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.