Indulj el egy utón (Start out on one road) is a Hungarian folk song that is Moldavian in origin. The YouTube video gives the lyrics and translation which I've edited slightly below. We've seen this song before in an updated version from the wonderful, but no longer extant group Fókatelep (whose name means Seal Colony), but the version above by Alexander Horsch with Gyöngyös band (and featuring beautiful folk-inspired artwork, mostly by Los Angeles based artist Sarajo Frieden) has an ancient melancholic flavor that suits the day.
Kimegyek az útra, lenézek az úton
Látom édesemet, ő es lát engemet
Akarom szólitni, szánom búsítani
úgyis megszólítom egy szóval kettővel
Ne menj el édesem ne hagyj el engemet
sír a szívem érted maj' meghalok érted
Vékony a pókháló az is megtart engem
csak egy hajszálon is hozzád ránthatsz engem
Te túl, rózsám, te túl a világ erdején,
De én jóval innet, bánatnak mezején,
Indulj el egy úton, én is egy másikon,
Hol egymást találjuk, egymásnak se szóljunk
Aki minket meglát, mit fog az mondani,
Azt fogja gondolni, idegenek vagyunk.
Idegenek vagyunk, szeretetet tartunk,
Ahol összegyűlünk, ketten szeretkezünk.
Idegenek vagyunk, szeretetet tartunk,
Ahol összegyűlünk, ketten szeretkezünk.
********* I go out on the road, I look down along the way
I see my sweetheart, and he also sees me.
I want to hold him, to stay with him
I'm going to hold him anyway with one word or two.
Don't go my sweetheart, don't leave me,
My heart is crying for you, I almost die for you.
The spiderweb is thin, yet it can hold me
You can pull me towards you with even a single hair.
You are over there, my rose, You are over the forests of the world
But I am here, on the field of sorrow.
Start out on one road, I'll take the other one.
Where we find each other, we won't say a word to each other.
Those who see us what would they say?
They are going to think that we are strangers. We are strangers, we keep love Where we gather together we make love. We are strangers, we keep love Where we gather together we make love.
Arvo Pärt composed this music in 1984 to the words of the Latin hymn, also known as The Ambrosian Hymn after St Ambrose who was supposed to have written it in 387 to commemorate the baptism of St Augustine, although it has more recently been attributed to their near contemporary, the Bishop of Remesiana, Nicetas.
An Estonian Lutheran by birth and living under a Soviet rule uneasy with individual expression in art or in religion, Pärt converted to Russian Orthodoxy in his 40s and soon after emigrated first to Austria, then Germany. He has since returned to Estonia. His music tends to be an expression of his faith, and is an exception to the trend in religious music in these latter days in that it is actually beautiful, profoundly conceived and felt, and emotionally involving to the point of inspiring awe, even in an atheist's heart. Nowhere is this more evident than in Te Deum, performed here at the Church of St Nicholas in Tallin in 1999 by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and Tallin Chamber Orchestra under the direction of conductor, Tõnu Kaljuste, all of whom made the definitive recording of the piece in 1993 (Note: You need an investment of about 30 minutes to enjoy this. There isn't much that can't wait.)
Part I:
Part II:
Part III:
Per Wikipedia, the text in Latin is as follows:
Te Deum laudámus: te Dominum confitémur.
Te ætérnum Patrem omnis terra venerátur.
Tibi omnes Angeli; tibi cæli et univérsae potestátes.
Tibi Chérubim et Séraphim incessábili voce proclámant:
Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Dóminus Deus Sábaoth.
Pleni sunt cæli et terra majestátis glóriæ tuæ.
Te gloriósus Apostolórum chorus;
Te Prophetárum laudábilis númerus;
Te Mártyrum candidátus laudat exércitus.
Te per orbem terrárum sancta confitétur Ecclésia:
Patrem imménsæ majestátis;
Venerándum tuum verum et únicum Fílium;
Sanctum quoque Paráclitum Spíritum.
Tu Rex glóriæ, Christe.
Tu Patris sempitérnus es Fílius.
Tu ad liberándum susceptúrus hóminem, non horruísti Vírginis úterum.
Tu, devícto mortis acúleo,
aperuísti credéntibus regna cælórum.
Tu ad déxteram Dei sedes, in glória Patris.
Judex créderis esse ventúrus.
Te ergo quǽsumus, tuis fámulis súbveni,
quos pretióso sánguine redemísti.
Ætérna fac cum sanctis tuis in glória numerári.
[added later, mainly from Psalm verses:]
Salvum fac pópulum tuum, Dómine, et bénedic hæreditáti tuæ.
Et rege eos, et extólle illos usque in ætérnum.
Per síngulos dies benedícimus te.
Et laudámus nomen tuum in sǽculum, et in sǽculum sǽculi.
Dignáre, Dómine, die isto sine peccáto nos custodíre.
Miserére nostri, Dómine, miserére nostri.
Fiat misericórdia tua, Dómine, super nos, quemádmodum sperávimus in te.
In te, Dómine, sperávi: non confúndar in ætérnum.
~~~~~~~~~~
Translation (from the Common Book of Prayer, also via Wikipedia):
We praise thee, O God : we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.
All the earth doth worship thee : the Father everlasting.
To thee all Angels cry aloud : the Heavens, and all the Powers therein.
To thee Cherubim and Seraphim : continually do cry,
Holy, Holy, Holy : Lord God of Hosts;
Heaven and earth are full of the Majesty : of thy glory.
The glorious company of the Apostles : praise thee.
The goodly fellowship of the Prophets : praise thee.
The noble army of Martyrs : praise thee.
The holy Church throughout all the world : doth acknowledge thee;
The Father : of an infinite Majesty;
Thine honourable, true : and only Son;
Also the Holy Ghost : the Comforter.
Thou art the King of Glory : O Christ.
Thou art the everlasting Son : of the Father.
When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man : thou didst not abhor the Virgin's womb.
When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death :
thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.
Thou sittest at the right hand of God : in the glory of the Father.
We believe that thou shalt come : to be our Judge.
We therefore pray thee, help thy servants :
whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood.
Make them to be numbered with thy Saints : in glory everlasting.
[added later, mainly from Psalm verses:]
O Lord, save thy people : and bless thine heritage.
Govern them : and lift them up for ever.
Day by day : we magnify thee;
And we worship thy Name : ever world without end.
Vouchsafe, O Lord : to keep us this day without sin.
O Lord, have mercy upon us : have mercy upon us.
O Lord, let thy mercy lighten upon us : as our trust is in thee.
O Lord, in thee have I trusted : let me never be confounded.
When political propagandist and Fox News entrepreneur Roger Ailes' career came crashing ignominiously to earth in July 2016 in a blaze of sexual harassment allegations and a law suit from no fewer than 10 women involving not less than $45 million in settlements, no one rushed more quickly to impugn the motives and integrity of his many accusers (when the legal gags on the women were in place) than ostentatious Catholic Bill O'Reilly. Eight months later, O'Reilly himself was out of his long time gig on Ailes' former network, himself accused of sexual harassment by at least 6 women , on a list that overlaps in part with Ailes'. <Pause to shudder violently for the poor women>. Almost as repayment for O'Reilly's earlier service to him, Roger Ailes, now living comfortably off his severence in forced retirement, seized headlines again by dropping dead days later at 77.
Later in the year, in the wake of an onslaught of outings of behaviors ranging from creepy to pathological to criminal involving Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Dustin Hoffman, Louis CK, Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, Al Franken, Pixar Chief John Lasseter, and Charlie Rose for starters (leaving aside for the moment the lurking, grabbing alleged rapist-in-chief), pioneering power tripping pervert O'Reilly had to pause from promoting the latest in his series of low-cal fanciful histories in an interview on the Today Show with Matt Lauer to discuss the allegations that had felled him, explaining that in spite of the widely-known reason for his dismissal he had received "not one complaint" against him in 42 years of harassment. (If you doubt that multi-million dollar payouts to accusers for signing of non-disclosure agreements, including $32 million to Lis Wiehl alone, challenge Bill O'Reilly's comment to Lauer that he'd never received one complaint, turn on your between-the-lines radar and watch this conversation between former O'Reilly colleagues Janet Huddy and Megyn Kelly. Some details of the accusations that prompted O'Reilly's settlement are here.)
Although Lauer did not pull many punches in the O'Reilly interview, it's interesting to contemplate what was going on in his mind if anything other than compartmentalization in a scenario that must be playing out in other guilty or self-deluding minds across many industries, for within short weeks after his O'Reilly interview, the clean cut Lauer himself was abruptly dismissed on multiple credible allegations of sexual misconduct at NBC. The following day, Lauer received support from none other than Geraldo Rivera via tweet - the same Geraldo who postulated to Sean Hannity that Harvey Weinstein's accusers might have been motivated by career ambitions; predictably, by the end of the week, Rivera too was exposed anew for his own "unseemly" misdeeds.
This 6 degrees of separation timeline has been brought to you courtesy of a prevailing mood of doneness with acquiescence to the grabby whims of very badly behaved people, cascading outward from the women for whom it is and has always been an all too familiar tale and gripping the whole culture -- certainly those with ears to hear and eyes to see. The alleged perpetrators come in "all varieties" -- if you like white, rich, male and powerful. The reportskeepcoming. Rebecca Traister of New York Magazine offers particularly salient insight into the apparent materialization out of thin air this year of a long and growing list of names and more importantly the shaping forces behind who makes the list and when:
Here is something you should know, from inside a publication: For every one of these stories of harassment and predation finally seeing the light of day, reporters are hearing dozens more that will not be published, because women won’t go on the record in an industry still run by the people they want to name, or because the men in question aren’t powerful enough to interest those who are powerful enough to decide what has news value, or because the damage these men are alleged to have done seems insignificant on a scale that has recently been drawn to accommodate the trespasses of Harvey Weinstein, and of writer-director James Toback, named by more than 300 women (whose accounts he denies).
Traister's essay is especially sharp in drawing a connection between the shameful treatment of women in the flesh and the shameless promotion of agendas advancing the cause of rich white powerful men like themselves:
Then, of course, there are Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, men whose work to bolster the white-male power structure was always direct. Through Fox News, they worked to promote a Republican Party bent on reinforcing the power imbalances that left men like them in charge of television networks and as anchors of television shows, and so powerful and so rich that years of complaints of direct harassment and abuse could land, get muffled, or be settled and paid off with barely a hitch. That both men finally lost their jobs, and that Ailes is now dead, offers little relief; the party and candidate they labored to create and sell to America are now in power.
There's an especially satisfying justice in having these two men in particular who made careers out of the dubious project of duping unsophisticated rubes into complicity in their own oppression, being called out for and falling flat on their faces just for being flat out creeps. There's a world of them left standing for the moment where those two were, but also a thirst for justice that is barely slaking. As Traister puts it:
This tsunami of stories doesn’t just reveal the way that men have grabbed and rubbed and punished and shamed women; it shows us that they did it all while building the very world in which we still have to live.
Is a propensity to sexually harrass women just an unfortunate characteristic coincidentally shared by so many of the otherwise gifted and generous men who shape our society? Or is it the case, as is becoming more evident, that the utterly poor quality of our current state can be directly attributed to the same poor character of the cadre of men who have been assuming power since time immemorial--the very character defect that also accounts for their entitlement with women? Indeed all the while the list of outed sex offenders in power grows, we are daily reminded of what happens when bad little boys are in charge. Only our kind is allowed in. If you can pay for it, it's yours even if 'it' is the oppression of others. If you can kill it, you can own it. If you can grab it, take it. If it feels good, try and stop me from doing it. Why grapple with nuance when force will do? The accelerated pace of exposure of offenders has happened in parallel with a frenetic burst of grabbyunpopularunsoliciteddecreesandlegislation.
If the obvious correlation between sex offence and sociopathological policy making is not merely coincidental, is there a glimmer of hope to be gleaned from current proceedings? To more immediate concerns, will the President-- as fetid and festering an example of the slime we're talking about as can be imagined-- succumb from taking liberties with his office and the American people, or will he be done in by his propensity to take liberties with women? Will he alone get off, or will we?
A bookish young girl, 'Molly', is interrupted from her homework of a rainy evening to take out the trash. The annoyance gets her creative juices flowing and inspires her to devise an automated process for the chore: conveyance by clothes line of the bag to the trash can. Her success with this inspires her to devise other automations -- for cleaning the goldfish bowl, making the bed, dusting the floor, mowing the lawn, selling girl scout cookies, and ultimately even for an elaborate ruse to make it appear she's paying attention in biology class when she's actually devising more inventions. The punchline: from this humble origin of applied cleverness, Molly has grown up to be an innovative developer of Robotics for GE. And cut. So goes GE's latest corporate PR campaign, another in a series that ostensibly advertises the company's laudable commitment to providing careers for women engineers.
The first thing I noticed was the cheesy but compelling Michel LeGrand score. It leant a kind of zany energy to the proceedings which on one viewing were both amusing and empowering. The second was the style of the filmmaking -- somewhat busy and breathless, while managing to be enigmatic and whimsical. You can't help but be charmed by the whirlwind progress of this wonder girl. Brava, Molly! Bravo, GE!
It's the rare commercial you actually look forward to seeing again. At first. But after repeated viewings, little moments of troubling doubt start to creep in. For me the first was the self-propelled lawn mower tethered to a pole. Hadn't I seen that schtick before? No matter, Molly surely hadn't! But wait, was the pole already there in the middle of the yard? Ok, let's say it was. Good on you, Molly for adapting the existing infrastructure. But are you telling me Dad really did not notice that the corners of the yard didn't get done? And while we're examining things, the insight that sets the whole thing in motion-- that a clothes line can be used as a conveyance for objects-- solves only the most trivial aspect of the garbage bag to trash can problem. How does the clothes line device retrieve and attach the garbage bag, open the trash can, release the bag and seal up the can again? And was it really easier to set up a contraption that brings cookies to the cardboard kiosk on the sidewalk than to sit out there at a cookie stand with a book herself? And hold on, when did she get the opportunity to set up her page turning ruse in class?
While the girl inventor scenes are contrived and fanciful and take more shortcuts with narrative than Molly herself with her chores, let's make an allowance for them as the stylish and stylized origin story of adult Molly, the GE engineer. There's nothing contrived about the payoff, right? But actually the ending of the commercial is as far-fetched as the beginning. In what workplace would someone be given the time, freedom and resources to develop a robotic inspection system and deploy it by herself without the foreknowledge of her boss. In what world would the boss's reaction be, "That's amazing, Molly." and not "Who the hell gave you permission to create an inspection robot, Molly? What budget did this come out of?" And whose jobs are being taken away by this invention? How will they get along in this new world that doesn't need their services? And who benefits? And, what the hell is that thing that's being inspected anyway? Is Molly a cool genius, or is she just a clever and educated stooge, another trained monkey of the military industrial complex?
As the year closes on the election of 2016, I find myself reliving the events, but not the historic ones so much as the numeric ones. A thought obsesses me. What does it mean when the actions of less than half of the less than half of eligible voters who voted that day-- some motivated by love; some by hate; some by accident; some following the orders of someone they know who knows more about these things; some due to flashes of name recognition; some due to spontaneous spasms of choice, like the people who order last at a restaurant because they can't decide and have run out of time but still feel they have to eat something; some willing to gamble on a wild card -- a really fucking wild card-- in hopes of making better times come; and yes, some who knew or thought they knew exactly what they were doing-- what does it mean that by their actions they won?
What happens to the wishes of the majority of that voting half, those who voted for The Other One? Speaking for myself, the wishes appear to be vanished. As unhappy as the nation is right now with the technical winner of the election, the focus of blame remains on the electorate, the mood of the country, the rejection of the alternative possibility that existed that day, even though numerically the blame was blunted, the mood was ambivalent, the rejection was technical. So it was (although much less so) in 2008 and 2012 and so it is ever thus in a democracy, and likely to continue to be in this one so long as people remain opposed to each other. This election is unlike any others in my memory however in the utter lack of interest on the part of the victor in the hopes and wishes of either the losing or the winning side, in how quickly the sham was exposed for reasonable observers, and judging by polling since January, how quickly and persistently a growing remorse has set in among the casual and impulse buyers.
So what about the meaning and the intention of the plurality, in this case, not of voters since the selections did not coincide, but of electors -- who are succinctly, if kind of oddly, described in Wikipedia's article on the electoral college as "many times ... simply important people whose wisdom would ideally provide a better choice than a larger body." That is, insiders chosen by insiders. What I mean is... I mean ...
Ok, unspeakable as heck fans, I admit it. I'm bone dry.
What precedes was a half-assed attempt to impugn the sanctity of not even majority but plurality -- not most, but merely more. Given the fragmentation of American society, I think I've come to doubt any and every outcome that is less than unanimous. It must be known that when not even half of the country can agree on who should be president that if the people have spoken, what they have said is, "what the fuck!" It may be the rules, but the game itself is broken, and what is the point of playing a broken game if only the side that won for stupid reasons is happy. And don't say it's the only game in the cabinet. Maybe it's time to stop playing games and get down to business. This goes not only for stupid presidential elections (of which the epitome was just conducted), but also of opinion polls, pundit panels, dinner table conversation, and internal debates with myself.
Speaking of which, what follows are pieces of actual communications I've had over the past year, with an unrepentant Green voter on the topic of the election. This is what I really wanted to say all along. Since the other correspondent is not here, I will present it as an interview conducted by email and edited for clarity and to favor myself.
Interviewer:There was one main reason to vote for Hillary: She wasn’t Trump. There were many more reasons not to bother to vote for her. What say you?
Unspeakable as heck: Of course you can switch out Trump and Hillary and all the pronouns in that sentence and it’s maybe even more true. I’m not defending Hillary mind you. I agree with you for the most part (not as bitterly perhaps but I have no illusions about her, believe me.) I guess I’m defending the impulse to vote for her. If we disagree I think it’s about that. I think people voted for Hillary from a much better place than she was running from certainly. It was not insane or bad to think that voting for Hillary was in the top 3 best ways to prevent Trump from happening. Probably the best legal way. The best ways that the average person who did not need this shit had at his or her disposal.
I:Polls seemed to favor Hillary Clinton for a good portion of the last election season, no less so than on election day. Yet her disapproval rating remained nearly as high as Trump's. In light of this, why not vote your heart, your conscience. Why not vote symbolically for the Greens? Why not get them to 5% for the sake of securing matching federal funds?
U: My memory could be tainted but aside from the period when everyone thought Hillary was going to walk all over all competitors, (back when it wasn’t clear that Trump was actually going to be the GOP nominee), HC didn’t ever seem to have it in the bag to me. I mean after the Primaries only an idiot would think Trump’s election wasn’t possible. There was a brief period on election day when all the exit polls were saying she was going to win that I let my guard down, but I don’t remember ever feeling too confident that she would win as soon as Trump was her competitor. That was why I voted for her. It didn’t seem to me she could pull it off on her own. And that meant Trump. That was my entire motivation and nothing could dissuade me from that. We haven’t exploded yet or blown up North Korea but I have no regrets about what I was trying to do. I: in Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes' book about the 2016 election Shattered, there's a discussion of the period when Hillary called half of Trump’s people a basket of deplorables and then a couple of days later collapsed into a van after escaping the 9/11 celebration. Shattered points out the unfortunate symbolism said collapse evoked.
U: Good times.
I:What a horrible idea it was to run Hillary, or for Hillary to run, whichever notion came first. Whose brilliant idea was that? This ain’t a hindsighted question. The DNC—which Obama apparently let fall into ruin, according to the book—ought to have seen the warning signs. They somehow convinced themselves that Hillary is at her best when half the country hates her and she or her husband is under investigation for something. And besides, it was her turn, they apparently believed in their hearts. Was it really Hillary’s turn? Was it really so cool to think that the first woman to win the WH would be a former first lady? Wasn’t there anyone anywhere with power who saw what was in the cards? Was it really that hard to figure out?
U: Does the book talk about the democratic field in the primaries? Clinton, Sanders, O’Malley and Webb? What the fuck was that about? Everybody thought it was Hillary’s to lose. Her femaleness was maybe just an accident but it was a good one—slightly more than half the population was a built in constituency. I don’t think anyone really thought it was cool to think the first woman president would be Hillary, but who else was it going to be? The narrative was “the most qualified person to run for president ever”. Who happened to be a woman. If you have an unduly high self-regard (and who among the political elite doesn’t) then why wouldn’t you think you had it coming? And against the perverted cartoon orange school yard bully with toad eyes and bizarre hair! With a basket of deplorables*! I’m not surprised there wasn’t doubt in the Hillary camp. Or maybe they were frantic like the 6th grade boy who can’t make the girl he has a crush on like him no matter how hard he tries. She likes the orange toad-eyed bully.
The fact that there really was an actual fucking basket of true deplorables in his camp, that he was essentially the same asshole then that he is now, that he bragged about grabbing pussy, but people were still fine with him being president told you everything you needed to know about the outcome, namely that anything could happen, that people could actually elect the biggest fucking dickwad ever for no fucking good reason. Dang it’s still raw when I poke at it!
I: After Bush v Gore, there was a legitimacy to the claim that Gore was robbed. Hillary lost this one mostly under her own power. Granted, a bunch of her enemies popped up at inopportune moments to insinuate that she was corrupt and dishonest. But except for the voter ID laws and voter purges that suppressed the Democratic minority vote in Republican run states, which is part of the American institutional landscape now, no one ripped evidence of Clinton’s “win” from her fingers and hid it.
U: True but she lost on a technicality. She won the popular vote. By a lot. You can certainly say, yes but she lost 3 states that mattered, that she should never have lost. True, but she came very close in all 3. Not to blame the Greens at all but in all 3 she lost by less than the Green percentage and the green percentage was less than 2% in all 3 states.† (to my memory and I looked at this recently so I may feel more confident about this assertion than I have a right to) And all 3 had voter suppression issues. In other words, you can dismiss her if you want to dismiss her, you can blame her if you want to blame her but if you want to believe she was robbed, you can also do that. It wasn’t decisive enough for rock solid conclusions in my estimation—my conclusion is that it calls for a mulligan of some kind—the sun was in America’s eyes—a squirrel walked off with the ball. It was fucked up! But it was so ferkakt that any interpretation of what happened is as valid as any other. I personally don’t give a crap about Hillary Clinton, but I feel the election was a travesty (her own nomination included), it was unsettled, it still stinks, you can practically see the stench rising from it like from a cartoon pile of shit. I think even Trump feels that way or he’d shut up about his stupid fucken unexceptional technical win. It’s really supportive, this travesty, of the need for a new republic slash system. Because no one (other than the lucky bastards whose dickwad won) feels good about it and there’s no way to get together on what stanks about it other than that the very wrong dickwad won partly thanks to poorly informed and badly motivated voters in addition to subterfuge, incompetence and whatever else you want to throw in.
Some libertarian dude on Real Time this past season said Trump is a low-information voter who somehow became president. Perfect!
Thank you for listening. If I'm still talking about this in a year, commit me.
*************
* And stop pretending that 'deplorables' refers to anything other than the very vocal, very racist, very misogynist still acned alt-right pricks who brazenly stood behind their pitiful synthetically persimmon Fuehrer and to the Fuehrer who stood behind them time and again both before and since the election; I have no pity for the obtuse idiots -- if they actually existed and were not merely a make pretend unintended consequence of the metaphor as imagined, nursed along and promoted by people who were already committed enemies of Hillary anyway-- to whom it absolutely did not refer who took the bait, missed the point, chose to overlook the subject of that epithet and take it personal and then bore down on their misguided support because of it. Congratulations! You reacted deplorably!
† And stop pretending all Jill Stein voters were going to abstain from voting but for her presence in the race. I voted for Nader in 2000 so I know a little about how it works. While it is absolutely true that some voters had no intention of voting at all until Jill Stein's message excited them to participate in the process (i.e., register, locate their polling place, pay the poll tax or whatever the acceptable modern obstacle in place at their precinct is, stand in line and cast their ballot for the absurdly distantly 4th place candidate), it's fantasy to believe that there was not a significant contingent of already registered voters who were planning (however devoid of enthusiasm) to vote otherwise until persuaded from their original plan by exhortations to vote Green. (And there were mistakes, and last minute waffles, and every other imaginable explanation for individual Stein votes.) It's a sign of how fucked up the system is that a Stein voter in Fresno or Buffalo was making a luxuriously whimsical statement, whereas a Stein voter in Ann Arbor or Milwaukee was, if not directly affecting the outcome of the election, choosing an irreversible action that did not assist in preventing the most horrible outcome from transpiring.
Francis Bacon, the 12-letter name under the painting that puts you in mind of English Enlightenment Philosophy and Breakfast Meat, is one of my personal formative icons like Stanley Kubrick, John Coltrane, Pauline Kael, William Burroughs, Moms Mabley.
Francis Bacon, Man with Dog, 1953
I may have seen a photo of him once or twice, but all I really knew about him-- all I really needed to know--was his work. Painting that made you feel. Darkness at the edges. Twisted, evaporating flesh and lurid viscera isolated but barely contained within glittering suggestions of 3-dimensional geometric shapes. Gaping, screaming darkness again at the core.
Francis Bacon, Figure With Meat, 1954
An Englishman born in Ireland in 1909 (a descendant of the stepbrother of his famous namesake), he took up painting in earnest only in his late 30s. Prior to that he was the original slacker: gambling, traveling, drinking, hanging out. He lived with the Cornish nanny of his childhood, Jessie Lightfoot into his early 40s, until her death in 1951.
Francis Bacon, Painting, 1946
He was "unapologetically gay" before his time, with a taste for violence that expressed itself as reliably in his relationships as on his canvasses. For a time as a young man, according to an account in Michael Peppiatt's Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, he placed advertisements for his services as a "gentleman's companion" on the front page of The Times of London. His Nanny would help him sift through the replies.
He was inspired by the impressionists and, particularly, by Picasso. As he developed his own voice, he bucked trends by returning to representational painting in his idiosyncratic expressionistic style. He was asthmatic and some have conjectured that the motif of the gaping mouth in his work is as much about breath as it is about fury. His own severest critic, he regularly destroyed scores of his paintings that did not meet his satisfaction.
Francis Bacon, Head VI, 1949
For a documentary that does justice to a complex, brilliant guide to the sharp edges of the unconscious, you could hardly do better than this recent production of the BBC, Francis Bacon: A Brush With Violence:
Francis Bacon, Splash of Water, 1988. He died 4 years later in 1992 at 82.
How many states have banned child marriage in the US? None. States that restrict marriages of minors permit them with the consent and approval of a parent or a judge. If that doesn't scare you, trythese.
I’ve been reading up on this Las Vegas shooter dude. What’s known so far:
- Was an accountant
- Worked for the IRS for a while
- Had been a landlord
- Made millions in real estate and gambling
- Moved to a retirement community in Mesquite NV to be closer to Vegas
- Liked high stakes video poker
- Developed a romantic relationship with a married casino host to get tips on "ripe" machines
- Girlfriend divorced her husband of many years and left her job to move in with him
- Remained jealous of girlfriend’s husband to the point of insanity
- Habitually verbally abused his girlfriend in public
- Sued the Cosmopolitan Hotel in 2012 seeking $10,000 for a fall but appears to have settled before it was brought to trial
- Collected weapons, including semi automatics and bump stocks to turn them into fully automatics
- Appears to have originally planned to carry out his plan a week earlier at the Life Is Beautiful festival in Vegas attended by 50,000 fans (or earlier and elsewhere and bigger), but didn't go through with it
- Stayed for free for a week in the suite at Mandalay Bay courtesy of the hotel (thanks to his high roller patronage), carting weapons and surveillance equipment up to the room in stages to avoid notice
- Monitored for police and security on the surveillance equipment while he sprayed machine gun fire on trapped, festive crowd of concertgoers from on high, from the comfort, safety and remove of his 32nd floor suite, for 11 minutes, killing 58 men and women aged 20 to 67 and wounding 489 more, and stopping to kill himself only when the police loomed.
- Killed himself before he could be reached to avoid any and every consequence of his mess.
- Perpetrated an act that ISIS coveted
- Does not appear to have been motivated by any ideology, creed or cause for "the greater good"
- Looks like a total dickwad in every photograph I’ve seen
- Is named Steve
Is it possible the guy is just a supreme asshole? Do we have enough information to establish that? If so, then I think what we have is a mass murderer for the Trump era.
Two things about a recent Real Time with Bill Maher got my cylinders clicking. The most astonishing was the New Rules piece using the story of the City Mouse and the Country Mouse as a way of explaining away any contradictions in Trump's recent collusion with 'city mice' Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi at the expense of 'country mice' Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.
And this is the existential crisis of our president: He's an asshole, but he's not a hick. He represents one group but belongs to another. I hate to break it to you real Americans, but what Trump likes about Chuck and Nancy is that they're not you. And he's not one of you. Trust me when Trump watches the Beverly Hillbillies he roots for Mr. Drysdale. And when he tells a crowd, as he often does, "I love you" what he means is that in middle America he found something he had long ago run out of in New York: suckers. Trump voters were played for rubes by the ultimate fast talking city slicker who saw vulnerable people nervous about jobs and the melting pot getting too melty and he told them he'd build a great wall and get their jobs back at the mine and they said, "where do I sign?" Folks, you didn't make America great again. You enrolled in Trump University.
Trenchant commentary, reminding us once again that the core agenda of this administration is to con the rubes, and at that it continues to succeed, literally wildly, the way con jobs tend to play out. Not enough to convince all observers but plenty enough to keep everyone off balance.
The other was more in line with my usual feelings about Bill Maher lately, and gives me an opening to discuss something I've been wanting to write about for a while. The topic was political correctness and free speech, and specifically an atmosphere increasingly charged with the former ("on both sides" to borrow a phrase) making the latter increasingly difficult to stand up for. I don't have a quote since it was mostly in conversation, but it could be summarized by these snippets:
Martin Short: ...lack of reading, breakdown of reading Maher: ... That is all of us when you don't read or you read just what's on your phone, or what's on your computer, what is just fed to you, what you already believe comes back to you. Rick Phillips: The interet bubble where they self-select what they're going to follow. Maher: We live in this echo chamber now where you can tune out anything.
Valid kernels of points certainly, although I increasingly find that Bill Maher, omnivorous though he takes pains to be -- he's made a career out of it-- is on the subjects he cares most about as calcified as any of us. But what about the self-selected internet bubble? I won't say that I never search for answers that I already know, but while it may not yet be formally proven, the anecdotal evidence is convincing to me that what Eli Pariser has called the filter bubble is real. It's just that the selection may not be an entirely conscious thing. Facebook news; Amazon, YouTube and Netflix recommendations; Google searches filtered according to your behavior. Search results tailored not only to your zip code but to your habits and whims. We shouldn't completely excuse anyone for stacking the deck of their reading material in favor of their prejudices and preconceived notions. That's not informing yourself, that's self-medication. But when search engine algorithms do it for you, for everyone, without their knowledge or consent, you can lose sense of where the boundaries of your knowledge are.
We should be suspicious of solutions to the filter bubble that rely on gatekeeping and tweaking of the algorithms, although both are to some extent in order. Rather we should cultivate a sense of vigilance and awareness in ourselves. We should learn ways around the limitations, and use them.
Smart search algorithms that keep us ignorant are just one example of how often and how unwittingly we yield control over the choice of possibilities to Commerce. Companies take away what you want - subway cars getting smaller and less comfortable while fares go up, iTunes removing features and degrading the "user experience" and air travel. Air travel! Let's just forget I mentioned it-- and then tell you it's what "you asked for!"-- unsolicited ads "tailored to your interests", required intelligence-gathering cookies that "enhance your user experience", videos playing automatically when you load articles.
I don't ascribe the tyranny of corporate hegemony over every aspect of our lives to evil. Certain personalities may be more inclined to take advantage of loopholes that have been widening everywhere for corporations since the dam was burst on corporate participation in governance-- think Citizens United as the crowning achievement of that project. But evil does not explain the choices actual people make when doors open in turn to greater and greater power, when one's choices of what to do with that power promise greater and greater freedom for oneself and one's own and fewer and fewer obstacles, no matter the price for everyone else. That response to an irresistible stimulus is an algorithm.
Metriology (from Greek: μέτριος - middling, mediocre, unremarkable + λόγος - cause) is the notion that the introduction of a perfect being into explanations for the universe we find ourselves in is not just a pleasing fiction but a leap that is contrary to experience. Every advancement in our understanding of the universe seems to support the notion that nothing is truly exceptional, so why would god be? If the cosmos originated in a realm beyond our understanding and experience, is it not as likely to be filled with even more inconceivable challenges to excellence for the artisan than that everything for the creator is a snap? This is not to suggest that there necessarily is an actual mediocre author behind the universe, merely that introducing an author into the explanation at all adds complications that, given the unsettlability of the matter, require desperate credulity to overcome. Requiring the author to be not merely adequate but perfect makes the story less likely, not more.
Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury's Ontological proof for the existence of god is approaching the end of its first millenium, and it is still regularly proffered as a show-stopper in theological arguments. The proof runs like this:
1. By definition, God is a being than which none greater can be imagined.
2. A being that necessarily exists in reality is greater than a being that does not necessarily exist.
3. Thus, by definition, if God exists as an idea in the mind but does not necessarily exist in reality, then we can imagine something that is greater than God.
4. But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God.
5. Thus, if God exists in the mind as an idea, then God necessarily exists in reality.
6. God exists in the mind as an idea.
7. Therefore, God necessarily exists in reality.
Painfully clever though this argument is, it is the textbook illustration of "Begging the Question." Kant, for one, took issue with the concept that Existence is a given as a quality of Perfection. I would argue that a merely existing God is inferior to a God whose Existence is Incontrovertibly Manifest to All of that God's Creatures. Speaking for myself, that greater imagined god does not exist. Substitute for "God" in the above, as Anselm's contemporary Gaunilo of Marmoutier did, the made up concept of "Piland" - the island than which none greater can be imagined - or, I don't know, "Giscuit" - the biscuit than which none greater can be imagined - and you experience very vividly the ho-hum quality of Anselm's pleading.
1. By definition, Giscuit is a biscuit than which none greater can be imagined.
2. A biscuit that necessarily exists in reality is greater than a biscuit that does not necessarily exist.
3. Thus, by definition, if Giscuit exists as an idea in the mind but does not necessarily exist in reality, then we can imagine some biscuit that is greater than Giscuit.
4. But we cannot imagine some biscuit that is greater than Giscuit.
5. Thus, if Giscuit exists in the mind as an idea, then Giscuit necessarily exists in reality.
6. Giscuit exists in the mind as an idea.
7. Therefore, Giscuit necessarily exists in reality.
As awesome as Giscuit would be right now, I'm not convinced it exists.
If there is a creator, why would we assume that it is perfect? If a single entity were powerful beyond what any of us could achieve, but we are the achievement, where does it follow that that being is unique and flawless? I mean look at us. Isn't it far more likely given everything we know about life, the universe and everything in it that if there is an entity responsible for everything we see that it is pretty average as responsible entities go? It's not good enough to say the bible tells us that god is perfect. It would say that, wouldn't it?
Make no mistake, my issue is not with the universe, of which I'm generally a fan, and of which I am moreover at certain profound moments in awe. My problem is with the impulse to ascribe to a conceived of being sole authorship to it, and not just responsibility for it, but perfection in the execution of it. Is it to god's glory that we exalt god? Or is it to make us feel better about ourselves, who were reported (suspiciously by us) to be created in the epic author's image? My money is on the second option. How typical of us would that be if I'm right!
Sarah Paulson's character getting the election night news on American Horror Story: Cult
If you're hearing this for the first time from Unspeakable (as heck) you might just need to expand your internet horizons a tad, but almost a year later, journalist and author (and comic book writer) Ta-Nehisi Coates has written at The Atlantic perhaps the definitive piece on the source of Donald Trump's support in the last election and beyond.
Some very choice quotes summarize the argument:
[Trump's] political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.
Coates provides a catalog of statistics to bookmark for future discussions:
Trump’s dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly every white demographic. Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31). He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37). He won whites ages 18–29 (+4), 30–44 (+17), 45–64 (+28), and 65 and older (+19). Trump won whites in midwestern Illinois (+11), whites in mid-Atlantic New Jersey (+12), and whites in the Sun Belt’s New Mexico (+5). In no state that Edison polled did Trump’s white support dip below 40 percent. Hillary Clinton’s did, in states as disparate as Florida, Utah, Indiana, and Kentucky. From the beer track to the wine track, from soccer moms to nascar dads, Trump’s performance among whites was dominant. According to Mother Jones, based on preelection polling data, if you tallied the popular vote of only white America to derive 2016 electoral votes, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81, with the remaining 68 votes either a toss-up or unknown.
The payoff:
And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over all its affairs—the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 300 million citizens; the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food; the future of its vast system of education; the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways; the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal—to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase grab ’em by the pussy into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.” And in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled.
I have only a minor quibble with Coates' presentation. The article rather boldly misses the point in my view of Bernie Sanders' stance with respect to the "white working class". As I see it, Sanders emphasis is appropriately on the second and third words in the phrase. He consistently chose to combat the very real problem of racial polarization within the working class as a whole by frankly confronting the problem makers directly on their terms and admirably without judgment (something I find very hard to do myself). Given widespread identification with whiteness among the white working class as Coates's own numbers attest, Sanders was carving a niche in appealing directly to their better angels-- and was to a great extent successful at it. Nothing inconsistent with basic socialism. Will it work in the long run in bringing white workers back into the fold of labor from their seduction away from it by racialist manipulations in the other direction? I don't know but at least Sanders is entitled to try.
But Coates' main point is well taken that for every demographic of age, gender, income and education, the white contingent across the board preferred the most openly racist and misogynist, anti-other reactionary, and in spite of the tan from a can, the whitest candidate perhaps in history.
Screen Capture from opening credits of American Horror Story: Cult
I know a lot of white people, and few who (openly at least) voted for Trump. But this was a political year for contrariness in all quarters. For me, the essay articulates what had been inchoate feelings about the election, especially in conversation with those who, unlike me, felt the luxury of voting their conscience, perhaps to the point of attacking what struck me as the only realistic option for anyone hoping to prevent the horrifying outcome we're now living with-- i.e., voting for the lesser "evil". Given the admittedly unappealing major party alternative in November (that is, the popular vote winner), it was to be expected that a certain segment of white progressive voters would feel emboldened to choose anyone else, casting (in some states decisive) numbers of votes for the distantly fourth place Green party instead. Maybe as was frequently suggested to me in the weeks leading up to the election, and even for some time after, the mood and condition of the country demanded that we vote for progress and for change. Wasn't that why both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, two candidates as outside the mold of either of the two major parties as could be imagined, had exceeded anyone's expectations? Could that explain the sudden overlap of vocabulary for what to react against -- status quo, neoliberalism, deep state-- from both sides advertising freedom from voting for the "inevitable" candidate? Sure Trump was a lying, perverted conman, but what would be the worst that could happen if the "most qualified candidate for president ever" was denied the crown? Only one outcome would "heighten the contradictions" and thereby bring about conditions for revolution. But maybe, given the likely consequences of a white progressive defection from voting Democratic, this wasn't the right time for antifascists to be principled. Maybe change and progress did not necessarily go hand in hand. Maybe the prevailing mood among the largest bloc in the country was regressive. That certainly turned out to be the case.
Throw into the mix of influences on the last election Russia, which I will use as an abbreviation for what should more specifically be termed the Russian counterpart to the American oligarchy. Evidence of their activities may not yet include outright tampering with votes and polling outcomes, but it does include propaganda in the form of tampering with messages consumed by voters."Hacking" may be a ridiculous way to characterize what we know so far to be Russia's part in the culpability for our current predicament. How about "dicking"?
Russia has a problem with nationalism, a problem which it shares with a number of other nations with regressive elites making a resurgence in power -- Turkey, Hungary, Poland come to mind, and Britain, France and Germany have active factions making sometimes successful stabs at it as well. Nationalism, which made our modern world a few centuries back, is traditionally the notion that a people deserve dominion over a territory, and that the natural order demands a kind of ethnic purity in the makeup and outlook of local society. Nationalism in its contemporary form is a romantic ambition to make your province great again by attempting to rewind to when it went off the rails due to imperialist overreaching. The resurgence of nationalism is an oligarchic response to what had been a more socialist track for the planet's future. In nearly all of the countries in which Nationalism is making a foothold, including Russia, a dominant ethnicity actually exists. America is unique in that is the only country experiencing a resurgence of nationalism in which there is rather explicitly no dominant official ethnicity (setting aside the Anglo-Saxon faction whose mouths are watering for a return to 1863). But there are Russians here who have observed that whiteness confers on them a claim to the American national character. And with a long history of propaganda and agitprop at their disposal, I have no trouble believing messages originating in Russia that were crafted for Trump and against Hillary hit their marks across the American political spectrum. I see Russia's participation as a symptom of an American inspired, global "white ethnic delusional" virus. And if Russia was not the primary force behind the November success of white Nationalism in America --and perhaps at injecting successful anti-Democratic propaganda into the discussion and helping to set a progressive agenda non-injurious to Trump for malcontents on the left end of the spectrum-- at least emblematic of how uniquely vulnerable from inside and outside white Americans are to messages evoking perceived threats to their non-existent ethnicity.
Whiteness, like blackness, is merely a skin tone shared by people who have nothing else automatically in common. Whiteness is taking credit for things we had nothing to do with. It is unearned status. Whiteness as a construct exists only to contrast the racially privileged with the racially oppressed, but we know who we are, based on which box we tick on the census. And the numbers do not lie: we took a pass this time on our responsibility to our planet and our fellow humans to take one for the skin tone, or if we're honest to "restore" the continued privilege it bestows on us.
