Public vs. Private

The organized Right has had a longtime campaign against the public sphere, continually selling the idea that dynamic private enterprise is always preferable to public program solutions. This is undoubtedly true from the point of view of maximizing profits for private businesses, although it is a dubious claim in many areas, like education, fairness, access to opportunity, good public policy, etc. You’d think the failure of the charter schools and the explosion of privatized for-profit prisons (along with mandatory sentences and vast increases in the number of incarcerated Americans — including, today, the confiscated children of asylum seekers) would put this zombie theory to rest. You’d be wrong. Private freedom trumps improving the public sphere every time. Winners vs. Losers, it doesn’t get any simpler than that, chumps.

I was talking to a friend last night who told me that the only reason he got a decent public education in NYC in the 1960s was because he went to schools with a lot of white kids. He was not a white kid, nor is he a white man today. The elementary school he’d attended in the Bronx was like the one I attended in Queens, outwardly integrated (in the case of the school I went to only after an ugly battle among the parents and teachers) but internally segregated. Each grade had classes ranked from one on down, the one class being the top students, down to two, three, and, in the case of most larger public schools, four, five, six, etc. As my friend reminded me, the further down you went, the more predominantly non-white the classes became.

In my friend’s case, he was in a class closer to the one class every year and as a result had mostly white kids as classmates. Because of that, he got the same education as the local white kids. Expectations were higher for them, and the level of teaching was higher and more challenging. He had the same experience in Junior High School and High School, both schools having populations approximately evenly distributed between “whites”, “blacks” and “Hispanics”. He said the schools he went to are no longer integrated, neighborhood patterns having changed, and we agreed that the schools had probably all declined along with the exodus of “white” kids and the general lowering of educational expectations.

At one point I mentioned that I ‘d grown up about a mile from the birthplace and childhood homes of our current president. I recall my mother telling me that small, intimate P.S. 178, my alma mater, was the top rated public school in New York City. That was one reason some of the parents and teachers were so adamant about not admitting black students from nearby Jamaica. Jamaica was a predominantly black area and the schools there were much lower rated than P.S. 178, obviously.

The neighborhood around the school was called Jamaica Estates, and its tree-lined streets contained mansions and the children of some very rich people. (I grew up in the adjacent, more modest neighborhood called “Flushing”). Many of the kids from Jamaica Estates attended 178. I figured our current president might well have attended the highest rated public school in the city ten years before I did. I’d figured wrong, as Jeeves informed me when I asked what elementary school The Man had attended:

Trump grew up in Jamaica, Queens, and attended the Kew-Forest School from kindergarten through seventh grade. At age 13, he was enrolled in the New York Military Academy, a private boarding school, after his parents discovered that he had made frequent trips into Manhattan without their permission.

Imagine my surprise to find out he’d grown up in Jamaica, among the blacks! Puts the man and his alleged racism in a whole new light, as they say. Then again, not surprising that his parents would raise him to be truly elite — a man of the right people. Good breeding and all that. No need for the best public school in the city, a ten minute walk from his home, when he could meet the children of the truly elite at a private school where his childish bullying could blossom unrestrained by the laws of the schoolyard.

If you go to public school, you never know what kind of ruffian you might encounter as you begin to intimidate your little classmates. In a private school, where the student is also the child of a customer (and the customer, if wealthy, is always right) a lot more leeway can be given for this kind of behavior. In the interest of curbing their son’s impulse to bully, to ignore rules, to put himself always first, the parents sent the young man to military academy. The results speak for themselves.

If you have a limousine waiting to take you wherever you want to go, and a helicopter, and a private jet for longer trips, you are much better off than the sad sack who has to wait for a public subway train at eleven pm and squeeze into a crowded car where he will stand for the long ride home. There is no question about this.

As a matter of public policy, even if only for purposes of reducing traffic and air pollution from millions of cars, it would be best to have a first rate public transportation system in New York City. This, sadly, is not a priority of the wealthy people who make these decisions. As for the people who ride the subways at night, standing room only, fuck ’em. Seriously. What are they going to do about it, no matter how intolerably bad the service gets? Spend $50 for an uber? A rich person need never even know about this situation, and it is certainly not remotely among their problems if a bunch of low-income losers have to stand on a late-night subway train.

Those people who stayed in New Orleans during that hundred year hurricane and flood a few years ago. The question was asked: what, are those motherfuckers stupid? Didn’t they hear the warnings? Couldn’t they have gotten out, moved temporarily to one of their summer homes until the shit blew over in New Orleans? What were they doing on the roofs of their houses, crying for help as alligators, snakes and dead cows floated by? They fully expected the rest of us to save them from their own bad life choices. What can you do with those kind of people?

That’s why many of the most wealthy are so devoted to reducing the size of government so that it can be drowned in a bathtub. The public is dirty, overused, crowded, smelly. The private is clean, comfortable, plenty of space for everyone, smells nice. Why do poor motherfuckers keep acting like there is supposed to be a better choice? Who gets to choose? You, loser?

Seeing things in another light

It’s funny, sometimes, to notice how one thing leads to another. Events and thoughts can proceed in a way that makes you suddenly see something in a completely new light.

The other day, in the sudden extreme heat (the real feel temperature got over 100 in New York City the last few days), I found myself walking around in just shorts. It was too onerous to wear a shirt, or socks, and since I was inside, moving from fan to fan, I simply wore the minimum to remain decent while walking past the many ground floor windows at the farm.

At some point, standing at the sink of the upstairs bathroom, looking into the mirror, I suddenly saw my immense, oblong gut in a new light– sunlight. Sunlight may be the best disinfectant for certain things, but it is the harshest possible light in which to see something like a watermelon-sized stomach ballooning over a waist band. The slanting sunlight lit my stomach from a merciless angle, with a light that made the bulk fully three dimensional in a way my own dim bathroom mirror does not.

I was suddenly filled with horror, true horror, as I turned and saw it from all angles (it was particularly grievous from the side). I immediately vowed to limit my caloric intake (and have so far, going on my third day, though today for brunch I had toast and home fries) as I rehab my knees, toward the day I will also get back on my former exercise regime. It was a visceral thing, truly. Not as if, mind you, I was unaware of the twenty or so pounds I have to lose, but seeing it in this harsh new light there was no longer any way for me to rationalize wearing this thick, bulbous vest of adipose tissue. Not good for my health, nor for wearing a bathing suit next weekend at our friends’ house by a lake.

From this thought to Hannah Arendt’s illuminating insight that totalitarianism, as distinct from normal despotism, military dictatorship, brutal monarchy and other familiar time-honored forms of authoritarianism, requires mobilization of the masses in the complete service of the leader and his State. This new mass authoritarianism only became possible with the advent of truly mass media. Hitler or Stalin, no matter what their genius for manipulating their followers, could not have exerted the complete social control they did without full ownership of the press and those two nascent mass media technologies, motion pictures and live broadcasts over radio waves (plus telephones and a few other useful technologies for keeping tabs and issuing orders).

Totalitarian society is always organized as a strict hierarchic bureaucracy, with party loyalists running every one of its hundreds of branches. Bureaucracy had been around before totalitarians harnessed it, but with the advent of new technologies, it became a much more efficient machine for social control. Technology, as it was developed, became instantly part of the administration of these bureaucracies.

International Business Machines (IBM), for example, caused a little bit of a stink (though it didn’t seem to hurt their corporate bottom line) when it was learned, after World War Two, that IBM had made its new punchcard technology available to Nazi bureaucrats who used it to ensure the cattle cars heading East were full, and to keep track of who was left to ship East for “resettlement”. Just a business doing business, corporate bottom line and all, no moral stance whatsoever, just money making money. [1]

The word bureaucracy conjures hellish images out of a Kafkaesque nightmare. That is for good reason. Bureaucracies are pyramids, and the vast bulk of the workers in a bureacucracy are powerless, hopeless ants serving their individual bosses on each level, without the slightest autonomy, or even much enthusiasm for their small, mechanical jobs, jobs they usually do with almost total indifference.

An ant seems undeterrably enthusiastic about moving crumbs back to the queen at the top of the anthill hierarchy because it is programmed to do so, not because that individual ant has a sense of agency or any kind of autonomy. A chemical impulse makes the ant behave as it does, and it is not the ant’s place to question anything. The human member of a bureaucracy, however, is by nature somewhat resigned, depressed and embittered. It is a job that can make you cynical and mean. You have responsibility for a limited set of mechanical tasks, a limitless amount of drudgery to get through each shift, a very small amount of power (if any at all) and, the best you can hope for, if you do the shit little job well, is upward promotion.

Reminds me of a great remark I once heard about the Rat Race. Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.

To be human is to expect more, if only because we have powerful myths about our unlimited power as individuals to determine the course of our own lives. It is undeniable that human progress, and individual progress, is made by those who tirelessly work to make this potential real. But for the vast masses of individuals, it’s off to work, to a job that usually sucks, for less money than they need or feel they deserve.

As a low level bureaucrat, you tell the disgruntled member of the public you are forced to deal with that they must do such and such. When they complain you defensively tell them you didn’t make the rules, and that if they don’t want to give up their place on the long line they have already waited on, they’d better do what you’re telling them. In modern corporate and government bureaucracy your chance of being given correct information is about 50/50, at best [2]. Things are much simpler under totalitarian bureaucracy: you simply do what they say or they send someone to get you and they kill you.

Adding current digital, algorithm-driven technology to bureaucracy brings us into a whole new world of shit. Use your phone to look for a product, you get all the related ads almost instantly. When Hitler was pioneering the use of radio, he could get on the air and make a persuasive, lying pitch to millions of Germans at once. This ability to sell “on the air” helped make him a celebrity, a star, a man with seemingly superhuman powers. He was the first to address a nation from the air, as his plane flew over a disputed corridor, under Polish control, that he claimed should by right be part of the German Reich. This was something only a god could do back in 1932, thunder from the air to millions of people. In 2018, a three year-old on the toilet, tweeting incoherently from his celebrity mommy’s phone, is as godlike as a flying, thundering Hitler over the Polish corridor. OK, extreme example, maybe, and not the best. A public official with 20,000,000 twitter followers can reach them all instantly, 24/7, from wherever he/she/it is. How’s that for a god?

I don’t know where else to go at the moment with these thoughts. It’s not as if, thank God, we actually have a public official with 20,000,000 followers who can instantly send them ranting real-time temper tantrums at 5 a.m. while straining over his stools.

(More fiber, you imaginary costive motherfucker.)

[1] In our own time, recently Bill Gates had a tiny bit of dung flung his way when it was revealed that Microsoft facial recognition software had been sold (or perhaps given) to the current U.S. government to help I.C.E. recognize and root out the many potentially dangerous foreign rapists, murderers, terrorists and just plain undocumented “illegal aliens” and their so-tempting-to-cage children.

[2] Trying to log-in the other day to pay my $375 biennial fee to keep my law license intact, I encountered a series of technological cul de sacs that prevented me from completing my registration (or even starting it, really). Frustrating. I sent an email to the help desk and got a helpful reply instructing me on exactly what I needed to do to complete my registration. I did those things, got no further than the day before, wound up in the same cul de sac.

Fortunately, the email reply came with a phone number, which I then called. Unfortunately, the phone was eventually answered by an imbecile. The imbecile told me that I had to log-in with a computer, that I couldn’t use a Mac or an iPad to register. I told the imbecile that I’d logged in and registered successfully two years ago with a Mac, which is also, by the way, a computer. He soon grew impatient with my attitude.

I asked him for the number for tech support, which he said was located in Albany. He didn’t have the number. Connected me to somebody who told me what was going on: the site had been down the other day when I tried to log-in, there had also been many problems with the site’s functionality on Google chrome. He assured me that, of course, it had nothing to do with Mac or PC format. While I had this guy on the phone I logged in with another browser and found myself in the same cul de sac. The problem was not Google chrome.

He agreed that an email about the website being down the other day, or known problems with Google, would have been preferable to constant ambiguous error messages, incorrect instructions, or the idiotic invention about the Macs. I mentioned my former friend the computer programer who is on the Asperger’s scale, suggesting that many automated replies, such as the ones I kept getting were programmed by folks like him and were neither intuitive nor helpful. We agreed that often machine logic is simply not the same as human logic, much as we might wish it to be so. We talked for a while and found a work-around

He had more useful information for me, I could forego the $375 fee if I did such and such (I may do it next cycle, if I can confirm it’s true). We spoke for a while, I made notes, he verified everything I read back to him. Great guy. Asked his name. It was Joe. “Thank you, Joe,” I told him. The odds of talking to a person like that, in any bureaucracy, are about 10 to 1 against it.

In any bureaucracy, you have a more than 50/50 chance of talking to a peevish moron talking through his or her ass than to someone who actually knows how to help. Luck of the draw, really.

Infallible Superman types

“The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error. The assumption of infallibility, moreover, is based not so much on superior intelligence as on the correct interpretation of the essentially reliable forces in history or nature, forces which neither defeat nor ruin can prove wrong because they’re bound to assert themselves in the long run. Mass leaders in power have one concern, which overrules all utilitarian considerations– to make their predictions come true.”

– Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

You can call this unending need to be unendingly infallible the hallmark of every overbearingly toxic type: the blowhard, petty tyrants of all stripes, bullies, unrepentant jackasses, stern overseers, vengeful teachers, viciously demanding bosses, bullied weaklings who grow up to get — and abuse– any measure of authority over others, small time authoritarians of every kind. The rule for infallibility is simple: never admit an error.

It is not that hard to insist on your own infallibility, if you are prepared to pay the cost to be the boss. For one thing, there is always somebody to blame: a liar who has it in for you, a thousand liars, a million liars, petty, mean bastards, the corrupt, the jealous, the weak, losers, insubordinate subordinates, traitors, leakers, blabber mouths, disloyal assholes, elites who claim they’re better than you are– hah! The list is limited only by your own infallible imagination.

Hannah Arendt makes this observation about mass leaders like Hitler and Stalin, the main subjects of part three of her treatise on totalitarianism. It is obvious, once pointed out, that every tyrant insists on his infallibility. Hitler was a great case– if Germany lost the war of aggression he started, and imbecilically prosecuted, overruling his generals and shouting that he was the smartest man in every room, until German defeat was a certainty, well– it only fulfilled his prediction that if the German Volk was weak that they deserved, every last one of them, to die. In the end he ordered German boys to man the barricades as the vengeful, brutal Red Army closed in on his bunker in Berlin. Every last German must die, because they had let their infallible selfless Fuhrer down. Nothing more he could do, he poisoned his idiot girlfriend, after hastily marrying her, shot his beloved dog and turned the gun on himself.

Which brings to mind the same thought I have every time some sick fuck kills a bunch of people and then “turns the gun on himself.” The thought: why didn’t he fucking turn the gun on himself BEFORE he murdered all those people? Makes me want to holler, although, of course, hollering doesn’t help much.

Another example Arendt gives of this infallibility/prophecy pathology is Hitler thundering to the Reichstag in 1939 that if international Jewry insists on forcing Germany into another world war, it will result in the annihilation of the “Jewish race”. You see how this prophecy business works among the infallible?

I’ve really got nothing more to add on this note, except to say that it appears those who most desperately claim to be to infallible are weak, vain, stupid, insecure, resentful, entitled, incompetent, jealous, petty, vindictive, hopelessly inferior feeling, empty, blindly hating, shallow, incurious, uninformed (yet supremely opinionated), envious, grasping, self-ignorant, desperate, persecuted, vicious types. Very fine people, fine people, no doubt, the finest people, if you know what I’m saying, but heaven help the nation that falls under the power of one of these headstrong, never wrong creatures.

A Few words about Isaac Babel

Isaac Babel was a Jewish writer from Odessa, born in 1894, not terribly far from where my mother’s people come from. My grandparents were five or six years younger than him. A kind of prodigy who wrote fluently in French as well as in Russian, and a great admirer of Guy de Maupassant, he was told by Maxim Gorky, to whom he submitted his precocious work, that he had talent but nothing to say yet. Gorky told him to go live and come back when he had something to write about.

Babel joined a group of Bolshevik Cossacks who rode into my grandparents’ neighborhood of the Ukraine during the second bloody phase of the Russian Revolution. These Red Cossacks battled the White Cossacks for control of the Ukraine and Poland. Their savage, idealistic battle for human freedom won the hearts and minds of teenagers like my grandmother.

Babel’s stories of this bloody campaign, and his life as a bookish urban Jew riding with rough horseman who lived by a brutal code, collected as Red Cavalry, are incomparable. He wrote in an extremely compressed way, telling these merciless, human stories with an amazing, sometimes terrifying economy. His characters spoke a dialect I immediately recognized, though I didn’t know from where. It was my grandparents’ language, I realized years after they died. (see this, if you would like more details)

He became a hero in the Soviet Union after the publication of the Red Cavalry collection — though the brutally honest stories also contained the seeds of his undoing. Lenin died, Stalin seized power, Trotsky fled. With Stalin, a paranoid mass murdering maniac in charge, the dream of the Revolution to spread equality and liberate the workers of the world from their oppression melted into a peculiarly Russian form of totalitarianism.

Under Stalin Socialist Realism, a style flattering to the State, was required. Babel continued to write but published little, tried not to say anything that might get himself killed, had chances to flee, didn’t get out of the Soviet Union in time. Was eventually arrested by Stalin, held in an infamous hellhole, given a quick trial in a tiny room with no windows, and no witnesses. He was expected to sign a confession that he was a spy, a Trotskyist terrorist and a traitor to the revolution.

He asked to be allowed to finish his work. That was apparently the last thing he said. He was taken out and shot in a courtyard a few months before Hitler ‘s armies invaded the Soviet Union. He was one of millions quietly done in by the smiling maniac with the big mustache who many knew as Uncle Joe, America’s ferocious, indispensable ally in the war against Hitler.

A reviewer of his works offers these bits of grim, colorful detail:

Babel was shot by firing squad in the Lubyanka, in 1940. His immense popularity in Russia did not save him; and besides, it had been most unwise of him to conduct a long-standing affair with the wife of the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov.

There was supposed to have been a trunk of Babel’s writings, hidden by his friends, a trove of his writings that were never published. It’s not clear if any of these pages were ever found. I know the trunk went the way of my mother’s blue, leather-bound poetry notebook I recall seeing as a child. A fucking tragedy every way you turn it.

I wrote the following as a footnote to the previous post. It seemed a waste to leave it as a footnote about a writer I love, an inspirational writer you may never have heard of, so here you go, those of you who may be unfamiliar with this genius’s work.

I am a great admirer of Isaac Babel’s writing. I put Babel’s writing in a class with Sam Cooke’s singing, Django’s guitar playing, Meryl Streep’s acting. I read Babel in English, of course, I know and love the 1955 translation (long out of print) by Walter Morison.

I was once told by a Russian poet that Isaac Babel’s Russian is “untranslatable”. I have always loved the Walter Morison translations, which this Russian poet told me captured Babel’s Russian surprisingly well. When I see other translations I am often struck by their clumsiness, the way they are nothing like the Babel I love.

Here is an excellent discussion, leavened by wryness, of the challenges of translating Babel’s Russian into English. I tip my cap to this writer, well done!

Here is the first article on the challenge of translating Babel I found, which struck me as great at the time. I thought it contained a section of Morison’s masterful rendering of Babel’s Guy de Maupassant (though the notes in the book I love apparently attributed the translation to Raymond Rosenthal and Waclaw Soski). It appears the author of the article linked above thought he was up to the challenge of improving this flowing translation. I say no, but, alas, am too lazy to rewrite the whole piece. To cut straight to the immortal passages in the beautiful translation I first read, skip to the last paragraphs of this post. Scroll to the double space above “Here, sorry about that.”

Here is Babel’s wonderful, laconic description of translating, of writing. This is possibly the best short description ever written about what we do when wrestling our thoughts into the best possible language (it comes after the other translator’s introduction of the story for context) (emphasis mine):

Babel himself was a translator from French and Yiddish. One of his best-known stories, “Guy de Maupassant,” is ostensibly about translation. Its narrator, a fictional Babel, has been hired by Raisa Berndersky, a rich Jewish Petersburg society wife, to help her with her attempts at translating Maupassant:

In her translation there was no trace of Maupassant’s free-flowing phrases with their drawn-out breath of passion. Mrs. Bendersky’s writing was tediously correct, lifeless and loud, the way Jews used to write Russian back in the day. I took the manuscript home with me…and spent all night hacking a path through someone else’s translation (*). The work was not as bad as it sounds. A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a barely discernible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm. You need to turn it once, but not twice. In the morning, I brought back the corrected manuscript. Raïsa wasn’t lying when she told me of her passion for Maupassant. She sat motionless, her hands clasped as I read it to her: these satin hands melted to the floor, her forehead went pale, and the lace between her bound breasts strained and trembled. “How did you do that?” So then I started talking about style, about an army of words, an army in which all manner of weapons come into play. No steel can pierce the human heart as cold as a period placed just right. She listened, her head bowed, her painted lips parted. A black light glowed in her lacquered hair, smoothly pressed and parted. Her legs, with their strong tender calves, were bathed in stockings and splayed wide on the carpet.

No, wait just a minute. This is not Morison’s translation, (or Raymond Rosenthal and Waclaw Soski’s) you treacherous fellow you. I get it now, you think you have improved on the “Morison” translation, made it more faithful to Babel’s writing, to the actual Russian words he chose. You haven’t, and I know this even though I don’t know a word of Russian. It is in the flow, the music of the language, the rhythm. Morison, the year before I was born, translated the phrase you style “hacking a path through somebody else’s translation” as “hacking my way through the tangled undergrowth of her prose” as far as I recall, I don’t have the tattered out-of-print paperback with me here at the farm. But compare those two phrases. Why would Babel have written the dry first phrase when the second is so full of flavor?

Now I see many small brutalities, inflicted no doubt, and without a sense of irony (especially considering the story itself, the passage about the subtle art of translation!) in the interest of making the translation more accurate, more tediously correct, if I may borrow your phrase for Raisa Bendersky’s stilted, painstaking, tuneless translation. I know that translation is a fine art, a very difficult art, no doubt, a kind of intoxicating dance (when working with something like Babel’s uniquely delicious prose). But sometimes you simply need to leave a fine translation alone.

“How did you do that?” with only the tiniest, almost imperceptible, turn of the warm lever, is inferior, and far less immediate, than Morison’s/Rosenthal’s & Soski’s breathless “How did you do it?”.

And fuck, the last line of the story, which made my young spine tingle and filled me with a longing to some day write a line like that, has been changed too! And not for the better, it ends the transcendent story rather flatly. It is rendered:

My heart felt tight. I was brushed by a premonition of the truth.

Nothing like the icy fingers grasping his heart as he has a premonition .. wait, I have found the original line, on-line:

My heart contracted as the foreboding of some essential truth touched me with light fingers.

Another great line, butchered also, damn it, made clumsy and clunky, along with the bit about needing to turn the lever once, not twice. The proof, if it was needed, that some phrases don’t need the lever turned at all. You took this:

No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.

and believe you’ve improved it, with only one turn of the lever, to this:

No steel can pierce the human heart as cold as a period placed just right.

Dunce!

Goddamn it, you fucker. Might be more accurate as a strict translation from the Russian, maybe the Russian word for “cold” is in there, “pierce” may be closer to the Russian than its close synonym “stab”, but for god’s sake, read the two lines in English.

Here, sorry about that. I mentioned I don’t have my moth-eaten copy of Babel with me. Read this, from the original translation, I found it in an old email I sent a friend in 2014. Observe the way it flows, without a word wasted:

I took the manuscript with me, and in Kazantsev’s attic, among my sleeping friends, spent the night cutting my way through the tangled undergrowth of her prose. It was not such dull work as it might seem. A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.

Next morning I took back the corrected manuscript. Raisa wasn’t lying when she told me that Maupassant was her sole passion. She sat motionless, her hands clasped, as I read it to her. Her satin hands drooped to the floor, her forehead paled, and the lace between her constricted breasts danced and heaved.

“How did you do it?”

I began to speak of style, of the army of words, of the army in which all kinds of weapons may come into play. No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place. She listened with her head down and her painted lips half open. In her hair, pressed smooth, divided by a parting and looking like patent leather, shone a dark gleam. Her legs in tight-fitting stockings, with their strong, soft calves, were planted wide apart on the carpet.

The maid, glancing to the side with her petrified wanton eyes, brought in breakfast on a tray.

Listening to an Audio Book

An audiobook of an excellent writer’s work, read by an expressive, intelligent reader is a wonderful thing. The audiobook of Eichmann in Jerusalem, read by the great Wanda McCaddon, is a fantastic aural read. I’d say Wanda’s reading is like a great translation of the original [1]. It is certainly “value added” and I’m sure Hannah Arendt would agree.

Listening to an audiobook requires a certain concentration, which can be improved with practice. Listening carefully is not something most people ever practice, we’re in a hurry, yo, get to the fucking point, did you hear… oh, sorry, were you still not getting to the point? I heard… wait, I thought you were done, were going to say the same thing you always say, are we still talking about that? — etc.

Wanda McCaddon read a line by Hannah Arendt that caused me to make a note to find the quote in Chapter IX of Eichmann in Jerusalem. It seemed to explain a lot. Why did the other countries of the world not help the Jews during the mass murder that went on for several years? Most of them did little or nothing to help (outside of Denmark) and looking back after most of one’s family has been murdered, like an Armenian after the slaughter by the Turks, it’s natural to feel betrayed, ask ‘what the fuck?’

Arendt writes (and it turns out to be merely a passing parenthetical), leaving aside the prevalent (though not Nazi level) anti-Semitism in Europe:

(As though those tightly organized European nation-states would have reacted any differently if any other group of foreigners had suddenly descended upon them in hordes– penniless, passportless, unable to speak the language of the country!)

How much light does this short observation shed on the worldwide refugee crisis the world is in the middle of today?

The United States refuels Saudi bombers in the air over Yemen so that our monarchist radical Islamic fundamentalist allies can continue bombing the towns and cities below. The Saudi planes and the bombs are made in the USA. We participate directly in creating the humanitarian crisis that has caused untold numbers of Yemeni civilians to flee their war-torn, cholera plagued country. When they flee the war that we are daily helping Saudi Arabia wage we make a new law: NO YEMENIS!!! None, no reason needs to be given, the great Oz has spoken.

The Koch brother’s boy, current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, releases an official State Department boast on International Refugee Day about how America has always been the world’s greatest supporter of those fleeing war and oppression. He mentions a dollar amount we’ve given, the rough equivalent of a dime, or maybe three cents, and says no other country has done more since the end of World War Two.

A few days later a highly partisan 5-4 Supreme Court vote comes down, along strict party lines, upholding President Turd’s Muslim Ban, er…”travel ban”. Under no circumstances (unless perhaps they are rich and doing business with one of the president’s businesses) will anyone from Yemen or several other Muslim countries be allowed to come to the United States.

USA! USA!!!!!

[1] I am a great admirer of Isaac Babel’s writing. I put Babel’s writing in a class with Sam Cooke’s singing, Django’s guitar playing, Meryl Streep’s acting. I read Babel in English, of course, I know and love the 1955 translation (long out of print) by Walter Morison.

I was once told by a Russian poet that Isaac Babel’s Russian is “untranslatable”. I have always loved the Walter Morison translations, which this Russian poet told me captured Babel’s Russian surprisingly well. When I see other translations I am often struck by their clumsiness, the way they are nothing like the Babel I love.

Here is an excellent discussion, leavened by wryness, of the challenges of translating Babel’s Russian into English. I tip my cap to this writer, well done!

Here is the first article on the challenge of translating Babel I found, which struck me as great at the time. I thought it contained a section of Morison’s masterful rendering of Babel’s Guy de Maupassant (though the notes in the book I love apparently attributed the translation to Raymond Rosenthal and Waclaw Soski) It appears the author of the article linked above thought he was up to the challenge of improving this flowing translation. I say no, but, alas, am too lazy to rewrite the whole piece. To cut straight to the immortal passages in the beautiful translation I first read, skip to the last paragraphs of this post. Scroll to the double space above “Here, sorry about that.”

Isaac Babel deserves his own post (and now, a few hours later, he has it), but here is Babel’s wonderful, laconic description of translating, of writing. This is possibly the best short description ever written about what we do when wrestling our thoughts into the best possible language (it comes after the other translator’s introduction of the story for context) (emphasis mine):

Babel himself was a translator from French and Yiddish. One of his best-known stories, “Guy de Maupassant,” is ostensibly about translation. Its narrator, a fictional Babel, has been hired by Raisa Berndersky, a rich Jewish Petersburg society wife, to help her with her attempts at translating Maupassant:

In her translation there was no trace of Maupassant’s free-flowing phrases with their drawn-out breath of passion. Mrs. Bendersky’s writing was tediously correct, lifeless and loud, the way Jews used to write Russian back in the day. I took the manuscript home with me…and spent all night hacking a path through someone else’s translation (*). The work was not as bad as it sounds. A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a barely discernible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm. You need to turn it once, but not twice. In the morning, I brought back the corrected manuscript. Raïsa wasn’t lying when she told me of her passion for Maupassant. She sat motionless, her hands clasped as I read it to her: these satin hands melted to the floor, her forehead went pale, and the lace between her bound breasts strained and trembled. “How did you do that?” So then I started talking about style, about an army of words, an army in which all manner of weapons come into play. No steel can pierce the human heart as cold as a period placed just right. She listened, her head bowed, her painted lips parted. A black light glowed in her lacquered hair, smoothly pressed and parted. Her legs, with their strong tender calves, were bathed in stockings and splayed wide on the carpet.

No, wait just a minute. This is not Morison’s translation, (or Raymond Rosenthal and Waclaw Soski’s) you treacherous fellow you. I get it now, you think you have improved on the “Morison” translation, made it more faithful to Babel’s writing, to the actual Russian words he chose. You haven’t, and I know this even though I don’t know a word of Russian. It is in the flow, the music of the language, the rhythm. Morison, the year before I was born, translated the phrase you style “hacking a path through somebody else’s translation” as “hacking my way through the tangled undergrowth of her prose” as far as I recall, I don’t have the tattered out-of-print paperback with me here at the farm. But compare those two phrases. Why would Babel have written the dry first phrase when the second is so full of flavor?

Now I see many small brutalities, inflicted no doubt, and without a sense of irony (especially considering the story itself, the passage about the subtle art of translation!) in the interest of making the translation more accurate, more tediously correct, if I may borrow your phrase for Raisa Bendersky’s stilted, painstaking, tuneless translation. I know that translation is a fine art, a very difficult art, no doubt, a kind of intoxicating dance (when working with something like Babel’s uniquely delicious prose). But sometimes you simply need to leave a fine translation alone.

“How did you do that?” with only the tiniest, almost imperceptible, turn of the warm lever, is inferior, and far less immediate, than Morison’s/Rosenthal’s & Soski’s breathless “How did you do it?”.

And fuck, the last line of the story, which made my young spine tingle and filled me with a longing to some day write a line like that, has been changed too! And not for the better, it ends the transcendent story rather flatly. It is rendered:

My heart felt tight. I was brushed by a premonition of the truth.

Nothing like the icy fingers grasping his heart as he has a premonition .. wait, I have found the original line, on-line:

My heart contracted as the foreboding of some essential truth touched me with light fingers.

Another great line, butchered also, damn it, made clumsy and clunky, along with the bit about needing to turn the lever once, not twice. The proof, if it was needed, that some phrases don’t need the lever turned at all. You took this:

No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.

and believe you’ve improved it, with only one turn of the lever, to this:

No steel can pierce the human heart as cold as a period placed just right.

Dunce!

Goddamn it, you fucker. Might be more accurate as a strict translation from the Russian, maybe the Russian word for “cold” is in there, “pierce” may be closer to the Russian than its close synonym “stab”, but for god’s sake, read the two lines in English.

Here, sorry about that. I mentioned I don’t have my moth-eaten copy of Babel with me. Read this, from the original translation, I found it in an old email I sent a friend in 2014. Observe the way it flows, without a word wasted:

I took the manuscript with me, and in Kazantsev’s attic, among my sleeping friends, spent the night cutting my way through the tangled undergrowth of her prose. It was not such dull work as it might seem. A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.

Next morning I took back the corrected manuscript. Raisa wasn’t lying when she told me that Maupassant was her sole passion. She sat motionless, her hands clasped, as I read it to her. Her satin hands drooped to the floor, her forehead paled, and the lace between her constricted breasts danced and heaved.

“How did you do it?”

I began to speak of style, of the army of words, of the army in which all kinds of weapons may come into play. No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place. She listened with her head down and her painted lips half open. In her hair, pressed smooth, divided by a parting and looking like patent leather, shone a dark gleam. Her legs in tight-fitting stockings, with their strong, soft calves, were planted wide apart on the carpet.

The maid, glancing to the side with her petrified wanton eyes, brought in breakfast on a tray.

Son of Personal vs. Political

One point I didn’t hammer home in the post I wrote the other day is the ease with which false equivalencies are made. I didn’t mean to imply that there is equal validity to both sides of our current political impasse or that everything can be made better by polite compromise. Is there room to compromise over who is right, climate scientists who link the catastrophic climate events now very common to the warming of the oceans due to man-made pollution and the oil industry think tanks who insist we must be skeptical of these claims because unprecedented wild fires, hundred year storms, floods, droughts, earthquakes, deadly heat waves etc. sometimes just happen, by sheer coincidence, many times a year?

There is a lucrative advertising-driven industry based on false equivalencies that makes it virtually impossible for most people to get past their bitter partisan differences for the sake of seriously analyzing a larger problem. Partisanship drives commerce, whether it’s the sports team you root for or the political team. The CEO of the company that owns CBS made some comment mildly critical of the bully, then one of a dozen Republican presidential candidates, who went on to become our current president, then he smiled and said how good this stirrer of shit was for the corporate bottom line: viewer eyeballs and advertising dollars.

Only people of good will and good faith can sit down together and have a larger discussion that doesn’t degenerate into the dogmatic defense of their personal and political biases. People of good will and good faith are out there in significant numbers, but our commercialized political system has made such individuals rare in the public sphere. The public debate we get to see is conducted by hard-nosed partisans who fight each other in a way that makes powerless viewers tune in to fume. It is much easier to put on a blue hat, or a red one, and chant. It is everybody’s right to chant, but not all chants are created equal.

My mother asked me, when I was ten or so, something that struck me as a profound question. “Can you admire a great artist if you find out he’s a Nazi?” In other words, can you separate the art work from the deep personal beliefs of the person who created it? To my ten year-old mind this was a puzzler. Being a great artist was very important to me at ten, I had a grandmother who convinced me it was crucial for me to become a world famous artist. Her first cousin was world famous plaster casting sculptor George Segal. Somewhere I have a letter from Georgik, received shortly after my lone visit to his farm studio, seething, in tiny controlled handwriting, at my monstrous attitude toward the fucking rich, people he called the most generous in the world. They’d certainly been most generous to him.

Anyway, after living in the world long enough I no longer have any doubt about the correct answer to that now obvious question: if a Nazi produces great art work he’s still a Nazi and fuck him and his fucking art work. My friend and mentor Florence, a great artist and a lifelong political activist, told me the same thing the last time I saw her. It’s kind of obvious, really. Art is personal and also political. Picture the curator or gallery owner:

“Look at the unmatched delicacy of these watercolors, the subtle gradations in shade and color, the beautiful control of the brush, the bravura treatment of the sky, the sea. The way the pigment is deployed perfectly for the luminous effect…”

You say: and look at the great artist in his SS uniform, impeccable, looking so self-possessed as he points to the right and the left, sending people to slave labor or the gas chamber. Also done with great style and an almost unmatched delicacy. You can tell the man is an artist. A great Nazi artist. As for these breathtaking watercolors, they should be neatly, respectfully rolled and delicately shoved up his war criminal ass, along with the brushes and his other painting supplies.

Harsh? Perhaps. The point is that, although we routinely deny it here, our life choices are both personal and political. Compromise is not possible on certain matters. At one time most Americans thought it proper to tolerate the institution of slavery. It was unthinkable to imagine dismantling that great money-making machine that had created so much wealth, prosperity, that charmingly genteel way of life. The Abolitionists were often thought of as extremists, maniacs, hysterics. History now takes another view of them, since they now seem to have clearly been on the right moral side of the terrible issue. The issue, racially based human slavery, and chattel slavery at that, was a great controversy at one time.

I dare say even those who cheer and chant for our current overbearer-in-chief would hesitate to scream their approval of a proposal to reintroduce race-based chattel slavery in America, no matter how enthusiastically they love the school-to-prison pipeline, privatized for-profit prisons, free enterprise, freedom, the free market, no matter how passionately they believe in the vague goal of Making America Great Again. Maybe I am giving the crowd at a shallow, adulation-craving celebrity megalomaniac’s rally too much credit, but I feel it would only be a few, at least at first, chanting: Chain them up! Chain them up!!!!!

Which is not to say, of course, that many of them might not feel that choking anger, and fear, and in some shameful place in their angry, frightened hearts they might not wish for the good old days when those contentious matters were simply settled law.

Now we have right-wing partisans, salivating at the prospect of a 6-3 Conservative Supreme Court for the rest of my lifetime, calling the famous Roe v. Wade ruling, making the right to choose abortion a Constitutional right for women, the modern Dred Scott case, a ruling that held that a black person, once a slave, was always a fucking slave anywhere in the U.S.A. for purposes of the Fugitive Slave Act. Within a few years of Dred Scott Americans would be spilling each other’s blood in rivers to settle the question once and for all.

Another Civil War over the question of a twelve year-old rape victim’s right not to be forced to carry the rapist’s baby to term? I don’t imagine so, but I also have no doubt that the merciless application of the abstract principle that “life begins at conception” does not quite cover the entire moral landscape of the argument over a woman’s right to choose an abortion, if she must. Those who believe that abortion is murder, period, will not be convinced that mercy is ever involved in the issue, since it would be condoning murder, something no moral person would ever do.

Ronald Reagan, either quipping or already demented, said “the right to life ends at birth”. Funny, Ronnie. Also true. The proponents of banning abortion seldom provide for the lives of the sacred, unwanted little souls they are insisting have every right to be born. Once born, of course, you’re on your own, motherfucker, this is America, bitch, nobody owes you jack shit.

Oversimplification? Take the question of a medically complicated pregnancy that threatens the life of the mother. If the fetus continues to grow in the womb the mother will die. Still murder to spare the mother’s life by terminating the pregnancy?

Let’s ask God. Isn’t it true, God, that there is no justice without mercy?

God informs me that He was driven to despair by man’s misuse of free will. Broke His heart, He said He’s done with these motherfuckers, particularly the ones who insist they are righteously killing in His name. We’re on our own down here.

I thought this article was a pretty good discussion of the dilemma we citizens face in an increasingly tribal nation, presided over by a blustering, supremely entitled imbecile who has only one trick: attacking people who make him feel stupid or inadequate. Wait, he has two other tricks: shameless self-promotion and doubling down. If you make a bad bet, double it. The alternative, admitting error, is unthinkable. How can your brand be infallible if you admit making a mistake? It is important to be the most important and the very best person in the world. Period. End of story. Make America Great Again, bitches.

Preface fragment no. 3 or 4 or 5

Two and a half years ago I set out to write a memoir of my father’s life, a complicated life that had always been a troubling puzzle to me. He was a man of high ideals, deeply held beliefs about justice, a great knowledge of history, sharp, funny, a lover of animals, underdogs and soul music, particularly Sam Cooke. He was also, when the mood was upon him, a monster to his own family, conducting a relentless war over the dinner table every night. A story that I thought might take a year or so to write has so far taken two and a half years. The manuscript I have to wrestle with now is almost 1,200 pages, goddamn it. I am continuing to wrestle with it, in my way.

It was tempting initially to structure the story of my father’s life with his dramatic deathbed regrets the last night of his life saved for the end, a kind of cosmic punchline at the end of a life insisting he’d had no choice but to strafe his children whenever he felt cornered. He was literally cornered there at dinner, he sat in the worst possible seat at the kitchen table, landlocked between the wall, the counter with the toaster on it and the refrigerator, with my sister blocking his egress. I had the best seat, right by the door, and often took advantage of it whenever I couldn’t stand the heat and had to get out of the kitchen.

I came to realize, as I worked on the book, that setting the story up that way, with the big reveal at the end, was no favor to the reader or any kind of worthwhile dramatic revelation, really. Not to say it wasn’t dramatic, or a revelation, but not one to save to the end of the story. It’s not really a suspense story, or a mystery, though it’s also a suspense story and a mystery.

My father was a perplexing riddle, true, but perhaps every father’s life must be a riddle to his children. When you think of telling the story of any life, boiling it down to a book, you are talking about a riddle. Every human life is a riddle, human history is a riddle without an answer and much of what we experience here falls into that category. I’ve had to keep this in mind as I work in a darkened room, trying to put together a puzzle that is missing many pieces, under the dimmest of lights. The fragments, I think, are probably story enough. Then again, I am not the judge of how much of a story I have managed to tell so far.

You can read all of it, in no particular order, here.

The other site I refer to at that link, while it does have some good photos and a selection of somewhat evocative early segments, hasn’t been updated for maybe a year and a half. Feel free to check it out, but be forewarned.

Personal vs. political

I am sitting alone, having my daily silent conversation, ostensibly with a reader, (with you, dear reader!) though one can pretty easily see that I do not write for a great number of readers. [1] It doesn’t matter if you write for one person, as in a letter, or to every sentient reader on the earth (as many of us strive to write for) the process is the same. It is a personal process and also a political process.

No less an authority on the subject than Adolf Hitler wrote, early in his life, that art is a bridge from the artist’s heart to the heart of another. He later applied this same principle to the art of political propaganda. Too bad the little shit was rejected from art school, his hissy temper tantrums at art critics and gallery owners without taste would have served the world much better than the ones he threw on the world stage, but that is another matter. No idea why I am thinking about fucking Hitler right now. [2]

I guess, to say, the exercise is essentially that — building a bridge from the self to others outside of the self. Writing clearly is the goal; making it easy for the reader to follow our guided tour through our thoughts, ideas and feelings. These are three different things, thoughts: what goes through our minds as we ponder, ideas: conclusions we come to about the things we ponder, and feelings: our emotions as this is happening. All three of these are important, essential really. When we write we explain what we are thinking and feeling to ourselves, in the process of setting it out clearly to the imaginary reader.

Kurt Vonnegut always wrote imagining his sister, who was a great reader, his ideal reader, reading the page. If the joke would make her laugh, it was worth keeping in. If the image would make her eyes grow moist, her nostrils flare slightly, the image stayed. If she would roll her eyes, or not buy it, or find it pretentious or ridiculous, out it went. His writing appealed to millions, appeals to this day, but he wrote every word, to hear him tell it, imagining his sister as his only reader. Good enough, I’d say. We write, on one level or another, to that imagined sensibility, the sensitive reader we’d love to be reading our words.

My mother was a great reader and I can often picture her reading a sentence or paragraph I’ve just written. She had a great grasp of language, and a love of it, and a poetic imagination. She didn’t mind something being just a little cartoonish, if it served to make the thing more clear, the feeling and colors more vivid, the conclusion that much more emphatic.

The dialogue we have when we are alone… I don’t think I could put a price on it. In the previous post Hannah Arendt is quoted as believing:

The passion of being was in thinking. And that comes from that two-in-one dialogue in one’s head. And for her, that was the beginning of moral life, that dialogue.

Can I get a “hell yeah!”? The world is vexing, often perplexing, the only quiet we often get, and the best chance to get any real perspective (if we are persistent and lucky, and disposed toward this exercise) is sitting by ourselves, thinking through this kind of quiet inner dialogue. All around us busy people are complaining: “I don’t have time to think!” “I don’t know whether to shit or wind my watch!” “Who has the time?!!!!” “It’s all too much!” “I can’t watch the news, it fills me with dread and hatred!!!”

I am a man with the luxury of time, and I spend some of it each day doing this, having a silent chat with someone I’ve never met as I run everything by myself.

How do I make the time? Admittedly I save a lot of time every day by doing virtually no cleaning. I clean my kitchen sink regularly, and keep all decomposable food garbage in the freezer until I take it out, I clean my bathroom occasionally. Outside of that, and a hump to the laundromat with a heavy bag every couple of weeks, I live in a chaos that would be embarrassing if photographed.

I could see the horrified jurors: “Look, ladies and gentlemen, if you have the stomach for it, at these photographs of the defendant’s living room…” The prosecutor could rest his case after showing the shots of the jammed shelves, the overflowing tabletops, the collapsing piles of boxes, the carpet of papers covering everything, the tangled chaos on the floor, the cracked walls, ceilings and broken tile floors. A jury of my actual peers would be a slovenly twelve indeed, but that is not the point. I’m not competing for a spread in Better Homes and Gardens.

I also have the great luck not to be a covetous person, which saves time too. A friend who plays guitar OK and has a couple of beautiful, expensive guitars– I say, God bless him! Truly. I’m not the envious type. I don’t waste time or emotion measuring what I have against the acquisitions of other people. I’m content to own what I need, to preserve the things I love– favorite pens, knives, musical instruments, to use things up, to wear the same shirt for a decade or more. One of my favorite shirts is one my mother always liked, I wore it to visit her at the hospice the last day she had her eyes open. It was the last shirt she saw me in, and she smiled to see it. A colorful affair it is, purchased at Costco once upon a time. My mother died eight years ago. I wear the shirt now for special occasions, rarely mentioning the shirt’s connection to my mother’s death, how she smiled to see it one last time.

There is the personal, the things that matter most to us, the things we find most fascinating, compelling, irresistible. These things vary greatly from one of us to the next. The realm of the personal, though, is something we all share. We all take certain things personally and we can all relate to exactly why that is. If you can illuminate your personal passions three dimensionally enough you might draw somebody through that doorway, into a world they never appreciated before. It’s like the old adage (and a wise one, too) that you take the professor, not the course. You can sign up for the most interesting sounding course in the catalogue, only to find the juice and life sucked out of it by a cadaverous professor. The flip-side is that you can take a course that appears less than marginally interesting in the course description that turns out to be fantastic, because the professor is brilliant and draws you into her love of the subject.

The personal, we are often reminded, is political, as the political is personal. Take the average partisan voter, they take their politics very personally and their political views flow from the experiences of their personal lives. If liberal they get exercised by the idea of racism, the state’s overbearing interference with a human right (abortion comes first to mind), the grotesquely uneven distribution of wealth and opportunity, the destruction of the natural earth by greedy corporations mining the last scraps of the world’s resources and poisoning everything. If conservative they are pissed off at “political correctness”, the idea that every lazy poor person feels entitled to free food, free medical care, a low-cost place to stay, a cell phone, fancy sneakers, sickened at government interference with human rights– like the right not to be killed as a fetus for the convenience of an immoral pregnant woman– job killing regulations to save some endangered bird or rodent, on down the line. These issues are litmus test left-right issues. Abortion. Poverty. Catastrophic Climate Disruption. Regulations. Income inequality.

Also, all deeply personal issues. This is where the rubber meets the road, as they say in that big cliche mill in the sky. The successful politician makes a personal connection, as, say what you will about him, the current president has undoubtedly made among his supporters. He speaks plainly to them, speaks the way they do, doesn’t worry if a bad word slips out, everyone uses a bad word sometimes. Fuck those sons of bitches, you know what I’m saying? Am I right? Seriously, (a huge huzzah of approval) fuck those fucking losers. We’re going to bomb the shit out of those motherfuckers! You know what I’m saying? His audience roars, they know exactly what he’s saying.

He is a star because he speaks a language his audience takes very personally. His opponent in the last election, whatever else we might say about her, did not have the same gift, was not as able to make that personal connection, even as she was arguably more personable, certainly less abrasive, than our current attacker-in-chief. Partisans will argue over which one was the bigger liar. We must not forget, the last election was a close contest between the most hated and second most hated political personalities in America.

I have long believed, and do even now, that if people of good faith and good will sit down to solve the local version of world problems, there is much even political opposites would agree on. The argument against this is the way “winning” politics is conducted in our intensely commercial society. It was discovered at some point that negative campaigning wins elections, if you can get people to believe your opponent is a pedophile, for example– you have a huge advantage with the voters.

Newt Gingrich and his friends made a science out of “wedge issues”, hammering on the emotional issues that divide us into opposing camps. The Democratic party’s response was to try to make their tent big enough for everybody, by carefully not offending anyone. Which in itself is kind of offensive to many, particularly if you adopt the worst ideas of your opponents in the name of “compromise” while engaging in the standard servile courtship of super-wealthy human and corporate donors.

The Democrats’ inclusive approach was disparagingly branded “identity politics” as though the politics of the conservative is not also based on identity, and carved into the other side of the same stone. On and on. Blue hat, red hat. Blue asshole, red asshole. Brands, mere brands in a culture raised on brand loyalty, steeped in the consciousness of brands, understanding quality only through brand names.

What is my brand? Not having a brand. (see footnote 1)

“Not much of a goddamned brand. Excellent brand for a loser, though, I have to give you that.”

The tone of the conversation in my head is calm, as honest as I can make it, with a bias toward trying to be fair. If we are fair when we analyze a problem, the odds are better we’ll come to reasonable ideas about how to solve it, or at least make it better. The alternative is an eternal contest between sullen, immovable two year-olds.

The trouble with voting for a brand, being a partisan, is that very often no thought at all goes into taking rigid positions that are always presented as either/or. Spokesmen for our self-identified brand will tell us what side to take on any given issue, assuring us that there are only two sides to any issue, an imbecilic position few bother to question. Good people don’t kill fetuses vs. good people don’t force fourteen year-old rape victims to carry the rapist’s baby for nine months and give birth to it. There are arguments on both sides, I suppose, and a world of nuance between these two absolute views but the ones that begin “God said”… well, enough said, I think.

I say believe in God as deeply as you like, and may the good, merciful things you do multiply as your faith deepens. Personally, I have no problem with the righteous of any religion, until they come with swords, because God told them… you know.

Meantime, the conversation continues, as all good conversations should.

[1] When I get a “like” I generally try to return the favor and like something on the liker’s site. I read something I like and click like, and am often number 399 liking that post. A big post for likes, in my case, is four or five.

I shit you not, I got a couple of likes on this very post today, went to the blahgs, read something I liked and clicked “like”. Czech it out, eerie, crazy:

Screen shot 2018-06-29 at 2.31.43 AM.png

[2] Not a day goes by… I had a great experience recently, a nervous, chatty guy I was waiting for a medical procedure with (by pure chance, never met him before), as we went up in the elevator, asking me what my ancestry was. I assumed he was asking if I was Jewish, so I told him where my people came from. “You’re a Jew? Jesus Christ,” he said, which I repeated with a big smile. I love that kind of shit. Only tangentially related to not a day going by without some thought of Hitler, this guy certainly didn’t strike me as an anti-Semite, but… Jesus Christ! That was great.

Hannah Arendt, towering intellectual It-Girl

I am, apparently, not the only one currently reading Hannah Arendt’s massive and fascinating The Origins of Totalitarianism (there’s a line waiting for it at the NY Public Library). It may actually be back on the best-seller list, for reasons impossible to fathom. One of those accidents of history, I suppose. Sekhnet alerted me to Krista Tippett’s great interview with a British academic and author, Lyndsey Stonebridge, who recently re-read Arendt’s collected works and wrote an article on Hannah Arendt. You can hear their conversation HERE and, bless Krista, there is also a full transcript of their edited chat.

Krista quotes Hannah Arendt:

“What prepares men for a totalitarian domination” — and here, again, is what happens in the human heart and psyche and society that makes these things possible — “is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience, usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.”

Loneliness, which has multiplied exponentially in our cyber age. Loneliness and the disconnection that leads some to despair, tens of thousands of Americans annually to death by drug overdose, gunshot, hanging, suicide by police, by drunk driving. Loneliness, which makes people join mobs, if they get the chance, chanting idiotic slogans by the flickering light of Tiki torches.

Loneliness, which has been monetized by shrewd fucks like Mark Zuckerberg (to the tune of $74,000,000,000 personal profit and counting) and organized by algorithm into potent personalized political propaganda delivery, instantly to your pocket, or bedside, with a little notification beep to remind you it’s waiting. Loneliness is the source of much human misery, and, as so often with massive human misery, there’s gold in that misery (think of slavery, Imperialism, the coal mines, the original factory system).

Here, at the oddly placed footnote below, Krista and Lyndsey Stonebridge talk about the power of a provocative lie versus the feebleness of factual truth in politics, something that has an unaccountable relevance at the moment, though, again, hard to put my finger on why. [1]

I need to read more about Hannah Arendt’s life, her soul calls out to me from another world. I feel she is a precious wise ancestor I’d be good friends with. I recall her description of an assimilated nineteenth century Prussian Jewish woman of great wit and charm, one Rahel Varnhagen, who held a salon where actors and other artistic and intellectual misfits gathered. Of Rahel Varnhagen Arendt later said, (Wikipedia informs us) that she was “my very closest woman friend, unfortunately dead a hundred years now.”^[13] I have similar feelings about Hannah Arendt, though she’s been dead far less long so far. Here is a nice short piece about my dear friend Hannah, with numerous linked quotes and articles.

Here is what she thought about thinking:

MS. TIPPETT: … And honestly, Americans have a very conflicted kind of relationship, historically and philosophically, with thought and ideas. It’s a different thing than it was, for example, in the Germany that Hannah Arendt was raised in. The power of ideas. But it feels to me like there might be a receptivity now precisely because we see that it’s not getting us anywhere to be meeting my emotion with your emotion. Her — as you say, you can only have moral imagination if you also think, if you are thinking.

You talked in this podcast I heard you in that brought me to you, In Our Time, about how she always talked about the dialogue we have in our heads, that we are constantly working out what it means to be human, to be a person, whether we realize it or not.

MS. STONEBRIDGE: Yeah. She took this from Socrates and then from Heidegger, but her sense of what it meant to be a thinking person was always to be having the two-in-one dialogue in your head, that thinking wasn’t about mastery. It wasn’t about thinking about stuff in order to control it or to rationalize it. Thinking was a way of being.

The passion of being was in thinking. And that comes from that two-in-one dialogue in one’s head. And for her, that was the beginning of moral life, that dialogue.

There also follows — there is a notion of judgment that comes through thinking and dialogue. And the ability…

MS. TIPPETT: Discernment. Reflection.

MS. STONEBRIDGE: Well, thinking, she says, is not the same as judgment, but it creates the right conditions for judgment. But also, she says, if you can’t have that inner dialogue, then you can’t speak and act with others either because it’s part of — if you’re already divided in yourself because you’re having this conversation with yourself, and that’s the passion of your being, people who can do that can actually then move on to having conversations with other people and then judging with other people. And what she called “the banality of evil” was the inability to hear another voice, the inability to have a dialogue either with oneself or the imagination to have a dialogue with the world, the moral world.

The inability to hear an opposing view, a voice not your own, to imagine an experience you have not personally encountered. The abiding curse of our fucking times.

Arendt quote.jpg

[1] MS. TIPPETT: We’re going to have to wind down here, but I’ve got so much else I want to talk about. But I want to talk briefly and this follows on that idea of lying. Which was one of those elements of totalitarianism, very much a subject alive in American politics now. But something I’m very intrigued getting a little bit deeper into this, and reading her — and I’ve thought a lot about — like a lot of things right now, it’s just out on the surface, what was already kind of fermenting. We already had a crisis of truth, or not being able to speak about truth in a complex way. And we’ve been relying on facts, and facts were never enough. And she makes these — like, here’s her essay “Lying in Politics.” She says that “factual truths,” here’s that. “Factual truths are never compellingly true. The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life. It is always in danger of being perforated by single lies, or torn to shreds. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy domain of human affairs. From this it follows that no factual statement can ever be beyond doubt.” Take us inside that and what that means for us now.

MS. STONEBRIDGE: For Arendt, I think why the idea of thinking and speaking as a form of action are important to her is that what she’s saying there is, you can throw enough facts, you can throw all the facts you like at people, and they will not stick. We had this, in the U.K., and I know you have, too, that it’s — “OK, against the false news we’ll have fact-finding, and we’ll tell you.

And we’ll have a team of researchers, and you just have to look on our website, and we’ll tell you which of those are lies.” And you can scream facts at people until you’re blue in the face, and a lot of colleagues and universities and journalists have been doing exactly that very hard, working tirelessly. And it’s not making any difference. And I think what she’s talking about there is the ability through thinking and communal discourse, to make truth meaningful in the world, it has to happen between people. Which is not saying we just make up our own reality. She’s not saying that. It means that this is why…

MS. TIPPETT: When she says testimony, it needs…

MS. STONEBRIDGE: Testimony.

MS. TIPPETT: It needs experience. It needs human experience around it.

MS. STONEBRIDGE: Yeah. And so I think she — that was why testimony was important to her. It’s why history and the sense of a myth were all important to her because it’s what makes truth meaningful to people together in a community. If you want a culture that’s going to take on fake news, and the political lie, I say as someone who teaches literature and history, what you need is a culture of the arts and humanity. What you need is more storytelling. What you need is more discourse. What you need is more imagination. What you need is more creation in that way, and more of a sense of what it is that ties us to those words and ties us to those stories.

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. We need three dimensional — we need stories and facts and conversations between people and all of that working together. Right?

Feral Trio

In spite of the generally accepted idea that a feral cat, once it reaches a certain age, will not allow itself to be touched by humans, we have a feral cat, Mama Kitten, who at first would not be touched and now very much likes to be petted. On her terms, of course, being a cat, but nonetheless, quite affectionate when the mood is on her. She came by this gradually, sitting near us when we were outside, showing her newborn kittens to Sekhnet in the garden, coming closer, rubbing against us, eventually letting herself be touched. We fed many of her kittens off a spoon, once she weaned them.

She is a beautiful cat, and a prodigious survivor, who, starting at six month’s old, has given birth to perhaps twenty kittens. She is a good mother, until it is time to push the latest brood out of the nest, to attend to the next. She can be quite savage driving off the surviving kittens when the time comes. Sekhnet, applying human morality (oxymoron?) condemns the little survivor as a bitch when she turns savagely on her children. In a better world we’d adopt Mama Kitten, get her spayed, make her an indoor/outdoor cat, extend her life by years, etc. This is not, of course, a better world.

Here are three of the latest batch of four, lounging on the ramp outside the back door from which, periodically, human servants emerge, opening cans of food. There are a few such cans on the right side of this recent photo by Sekhnet.

We generally don’t give these beautiful little strays names because every time we get attached to a particular individual he or she disappears. Sometimes there is a bad smell in the garden and we find a tiny corpse under a bush. More usually the kittens are whisked off without a trace, to become meals for the local hawks.

Yesterday, strolling back from Cunningham Park just before sundown, I passed several groups of cats, a lounging mother and two or three kittens playing under a bush. The kittens watched me as I approached, scurrying for cover as I got close. Their mothers eyed me warily until I was a safe distance away. Their looks said “that’s right, motherfucker, continue to carry your ass on down the street and stop looking at my children, you sick bastard.”

I recalled the debate Jonathan Franzen was involved in at one time, about wiping out the colonies of feral cats that kill, as it turns out, not thousands but billions of local birds and rodents every year. Often for sport, it appears. Sekhnet once saw Mama Kitten take down a finch, leaped up and tore the little yellow bird out of the air. “I hope she’s teaching her children to hunt,” she sometimes says when she laments that we are not always around to feed them.

It’s a brutal world out there for animals in the wild. Even more brutal, I suppose, in areas where humans have remade the natural world, turning local species into cagey outlaws. This brutality has been escalated (like a consumer complaint to any corporation, only for real) by the needs of the world’s top predator, homo sapiens, until not that long ago another insignificant and desperate prey animal, living by guile, as ruthless as necessary to survive. I’d love to be able to live without making constant judgements, the way I don’t judge Mama Kitten, but, as you may have noticed, greedy, ruthless, ignorant, loud talking motherfuckers will not give it a rest.

These are three very cute kittens, though, no?