Yesterday, at my younger daughter’s new school: So there we are, a clutch of parents, waiting to pick up our kids. Some of the parents are obviously professionals – lawyers, accountants, doctors and the like. We stand on a sidewalk, facing a building fronted by a large plate-glass window. Huge SUVs idle on the street.
Through the big window we can see a hundred or so middle-schoolers gathering their things, fastening their backpacks. The vista is an unrelieved expanse of skinny jeans, Abercrombie & Fitch, American Apparel, Urban Outfitters, Uggs…
“I think I’ll wait for my daughter to come out of the building,” I say with an attempt at levity. “They all look the same, I can’t tell them apart.”
Silence. Looks of horror.
The empty space surrounding me suddenly grows very large.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Monday, January 9, 2012
Questions for a New Year
Why ill in kill, but laughter in slaughter?
Is men in women there deliberately?
Do all interesting women have problematic relationships with their mothers?
If the child is the father of the man, then he’s sleeping with… ? Never mind.
Which Republican presidential candidate would you feel most at ease with in a bar, sharing a pitcher of hemlock?
When a priest pennstates a choirboy, is the end-product sancta santorum?
If Immanuel Kant but the Vatican, should we even complete the sentence?
Are you better off in life crying in a Bentley or laughing on a Vespa?
Is Sumatra comfortable?
Why do Americans pretend there’s an “r” in Goethe?
If your spouse gets raptured, do you have to quit your swingers’ club?
Can you get acne from Facebook?
Is your guiding principle WWYYMD?*
Why does Texas exist?
Did Jimmy Carter really say, “I came, I saw, Iran”?
Is one man’s Mede another man’s Persian?
Do you pronounce Cretan and cretin the same way? Why? What have you got against Greeks?
If you were a drone, would you enjoy the flight?
Can you have an atrocity in the countryside?
Have you heard the one about Orthodox Jews refraining from having sex while standing up because it might be construed as dancing?
Who was Kim Kardashian’s equivalent in Classical Antiquity?
Do you agree with the following syllogism: “Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; therefore Socrates is a homosexual”?
Does it get better? Really?
*What Would Yo-Yo Ma Do?
Is men in women there deliberately?
Do all interesting women have problematic relationships with their mothers?
If the child is the father of the man, then he’s sleeping with… ? Never mind.
Which Republican presidential candidate would you feel most at ease with in a bar, sharing a pitcher of hemlock?
When a priest pennstates a choirboy, is the end-product sancta santorum?
If Immanuel Kant but the Vatican, should we even complete the sentence?
Are you better off in life crying in a Bentley or laughing on a Vespa?
Is Sumatra comfortable?
Why do Americans pretend there’s an “r” in Goethe?
If your spouse gets raptured, do you have to quit your swingers’ club?
Can you get acne from Facebook?
Is your guiding principle WWYYMD?*
Why does Texas exist?
Did Jimmy Carter really say, “I came, I saw, Iran”?
Is one man’s Mede another man’s Persian?
Do you pronounce Cretan and cretin the same way? Why? What have you got against Greeks?
If you were a drone, would you enjoy the flight?
Can you have an atrocity in the countryside?
Have you heard the one about Orthodox Jews refraining from having sex while standing up because it might be construed as dancing?
Who was Kim Kardashian’s equivalent in Classical Antiquity?
Do you agree with the following syllogism: “Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; therefore Socrates is a homosexual”?
Does it get better? Really?
*What Would Yo-Yo Ma Do?
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Vive le GOP!
For reasons unknown to my conscious self, I watched the two Republican debates that took place in New Hampshire this weekend. Actually, I had heard, from snarko barfly friends, that the debates were what you could watch if you had exhausted your Three Stooges queue on Netflix, but, alas, with Cain and Bachmann gone, I never got the promised laff riot.
Instead, I got the peculiar feeling of being in France.
(Let us here, at the outset, retire the usual uninformed faux-sophisticate wheeze and state clearly that no Jerry Lewis joke is in the offing.)
Why France?
Because it seemed to me that the shiny white men on stage were talking about a world that no longer existed.
Background: As a journalist in France in the 1980s and 1990s, I sometimes did political stories. Not mainstream stories, but quirky ha-ha-those-crazy-French features about the country’s political fringes. On the left, the US has nothing comparable to what can or could be found in France. But on the right in France, there was a plethora of teeny and not-so-teeny parties and movements – Front National, Action Française, Renouveau Français and others – that appealed to, say, 20% of the electorate. And what they had said two or three decades ago, I realized with a start while watching the teevee this weekend, resembled what the speakers of New Hampshire are saying now.
Not in their particulars, of course, but in their worldview. Both – the present-day GOP and the French ultranationalist right – are not so much conservatives as archeologists, and militant archeologists at that.
In the French iteration, France is still Number One, Top Dog, Center of the Universe, Indispensable Nation of the world. The distressing past hundred or two hundred years have been swept under the rug by the Senegalese chambermaid, and the speakers at rallies could depict a world still under the sway of the great Parisian idea machine. Homeland of human rights, beacon of liberty, and all that. If any acknowledgment had to be made of the reality of the planet – that France was not first among equals on the world stage – then our far-right orators would cite not outside influences beyond their control, but domestic enemies, enemies within. For the hoarier of these groups, those enemies remained Jews and Freemasons. For the more “modern,” they were Arab immigrants and, well, Jews.
But the takeaway was that the world had not changed – if anything was temporarily amiss, that could be remedied by addressing the enemies within.
Now, back to New Hampshire. The militant archeologists there are living in a dig that, through carbon dating, I would put at about 1948 or 1949. The rest of the world, after the war, is on its knees. America is the undisputed Number One, Top Dog, Can-Do, Know-It-All, Benign, Superior Despot/Liberty Beacon of the world. The intervening sixty or so years or history have been swept under the rug by a Dominican illegal, and the speakers can paint a world where what America wants, America gets. Europe, the Middle East, India, Asia… they are all still bit players in the great Broadway musical known as We Are The Best. And if there is a jarring note coming from the ochestra pit – a shrill piccolo blast of reality regarding declining American education, income, influence, etc. – that too, pace the French archeologists, can be blamed on an enemy within. Thus the commies have become American Muslims; the liberals, socialists; the unions, antiAmerican layabouts; the poor, parasites.
Again, what is not acknowledged is that the world has changed. And that this change cannot be stopped, much less undone. I would say that identifying and fighting internal enemies to combat external forces is what adds the tags ‘militant’ and ‘futile’ to the title of archeologist.
Change has always been the central challenge to the conservative. Those wishing to remain in an inflexible past become the fringe, then gradually go away. A few of the French mini-movements I mentioned above are no more (excepting, of course, the far-from-mini Front National). But what is surprising here in this country is when a major political party, with all the resources at its disposal, deliberately chooses a starting point, a ground from which to argue, that in no way resembles the fluid, ever-changing realities of world politics and power relationships. The French ultranationalists are more ridiculous than the GOP – French superpowerdom lying so far in the past – but that does not make the Republicans’ fundamental error any less egregious.
And, yes, of course they are sincere in their beliefs. Trappist monks are sincere in their beliefs. So are flat-earthers. But, in politics, to address the world as it is requires seeing the world as it is. All parties, in all countries, make exhortations to patriotism and national exceptionalism – that’s par for the course. Yet here, the pride in having been Number One for a few decades has engendered, in the American conservative mind, a sort of romanticism. They look at ruins and see castles.
Just like archeologists.
Instead, I got the peculiar feeling of being in France.
(Let us here, at the outset, retire the usual uninformed faux-sophisticate wheeze and state clearly that no Jerry Lewis joke is in the offing.)
Why France?
Because it seemed to me that the shiny white men on stage were talking about a world that no longer existed.
Background: As a journalist in France in the 1980s and 1990s, I sometimes did political stories. Not mainstream stories, but quirky ha-ha-those-crazy-French features about the country’s political fringes. On the left, the US has nothing comparable to what can or could be found in France. But on the right in France, there was a plethora of teeny and not-so-teeny parties and movements – Front National, Action Française, Renouveau Français and others – that appealed to, say, 20% of the electorate. And what they had said two or three decades ago, I realized with a start while watching the teevee this weekend, resembled what the speakers of New Hampshire are saying now.
Not in their particulars, of course, but in their worldview. Both – the present-day GOP and the French ultranationalist right – are not so much conservatives as archeologists, and militant archeologists at that.
In the French iteration, France is still Number One, Top Dog, Center of the Universe, Indispensable Nation of the world. The distressing past hundred or two hundred years have been swept under the rug by the Senegalese chambermaid, and the speakers at rallies could depict a world still under the sway of the great Parisian idea machine. Homeland of human rights, beacon of liberty, and all that. If any acknowledgment had to be made of the reality of the planet – that France was not first among equals on the world stage – then our far-right orators would cite not outside influences beyond their control, but domestic enemies, enemies within. For the hoarier of these groups, those enemies remained Jews and Freemasons. For the more “modern,” they were Arab immigrants and, well, Jews.
But the takeaway was that the world had not changed – if anything was temporarily amiss, that could be remedied by addressing the enemies within.
Now, back to New Hampshire. The militant archeologists there are living in a dig that, through carbon dating, I would put at about 1948 or 1949. The rest of the world, after the war, is on its knees. America is the undisputed Number One, Top Dog, Can-Do, Know-It-All, Benign, Superior Despot/Liberty Beacon of the world. The intervening sixty or so years or history have been swept under the rug by a Dominican illegal, and the speakers can paint a world where what America wants, America gets. Europe, the Middle East, India, Asia… they are all still bit players in the great Broadway musical known as We Are The Best. And if there is a jarring note coming from the ochestra pit – a shrill piccolo blast of reality regarding declining American education, income, influence, etc. – that too, pace the French archeologists, can be blamed on an enemy within. Thus the commies have become American Muslims; the liberals, socialists; the unions, antiAmerican layabouts; the poor, parasites.
Again, what is not acknowledged is that the world has changed. And that this change cannot be stopped, much less undone. I would say that identifying and fighting internal enemies to combat external forces is what adds the tags ‘militant’ and ‘futile’ to the title of archeologist.
Change has always been the central challenge to the conservative. Those wishing to remain in an inflexible past become the fringe, then gradually go away. A few of the French mini-movements I mentioned above are no more (excepting, of course, the far-from-mini Front National). But what is surprising here in this country is when a major political party, with all the resources at its disposal, deliberately chooses a starting point, a ground from which to argue, that in no way resembles the fluid, ever-changing realities of world politics and power relationships. The French ultranationalists are more ridiculous than the GOP – French superpowerdom lying so far in the past – but that does not make the Republicans’ fundamental error any less egregious.
And, yes, of course they are sincere in their beliefs. Trappist monks are sincere in their beliefs. So are flat-earthers. But, in politics, to address the world as it is requires seeing the world as it is. All parties, in all countries, make exhortations to patriotism and national exceptionalism – that’s par for the course. Yet here, the pride in having been Number One for a few decades has engendered, in the American conservative mind, a sort of romanticism. They look at ruins and see castles.
Just like archeologists.
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