Dusk
(Originally November 28, 2016)
(Now, at the end of November 2017; currently re-reading Rosbottom's When Paris Went Dark: The City Of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944; paragraphing added for emphasis:)
As I punch this in, it's twilight on the Left Coast and almost too obvious an image. At work, in the aftermath of the election few people spoke about the results. Even fewer people mention what's to come, now, except with a lot of who-the fuck-knows eye rolling and shrugging.
For now, there is an adult, no matter what you think of his policies, in the White House. We can push the image of Trump and his ilk, of Mike Pence telling the media to "buckle up", out of our minds -- but everyone knows that this (relatively) liberal presidency is ending; the light is fading.
I wrote a long post claiming to know something of the future, but this was bullshit: I don't know, and am not going to pretend otherwise. I let those who can analyze and translate current events well, or those with louder voices, or with their penchant for ego masquerading as enlightenment, do their thing. The river will carry everything past if we're patient enough, sitting on the bank.
Something else, too: the future is very present. It's going to play out in the faces and the lives of friends and total strangers, whose fates seem more important now than they did a month ago.
I'm not a very deep reader, and when uncomfortable tend to chew on the familiar. So I grabbed Alan Furst's The World At Night to read over the long weekend. It's a story of Paul Casson, a Parisian and a producer of films, in France at the fall of the Third Republic, and the choices he makes after. It's about morality, love, and the courage and venality of life during occupation.
Casson has been recalled to the army in the late spring of 1940; the Germans are already invading the Low Countries (and eventually, as everyone knows, France itself via the Ardennes). He is part of a propaganda unit filming the French army as it heads toward the front.
At the end, Casson makes another choice -- as much an act against Occupation and exclusion, division and hate. For a purist or a Marxist, it will appear as sentimentalist garbage, a fool's choice. But it's often our deepest passions, sometimes hidden from ourselves and spurring us to act, that define us in the end.
For the Left, the appointment of Bush in 2000 was a shock unlike any other in American politics -- and what followed was an eight year chapter in the Banality of Evil.
Life under Bush, a limited, Dauphin of a man, was Life During Wartime -- one reason Obama's election in 2008 was greeted with street parties -- here in Kiddietown, it was like the Place De Concorde in 1944 -- The nazis are gone! Vive La France! We were Liberated!
But, Bush and the creatures that swept in with him had some legitimacy as part of the political mainstream. Lil" Boots played at being a loud, crude Man Of The People but was always the son of a Yankee, blue-blood, Old Money family.
Not so with Trump or the alt-Right. He has all the sophistication of an infomercial, the intellectual depth of a racetrack tout -- and, it's not an act. The opportunistic fascist con artists he will drag into government in his wake will wipe their boots on the collective culture. No one knows precisely what will happen but it's almost certain to be even worse than we imagine.
And compared with the Bush-time, it feels more like Occupation. Like the real thing -- as if Bush had been a dry run, a testing of limits. Just outside our field of vision, we sense men in Field Grey on the corners, but they're waiting, not asking for Ausweis; not yet. Unconsciously, this was perhaps why I had taken Furst's book down from the shelf in the first place.
It's going to take time for the corrosion to sink in. And it will take time for people to act against it from our moral centers -- some sooner than others, but act we will have to. And the values and passions at the core of our Selves will direct us. We don't have any other choice, really.
And, comparing what's coming to the nazi Occupation of Paris, or Europe, as metaphor isn't romanticizing our situation. It's all for-real.
From the Post That Never Was, some tasty links as you cook that Crayfish. Pass the square bottle of yellow stuff, would you? And, which way to The Pig's Ass?
"Red Front!" They called after him.
Alastair Crooke, Without Any Masterpiece Theatre -- and who he quotes, Raul Meijer.
ARTHUR, Once Upon A Time In His Head, who self-references. It's totally okay.
Richard Rorty, though he be dead (quotes below -- see The Paper Of Record's original 1998 review.)
(Originally November 28, 2016)
(Now, at the end of November 2017; currently re-reading Rosbottom's When Paris Went Dark: The City Of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944; paragraphing added for emphasis:)
Article 43 of the... Hague Convention of 1907 states succinctly: "The authority of the legitimate power... [upon occupying an enemy's territory] shall take all the measures in his power to restore and ensure, as far as possible, public order and (civil life), while respecting... the laws in force in the country."
Such benign language assumes that all occupying forces see their primary duty as maintaining a semblance of antebellum daily life. Yet it suggests that the occupier might well read in the innocuous phrase "as far as possible" a loophole that would permit him to do whatever he wants. Also, there is no reference in [article 43] to the notion of time: How long is an occupation? Can it go on forever? Is it... open-ended?
One of the cruelest impositions on an occupied nation is the idea that time is also an enemy, a heretofore anodyne phenomenon that becomes a patient, insatiable consumer of hope. [An] occupation is no longer just the temporary appropriation of sovereignty.
________________________________
As I punch this in, it's twilight on the Left Coast and almost too obvious an image. At work, in the aftermath of the election few people spoke about the results. Even fewer people mention what's to come, now, except with a lot of who-the fuck-knows eye rolling and shrugging.
For now, there is an adult, no matter what you think of his policies, in the White House. We can push the image of Trump and his ilk, of Mike Pence telling the media to "buckle up", out of our minds -- but everyone knows that this (relatively) liberal presidency is ending; the light is fading.
I wrote a long post claiming to know something of the future, but this was bullshit: I don't know, and am not going to pretend otherwise. I let those who can analyze and translate current events well, or those with louder voices, or with their penchant for ego masquerading as enlightenment, do their thing. The river will carry everything past if we're patient enough, sitting on the bank.
Something else, too: the future is very present. It's going to play out in the faces and the lives of friends and total strangers, whose fates seem more important now than they did a month ago.
I'm not a very deep reader, and when uncomfortable tend to chew on the familiar. So I grabbed Alan Furst's The World At Night to read over the long weekend. It's a story of Paul Casson, a Parisian and a producer of films, in France at the fall of the Third Republic, and the choices he makes after. It's about morality, love, and the courage and venality of life during occupation.
Casson has been recalled to the army in the late spring of 1940; the Germans are already invading the Low Countries (and eventually, as everyone knows, France itself via the Ardennes). He is part of a propaganda unit filming the French army as it heads toward the front.
...Casson was stopped. The sentries were drunk and unshaven. "What brings you here?" one of them said.The German army is successful; Casson melts away, towards Paris, more a vagabond than a fleeing soldier.
"We're making movies."
"Movies! You know Hedy Lamarr?"
"Dog dick," said another. "Not those kinds of movies. War movies."
"Oh. Then what the hell are you doing up here?"
The second man... offered Casson a bottle through the window... [and] laughed as he took the bottle back. "Come and see us, squire, after this shit's done with."
The hard Parisian sneer in his voice made Casson smile. "I will."
"You can find us up in Belleville, at The Pig's Ass."
"See you then," Casson said, shoving the clutch in.
"Red Front!" They called after him.
... Sometimes, in a cafe, he heard the news on a radio. Nothing, he realized, could save them from losing the war. He left the roads, walked across springtime fields... He shared a campfire with an old man with a white beard, a sculptor, he said, from Brittany somewhere, who walked with a stick, and got drunk on some yellow stuff from a square bottle...Casson is a character who lived a comfortable, creative life, a Parisian life, and after the nazi victory he only wants to get back to living it -- and he does, until he discovers that he actually is a moral man. And, while it takes time for the corrosion of the Occupation to seep through to him, eventually he has to act against it. He had no other choice, really; it just took some time for him to become clear to himself.
... "We'll all live deep down, now," the sculptor said, throwing a stick of wood on the fire. "Twenty ways to prepare a crayfish. Or, you know, chess. Sanskrit poetry. It will hurt like hell, sonny, you'll see."
At the end, Casson makes another choice -- as much an act against Occupation and exclusion, division and hate. For a purist or a Marxist, it will appear as sentimentalist garbage, a fool's choice. But it's often our deepest passions, sometimes hidden from ourselves and spurring us to act, that define us in the end.
_______________________________
For the Left, the appointment of Bush in 2000 was a shock unlike any other in American politics -- and what followed was an eight year chapter in the Banality of Evil.
Life under Bush, a limited, Dauphin of a man, was Life During Wartime -- one reason Obama's election in 2008 was greeted with street parties -- here in Kiddietown, it was like the Place De Concorde in 1944 -- The nazis are gone! Vive La France! We were Liberated!
But, Bush and the creatures that swept in with him had some legitimacy as part of the political mainstream. Lil" Boots played at being a loud, crude Man Of The People but was always the son of a Yankee, blue-blood, Old Money family.
Not so with Trump or the alt-Right. He has all the sophistication of an infomercial, the intellectual depth of a racetrack tout -- and, it's not an act. The opportunistic fascist con artists he will drag into government in his wake will wipe their boots on the collective culture. No one knows precisely what will happen but it's almost certain to be even worse than we imagine.
Obligatory Cute Animal Photo In Middle Of Blog Ogg Ogg
It's going to take time for the corrosion to sink in. And it will take time for people to act against it from our moral centers -- some sooner than others, but act we will have to. And the values and passions at the core of our Selves will direct us. We don't have any other choice, really.
And, comparing what's coming to the nazi Occupation of Paris, or Europe, as metaphor isn't romanticizing our situation. It's all for-real.
_______________________________
From the Post That Never Was, some tasty links as you cook that Crayfish. Pass the square bottle of yellow stuff, would you? And, which way to The Pig's Ass?
"Red Front!" They called after him.
Alastair Crooke, Without Any Masterpiece Theatre -- and who he quotes, Raul Meijer.
ARTHUR, Once Upon A Time In His Head, who self-references. It's totally okay.
Richard Rorty, though he be dead (quotes below -- see The Paper Of Record's original 1998 review.)
"[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
"At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. …
"One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet...
"This world economy will soon be owned by a cosmopolitan upper class which has no more sense of community with any workers anywhere than the great American capitalists of the year 1900... [This group included intellectuals who are] quite well insulated, at least in the short run, from the effects of globalization."
__________________________
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