cheese it, the cops!

Freedom, Fear and the Knock in the Middle of the Night...

 

FREEDOM

FROMM and ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM are popping up often enough at the moment to think we might have realized that we've had a pretty good working hypothesis about the "end of Liberal Democracy" and "the rise of the New Right." Of course, he figured it out a long time and the fact that we re-discover it whenever freedom is threatened means it's possible to at least remember if not prevent. Fromm left Germany and after a year in Geneva, accepted a teaching position at Columbia University in 1935. His approach to psychoanalysis was informed by his early academic work in law and graduate work in sociology and philosophical psychology. Escape From Freedom jumps up the university reading lists whenever the pendulum in this country moves toward repression and authoritarianism. Approachable and crisp, his work provides a great working model for understanding we're doing to ourselves and why. I've been meaning to revisit it for a while, and this piece in the The Guardian will make me wander in to my stacks and find my copy. From the Guardian article by Dr. Michele Gelfand, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland:

"The philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm first identified this predicament in his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom. The gist of it is this: when people perceive an increase in disorder, they feel tremendous anxiety. Inevitably, this anxiety leads to a quest for security. To bring a sense of safety back into their lives, they latch on to authoritarianism and conformity. As Fromm noted, this often leads to “a readiness to accept any ideology and any leader if only he offers a political structure and symbols which allegedly give meaning and order to an individual’s life”. He had observed this in Germany, which he fled in 1933: “Modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds,” he wrote."

Anxiety is probably not the best word today, since we are always anxious about most things in our lives. Probably because the amount of stimulus has increased tremendously over the decades and because some of us recognize the symptoms if not the causes of what we observe around us, the concept I keep hearing is "Existential Dread." From Ari Melber and Hip Hop Artists on MSNBC to music reviews of Dustin Welch's "Amateur Theatre" to George Will, the concept is starting to surface a lot. Worth considering before it gets it's own TV show. Fromm wasn't an Existentialist, although he studied with Karl Jaspers while a doctoral student at Heidelberg in the 1920s. He was certainly influenced by Existentialism, being a contemporary of Hannah Arendt and Sartre. So before the TV show comes out with a theme song about "Here comes the Zeitgeist," Escape From Freedom is available on Amazon and Google and any other place you care to look.

What if Donald Trump is really the Joker but with as a result of inbreeding just has a lower IQ?

Just wondering about a few things. 

My latest piece of at Veterans News Today. We're kind of banned by Facebook these days, and I'm ok with that. It seems pretty clear that while we all must be insane to think that writing for an alternative media independent and intentionally unbridled will in any way accomplish or gain anything. Hell, we don't even get T-shirts.

“Logicians have but ill defined /As rational, the human kind; Reason, they say, belongs to man,/But let them prove it, if they can. Wise Aristotle and Smiglesius,/By ratiocinations specious, Have strove to prove with great precision,/With definition and division, Homo est ratione præditum;/But, for my soul, I cannot credit ’em. And must, in spite of them, maintain/That man and all his ways are vain;  And that this boasted lord of nature/ Is both a weak and erring creature. That instinct is a surer guide /Than reason-boasting mortals pride; And, that brute beasts are far before ’em…” Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, 1697

Enjoy, and Slainte!

Go to Sodom and Gomorroh, what do you care, aint nobody there'd want to marry your sister!

I was working on a different piece, wanting to segue from Trump into some recent books about how generally awful war and diplomacy are when you have no idea as to what you want tor an outcome. However, I began by wondering if I was the only writer on the staff who wondered when the woke daily "what the hell has that idiot done now?" Tapped a vein...

http://www.veteranstodaynews.com/2017/07/04/dispatches-from-wolf-country-round-and-round-stumble-on/#1

There is some related, kind of, Mothers of Invention. 

Here is some always related Allison Moorer-Shelby Lynn from a joint project...

http://www.npr.org/2017/06/15/532936594/songs-we-love-shelby-lynne-allison-moorer-not-dark-yet

 

A Duck will kick your ass if you're not careful!

 

Been wondering what will happen to the nation and the world and your 401K and the Mets when Boehner is gone and the guy who wants to invade Syria takes the gavel as the Speaker of the House? Well, in general, everything is fucked. 

My friend Eric Garland and I semi-collaborated on this piece that points out how sad it is that the departure of Boehner in KMAGYOYO moment inspired by the Pope saying, "Pray for me. You're fucked." or whatever he said, inspires not joy in Mudville but absolute...nausea. 

Yes, the Republican Party is now the tree in Nausea. Sartre. Read it. You'll never read another philosophical novel again. However, you can still be happy if you've a mind too...

 

Excellent piece there, Crispy --

Crispin has a great piece as a part of The Stone series on the NY Times today. As a friend, occasional co-conspirator and one-time Vice Presidential Candidate for the Defeatists!, I;m really happy for him and recommend the article enthusiastically.

I sense that like me, Crispin has been taking a vacation from giving a damn about US presidential politics, but occasionally feels pulled back into it. Certainly, in the progression of American culture, presidential politics, choices and elections have been used to make transitions. Kennedy replaced tired, worn out old Eisenhower with vigah! and such -- in reality, drugged to the gills for back pain, suffering from Addisons and various iterations of venereal disease. Ronald Reagan was going to reform everything after the weakness of Jimmy Carter and then should have been impeached for the Iran Contra deal. And so on -- Barrack Obama was supposed to mark out transition to being a post racial nation, and since then we have gotten to continually play out our dark night of the soul in communities all over the country. 

Crispin's more populist work, like cheese it, tend toward an ironic approach which was my first reason for reading his stuff. This piece, which comes at least in part from his piece on the Philosophy of Edgar Allan Poe, contains more than a little of it. Basically, one could contend that Crispin examines the idea of human self-improvement as moral and ethical and compassionate human beings. 

It's safe to say he approves that outcome, he just doesn't think it's very likely. I suspect most of us will probably agree, at least in part. As I tell the conspiracy freaks who normally read my stuff, if I'm looking for a reason why somebody did something stupid, I opt first for stupidity and then for the seven deadly sins. Dr, King was hopefully correct about the arc of human history being toward justice, but I'd hedge those bets with one's on sloth, gluttony, greed, lust, hatred, anger and pride.

By the way, today is Van Morrison's birthday. 

 

Been awhile...

I've been sulking in my cave as I follow the news avoiding anything about Presidential Politics that isn't outright hilarious, so obviously Bobby "Alligator Gar" Jindal and Donald "Singing Bass" Trump and Ted "Hey, I'm an asshole, all right" Cruz are amusing the hell out of me. Unfortunately, the rest of the world sucks.

 

The Mother Emmanuel killings were horrible, and the relocation of the Confederate Battle Flag to the the Statehouse Museum in Columbia was so overdue that the joy seems as sad as the tears and anger. I was slightly enraged about all the nonsense with the faces on the dollar bills, since I am a fan of Andy "By God" Jackson, the first true Democrat and elected man of the people as opposed to aristocrat who would have handled things a bit differently than Lincoln. Since he threatened to hang his Vice President, John C. Calhoun for sedition with his nonsense about "secession" and "nullification" I suspect he would have been very nasty to the south early on in the secession kerfluffle, resulting in a lot less death and destruction. I also think there's no reason to have the permanent fixtures on the bills anyway...rotate them with bona fide distinguished Americans and heroes who were not politicans; have multiple faces on the bills.Let each new Secretary of the Treasury usher in new placeholders on the Bills. 

Then David Brooks wrote some nonsense about removing all the monuments to Confederate heros from the public byways and locations in the South. In a way, Brooks is advocating something a lot more draconian than just moving one flag and possibly changing a couple of others. Of course, his big focus was on Robert E. Lee which was silly. Lee made one ethical error that resulted in the destruction of his beloved Virginia, the loss of his estate, and the death of friends, family members and close associates including more than a few Yankees. It was an ethical judgement that he struggled with; had Joseph Jackson not been seriously wounded and forced to spend a couple of years recovering, Lee had been asked to fill and had agreed to fill a non-combatant job advising Jefferson Davis, whom he disliked, and who was not so fond of him. Lee also refused to be buried in his uniform and famously told his soldiers to go home. He was one of the first of the Southern generals to request that he be granted his citizenship back. 

So, Brooks -- the smug, wealthy elitist who writes the same Capitalism is the answer/Globalism is great drivel as Tom Fiedman although less hysterically -- pissed me off. I mused over that article, but before I could get my teeth into it, the Cosby thing blew up. And continued to blow up. 

 

Now, possibly alone in my generation and subsequent ones, I never liked Bill Cosby. His last original stuff was in the first couple of albums, and the rest of his body of work has been jejune and marginal. I never watched the show, and think anyone who goes out of his way to wear some multicolored vomit looking sweater needs help. I had no problem with his diagnosis of many of the problems in the Black community; I did think he was pretty smug about it and very good at blaming victims. 

 

But, I'd never picked him as a serial rapist. Surprise! At the same time, it appears that Kim Fowley whom I've written of recently with a certain amount of respect, raped at least one and possibly more of the members of the Runaways...when they were minors. He wrote in one of his memoirs that he had never "made love" to any of the Runaways. Well, the HuffPo article bears no resemblance to a description of love making...he drugged her, ripped her clothes off and fucked her in front of a room full of people including some of the other members who were so intimidated that they never spoke of it. 

Ok, the Kim Fowley I got to know a little and whose Underground Garage Show on SiriusXM that I enjoyed was the guy 40 years later. He was a rock and roll auteur; most of the stuff he produced and did himself was pretty awful dreck and he admits it. The Runaways were probably his greatest success after getting people to light their lighters to show John Lennon how much they loved him as he made his first Plastic Ono Band appearance and I shouldn't forget Alley Opp which was actually his first record and probably his biggest hit. 

 

So, Cosby and Fowley were both reprehensible men. The difference between them is that Cosby held himself to be a role model; Kim Fowley never held himself up as anything except a rock and roll animal. One is a hyprocrite; one far less so. I know which I prefer. 

With that, my most recent article over at Veterans Today, on the problem of Sex, Ennui and Hubris. I hope it lets you think. 

Dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free --

Did you catch the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame induction the other night with Willie Nelson, Double Trouble, and others? Willie's voice is more or less a whisper now, but still interesting and compelling...and, of course the reason for the title is to aggravate Crispin after the last anti-Dylan rant. No Dylan, and it would all still be "moon...spoon...goon...macaroon...love..dove..above..shove" in music. I get it that he doesn't like Dylan...there's a lot of Dylan that I, as a certified Dylan nut, don't really care for. I really don't care for the Beatles. Seriously. But, I'd be a fool to deny their impact and influence. It would be as silly as ignoring Bob Wills or Memphis Minnie in Country or in Blues. Crispy knows this well, and acknowledges it....He just doesn't like the guy. He's Crispin's "picked sturgeon."

 

Well, I don't like pickled sturgeon either, but my approach is to ignore it. Pretend it doesn't exist in my universe. Smile politely when offered it someplace -- I go to some odd places -- as if offered something by an Alien Space Hostess. Crispin likes to pick at it, sniffing, snorting and making faces. Like an unhappy version of Browning's Duke in My Last Duchess, he occasionally rants about it and then goes off to mutter in the corner.  

 

Meanwhile, over at Vets Today...

Possibly the most important thing I have ever written, as edited by the incomparable Erica Wissinger. In fact possibly the most important thing that has ever been written since...writing! 

 

And then, there's this. Buddy wrote a book, it's great, guitar manufacturers are stupid and private equity is total insanity...got it. 

And, just for the record, Beyonce is one of the best cover artists for blues and soul music that has ever picked up a microphone.

 

Here we go round again...

 

 

Ray Davies is touring, Dave Davies is touring and the Kinks are supposedly going to do a reunion tour which sill be interesting since everybody else in the band is dead. 

And, for the second time in 20 years, a bunch of mouth-breathing troglydytes are babbling about impeaching the president, this time for exercising his constitutional powers. 

So, it seemed like a good time for this. 

 

East of the rising sun, west of Gibraltar

 

Crispin, as most of his devoted Crispyheads know, doesn't like Dylan. However, I was driving home the other day, and something I'd never heard before that was obviously an older number because he didn't sound like the late Bob Shepard, Yankee Stadium PA man channeling Son House while introducing Mickey Mantle and it struck me. And, got me thinking about how screwed up the world is...we've got a brilliant president replacing the village idiot; we are a pretty smart country. And we keep stomping on it with cleats...not rubber cleats, but sharp steel ones like Ty Cobb wore

I've been shilling Russian mail order brides to all my lonely, unmarried or thinking about it friends. I'm helpful that way. One of my buddies, recovering from his third or fourth marriage told me that he would run before having anything to do with a Russian woman because they come from the womb crazy. This from a guy with 9 cats who wears thin lapelled suits and thin ties with a fedora at work...my comment was fairly simple. "And..." figuring with the Russian bride, you don't have to fool yourself that it's going to be wonderful. 

Kind of like our latest adventure in Syria. So, I wrote this...It's not going to get better in a little while. 

I despise Upworthy, don't you...cue Emily Dickinson

 

I really don't like that bloody thing. Upworthy -- what the hell does it even mean? It's kind like RL Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verse which some people find poetic but I always found it to be saccharine, maudlin "why the hell did they give me this instead of the book about Vikings I wanted" even when I was a kid. But, in the words of the old Russian proverb, Даже слепая свинья находит желудь иногда, or as we say in Dusquesne, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH THIS SCREWY INTERFACE?

Ok, it's ok now. Actually, it translates like this...

Charlie: You're getting on. You're pushing 30. You know, it's time to think about getting some ambition. 
Terry: I always figured I'd live a bit longer without it. -- 

 

 

Anyway, there is also music provided by that twanging philosopher, Mr. Dwight Yoakum. But, watch the Ted Thing and I know you'll like it

And if you're taking a course in Aesthetics and Politics with Herr Professor Doktor Sartwell, compare and contrast values based on this contrasting versions of the Clash piece by Mr. Yoakum and Ms. McColl with extra credit if you can describe the similarity in the personal sitations of Ms. McColl and Mr. Strummer in 2012. Guaranteed C-, I tell you. Trust me. I used to be in govenment...

 

Republican Congresscritters -- Weasel Taxonomy

 
Most of us would not think of damaging the United States for our own political benefit, monetary benefit or just for kicks. (Well, there was Crispin's advocacy of BushII over Kerry, but that was probably sunstroke at John Edwards' teeth...) Obviously, Republican Congresscritters, as Molly Ivins used to call them at times, are more malleable. 

 

Channeling Yeats, King Solomon and the APA, kinda sorta

Download The Unlearned Lessons -- Ethics Assignment

 

Clarity...

 

In which Crusader AXE shares the brilliant insights of a English Muslim on the future of the middle east. 

Pefectly rational solutions abound and nothing will go wrong!

Nothing but togetherness and love in the Muslim World. 

At the final Peace Festival, the Kinks Reunion Concert will sell out.

 

more mencken and nathan

    The American Credo consists of all and only the beliefs that all Americans share, the apothegms or truisms endorsing which constitutes american identity, more or less, all of them entirely false, of course. How about (155): "That the extinction of the Indian has been a deplorable thing." (114) "That the editor of a woman's magazine is always a lizzie." (!) (105) "That a negro's vote may always be readily bought for a dollar." Or (114) (79) "That a member of the Masons cannot be hanged." (175) "That a man will do anything for the woman he loves."Every single one of these has a subversive or progressive reading precisely in its various transgressions and the ways they are shaped. But they are the words of a man who essentially controlled his own press and had given himself permission to say whatever he wanted to say, in whatever manner he deemed most amusing. That actually takes tremendous guts.

mencken on the snowden, bradley manning, assange etc

Almost alone among the civilized nations of the world, the United States pursues critics of the dominant political theory with mediaeval ferocity, condemning them to interminable periods in prison, proceeding against them by clamour and perjury, treating them worse than common blacklegs, and at times conniving at their actual murder by the police. (Mencken and Nathan, American Credo, p. 42)

i'm too outraged to be cynical, but i'm trying.

just to take a momentary break from direct treason, i've been working on the american cynics (my personal peirce, james, and dewey; my three stooges of the apocalypse: twain, bierce and mencken). one text i can really recommend as characteristic, problematic, and brilliant, is the american credo by mencken and his relatively frequent collaborator the drama critic george jean nathan (1920; revised edition 1921). oh quotes of course! 

 

*

here is one of several texts in which twain develops his response to darwin. i do actually regard it as an important advance in our conceptions of evolutionary biology:

And so I find that we have descended and degenerated from some far ancestor,- some microscopic atom wandering at its pleasure between the mighty horizons of a drop of water perchance,- insect by insect, animal by animal, reptile by reptile, down the long highway of smirchless innocence, till we have reached the bottom stage of development - nameable as the Human Being. Below us - nothing. Nothing but the Frenchman. ("Man's Place in the Animal World" [1896])

 

 *

Truth shifts and changes like a cataract of diamonds; its aspect is never precisely the same at two successive instants. But error flows down the channel of history like some great stream of lava or infinitely lethargic glacier. It is the one relatively fixed thing in a world of chaos. It is, perhaps, the one thing that gives human society the small stability that it needs, amid all the oscillation of a gelatinous cosmos, to save it from the wreck that ever menaces. Without their dreams men would have fallen upon and devoured one another long ago--and yet every dream is an illusion, and every illusion is a lie.  The American Credo, p. 3

the bit of that i want to emphasize is this: Truth shifts and changes like a cataract of diamonds.

*

Past. That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance. A moving line called the Present parts it from an imaginary period known as the Future. These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy. The Past is the region of sobs, the Future is the realm of song. In the one crouches Memory, clad in sackcloth and ashes, mumbling penitential prayer; in the sunshine of the other Hope flies with a free wing, beckoning to temples of success and bowers of ease. Yet the Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one - the knowledge and the dream. (Bierce, Devil's Dictionary)

 bierce is really best consumed in smal doses. oy it's a bile tsunami! but that there is profound.

note on bierce, who no doubt was executed by zapata and villa as he simultaneously committed suicide and then disappeared into the hills with his inca squaw, here's my real theory. yo dumbass! he thought he could sell stories and get scoops about the situation in mexico. then, you know, something bad happened; he was near or in an unexpected engagement and suffered harm; montezuma's revenge. he's just the type to take a semi-stupid risk, not at all to commit suicide. deceased war correspondent: look you might only read a few of the texts, which is best, but you've always got to bear in mind that he himself made his living as a journalist throughout his post-military life. right? this is still the way people in the biz think: wow maybe i could sell a piece on this: do a query etc. no can you pay 500 and expenses? then you see if you can't work a similar deal for another piece for someone else (hearst, say), doubling up on expenses, etc. but this is the most positive thing you can say for his vision: too much pleasure in the things that cause his sardonic formulations to throw it over. 

 

 

 

It hurts my head when Fox News is in the right on a matter of principle

In which Crusader AXE mutters into his amontrillado about Harry Frankfurt, bullshit, talking points, the relationship between Roland Hedley and Winston Churchill and whether or not Jay Kearny now showers after or before or during each press conference....hands and soul never get clean. Oh, and involves Montaigne, Rolling Stone b-sides and Bob Dylan...with Popeye. 

Clarity, madness, venality and heroism...

In which Crusader AXE uses a picture of Gina the PTSD suffering IED dog to illustrate how sadness in the face of pain and madness infects us all, confusing the better natures and sparking occasional moments of communication outside the noise media...and then fades away .

Of the sanctity of poverty chosen and the ironic subtext

In which Crusader AXE (St Mary's School, 1965; Bishop Ludden High School 1969; College of the Holy Cross, 1973) ponders the problems inherent in recommending the cannonization of a socialist anarchist, abortion survivior, social activist, feminist and economic radical for Sainthood by the American Catholic Hierarchy, and smiles... 

Early Roman Kingmakers

In which Crusader AXE tips his hat to Crispin, defender of Sarah Palin as an authentic American Voice like Aimee McPhearson or Charles Whitman, and discusses the possibility that Mitt Romney is really an Israeli disinfomration operation and the riots and murders and such are really an attempt to excite sales of Salmon Rushdie's memoirs. 

Just to make Crispy a little nervous in the night...

One of the loose collective that binds Crispin and me -- The Defeatist-Malcontent-Anarchist Slacker Collective and Bait Shop -- a Vet who's trying to get his band going in upstate New York doing kind of boogie rock with metal overtones, spends time he should spend doing something like picking up bottles for the return fee on a Marshall Amp blog, and one of the folks on it posted something about a piece of software that my pal had not heard of. He tossed it out to the collective, and one of the guys explained that it is really kind of an auto-cad system that enables engineers, architechts, and marketing types to overlay everything and walk the customer through the whole bloody thing. He then commented that if he wanted to go back to working for somebody else, he's take some classes...and then realized what he just said. Commented that he hated his life, and went off to drink copiously in the pine woods of Maine. 

This made me realize something. The goal is not 3D confusion but infinite dimensional confusion. Then,
people can do things like compare the budget and expenditures of the United States with your family checkbook, and have people pay attention. This software then is part of the Koch agenda and goal for the brave new world where You can confuse the customer in multiple dimensions, including time, simultaneously! What is it? It's all of this. When will it be done? When it is done. What will it look like? Like all of this in layers. Why is this here? it's in the regulations. In France, it would have to be here, but we're not in France so it has to be there. Don't blame us, it's in the regulations. What is it going to cost? What it costs. Cost =f(X,L) where X is the "cost" and L is "a lot" and the relationship is undefined...either you add a lot or you multiple by a lot, but it's going to really cost a helluva lot.

So, I decided to hide in music for the rest of the day...Anybody besides me remember The American 


Breed? 60s garage band that incorporated a trumpet in a lot of their fadeouts. Almost recruited a chick trumpet player for my non-existent but brilliantly conceived garage-punk-blues-rock band...The Barstow Bad News Blues Band. However, she can't sing and only knows how to play marches. Wouldn't really help get a unique sound. Have been thinking about substituting kazoo for the trumpet if we do a cover version of their hit, though?

 

Looking for the one thing led to a lot of others. Here's some other garage-type stuff from my youth...For example, the Knickerbochers.  Guys were from Yonkers, or someplace else in the neighborhood,  but everybody thought they were either the Beatles or from Liverpool. Yeah...Liverpool, outside Syracuse, home of Heides Hotdogs...

The Beau Brummels were an interesting group. With that name, in the 60s, they should have been dressed in electric suits (really electric, plugged in like Christmas trees) but I guess they just liked the name. Pretty good song...

The Zombies had an interesting kind of vibe and were a talented band. Sort of stuff the Moody Blues originally did before they discovered psychedelia...and flutes.

Here are the Yardbirds with Jimmy Page supposedly playing the Beck riff because he was off being "brilliant" some place. I hate Jeff Beck, although I think his current bass player is hot. Actually, seeing her with that geezer is something I find scarey... I also think this was lip synching. Here's the   Original with Beck --and, I don't hear the difference. To complete the circle of jerks and egos at the time, here's one their first lead guitarist, What's his name, Dick Crampton or something...I read something recently that said that the Minor Pentomic Blues Scale was what differentiated the three of them. Beck rarely uses it; Page was sloppy with it; Clapton precise and thorough. Yeah...sure.

Now, We Five was an interesting group -- kind of folky, with a big voiced lead singer named Beverly. Who had a helluva voice...since by then the folk voices for women were the amazing altos of Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell, not too surprising that they got lost in the dust. Kind of a shame -- she's dancing, shaking and jiving on stage like she might mean it, in a nice Christian California girl way. 

Syndicate of Sound -- A classic song, but what a waste of two Rickenbackers including a George Harrison 12. Couple of Japanese Squier knockoffs from Kresge's before it was K-Mart would have done the trick for that rif.  Saw these guys in 66, one of the opening acts for the Stones.

Finish up this nostalgia with two organ songs...despite the legend, not  Augie March on both of them.  She's About a Mover  was Doug Sahm, Augie and some other guys. Flip side was his attempt at being part of the summer of love, which I think was horrible. MENDI-cino. MENDI-cino. Mover was a helluva number though...\ Then, of course, there's that great American Band, ? and the Mysterians.

There is nothing about these numbers that doesn't say the yearning of teenage sex, Budwieser and cold duck on a Friday nite after the dance in the gym...who wouldn't like that, again?...

That should ruin the weekend for those of you with daughters!

And for us to pretend to be interested in Hank Williams Junior and the sign at Rick Perry's hunting camp. Been a long time, long time, long lonely, lonely time indeed...

 

so i'm sort of trying to develop a reading of american cynicism of the mencken/bierce variety. and actually, though it doesn't seem that way, folks like that are moralists, even extreme and extremely passionate moralists. they've given up all their naive idealistic hopes, supposedly, but they are exquisitely sensitive to the forces that made them do so: in particular, hypocrisy. i would see bierce and mencken as disappointed emersons, emersons who finally let the actual world destroy their optimism. 

the very darkest and yet most hilarious things i've ever read are the sick stories of ambrose bierce. (like my favorite murder, an imperfect conflagration, or, god help us, oil of dog). amusingly enough, these are often characterized as "tall tales," or even "tall tales of the old west": if you came looking for pecos bill, you'd be in for a rude awakening; that's why i'm going with "sick stories." obviously they owe a lot to swift, though swift in his utmost biliousness could have conceived nothing quite like this. bierce wrote a bunch of stories in this vein, each better than the last.

i think their amazing satiric bite comes from their routineness, which constructs an audience. the narrators just assume that they are speaking to an audience of thieves, murderers, animal-torturers, and ministers of the lord. that is, the stories of bierce characterize the society around him, the american reading public, his very own audience, as crazed psychopaths living just beneath a surface of highly polite, decorous appearance, a punctilious observation of social norms, the niceties of law or business coupled with perfectly routine mass murders. it's not only that that's what people do in the stories; it's that in writing into the world he creates bierce just blandly continuously implies that we are precisely the same.

one way to think about this in in terms of war. bierce was at shiloh, chickamauga, sherman's march across georgia, and war of course is the great theme of many of his short stories. what he took himself to have seen was the utter darkness behind the facade of civilization: his great theme.

it's funny to be circling around to mencken. he was the hero of my father and my grandfather: both franklin sartwells, both hard-drinking newspapermen just down the road in dc, for whom mencken was the greatest of their very own kind. i believe they both took on a semi-ironic reactionary stance in politics in conscious homage to their sage. it mattered that mencken came from a working-class background and never went to college; he was a practical newsman with ink on his hands. 

so i have a lovely weathered three-volume mencken autobiography, published by knopf in 1940 and consisting of happy days, newspaper days, and heathen days. they are inscribed "FGSartwell, 1943" and then "and Frank Sartwell, his son, to Crispin Sartwell, his son, on his 21st birthday. June 20, 1979" (that was in the last year of my father's life). but also mencken's undoubted status as a man of letters lent respectability or dignity to the status of newsman. 

bierce and twain were beloved on all the same grounds, and i also have my dad's devil's dictionary. i never met my grandfather, but it would shock me if he didn't cultivate a nice disillusionment with regard to the entire human condition and a humorous leverage thereon, since that is the code of the sartwells!

mencken (1926):

On Cynicism

One of the most curious human delusions lies in the theory that cynics are unhappy men - that cynicism makes for general biliousness and malaise. It is a false deduction, I believe, from the obvious fact that cynics make other men unhappy. But they are themselves the most comfortable and serene of mammals; perhaps only bishops, pet dogs and actors are happier. For what a cynic believes, though it may be too dreadful to put into formal words, at least usually has the merit of being true - and truth is ever a rock, hard and harsh, but solid under the feet. A cynic is chronically in the position of a wedding guest who has known the bride for nine years, and has had her confidence. He is a great deal less happy, theoretically, than the bridegroom. The bridegroom, beautifully barbered and arrayed, is about to launch into the honeymoon. But the cynic looks ahead two weeks, two months, two years. Such, to borrow a phrase from the late Dr. Eliot, are the durable satisfactions of life.

 

no telling when, but i have been soaking in mencken (and bierce and twain). mencken is truly astounding. fantastically productive, even while flirting around continuously with hooch and movie starlets (aileen pringle, e.g.), traveling about here and there, and supervising a variety of periodicals.

the prose is almost unbelievably alive, vivid in its every sentence; it arouses my envy. he is an auto-didact of epic proportions, and behind each little declaration is the equivalent of a number of ph.d.s: in history, philosophy, literature. the american language is an immense work of scholarship: tantamount to writing the oxford english dictionary. and even there the prose fucking sparkles. 

he is an extremely strong literary critic: frank, with an almost unerring judgment; he has a way of zeroing in on the writer's weaknesses, but is also capable of cherishing all sorts of surprising things. his assessment of bierce, for example, is harsh and loving and right. but this is entailed by his basically so-right reading of the whole american literary tradition.

throughout his life, people who encountered him professed themselves surprised to find the bitter cynic mencken to be the sweetest and most jovial person imaginable. this is not surprising at all; just beneath the terrible disaffection lurks a real love of human foibles, an inexhaustible curiosity about the human condition, which he fundamentally affirms as endlessly amusing.

the positions are beautifully and amusingly perverse: pitted quite consciously against his age. that his basic commitment in politics was to individual liberty - something he said of himself - is obvious. this is not to say that mencken is always right or in good taste. his germanophilia was sort of amusing on behalf of the kaiser during world war i; after that it got less charming. he had a pretty primitive darwinianism going, part of his reactionary realism, etc. but in a way those are quibbles. my sense is that mencken - a true celebrity in his own time - is comparatively neglected today.

what he got away with is almost unimaginable: screeching anti-religious atheism much more beautifully defended than in dawkins or even hitchens (treatise on the gods); pro-german tendencies; utter skepticism of the political and aesthetic consensi surrounding him; a systematic program to destroy every national myth, starting with democracy. what he has to say about such topics as women and marriage and sex is entirely unacceptably frank, brutal in its sardonic truth. and for all that he was a beloved piece of americana, a kind of norman rockwell character: the barber-shop skeptic. but here with insane chops, introducing nietzsche or ibsen to american audiences, for example. chicks dug him. writers groveled before him. he made baltimore into a kind of anti-romantic paradise, the anti-center of the anti-universe.

the book below tells the almost unbelievable story of mencken roaring through the twentieth century. for one theme, just three little girls, growing up best friends in montgomery alabama: sara haardt mencken, zelda sayre fitgerald, and tallulah bankhead, later depicted doing catastrophic drunken gymnastics at the algonquin, where mencken maintained a suite. admittedly their dads were supreme court justices and state senators. unimaginably sexy high-society fundamentally non-monogamous debs from the deep south on a party tear; oh and brilliant artists of various kinds. what if paris hilton was a genius?

 "Zelda never learned the gentle art of 'policing' her husband's parties," writes sara mayfield. "Instead, she rode with him on the tops of cabs, drank toasts to him from her slipper, and flirted with his friends." zelda is depicted more or less ghost-writing scott's books, and as producing the immortal sentence "plagiarism begins at home."

i've got to say that zelda vid is charming; the youtube tribute is its own little democratic artform.

so i'm sort of thinking my next book will be the american cynic, focusing on the attitude toward life of ambrose bierce and h.l. mencken. for one thing, i've learned the hard way that if you're going to work through people's voluminous complete works, it helps if they are really, really good writers.