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.

Traction

     Lymie came up from the locker rooms,

     in his street clothes,

     with his logic book under his arm,

     and his leather notebook, his an-

     thology of nineteenth century poetry.

William Maxwell

The Folded Leaf

  III: A Cold Country

1945

Christopher Carduff

  editor

Early Novels and Stories

The Library of America, 2008©

Plan now

It is becoming clear that the 're-education'

of Germany by the allies will not be a pious

aspiration, but an unavoidable duty.. 

First, although the German people certainly

did know about the horrors of the concentra-

sion camps, their real crime was not that 

they failed to stop them when all power was

in the hands of the Nazis, for this would

have been practically impossible, but that

they ever allowed the Nazis, whom they knew

to be villains, to rise to power at all..

Secondly, it is no use hoping to build any-

thing except on some foundation of national

tradition. Germany will not be a tabula rasa.

Every means should be taken to persuade the

Germans that they themselves have such a tra-

edition, however completely forgotten now, 

on which a decent society can be based.. It

was in part the influence of American schol-

are who had caught the flame in Germany that

made Harvard, as early as the 1830s, a stead-

fast defender of the scholar's freedom from

political and religious pressure..

Thirdly, the Germans must learn to respect

the Slavs. In Western Europe it is not gen-

really recognized that one of the main tra-

editions in German history, and the most 

sinister, is that of the conquest and col-

onization of Slav lands. As a result the

ordinary German has come to regard the Slav

as an inferior being..

Yours faithfully,

                  R. Birley

May 8, 1945

Sir Robert Birley

Headmaster of Charterhouse

  later, Headmaster of Eton

  Advisor to the Military Governor,

    Control Commission of Germany

    1945 - 1947

Letter to The Times [London]

Kenneth Gregory, editor

Your Obedient Servant

 op. cit.

Suppose it were Friday cliv: A fixer's payroll

Casual Friday brings out the paddle

player-hero in all of us, to the ex-

tent that all we have to wear on our

sleeve to distinguish ourselves are

the testimonials of prior conquests.

Yolanda, Liz, the redoubtable Erica.

And, one keeps looking for the name,

Hope Hicks, whitest of lissome liars

in that realm, but how soon we for-

get the roster of our vanquished as

they settle off the table with Cohen.

Sascha Schneider
1913