Oh, yeah, there's no question that Gertrude Stein was an active Nazi collaborator, through her connections with the puppet Vichy government. They protected her and Alice Toklas and, probably more important to Stein, her art collection, and allowed her to live in comfort in occupied France even as Jewish children a few miles away from her were being sent to their deaths. She attempted to produce pro-Vichy propaganda to be marketed to the American audience, I would think it was supposed to keep America out of the war. It was amazing stupidity that fit right in to her pre-war proclamations about how Hitler was no danger because he was a German romantic and how war was like dancing, going back and forth.
“Hitler will never really go to war. He is not the dangerous one. You see, he is the German romanticist. He wants the illusion of victory and power, the glory and glamour of it, but he could not stand the blood and fighting involved in getting it. No, Mussolini—there’s the dangerous man, for he is an Italian realist. He won’t stop at anything.”
Like so much of the common received wisdom, right and alleged left, and especially among the ersatz intellectual class of the unlightenment, the reputation of Gertrude Stein is a total PR cover up job which people repeat in complete ignorance of her actual production and her putrid and self-centered life. That such an abominable record of stupidity, superficiality and phoniness is still the common conception of Gertrude Stein seventy years after she died only shows what a phony, superficial and stupid thing our so called intellectual class is, these days.
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Yesterday's comments made the accusation that I dissed Oscar Wilde. Well, you see that little search box at the top of the screen? If you type Oscar Wilde and search my blog you will find I've mentioned him three times. My thinking on Oscar Wilde is a bit more complex than that.
Once in a piece pointing out, among other things, the biological and epidemiological fact that anal sex was and still is a risk to the health of the people engaging in it.
Not having yet seen K.J. Dover's book about intercurral sex as depicted on Greek pottery or knowing that Oscar Wilde and a number of other famous gay writers had rejected anal sex, I didn't argue the issue on those grounds.
The second, in reference to one of his not unproblematic The Soul of Man Under Socialism, was far from a slam.
I intend to be as underservingly poor as was imagined by Oscar Wilde and as outrageously insistent on facing the most inconvenient and uncomfortable reality of intentional liberal failure as Marilynne Robinson in her great, ignored essay, Mother Country.
There are huge problems with Wilde's conception of socialism,though no more of a problem than the socialists conception of socialism. Beginning with his opening sentence which is about as anti-socialist a statement as it's possible to imagine.
The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody.
Well, no, that's the chief desideratum of the opposite of socialism, even as found among many socialists, and it is the opposite of any system that even has a decent society as its goal. Wilde had a few good ideas and was able to write some biting satire on upper class British society but he wasn't a deep or systematic thinker. He did, though, see through the grotesque hypocrisy of much of British social welfare which was the upper income doing the minimal amount of good to the poor while extracting the maximum of shame, embarrassment and petty cruelty to the recipients of its incredibly stingy largess. He might have been superficial but he saw something as desirable that the establishment social thinkers of Britain couldn't bear the thought of, economic equality.
If by the word "charity" you understand the kind of stuff that the British establishment did to the poor, his use of the word makes complete sense.
They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.
But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.
Perhaps he didn't consider there is another kind of charity that doesn't have the goal of the giver having the satisfaction of lording it over poor people, the sadistic pleasure of making them feel ashamed of needing to take their crumbs and the other and many ways in which the British establishment at its most "charitable" was just the other arm of its hatred of poor people. There is a conception of charity as the just distribution of wealth and the benefits of society and culture on an equal basis for the benefit of the poor. That is the concept that is behind the economic content of Jewish prophesy, in both the First and Second testaments of the Bible, the economic ideas that I've come to see as entirely superior to just about any definition of socialism I've come across, it is far more radical than Marxism and the opposite of that putrid pantomime of socialism, Fabianism.
But this is the passage I was referring to, again keeping in mind that he was talking about Victorian and Edwardian Britain and its pathological notion of charity.
The virtues of the poor may be readily admitted, and are much to be regretted. We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal.
The third time I mention Oscar Wilde one ties up this post.
The reports of [Gertrude] Stein nominating Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize are convincing. She was a right winger, a rich trust-fund baby, decadent, superficial fraud, promoting her "genius." Her declaration of her genius is the only thing distinguishing about her and she stole even that act from Oscar Wilde who did so much more to earn the title, though I wouldn't hold him as having actually been one. He was certainly deeper on those occasions he wasn't playing the fop. Stein was only a fop and her act grows really tedious through the sameness of her production.
You see, Simps, I've read both Stein and Wilde and I've read some history too. It's not enough to just repeat lines you've read in the foppish magazine journalism of the smart New York set, or, more likely, in pretentious movies and TV shows. There's more to life than entertainment, in fact, there is more to politics. I've never gone far into the corrosion of the left through people being distracted by stupid stuff but it's probably as bad as anything in producing that effect. We are in a country in which one Hollywood B-list actor was given the power to destroy everything Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson did to produce egalitarian democracy. We are in a year in which there is a real prospect that the man who most of his followers know through The Apprentice is a front runner of one of our two parties. That's not just a coincidence.
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