For the infant says it's so

     "North Korea is no

     longer a nuclear threat."

     All this, he could tell, from the first
     few moments of being in the presence of
     his erstwhile nemesis; and could trust,
     from the recapitulation, word for word,
     of prior promises, which had so deluded
     his small and even Kenyan predecessors.

Better the rape of Europa than this

  

   In subtropical semiotics of
   psychopathic summitry, a hand-
   shake is no mere photo-op. The
   clutch of the upper arm, the
   bold caress of the manicure
   portray a power exchange for
   mortals in their terror to
   marvel at, and minion media
   flacks to frame on-site, by
   manipulation made hilarious,
   at last, by extenuation of
   great distances spanned,
   hazardous seas traversed in
   triumphal passage, to a safe
   harbor of serenest dictator-
   ship. Now must America be 
   dazzled by her abduction.
   What was ever so Olympian?

i   Ralph Gleason

    undated

Ought Americans to have a representative government?

The extraordinary international exposure afforded this weekend in Canada, of undeniable incompetence in the American President - both intellectually, as many have pointed out, and emotionally - has coincided with heightened worldwide interest in the apparently ungovernable and indisputably cynical power of social media enterprises. The American President's demagogic genius has emerged as implicit in, not merely reliant upon the exploitation of this callously amoral nexus of glamorous toys and their besotted societies, throughout the developed world. 

His great achievement, miming Hitler's demonstration that there is no power greater than an alluring delusion, has incalculably entrenched the already acute concentration of wealth and impregnability in what used to be called an information industry, whose natural object is the dismissal of all other vessels of information. Unsurprisingly, the most cogent essay of the season has correlated these trends as embodying the science fiction imagined by the late Ray Bradbury, in Fahrenheit 451.

The natural tendency, to appraise what the Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman has finally described as ignorant and insane aspects of the American President, as unrepresentative of the American people, is tempered by abundant manifestations of his popularity among the necessary masses, in whom his project naturally is to inculcate these very qualities. If he isn't representative and yet still governs, it is not merely because the structure of the American democracy was never mended by Reconstruction or matured by expanding the franchise; it is now materially because that structure is being shredded by industrialized confusion, and the wholesale piratical theft of the human personality, one synaptic gesture at a time. And because that amoral nexus, immune as it may be from any regulatory reach of the American people, is demonstrably vulnerable to crass seduction, covert invasion, even solicited manipulation by hostile powers, not merely nation states. We spawn a new epidemiology, on the perpetration of viral insanity by weapons of mass intellectual destruction.

The question, then, is whether any civilized perspective could lend itself to recommending a representative government for the United States. This is not being asked, except by who can say how many, willing to glance at these times with any perspective at all. The President and the social media industry do all they can to frustrate the emergence of any such intention. They do guide us to forget, lustily to deny the destructiveness of our diurnal dose of alluring delusion. Here, look: you can have your stimulus, your reward, on a glossier, now curvaceous screen. And upon this debilitating, destabilizing and demoralizing, dehumanizing platform, lies the casualty of its business plan, Free Speech.



It follows, the very definition of representative government is so fraught with compromising institutional, social, cultural, and political contradiction, as to hound the phrase off the stage for the next few acts. No responsible playwright would venture to design one for Americans at present. Better a U.N. Protectorate, or a Parliament of Parkland High School students, until the dust of extirpating the New American Government has melted the last cube of ice in Mitch McConnell's julep.

                               In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand

                               of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with

                               generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline . . .

With Dos Passos, I keep resorting to an expression that can't mean much anymore: Do the reading. A wrecking, idiotic misanthrope for a Head of State has been seen before, even by contemporaries of George III, whether honestly portrayed or not. Now, the prestige of elevating such a beast, above (as he says) the law if not the profits, has fallen to ourselves. Rapidly, the monster remakes this society in his image, and/or atomizes the normal, the stable, the informed. Hitler was elected; Hitler was popular. Putin was elected; Putin is popular. It is easier than ever here, because it was never believed possible. America does have a representative government, no more and no less than these deluded states. Ought Americans to have such a government? Then the fault is not in our stars.














Fritz Stern
Dreams and Delusions
  National Socialism in the
  Drama of the German Past
Alfred A. Knopf, 1987©

John Dos Passos
The Ground We Stand On
  The Use of the Past
1941
Cited in Stern, supra

Origins of Wednesday lxxi: 50 years with Robert Kennedy

The unrandom slaughter of Robert Kennedy
in Los Angeles has shown itself to share
the legacy of the unrandom extermination
of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the souls of
those who were alive at the time. The oc-
currence of another California "primary"
election yesterday [first of two stages],
on that 50th anniversary has been noted
as a mournful reminder of what American
history might have become, had Kennedy
continued his distinctly pastoral polit-
ical struggle through the term of a nat-
ural life. But surely this is to place
the virtues he called forth, from the
stoniest of social and cultural divides,
in a grave too quiet for their complaint,
whose natural register he rang as joy.

He was not eliminated, he was dissemin-
ated, inculcated, and has elevated Am-
rican progressivism ever since millions,
still alive, heard him speak with univ-
ersal respect for the peoples of all
nations. We point to the smallness, the
hysteria, the crabbed self-pitying mal-
ignancy directed still against his vi-
sion; but also to the hollowness, not
of the content but of the structure of
our embrace of him, shriveled by con-
descension and self-exoneration as hid-
eous as anything we face, as impugned by 
this very survivorship. He is our exemp-
lary threat to the most wretched afflic-
sion, contempt. The most bracing run on
the beach ever mounted in our politics.

                         Let all who shrug

                         The grip of envy off

                         Sing in season

                         An expert's praises.

Robert F. Kennedy

  & his English Cocker 

Oregon, 1968

Bacchylides

Nemean Ode for Pytheas

  of Aegina

  fragment

Robert Fagles

  translation

Yale University Press, 1961©

op. cit.

Alexandra Petri and the English language

As is widely understood, the New
American government has hoisted
barbarian vulgarity as the de-
fault idiom of public discourse
in this interesting country, and
has raised legions of practition-
ers in the arts and other arbit-
ers of civic morality. It was on-
ly endearingly delightful, then,
as a broadcast network defrocked
a brutish virago of this movement,
to savor unalloyed pleasure while 
Alexandra Petri anatomized it all.
Fulsome euphemism met its match,
and dulness its deadliest dagger.

Heartlands

I had been in Berkeley, visiting a couple

of shops dealing in used and rare books, 

when I heard on the radio while crossing

the Bay Bridge, returning to Stanford, of

the conclusion of a rudimentary peace be-

tween Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger. In

no more than a few moments, I exited the

freeway at Washington Street to turn up

Montgomery, for dinner at Ernie's. You

know Ernie's, even though it is nominal-

ly not there anymore, because it is where

James Stewart and Kim Novak dined in Ver-

tigo. A gentleman might not dine in res-

taurants, but when the occasion demands

access to a superior wine list, improvi-

sation is understandable, and forgiven.

Ernie's is still there in that principle,

while paranoia and deception are still as

vigorous in the land as they were in Ver-

tigo. And no one is allowing himself a

Château Ausone until the present terror

has been purged from Pennsylvania Avenue.

Still, a civil thirst sustains the dream.

If Ernie's were still ensconced in its Bar-
bary Coast brick digs in the 700 block of
Montgomery, its cellar would certainly now
boast a Californian corollary of Ch Ausone.
Their common debt to the wine grape Rabel-
ais grew in the Loire, and called his lit-
tle raspberries - Cabernet Franc - upholds
a stunning structural elegance amidst a
sea of grapes of famed intensity and bulk.
  
Investing in the 80's in several acres of
the choicest slope in Napa Valley, and cul-
tivating daringly at right angles to the
grade of custom, a bold single-mother im-
migrant named Delia Viader planted a vine-
yard of Cabernet Franc with Cabernet Sauv-
ignon, whose principal wine exhibits that
shining confluence of terroir and oenology
which made Ausone the wine of Cole Porter,
and which defies any mention as commonplace.

They are not always saints, despite a
famous lyric, who finally go marching
in. We think they surely must be saints,
who'd deliver us from the New American
government some day; but Saigon fell to
other sorts, and no one underestimates 
the relentlessness of a riposte deferred.
Mr Porter wrote a song I like better, for
setting things aright, Why Don't We Try
Staying Home? It would have spared this
generation a great civil war of foreign
policy, still playing out in the braying
vainglory of this most degenerate of our
Presidencies. It would have steeled us
against the lurid distractions of this
hustler demagogue, snarling at the world.
It would have cultivated the human right
of taste.

  










Jason Lowe for Berry Brothers & Rudd
Château Ausone
Bordeaux

Anonymous photographer
Viader Vineyards
Howell Mountain, Napa

End of the clown

Looking back, it seemed to those who

play the long game in Asia - not un-

numbering the two players, Russia and

Japan, who won an American President

a Nobel Peace Prize for hosting them

at Portsmouth - that the new American

President had already made every con-

cession to North Korea and China that

they could ever have begged, in with-

drawing the United States from the one

dynamic trade pact in that sphere, of

any counter-balance to their interest.

That bold blow, to isolate America and

wither its reach into the future of in-

ternational economic growth, was cer-

tainly worth a temporary retrenchment

in an exorbitant weapons program of

no productivity, especially if such a

feint might fortify their mark's posi-

ition at the head of his nation for a

second term of sabotage, and result

in the deportation of its forces.

How little like rocket science it was,

to play the pulp hero of hollow poses.

Yet through it all, he beguiled his 

people to upbraid him as a racist, a

dilatory misogynist, and incompetent

albeit savage head of state, when all

the time, he was the simplest traitor.

Herbert List
Ostsee
1933

Origins of Wednesday lxx: I never read a thing by Philip Roth

Overnight my telephone screen
flashed the New York Times'
report of Philip Roth's death
at 85. He was one of the most
heralded observers of post-War
American society, and I was a
post-War child.

The failure was not, in short, Philip Roth's. He wrote of a society and from a culture of highly fertile influence in American life, which were nevertheless circumscribed by covenants and restrictions and holocausts and other persisting maldistributions in the American dialogue in which my generation was raised: a brilliance in a shell game of bushels in scarcely glancing interaction. I knew a massive war had ended just before I was born, but I was 10 years old before I was aware there are Jews.

I think such oblivion defines the intractability of the wasteland cherished so anxiously by the new American government, that one needn't ask how It happened. It, an insidious presumption of innocence in resistance to information, withstood masterpiece after masterpiece from Philip Roth - not alone among post-War writers to do his best to give meaning to the permeating leanings of a common language, but just stellar enough to illuminate the density of the shell with each one.  

Today we hear counsels for mourning. As if this were understood.