Why we need Doris Lessing

Before all Nobel-oriented discussion turns to Al Gore, The Wife wanted to get in a few comments about another of this year's deserving winners, who, she rightly believes, has been sorely misunderstood.

Pay attention.

*******

My brief elation yesterday at learning that Doris Lessing had received the Nobel Prize for Literature was almost immediately thrashed by the ‘mixed’ reactions of the literary establishment to this long overdue recognition.

In Der Spiegel, Marcel-Reich Ranicki, a German literary critic renowned for his condemnation of well nigh anything and anyone but himself, voiced his ‘regret’ about the decision. ‘I would have expected Philip Roth,’ he sulked with his familiar splutter, reminding us that the Anglo-Saxon world had so many more deserving authors to offer than Lessing – of whose 50 (50!) books he’d read about three.

In the same Spiegel article, Denis Scheck, a youthful literary doyen, called the committee’s decision ‘politically good, but aesthetically bankrupt.’ Scheck did not let us in on how much (or how little) of Lessing’s oeuvre he had deigned to ingest, though I assume that – given his youth and the vacuity of his critique – it probably wouldn’t amount to more than a light lunch.

I also have to add that until yesterday I’d never heard of Master Scheck, but I was pleased to learn from his Wikipedia entry that we not only belong to more or less the same generational cohort, but also that we both took to reading at about the same, early age (a significant piece of biographical information that I will make sure to add to my own Wikipedia entry once I have it up and running).

Reich-Ranicki and Scheck, although at roughly opposite ends of the age spectrum, share membership in the vociferous anti-Lessing league, which always returns, with a persistence that borders on the obsessive, to the same hackneyed and unfounded prejudices from which its members seem to derive carte blanche to go around rubbishing her work at every available opportunity. These prejudices are:

a) Lessing is a bloody feminist.
b) Lessing is not Virginia Woolf.

Having said that, even those who celebrate Lessing seem determined to get her wrong. Among the more defensive responses was an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which opens with the following line: ‘But for a few weak books, Doris Lessing’s biography is flawless – it is all politically correct. The Nobel Prize for Literature appears to be standing in for the Nobel Peace Prize.’

Drivel like this confirms my sneaking suspicion that many journalists are simply not the sharpest tools in the shed. A politically correct biography!? Doris Lessing? A former Rhodesian Marxist who dumped her boring first husband for a German radical, abandoned two small children to go and live it up in London’s literary set and subsequently dabbled in Sufism and Sci-Fi only to spend most of the rest of her life railing against any form of political utopianism from feminism to Islamism?

Methinks that someone out there has some reading to do.

Moreover, the author of that article apparently has a hard time distinguishing biography from bibliography.

No, Lessing has not been indulging in the facile pleasantries of political correctness, whatever Harold Bloom, who also had an opinion about the Nobel Prize committee’s decision, might say about her (thereby revealing his own intellectual limitations).

In fact, she has spent much of her career mauling the self-comforting, self-satisfied ethical certainties with which she is now being falsely associated. In a 2001 interview, she rejected the very notion of political utopianism and pointed out its close links with madness – very much to the disappointment of the interviewer, who apparently had expected different opinions from Lessing. (Susie Linfield, “Against Utopia: An Interview with Doris Lessing,” Salmagundi 130/131 (2001): 59-74).

In her novel published in the same year, The Sweetest Dream, Lessing similarly dismantles the political pretensions of which she herself was an early adherent. In a narrative sweep spanning three decades, her story depicts the fractious domestic banality underpinning the high-flying political ideals amongst some of the more irrational individuals on the Left, especially through her portrayal of her character Johnny Lennox.

An archetypal self-appointed Marxist guru (are there any other kinds?), Comrade Johnny is busy organising the world revolution while neglecting his children and sponging off his former wife Frances. His talk infinitely bigger than his walk, he has a particular talent for getting others to pay his commitments and to take the fall for his failures.

When the novel opens, we meet Frances pondering a promising telegram she had received from Johnny three days before:

SIGNED CONTRACT FOR FIDEL FILM ALL ARREARS AND CURRENT PAYMENT TO YOU SUNDAY.

Experienced Lessing readers will know by the time they have finished reading the word ‘Fidel’ that the money he owes Frances will not be forthcoming. In fact, ‘Fidel’ is an efficient shorthand for ‘Johnny is an irresponsible bastard whose grandiose pseudo-revolutionary gestures conceal his real-world incapacities.’

A couple of pages later we meet the author of the momentous telegram in person, leaning ‘against the [kitchen] window, standing with his arms spread to take his weight on the sill [...] all bravado and – though he was not aware of that – apology.’

The image of Johnny ‘leaning’ against the window of course suggests his tendency to lean on others, an early hint at his pompously self-deluded personality that is the butt of Lessing’s sarcasm throughout the book – as it is here:

Around the table sat an assortment of youngsters, and [Johnny’s and Frances’s sons] Andrew and Colin were both there. All were looking towards Johnny, who had been holding forth about something, and all admiringly, except for his sons. They smiled, like the others, but the smiles were anxious. They, like [Frances] herself, knew that the money promised for today had vanished into the land of dreams (Why on earth had she told them? Surely she knew better!). It had all happened before. And they knew, like her, that he had come here now, when the kitchen would be full of young people, so he could not be greeted by rage, tears, reproaches – but that was the past, long ago.

Johnny spread out his arms, palms towards her, smiling painfully, and said, ‘The film’s off ... the CIA ...’ At her look he desisted, and was silent, looking nervously as his two boys.

‘Don’t bother,’ said Frances. ‘I really didn’t expect anything else.’ At which the boys turned their eyes to her; their concern for her made her even more self-reproachful.

She stood by the oven where various dishes were shortly to reach their moments of truth. Johnny, as if her back absolved him, began an old speech about the CIA whose machinations this time had been responsible for the film falling through.

Colin, needing some sort of anchor of fact, interrupted to ask, ‘But, Dad, I thought the contract ….’

Johnny said quickly, ‘Too many hassles. You wouldn’t understand … what the CIA wants, the CIA gets.’

Johnny is a typical Lessing radical – all mouth and no … well, you know what I mean; like Jasper in The Good Terrorist (1985) – another fashionable commie – he is a political performance artist whose survival relies on other peoples’ credulity as well as their hard work and generosity.

As Johnny is going around spreading the word (and a not insignificant amount of his seed), Frances does the nitty-gritty: feeding him as well as a multitude of semi-damaged individuals sheltering in and passing through her home (including a daughter he had fathered with another woman). To his rather pathetic end, Johnny exists in a world of his own, oblivious to the consequences of his actions, while Frances, however ambiguous her self-abandonment, at least takes responsibility for others – at much cost to her heart and bank account and, often, against her better judgement.

There is nothing utopian or politically correct about Lessing’s protagonist. Frances is Everywoman, trying to make do in a world of radically different individuals with conflicting interests and expectations, only to realize that, however hard one tries, there will always be plenty of loose ends left over. It’s those with the grand ideas that have it wrong: the café politicos and middle-class feminists wasting precious time making molehills into mountains. Consider Julie, Frances’s right-thinking journalist colleague at The Defender, a leftish daily modeled on The Guardian, who flies into

a fit of tearful rage when hearing on the radio that it was the female mosquito that is responsible for malaria. ‘The shits. The bloody fascist shits.’ When at last persuaded by Frances that this was a fact and not a slander invented by male scientists to put down the female sex – ‘Sorry, gender’ – she quietened into hysterical tears and said, ‘It’s all so bloody unfair’ (226).

Now, how many ‘politically correct’ feminist icons go around smacking the universal sisterhood upside the head with the more irrational bits of their creed? Like Lessing, Frances resists succumbing to ideology, although at the cost of being excluded from much of what is going on.

However, I would hate to give the impression that Lessing’s novels are all about petty conflicts and domestic squabbles. In The Sweetest Dream, as in other novels, Lessing takes the old feminist adage terribly seriously equating the personal and the political. The political silliness of Comrade Johnny & Co. has a catastrophic counterpart in a fictive postcolonial African country reigned by nepotism, corruption and empty revolutionary sloganeering. Where Johnny merely accumulates debts, those in charge of ‘Zimlia’ accumulate deaths.

The longstanding misjudgment of Lessing and her work, both by her supporters and detractors – with a few notable exceptions, such as Umberto Eco – suggests that this nomination for the Nobel Prize is more than well deserved.

Whatever the Reich-Ranickis and Schecks of this world might suggest, Doris Lessing is no intellectual, political or aesthetic lightweight: like the best writers, she resists labels and fashions and, far from being the chattering classes’ favourite comforter, has spent the last decades antagonizing precisely that stratum of society (often, it seems, without them noticing). The fact that she has done this without ‘playfully’ (how I hate that word!) fiddling with the fundamental precepts of reality and managed to resist the dogma of subversive metatextuality in favour of good old-fashioned realism, makes her all the more likeable and significant.

It is for precisely those reasons that we need Doris Lessing.

Congratulations!

A nobel choice

Wonderful...

Congratulations, Ms. Lessing.

A weird CHIP on their shoulders

Via This Modern World, I ran across a story that seems to have been generating an enormous amount of angry ranting in the right-wing assholosphere.

The issue is a bit complex and involves the ever-exciting topic of American health-care policy, but it does seem to speak to a wider issue as well, so bear with me.

The background boils down to this:

There is a government programme (with federal money being administered by individual states) called the 'State Children's Health Insurance Program' (SCHIP). As the Baltimore Sun describes it,

Popular with the states, the health insurance program, also known as SCHIP, covers 6.6 million children from modest-income families that are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.

(Note for non-Americans: Medicaid is the public health insurance programme for poor people.)

Democrats, with support from a number of Republican representatives and senators, passed an act (H.R. 976) aimed at making changes to SCHIP: the programme was to be expanded to include some 4 million more children at a cost of $35 billion over the next five years, the costs to be funded out of increased tobacco taxes.

President Bush signalled his intention to veto the act when it reached his desk.

In response, Democrats invited a 12-year-old boy, Graeme Frost, to deliver their response to the president's weekly radio address.

Now, I have my own qualms about this kind of emotive political message-making: I don't know why rational adults can't have a reasonable discussion about social policy without having to push the sympathy button.

But in the world of American politics, these sorts of things are standard operating procedure, something Republicans know all too well, and this has long been the case, particularly in issues related to education, families, and disability.

Then, too, perhaps 'putting a human face' on abstract policy questions isn't always a bad idea.

Context, after all, is sometimes helpful. (For example: $35 billion over five years is indeed a lot of money, but it pales in comparison to the as much as $190 billion which may be spent next year alone in fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a figure that itself excludes all other military spending.)

And Graeme, in this case, fit the role, as the Sun notes:

Graeme and his 9-year-old sister, Gemma, were passengers in the family SUV in December 2004 when it hit a patch of black ice and slammed into a tree. Both were taken to a hospital with severe brain trauma. Graeme was in a coma for a week and still requires physical therapy.

Bonnie Frost works for a medical publishing firm; her husband, Halsey, is a woodworker. They are raising their four children on combined income of about $45,000 a year. Neither gets health insurance through work.

Having priced private insurance that would cost more than their mortgage - about $1,200 a month - they continue to rely on the government program. In Maryland, families that earn less than 300 percent of the federal poverty level - about $60,000 for a family of four - are eligible.

So, the story so far:

1. there's an established health care programme;
2. a bill has been passed through both houses with bi-partisan support to expand it in response to a real social change;
3. the president threatened to veto it;
4. the bill's supporters presented a family as an example of the kind of people who might be assisted by this bill and their son appeared in a radio broadcast.

So far, so good.

However, the president (who had proposed increasing the funding for the programme by only $5 billion over five years), made good on his promised veto.

Which is bad enough.

But the really disgusting part of the story is the hateful campaign by the more wingery-nuttery right-wing bloggers to smear the family.

Think Progress summarises the sort of bile being spewed:

Conservatives have more recently turned their targets on young Graeme Frost himself. A poster at the Free Republic propagated information alleging that Frost was actually a rich kid being pampered by the government. Among other bits of information, the post by the Freeper “icwhatudo” asserts that Graeme and his sister Gemma attend wealthy schools that cost “nearly $40,000 per year for tuition” and live in a well-off home.

The smear attack against Graeme has taken firm hold in the right-wing blogosphere. The National Review, Michelle Malkin, Wizbang, Powerline, and the Weekly Standard blog have all launched assaults on the Frost family. The story is slowly working its way into traditional media outlets as well.

Very good antidotes to this toxic brew are available from Joe Gandelman, Whiskey Fire, Lawyers, Guns and Money, Atrios, Ezra Klein, and John Cole.

I've browsed around in the links provided by Talking Points, and really, you have to shake your head.

There is a lot of discussion, for instance, among right-wing bloggers about how this family is 'not really poor' and a great number of snide comments along the lines of 'ah, they can send their kid to private school but they need assistance getting health insurance' and speculation regarding their house and small business.

A lot of this has involved just plain lying, as TP points out:

Here are the facts that the right-wing distorted in order to attack young Graeme:

1) Graeme has a scholarship to a private school. The school costs $15K a year, but the family only pays $500 a year.

2) His sister Gemma attends another private school to help her with the brain injuries that occurred due to her accident. The school costs $23,000 a year, but the state pays the entire cost.

3) They bought their “lavish house” sixteen years ago for $55,000 at a time when the neighborhood was less than safe.

4) Last year, the Frosts made $45,000 combined. Over the past few years they have made no more than $50,000 combined.

5) The state of Maryland has found them eligible to participate in the CHIP program.

It is also noted there that:

Right wing bloggers have been harassing the Frosts, calling their home numerous times to get information about their private lives.

One of those apparent blogger-stalkers, it seems, is someone called Michelle Malkin, who has gone probing around the Frosts' property and who, at her blog, makes all kinds of unfounded speculations about them. I've never heard of her before but she's a nasty piece of work, and undoubtedly for this reason she seems to have become some kind of right-wing super blogger. And part-time cheerleader. Or something.

But if this is what passes for investigative journalism on the right, then I'm very disappointed.

Leave that family alone. What the fuck is wrong with you people!?

But in a revealing comment, Mark Steyn points out that--despite the enormous amount of almost psychotically obsessive energy he and his cohorts have used in trying to expose the sinister truth behind an ordinary lower-middle-class family who are having difficulty with paying the health bills--none of this really matters:

But one thing is clear by now: Whatever the truth about this boy's private school, his family home, his father's commercial property, etc, the Frosts are a very particular situation and do not illustrate any social generality - and certainly not one that makes the case for an expensive expansive all-but universal entitlement.

A more basic point is made very robustly by Kathy Shaidle: Advanced western democracies have delivered the most prosperous societies in human history. There simply are no longer genuinely "poor" people in sufficient numbers. As Miss Shaidle points out, if you're poor today, it's almost always for behavioral reasons - behavior which the state chooses not to discourage but to reward. Nonetheless, progressive types persist in deluding themselves that there are vast masses of the "needy" out there that only the government can rescue.

Mm hmmm...

Interesting: how does Steyn know that the Frosts don't 'illustrate any social generality'? And how can he say that, having determined that the truth about them doesn't matter? That seems logically impossible to me.

Moreover, pointing out that nobody in the West lives like a medieval peasant, while true, is...well, sort of bizarre.

There was no shortage of commentators in the Victorian era who said exactly the same thing about poverty as Steyn (i.e., not that it is often caused by personal failures or inadequacies--which any sane person knows--but that it has only that sort of cause), while at the same time there were millions of people who were living in a situation that most Republicans (maybe even Steyn) probably recognise as wretched. But in many ways, the poor of nineteenth-century Manchester were probably living better than many human beings who had gone before them. However, the value of that statement is completely lost on me. What is the timeless and unchanging definition of poverty Steyn would use?

More to the point: why is he making that point when what is under discussion here is not giving the Frosts some kind of free luxury car, but helping them to pay for affordable health care.

But I don't think Steyn is really interested in poverty. Not at all. In fact, I'm quite sure of it.

And here a further insight into this mind-set, from the 'robust' Ms. Shaidle whom Steyn cites so approvingly:

That's why I don't care about the poor. They're no more real than Bigfoot. Those we and these lefty Christians call "poor" are "poor" because they've made a series of stupid choices; spend all their (actually, my) money on lottery tickets, beer, tattoos and manicures; are suffering from undiagnosed but easily treated mental illnesses; had too many kids too young; smoked behind the gym while I spent recess in the library, etc etc etc.

I grew up with them. They were jerks and losers.

There is definitely something to appreciate here: witness the true voice of blinding anger that motivates a large segment of the right-wing without all that sweet vaporous talk about 'compassion'.

Ah, the moment of clarity.

In all their bug-eyed fury, though, the point that she, Steyn and all the rest seem to miss in this particular discussion is that CHIP is (rather explicitly) not aimed at 'the poor'. Were the Frosts 'poor', they might be eligible for Medicaid.

Moreover, CHIP is aimed at the children of the families to which it would apply. (The act mentioned above would remove most adults from eligibility in those states that have decided to include them, targeting it more clearly at children.) I'd be interested in knowing how they can be blamed for their predicament. (Perhaps all that time spent enjoying recess.)

The political philosophy, if we can call it that, of Shaidle and many other like her seems to add up to this: 'I'm doing fine, so fuck you!'. It's a sentiment that nicely encapsulates the growing right-wing contempt, not only for the long-term (and maybe even multi-generational) poor, such as the legendary 'welfare queens' of yore, but also for any kind of failure whatsoever.

While it might be obvious that if you're irredeemably dysfunctional enough, you will likely end up poor, I'm not sure why it is necessary for right-wing pundits to drone on about this at such length, unless it's just to allow them to feel all good and superior about themselves by looking down on other people.

Liberals already know that not all the poor are noble.

It is, however, also possible to spend your recesses in the library, not take drugs, avoid teenage pregnancy, and work hard all your life and still end up, at some point, losing out or being blindsided by one of life's many nasty little surprises (illness, injury and unemployment most obviously among them).

As I've noted before, anyone, can point to instances of people who land in poverty through bad choices. Big fucking deal.

I've also known many people (and known many more people who've known people) who have ended up in difficult financial situations--too much debt, no health insurance, crap job, no education, whatever. Some of these were bad choices, some were bad luck. Most were some combination of those.

But even if someone is struggling to get by (even on a Western lower-middle-class level that puts them well above the quality of life in the stone age) due to 'bad choices', I don't see the point or value or morality in denying them--or their children--access to medical care.

The weird caricature of reality offered by Steyn and Shaidle is intriguing though: The right-wing used to just demonize the presumably idle poor; now it seems that they are offering a more big-tent version of hatred, taking aim at those who work but nevertheless are finding it difficult to make ends meet. They think that if you find yourself in such a difficult impasse and seek any variety of public assistance you are, by definition, a loser.

However, the notion that social problems are simply based upon 'behavioral reasons' is absurd. In an economic slowdown, for instance, unemployment and poverty go up: is that simply due to an increase in loserdom?

As the New York Times reported earlier this year, the numbers, for instance, of the uninsured in America have been growing steadily, and the fastest growing group are 'solidly middle-class people'. A mad outbreak of loseritis? A generation coming of age that is suffering the after-effects of smoking behind the gym rather than sitting in the library at recess? A sudden plague of irresponsibility striking the land?

Or maybe--just maybe--it's a sign that there is something wrong with the way health insurance is supplied and that an incremental expansion of government assistance in some cases might be in order.

Or consider the wide variation in the percentage of people without health insurance across America: in the Midwest it's about 11.4%, in the South about 19%. Are Southerners simply 66% more loserish?

Finally, the vehemence of the right-wing attacks is all the more bizarre, since, as John Cole points out, the Frost family appears to have all the characteristics most Republicans say American families should have:

If you look through this family’s dossier, it appears they are doing everything Republicans say they should be doing- hell, their story is almost what you would consider a checklist for good, red-blooded American Republican voters: they own their own business, they pay their taxes, they are still in a committed relationship and are raising their kids, they eschewed public education and are doing what they have to do to get them into Private schools, they are part of the American dream of home ownership that Republicans have been pointing to in the past two administrations as proof of the health of the economy, and so on.

In short, they are a white, lower-middle-class, committed family, who is doing EVERYTHING the GOP Kultur Kops would have you believe people should be doing. They aren’t gay. They aren’t divorced. They didn’t abort their children. They aren’t drug addicts or welfare queens. They are property owners, entrepeneurs, taxpayers, and hard-working Americans. I bet nine times out of ten in past elections, if you handed this resume to a pollster, they would think you were discussing the prototypical Republican voter. Hell, the only thing missing from this equation is membership to a church and an irrational fear of Muslims and you HAVE the prototypical Bush voter.

Or, as a commenter at Whiskey Fire eloquently put it:

Let me get this straight. This guy's a cabinet maker, and these geniuses are leering about how nice his cabinets are?

Given that those people basically live in downtown Baltimore, I'd be willing to bet that they bought a a rundown house in a gentrifying neighborhood on the cheap so that Mr. Frost, who is good with his hands, can fix the place up and they can turn the house around for a profit. His business, which is a couple of blocks away in downtown Baltimore, basically comes from all the people fixing up all the old brownstones in the area.

In the meantime, he has to send his kids to school and the public schools in Baltimore don't really seem like the ideal option. So he looks around, and finds that he can send them to a private school using their assistance program.

But given that $45000 dollars, while a decent living all things considered, isn't a whole hell of a lot of money, especially when there are six mouths to feed, after everything's said and done with he just can't make things work with health insurance (when it comes down to it, after the mortgage, food, clothes and all the rest of the expenses of raising a family, even another $600 is no small potatos).

Then the children get into a catasrophic accident, the family is suddenly looking at medical bills it can't pay. They are in such bad straits that the school is doing fundraisers for them. This government program helps them; makes their lives better in a fundamental way.

And these jokers are pissed off about it.

Amazing.

Apparently, the only thing the far-right can come up with in fighting this issue is to launch a scummy personal attack on a family and indulge in a lot of back-patting self-aggrandisement that seems to have resulted more from reading Atlas Shrugged than paying much attention to reality.

What losers.

PZ Myers has also joined in, with a post that is particularly relevant to residents of Minnesota.
Bitch Ph.D. (I'm linking to the main site so you can track updates) has lots of constructive political-action type info for anyone who wants to assist in overturning this veto.

Going out on a line

One of the more exhausting topics of debate is that regarding the merits of the respective ways of life in Europe and the United States.

Not that it's a debate I avoid, exactly, and it's something about which I've got my own strong views.

But I've increasingly noticed that these kind of discussions tend to generate far more heat than light, not least since the notion of what constitutes the 'good life' is a highly personal one.

Moreover, when two people on opposite sides of the issue come to rhetorical blows, the statistics flow fast and furious, regardless of their relevance, comparability, or ability to answer the question of which place is 'better'.

(And there are so many things to pick from: GDP, productivity, gini coefficients, social mobility, homicide rate, trade deficit, currency value, home ownership, health insurance coverage, life expectancy...etc., etc...)

What is more, partisans on both sides tend to exaggerate both their praise and their criticism. Perry Anderson may be right, for example, to puncture the 'illimitable narcissism' and 'political vanity' of some of the more high-flown rhetoric of Europe's recent boosters, even if I think that his recent LRB article is far too nitpicking and gloomy about the EU in general.

But given the volume and venom of its detractors from abroad (particularly by the American right) and the constant jeremiads from within (in Germany anyway), I have to say that I've found at least parts of the more recent wave of pro-European assertiveness to be a very welcome balance.

This has been more the case with Will Hutton's relatively down-to-earth (if dry) analysis than Jeremy Rifkin's more stratospheric philosophising, and in the end it is probably only in some middle ground between The New European Century and Eurabia that we are likely to find that pesky thing known as reality.

However, one of the even more fundamental problems with this discussion is that it tends to go somewhere over the heads of everyday experience--focusing relatively too much on ideological abstractions and large-scale institutional frameworks while giving rather too little attention to life as it is actually lived.

As I've suggested, for those Americans who even think about it (which is maybe a minority in any case), Europe really doesn't exist, except as a blank screen for the projection of their fantasies and nightmares. If you're a liberal, you admire (selected) bits of it; if you're a conservative, you find (selected) bits of it abhorrent.

(Part of this, it occurs to me, might have something to do with the difficulty of translating political language across the ocean. In Germany, for instance, the party which most assertively advocates far-reaching free-market reforms and smaller government is not 'conservative' but rather 'liberal', while conservative parties tend to remain relatively statist and corporatist. For their part, the environmentalist 'greens' have, as far as I can tell, nearly as many conflicts with the left as they do with the right (though they have tended to lean leftwards on cultural issues) whereas greenish Americans are almost certainly to find their home amidst the Democrats.)

A similar lack of understanding occurs when Europeans look at America, of course, as I realised when I taught German university students about American culture in my former incarnation as a language teacher. For instance, I had previously not been aware that America 'has no welfare state' or that 'most Americans have to work 3 or 4 jobs just to get by'. To teach is to learn, as they say. (Of course, there were the opposing views: students who had spent a high-school year in New York City or San Francisco saw 'America' through their own set of utopian goggles...)

With this somewhat elaborate prologue in mind, then, I was pleased to read Georgetown professor Patrick Deneen's positive, clear-eyed and reasonable evaluation of European lifestyles that appeared--and here I was surprised, I must admit--in the Dallas Morning News.

There are several things to like about Deneen's article, 'There's a lesson in Europe's gardens, woodpiles and chickens'. (Via the excellent Atlantic Review; however, you might read the comments section for an example of just how exhausting the debate about the transatlantic qualities of life can be.)

One very worthwhile point is that he eloquently and succinctly sums up what I was saying above, about Europe being effectively non-existent for many (perhaps most) Americans, by noting that views of Europe have become caught up in America's 'culture wars':

According to the progressive left-wing view, Europe is the ultimate "blue state." Progressive in its taxation, generous in its health policies, loose in governing marriage and euthanasia, it is praised as a nirvana of easygoing libertarianism.

According to the right-wing narrative, Europe is in the throes of cultural suicide, a statist nightmare with its churches abandoned and cradles empty, incapable of dealing with the threat of eventual Islamic domination given dwindling birth rates.

Deneen also puts his finger on (and then helps to counteract) a further problem:

According to both narratives, Europe is largely reducible to Amsterdam, Brussels and the Hague.

In facing this view, Deneen usefully draws attention to a different kind of Europe, the provincial one that most Americans too often overlook.

It also happens to be the one I'm most familiar with, having lived in it for more than the last six years, in various smallish towns (and one small city) in southern Germany.

And in that rural and small-town Europe, Deneen finds many everyday (and perhaps easily overlooked) things that are worth considering:

Nearly every household seems involved with the land in some way or another, whether through a small garden and wood stand or a larger farm. In the back yard of many homes, one still finds chickens that roam free; fruit trees that are now bearing apples, pears and cherries that will be made into jam; water barrels that catch rainfall with which families water their plants. Nearly every yard has an enormous pile of wood, stacked carefully and in perfect symmetry.

Also in nearly every yard is a compost heap. One pays for garbage by weight, so every incentive is to avoid creating or accumulating trash. Individuals must pay for plastic bags at supermarkets, an expense most people avoid by bringing their own canvas bags.

He concludes:

The Europeans I have seen are light years ahead of us in energy conservation and will weather the storm of rising energy costs better than we in America. Indeed, the combination of local economies, nearby productive farmland outside every town, viable public transportation and widespread use of alternative energies points to a culture that has never abandoned sustainable communities in the way that America willfully and woefully has done over the past 50 years.

There are points at which one might protest that Deneen's vision itself is just a bit too rosy, where it comes across as an almost Walden-esque dream that sees only the green landscape and overlooks the IKEA or hypermarché that blights it. Also, there are undoubtedly rural communities in the US where at least some of these factors are also present.

And that's true.

Still, having read his essay I considered our own provincial European life (that is, the one that The Wife and I share), and it was something like looking into a mirror.

Now, we don't have a chicken running freely in the yard (though I'm now sorely tempted to get one); however, we do have a woodpile (its symmetry rather imperfect, I must admit), a rain-barrel, a compost heap, fruit trees and a small-but-productive garden (this year's highlight--all to the credit of The Wife--several kilos of delicious tomatoes and some excellent green beans).


Moreover, our town is rather densely zoned and there are three supermarkets within easy walking distance and, normally, we do walk. Our rubbish--as elsewhere in Germany--is divided up in half a dozen ways, and thus the amount of Restmüll (i.e., that which cannot in some way be recycled or put in the compost heap) is incredibly small. The bottled drinks we buy come in deposit bottles which are re-used. Although only home to about 25,000 people, the town is well-served by public transit and the winding bicycle paths passing through the vineyards and fields around us, meaning that you could commute rather a long way by bike without having to risk confrontations with auto traffic.

We don't have a clothes dryer (this will become a more significant point somewhat further down), nor do we have air-conditioning and our fridge is (quite literally) laughable by American standards.

Now, don't get the idea that I'm patting myself on the back here as some kind of noble super-green exemplar. Not only would I not do that, it's not the point.

The interesting point is that while a commitment to this kind of lifestyle would likely mark you out as some kind of tree-hugging-hippie-freak in most parts of America, across at least a significant stretch of provincial Europe (at least the German-Austrian-Swiss bit that Deneen notes) it would be considered a normal way of life. It is just assumed that this is a good way to live. And much of that assumption has (relatively) little to do with 'politics'.

As Deneen writes:

In a revealing moment, my father-in-law pointed to the solar panels and the wood piles and the gardens and the compost heaps and told me that they were conservative – meaning that they represented the effort to conserve the goods of life, to preserve a community that can sustain itself and to pass on a cultural inheritance that has been bestowed upon them.

In America, it is our liberals who praise the liberties of Europe while overlooking the conservative impulse of its self-restraint. Meanwhile, our conservatives condemn the statism of Europe without understanding that efforts to conserve – to be conservative – require the active support and laws of government in order to combat the tendencies of markets to produce waste and undermine thrift.

And here, perhaps, is a useful lesson in transatlantic relations.

Now, I could end here...indeed, I intended to.

But then I was plagued by some second thoughts: maybe, I was thinking, just maybe I'm overdoing the European-American differences when it comes to everyday life.

Maybe, just maybe they're not so different after all...

...and then I saw a television report about a struggle being carried on by various people in different parts of America. A struggle for freedom and for energy efficiency. A struggle, indeed, for 'conservation' in the sense that Deneen's father-in-law would understand.

They want to hang up their wash on clotheslines.

Yes. That's it.

If you think hanging up your clothes to dry should probably be the greatest non-issue of all non-issues, then I'm with you.

But, believe me, dear reader, last Sunday evening I was sputtering obscenities at my television screen like I haven't in a long, long time. (A few of which, you might note, have also seeped into this blog.)

Because, dear reader, it seems that there are parts of America where hanging up your laundry is Against the Rules.

I was flabbergasted. Was this some kind of health-and-safety thing gone wild: were they concerned that children (their brains perhaps addled by playing with the latest leaden toys from China) were becoming tangled in the wires? Was there an epidemic of toddlers choking to death on clothespegs?

No. It turns out it is a lot...weirder...than that.

I'll let the hippies at the Wall Street Journal explain it (emphasis added):

To Susan Taylor, it was a perfect time to hang her laundry out to dry. The 55-year-old mother and part-time nurse strung a clothesline to a tree in her backyard, pinned up some freshly washed flannel sheets -- and, with that, became a renegade.

The regulations of the subdivision in which Ms. Taylor lives effectively prohibit outdoor clotheslines. In a move that has torn apart this otherwise tranquil community, the development's managers have threatened legal action. To the developer and many residents, clotheslines evoke the urban blight they sought to avoid by settling in the Oregon mountains.

"This bombards the senses," interior designer Joan Grundeman says of her neighbor's clothesline. "It can't possibly increase property values and make people think this is a nice neighborhood."

Yes. A clothesline 'bombards the senses'. That's very interesting Ms. Grundeman. (Knowing that you think that, I'd be interested in seeing what kind of 'interiors' you 'design', actually.)

Now...I like to think of myself as a sane, tolerant and reasonable person. But, really, what kind of over-sensitive, arrogant, puritan, yuppie bullshit is this? I'm sorry, anybody who thinks that way--even an interior designer who just wants to live in a 'nice neighborhood'-- is a complete and utter fuckwit.

'Urban blight'? What has happened in America?! No, really I want to know.

Listen, I grew up in a Chicago suburb that, while far from posh, was definitely respectable. My parents, like most of our neighbours, were certainly house proud: the lawn was regularly mowed (didn't I know it...), the garden was well-maintained and the house regularly painted.

And, twice a week, like clockwork, the laundry was done and, if the weather was right (and even when it was kind of iffy) that laundry would go 'out on the line' in the backyard. Back in the 50s my father had even sunk posts in cement in an ideal, sun-bathed spot to make this possible.

But my own memories do not stretch back to some forgotten era: I'm not even 40 yet, and it was often one of my chores to hang up the wash. That might be the reason that this whole thing gets me so much.

You see, we had a dryer. We were not in the ghetto.

It was just that my parents (people who --growing up on different sides of the Atlantic--remembered the depression and had been old enough to participate in winning the Second World War) thought that it was better to have all that fresh air out there drying our clothes. Why use the dryer when you have the sun? For free. This involved saving energy, of course, but, more importantly for both of them probably, also saving money. And they just thought the clothes and sheets smelled better.

They would have seen the point that something like 6% of household energy usage goes to drying clothes, but for them--Reagan voters...Nixon voters...Goldwater voters for christ's sake --this was just a sensible thing to do.

To save. To conserve.

And this is where I think this issue returns us (at least those of you who are still along for the ride) to the 'lesson' in Deneen's article.

Across the street from our house here in Germany, for instance, is an old (1930s) apartment complex, and during the summer we regularly have our senses 'bombarded' by our neighbours laundry hung up to dry.

Do you think that I have ever, once, even for a fraction of a moment given this a second thought? No. People who do worry about such things have way too much time on their hands and/or too few problems in their lives.

A person, perhaps, like one of the figures in the television report I saw: Penny Lewis, from Poughkeepsie NY, where you can be fined up to $100 for hanging out the laundry. Having taken it upon herself to enforce the rules of her community, Lewis regularly drives around (yes, of course she drives...and as it turns out, I think she was driving some kind of enormous fuel-guzzling truck...) to look for people to report, even heaping verbal abuse on those she happened to find in the process of hanging up their laundry.

What is somehow so galling to me is not just the energy issue, or a lack of respect for a certain kind of sensibly traditional, even 'conservative' way of life. (Even if those do bother me.)

No, it's also what seems to be a growing trend in American life. The WSJ:

Nationwide, about 60 million people now live in about 300,000 "association governed" communities, most of which restrict outdoor laundry hanging, says Frank Rathbun, spokesman for the Community Associations Institute, an Alexandria, Va., group that lobbies on behalf of homeowners associations.

'Association governed' has a nice kind of 'town-hall democracy' ring to it, but in some ways, it seems to me that they have mainly served to create a small-minded tyranny of the majority via a suburban commissariat whose main goal is to enforce conformity to ridiculous rules.

Curiously, I have no doubt that many of the people living in those communities would bellow rather loudly about their American 'freedom', while at the same time threatening their neighbours with legal action for violating 'covenants' (are they really called that?? Jesus...) stipulating that no toys are left in the front yard of all those houses that must be painted in matching 'medium to dark tones.'

Call this what you like, but the American spirit (at least as I understand it) it ain't.

Consider the case of Susan Taylor, reported in the Journal article and also featured in the Weltspiegel report I saw on Sunday:

Ms. Taylor in Bend had always used a clothesline before moving to the subdivision in 1996. Awbrey Butte's Covenants, Conditions and Restrictions, established by local developer Brooks Resources Corp., require that "clothes drying apparatus...shall be screened from view." Not an easy task in a community where fencing is also "discouraged" in the covenants.

The clothesline ban gave Ms. Taylor pause when she moved here, she says, but she and her husband decided they could live with it. Then, in May, she heard an environmental lawyer on the radio who "talked about this narrow window of opportunity for us to respond to global warming," Ms. Taylor recalls. "I said, 'Dang it, that's it. My clothesline is going up.' "

Then the trouble started. One neighbor asked if it was temporary. Next came a phone call -- and then a series of letters -- from Brooks Resources. The first letter, dated June 12, warned that "laundry lines are not permitted in the Awbrey Butte Subdivision," adding that "many owners in Awbrey Butte take great pride in their home and surrounding areas."

Ms. Taylor responded two days later with a letter asserting that the rule is "outdated." She requested a change in the rules to "reflect our urgent need and responsibility to help global warming by encouraging energy conservation."

The Awbrey Butte Architectural Review Committee "appreciates your desire to make a difference for the cause of global warming," responded Brooks Resources Owner-Relations Manager Carol Haworth. But she pointed out that homeowners agree to the rules before they buy their homes, "and therefore the ARC is required to uphold those guidelines as they now exist."

The letter more sternly asked "that you discontinue this practice by July 9, 2007, to avoid legal action which will be taken after that date."

Ms. Taylor responded by pointing out that the subdivision is "blatantly full of noncompliant owners" who display everything from plastic play equipment to exterior paint colors that don't meet the requirement of "medium to dark tones." She added: "Who am I hurting by hanging clothes out to dry?"

Brooks Resources repeated its threat of legal action, and then advised Ms. Taylor to "develop a plan to screen your outdoor laundry and submit the plan to the ARC for review." It also suggested the possibility of formal proceedings to get the rules amended, which would require 51% of homeowners' support in writing.

The following month, Ms. Taylor constructed a fabric screen to conceal her clothesline. The committee, which included Brooks Resources Chairman Michael P. Hollern, gave it a thumbs down. "It doesn't blend with the home or the native surroundings," says Ms. Haworth.

Mr. Hollern says, "Personally, I think people probably ought to screen their laundry from other people's view. If you feel differently, you should probably be living somewhere else."

Perhaps she should.

All of this bodes rather ill for the future.

Think about it: if tens of millions of Americans are so aghast at the merest possibility of catching a glimpse of their neighbour's underwear fluttering in the breeze that they're willing to pass ordinances and enforce 'covenants' against one of the most simple, traditional and pleasant means of saving energy, what chance is there for them making any other, more onerous efforts in the same direction?

Moreover, I find something worrying in the trend toward 'association governance'. One of the much storied American ideals--indeed, one of the ones that I feel I've absorbed and continue to admire--is that of living in a place where people leave you basically the fuck alone and allow you to do your own thing. But it seems that although my countrymen and women will immediately fly off the handle at the very thought of the guv'ment telling them what to do, they are increasingly happy to let their neighbours ('housing associations') and private companies ('HMOs') do exactly the same.

Sad, really.

Well, I've got some laundry to do. And some freedom to express.


Note: Patrick Deneen blogs at What I Saw in America. And for your radical and socially subversive laundry efforts, The Clothesline Shop seems to cater to every conceivable need.

A great leap forward

There was a remarkably enthusiastic (and surprising!) reaction to the postmodern propaganda game we devised a week ago, which involves combining images from Chinese Communist political posters with postmodern academic waffle.

We had some nice feedback and lots of visitors (thanks particularly to links from David and Ophelia) and there were several people who came up with their own creations.

Some participants bent the rules a bit, in particular because they had no obfuscatory postmodern feminist texts to hand. This is the kind of practical-mindedness of which we here in the Central Committee fully approve.

But we wonder: what...not everyone has some Irigaray, Kristeva and Butler within easy reach? This might be right-wing deviationism of the most counter-revolutionary sort...

So, to make things simpler, we think any passage from the leading lights of Theory (we think we should limit ourselves to the vanguard here) that combines muddied thinking, incomprehensible jargon, faulty philosophical assumptions, and a facile and self-regarding presumption of 'subversion' (especially if it has a 'post-' attached to it) makes a delightful caption for one of the very fine posters from the collection to which we linked.

Most importantly of all, of course: have fun!

Entries so far:

Gwyn: '...a journey to the dark portals of life...'
Geoff: '...restoring erection in the ageing penis...' (image)
Rob: '...no fully (as opposed to partially) comprehensive doctrine...'
Michael: 'The discipline of the workshop...' (image)
Norm: '...a priori surfaces of emergence of antagonisms...' (image) (I have to say, this is one of my favourite images.)
Dale: '...far removed from the realm of interest...'

(If there are any I've missed, let me know and I'll update the list.)

Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft

As the wife (somewhat insistently) tells, me, today is German-American Day.

She's German, I'm American, so we feel--in some way--that this was a holiday made for us. The fact that it was originated by none other than our shared number one hero Ronald Reagan, makes it all the more special.

So...we...well, we hope you had a good time today. And, uh,...drank some beer. And maybe went to one of those many 'German-American Day Clearance Sale' sales. And, uh, drank some more beer. (Come on, it's Oktoberfest...)

Taking account of its birth in what we of a certain age remember as the Cold War, we offer two remembrances of that era: one in German, one in English.



Nena, '99 Luftballons' (I analysed this song, as I recall, in German class, circa 1986)



Peter Schilling, 'Major Tom'

Something is happening that is not happening

Two videos from The Books.



'Take Time', from The Lemon of Pink.



'Smells Like Content', from Lost and Safe.

Tales from the inner geek

I love coincidence.

In between writing a conference abstract and revising a letter that I hope will convince someone to publish my next book, some random link-clicking led me to two references to H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, which was one of the main foundations of my teenage geek enthusiasms.

(Not all that long ago, I re-read several of Lovecraft's stories: they still scare me...)

The first is Toren Atkinson's excellent revision of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are entitled 'Where the Great Old Ones Are' (via Boing Boing):
(He says at his site that he can make a t-shirt out of it. Very tempting...)


And then there's this cartoon from the consistently hilarious Monkey Fluids:


And, as an extra geek-bonus, the following cartoon was also at MF.

It's not about Cthulhu, but close enough: if you don't recognise the term 'polyhedral dice' and have never owned a bag of holding, you may not understand the joke.

Things worth reading: post-unification edition

1. One big happy family?

Yesterday was the Tag der deutschen Einheit ('The Day of German Unity', or, as the Babel Fish web translator insists, 'Day of the German Unit') which once again passed us by here with relatively little fanfare.

The Germans, I have come to understand, keep the flag waving generally confined to sporting events (such as at the recent celebration of their world champion women's football team: Wir sind Weltmeisterinnen!) and many even still seem a bit uncertain about whether reunification was even a Very Good Idea in the first place.

But the discontents of German patriotism are a discussion for another time.

However, I'm pleased to see that the German army is so successfully spreading goodwill around the world, as noted in a report from Spiegel International and nicely summarised at Atlantic Review:

Ed H., a US soldier stationed in Kandahar from December 2001 onward (...): "Basically, the Germans were not allowed to do anything," he recalls. "They looked around for things to do. They were incredibly bored." (...) But then the Germans' reputation abruptly changed. A rumor spread among US troops that at least one thing was worthwhile in the German unit -- its supply of alcohol. "Beer was like a currency," says one US soldier, who stocked up on the beverages provided by the KSK troops. "To us, the German beer supplies were Big Rock Candy."

As I've previously mentioned, the (unsung) second verse of the poem that forms the basis of the national anthem might contain a certain recipe for national happiness: 'German women, German loyalty, German wine and German song, Shall retain in the world, Their old lovely ring, To inspire us to noble deeds, Our whole life long.'

Who knows, they just might.

2. Next week on 'Academic Idol'...

There was a point in this interview between David Thompson and Ophelia Benson where I thought it might be interesting to have a TV series that placed the leading lights of Theory on a desert island and posed them with real-world survival problems. At some point the discussion would turn to cannibalism as a 'textual practice' and then the fun might really begin.

David liked the postmodern propaganda party game that The Wife and I developed a few evenings ago and kindly linked to it. I ran across the interview by following the links in his post. The interview is largely concerned with addressing the relationship between the left and postmodernism, and contains a number of good points by both participants.

It seems blindingly obvious that any movement or political perspective that wants to change the world (even in minor ways) is going to have to have a firm grounding in reality (and should have no hesitation in using that term without ironic inverted commas...).

However, this doesn't seem to be at all the case for many.

There's a particularly good passage by Ophelia when it comes to academic idol worship:

But I think the academic hero-worship is a different kind of thing. But what kind of thing; that is the question. And I don't know. I think it's partly (or maybe mostly) to do with not having much (if any) real research or inquiry to do. I think the celebrity worship is in inverse proportion to the substantive heft of the discipline. 'Theory' has to be bigged up precisely because there's not much to it. But what I still have no idea about is what that has to do with the left, and I would still say pretty much nothing. In fact I would even say it's a kind of anti-left, and then I would wonder why that doesn't trouble putative leftists more than it does. Why doesn't the stink of prestige and sycophancy and mutual adulation put them off their food? Why are they happy to cite each other in print with obligatory gold-star adjectives? The brilliant Butler, the powerful Bhabha, the epochal Spivak - why don't they make themselves sick? It seems to me more than a little narcissistic and depraved, it seems stomach-turning - and it certainly drives a lot of people out of the field.

Well put.

3. Despite all our rage, are we still just rats in a cage?

Also worth your time is David Barash's article on 'redirected aggression' at the Chronicle of Higher Education (via A&L Daily). (He refers to responses to inflicted pain and suffering that involve taking them out on someone other than the person who wounded you--typically someone weaker and more vulnerable. If you spent much time on a playground as a child, you'll no doubt recognise the phenomenon.)

Redirected aggression does not simply derive from irrationality or human nastiness, but — along with retaliation and revenge — is entrenched in the very fabric of the natural world, part of a continuum involving nature's response to pain. The biology of redirected aggression goes a long way toward explaining not only its apparent senselessness but its universality as well. It shows up across the ages, as we've seen, across cultures, and across social units, from individuals to communities to nations.

It's not entirely convincing in bits (I'm sceptical that the US invasion of Iraq can be reduced to the collective pain of 9/11 in such a simple way), and it gets a but mushy at the end with regard to religion, but I think the principles it lays out are thought provoking.

It is, of course, difficult to transfer the relevance of other-animal experiments to human beings, but the findings Barash notes are certainly intriguing even just in terms of the behaviour of other animals:

Place a rat in a cage with an electrified floor and subject it to repeated shocks. Not surprisingly, the poor animal will show many signs of stress, at first flinging itself against the walls with each shock. But after a while, it just sits there apathetically, showing no inclination to escape from its painful prison. When autopsied, the animal will be found to have oversized adrenal glands and, frequently, stomach ulcers, both indicating serious stress.

Now repeat the experiment, but with a wooden stick in the cage alongside the rat. When shocked, the rat chews on the stick, and as a result, it can endure its experience much longer without burnout. Moreover, at autopsy, its adrenal glands are smaller, stomach ulcers fewer. The rat buffered itself against the stress merely by chewing on the stick, even though doing so does nothing to get it out of its predicament.

Finally, put two rats in the electrified cage. Shock them both. They snarl and fight. Do it again, and keep doing it; they keep fighting. Yet at autopsy, their adrenal glands are normal, and, moreover, even though they have experienced numerous shocks, they have no ulcers. When animals respond to stress and pain by redirecting their aggression outside themselves, whether biting a stick or, better yet, another individual, it appears that they are protecting themselves from stress. By passing their pain along, such animals minister to their own needs. Although a far cry from being ethically "good," it is definitely "natural."

4. Dulce et decorum est...

Finally, 'A Death in the Family' by Christopher Hitchens, at Vanity Fair (via here) is a remarkably personal and self-searching look at the consequences and responsibilities of writing.

Hitchens recently discovered that his writings in favour of the invasion of Iraq had been part of the inspiration for one soldier's enlistment. He found out after said soldier's death from a roadside bomb attack.

It is particularly interesting to read, as Hitchens appears to be increasingly pessimistic about the war, and -- having followed his impassioned and eloquent (though in my case ultimately unconvincing) arguments for the war -- it is striking to see him write something like the following:

As one who used to advocate strongly for the liberation of Iraq (perhaps more strongly than I knew), I have grown coarsened and sickened by the degeneration of the struggle: by the sordid news of corruption and brutality (Mark Daily told his father how dismayed he was by the failure of leadership at Abu Ghraib) and by the paltry politicians in Washington and Baghdad who squabble for precedence while lifeblood is spent and spilled by young people whose boots they are not fit to clean.

I killed a party again

Have mandolin, will travel.



Jens Lekman, 'Black Cab', live in Gothenburg, 11 December 2003

A fabulous new party game...

[UPDATE: a list of participants and a slight relaxation in the rules is provided here.]

OK, The Wife and I have come up with something fun and innovative to do with your spare time.

1. Take one of the Chinese propaganda posters referred to in the previous post.

2. Go to bookshelf and find postmodern feminist tract of your choice (our preferred plaything is Judith Butler)

3. Flick pages and stop at random.

4. Place finger upon open page. Treat the selected sentence as a caption for the chosen Chinese propaganda poster.

This is our first result. We like. We like very much.

'Libidinal dependency and powerlessness is phantasmatically overcome by the installation of a boundary and, hence, a hypostacized center which produces an idealized bodily ego; that integrity and unity is achieved through the ordering of a wayward motility or disaggregated sexuality not yet restrained by the boundaries of individuation.' (Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, 75)

A perfect match, we think. Now that is gender trouble.

OK, now it's your turn.

Herdspeople love to read books by Marx and Lenin

Via the newsletter of the International Institute of Social History (based in Amsterdam), I discovered a remarkable exhibition on the topic of 'books in Chinese propaganda posters'.

They are...interesting.



And even just the titles are sometimes fascinating. The above, for instance, is called 'Turn philosophy into a sharp weapon in the hands of the masses', a stirring message for any era. And note the philosophically inspiring mushroom cloud to the left. Oh, how it warms the heart.

The exhibition is certainly worth a look.

What if?

The following sentences in Anne Enright's intriguing essay at the London Review of Books -- on the case surrounding the disappearance of Madeleine McCann -- provoked a spark of recognition:

Who needs a cadaver dog when you have me? In August, the sudden conviction that the McCanns ‘did it’ swept over our own family holiday in a peculiar hallelujah. Of course they had. It made a lot more sense to me than their leaving the children to sleep alone.

For us, that 'peculiar hallelujah' swept over us during our vacation in early September (leading to much frantic perusal of French newspapers and German satellite television for new developments), but it involved otherwise much the same sort of feelings that Enright describes.

It just seemed so...right, so much more interesting than the alternative version focusing on the random paedophile (a word which seems to have become as common in the British press as any definite article and therefore much reduced in shock effect).

The almost unimaginable level of hypocrisy and lying that would have been involved had they 'done it' (in whatever way and to whatever extent) was just almost too good to be true (i.e., too horrible to be believed).

But, as a recent and unconnected story shows, the larger the lie the more believable it might be.

Now that sort of turn in the McCann story would be psychologically interesting.

And it was at this point that the 'Madeleine' case began to intrigue me in a way that it previously hadn't. The 'story', as such, suddenly became much more fascinating.

Which, I realise, might say more about me than it does about the case itself.

Of course, the matter has since become rather more muddy again and, to be honest, I have no idea what really happened.

And I have a suspicion that we (apart from at least one key person involved in whatever happened) might never know.

But regardless of what turns out to be the truth, it occurred to me recently that I really don't like the McCanns. No. I don't.

As Enright notes, 'Disliking the McCanns is an international sport', so I know I'm not alone in this, and during that somehow very exciting week or two I wasn't. But, for some reasons that I can't quite describe in a way that seems to justify it, even if Kate and Gerry McCann turn out to be victims of a horrible crime and a (in that case) shameful set of police and press insinuations, I won't be capable of liking them or feeling all that sympathetic toward them.

As people.

And I'm intrigued by this issue in a particularly strong way, as I'm currently writing a book about a woman who, in the 1920s, was acquitted of committing a horrible crime, and her acquittal, while legally correct and at the time not apparently doubted by anyone in the press, leaves enough room for doubt to be painfully tantalising.

The question 'did she do it or didn't she' is the one I typically get when discussing this case, and, honestly, I really don't know. My own opinion, my gut reaction, has swung back and forth between seeing her as an innocent and tragic victim of the police and prosecution and a cynical manipulator of public opinion. The fact that she was (apparently unanimously) idealised by the newspapers of the time makes her case (much like that of the McCanns until recently) all the more fascinating. Like the McCanns, at least for a while, the woman I'm studying was idealised in the press, becoming a household name (though she has long since been forgotten, as the McCanns, someday, will be too.)

As in Madeleine's case, people invested a great deal of attention and emotion in the experiences of someone who was a stranger to their family.

What an odd thing to do.

And our fascination in such cases comes down to a great extent to the following question: What if?

Which allows us -- and our imaginations -- all kinds of options.

I think that Enright is correct to some extent that our opinions of the McCanns have a lot to do with things that are completely unconnected to their case and reflect our own perspectives on our own lives.

But unlike her own experience (related in her last sentence), I have yet to wake up one morning 'liking the McCanns'.

No. For whatever reason, I can't do that.

The Bastard of Baltimore

'H. L. Mencken', Morgan Meis reminds us in the opening of his essay at The Smart Set, 'was a bastard'. Nevertheless, he points out, if he hadn't been one, the English language (at least in its American guise) would be a great deal more impoverished.




I've long been a great admirer of Mencken's writing (if not necessarily of all his opinions), though I'm sure that having spent a few fondly remembered years in the city most associated with the 'Sage of Baltimore' has helped make me feel more closely attached to him.

Jesse Smith's article on the commemoration of Mencken's birthday on 12 September (via Arts & Letters Daily and something I'd have written about earlier had we not been en vacances) certainly took me back to those years, recounting, as it does, a series of talks and events in the Enoch Pratt library and Peabody Conservatory: I used to live just around the corner from both of them (a bit more literally in the case of the Pratt library).

And they are both lovely buildings.

Furthermore, the atmosphere, as Smith points out, is pure Baltimore, as I recall it:

The Pratt is the perfect setting for such a celebration. There are parts that feel as if they haven’t changed since Mencken wandered its halls. The first day of the celebration, the library’s main elevator was broken. Visitors who didn’t want to climb the stairs to the third floor auditorium — and there were many, Mencken fans being on average quite advanced in age — had to instead take an elevator operated by an attendant. An actual elevator attendant, who had to open the door by hand, and raise and lower the elevator with a handle. The bathroom just outside the auditorium had a shower, and its mirror was a medicine cabinet that actually opened — features for a library that seem like they could only have been logical a century ago.

Nonetheless, reading about the lectures given on his behalf and the people who came to celebrate his memory makes me think, adapting Groucho Marx's famous comment (via Woody Allen), that I would rather not be a member of a club that would have them as members.

Read the article and you might understand what I mean.

Inspired by the Smart Set articles, I pulled out one of the Mencken collections on my shelf (A Mencken Chrestomathy) and I, lo and behold, with only the briefest of skimming glances, ran across the following bits of wisdom:

The old anthropomorphic notion that the life of the whole universe centers in the life of man -- that human existence is the supreme expression of the cosmic process -- this notion seems to be happily on its way toward the Sheol of exploded delusions. The fact is that the life of man, as it is more and more studied in the light of general biology, appears to be more and more empty of significance. Once apparently the chief concern and masterpiece of the gods, the human race now begins to bear the aspect of an accidental by-product of their vast, inscrutable and probably nonsensical operations. A blacksmith making a horse-shoe produces something almost as brilliant and mysterious -- the shower of sparks. But his eye and thought, as we know, are not on the sparks, but on the horse-shoe; their existence depends upon a wasting of its tissue. In the same way, perhaps, man is a local disease of the cosmos -- a kind of pestiferous eczema or urethritis. There are, of course, different grades of eczema, and so are there different grades of men. No doubt a cosmos afflicted with nothing worse than an infection of Beethovens would not think it worth while to send for the doctor. But a cosmos infested by Socialists, Scotsmen and stockbrokers must suffer damnably. No wonder the sun is so hot and the moon so diabetically green (p. 1).

**

Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and inescapably deceived, not only by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself, but also and more particularly by himself -- by his incomparable talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true (p. 8).

**

To sum up:
1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute.
2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride (p. 9).

**

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. There is thus a flavor of the pathological in it; it goes beyond the normal intellectual process and passes into the murky domain of transcendental metaphysics. A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable, for disappointment, being essentially an objective phenomenon, cannot permanently affect his subjective infirmity. His faith takes on the virulence of a chronic infection. What he says, in substance, is this: 'Let us trust in God, Who has always fooled us in the past.' (p.11)

And on it goes, for more than 600 pages.

Wonderful.

Mencken saw his main adversary as the American middle-class, and he invented the term 'booboisie' to describe them. His vision was a useful corrective to the unbounded optimism that has tended to accompany the American cultural soul (which is something different than saying there are not many very excellent things that have -- and continue to -- emerge from the US of A).

In a striking passage from his article, Meis points to a key aspect of Mencken's world-view, in the context of an essay on writer Theodore Dreiser:

Summing Dreiser up one last time, Mencken writes: “His moving impulse is no flabby yearning to teach, to expound, to make simple; it is that ‘obscure inner necessity’ of which Conrad tells us, the irrepressible creative passion of a genuine artist, standing spell-bound before the impenetrable enigma that is life, enamored by the strange beauty that plays over its sordidness, challenged to a wondering and half-terrified sort of representation of what passes understanding.” Ironically, with that one sentence, Mencken redeemed American literature (at least for a minute or two) and realized something of the promise that Emerson and Whitman had gestured to with such profound, irrational hope. But with Mencken, there is no glorious tale to tell, just the desire that someone express the crappy truth as the only glory we’re likely to grasp.

[...]

America had grown up in the decades between Emerson and The Smart Set. In growing up, it gave birth to a brilliant little beast named H.L. Mencken who had the stomach to stare into the odd abyss, to look hard at the “strange beauty that plays over its sordidness.” In rejecting Emerson’s and Whitman’s hope he had to leave behind the vestiges of American Exceptionalism that still linger in Emerson’s rhapsodizing and in Whitman’s singing. He had to show us in our dumbness, engaged in the same fruitless struggle that lays low every beast in time. Funnily, and in spite of all his maddening missteps of judgment, Mencken — in being such a relentless bastard year after year — gave the American voice back a little of its humanity. For that reason alone his birthday, last week, ought to mean something now and for a long time to come.

Yes it should.

Thus, a somewhat belated Obscene Desserts birthday greeting goes out to H. L. Mencken.

I am honoured, for three exciting years, to have walked the same streets as that gloomy, grouchy, misanthropic bastard.

Mon petit village...

Well, we're back, after a thoroughly relaxing and enjoyable couple of weeks away.

The mental fires are being re-stoked and the neuronal pistons oiled, so I should soon be back on track.

Until then, though, I present for your enjoyment 'Ulysse' by French singer-songwriter Ridan.

We heard it several times in different contexts (car radio, supermarket, music shop) and we were unable to get it out of our heads, making it, in some way, our vacation anthem.



Till soon...