other, that is, than selling frozen peas, or having embarrassing drunken outtakes during the filming of Paul Masson commercials. The last few years have been a perhaps unexpectedly fertile period of Orsoniana. It started with the release of a posthumously-completed Welles work, The Other Side of the Wind, on Netflix. This was accompanied by a documentary about the director's final years and the making of the unfinished work, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead. Then, two years later, Netflix was at it again, releasing an Oscar-bait historical biopic, Mank, about the screenwriter, Herman Mankiewicz, who co-authored the script of Citizen Kane. Orson was everywhere, all at once. 

There's just one odd thing: it's not entirely clear why all these works suddenly found Welles relevant again; or what exactly they wanted to say about him. There is some general sense in which they all partake of the revisionist project of puncturing the myth of a great man. Whenever pop culture gets ahold of an historic figure again that it has been neglecting for a while, after all, it will either be to elevate the "previously forgotten" or to dash down the over-praised; still, though, as a friend of mine likes to point out, Orson Welles seems a rather odd target for this treatment. 

"Harsh Necessity"

There's a passage in Dostoevsky's Notes from a Dead House—his classic prison memoir, thinly disguised as a fictional account—in which the narrator contemplates the fact that sometimes, during his confinement in Siberia, he saw prison authorities subject deathly-ill patients from the infirmary to the ordeal of corporal punishment—undergoing the gauntlet and similar tortures, even as they were wracked with consumption or other disease. So too, he notes, sick prisoners were often denied relief from the fetters they all wore, no matter how severe their ailment. 

After relating these horrors, he then adds the caveat: "it goes without saying that some strict, harsh necessity probably forced the authorities to take measures so harmful in their consequences." (Pevear/Volokhonsky trans. throughout.) The narrator admits he can't be sure what that necessity was, but he will not deny it existed.

Coincidences

 My reading and blogging life is made possible entirely by a series of fortuitous coincidences—"Synchronicities," as the New Age types could call them. Here I am, talking to my sister about the problems with the modern educational establishment, say; and I just happen to be reading D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, which then includes an extended narrative section in which the heroine Ursula Brangwen goes to work at a miserable government-run school and compares it to a prison. The basis for some future blog post starts to form, for every Six Foot Turkey post is, in honesty, nothing other than a clump of three or four such occurrences pulled from disparate sources (literary, political, autobiographical) and strung together through some such dimly-perceived connecting line. 

This post is not the education post, however, which the above synchronicity made possible. I'm still waiting for a third or fourth element to come my way in order to finish that one. This post, rather, is about the more fundamental underlying phenomenon of the synchronicities themselves, because The Rainbow furnished me with two even more striking examples of the same. The education/schooling connection, after all, is easily dismissed. It is a common enough theme in English literature, school being a close-to-universal experience in modern society, and I knew going in to the novel that Lawrence had worked as a school teacher as a young man, so perhaps I subconsciously sensed the connection, or might have been able to predict, if asked, that this experience would figure in a novel he published at age thirty. 

Getting Away With It

In this airplane-avoidant age of COVID I have had to make multiple long road trips to and from Boston over the past year, and I have done it enough times by now to have developed a routine. When I need to pick out some listening material for the journey, I always go with a Trump/Russia-related book. I don't know why this has become so compulsory to me, but nothing else seems to go as well with a long day on the road. It's something about the fact that these sorts of journalistic accounts alone manage to marry the guiltier pleasures of the true crime yarn with the ability to tell myself that I am just doing my patriotic duty of catching up on the last few years' political news and keeping abreast of current events. 

Whatever the reason, I have tried to have a Trump/Russia book at my side—or rather, piping through my phone's speakers—on every multi-day road trip I have undertaken since last fall; and the trouble with that plan is that they are finite in number. Having exhausted some of the more staid and cautious among them, I didn't know where else to turn. That is, until I learned from The Guardian that a new book had come out offering some of the more sensational revelations on this subject yet—including a former KGB agent who claims to have seen a memo circulating in the Washington Rezindentura in the 1980s that named Trump's full-page newspaper ads of the time (calling for things like the abandonment of the U.S. strategic alliance with Japan) as the Soviet intelligence "active measures" they were long rumored to be; a convoluted argument somehow linking these events to Jeffrey Epstein's secret blackmail operation; and so on. 

Conspiracy Theories

We are obviously living in an age of conspiracy—one of those great flare-ups of conspiracist thinking that are recurrent in American history. Once-fringe theories about global elite sex-trafficking rings and child murders, and even enormous space lasers,—all of them riddled with centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes hiding in plain sight—have migrated into the mainstream of one of America's two major political parties. As Francis Fukuyama recently observed, in a passage I've quoted now in multiple contexts: "There is a qualitative change in the nature of partisanship [...] reflected in poll data showing that a majority of Republican voters believe some version of QAnon theories about Democrats drinking children’s blood."

As Fukuyama rightly recognizes, this is a partisan phenomenon (only one of our two parties currently makes room for these cracked theories at the highest levels, and it is impossible to both-sides the issue). It is all too tempting, therefore, to see it as exclusively that. We can portray this as a delusion or psychosis that is rooted in the collective psyche of the Republican party alone—and viewed from that angle, there are in fact a few potential explanations for it that are inviting. 

Books as Messengers

 I was talking to my sister about possessions the other day, as she was recounting to me some recent successes she has had with selling old books and articles of clothing online. "I think I'm embracing minimalism," she said. I remarked that that made sense for a disciple of Marie Kondo. It was a kind of evolution. Once one had purged one's personal possessions of those objects that did not bring joy, one could then move to the next stage, and purge oneself of the joy-bringing objects as well. 

My sister replied that this evolutionary process made more sense than might at first appear. "When you are paring down your possessions to only the ones that bring joy," she said, "one of the things you start to realize is just how few of them do actually bring you joy." She then introduced me to the Kondo precept that you should listen to the "messages" your objects send you. The idea being that every possession has a message for you, and you just have to hear what it is. 

The Problem with Things

Continental European writers spent much of the 20th century being terribly interested in things. (Georges Perec even had a book with precisely that title.) And not just in thinking about things. But in worrying about them. There seems to have been general agreement that there was a problem with things. A crisis in the thing kingdom. People had become alienated from the things around them. The thing-question was the great topic of the age. Whole literary movements were devoted to it. The nouveau roman was about nothing else. There are few if any, it would seem, who did not share in this general anxiety.

Should we be anxious too? It's hard to know. It would have to be clear what exactly the problem with things is before we can assess how dire it might be. I'm not sure exactly what people meant when they said they had become worryingly alienated from the things around them. 

Addenda to earlier posts

In one of the earlier posts on this blog, I began with an observation that anyone who has ever written or created will recognize from their own experience: namely, that it is horrible to re-read any of one's own work. And this is usually so for the obvious reasons: the creations of one's younger self often strike one as pretentious, shallow, sloppy, and worse. Which is an awful feeling. But then, I noted, the alternative possibility is often no better. 

Uncomfortable as it may be to discover that something you wrote in the past is bad, that is to say, it can be even more unsettling to discover that it is good. As I put it in another post not long after: "This feels like an affront and a challenge to [one's] current, older self, who is supposed to be wiser but may in fact be duller and more complacent, like the elder lion who is chased out of the pride by his own offspring."

Mudita and Invidia

There is a section in the middle of Spinoza's Ethics, in which he runs through the list of human emotions, which he sees as compounded entirely out of three primary "affects": joy, sadness, and desire. Modern emotional psychologists would of course expand that list to five (if Inside/Out is to be trusted), but Spinoza seems not far off; and he is able to provide a quasi-persuasive, if unromantic, account of how every more complicated emotion in our repertoire might be boiled down to one of these three elements. Love, for instance (in Spinoza's telling) is the emotion we feel when our power of acting expands and we attach this sensation to another person; hate, that which we experience when it is constricted or restrained, and we attribute that to another. 

Moral sentiments therefore, in Spinoza's telling, come about through a kind of extension of these same feelings by analogy to other creatures who are like ourselves. If someone to whom we can relate has constraints placed upon their power to act, we feel sadness on their behalf, because we can recognize their similarity to ourselves and thus analogize their plight to our own condition. This, says Spinoza, is what we mean when we speak of the emotion of "pity." Next, he turns to the analogous situation respecting joy. Presumably, if we feel sadness at the misfortune of some other being like ourselves, by the same logic we feel joy at contemplating their happiness. Yet, Spinoza notes, "By what name we should call the joy which arises from another's good I do not know." (Curley trans.)

A Postscript to the Last Post

Continuing the topic of the most recent post, about AA and liberal religious communities, I almost forgot about this passage, in which DFW makes the analogy for us:

Demographic Trends

 Back when I was a student at a liberal New England divinity school, my classmates and I—at least, those of us who were theoretically on the "ministry track"—were all facing down a shared doom. We talked about it; we analyzed it; we discussed it together every day and sought for ways to evade it. The doom had a name: "Demographic trends."

The idea was that, due to some all-but-inevitable process of secularization and the way people in our age cohort lived their lives, millennials (they were still the only young people at the time) were drifting away from traditional congregation-based-Sunday-morning forms of worship. (Magnifying our terror of this phenomenon was our sense of guilt and complicity—none of us ever went to Sunday morning services either, unless we were tasked with leading them.) 

The question, therefore, was how to either arrest this trend or slow it down enough that it would allow us to have jobs for the duration of our future careers. 

Becoming the Adversary

In innumerable bad 'Nineties action flicks, there will appear a character who evinces superior wisdom by dropping gnomic quotations from East Asian textbooks of martial lore. As I understand it, there was a similar fad in business circles around this same time for applying the lessons of Sun Tzu and his ilk to the art of strategic confrontation in the marketplace (with this penchant for silly exoticism eventually reaching its zenith in a series of books devoted to the leadership lessons to be gleaned from the career of Attila the Hun). 

And as much as I can recognize that all of this is in bad taste, perhaps offensive, I am also not immune to its allure. I too have longed to be the kind of strategic mastermind who could dispense pearls from the Chinese Art of War or the Japanese Way of the Samurai at will, finding them unexpectedly apropos to a host of non-martial situations. Except, of course, that in my case, we would not be talking about either war or business, but would be applying the lessons contained in each to the no-less-conflict-laden worlds of politics and human rights advocacy. (After all, "human rights strategy" has in fact started to come into its own as an ostensible discipline, complete with course syllabi featuring Sun Tzu.) 

DFW and the Zoom Room of Doom

This past week I have been occupying the odd patches of 5:00 AM to 8:00 AM insomnia that seem to afflict me every day—at least when there is a stressful work meeting coming up or I am in the midst of a nerve-rattling mid-winter road trip—by finally getting around to reading David Foster Wallace's mammoth satire Infinite Jest—a tome with which I have had a love-hate relationship ever since I had college associates who outstripped me in readerly ambition by daring to take on this legendarily long and involved novel, written by an author with whom I have had a love-hate relationship ever since I read his books on rap music and infinity and found them both immensely readable and delightful and informed and hip and smart—and also undeniably smug and gloating. 

DFW may of course have reason to gloat, but I am not here to discuss the quality of Infinite Jest, which I am only just over a third of the way through in any event. Suffice to say it is—smugness and all—consumable and entrancing in much the way its subject-matter is purported to be, and it has filled me with desires much like those of its Substance-addicted characters to hole up someplace for days, unplug my phone, and indulge shamelessly in the drug of this book, telling myself this is the last time. The point I want to discuss here is not that the book is delicious and delightful and achingly sad and funny and poignant and smug and annoying and sexist (tending to divide the female fifty percent of the human population into either potential sex partners or a single all-giving mother figure) and many other things...

What We Argue About When We Argue About the Childcare Tax Credit

 The debate happening on Capitol Hill this week about whether or not to include expanded child tax credits in the COVID relief package has given new scope for a very old and supremely bad right-wing take on this issue to rear its head. The classic conservative argument would have us believe that this program, and other safety net benefits like it, would remove the incentive to work. As an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute put it—according to the Washington Post—historical experience allegedly reveals that "greater benefits led to a sizable decline in employment among single mothers, and research on the state and federal welfare reforms of the 1990s found that, on net, less generous benefits led to more work in the population affected."

Empirically, this does not hold up. Christopher Jencks looked into the historic data on this decades ago, in tussling with Charles Murray's Losing Ground, and concluded that there was no evidence of any linkage between the amount of welfare benefits going to single mothers and their propensity to join the labor force—indeed, he found that policy changes in the 1970s lowered the purchasing power of welfare benefits, yet unemployment increased in the aftermath of the change, whereas it had been reduced in a prior period of more generous benefits. 

Errata and Marginalia 017: Althusser

Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), Ben Brewster translation, originally published 1971. 

Here it is, at last! The ur-text, the point of origin, whence came all of those annoying people in college who described themselves as "Neo-Lacanian-Marxists." Here, reading this, one finally knows where they were getting this stuff, when they would bring off some strange and ungainly phrase, such as when an article in some specious humanities discipline apologizes to you in its opening sentence for being terribly "schematic" (a word that Althusser for unclear reasons always italicizes). 

Before looking into this book, I knew Althusser only as one of the "theorists" whom E.P. Thompson thought ridiculous. If there was a great division between the humanistic and the structural Marxists, it was clear to me as a teenage Marxist that I should side with the former. Now that I am older and less of a Marxist of any stripe, however, E.P. Thompson seems quite as ridiculous in his own right; so maybe one should not be so hasty to take sides in that particular tussle, and should go back to both authors, or either, and see what can be learned from them, knowing full well that they will be ridiculous for long stretches. 

Simulation Argument Reloaded

In two earlier posts now, I have expended energy on trying to clarify exactly what is wrong with the "simulation argument"—not because I think it is particularly likely to persuade anyone, nor because it would have any consequences if it did, but because it is a kind of epitome of faulty reasoning. If we can manage to pinpoint exactly where it goes astray, therefore, we can use what we have learned to defeat any number of other sophistries. More specifically, it will enable us to think our way out of that species of theological argument that seeks to work upon our sense of wonder at the inherent "implausibility" of our particular universe. 

Having made the earlier arguments, I don't intend to revisit them fully here. I have already made the case to the best of my ability that the core of the argument's fallacy is to be found in the "principle of indifference." I will, however, lay out these arguments in abbreviated form once again, so that we don't need to turn back to those earlier attempts.

Upsetting the Apple Cart

 So I guess this GameStop market frenzy is the latest way in which quasi-libertarian online subcultures are invoking their ostensible right to unrestricted personal action to ultimately compromise the freedom and wellbeing of all the rest of us. Reading about the online Reddit and Discord chat rooms that have launched this faceless and uncoordinated effort to drive up the stock price of otherwise failing companies—in order to reap enormous pay-outs on the part of those who are able to unload their shares and/or options before the house of cards collapses—one gets a distinctly Parler-ian, 4chan-ish vibe. In other words, we have a group of atomized young-ish men reveling in the anonymity and near-total exemption from social and legal constraints that the internet affords, no matter how destructive their actions may be to the rest of society. 

And, as with so much on the internet, it is also a space where extremes meet. Just as this postmodern, decentralized pump-and-dump scheme for the digital age has emulated the far fringe of the anti-governmental right; so too it has drawn the favorable attention of segments of the Left, who delight in its insurgent mentality—not to mention the schadenfreude of watching established investment firms and rich hedge fund managers suffer billion-dollar losses for having shorted the same stock prices that are now being artificially jacked up. At least one Wall Street Journal article covering the phenomenon cites—rather pointedly—a former Bernie Sanders campaign staffer who has sunk his own cash into this GameStop venture, arguing as he did so that the scheme is a chance to turn the tables on the supposed experts of the financial industry, scoring big for the outsiders and the newcomers. 

Errata and Marginalia 016: Horkheimer/Adorno

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 1987), originally published 1947, Edmund Jephcott translation. 

When one is young, one often aims to know everything all at once, and therefore to have read everything all at once; and since that proves impossible in such a compressed timeframe, one resorts to certain expedients. For instance, one starts to thin the list of books that one accepts as counting toward the real knowledge one wishes to acquire. 

For my college-age self, the application of this particular strategy meant tossing out anything that smacked—however faintly—of Critical Theory, postmodernism, and continental philosophy. Life is short, I declared, and I had seen enough early enough to believe that everything in the above-mentioned categories was just so many shades of mumbo-jumbo. (And I'm not saying I was entirely mistaken either, but hey—I remain more than happy to be proven wrong on further reading.)

A Passage from Suetonius

It will surprise exactly no one to learn that Southern segregationist Senator Robert Byrd—he of the bad old variety of racist Democrat, who modulated his views somewhat over the course of his career but nonetheless, it is worth recalling, helped filibuster key civil rights legislation, and began his political life as a member of the KKK—was also, when the issue arose in the early days of the Clinton administration, a fierce opponent of allowing gay men to serve in the military. (One form of bigotry oft begets another.) What is surprising, however, is the particular angle he adopted for his line of attack.  

In a record of conversations between himself and the president while in office—published as The Clinton Tapes—historian Taylor Branch details a rather striking conversation Clinton held with a group of elderly Democratic senators. The topic was that of whether or not out gay men should be able to serve in the armed forces. Lo, Robert Byrd was against it. And while he eventually got around to quoting the tenets of his fire-and-brimstone religion to justify his stance, the Bible was not the first authority he chose to cite in his favor. Instead, and rather unexpectedly, he turned to the reports of the scurrilous Roman historian Suetonius. 

Waiting for the Carthaginians

In a post from late November, I quoted from a very brief—about two paragraphs long—reflection on the Trump era by Francis Fukuyama; to me it still seems the most honest assessment that can be made of the fundamental mystery of the last four years. As a big thinker and explainer, of course, Fukuyama should of all people be ready to supply reasons and causes to account for the direction our country has taken—and he acknowledges that plenty of these might be and have in fact been put forward: economic dislocations caused by globalization, white backlash caused by a perceived shift in social values and relative prestige, etc. 

What none of these proferred reasons, however, can manage to explain is—why now? And why is it taking such an intensely aggressive and virulent form? "There is a qualitative change in the nature of partisanship that conventional explanations fail to capture," Fukuyama observes. We have seen a shift toward right-wing extremism, a mainstreaming of ideological currents that were previously kept to the fringes, that seems totally out of proportion to any particular concrete source of social strain or economic distress. 

"I'll be right there with you"

In the latter half of Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power— the 1960 classic discussed in somewhat more depth in the previous post—the author quotes at length an autobiographical passage from the ancient historian Josephus. The reason the section would have stood out to Canetti is readily apparent—it is astonishingly self-revealing; even self-incriminating. Josephus describes how he managed to evade capture and execution at the hands of the Romans, despite his role as a military commander in the Jewish revolt against their power, and it does not redound to his credit. 

The future historian tells us (in Canetti's citation) that he first managed to survive by taking shelter with a group of his soldiers in a cave. Then, when offered a chance to live by the Romans, he was inclined to trust them and deliver himself into their hands. His soldiers, however—whom he used to command—regard this as rank treason and cowardice. They urge him to stay in the cave so that they might all perish together. Josephus dissimulates, pretending to agree with them and suggesting they draw straws, with the loser in each case being killed by one of his comrades. 

Crowds and Power

Events of the last week prompted me to finally take down from my shelf a volume I have kept there throughout the final months of the Trump administration, assuming its day would eventually come. And lo, it has: Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power (Carol Stewart translation) has never felt more relevant. I am just shy of halfway through the book, but it is already clear—as I expected from its reputation—that Canetti's classic work seems to presage our time. It is impossible to turn to this volume in this week after January 6, 2021, and not see the insurrectionist assault on the Capitol foretold in its pages.

There is Canetti on the destructiveness of crowds: the impulse to break windows, to storm buildings, to smash plates—all attacks on the symbols of separateness and hierarchy within society (the need to "pull down established honour" being one of the well-known instincts of this mass, as Yeats says of "The Leaders of the Crowd"). Think of the pro-Trump mob carrying off the speaker's podium from the House of Representatives. Think of their desire to invade the inner sanctum of constitutional governance and halt the certification of the votes.  

Against Trumpius

Two nights ago, I wrote a post for this blog comparing our outgoing president to an ancient Roman aristocrat, Catiline, who conspired to overthrow the Republic through force of arms. I was basing the analogy on Trump's repeated effort to subvert the outcome of the election—including by trying to bully state officials into "finding" ballots that were never cast in his favor, as well as his plans to host a rally in front of the Capitol building on the day Congress was set to tally the electoral college votes and confirm Joe Biden's victory... but even with these marks against him, the comparison between the ancient and the modern demagogues might have seemed forced. After all, Trump, unlike Catiline, had at least not conspired in a violent coup attempt, right? 

Since that post went up, the events of the last forty-eight hours have shown the analogy rather more inescapably apt than it was even the first time around. I decided Catiline needed a further look. I therefore turned (having read Sallust in preparation for the first post) to the other great ancient account of the events of Catiline's plot: namely, Cicero's contemporaneous speeches in which he denounced the would-be usurper. What one discovers is that Cicero—who was serving at the time as consul, the highest executive position in the Republic—was in much the same position as we find ourselves now, on January 7, 2021. The plot has been unmasked. All serious doubt as to the seditionists' plans has vanished. 

The Conspiracy of Trumpius

I seem to recall an interview with Steve Bannon in the early days of the Trump presidency—before the two had become enemies—in which he referred to the president as a modern-day version of the "Gracchi"—the plebeian-friendly land reformers of Roman times. It struck me at the time as a profound abuse of would-be Classical erudition—not least because Trump's plutocratic policy agenda in office has evinced not the slightest desire to redistribute anything, least of all land, which he has hoarded to himself throughout his career the better to waste as much money as he can on tax-deductible business expenses and accelerated depreciation ("depreciated acceleration" as William Gaddis' J R calls it). 

A vastly more fitting Classical reference for Trump fell into my lap the other day, in the course of my attempt to catch up on all the Roman history I missed in college by taking the non-traditional path through the "Civ" sequence. Here I was, looking at the works of Sallust online, and a vaguely-familiar title suddenly took on new significance to me. "The Conspiracy of Catiline." Conspiracy, you say? Who was this Catiline again, and what was he conspiring to do? I looked it up—an aristocrat who sought to subvert the Republic and carry off a coup, before he was halted mid-course by the opposition of then-consul Cicero. That Catiline. What could be more fitting to the moment? I decided I had to read Sallust. 

Even Under Bad Emperors?

Well, here we are in a new year, 20 days out from the inauguration—far past the safe harbor deadline, long after the states certified election results and the electoral college voted to confirm them (without a single faithless elector), long after the Supreme Court rejected the last major legal challenge to the results, and after federal judges around the country threw out innumerable similar, lesser lawsuits—long after all these things... and still, Trump is plotting to overturn the results of the election. 

Once again, that is to say, the president has confirmed the worst that might have been said of him. The attempts to normalize him, to "both-sides" the issue, to dismiss criticism of Trump as so much partisan hype and hand-wringing, has run up against the final, irrefutable fact of the president's own behavior. 

This happens time and again! Trump makes life difficult for everyone, but perhaps no one suffers more under his reign than his would-be "respectable" defenders—the op-ed writers who say every couple of weeks, "Oh, we doesn't really mean that"—only to have Trump swing around days later and do exactly that.