As I groom an English Cocker and prepare to grille some quail

It is a riddle I ponder more and more,
in Fall, when I find myself enjoying
the amenities of country living as if
friends were not disseminated as in a
diaspora we cannot interrupt for dinner.
I fashion my existence as if it were
not so that Valéry Lorenzo is in Naxos,
far away. What mechanism sustains this?

     

My favourite clothespin vii: there might be freckles

    This is a structure

    so widely associated

    with exemplary ethics

    that it takes some work

    to resist that illusion.

    Friday is a bad day to ask

    that of people, so we might 

    hold that question, say, for

    a later, decisive generation?

  

The revolt of the oligarchs

   There can be no doubt that the ugliest thrust of the vulgar literature of Ayn Rand, and therefore of the platform of the Republican Party in 2012, lies in a rejection of political obligation. The gastronomic séance Mr Romney conducted in Boca Raton, the rat’s mouth of Florida, speaks of nothing so much as the celebration of the will to exploit, the noisettes d’agneau-sucking equivalent of Drill, Baby, drill. We are guided to suppose an upside of rape.

   It is alleged, that the manifest lewdness of Romney’s pitch of succour to the Caligulans is nothing more than a brisk sketch of the field of battle before him, and that when he prevails, he will remember to pick up the pieces of his mandate. This promise rings the hollower, not for the Ryanesque puerility of his division of the body politic, but for the momentum of the feeding frenzy embodied in that dinner: a shark is no leader of a school of fish. It is, of course, that very carnal gusto which was Ayn Rand’s, and motivated her besotted acolyte Alan Greenspan to decouple American banking from obligations of capital, itself.

   No, therefore, it is not true, that the art of political campaigning would warp American society and its tentative democracy. It is true, rather, that the warp of oppressive political victory, in the partisan seizure of the Supreme Court, has shattered the American body politic by the miconstruction of freedom -- in the present case, by freedom of speech, in the infamous Citizens United case. Thus, Paul Ryan’s lament at the Republican convention in Tampa, that political obligation leaves his partisans “unfree.” The poor dolt has his oligarchy, already, and he simply campaigns to pull its levers.

   Political bodies can be moved, and generally are, by relatively small numbers of men who possess wealth, offices, inherited status, or a monopoly on the means of violence. The defense of majority rule requires something more: a theory of equality stipulating that every man ought to have and must be provided with the same political force as every other man. Then the greater force can only be discovered by counting heads.

   The leading thinker in our time, with John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, of the problem of political obligation, Michael Walzer framed the dilemma of majority rule as exactly that of Romney's rejection of John Locke's unified body politic; and it is no wonder, that he addressed this problem under the heading, the obligations of oppressed minorities. Bankers indeed, as Jamie Dimon and Robert Rubin, refugees respectively at JP Morgan Chase and Citibank, have lived to see themselves as oppressed minorities, as such merchants in fossils as the Koch brothers must always be. Who ever claimed it should be easy, to be misunderstood?

   We have come so far as to see, set free by his Party's kept Court to wield oppressive capital as an instrument of violence under the assertion of freedom of speech, a candidate for the Presidency articulating the pure, bright hope of Sheldon Adelson's Macao, that the shackles of avarice may be sundered in a bold, climactic surge of carnivorous candour. All along the heights of the Right, from Reagan's Peggy Noonan at Murdoch's Wall Street Journal to the latest blonde at his Fox News, we hear the amplified, resounding shrieks of the warrior wives as the catacombs of capital yield up the latest horsemen of the myth, as mountebanks we've known since Huckleberry Finn. 

   We're ready.

vi  Jeremy Young

Michael Walzer

Obligations

  Essays on Disobedience, War,

  and Citizenship

Harvard University Press, 1970©

The seduction of boys vii: Atlas Shrugged in public

An American youth doesn't have

to be very bright to realise,

he is mentored every day to re-

fine his aggressions to surpass

the power of others. Now he sees

this instruction embodied in nom-

inations for higher office of a

pair of conspicuously cruel men,

doing their best to justify them-

selves as saviours of the nation.

Who is watching to see what warp
this shock inflicts?

At first it came easily, with the knowledge of the shadow line

Picking its way through various landscapes before coming

To stand far from you, to bless you incidentally

In sorting out what was best for it, and most suitable.

Like snow having second thoughts and coming back

To be wary about this, to embellish that, as though life were a

   party

At which work got done. So we wiggled in our separate

   positions

And stayed in them for a time. After something has passed

You begin to see yourself as you would look to yourself on a

   stage,

Appearing to someone. But to whom? Ah, that's just it,

To have the manners, and the look that comes from having a

   secret

Isn't enough. But that "not enough" isn't to be worn like a

   livery,

To be briefly noticed, yet among whom should it be seen? I

   haven't

Thought about these things in years; that's my luck.

In time even the rocks will grow. And if you have curled and

   dandled

Your innocence once too often, what attitude isn't then really

   yours?

John Ashbery

Punishing the Myth

  Shadow Train

  Collected Poems, 1956-1987

op. cit.

Some time ago, when this date fell on a Saturday

 I was married

 as most of us

 would have been,

 at four o'clock,

 and careful to

 be dining on

 rognons de veau

 at 8.

                      They say, there is

                      no more cuisine.

                      I will never 

                      believe it.