Awaiting One's Daily Bread

 There is a moment in Italo Svevo's poignant early novel, As a Man Grows Older--one of two books the Triestene writer published during his period of obscurity as a young author, before he gave up literature in discouragement, only to be coaxed back decades later into setting pen to paper by an improbable and fateful friendship with James Joyce--when the novel's hapless and irresolute, yet touching and lovable protagonist Emilio (a forerunner in these qualities of Svevo's later and more famous literary creation Zeno Cosini) is suddenly reminded, by the sight of a group of laborers on a river, of his earlier socialist convictions. 

It occurs to him that these beliefs, his former political faith and the visionary dreams of human flourishing that they engendered, now seem very remote from him. It's not that he ever renounced them; they just seem distant from his present life. And at once this fact fills him with shame. "He was stricken with remorse for having betrayed his earlier ideals and aspirations," writes Svevo (De Zoete trans. throughout); "for the moment the whole of his present life seemed to him to be a kind of apostasy." 

GOP Tankies

Watching the GOP primary debate on live TV earlier this week, I found one of the more reassuring moments of the event to be simultaneously its most disturbing. This came when the moderators introduced the subject of U.S. support for Ukraine. One after another, the vast majority of the candidates on stage spoke in favor of maintaining U.S. military aid to Ukraine. This (setting aside nuanced disagreements on strategy for the moment) was the reassuring part: Despite our differences across party lines, most of us--it briefly seemed--can still agree on a few basic truths: Putin is a ruthless authoritarian; his invasion is bad; Ukraine is an ally, whose preservation as an independent state implicates the fate of the democratic West in general, and we owe them our support in their attempt to resist Russian aggression. 

The disturbing part was that, even though the majority of the candidates on stage voiced support for these consensus views, they do not actually represent the majority of the Republican party. The pro-Ukraine vote on stage may have amounted to about 87% of the candidates in the race-- but they collectively are polling in the single digits among likely GOP primary voters. The candidate who wasn't on stage-- the absent Trump-- is still attracting more support in the polls than all the others combined. And the only person present for the debate who disagreed with the rest on Ukraine is also the most representative of Trump's views on this subject--the lickspittle Vivek Ramaswamy, who spent his air time evidently trying to toady up to the absent former president in the hopes of an eventual cabinet post or even a VP spot on the ticket. 

Easter Eggs: Baker

As John Livingston Lowes proved better than anyone in The Road to Xanadu, there is exquisite intellectual pleasure—combining the satisfactions of scholarship, mystery, and the chase—to be found in tracking down exactly what an author was reading at the time they composed their works. And if anyone is likely to provide enough textual clues to complete the task, it is Nicholson Baker. Here's why:

Déjà vu

I spent much of the summer watching the looming GOP primaries with a kind of cynical detachment that now seems inexplicable to me. I of course can't imagine enduring another Trump presidency, but DeSantis seems nearly as awful, and his personal arrogance and sense of entitlement invite a feeling of schadenfreude, even when the obvious replacement, should he stumble and fall out of the gates, is the man who just tried to subvert American democracy. When one heard anecdotes out of DeSantis's self-applauding memoir about how superior he is in courage and awesomeness to all other mortals, it was hard to suppress an inner impulse to say, "Go get him Trump--take him down a peg!"-- even on the part of someone who knows full well--or thought they knew-- just how disastrous a Trump administration redivivus would be for the country. 

That all changed for me, though, on listening to the recent rounds of reporting on Trump's indictments. Of course, there was little in any of them to catch one wholly by surprise. But a few choice details made it all real to me again in a way that was fresh and living: Pence's testimony, for instance, that Trump had described him as "too honest" for his unwillingness to violate the Constitution; the fact that Trump insiders were openly discussing the Insurrection Act as something that might empower them to deploy the military to suppress opposition, in the event that their scheme to overturn the election provoked widespread unrest. In other words, it was borne in all over again to me-- something I should never have forgotten: this man tried to undo democracy! He tried to stage a coup and unlawfully retain power! He must never again be trusted anywhere close to the reins of authority!

If Only...

 One of the more baffling displays of culture wars run amok happening in my home town in Florida right now is the campaign that far-right officials have waged against the local hospital for its handling of the COVID-19 crisis. Their objection? That the hospital did not dose patients with experimental pseudo-treatments with no support from the FDA but an ardent following on the political right: things like the horse de-worming medication ivermectin and the anti-malarial drug once touted by Trump, hydroxychloroquine. No matter that a hospital needs to follow scientific advice on how to treat its patients or else risk liability. The facility and its staff were nevertheless put through the wringer merely for complying with FDA guidelines. 

In trying to understand how such an absurd controversy could even begin, my mother made a helpful observation: a lot of the local people leading the charge had lost loved ones to the pandemic. And, in a state of personal grief, it is easy to become obsessed with the haunting question of whether things could have gone differently: whether there was not some one thing that one could have done that would have prevented the catastrophe. Would my family member still be alive, people would ask themselves, if only the doctor had been willing to think outside the box--if only they had been willing to try one of these other less popular or mainstream treatments? 

What Would Randolph Do?

 The shambling figure of the early twentieth century critic, radical, and social prophet Randolph Bourne must forever be one of those ghosts that haunt the American left-liberal conscience in times of war; and now that we are nearly eighteen months into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with no end in sight, it's worth taking stock of how the liberal intelligentsia has responded to the conflict. 

Bourne, recall, was one of the few writers of the progressive generation who consistently and unbendingly opposed U.S. involvement in the First World War, and he castigated his fellow intellectuals searingly for their willingness to dupe themselves into backing the President's position. All too many became convinced that the instrument of war could be used for ideal social ends. Bourne, in expressing skepticism toward this proposition, stands out with the benefit of hindsight as uniquely prescient among his contemporaries.

Truth Vaccine

 In his collection Mythologies, the French critic Roland Barthes describes at one point a technique in counter-intuitive advertising which he dubs "Operation Astra." The process works like this: first, spend some time criticizing your own product. Acknowledge and emphasize all of its most notorious flaws. Outdo your very critics in deprecating your wares. This old thing? Terrible. Look at it! It's tattered; moldy; it has holes. Who'd want it?

This gains you credibility in the eyes of a jaded and leery public, sick of being told what to do and buy. 

Stockmanns

 When, as a teenager, I first heard the plot of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People described, I recall thinking that it was a strange way to illustrate the Norwegian dramatist's thesis about the heroism of the isolated individual. If Dr. Stockmann had been driven from his hometown for being a socialist or the village atheist, say, it would have made more sense to me. But the idea that the townsfolk would resent so keenly a scientific conclusion about their water supply that seemed inarguable, and that it was manifestly in their own interests to heed, struck me as implausibly pessimistic. This is not the sort of thing that gets politicized, I thought. 

Of course, this was a naive attitude for me to hold even in the context of the times: the second George W. Bush administration. In reality, public health has always been controversial, and was so even then. There was no halcyon era in which it was held to be above politics. People with financial interests impacted by the findings of scientists have always resented them for it and sought to discredit their work. In this regard, Dr. Stockmann's fictional experience could be analogized to the controversies over mass tort liability in the twentieth century: legal disputes and fiery public debates over cigarette smoke, lead paint, and other public health menaces. 

Running with the Pack

 Every few years I experience a great wave of conformism. "What if it is not, after all, too late for me," I ask, "to be like everyone else?" Why, after all, should I have created all these rules and prohibitions for myself—no this, no that? Why must I devote my life to chimeras and dreams that can never love me back—justice, virtue, and other abstractions? Why can't I just get a job like other people have, make an ordinary sort of living, and find meaning in the usual places—family and so forth. As I once wrote in a poem on this blog: 

One wonders if it is not
After all so easy
To tuck in the shirt and find the mate
And birth the baby and bring up the child
And have the large family and build the large house
And make the large money and lay off the coffee

And quiet the large doubts and leave the large terrors