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.

Suppose it were Friday lxv: am I going in

      

        I know the sea -         

        like some meeting 

        where I'm going, 

        the closer I am.

        I just don't know

        when.

From patriots to Superman

In his column in The New York Times last month, Thomas Friedman said it best, on Mr Romney's return from a tour abroad, denouncing that immortal bulwark against fascism in London and fanning the fumes of apocalyptic war in Jerusalem: his foreign policy is that of George W. Bush on steroids. Now there is reason to doubt that this man even wants to be President of the United States, so eager is he to humiliate the nation with a pathetically infantile belligerency. He is running for Superman, and would embroil our society in a fitful history of tantrums without notice. He goes beyond having imbibed the degenerate indignations of his vulgar, shriveled base. He believes his own false biography, about the meaning of his badge of predatory wealth. We should trust his genius for exploitation.

O, Michigan! O, Republicanism when it worked. The natural human wellspring of patriotism once ran clear and humble there, speaking for the State of Mr Romney's birth through a US Senator in the time of Harry Truman: Politics stops at the water's edge. Arthur Vandenburg, Republican, led his Party away from cheap shot nativist attacks on the diplomacy of the United States, and helped to forge the most durable bipartisan foreign policy the nation had ever known: the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, the development of NATO to defend it. None of this would have been possible without the abiding moral force of that unarguable maxim, a policy which held until both parties resorted to the gross deception of the nation in the war in Viet Nam.

But there were two Arthur Vandenburgs. The Senator's son, a leading figure on his Senate staff, was selected by General Dwight Eisenhower to become his Appointments Secretary when he was elected to the Presidency. It was a natural gesture of continuity of policy, as well as a brilliant stroke in staffbuilding, by a man who knew something about hiring well; and it had the staunch support of the next generation of Republicans, led especially by Nelson Rockefeller of le tout New York.

This was an appointment not to be effected, however, as young Arthur Vandenburg, Jr suddenly took medical leave to Florida, to address a confidential sort of ailment. Only when Lyndon Johnson became President did he disclose the nature of Vandenburg's condition: blackmail. In one of the shabbiest conflicts between hypocritical, powerful media figures - Drew Pearson and James Reston in this case - and the political set in which they mingle, Vandenburg was threatened with being outed as a gay man, in this case, as the lover of Joseph Alsop. Eisenhower wrote a touching letter to Nelson Rockefeller, urging him quietly to continue to find gainful work for Arthur Vandenburg, Jr. There was no question of his working in the White House.

Now we recall Mr Romney's debate with Mr Santorum at St Anselm College in New Hampshire, in which he openly speculated on how to handle the menace of homosexuality, allowing citizens some rights, denying them others. It's a speculation for a Superman, for the kind of man who will always condemn, destroy, exploit, and extract a grisly personal advantage. I don't wonder that his contempt for a steady hand in diplomacy, goes so far as to denounce the loyalty of the President of the United States.

It is tragic for Republicanism that this man has seized this Party's permission to seek the White House. Who shall let him pass?

I have a barometer I love because it doesn't work

     

It never did work. It's from Hermès,

where at best such conduct would be

unseemly except in a saddle, where

decoration is all that the law re-

quires. But it has three settings -

pluie, beau, et variable - which

one may manually toggle at will, by

opening its cunning little port-hole

design, and tweaking a knurled knob

inside. I adore it, of course, for

this very disposition toward my tem-

per at any given time.

Such is our academy's play with the

roiling tides of erotic identities,

that in any given season we may have

a consensus for continuity, never to

despair of a period of fetishes for

distinctions. Sometimes it is argued,

no one can have been gay who didn't

see Boys in the Band with its origin-

al cast; how well I remember my class-

mate's seduction (inconclusive) by 

Mart Crowley in the lobby of the Al-

gonquin, not so long before my wed-

ding. So we retire Patroclus and the 

writer of Michelangelo's Sonnets, un-

til the next toggling of our barometer, 

to resume our speculative practices.

Our friends from Thebes have reported

on another such episode of renaming

the weather of the past in terms of

the present, in the name of not doing

so. New credentials must dangle in the

meteorology of history all over again,

to show how supremely tiresome the wor-

ry is of when we first knew rain.

  

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Between Men: English Literature
  and Male Homosocial Desire
Columbia University Press, 1986©

Allen Barnett
The Body and its Dangers
  and Other Stories
St. Martin's Press, 1990©

Daniel Mendelsohn
The Elusive Embrace
  Desire and the Riddle of Identity
Knopf, 1999©

And why wasn't he told?

"It always amazes me 

to think that such a 

mass of water, such 

power, such pure force, 

can lick the land in 

such a delicate way."

Possibly one is the last 

to notice that our ref-

erence page in shimmer-

ing imagery has under-

gone refreshment under

the title, visual diary.

These pictures are drawn

from elsewhere; the ob-

servation is from the

host, Ivan Terestchenko.

iv   Ivan Terestchenko©

If you're awake, how come you don't already have your feet on?

 We have this conversation

 pretty much nearly every

 morning. There is always

 A Wait for Someone to put

 his feet on, before we go

 outside. And going out is

 very, very large. We just

 do not understand unfoot-

 edness in a gentleman.

To a certain extent, we rely on 

this first outing of the day to

help us get our footing, broadly

speaking, in the context of what

to expect of the day. We might

go to bed, for example, savour-

ing a promise from Mitt Romney;

and we take this into account in

our stride. For example, we dozed

securely in his vow to extinguish

the new civil right to health care;

and yet, no sooner had the news of

Meet the Press poured in, than he

had evidently seen a poll gauging

its intense popularity, and there

went that assurance, in his newly

generic embrace of more or less

the whole statute, except possibly

some parts which might be unpopul-

ar later on. Ask him another day,

you might say. 

We don't wish to be indelicate in

the matter, but living on a farm,

we are cognisant of where we step

in the morning, and so it doesn't

occur to us to scatter convictions

like so much night soil of a head-

less herd. Would it be asking too

much, do you suppose, for someone

to pose the question of Mr Romney, 

If you're awake, how come you don't

already have your feet on? That, or

we wish he'd keep off our farm.

Updates

The New York Times
  The Shallow End of the Campaign 
September 10th

Amy Davidson
Does Mitt have a preëxisting condition?
  The New Yorker
September 10th

The New York Times
  The Caucus blog
September 9th