Since I’m not on the boat at the moment, and haven’t had to drive anywhere lately, I haven’t had to listen to NPR. But occasionally I walk into the kitchen unexpectedly, to find one of my household furtively tuned in to Fresh Air or something. I never object, but even so, it’s like an old Radio Free Europe TV ad I remember from my youth: A ragged, frostbitten Eastern European family huddled around an ancient tube radio of vaguely Gothic design, a single, naked, flickering light bulb suspended from the ceiling casting Fritz-Langian shadows. Then a peremptory knock at the door, terror on every pale, high-cheekboned face, the dial rapidly twirled to WCOMMIE…

One of these early-morning raids on my part was rewarded the other day by hearing some ‘journalist’ or ‘analyst’ or ‘political scientist’ burbling on about Congressional ‘gridlock’ — a fine durable old cliche, that. She predictably bemoaned the fact that nobody was willing to ‘compromise’. So far, the usual NPR white noise.

But then she made my jaw drop.

She mentioned –approvingly — the notorious Compromise of 1850, and held it up as an example of what the Administration and the Democrats ought to do. Instead of pushing for what you might call a comprehensive compromise, covering all the contended topics, break it up into half-a-dozen smaller bills and assemble slightly different coalitions to pass each.

I don’t recall whether she mentioned the Fugitive Slave Act, one of the crown jewels of the Compromise. If so, it was in parentheses. I was too stunned by her chipper sum-up: “It postponed the Civil War for ten years!”

Now among historians, of course, one finds many Lords of The Subjunctive, who will tell you very confidently what would-have-happened-if. And among this tribe there are those who say that if the war had come earlier the North would have lost. The extra ten years bought time for the North to industrialize, etc. A little like the Hitler-Stalin pact. And though the slavers got ‘popular sovereignty’ in the Utah and New Mexico territories, abrogating the earlier Missouri Compromise in their favor, the Subjunctivists will assure you that these territories would never have gone slaver.

What there’s no ‘if’ about is that the slavers got out of the Missouri Compromise box; they got ten more years to lash their chattels; the federal government and all the free states committed themselves to assist the said lashing, under the Fugitive Slave Act; and the monster slave state of Texas was created in its present bloated bounds, an acquisition I for one could have done without.

In short, an approving reference to the Compromise Of 1850 is an excellent illustration of the Madness Of The Center, a topic which is becoming a downright hobbyhorse for me.

I think my disembodied radio expert was mostly impressed by the ingenuity of the manoeuvre; a matter of the means justifying the end. For more ponderous thumbsuckers, the case for the Compromise is that it was good for ‘the country’ — which is to say, that it set ‘the country’ on course to become the monstrosity it now is. Had the Compromise not occurred, some other monstrosity would have resulted. Would it have been a worse monstrosity, or a better one?

The Subjunctivists are sure they know; and I’m sure they don’t. What I do know is that the Viral Center is in love with the monstrosity we have, and is happy to speak well of whatever brought this particular rough beast to birthing.

Fugitive Slave Act and all. Hey, you can’t make an omelette without beating a few slaves.

Strange, isn’t it, how deeply consoling a novel can be. Amid depths of distress that no therapeutic or amicable or even connubial lead-line can sound, the words of a Trollope or a Nabokov or, I suppose, for some, a Dickens, can send the noonday or the midnight devil into a corner and shut him up. For the time being.

Escape fiction? Perhaps; but what other kind is there? Why would we make up stories, otherwise? And as somebody once observed, every prisoner wants to escape; why shouldn’t he? Modernism is a doctrine that teaches us to love our chains. Or try to. So the hell with it.

I would like to record here my personal gratitude to Anthony Trollope, fox-hunter, post-office bureaucrat, ‘advanced Conservative Liberal’ as he described himself, and a very present help in time of trouble for me since I was sixteen.

There are so many things to like about old Tony. For one thing, he has no use for suspense. He says somewhere — I am quoting from my very fallible memory, so forgive me — ‘I disdain to be in possession of any secret not known to the reader’.

For another: he has no use for the arc. His characters don’t develop. The bad ones get worse and finally throw themselves under a train, or emigrate to North America and are heard of no more. The good ones — or rather, the good-enough ones — blunder around, shoot themselves in the foot, entertain all sorts of crazy notions, and after they’ve been beaten up for a while, through their own folly, finally come round to a certain grudging accommodation to their circumstances. And godlike Anthony rewards them with a Trollopian happy ending.

No writer was ever better at the happy ending — not even the divine Jane Austen. What’s lovely about the Trollopian happy ending is that it goes on for a hundred pages. Most novelists, once they have contrived their marriage-cum-inheritance, polish off their protagonists with an audible hand-washing: At last I’m rid of those tedious puppets. They lived happily ever after. Finis, and not a page too soon. Splash. Somebody hand me a towel.

Tony doesn’t do that. He follows the assembly of the trousseau, the selection of the bridesmaids — not altogether satisfactory to anybody, especially the bride — the backward glances at paths not taken — the perfectly justifiable, and usually justified, anxiety about how it will all turn out — the deplorable smarmy demeanor of the oleaginous Low-Church clergyman who will preside over the nuptial solemnities.

So what, you ask, is so consoling about this? Doesn’t it just sound like the usual depressed bleak modern fiction?

But it isn’t. Tony, the old fox-hunter, was often disappointed in his sport, but always ready to saddle up anyway. Clear-eyed as he is, he recognizes that the odds are always against a good run, much less being in at the kill; yet he retains a certain rational openness to the possibility. So his creatures can rise to the occasion, when the occasion demands it; sometimes fire off a good quip and even, once or twice, land a telling punch; often die resigned and true to themselves and their friends and faith, and leave a kindly and generous will.

This is not an impossible demand. It is within the scope of humankind. Tony is realistic but not hopeless.

A good guy to read, early in the New Year. May all our stories be Trollopian rather than… oh, let’s say Faulknerian.

… I don’t want any, thanks.

Somehow I got myself on this outfit’s mailing list and receive an email newsletter every five minutes or so called ‘Thinkprogress’. Recently I got a particularly stupid one about Israel and Iran — the problem, it seems, is that those dumb knucklehead Likudniks are stubbornly ignoring the advice of the experts in Mossad. Fools that they are. I had meant to write a little squib about this remarkable piece of imbecility, but then I got distracted by CAP itself, which is, of course, the Democratic Party’s answer to the Heritage Foundation etc.

A half-hour of superficial research confirmed my long-standing view that anybody who mentions ‘progress’ in an approving tone, or characterizes himself as a ‘progressive’, is just begging for a kick in the teeth. CAP’s web site offers a great deal of fun — Larry Summers is a senior fellow, for example, and if he stands for progress, I’ll take regress any day. And the corporate supporter list is juicy. But among many delights, this was the best bit:

Building on the achievements of progressive pioneers such as Teddy Roosevelt and Martin Luther King…

I read this and rubbed my eyes. I was sure that I had fallen asleep and dreamt it. But no. It’s really there.

‘Teddy’ Roosevelt — that cozy, cuddlesome, dear little bear, with his big shiny teeth — and Martin Luther King. As always: where do you start?

It does, of course, rather vindicate my theory of the madness of the Center. No doubt there are sensible, judicious people — people in positions of reponsibility and emolument — who would read this line and nod approvingly. Yes indeed, that’s what we need. Imperialism — with diversity!

To this extent CAP has already succeeded. They have grafted Martin on the stock of ‘Teddy’ — an admirable black guy joined at the hip to an unspeakable white guy. Result: An unspeakable light-skinned black guy:

I remain bemused by the passionate cheerleading for the Syrian ‘insurgency’ exhibited by so many of my Lefty comrades. In the case of The Great Wet Hen himself, Louis Proyect, the mania seems to have tipped him over into taking sides in what is, after all, a religious war — to the extent that any war is really a religious war. I refer of course to the Sunni/Shia aspect of recent events in the Middle East. Louis appears to be on the verge of a conversion to Sunnism. (Of course I have a Proddie weakness for Shiism myself, so who am I to talk?)

The GWH recently penned a furious essay which took its starting point from a creepy little Israeli rumor site called Debkafile. Louis writes:

Today a Debkafiles item titled “US and Iran’s First Joint Military Venture: Fighting al Qaeda in Iraq” turned up on Facebook. As you might know, Debkafiles is an Israeli intelligence website committed to the “war on terror” so you can assume that they are pleased with Obama’s turn against a common enemy.

Now this is so muddled that it qualifies as Not Even Wrong.

First of all, who cares what appears on Debkafiles? Does even the GWH believe that a pipsqueak operation like this gives us a window into the deepest counsels of Netanyahu et al.?

But even if we join the Hen in his curious enthusiasm for Debkafile, he doesn’t seem to have read the piece he cites very alertly. It’s written in a superficially straight, journalistic style, but clearly reflects a certain dividedness of mind. An undertone of dismay about hints of a US rapprochement with Iran coexist uneasily with the usual sloganeering about al-Qaeda, ‘terrorism’, ‘jihadists’ and so on — these latter being the people that the US and Iran have supposedly teamed up to defeat. The GWH’s comment that ‘you can assume [Debkafile] is pleased’ seems manifestly wrong if you actually read the piece.

But of course, as noted, Debkafile is of no consequence. Let’s step back a moment from this kind of offal-reading and just do a little thinking about Israel and its situation.

The most important fact about Israel is that all its neighbors hate it — with good reason. Israel has no friends in the region. How could it? Everybody there understands perfectly well that the Israeli game plan is to become the unrivalled regional hegemon, and its tactical approach, of some decades’ standing, is to weaken, destabilize, and if necessary dismember all the states in the region who might offer any competition. Even the Sunni petroligarchs of the Gulf can hardly be expected to sign on to this proyect project.

But fortunately for Israel, its neighbors are also divided among themselves.

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
‘T was half-past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t’ other had slept a wink!
The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate
Appeared to know as sure as fate
There was going to be a terrible spat.

So the obvious tactic is ‘both ends against the middle’. It seems unlikely that the Israeli regime wants either the petroligarchs or the Iranians and their allies to achieve an actual clear-cut victory. Rather, as with the gingham dog and the calico cat, the hope is surely that they eat each other up.

At the strategic level, of course, Iran is more worrisome than the Gulfi states; it’s a real country and not just a postcolonial contrivance ginned up on top of an oil field. Syria is nearby, and plays a role in Lebanon, also nearby; and Hizbollah and Hamas are thorns in the Israeli side, as ‘Qaeda’ is not. And this, I think, is the reason why Israel’s amen corner in the US is so wildly enthusiastic about the Sunni reptile-funded Syrian insurgency. Not to mention the Hipster Insurgency in Iran itself, a few years back.

But then again, time was that Iran — back in the dear old Shah’s day — was a useful counterbalance for the Israelis against Arab nationalism; and who knows but what a chastened, globalized Iran might not someday play that role once more? Hey, even the Sunnis have been known to get frisky from time to time.

All this seems like Politics 101 to me — an improvisatory muddle, reeling from crisis to crisis. States collude and simultaneously contend. To update an old observation, states have neither friends nor enemies — only frenemies.

The Hen doesn’t think this way, though. For him, as far as I can tell, it’s all a question of trivial lemmata derived from deep essences. All the bad guys are of course on the same side. Hey, they’re bad, aren’t they? What deeper bond could there be?

I haven’t read the Hunger Games books, I haven’t seen the movies — not on principle, I hasten to add; but the target demographic is a bit younger than I am. What I have heard of the story line, I’ve liked.

But alas, many of my fellow Lefties are quite disappointed. For all kinds of fascinating reasons. The Original Old Trot Wet Hen, Louis Proyect, has been passing along devasting Leftie critiques of the franchise, when he’s had a chance to catch his breath from cheerleading the Saudi/Israeli initiatives in Syria.

(I don’t know how he does it. Louis’ opera-omnia are going to be at least as voluminous as the Boswell Papers, if not quite so much fun to read.)

Lefties, it seems, are not immune to the impulse to fall into the story, and respond as if they were high-school students encountering the characters in the cafeteria line. This is a not unamiable trait, and shows a certain likable childlike unguardedness on the part of people whose hyper-adult conversation on other topics consists mostly of abstract nouns.

Alas, the guardedness comes back once the lights come up and the blog post is composed. It takes the form of political critique. The childlike response — bless it — provides the impulse; but it appears muffled in a kind of stiff hazmat suit, inflexible at the knees and elbows, and comically robotic in its general demeanor. Danger, Will Robinson!

Here are a few such items my man Louis passed along:

Homophobic garbage:

The heroine Katniss (um, what’s up with that name?) lives in a poverty stricken, mountainous American rural mining town – it’s obviously meant to represent Appalachia. The people who live in that town appear to be predominantly God-fearing white country folk. If they lived in present day America they would be members of the extreme Christian right. But alas, Katniss must desert this tough yet wholesome country life and travel to a big city that somewhat resembles the Emerald City of Oz, except everyone who lives there appears to be homosexual, or at least ‘homosexualized’.

Ugly LGBT stereotypes — and anti-Semitism, too!

Imagine if you could make a film that pandered to the worst prejudices and false grievances of the most ignorant, privileged and socially paranoid….

The film begins in a poor, overwhelmingly white rural town, which feels disturbingly like the US Bible Belt….

Unfortunately, insane delusions about the sacrificing of innocents by cultural outsiders are nothing new. If anything they’re sadly familiar.

Indeed, a newspaper article claiming that Jews were killing Christian children to use their blood for Passover rituals sparked the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903, an infamous massacre of some 50 Jews in the Bessarabia province of the former Russian Empire.

If theatrical release of Catching Fire leads to pogroms in Williamsburg, I for one will be surprised, but no doubt anything is possible.

I have always loved these what-if narratives about fictional characters. As a parlor game, it’s great fun: What’s Becky Sharp’s favorite flavor of ice cream? (Rum raisin, I think). The ability to play this game depends on real imaginative engagement with the text. But as with any game, it’s important to remember that it is, well, a game.

The ludic character is rather lost once you start to make up an imaginary biography for Katniss in Wolfe County, Kentucky — home of my own ancestors, by the way — and enroll her in a snake-handling Proddie cult and provide her with a tortured self-hating closeted gay pastor and so on.

At that point you have started writing your own screenplay, and I wish you the best of luck getting it produced.

One nice thing about living in New York: One is never disappointed in one’s ‘elected’ officials. They always run true to form.

Of course I was delighted when Mister Community Organizer, Mayor-elect de Blasio, re-appointed that appalling shitheel Willliam Bratton — the father of stop-and-frisk — as police commissioner. Delighted and I must say a bit surprised: I hadn’t expected him to do anything so nakedly contemptuous of the people who hoped for something different from him quite so soon. But I suppose it’s never out of season to tell folks to lower their expectations. Indeed, one should never miss an opportunity.

And considering his stage-managed lopsided victory, it seems clear that the tiny minority of liberal-schmiberals were never an important constituency. The gestures made in that direction were just an exercise in pacification: let’s have no trouble out of those professional kvetchers. After the election they can raise as much geschrei and gevalt as they like. To revise a James Baker aphorism: Fuck ’em — they’ll always vote for us.

Mayor Bloomberg Lite has now followed up in rare form, appointing the amazing figure shown at right above(*) as chief PR flack for the New York Praetorian Guard. The Times story was perhaps a bit more more humorous than it meant to be:

After a career spent toggling between television and law enforcement…

Which of course — for any thinking person– raises the question: What’s the difference?

—————-
(*) One John Miller, a notorious police buff and TV talking head.

Email from a pal of mine:

See the front-page story in The Times today about how Washington is “furious” that the Kurds are making oil deals with Turkey without going through the central government of Iraq? How dare they.

I suspect there are wheels within wheels on this one. One of the big wheels is Israel, which really would like to dismember all the Arab states, including Iraq. I think that was really the point of the recent war, more than anything else.

Now that it’s backfired and Iraq is in the Iranian sphere of influence, the Kurds, once again, are the most useful of idiots.

US imperial ‘realists’ value stability and would like to find a rapprochement with Iran. The Zionists, however, want instability and war with Iran. And there’s a kind of uneasy entente on this topic between Israel and the Sunni Islamist states (including Turkey) — the latter have gone all jihadi on Iran’s ass, for their own reasons.

The recent flap over Syria, ending as it did, was certainly a defeat for the Zionists and may have strengthened the realists’ hand, for a time, anyway. They’ve been on the defensive for quite a while, but the Israel Firsters may have overreached. Bound to happen sooner or later, I guess. Ὕβρις, ἁμαρτία, νέμεσις. If so, not a minute too soon, and serve ’em right.

A friend of mine — not a Facebook friend, a real one — was recently bemoaning the craziness of Teabaggers and other such freaks. Of course I also get a lot of similar handwringing from earnest ‘progressives’ and even from self-identified Commies on mailing lists and on Facebook, when I’m incautious enough to visit the latter. Everybody seems very worried about people who are, basically, Flat-Earthers.

Now it has always seemed to me very silly to pay any attention whatsoever to these clowns; but this was more a matter of intuition than careful thought.

Talking with my friend, I came to the conclusion — surprise, surprise — that my intuition was correct, but now I have some thinking to back it up.

I think my friend — and many other people — see political culture as a kind of arithmetic average. If you could just somehow eliminate the Teabaggers and kindred species, either by conversion or some other means, the center would automatically shift Leftwards — simple arithmetic, right?

This inorganic view of the matter seems not only wrong-headed but topsy-turvy to me. I don’t think the center is where it is because the Teabaggers are pulling it in a crazy direction. I think the Teabaggers are crazy because the center is crazy. That is, the fundamental, almost-universally accepted axioms of American political discourse are incoherent and delusional. My ‘progressive’ friends, who are capable of very sensible and cogent thinking on any other topic, start spewing word salad as soon as the conversation turns to Our Great Republic. Systematically unexamined concepts like ‘democracy’ and ‘the rule of law’ and ‘mixed economy’ and ‘extremism’ and ‘order’ and ‘chaos’ start to be flung around like badly-designed, un-aerodynamic Frisbees. They all fall to the ground; nobody ever catches them; and yet the pretense is kept up that some fun game is being played, out in the open air, to the general increment of cardiovascular health for one and all.

Seen in this light, the Teabaggers haven’t departed from the center; they’ve just raised it to a higher power. And maybe zeroed out some terms, as is the case with people who go the market-cult route. Put another way, craziness like the Teabaggers’ is simply a lemma of craziness like the center’s — an emanation, an epiphenomenon, a statistically predictable tail of the distribution, maybe one or 1.5 standard deviations out.

Of course this has some implications for the Left too. Maybe the abstract moralizing schematism of a lot of Left thinking is also an emanation of the Viral Center’s craziness.

So what do you do if you live in a crazy culture? You can’t simply bootstrap yourself out of it. You’re going to participate of the craziness around you, more or less.

Perhaps the best we can do is try to become, at least, a bit more aware of it — self-aware in the sense that any high-functioning crazy person has to be: There I go, being crazy again. Time to take a nap.

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Suicide has become a very popular option of late, among farmers in India and suburbanites in the Amurrican Sunbelt, and it’s not hard to see why. When I contemplate my own expectations from Social Security, Miss Parker’s list of modalities tends to scroll down my mental movie-screen. But I long ago concluded, with her, that one might as well live — driven, in my case, by a novel-reader’s or movie-goer’s stubborn need to know what happens next, even if the book is by Dan Brown or the film by Stephen Spielberg. Hell, even if the film is Sophie’s Choice. I almost never walk out, no matter how bad it is.

A kind friend recently sent along this item:

Gun suicides now outpace traffic fatalities in Colorado
Experts say suicide must be framed as public health issue

Gun deaths have outpaced motor vehicle fatalities in Colorado since 2009, but data from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment indicate the state has passed yet another milestone in death statistics.

For the first time in 2012, suicides by firearm alone surpassed motor vehicle fatalities, with 457 Coloradans dying in fatal car crashes and 532 taking their own lives using guns.

Gun suicides experienced their biggest increase in the past 12 years between 2011 and 2012, jumping up nearly 20 percent. Experts say many of these deaths are preventable, but that prevention requires framing suicide as a public health issue….

… Gun suicides didn’t take the biggest chunk of the increase. Fatal, self-inflicted gunshot wounds increased by nearly 29 percent while suicides by other means increased by nearly 64 percent.

Of course the phrase ‘experts say’ in itself is an incitement to suicide — I want to hang myself every time I hear it. But leaving that aside, there is much to puzzle over in this story.

The reporter acknowledges, for example, that gun suicides have increased less rapidly than those consummated by poison, rivers, gas, nooses and the rest of Miss Parker’s morbid list. Yet the story is framed as one about guns. Why?

Then of course there’s the comparison with road deaths. It seems to be okay for people to die on the road — though how many of those deaths are suicides too? A lot, I bet. But it’s not okay to check out under your own volition, simply because the deal on offer from our advanced civilization seems less appealing than the endless velvety dark. That’s cheating. Why do you get to go home earlier than everybody else?

No; it’s a ‘public health issue’, crying out for a technical solution; as if suicide were something like cholera, a problem that might be addressed by better drains.

Actually, I suspect suicide is in fact such a problem. If nobody ever had to worry about living in a cardboard carton above a heating grate, for example, I daresay fewer people would blow their brains out, or hang themselves, or jump in front of a subway. On the other hand, as technical solutions go, this one is perhaps a bit more far-reaching than anybody wants to contemplate. Why, it’s… it’s Communism!

The little server that serves this ‘umble site has been experiencing troubles of late. Not yet sure why. Sorry for the un-helpful error messages and the even less helpful timeouts. I’m working on it.