Real government, real men

Sixty minutes into Costa-Gavras'
Cold War thriller, State of Siege,
a sexy masked terrorist interroga-
tor guides a captive CIA advisor of 
a repressive South American régime
to the core of his character's il-
lusions. Their dialogue now returns
to life in the nature of the new
American government, and tends to
make one sentimental for the music
of Mikis Theodorakis. Who restores
the state of mind of a nation to
grotesque alternatives, first em-
bodies one for seduction's sake.

Tupamaro: A policeman might become a 
revolutionary and vice-versa ..

Captive: Not a true policeman.

Tupamaro: Do you belong to a specific
breed?

Captive: Yes, in a way. Our vocation
is to uphold order; which means, that
we do not like change. We're conserva-
tors. 

Tupamaro: Here, many become cops out of
hunger, not by vocation.

Captive: Yes, but they become policemen,
while others, out of hunger become thieves.

Tupamaro: You think hunger gives you the
choice?

Captive: I believe, that a man, a real man,
always has a choice. Don't you?

Tupamaro: No. We don't believe in real men,
[sir]. We believe in men, and their right
to equality.

Captive: I believe in those things.

Tupamaro: No, you do not. You accept in-
equality, you defend privilege. Actually,
what you believe in is ownership. 

Captive: What do I get out of it?

Tupamaro: The illusion that you're one of
the bosses, when in fact you're an errand
boy.

We accept that this is why the new government

sustains its unbroken partisan commitment to

the President's incompetence and instability,

given the vanishing opportunity he presents to

win the repressive alternative, of battles it

has lost before, and must surely lose again -

on the strength of a collage of ante-bellum

white male fetishes, crumbling before our eyes.

What illuminates the new government's betray-

als of these voters is his hunger to run any

errand to be petted as a boss. What brightens

the exposure of his Congressional conspirators

is the very same errand. All over again, des-

pair is premature. They make themselves real.

Costa-Gavras
  director
Franco Solinas
  screenplay
Pierre-William Glenn
  cinematography
State of Siege
KG Productions, 1972©

Fairfield Porter
Calm Sunrise
1963

Suppose it were Friday cxxv: Calder at the moment

    Like a face crossing a mirror
    at the back of the room, Eros
    moves.. He never looks at you
    from the place from which you 
    see him. Something moves in
    the space between. This is the
    most erotic thing about Eros.

Anne Carson

Eros

  The Bittersweet

  What is this dialogue about?

Princeton University Press, 1986©

Dominik Sadoch

Alexander Calder

Untitled

1947

Whitney Museum

Calder: Hypermobility

An exhibition, June 9 - Oct 23

New York

Likely stories come again

  One could sense we were on somewhat soggy

  ground when young Trump denounced the tak-

  ing of Shakespeare, relevantly, repeating

  these learned admonitions on the heels of

  another shooting spree. Of course convul-

  sive exhalations reign just now, such that

  soon enough a séance is bound to be called

  by some Calpurnia of the Right, to exploit

  the hour by demanding forgiveness of mis-

  rule. Why should opportunism lack for in-

  dignation's mask, with all that practice?

Arthur Garfield Dove
Sun on the lake
1938
Museum of Fine Arts
Boston

Origins of Wednesday lii: And the green?

         Ow. In fact ouch.

         I was just bothering over

         these torpid interpretations you see

         when, blessed by the grass, I understood the signs

         in the round. I felt dated,

         much as my contemporaries did.

         The clouds noticed.

         To be off and running

         the distance of a hilltop from old frame

         buildings without whose lens no one

         seems to understand. Nor can they

         move inside when the season decrees sheen:

         black yet morbid at the sunflower's

         peaked center. Yes you know I

         was saying that too. Blank testicles.

        

         Sometimes if we listen without noticing

         at the packed city's center other oblongs allude

         to what the hotel dissipates.

         There were onions at the triangular coated

         basin at the center of all aligning

         and shy tempests attuned to cottage

         meanderings - I mean, save me,

         I might not have candle power

         to unstring meritable hoops. I say,

         have we no thin power rotting

         in English kitchens for the duke's children

         to inherit like insecure boats

         too distant from the onyx horizon?

        

John Ashbery

Planisphere

  Is it just me or

Harper Collins, 2009©

op. cit.

Alexandra Leblans
Souffleur de glace

Strategies of falsehood

O sentiments sitting beside my bed

what are you thinking? of an ebony vase?

of a pail of garbage? of memorizing Whitman?

You are leaning on my elbow backwards.

What are you doing, my darling sentiments?

You are indeed bored. Can it be that I'm asleep?

Shall you stride on the shingle with an oar

in your hands, or beach my heart, my barnacled?

You would let me lay in bed all day,

free to drown in your wing-beatings as you fled

past and past my glazed, teary-from-the-breezes heart,

which is not going to open up and look out any more.

The great project of the new American government, to pulverize humane society into anomie through every pore of its apparatus, relies on sustained pummelings of humiliation by every available means. This afternoon, one of its pluperfect practitioners of vitriol, chosen for those qualities to be Attorney General of the United States, will carry out that task before every camera in the country, that can be conducted to the Senate. Again the beating will be inflicted, to cushioning huzzahs of Republicans on the dais, and especially from Rubio, to be rewarded soon with a crushing blow to relations with Cuba. What this nation can be conditioned to tolerate is written well enough in that revolting legacy of the Cold War; this new American government is but a sentimental monument to a transparent continuity.

So many of its rhymes are audible clarions of one reflex after another, tempered and tested for decades in demagogy's cauldron here, that I don't know why we aren't collecting this literature more meticulously as we go. But we do have another, incalculably more prolific in its tributaries than this procrustean lode of manipulation and force. As the poet Kenneth Koch wrote in The New Republic, "In its music and its language and in its conception of the relation of poetry to the rest of life, [O'Hara's] is a poetry which .. changed poets and others, and which promises to go on moving and changing them for a long time to come."

Refreshment rises to occasion, not to custom. Given the occasions mounted by this government, I shouldn't wonder that this language will do it in.  

Frank O'Hara

The Collected Poems

  of Frank O'Hara

Donald Allen

  editor

  Dolce Colloquio

  1953

  Poetry, May 1970

University of California Press

op. cit.

Ryan Matthews

Kees Scherer

  Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon

  at MoMA

Matthias Lauridsen

Pier, 1950s, anonymous

"There is a house, somewhere in this city . ."

Remembering the spymaster, Smiley,
in Le Carré's twice perfectly film-
ed tale, Tinker, Tailor, we are told,
there is a house where the double a-
gent meets with the top brass of Her
Majesty's intelligence services, to
exchange tradecraft. There is no rea-
son to analogize that fiction, with
the picaresque reality of devoting
the only Cabinet meeting ever to be
held in the history of the new gov-
ernment, to idolatry for its leader.
The comparison would be contemptible.

No reason, but for the resonance of
the idea, that there is a house that
was used to facilitate this rite. A
room, indeed, presided over by por-
traits of George Washington, as Gen-
eral of the Continental Army, and
Harry Truman, as architect of the
Atlantic Alliance and the recovery
of every capital in the West. A room,
heretofore, which has hosted council
and decision touching on the gravest
crises in the survival of this Repub-
lic, now degradation's rendezvous.

I don't sense that we are asking

ourselves, soon enough, how we may

expect to find our way back from

these days, to the provenance we

inherit with that house. What pro-

visions have we laid by, to carry

us through these excoriating sea-

sons of abduction, betrayal, humil-

iation, and the revolting response

of despair? Apart from cataloguing

the requisite indictments and de-

fenestrations, contriving resis-

tances, and piling up barricades

of improvised alliances, where is

democracy's displaced debate occur-

ring, to keep us abreast of time?

We find, we need a city of houses,

somewhere close to this one, to 

nourish the restoration to be won.

Tomas Alfredson

  director

Bridget O'Connor,

  Peter Straughan and

  John Le Carré, screenplay

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Focus Films, 2011©

Anna Morosini, photograph

Cabinet Meeting

November, 2009