unspeakable (as heck): November 2017

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.

unspeakable (as heck)

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Friday, November 3, 2017

Slabs of Bacon

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