False Situations

 No sooner had I finished my recent post about Julien Gracq's 1951 novel The Opposing Shore than tensions flared between our real-life Orsenna and Farghestan in the Pacific: by which I mean Taiwan and the People's Republic of China. This week, the PRC military engaged in an unprecedentedly aggressive set of war games, completely encircling Taiwan in what can only be seen as a dangerous sign of escalating tensions between the countries—if not a threat of something even worse (like a looming invasion). 

As you may recall, the mythic nations in Gracq's novel are engaged in a long-simmering conflict in which there are no active hostilities—but neither has peace been officially declared. In this regard, Gracq's fictional premise could be regarded as a stand-in for any number of real-world geopolitical conflicts dating from the twentieth century that have never been formally resolved: the uneasy truce between North and South Korea, say—or, to the point here, the dispute over the political status of Taiwan. 

The Lyncher's Mentality

 In a recent run-down of Trump's meandering interview before the Economic Club of Chicago, two writers for Rolling Stone describe a uniquely bizarre moment. It should go down in the history books as perhaps quintessential Trump. Rarely has there been an episode of his rhetorical bombast that so completely encapsulated his character and combined so many of his most disturbing obsessions. 

The conversation was supposed to be about Trump's economic policies, but of course, he seized every chance to instead redirect the discussion to his pet topics: crime and immigration. At one point, according to the reporters, he suddenly pointed to a woman seated in the audience. Trump said she was a "beautiful" woman, and added that immigrants coming across the border "will kill you." 

The Masks We Wear

 Earlier this week, J.D. Vance sat down for an unusual unscripted interview with the New York Times. One of the first things that piques one's curiosity, as it does in any conversation with Vance, is the question of how exactly he manages to look himself in the mirror. How can he live with himself, after completely reversing his positions and selling out his own values so many times over the course of his career? 

The interviewer's polite way of edging into this topic was to tell Vance that she was not sure, going into the discussion, "which J.D. was going to show up." He has so many chameleon shades. Vance's response to this was revealing: "Isn't that how most people are?" As in: doesn't everyone have this gnawing emptiness and void inside that makes them able to contort themselves into new forms without remorse? 

Poets of the Event

 If the American people do decide to elect Donald Trump again, three weeks from now—future historians will be hard pressed to explain why exactly we decided to throw out our democracy after two and a half centuries of relatively stable existence. Don't believe any of the would-be sociological explanations they may provide. The United States didn't suffer defeat in any major wars on the eve of Trump's re-election. There was no obvious national humiliation. We were not experiencing a recession or widespread unemployment. Our economy was growing and remained the largest in the world. 

We had our share of valid grounds for discontent, to be sure; our society was still rife with many of the same inequities and dispossessions that had plagued it for the last two-and-a-half centuries—but that doesn't explain why now, why in 2024. Nor do people's legitimate grievances about society explain why so many collectively hallucinated that a raving narcissistic demagogue would solve any of them (especially since he had not managed to solve them the previous time he was in office, and in fact had left the country worse off and had tried to stage a coup on his way out the door). 

Our Firebug Problem

 We truly do have a Firebug problem in this election. What I mean by that is: no matter how clearly Trump telegraphs his violent and authoritarian intentions, people simply will not believe him. Thus, our nation is in the same position as the protagonist Biedermann in Max Frisch's 1950s play, The Firebugs. The evidence keeps piling up in his attic that his newfound guests intend to start a conflagration. They even brought drums full of petrol and lots of matches. But he simply refuses to take the threat seriously. 

The New York Times reports today, for instance, on the surprisingly large share of Latino voters who support Trump. Most do not endorse, when asked, his plans for mass deportation. But they also insist that Trump does not really mean it. Reporter Jazmine Ullua writes that those who are aware of his pledges tend to "believe he will not go through with such actions, because he did not the first time he was in office." Ruth Igelnick adds: "40 percent said people who are offended by Trump are taking him too seriously." 

A Visit to the Unworld

 Surely one of the most embarrassing chapters in the modern history of the Left is the era when all the seemingly thoughtful and intelligent progressive writers were letting themselves be taken in by the dozens as dupes of the Stalinist regime. There is almost no worse genre of left-wing literature than the 1930s fellow-traveling memoir touting collective farms as a charming success (while somehow managing to avert their eyes to the purges, famine, and secret police standing stage left). 

One after another, these writers visited the fatherland of the socialist revolution, and they returned to the West to offer starry-eyed accounts of the progress they had seen. There were endless paeans to tractors, from people who had survived carefully stage-managed Intourist trips that offered them a guided tour only of the various Potemkin villages that the Soviet state wanted them to see. And all too many never dared to peek behind the cardboard cutouts to see what was on the other side.  

Charitable Inconsistency

 I just finished reading James Hogg's rediscovered classic, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner—a Gothic novel on the theme of Protestant fanaticism that was published two hundred years ago, then forgotten for a century, until André Gide (who knew something about Protestant fanaticism) happened upon it in 1924 (the centennial year of its first publication). Since 2024 is now the novel's bicentennial, and its ghoulish elements befit the month of October, I suppose it is an appropriate time to write about it here. 

The novel works equally well as supernatural horror and a darkly comic satire on Calvinism. Put briefly, it tells the story of a man so thoroughly convinced of the truth of "absolute predestination" that he carries it to antinomian extremes. Since the justified have already been chosen from eternity for salvation, he reasons—then nothing they do in this life can possibly put their blessed future estate in jeopardy. Thus, they can sin with impunity. He therefore proceeds to commit murder and other atrocities, in the belief that no harm can ever come to the saints from their own actions.