… is a great name for a band, but otherwise unimpressive. A kind friend just sent a link to a correspondence between one of the imprisoned Rioters and… wait for it … a person characterized as ‘the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek’.

A ‘Slovenian philosopher’! O Preston Sturges, thou should’st be living at this hour.

It’s pretty much unreadable, of course: windy, unmeaning self-importance and oily compliments on both sides. But there are some funny moments. This one comes from the ‘Slovenian philosopher’:

Since the 2008 crisis, this distrust of democracy, once limited to third-world or post-Communist developing economies, is gaining ground in western countries.

Clearly, Slovenia needs to teach its philosophers a little history. When, exactly, in the ‘West’ — and where exactly is that, by the way — when, I say, in this legendary ‘West’, was ‘democracy’ ever ‘trusted’?

Every sensible person, of course, understands that Zizek is a mountebank, an incoherent gasbag, a motormouthed buffoon, a bad joke.

That’s why I have written to my great and good friend Vladimir Putin, suggesting that he ought to let the Pussy Rioters go, preferably in honor of the Russian Orthodox feast of the Epiphany. They’ve had their fifteen minutes; they’re no threat to anybody; but please, please, Volodya, don’t let them give Zizek another opportunity for publicity. Imperial rivalry is one thing, but a loquacious bore is the common enemy of all mankind.

… But I couldn’t help recalling Wilde’s line about Caliban seeing his own face in a mirror. This particular Caliban seems undisturbed by the reflection, however.

I’ve been buttoning my lip for months now, but what is it about Trots and Syria? They just can’t wait to send in the drones. It was the same with Libya, if memory serves. They’re really happy to line up with AIPAC and Netanyahu and the Saudis, on the principle that some abstract idea — like ‘tyranny’ — must be ‘resisted’. No matter who’s resisting it, or who’s supporting them, or why.

One can’t help remembering that the original neocon ranks were extensively populated by ex-Trots. Is there something about that abstract, schematic way of thinking that makes it psychologically easier to just reverse the sign?

I don’t know. I don’t get it. The appeal of Leon Trotsky for me is nil. I’d rather be a transsexual, than whom Trotskyites are the only class of people more tedious.

… Michelle Obama wants to make ’em go to college.

I have to admit, I can’t stand Michelle and never could. I think I dislike her even more than I dislike her husband. He seems to me like a glib con-artist of a familiar type; he can be engaging when he wants to, though his more Presidential manner — sanctimonious, didactic, in a word, Wilsonian — is extremely repellent. But at bottom, he runs on jive, and that’s not the worst type of human character. One has known plenty of jivers, and they’re more fun to be around than your average professor(*).

But Michelle … Michelle really seems convinced of her own righteousness, her own deservingness; of the credit entirely due to her for her own undoubted, blazing success. This note of self-congratulation, mixed with censure for everybody else, booms like a basso ostinato through a recent talking-to she gave to a hapless captive audience of Washington teenagers, at a facility oddly called the Bell Multicultural High School (as opposed to a monocultural high school?).

Note her admonitory, accusing finger, always a dead giveaway:

Here’s a sample of her treacle-and-brimstone style:

I’m here today because I want you to know that my story can be your story…The details might be a little different, but so many of the challenges and triumphs will be just the same….

I couldn’t afford to go on a bunch of college visits, I couldn’t hire a personal tutor. I couldn’t enroll in SAT prep classes. We didn’t have the money.

… Some of my teachers straight-up told me that I was setting my sights too high,” she continued. “They told me I was never going to get into a school like Princeton…. [Once there,] There were times when I felt that I could barely keep my head above water.

She terrorized her audience with the usual dismal forecasts: by 2050 a PhD will be required to run a cash register at Wal-Mart, etc. etc.

My story can be your story. Every one of those kids at the Bell Multicultural Indoctrination And Prison Prep Center can, and should, come to live in the White House. All at the same time, in fact, having all graduated from Princeton in the same class and with the same GPA, all tied for valedictorian.

No doubt she’s right that credential creep will continue; it creates a considerable wealth transfer to the credentialling sector, after all, which is now an important industry, though it sells a very mediocre product. But it is surely obvious to the meanest intellect that although anybody can get on a bus — or, judging by some recent tenants, into the White House — everybody cannot get on a bus. A bus isn’t big enough for everybody. Not even the White House is that big.

So Michelle’s message, correctly generalized, is that you will have to work ever harder, and spend ever more time in one pedagogical feedlot after another, if you want to be declassed a bit less rapidly than your less compliant or energetic schoolfellows. We’re going to shaft you all, she’s saying; but some of you are going to get shafted worse than others; and you’d better get that nose to the grindstone, and burn that midnight oil, if you prefer the slightly smaller shaft.

—————–
(*) Of course there are exceptions. I’ve known plenty of likable professors too. Though none of them were law school, or “Political Science”.

Sorry there’s so much of it on the site. Don’t know how to stop it. Feel like a cop, and not a good one. Maybe blogging is… over.

… Or do I mean gender? It’s a minefield, this topic.

Some weeks back I wrote a perhaps rather grumpy post prompted by Chelsea Manning’s choice of gender. It attracted no more comment than it deserved until recently, when an old friend stumbled on it via Facebook and reacted with a level of froth and fury I would hardly have believed possible.

Every age, I suppose, has its wild flights of metaphysical fancy. The age of the great ecumenical councils gave us the glorious ontological extravagances of Christology — three persons, one God, identity of substance without confusion of person — now there, if you like, is the metaphysical faculty at full stretch. Later on we get the only slightly less imaginative speculations of the Schoolmen about the Real Presence.

Our age has set its sights a bit lower, and Dawkinsonian types who would scoff at the Athanasian Creed or the dogma of transubstantiation can nevertheless be heard maintaining that a person possessing one each of the X and Y chromosomes, and exhibiting the usual anatomical sequelae, is nevertheless, in some sense, ‘really’ a woman.

What heaven-stormers we modern secular folk are, eh? Earlier ages were okay with human finitude and particularity, but allowed quite a lot to divinity. We, on the other hand, believe that anything we don’t understand must be nonsense — unless it emanates from the faculty of physics, that is — and that attributes of ourselves once considered fairly fundamental are in fact matters of choice.

Personally, I would like to be taller. Perhaps, in some sense, I ‘really am’ a rangy, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped six-two, rather than the stubby short-legged munchkin I appear to be.

Obligatory disclaimer: I may be puzzled by the metaphysics — and even, admittedly, a bit puzzled by the impulse; the recent popularity of gender-switching is a phenomenon for which it doesn’t seem entirely wrong-headed to seek an explanation. But that doesn’t mean I begrudge to anyone his or her quest for happiness, whatever form that takes.

I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned, before, the miserable circumstances under which I spend my days, Monday to Friday.

It’s a sort of software sweatshop — we’re all lined up at benches, no privacy at all, and most horribly, no quiet. In my case the situation is even worse, because two Russian guys sit across the bench from me.

Now as everybody knows, Russians are great motor-mouths to start with, and these two are especially voluble and combative. They argue and scold each other nonstop in Russian — or almost nonstop; they occasionally take a break to argue with, and scold, somebody else, on the phone.

I know, or rather once knew, a little Russian, and so I pick up maybe one word in ten, and of course they drop a little English vocab into their conversation — nivitz gevizt mozhe buy superclass. VITZ?!

So it’s pretty distracting.

My never-sufficiently-to-be-praised wife bought me a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, and when it gets really bad, I plug them into my phone and try to find something to listen to that won’t distract me too much from what I’m doing but will drown out the Russians.

Debates in the British parliament are a godsend; nothing very demanding is being said but everybody seems to be having a good time. It’s like a sitcom. William Hague is actually quite likable, in a horrific kind of way, and Ed Miliband is such a pathetic damp squib that he brings out my inner sadist — the kind of person who would laugh at a blind guy slipping on a banana peel.

I also listened, recently, to some archived interviews, on NPR, with John Updike, a writer who was never in my pantheon — though I’ve read his stuff with more than slight pleasure. On the radio he was indescribably delightful; a bit arch, a bit fey, but very perceptive and always seemed to find the right word. He gave the impression of being a shy guy who had managed to assemble a suitably self-protective public persona, but without misrepresenting himself. I greatly envied his rather whispery, level, unemphatic voice. I too am a shy guy but my public persona has the plummy, orotund voice of Senator Claghorne.

Updike was a riot on the subject of that unspeakable monster Michiko Kakutani. I was laughing so hard the Russians stopped talking (mirabile dictu) and shot me a puzzled glance.

Ordinarily I can’t listen to music. Too demanding. I can’t think of anything but the music and I start to write the strangest, most disconnected Python code. But on a particularly bad day recently, Youtube offered up a complete Art of the Fugue, played on the organ. Out of curiosity, more than anything else, I fired it up, and from the first five notes of that apparently simple but Protean and ultimately spooky theme, I was, as always, putty in the hands of that sui-generis old sorcerer, Herr Kapellmeister und Kantor Johann Sebastian Bach, blest be his name unto ages of ages.

To paraphrase another spooky old gent, Dante Alighieri, very little Python code got written for the next half hour. Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately, if you take into account that the rent must be paid — the available data rate, in my corporate ziggurat, wasn’t enough to keep up with the old boy’s counterpoint. Maddening gaps and hiccups at last frustrated me so much that I tore the headphones off, with a muffled oath.

It’s been a while since I heard anybody play the Art of the Fugue. It’s not a crowd-pleaser. But a great deal of nonsense has been spread about this… this what? Not a ‘piece’. Not a collection of pieces. A secret garden? A labyrinth that somehow grows larger, that expands into new dimensions, as the visitor works his way toward the heart of it?

People say it’s music for the eye, or the head; bloodless, cerebral, ethereal. Very ‘great’, of course, whatever that means, but at the same time, somehow, a bit eccentric and dead-end.

Whether anybody will ever take up where old JSB left off, in measure 239 of contrapunctus XIX, is anybody’s guess, of course. So maybe it is a dead end, in some sense — or better, the living end.

But bloodless it is not. Every measure, as I hear it, is charged with passionate intensity — with feeling so deep it can’t waste itself in gesture and rhetoric, those usually charming and amiable attributes of the music we so oddly call ‘Baroque’. The KdF just speaks itself, in the plainest of terms; it follows its own thought to the deepest heart of its matter, and invites us — without persuasion, much less the hard sell, without any airs or graces — to come along if we like.

I came home from the job and dug out my old Dover edition and played, very slowly and haltingly, through the first two contrapuncti. To see the notes on the page, to feel all that godlike largesse unfolding itself under my own thick, unskilled fingers… if I try to describe it, I’ll just embarrass us both.

I found that I wanted to shed all my Early Music habits; to indulge in rubato like a highwayman; to play some notes loud and others soft; to put it over, in fact. A thing I don’t usually do much of, beyond a very modest level.

This seems wrong. But I don’t want to be robotic about it, either.

Because I now have my mission. Before I die I want to learn all the contrapuncti. They’re nearly all pretty manageable on manuals and pedal, though there are a few spots that want a terza mano.

I wonder what my captive Episcopalians will make of this, when I get to bestride the bench. Perhaps some will think the contrapuncti dull, though clearly most respectable.

Others, better informed, will think I’m being self-indulgent, and of course they’ll be right.

Perhaps the best I can hope for is that somebody will have the experience I had, fleeing from the world of my quarrelsome Russian friends, and re-discovering the strangeness and wonder of a country I thought I knew.

[Pentimento: Reading this again, ten years later, I greatly regret its unkind and dismissive tone. I’m not going to clean it up, since I think that would be a bit dishonest — sanitizing one’s own history. This is what I thought then; it’s not exactly what I think now. In particular, my harsh words about transsexuals in their social capacity seem grossly unfeeling. I continue to believe that gender theory is nonsense, but I could have been more sympathetic to people caught up in it; experiencing deep distress and trying to find their way out of it. I offer a most sincere mea culpa.]

All the transsexuals I’ve ever met have been crashing bores, and very bad company. Admittedly, it’s a small sample — half a dozen or so — but the lineaments of tediousness have been pretty consistent. The level of self-absorption is extraordinarily high — approaching, or even exceeding, adolescent levels. The range of interests very narrow. Transsexuals don’t flirt like girls and they’re not chummy like guys and no matter what you say or do, you end up feeling you’ve put a foot wrong. They’re like 70s feminists, except with big feet and hoarse voices, and wardrobes that aren’t at all butch but don’t quite make it as femme.

If I were Sex Commissar I wouldn’t ban it, of course. Liberty Hall, that’s my motto. Get the hormones and the surgery if you like, and good luck to you.

These ruminations got started in my head by Chelsea, nee Bradley, Manning, a great hero of mine, and the subject of a very fine piece by Jacob Bacharach, the former IOZ.

Chelsea is fully entitled, as a matter of courtesy if nothing else, to the name and pronouns she prefers. And in spite of her somewhat dismal choice of given name, my admiration for Chelsea remains entirely undimmed. If I were President, I would pardon her, give her the Medal Of Freedom, and pay for her surgery out of my own pocket.

In all fairness, it must be said that Chelsea, in the photo above, looks a lot foxier than any fait-accompli transsexual I have ever met. Of course when the picture was taken, I suppose she was, technically, a transvestite rather than a transsexual(*). And everybody knows how fabulous transvestites are.

Perhaps this is partly because transvestites are still navigating the shadowlands of gender — they have, so to speak, a foot in both camps. Their answer to the ‘identity’ question is, in effect, ‘None of the above’. Which is almost always the right answer to any multiple-choice question.

This American Life — I believe that’s an NPR show, right? — is one lockdown after another: day care, school; the office, or prison, or the army; and finally the old folks’ home or the ironically-named ‘hospital’.

We’re an institutionalized nation. No wonder we dream wild dreams of a wholly other life; some fence we can jump and find lusher, greener pastures on the other side. Of course the fences we might jump are laid down by the culture we live in, and the far-side pastures are as fenced in as the hither-side.

Perhaps the transsexuals I have known are so grumpy because they’ve realized that being a girl in America is no improvement on being a guy, although it may sometimes seem so to us guys.

Lemma, for you girls: Being a guy is also not much of an improvement on being a girl. We’re all fucked, more or less. Okay, you rather more than us. Fair enough.

There were some sourly funny sequelae to Chelsea’s self-revelation. The Nation magazine, for example, tried to crank up a campaign to get the prisons to provide ‘hormone therapy’ and indeed — they’re very radical at The Nation — sex-change surgery, for the Incerceration Sector’s long-term guests.

This struck me as a classic example of crackpot realism. Take it as given that the jailers will have a shocking number of us in their charge, for ever and ever, amen. Let’s make them kinder, gentler jailers.

———————-
(*) Lord, how dismal this bastard Latin-Greek vocab is.

This gaunt, haunted self-starveling has got to be the strangest, creepiest creature to bestride the public stage in my lifetime.

And that’s saying a lot: I cut my teeth on Richard Nixon.

Over the last few days, it’s been fun, in a sour sort of way, to watch the Obama administration’s efforts to hedge and undercut the remarkable process that unfolded after Kerry’s ‘gaffe’.

Maybe it really was a gaffe, or maybe, as has been suggested, a deal was already in the works. I dunno, personally; they don’t invite me to these meetings.

Gaffe, or no gaffe, it provided a relatively un-humiliating way for Obie & Co. to climb down off the war wagon, once it became clear that the Israel lobby doesn’t have quite such tight control over the American and European public, or even the American and European political class in general, as it does over the White House, and Downing Street, and the Palais des Elysees, and of course the congressional ‘leadership’ — Boehner, Feinstein, Pelosi and so on.

I don’t think they’ve given up. There are plenty of indications: If the Syrians don’t do — or if Obama says they haven’t done — what they’re supposed to do, then the US ‘reserves the right’, etc., etc. (How can you reserve a right you never had?)

I almost never make predictions, but I would bet the farm that we will hear the war drums beating again about Syria before this tiresome administration folds its tent and grumpily steals away.

Nice piece by Diana Johnstone, a great favorite of mine, and Jean Bricmont, on Counterpunch. Read the whole thing. Here’s an excerpt:

For now, the threat of war has been avoided, or at least “postponed”. Let us not forget that Iraq and Libya also gave up their weapons of mass destruction, only to be attacked later.

Syria is likely to abandon its chemical weapons, but without any guarantee that the rebels, much less Israel, won’t retain such weapons.

The popular mobilization against the war, probably the first one in history to stop a war before it starts, has been intense but may be short-lived. Those whose war plans have been interrupted can be expected to come up with new maneuvers to regain the initiative.