If the United States elected the executive by the popular vote instead of the appalling anti-democratic Electoral College allocating electoral power unequally to different states and different voters around the country, if the Senate were not so constructed that Wyoming and North Dakota voters have many times the voting power as voters in California and New York, that anti-democratically structured Senate given the sole power to approve of federal judges and the Supreme Court, and a host of other democracy thwarting features built into the Constitution were not there and running events in the United States - we might be able to have both a democracy and a country in which approximately two of out five Americans are more than just OK with the kind of Republican-fascism which we have experienced under, not only Trump but under Bush II.
Clearly what happened in this past week when Trump ordered the American military to violate the Constitutionally recognized rights of Americans - that iconic right of "free speech"* - when he has committed clearly unconstitutional acts with the approval of the Republican majority in the Senate and the laughably called "justice" system is completely allowed under the Constitution as it really is, as it really has turned out to be. That alone proves that this Constitution has flaws which have been studiously sought out and expanded and weaponized to use in order to maintain a Republican-fascist power which is not going to be stopped - we don't know if the election will stop it, what if it doesn't? Where in the failed Constitution are you going to seek refuge in there? The likes of fucking Robert Mueller? The other men of "honor"? The sense of justice in the Courts filled with Federalist Society fascist goons by Grassley, McConnell, Trump and, yes, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and the rest.
The Constitution has basic flaws in it, far from the least of those the studiously discovered "right" to lie us into fascist dictatorship, something that the "liberal" ACLU and "civil liberties" lawyers such as Joel Gora and so many other elite lawyers and law scholars fully participated in.
The American Republic was born the bastard child of northern money interests who had qualms about slavery - a few of whom might have wanted democracy - and the slave-power - not forgetting lots of them on both sides had the ambition to exterminate the native population of the Americas and stealing their land, too. The Constitution they wrote excluded women, excluded Black People, excluded Native Americans, even held the possibility for the states to exclude poor white men who did not own property of sufficent worth. It has been an often violent slog to struggle against its original forms and original intent to force change in the direction of equality and democracy. And all along the way those wanting unequal privilege, the legal ability to rob and steal and cheat and oppress have had an allies on the Supreme Court, especially through the non-Constitutional means of Supreme Court nullification of not only laws, but of the person hood of Black People, not only in Dred Scott but also in the lie of "separate but equal" and in so many other ways. The "free speech" rulings that allowed the wealthy owners of mass media to lie us into fascism, making their money "speech" which by simple arithmetic proves that they have more of it than those without money, using the very slogans of "freedom" contained in the Bill of Rights doesn't prove the law is an ass, it proves that we have been for not seeing the effects put into effect through that ruse. And they don't even need to make a ruling of justices, corporations were rended "persons" having more money and so more rights than mere human beings by the act of a goddamned clerk of the court.
If anyone doesn't admit that this disaster proves the Constitution is entirely able to be a vehicle with which to impose fascist dicatorship, one-gangster-party rule on the United States through those things that make power under it unevenly distributed, through the privileging of lies over the truth, of fantasy over reality, they are as much enablers of that gangster rule as William Barr and Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito and John Roberts.
American democracy either has to dilute the clogs of fascist prone voters through the change to direct, popular majority of the executive, altering the constitution of the Senate to prevent states with a majority of fascists to overpower those opposed to fascism, to extend the power to confirm judges and justices to the House - since the Court has given itself the power to overturn their duly adopted laws, that only makes sense - and such other changes or, I don't know, I would favor states not inclined to suffer another Trump leaving the union. Those anti-democratic features were installed on the threat of such states as South Carolina and Georgia reusing to join the United States, Virginia, too. The issue then was slavery, that is proved by the same states and others - many of which are bastions of Republican-fascism, today, breaking away when they thought legalized slavery was going to be abolished - as soon as they could exercise power after the Civil War amendments were added to the Constitution - in the corrupt Electoral College deal that put Rutherford Hayes into the presidency, they began reestablishing de facto slavery under that regime codified by the Supreme Court in the infamous Plessy v Ferguson ruling and which is being returned to under the Rehnquist-Roberts court which is reimposing the conditions under which Jim Crow flourished.
Even if Democrats sweep the election in 2020, the fascists now know that the Constitution can encompass not only the conditions that produce Trumpian gangster governance, it can keep it there and confirm its practices under the Supreme Court "interpreting" the Constitution to that effect. They've done it once, they will do it again. The Bush v Gore decision of 2000 was a watershed under which it became clear that the Republican-fascists on the court were willing to stop an election to impose one of their own on us. The stupidity of the media and commentators proves that the "free press" cannot be counted on to counter that - much of the "liberal press" the New York Times proved they would have no problem with going along with that.
I don't want my nieces and nephews, young people I now growing up in a Republican-fascist country in which Black people can be murdered BY THE GODDAMNED POLICE with impunity, a country in which a "president" installed by a minority of votes under the Electoral College can call out the military against The People because his impotent sense of manhood has taken a public humiliation when his cowardice was revealed.
If the Constitution is not changed, I think it's time for those favoring equality and democracy to divorce themselves from the madness of King Trump or whoever the Repubican-fascists try with the next time, and learn from the long terrible history of injustice which has come to a head, now. I may feel sorry for those in states that stick to the system as it is but this has come to the point of self-preservation, the preservation of the possibility of equal justice under just law, the possibility of telling the truth and understanding the difference between reality and fantasy, advertising and real life.
* Not to mention the somewhat less iconic one of "free assembly" that right unevenly recognized not only by the government but by the media, the right to petition the government to demand equal justice - those demanding unequal privilege privileged to do that favored and supported, instead.
Thursday, June 4, 2020
Wednesday, June 3, 2020
More On The Entertainment Division
So it was human Disney princess, Hope Hicks who came up with Trump's photo-op publicity stunt of walking - so we know it wasn't Trump's idea - across the way to a church holding a book - further evidence it wasn't Trump's idea - to stand in front of a church he doesn't go to and whose pastor and Bishop gave him no permission to use for this stunt but who were outraged by his use of the Church building. The Bishop's reaction was spot on,
" He did not pray. He did not mention George Floyd, he did not mention the agony of people who have been subjected to this kind of horrific expression of racism and white supremacy for hundreds of years. We need a president who can unify and heal. He has done the opposite of that, and we are left to pick up the pieces."
I think the church should pointedly dis-invite Trump from going there again and using the building as a photo-op after he has his storm troopers clear the area with teargas. From what I read it's the same church Robert Mueller used, though apparently he actually attended worship there. It made me wonder if he thinks he might have been a little more forthcoming about what his investigation turned up or if they might have been a little more interested in revealing the depravity of the man his good buddy, Barr has been turning into America's dictator.
" He did not pray. He did not mention George Floyd, he did not mention the agony of people who have been subjected to this kind of horrific expression of racism and white supremacy for hundreds of years. We need a president who can unify and heal. He has done the opposite of that, and we are left to pick up the pieces."
I think the church should pointedly dis-invite Trump from going there again and using the building as a photo-op after he has his storm troopers clear the area with teargas. From what I read it's the same church Robert Mueller used, though apparently he actually attended worship there. It made me wonder if he thinks he might have been a little more forthcoming about what his investigation turned up or if they might have been a little more interested in revealing the depravity of the man his good buddy, Barr has been turning into America's dictator.
On A Damned American General Strutting Around The Nation's Capital In Battle Fatigues Without Being Fired
Again, the morning after, I find that an important part of a sentence was unintentionally deleted in my awful editing, so I will fix that in this post.
Even if Democrats sweep the elections in November they will do it again until all of the defects in the Constitution that they and the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court - and, yes, the dumb "liberals" who had a hand in this too - used to get us here are decisively obliterated, the shreds never to be able to be put to that use again. They hire lawyers, fund law school positions, get judges appointed to make it possible to twist words and make loopholes into gaping chasms to thwart equal justice, to thwart democracy, to impose rule by the oligarchs with a veneer of democracy - using the poison of regionalism and racism and every human weakness, flaw and failing as their tools. They do it mostly through the media which has been not only freed by novel interpretations of the First Amendment to lie with impunity but commissioned to do it through turning money into speech. If there's one thing you can count on with the media, they will eventually follow that money - they are profit making corporations, in the end.
If the Electoral College is not abolished, if the Senate is allowed to stand in its anti-democratic form and given the sole power to confirm justices and judges and other positions, if states are permitted to suppress the vote and gerrymander and are exposed to partisan manipulation the way ours are, this will not ever end.
The sickening sight of General Mark Milley, strutting around in battle fatigues IN THE NATIONS' CAPITAL which Trump turned into a Battlefield USA was done by a guy who is not in any way ignorant of what his actions implied, it was done by a guy who is a product of the Prep-Ivy system as so many of those imposing fascist rule on the United States are. He's got a bachelors in political science from friggin' Princeton, his senior thesis was entitled "A Critical Analysis of Revolutionary Guerrilla Organization in Theory and Practice," he certainly knew what his actions not only implied but embodied. He's got graduate degrees from Columbia in international relations and one from the Navel War College in national security and from MIT, the Seminar XXI in the National Security Studies Program.
Mark Milley should be discharged dishonorably, immediately.
We have an extremely dangerous and dangerously large percentage of Americans who would have no problem with putting the country under marshal law, suspending Constitutional rights, all of those other rights not enumerated in the Constitution and electoral democracy. I think it's fairly clear that percentage hovers about about 40%, much of it so concentrated in states as making Trump's re-installation even after this winter and spring safely improbable. That is due in no small part to the promotion of fascism in the media, both "journalism" and even more so and more persuasively and more widely consumed among the susceptible, in entertainment. Trump's rise had everything to do with the entertainment "division" of television, hate-talk jock radio, the feuilleton sections of the New York Times and other newspapers and magazines. He is proof that that content can have the same disastrous results it did when Birth of a Nation was named as the inspiration of the man who reignited the terrorist group, the Klu Klux Klan.
The claims that such stuff is of no proven danger have been disproven in the Trump regime, they have been disproven over and over again. If we keep things as they were before Trump rose, before the Supreme Court, the Bush family and FOX installed the loser of the 2000 election, expecting a different result is not only stupid, it is insane, insanity through the slogans of the prep-ivy legal establishment from the ACLU to the Supreme Court, in many cases of the former, in the pay of the entertainment industry, in the later, oligarchic fascists all on their own.
They, with the help of the billionaires, foreign as well as domestic especially those in charge of media outfits, are turning the United States into a banana republic in style as well as reality, that was the goal all along, it turns out.
Tuesday, June 2, 2020
in too many cases in the United States policemen and individual police departments, especially where police unions have become quasi-fascist political entities, the cops can get away with murder, literally doing what they're paid to prevent.
In my own defense I'll point out that this is how I began a post 20 days ago:
I have been telling people that the police in the United States had way too many officers whose political beliefs were fascistic since at least the late 1960s and that they seriously needed to be de-Nazified for the safety of the population. So I'm not in favor of going easy on the police when they do wrong. And neither should they be. If you are going to take on a responsibility that includes the ability to get people locked up for long periods of time, not that infrequently unjustly and the ability to shoot people, even killing them on the basis of your judgement, you shouldn't expect that doesn't come with the responsibility to do it well. I think in too many cases in the United States policemen and individual police departments, especially where police unions have become quasi-fascist political entities, the cops can get away with murder, literally doing what they're paid to prevent.
In other cases, when it isn't a matter of intentional wrongdoing, the placement of responsibility might not always be as clear cut but there is also wrongdoing by the police based on incompetence. Incompetence in this case should be either not thinking through a situation, not taking clearly needed action, not using what resources they had effectively or any number of other things. The police should be answerable for that if bad outcomes are a result of not doing what they should have done well.
What we are seeing in the police-riots and attacks and wild over-reaching is covered under that. I've always been entirely against going easy on the police when they are criminal, when they are bad in a non-criminal way and when they are incompetent. I've never said otherwise. '
So, I was saying that before the police-murder of George Floyd but after so many other cases of it. We are going to have to have police, there is no way that we can live without them, but we have to have police who do what they're supposed to, not these Nazified thugs and goons and storm-troopers who you throw at me. We need the other kind of police who were also in the news but not so much and perhaps in too few numbers. You can read the rest of what I said for how I thought you could weed a lot of the worst out BY MAKING THE PROFESSIONAL TRAINING OF THE POLICE LONG ENOUGH AND RIGOROUS ENOUGH TO DISCOURAGE THEM AND BY DE-MILITARIZING THEM.
I don't mind answering for things I've said but I resent not only having to defend myself for things I haven't said but especially for being accused of not saying things I said while idiots like you were debating movies and pop music and your shows.
I have been telling people that the police in the United States had way too many officers whose political beliefs were fascistic since at least the late 1960s and that they seriously needed to be de-Nazified for the safety of the population. So I'm not in favor of going easy on the police when they do wrong. And neither should they be. If you are going to take on a responsibility that includes the ability to get people locked up for long periods of time, not that infrequently unjustly and the ability to shoot people, even killing them on the basis of your judgement, you shouldn't expect that doesn't come with the responsibility to do it well. I think in too many cases in the United States policemen and individual police departments, especially where police unions have become quasi-fascist political entities, the cops can get away with murder, literally doing what they're paid to prevent.
In other cases, when it isn't a matter of intentional wrongdoing, the placement of responsibility might not always be as clear cut but there is also wrongdoing by the police based on incompetence. Incompetence in this case should be either not thinking through a situation, not taking clearly needed action, not using what resources they had effectively or any number of other things. The police should be answerable for that if bad outcomes are a result of not doing what they should have done well.
What we are seeing in the police-riots and attacks and wild over-reaching is covered under that. I've always been entirely against going easy on the police when they are criminal, when they are bad in a non-criminal way and when they are incompetent. I've never said otherwise. '
So, I was saying that before the police-murder of George Floyd but after so many other cases of it. We are going to have to have police, there is no way that we can live without them, but we have to have police who do what they're supposed to, not these Nazified thugs and goons and storm-troopers who you throw at me. We need the other kind of police who were also in the news but not so much and perhaps in too few numbers. You can read the rest of what I said for how I thought you could weed a lot of the worst out BY MAKING THE PROFESSIONAL TRAINING OF THE POLICE LONG ENOUGH AND RIGOROUS ENOUGH TO DISCOURAGE THEM AND BY DE-MILITARIZING THEM.
I don't mind answering for things I've said but I resent not only having to defend myself for things I haven't said but especially for being accused of not saying things I said while idiots like you were debating movies and pop music and your shows.
Continuing On
I am finding my re-engagement with the trolls makes me feel cheap and dirty and it's more unedifying than it is fun. Fun that it is. I guess you can even outgrow that kind of thing if you get old enough and age with the numbers instead of just letting those pile up as you remain a punk.
I'm going back to Hans Kung and his trilogy of books I excerpted from over the Easter season. Maybe it will have a positive influence on me, imagine how bad I'd get if I wasn't trying. And it's how I've found I can best cope with what's going on. Pointless cynicism is certainly useless, talking about things you outgrow if you make yourself grow up.
I'm going back to Hans Kung and his trilogy of books I excerpted from over the Easter season. Maybe it will have a positive influence on me, imagine how bad I'd get if I wasn't trying. And it's how I've found I can best cope with what's going on. Pointless cynicism is certainly useless, talking about things you outgrow if you make yourself grow up.
We Are To Judge, We Are To Decide, Putting Equality Of Ideologies Above Equality Of People Empowers Evil Ideologies That Exploit Human Weakness
George Soros, like so many influenced by the seductive power of a persuasive philosopher, in his case Karl Popper, is looking for the causes and cures for things in the wrong place. I doubt Plato or Hegel has anywhere near as much of an influence in politics as Popper or so many of Popper's critics insisted. At best they provided some intellectual allure to an otherwise far less idealized project. Government is always a skin of our teeth things, at some point, at the vital points of decision. And in almost ever case some of the ideas their philosophies contain can turn out to have had effects they didn't believe they would. Karl Marx, certainly did.
Which is no surprise, look at what "Christians" have done to the Gospel, which is far superior to philosophical systems if egalitarian democracy is the goal. And that history follows on another long history of the inability of those presented with a superior alternative to sustain it. The Old Testament is a record of the repeated failure of the governments of the Children of Israel to match the radical vision of Moses - though it's notable that even during the period of the Roman occupation, it was said that destitution didn't exist among the Jews, such was the power of that radical vision, one which continues today in the traditional "American-style" liberalism that is far more typical of American Jews and Jews in many other places. That is not anything surprising because the "American style" of liberalism, as opposed to the "enlightenment" 18th century European meaning of the word, is founded on that same Law and its extension by Jesus.
If you want to look at clues for better and less oppressive government, that's the place to look, not what is romantically considered the aftermath of the ancient Greeks in Europe.
There is always a difference between what is promised in philosophical-logical assertions and what you get when those are put into effect. The American Constitution coming after the Declaration of Independence - so many of the same men involved intimately with the framing of both documents - is notable in NOT producing a government which held that all men are created equal with equal rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" but the Constitution, framed after they found out that too many of the common men who had fought the Revolution on the promises of the Declaration wanted what it claimed were the intentions of that revolution. What it produced was an anti-democratic system masquerading as an electoral republic while not only retaining the original sins of the United States, slavery, imperialism, but of protecting and promoting those.
You can see the same thing in the French Revolution in which "liberty, equality, fraternity" quickly turned into the homicidal power plays of the intellectuals who killed each other as well as the blood bath that that debacle was.
No, the basic differences in government are between governments which serve the moral purpose of the common good on the basis of equality of people, not of ideological schemes, ideologies, theories. When government is not based on the principle that inequality is the open doorway of corruption and oppression and that material equality, equal distribution or resources is as essential as the vote, that is what's going to lead to oppression whether some academic calls it "totalitarianism" or "authoritarianism". A better comparison with Plato's fascist Republic isn't some other idea allowed into the category of "western thought" by 20th century academics, it's The Law of Moses and its further development in the radical extension of that in The Gospel. Whatever progress was made in addressing the defects of the United States Constitution only came about by people demanding things that come from that tradition. It is notable that every partially successful attempt at reform of the original Constitution was led at the start by those who explained themselves in religious terms. Abolition, the rights of workers, women's equality, had their greatest success when expressed in those terms. And none of them have been a total success, that progress impeded by Supreme Courts using the language of the Constitution and "originalism" or "literalism" and the regressive, anti-democratic features in it to impede its reform.
I think George Soros, whose experience included so notably a skin-of-our-teeth evasion of the Nazis through the ingenuity of his father, Theodore (an eminent Esperantist,by the way) has been looking in the wrong place for the solution. I suspect that's due to his formal education which, typically in 20th as in 19th century Europe and America, discouraged looking for it in the right places. It's not in the "openness" that Popper imagined was the solution. That's no better than throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks, at best. Ignoring that what sticks best is some of the worst. You have to start with the desired outcome of a decent life for all and admit that anything that opposes that isn't something you can safely allow to flourish and propagate. That was the same fatal mistake that the "liberals" on the American Supreme Court made in creating an "even playing field" of ideas by allowing lies in the mass media to be told with impunity. They reinforced the power of lies by doing that, the "more speech" left to those without money has failed, continually with little effect.
And if the response to that is "who is to judge" "who is to decide" which ideas are to be suppressed, the hard and clear truth is that even in an "open" society the answer is the same, WE ARE TO JUDGE, WE ARE TO DECIDE. TO REFUSE TO MAKE THAT DECISION IS TO DECIDE AGAINST EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY, IT IS A CHOICE THAT EMPOWERS THE WORST IDEAS BECAUSE THEY CAN BE SOLD IN A DECEPTIVE, ATTRACTIVE CAMPAIGN OF LIES MADE TO SELL. To allow all ideas equality is to include those ideas which call for people to be enslaved, people to be oppressed, people to be exploited and people to be killed as desired or as suits the purpose of those with power. The opposition to those ideas will be no less reliant on WE BEING THE JUDGES, WE BEING THE CHOOSERS. Only it's a lot more dangerous because we so often will make the wrong choice especially if a fetish of "liberty" for those ideas to flourish and win over justice for all.
Update: I don't know how well it translated into English but Theodore Soros' Tivadar Soros' book, Maskerado ĉirkaŭ la morto is very good. Who knows who might need the lessons in survival it carries in the coming months and years.
Which is no surprise, look at what "Christians" have done to the Gospel, which is far superior to philosophical systems if egalitarian democracy is the goal. And that history follows on another long history of the inability of those presented with a superior alternative to sustain it. The Old Testament is a record of the repeated failure of the governments of the Children of Israel to match the radical vision of Moses - though it's notable that even during the period of the Roman occupation, it was said that destitution didn't exist among the Jews, such was the power of that radical vision, one which continues today in the traditional "American-style" liberalism that is far more typical of American Jews and Jews in many other places. That is not anything surprising because the "American style" of liberalism, as opposed to the "enlightenment" 18th century European meaning of the word, is founded on that same Law and its extension by Jesus.
If you want to look at clues for better and less oppressive government, that's the place to look, not what is romantically considered the aftermath of the ancient Greeks in Europe.
There is always a difference between what is promised in philosophical-logical assertions and what you get when those are put into effect. The American Constitution coming after the Declaration of Independence - so many of the same men involved intimately with the framing of both documents - is notable in NOT producing a government which held that all men are created equal with equal rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" but the Constitution, framed after they found out that too many of the common men who had fought the Revolution on the promises of the Declaration wanted what it claimed were the intentions of that revolution. What it produced was an anti-democratic system masquerading as an electoral republic while not only retaining the original sins of the United States, slavery, imperialism, but of protecting and promoting those.
You can see the same thing in the French Revolution in which "liberty, equality, fraternity" quickly turned into the homicidal power plays of the intellectuals who killed each other as well as the blood bath that that debacle was.
No, the basic differences in government are between governments which serve the moral purpose of the common good on the basis of equality of people, not of ideological schemes, ideologies, theories. When government is not based on the principle that inequality is the open doorway of corruption and oppression and that material equality, equal distribution or resources is as essential as the vote, that is what's going to lead to oppression whether some academic calls it "totalitarianism" or "authoritarianism". A better comparison with Plato's fascist Republic isn't some other idea allowed into the category of "western thought" by 20th century academics, it's The Law of Moses and its further development in the radical extension of that in The Gospel. Whatever progress was made in addressing the defects of the United States Constitution only came about by people demanding things that come from that tradition. It is notable that every partially successful attempt at reform of the original Constitution was led at the start by those who explained themselves in religious terms. Abolition, the rights of workers, women's equality, had their greatest success when expressed in those terms. And none of them have been a total success, that progress impeded by Supreme Courts using the language of the Constitution and "originalism" or "literalism" and the regressive, anti-democratic features in it to impede its reform.
I think George Soros, whose experience included so notably a skin-of-our-teeth evasion of the Nazis through the ingenuity of his father, Theodore (an eminent Esperantist,by the way) has been looking in the wrong place for the solution. I suspect that's due to his formal education which, typically in 20th as in 19th century Europe and America, discouraged looking for it in the right places. It's not in the "openness" that Popper imagined was the solution. That's no better than throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks, at best. Ignoring that what sticks best is some of the worst. You have to start with the desired outcome of a decent life for all and admit that anything that opposes that isn't something you can safely allow to flourish and propagate. That was the same fatal mistake that the "liberals" on the American Supreme Court made in creating an "even playing field" of ideas by allowing lies in the mass media to be told with impunity. They reinforced the power of lies by doing that, the "more speech" left to those without money has failed, continually with little effect.
And if the response to that is "who is to judge" "who is to decide" which ideas are to be suppressed, the hard and clear truth is that even in an "open" society the answer is the same, WE ARE TO JUDGE, WE ARE TO DECIDE. TO REFUSE TO MAKE THAT DECISION IS TO DECIDE AGAINST EQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY, IT IS A CHOICE THAT EMPOWERS THE WORST IDEAS BECAUSE THEY CAN BE SOLD IN A DECEPTIVE, ATTRACTIVE CAMPAIGN OF LIES MADE TO SELL. To allow all ideas equality is to include those ideas which call for people to be enslaved, people to be oppressed, people to be exploited and people to be killed as desired or as suits the purpose of those with power. The opposition to those ideas will be no less reliant on WE BEING THE JUDGES, WE BEING THE CHOOSERS. Only it's a lot more dangerous because we so often will make the wrong choice especially if a fetish of "liberty" for those ideas to flourish and win over justice for all.
Update: I don't know how well it translated into English but Theodore Soros' Tivadar Soros' book, Maskerado ĉirkaŭ la morto is very good. Who knows who might need the lessons in survival it carries in the coming months and years.
Unless We Seal Shut The Loopholes The Billionaires Lawyers And "Justices" Have Expanded To Destroy Egalitarian Democracy This Will Never End
So, all of you smart asses and wise guys, especially those in the media who cleverly repeated the line "The first person to say "fascist" looses," say it again, now. Those who said, "Godwin's Law", too.
The Republican Party is and has been a fascist party for quite some time now, if you want to argue it wasn't when Reagan was in office, it certainly was after Newt Gingrich remade it in the 1990s. First the Supreme Court under the majority of its Republican members cancels a vote count and installs a son of an old Republican power family - with the help of the Brooks Bros. Putsch instigated by a cousin on FOX - and now Trump calling out the military on Americans.
The Republican Party is what the hate-talk radio-Murdoch-Sinclair style media has made it, a fascist party which is an arm of billionaire thugs domestic and foreign, again empowered and enabled by the Supreme Court.
Even if Democrats sweep the elections in November they will do it again until all of the defects in the Constitution that they and the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court - and, yes, the dumb "liberals" who had a hand in this too - used to get us here are decisively obliterated, the shreds never to be able to be put to that use again. They hire lawyers, fund law school positions, get judges appointed to make it possible to twist words and make loopholes into gaping chasms to thwart equal justice, to thwart democracy, to impose rule by the oligarchs with a veneer of democracy - using the poison of regionalism and racism and every human weakness, flaw and failing as their tools. They do it mostly through the media which has been not only freed by novel interpretations of the First Amendment to lie with impunity but commissioned to do it through turning money into speech. If there's one thing you can count on with the media, they will eventually follow that money - they are profit making corporations, in the end.
If the Electoral College is not abolished, if the Senate is allowed to stand in its anti-democratic form and given the sole power to confirm justices and judges and other positions, if states are permitted to suppress the vote and gerrymander and are exposed to partisan manipulation the way ours are, this will not ever end.
The Republican Party is and has been a fascist party for quite some time now, if you want to argue it wasn't when Reagan was in office, it certainly was after Newt Gingrich remade it in the 1990s. First the Supreme Court under the majority of its Republican members cancels a vote count and installs a son of an old Republican power family - with the help of the Brooks Bros. Putsch instigated by a cousin on FOX - and now Trump calling out the military on Americans.
The Republican Party is what the hate-talk radio-Murdoch-Sinclair style media has made it, a fascist party which is an arm of billionaire thugs domestic and foreign, again empowered and enabled by the Supreme Court.
Even if Democrats sweep the elections in November they will do it again until all of the defects in the Constitution that they and the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court - and, yes, the dumb "liberals" who had a hand in this too - used to get us here are decisively obliterated, the shreds never to be able to be put to that use again. They hire lawyers, fund law school positions, get judges appointed to make it possible to twist words and make loopholes into gaping chasms to thwart equal justice, to thwart democracy, to impose rule by the oligarchs with a veneer of democracy - using the poison of regionalism and racism and every human weakness, flaw and failing as their tools. They do it mostly through the media which has been not only freed by novel interpretations of the First Amendment to lie with impunity but commissioned to do it through turning money into speech. If there's one thing you can count on with the media, they will eventually follow that money - they are profit making corporations, in the end.
If the Electoral College is not abolished, if the Senate is allowed to stand in its anti-democratic form and given the sole power to confirm justices and judges and other positions, if states are permitted to suppress the vote and gerrymander and are exposed to partisan manipulation the way ours are, this will not ever end.
Monday, June 1, 2020
The Great Mistake Of George Soros
The oligarchs, billionaires, fascists, commmunists, monarchist romantics, other promoters of gangster government have a lot less to fear from their favorite bogeyman, George Soros than they promote. And I know, it's not that, it's that he's a representative of Jews for the Jew haters they hope to harness for their purpose.
I've mentioned before that in at least one case Soros definitely backed the wrong horse in the Hungarian neo-fascist Viktor Orban, who he financed at Oxford as a promising promoter of an "open society" I would guess. He's the kind of guy who can go from enthusiastic young Communist - when Hungary may have seemed to have a Communist future as it then had a present - to something mistaken as a European style "liberal" and now has revealed himself as not only a fascist nationalist (in that resurgence in Europe) but one who openly uses Soros the way American fascists and fascists elsewhere use him. I would note that at some point he either remembered or gained membership in the Hungarian Reformed Church, if I'm correct, a rather old-line Calivinist group. I wonder if he did that double step that would allow that while being a Communist.
Soros, for what admirable qualities he has, is rather naive as to what the problem is and what its solution is. The problem isn't merely "openness" as in this passage taken from his foundation's website:
George Soros used his fortune to create the Open Society Foundations—a network of foundations, partners, and projects in more than 120 countries. Our name and work reflect the influence on Soros’s thinking of the philosophy of Karl Popper, which Soros first encountered at the London School of Economics. In his book Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper argues that no philosophy or ideology is the final arbiter of truth, and that societies can only flourish when they allow for democratic governance, freedom of expression, and respect for individual rights—an approach at the core of the Open Society Foundations’ work.
It is certainly true that no philosophy or ideology will be "the final arbiter of truth," all human institutions will fail at some point, none of them have what it would be necessary for that not to happen, a superhuman level of perfection which we will never have. But that's not the crucial issue in this, the crucial issue is that to be an egalitarian democrat, you have to start with those stands that first face the fact that anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic, anti-truth ideologies are seductive in their power to gull and attract and use the weaknesses of human beings, cultures, societies in order to destroy any possibility of democracy. The "openness" to those being allowed to flourish, especially in the mass media and through organized efforts that proselytize is an invitation for them to do before what they have done in the past in the large majority of cases. In fact, such are using the very "openness" that the United States Constitution, the various Constitutions and laws and rules that permit the free spread of hatred, racism, sexism other forms of discrimination are the reason that so many of the formerly Communist and, yes, those which had been somewhat democratic are in such deep trouble from resurgent fascist gangsterism funded largely by Soros' fellow billionaires and the very media that he wants to be free to do that.
It isn't just that all-too-human institution of "liberal democracy" that is failing as the gangsters and billionaires and their minions exploit its inherent weaknesses, it is the very notions that complete "objectivity" in the law, which does not openly and completely favor equality, justice, fairness and, perhaps most of all the overall right of The People to have the truth instead of privileging lies by allowing them to flourish in the media owned by the affluent is going to lead to what it most certainly is failing at now, egalitarian democracy with justice for all. No one has the right, no one should have the liberty to promote fascism, communism or any other form of gangsterism. Justice is a superior thing to liberty which should only ever be seen as the facilitator of the conditions in which justice is possible. It is a failure of not only secular, materialistic, scientistic systems of thought that has made that tragically mistaken mistake of not making that distinction, it is present all through modern culture and modern society.
Those refusals to make that distinction so often prefaced with "who is to say," "who is to judge" "who is to determine" is a pose of objectivity when its nothing like even handed in its results. That is one of the greatest failures of secular modern liberalism. If you don't raise justice over the liberty to destroy justice,if you don't raise the truth over lies, you are promoting injustice and lies and the inequality and lack of democracy that are guaranteed by doing that. Soros has, I believe, made that common and ubiqutious mistake, a mistaken stand for "liberty" which is an all too often easy and cowardly refusal to admit the essential choice for what's right.
I've mentioned before that in at least one case Soros definitely backed the wrong horse in the Hungarian neo-fascist Viktor Orban, who he financed at Oxford as a promising promoter of an "open society" I would guess. He's the kind of guy who can go from enthusiastic young Communist - when Hungary may have seemed to have a Communist future as it then had a present - to something mistaken as a European style "liberal" and now has revealed himself as not only a fascist nationalist (in that resurgence in Europe) but one who openly uses Soros the way American fascists and fascists elsewhere use him. I would note that at some point he either remembered or gained membership in the Hungarian Reformed Church, if I'm correct, a rather old-line Calivinist group. I wonder if he did that double step that would allow that while being a Communist.
Soros, for what admirable qualities he has, is rather naive as to what the problem is and what its solution is. The problem isn't merely "openness" as in this passage taken from his foundation's website:
George Soros used his fortune to create the Open Society Foundations—a network of foundations, partners, and projects in more than 120 countries. Our name and work reflect the influence on Soros’s thinking of the philosophy of Karl Popper, which Soros first encountered at the London School of Economics. In his book Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper argues that no philosophy or ideology is the final arbiter of truth, and that societies can only flourish when they allow for democratic governance, freedom of expression, and respect for individual rights—an approach at the core of the Open Society Foundations’ work.
It is certainly true that no philosophy or ideology will be "the final arbiter of truth," all human institutions will fail at some point, none of them have what it would be necessary for that not to happen, a superhuman level of perfection which we will never have. But that's not the crucial issue in this, the crucial issue is that to be an egalitarian democrat, you have to start with those stands that first face the fact that anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic, anti-truth ideologies are seductive in their power to gull and attract and use the weaknesses of human beings, cultures, societies in order to destroy any possibility of democracy. The "openness" to those being allowed to flourish, especially in the mass media and through organized efforts that proselytize is an invitation for them to do before what they have done in the past in the large majority of cases. In fact, such are using the very "openness" that the United States Constitution, the various Constitutions and laws and rules that permit the free spread of hatred, racism, sexism other forms of discrimination are the reason that so many of the formerly Communist and, yes, those which had been somewhat democratic are in such deep trouble from resurgent fascist gangsterism funded largely by Soros' fellow billionaires and the very media that he wants to be free to do that.
It isn't just that all-too-human institution of "liberal democracy" that is failing as the gangsters and billionaires and their minions exploit its inherent weaknesses, it is the very notions that complete "objectivity" in the law, which does not openly and completely favor equality, justice, fairness and, perhaps most of all the overall right of The People to have the truth instead of privileging lies by allowing them to flourish in the media owned by the affluent is going to lead to what it most certainly is failing at now, egalitarian democracy with justice for all. No one has the right, no one should have the liberty to promote fascism, communism or any other form of gangsterism. Justice is a superior thing to liberty which should only ever be seen as the facilitator of the conditions in which justice is possible. It is a failure of not only secular, materialistic, scientistic systems of thought that has made that tragically mistaken mistake of not making that distinction, it is present all through modern culture and modern society.
Those refusals to make that distinction so often prefaced with "who is to say," "who is to judge" "who is to determine" is a pose of objectivity when its nothing like even handed in its results. That is one of the greatest failures of secular modern liberalism. If you don't raise justice over the liberty to destroy justice,if you don't raise the truth over lies, you are promoting injustice and lies and the inequality and lack of democracy that are guaranteed by doing that. Soros has, I believe, made that common and ubiqutious mistake, a mistaken stand for "liberty" which is an all too often easy and cowardly refusal to admit the essential choice for what's right.
I Have To Keep Reminding Myself That I Don't Have Any Right To Feel As Old As This Makes Me Feel
I haven't written about the demonstrations in the aftermath of the public police-murder of George Floyd and the slow and inadequate response by police and public officials in Minneapolis. I'm afraid I'm feeling overwhelmed by it all, I don't think I've ever felt my age so much as I have the past several days. The murderer, when it's done on camera, in public I'm not going to pretend I didn't see what I saw, there was absolutely nothing that could possibly mitigate the murderous intent and actions of that experienced killer - should have been arrested by the other cops who were there, though they certainly are accomplices as any of them could have stepped in and stopped the murder, in fact at least two others are reported to have knelt on him so they are murderers, also.
The police in Minneapolis are certainly to blame for the fury that this unleashed as are the prosecutors who were so slow in moving to arrest and charge the killers, that could have completely avoided the worst results of angry frustrated people who are routinely denied justice and are the focus of police crime on a routine basis.
But this has all gone way past one city in one state and it has burst the diseased, infected torso of the United States, releasing the infection that has been building for the past half a century even as that rot has undeniably moved into the White House and the Senate and the Supreme Court, the news media the circulatory system that spread it. This last several days is going to turn out to be a fiasco for the United States. I have heard commentators include not only the rage of People of Color over their treatment by the police but the fact that they bear the largest burden of death in the pandemic that Trump and Republicans and their billionaire backers have done everything possible to make worse. This goes way beyond the police-murder of George Floyd, his murder was an incident that is part of a far larger system of death that the American system is and has been for a long, long time. I recently pointed out that the Panglossian view of the American system, the American Constitution was obviously a lie and a fraud to those enslaved under it, both before and after the Civil War amendments were adopted, those who were slaughtered under it in the greatest land thefts in the history of the world and so many others. This has been going on for a lot longer than we are supposed to mention in polite company - mostly white, privileged company, the affluent foam and scum that rises to the top of a melting pot.
The Republican-fascists, their media, the media that is not supposed to be but will become defacto supporters of Republicans in the upcoming elections - through their cowardly non-reporting R says - D says bullshit - are going to try to use this to scare white racists and those who are nervous about People of Color to vote for Republicans. That is what I am afraid will be the unintended outcome of this fury, it has generally been the outcome of such action in the past - the reason that I feel so overwhelmed by it.
The typical catch words are coming out of the troll bots and their human echo. "Soros," even, for anyone who believes that stuff died when the Czar was overthrown the current Czar of Russia is still pushing the "Protocols" stuff that came from there before. I've seen this before, I doubt it's going to come out anywhere good. It makes me feel old but my right to that feeling is certainly nothing compared to the feeling of those of Color who have been the main target of police-murder, injustice, crime by the State, crime by the billionaires and millionaires going back to the Founders and before them. Those peoples' right to be past the point of tired of that takes precedent over mine. I don't think arguing against it makes any difference, I'm not the one who is likely going to have a serial killer cop kneel on my neck as two others kneel on me, too.
--------------
I would give a thousand bucks I don't have to know what cop shows and movies those killer cops watch because I'm sure they must have seen this stuff on TV before they copied it. I know cops watch cop shows. I am certain they get a lot of this stuff from watching them. I wonder what part FOX has played in the epidemic of killer-cops with their programming.
The police in Minneapolis are certainly to blame for the fury that this unleashed as are the prosecutors who were so slow in moving to arrest and charge the killers, that could have completely avoided the worst results of angry frustrated people who are routinely denied justice and are the focus of police crime on a routine basis.
But this has all gone way past one city in one state and it has burst the diseased, infected torso of the United States, releasing the infection that has been building for the past half a century even as that rot has undeniably moved into the White House and the Senate and the Supreme Court, the news media the circulatory system that spread it. This last several days is going to turn out to be a fiasco for the United States. I have heard commentators include not only the rage of People of Color over their treatment by the police but the fact that they bear the largest burden of death in the pandemic that Trump and Republicans and their billionaire backers have done everything possible to make worse. This goes way beyond the police-murder of George Floyd, his murder was an incident that is part of a far larger system of death that the American system is and has been for a long, long time. I recently pointed out that the Panglossian view of the American system, the American Constitution was obviously a lie and a fraud to those enslaved under it, both before and after the Civil War amendments were adopted, those who were slaughtered under it in the greatest land thefts in the history of the world and so many others. This has been going on for a lot longer than we are supposed to mention in polite company - mostly white, privileged company, the affluent foam and scum that rises to the top of a melting pot.
The Republican-fascists, their media, the media that is not supposed to be but will become defacto supporters of Republicans in the upcoming elections - through their cowardly non-reporting R says - D says bullshit - are going to try to use this to scare white racists and those who are nervous about People of Color to vote for Republicans. That is what I am afraid will be the unintended outcome of this fury, it has generally been the outcome of such action in the past - the reason that I feel so overwhelmed by it.
The typical catch words are coming out of the troll bots and their human echo. "Soros," even, for anyone who believes that stuff died when the Czar was overthrown the current Czar of Russia is still pushing the "Protocols" stuff that came from there before. I've seen this before, I doubt it's going to come out anywhere good. It makes me feel old but my right to that feeling is certainly nothing compared to the feeling of those of Color who have been the main target of police-murder, injustice, crime by the State, crime by the billionaires and millionaires going back to the Founders and before them. Those peoples' right to be past the point of tired of that takes precedent over mine. I don't think arguing against it makes any difference, I'm not the one who is likely going to have a serial killer cop kneel on my neck as two others kneel on me, too.
--------------
I would give a thousand bucks I don't have to know what cop shows and movies those killer cops watch because I'm sure they must have seen this stuff on TV before they copied it. I know cops watch cop shows. I am certain they get a lot of this stuff from watching them. I wonder what part FOX has played in the epidemic of killer-cops with their programming.
Sunday, May 31, 2020
Thomas Clausen - Concertino for recorder and strings
Michala Petri, recorders
Lapland Chamber Orchestra conducted by Clemens Schuldt
I never recall hearing of Thomas Clausen before hearing this just now, though I wouldn't be surprised if I had heard him playing with jazz musicians, he's played with many of the best. Michala Petri plays some of those dissonances in the slow movement so beautifully it's heartbreaking.
Hate Mail I Will Choose To Deal With Here
Well, you see, in order to know that Jim, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer were in a hot air balloon you'd have to have read the little known, little read parody that Twain wrote, Tom Sawyer Abroad, which is kind of dreadful except as the parody that Twain clearly intended the book to be. Like all of Twain's humor, some of it is excellent for a line or two or even a whole sketch but it's very uneven. It's silly to think he could have sustained the same level of jokes through the length of a novel. I doubt anyone could do that. Some of what may have seemed quite amusing in the 1890s falls pretty flat today.
And there is that defect in writing a humorous novel, I don't think it's possible to write characters who are comic figures without making them funny page cartoons who are presented in a way that invites condescension. For some reason, thinking about that, I think of the character George Marvin Brush in Thornton Wilder's book Heaven's My Destination who, when I read the book, I think I'd have liked to meet in real life, you'd rather have had him for a next door neighbor than just about anyone else, but Wilder clearly intended him as such a figure. Like all of Wilder's things I know of, it kind of falls flat at the end. I think it's inevitable that those who grew up in affluence, or relative affluence or aspire to it, as most academics and pro-scribblers do, they will either have that attitude to any character of the lower class or they will treat them with an unavoidably condescending sentimentality. Which was Twain's other literary sin, to use his own term. Though mostly when he wrote women characters. It's hard to write sympathetically about a character without going overboard, I don't think I could do it, which is why I only write fiction for my own entertainment.
I think it's clear that he was tired of the characters since he put them into parody. As I said yesterday, it was clear from his description of how long he prepared and wrote Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (which is an historical novel, not a humor piece) during that same period, he wanted to do more than that. I imagine he read the better authors of his time and earlier and wished he could do more than he was allowed to do. It may have been enough for those who maintain some kind of sentimental image of him as "the Lincoln of our literature" but it clearly wasn't for him. "The Lincoln of our literature," which he may have been in liberating writers to consider the lives of poor people on something like their own terms - allowing Huckleberry Finn to narrate the books he appears in after Tom Sawyer, but it's pretty clear he wished he could write other things, too.
Apart from the old man with the big mustache in an ice cream suit that Hal Holbrook did so much to impose on him,* I look at that period and I see a man who wanted to do more than that. I think he probably found the sentimentalism, on one hand and the cynicism on the other side of his humor wore thin for him. I deeply admire his best work while refusing to be blind to the defects in the work but mostly in the stupid adulation of him based mostly in people never, ever really reading most of what he wrote.
Even more than that, I don't fault Twain for the use his best novel is put to in allowing a white man's invented Black man to carry the burden of so much of the consideration of the real lives of real Black People in American history. That wasn't Twain's fault it is the fault of the academic establishments that put the fictitious character to that use. The same could be said of the representation of Huck Finn for the children of the underclass who are mostly not as jolly and happy or spunky and independent as Huck Finn but live lives of pain and spiritual damage such as Thomas Hardy put adults through. I think it is sheer indifference and the cowardly laziness of too many academics and professional scribblers that they don't allow such people to speak for themselves, ironically using Mark Twain's fictitious characters so they don't have to listen to what such people would tell them if asked. That's not Twain's fault, that's the fault of those who use him to avoid the real voices of real Black People.
* I think that that depiction of him in Mark Twain Tonight, picking and filtering lines and passages from Twain mixed with things Twain never said, deceives people into thinking they are seeing Twain when what they're seeing is an invented character as much as Huck Finn or George Marvin Brush, a character invented to serve the purpose of its maker. I think that's especially true with Mark Twain who serves some pretty base purposes I have a feeling he, at least in his last years, may have not fit. Which is one of the reasons I've come to be very suspicious of the theatrical or dramatic or fictitious use of real people, something Twain did himself in presenting Joan. That he valued that book which the anti-religious fans of their twin disdain and despise is certainly a good indication that they have never gotten the full measure of the man.
And there is that defect in writing a humorous novel, I don't think it's possible to write characters who are comic figures without making them funny page cartoons who are presented in a way that invites condescension. For some reason, thinking about that, I think of the character George Marvin Brush in Thornton Wilder's book Heaven's My Destination who, when I read the book, I think I'd have liked to meet in real life, you'd rather have had him for a next door neighbor than just about anyone else, but Wilder clearly intended him as such a figure. Like all of Wilder's things I know of, it kind of falls flat at the end. I think it's inevitable that those who grew up in affluence, or relative affluence or aspire to it, as most academics and pro-scribblers do, they will either have that attitude to any character of the lower class or they will treat them with an unavoidably condescending sentimentality. Which was Twain's other literary sin, to use his own term. Though mostly when he wrote women characters. It's hard to write sympathetically about a character without going overboard, I don't think I could do it, which is why I only write fiction for my own entertainment.
I think it's clear that he was tired of the characters since he put them into parody. As I said yesterday, it was clear from his description of how long he prepared and wrote Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (which is an historical novel, not a humor piece) during that same period, he wanted to do more than that. I imagine he read the better authors of his time and earlier and wished he could do more than he was allowed to do. It may have been enough for those who maintain some kind of sentimental image of him as "the Lincoln of our literature" but it clearly wasn't for him. "The Lincoln of our literature," which he may have been in liberating writers to consider the lives of poor people on something like their own terms - allowing Huckleberry Finn to narrate the books he appears in after Tom Sawyer, but it's pretty clear he wished he could write other things, too.
Apart from the old man with the big mustache in an ice cream suit that Hal Holbrook did so much to impose on him,* I look at that period and I see a man who wanted to do more than that. I think he probably found the sentimentalism, on one hand and the cynicism on the other side of his humor wore thin for him. I deeply admire his best work while refusing to be blind to the defects in the work but mostly in the stupid adulation of him based mostly in people never, ever really reading most of what he wrote.
Even more than that, I don't fault Twain for the use his best novel is put to in allowing a white man's invented Black man to carry the burden of so much of the consideration of the real lives of real Black People in American history. That wasn't Twain's fault it is the fault of the academic establishments that put the fictitious character to that use. The same could be said of the representation of Huck Finn for the children of the underclass who are mostly not as jolly and happy or spunky and independent as Huck Finn but live lives of pain and spiritual damage such as Thomas Hardy put adults through. I think it is sheer indifference and the cowardly laziness of too many academics and professional scribblers that they don't allow such people to speak for themselves, ironically using Mark Twain's fictitious characters so they don't have to listen to what such people would tell them if asked. That's not Twain's fault, that's the fault of those who use him to avoid the real voices of real Black People.
* I think that that depiction of him in Mark Twain Tonight, picking and filtering lines and passages from Twain mixed with things Twain never said, deceives people into thinking they are seeing Twain when what they're seeing is an invented character as much as Huck Finn or George Marvin Brush, a character invented to serve the purpose of its maker. I think that's especially true with Mark Twain who serves some pretty base purposes I have a feeling he, at least in his last years, may have not fit. Which is one of the reasons I've come to be very suspicious of the theatrical or dramatic or fictitious use of real people, something Twain did himself in presenting Joan. That he valued that book which the anti-religious fans of their twin disdain and despise is certainly a good indication that they have never gotten the full measure of the man.
Saturday, May 30, 2020
Saturday Night Radio Drama - Hugh Costello - Personal Shopper
A topical drama about how living in enforced isolation can lead to the forging of new relationships, and to the revitalisation of old ones.
It starts with a skinny slip of paper posted through Nina’s letter box:
Dear Neighbour. My name is Max. I am almost 15 years old and I live at number 76 of this road. My school has been shut and I am free to do shopping for anyone who needs it. Just ring me on the number below.
Nina’s first instinct is to bin the note. She’s not hugely bothered about the neighbours. The younger people who’ve moved onto the street in recent years are very different from her. They’re smarter, richer. They have well-spoken kids with names like Max.
But life is tricky in isolation. Nina’s husband Frank is ill. Maybe it’s the virus, maybe’s it’s just a bad cold, they can’t really tell.
Nina knows the rule is that she must stay indoors. And they don’t have anyone else. So Nina gives Max a call. The next day, he leaves a first bag of shopping outside her hall door.
Told through phone calls and an audio diary that Nina is updating daily, the drama follows the relationship that develops between Max and Nina through the first weeks of enforced isolation.
As the story unfolds, we come to realise that Nina is making the audio diary for a particular, special person.
CAST
Nina .......... Monica Dolan
Frank ........ Phil Davis
Max .......... Tom Glenister
Sarah ....... Jane Slavin
Written by Hugh Costello
Produced and Directed by Eoin O'Callaghan
A Big Fish Radio production for BBC Radio 4
Interesting what you can do over the phone when it's radio drama.
Update: This is my last notice. If you want to engage with me on things I won't post here, you can do it at my other blog which will not have moderated comments, for the time being. If you don't take advantage of that, <meh>. In the meantime, you can read me having fun at a liars expense.
Clearly, Twain Wanted To Be More Of A Writer Than He Was Allowed To Be
Can't let this go, just yet.
Looking at the history of the book which was called "The Mysterious Stranger" it is a product from after Twain died, he having written several quite different versions of it, finishing none of them, over a number of years. One is clearly him wanting to recycle his most successful characters, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Becky Thatcher all appear in one of the fragments unused by the characters who pasted together what was sold to the world as Twain's book during the period I read it. I can't imagine that that version "Schoolhouse Hill" would have been much better, it's clear that none of them interested or pleased Twain enough for him to finish them.
There was, apparently some controversy over the version that the world knew as the novel, especially when Bernard Devoto released all of Twain's unpublished manuscripts which the guy behind that cut and paste job, Albert Bigelow Paine had concealed. Paine had kept the manuscripts private till his death. It is clear that he pasted the ending of one story onto the version he published, changing the names of the characters to fit. If Twain would have approved of that is doubtful, as can be seen in the history of his own revisions that led to The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, he'd certainly have done the grafting job himself if he'd wanted to.
The main selling-point of the book is its very conventional anti-religious content, which you'd think would get tiresome but that assumes what isn't in evidence, that the fans of that do much in the way of thinking. I might, might go back to look at Twain, the anti-religious, anti-Christian, anti-Catholic might have said by way of clues that account for his holding the finished, published, well prepared and carefully written book about Joan of Arc as the one of his that he was proudest of and held in the highest esteem.
It's clear that he longed to be more than the writer of cynical or sentimental humor but that he didn't know how to do it. I don't blame him, if I was reduced to writing the same stuff over and over again to sell to magazines over that length of time, I'd long for more, too. I think that accounts for him reporting that he did twelve years of preparation for writing it and two years writing the book. He was trying to do something he hadn't done before because he was essentially repeating stuff - as can be seen in how many times he tried to re-write the Tom Sawyer-Huck Finn bunch into new books. I'm surprised he didn't send them over Reichenbach Falls or have that hot air balloon he had them in crash into the ocean.
The hostility of the critics to the book is more telling about why they might value a piece of tripe like Pudd'nhead or Mysterious Stranger entirely more than the content those books as published merit. I think it's exactly the anti-religious and generally cynical content of those books that both account for the reputation of those books and for the hostility towards Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. Every fault I've read them cite in that book - "sentimentality" "mawkishness" etc. are present in practically every single other thing he wrote, including sections of Huckleberry Finn. He seldom presented women and their thinking in other terms that I recall. I would have to go back and re-read the book but I think they are most absent in the one book of his I like the best, Life on the Mississippi. But that wasn't supposed to be fiction, though it's clear there are tall tales included. I don't recall much in the way of anti-religious content in it, though I don't think I've picked it up in a decade except to move it on the book shelf.
Update: Comment withheld here posted at commented on here.
Looking at the history of the book which was called "The Mysterious Stranger" it is a product from after Twain died, he having written several quite different versions of it, finishing none of them, over a number of years. One is clearly him wanting to recycle his most successful characters, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Becky Thatcher all appear in one of the fragments unused by the characters who pasted together what was sold to the world as Twain's book during the period I read it. I can't imagine that that version "Schoolhouse Hill" would have been much better, it's clear that none of them interested or pleased Twain enough for him to finish them.
There was, apparently some controversy over the version that the world knew as the novel, especially when Bernard Devoto released all of Twain's unpublished manuscripts which the guy behind that cut and paste job, Albert Bigelow Paine had concealed. Paine had kept the manuscripts private till his death. It is clear that he pasted the ending of one story onto the version he published, changing the names of the characters to fit. If Twain would have approved of that is doubtful, as can be seen in the history of his own revisions that led to The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, he'd certainly have done the grafting job himself if he'd wanted to.
The main selling-point of the book is its very conventional anti-religious content, which you'd think would get tiresome but that assumes what isn't in evidence, that the fans of that do much in the way of thinking. I might, might go back to look at Twain, the anti-religious, anti-Christian, anti-Catholic might have said by way of clues that account for his holding the finished, published, well prepared and carefully written book about Joan of Arc as the one of his that he was proudest of and held in the highest esteem.
It's clear that he longed to be more than the writer of cynical or sentimental humor but that he didn't know how to do it. I don't blame him, if I was reduced to writing the same stuff over and over again to sell to magazines over that length of time, I'd long for more, too. I think that accounts for him reporting that he did twelve years of preparation for writing it and two years writing the book. He was trying to do something he hadn't done before because he was essentially repeating stuff - as can be seen in how many times he tried to re-write the Tom Sawyer-Huck Finn bunch into new books. I'm surprised he didn't send them over Reichenbach Falls or have that hot air balloon he had them in crash into the ocean.
The hostility of the critics to the book is more telling about why they might value a piece of tripe like Pudd'nhead or Mysterious Stranger entirely more than the content those books as published merit. I think it's exactly the anti-religious and generally cynical content of those books that both account for the reputation of those books and for the hostility towards Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. Every fault I've read them cite in that book - "sentimentality" "mawkishness" etc. are present in practically every single other thing he wrote, including sections of Huckleberry Finn. He seldom presented women and their thinking in other terms that I recall. I would have to go back and re-read the book but I think they are most absent in the one book of his I like the best, Life on the Mississippi. But that wasn't supposed to be fiction, though it's clear there are tall tales included. I don't recall much in the way of anti-religious content in it, though I don't think I've picked it up in a decade except to move it on the book shelf.
Update: Comment withheld here posted at commented on here.
How Next To Upset Their World?
Let's see, in trying to entertain the Covid shut ins with something other than cooking or exercising to try to counteract the effects of the mountains of food so cooked . . .
I've suggested do-it-yourself audio theater using cheap recording and editing devices and programs. Even doing two-handers over the phone where you don't even have to risk infection. Probably most controversially, advocating practicing it to see if you really want to make an effort before you spend any money on equipment.
Then it was amusingly as it was surprisingly aggravating international communication on dirt cheap micro-powered transceivers in Morse code, I'm entirely in favor of doing the most with the least, especially if it's home made and you learn something while trying it.
Then it would have to be when I pissed off the champions of the officially sacrosanct by pointing out that Mark Twain wrote a lot of crap (something I will bet you he would be the first to admit if he were here today, he'd make a comic piece for sale from it).
What should I try next? Something novel, not something done to death. I think that's what pissed off those who got their pinafores in a twist over Morse code, it was something slightly out of their very limited ordinary. They are the champions of the typical and the ordinary. That's what they like about TV and the movies, easily consumed junk unchallenging to the accustomed and well practiced avenues of presented, approved experience. I'm bored with that.
I am coming along with the Morse, by the way. Maybe when I can't afford to be online anymore that'll be the only way you can get my content. At least I can promise there will be content, content that will upset the contented cows of the conventional. Though cows are more curious than they are. Better natured, too.
I am relegating any discussion of the champions of convention to my other blog, where comments are, for now, unmoderated.
I've suggested do-it-yourself audio theater using cheap recording and editing devices and programs. Even doing two-handers over the phone where you don't even have to risk infection. Probably most controversially, advocating practicing it to see if you really want to make an effort before you spend any money on equipment.
Then it was amusingly as it was surprisingly aggravating international communication on dirt cheap micro-powered transceivers in Morse code, I'm entirely in favor of doing the most with the least, especially if it's home made and you learn something while trying it.
Then it would have to be when I pissed off the champions of the officially sacrosanct by pointing out that Mark Twain wrote a lot of crap (something I will bet you he would be the first to admit if he were here today, he'd make a comic piece for sale from it).
What should I try next? Something novel, not something done to death. I think that's what pissed off those who got their pinafores in a twist over Morse code, it was something slightly out of their very limited ordinary. They are the champions of the typical and the ordinary. That's what they like about TV and the movies, easily consumed junk unchallenging to the accustomed and well practiced avenues of presented, approved experience. I'm bored with that.
I am coming along with the Morse, by the way. Maybe when I can't afford to be online anymore that'll be the only way you can get my content. At least I can promise there will be content, content that will upset the contented cows of the conventional. Though cows are more curious than they are. Better natured, too.
I am relegating any discussion of the champions of convention to my other blog, where comments are, for now, unmoderated.
The Choice For All Media Are To Be Arbiters Of Truth Or To Be Marketers Of Lies
The moral abyss which is Mark Zuckerburg was on display the other day when in reaction to the tiniest, tiniest act of moral responsibility on the part of Twitter's Jack Dorsey when he feigned horror at the idea that he might have to take a moral stand against Trump's lies that get thousands and more killed, and declared in the kind of pose that libertarians love, that his Facebook will never be an "arbiter of the truth." It was as if he needed to fall on the fainting couch and have smelling salts wafted under his nose at the thought. That is the ridiculous pose of scrupulosity common among media types when the idea is raised that media has moral responsibility, generally around its responsibility to not lie. That has replaced the cartoon images of blue-hairs fainting at mentions of sex or dirty words in books and it's far more ridiculous than that stock image of b-grade comedy presentations.
Well, it's no shock, morality is not generally healthy for a corporate bottom line, especially a corporation that makes money by selling eye/hours to advertisers, flagrant amorality is what brings in those bucks or why else would our media be so morally degraded. Where your heart is, there will your treasure be and their heart is on money, nothing more deserving of devotion.
Because of that fact media that refuses to be an "arbiter of truth" will inevitably be a shopper of lies which is certainly just fine with the Zuckerberg going on as it has been for Jack Dorsey up till the time when we found out that he has an extremely high threshold of moral responsibility but he has one that will lead to him taking the tiniest of steps. It's clear that the whey-faced slime ball of Facebook doesn't have one and has no intention of developing even the appearance of having one for PR purposes.
It's obvious that democracy, egalitarian democracy conducted to produce maximal possible decency in the lives of People is incompatible with the media we have, especially the "social media" a phrase that should have about the same status as the phrase "social disease" had in my youth. Those were what STDs were called back then, in case there are any younger people reading this.
If Democrats win the election they will have daunting tasks ahead of them, de-Nazifying the federal judiciary one of the most daunting, including the Supreme Court. But as important as that will be to break up the internet based cartels and corporate monsters that are destroying not only democracy but even the very sense of morality and reality - which it is becoming obvious are entirely and intimately interconnected. Without a sense of morality capacious enough to include the idea that truth is good and lies are bad it is clear from the Trump phenomeon, as with the other Murdoch media, Sinclair promoted Republican-fascism that even a knowledge of reality is forfeited and disaster follows on like a wheel behind a draft ox.
That last simile was due to the fact that Zuckerberg has - no doubt for PR purposes, claimed to be an admirer of Buddhism. Or maybe he's sincerely influenced by his wife. He is quoted as calling it "an amazing religion." and was photographed keeling and bowing at a Buddhist shrine. He should read the first verse of the most widely cited and proclaimed text of Buddhism, the Dhammapada.
All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.
True, obviously true. And when billions speak and act out of evil thoughts, not least of which by lying and spreading gossip and false witness as on the thing that made him a billionaire, that effect is magnified and destroys everything. And the next of the twin-verses states that if you speak or act morally pain stops as the ox heads in that direction. That is the direction not taken by the "Buddhist" Zuckerberg in his lofty declaration that he will not be "an arbiter of truth."
Democrats are going to need to break up Facebook and Twitter and the rest of it, they are going to have to do one of the hardest things of all, overturn the disastrous decisions of the Supreme Court that allowed lies to be broadcast in the mass media with impunity if democracy and the possibility of a decent life is to continue. That was how we got here from the point where we were almost making progress in the mid-1960s. That went sour almost immediately after those rulings began. I think if they had gone the other way that start at progress towards true egalitarian democracy and a decent life might have continued instead of stalling and then reversing direction. That ox cart got turned around by lies.
Well, it's no shock, morality is not generally healthy for a corporate bottom line, especially a corporation that makes money by selling eye/hours to advertisers, flagrant amorality is what brings in those bucks or why else would our media be so morally degraded. Where your heart is, there will your treasure be and their heart is on money, nothing more deserving of devotion.
Because of that fact media that refuses to be an "arbiter of truth" will inevitably be a shopper of lies which is certainly just fine with the Zuckerberg going on as it has been for Jack Dorsey up till the time when we found out that he has an extremely high threshold of moral responsibility but he has one that will lead to him taking the tiniest of steps. It's clear that the whey-faced slime ball of Facebook doesn't have one and has no intention of developing even the appearance of having one for PR purposes.
It's obvious that democracy, egalitarian democracy conducted to produce maximal possible decency in the lives of People is incompatible with the media we have, especially the "social media" a phrase that should have about the same status as the phrase "social disease" had in my youth. Those were what STDs were called back then, in case there are any younger people reading this.
If Democrats win the election they will have daunting tasks ahead of them, de-Nazifying the federal judiciary one of the most daunting, including the Supreme Court. But as important as that will be to break up the internet based cartels and corporate monsters that are destroying not only democracy but even the very sense of morality and reality - which it is becoming obvious are entirely and intimately interconnected. Without a sense of morality capacious enough to include the idea that truth is good and lies are bad it is clear from the Trump phenomeon, as with the other Murdoch media, Sinclair promoted Republican-fascism that even a knowledge of reality is forfeited and disaster follows on like a wheel behind a draft ox.
That last simile was due to the fact that Zuckerberg has - no doubt for PR purposes, claimed to be an admirer of Buddhism. Or maybe he's sincerely influenced by his wife. He is quoted as calling it "an amazing religion." and was photographed keeling and bowing at a Buddhist shrine. He should read the first verse of the most widely cited and proclaimed text of Buddhism, the Dhammapada.
All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.
True, obviously true. And when billions speak and act out of evil thoughts, not least of which by lying and spreading gossip and false witness as on the thing that made him a billionaire, that effect is magnified and destroys everything. And the next of the twin-verses states that if you speak or act morally pain stops as the ox heads in that direction. That is the direction not taken by the "Buddhist" Zuckerberg in his lofty declaration that he will not be "an arbiter of truth."
Democrats are going to need to break up Facebook and Twitter and the rest of it, they are going to have to do one of the hardest things of all, overturn the disastrous decisions of the Supreme Court that allowed lies to be broadcast in the mass media with impunity if democracy and the possibility of a decent life is to continue. That was how we got here from the point where we were almost making progress in the mid-1960s. That went sour almost immediately after those rulings began. I think if they had gone the other way that start at progress towards true egalitarian democracy and a decent life might have continued instead of stalling and then reversing direction. That ox cart got turned around by lies.
Friday, May 29, 2020
I would bet that easily 950 out of 1000 high school and college graduates have not read A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court or The Mysterious Stranger. I have, neither of them are great books. I doubt Simps has, though I'm sure he saw Bing in the movie if not the musical of the one and that PBS made for TV movie of the other.
Oh, wait, I should be posting this on the blog I have for haphazardous waste.
Update: I never said those things, it was one of my early clues that the rump of regulars at Baby Blue were lazy slacker geezers when they believed his lies instead of finding out if they were true. Unlike Simps and his buddies, I read books including books by those authors and many others who Simps doesn't know about. He's only the most attention seeking of the attention seeking TV addled old people who frequent that den of dopes.
Oh, wait, I should be posting this on the blog I have for haphazardous waste.
Update: I never said those things, it was one of my early clues that the rump of regulars at Baby Blue were lazy slacker geezers when they believed his lies instead of finding out if they were true. Unlike Simps and his buddies, I read books including books by those authors and many others who Simps doesn't know about. He's only the most attention seeking of the attention seeking TV addled old people who frequent that den of dopes.
Before Putting Twain Away For Another Decade
Re-read it, it's a pretty bad book. Pudd'nhead Wilson is a good book that got ruined by sticking it inside a bad book or, as is claimed by some, a good book gone bad. It would have been better if he'd left out the title character, completely, though I think he wanted him mostly for the "Calendar" aphorisms he began the chapters with. I have to wonder if Benjamin Franklin, who is famous mostly for his Poor Richard sayings than any of his serious writing had anything to do with Twain's science tinkerer-"free thinker".
If Twain had just used the story of Roxy and the two boys and given it a more realistic narrative conclusion and relegated Pudd'nhead Wilson to his own book he might have produced a book that was better than Huckleberry Finn. Roxy, even in that bad book, might be the fullest female character Twain ever invented or imagined, though he could have cut down on the dialect to better effect. I have never been able to warm up to his treatment of Joan of Arc though he, himself, considered it his finest book.
From what I read in this paper by Anne P Wigger (inventing my own "institution" in order to get Jstor access, I'm sure Twain would have done it if he were in my position) I was right that his ridiculous fingerprint plot device was inspired by him reading Galton's book on fingerprints. The concluding court scene for which he used it is some of Twain's worst writing, it was pretty clear to me that he wanted to get the thing done and dusted as expeditiously as possible - he claimed writing the first draft was easy, the revision almost killed him. The idea that fingerprint evidence would have been produced in a court in a murder trial in the period of the story is absurd enough, the idea that untrained judges, lawyers and jurors would have been able to discern their individuality as described in the story even so absurd that Twain must have known that even as he rushed to be rid of it so he could use Pudd'nhead and his cynical aphorisms.
The paper notes that the book began as a planned farce on the topical topic of a pair of Italian conjoined twins who had toured the United States and as Twain found that topic to be less useful for a book length treatment he expanded the two stories of Roxy and the switched babies and David Wilson and Judge Driscoll gluing together bits of all three to sell in serial form to a magazine even as he, as he said himself, "pulled the twins apart". The first book form of Pudd'nhead was, at Twain's direction, published with the story of the conjoined twins "Those Extraordinary Twins."
The paper is very interesting in that it notes that Twain's correspondence with his publisher and others about the novel as well as the manuscripts and published versions of the two works the first draft became gives an extensive insight into how Twain was writing in his later years.
Twain's carelessness in his final revision is notable, in the published version of Pudd'nhead Wilson, for instance, the twins are still described as "side-show riff-raff, dime museum freaks" - terminology which is meaningless once the twins have en separated. The twins are in fact, superfluous to the plot, and a more suitable character could have been introduced to serve as the murder suspect. Leslie Fiedler, in an article on Pudd'head Wilson, attributes these remnants of the earlier story to Twain's reluctance to separate the two stores. Lamenting that the "most extraordinary book in American literature" does not exist as a whole, Fiedler argues that Twain, on the verge of creating a "monstrous poem on duplicity," lost his nerve and separated the Siamese twins farce from Puddn'head's story, the vestiges of the earlier story pointing to his "lack of conviction" about the revision. But twain could have suffered no loss of never, for not only did he finish the "monstrous poem," which is, of course, the Morgan manuscript, but he also attempted to publish it. It is relevant here to remember that Twain, particularly during the 1880's and 1890's was motivated by financial as well as artistic considerations, and his desire for a profitable sale from Pudd'nhead Wilson runs like a refrain through his letters during the period in which Pudd'nhead was being written.
I think as extraordinary and evidence that Twain, himself, must have felt like he had to explain the mess he produced, was his introduction to Extraordinary Twins and the post script is an attempt at exoneration.
Looking at a list of the literary product of Mark Twain it is remarkable how much of it there is and how little of it has lasted in common culture. I doubt much more than the original Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Prince and the Pauper and a few of the short works are read in their entirety except by Twain Scholars. The later books in which Tom and Huck and Jim appear - such little read things as Tom Sawyer Detective, Tom Sawyer Abroad - did nothing to make me look more kindly on the original.
I have read that Twain left a number of unfinished books in which Huck was to have appeared - I've never read the existing fragments - which pretty much indicates that he was trying to recycle them for some purpose, probably hoping to repeat the success he had with them. Perhaps in terms of money as well as inspiration. Looking at the chronology of his published work, I think it's pretty clear that after Life on the Mississippi (1883) his best years were behind him.
I can't think of a single piece, book length or short, that stands up in full. Huckleberry Finn almost does till Tom Sawyer reappears - the beginning with him isn't the best part of the book, either. And that's his best novel. Some of it is great writing, there are some great chapters, perhaps, there are some good stories but most of the best of it lasts the length of an aphorism.
There are certainly better American writers. I'd rather read the writing, particularly the non-fiction, of Black authors to get Twain's main theme directly from them. It is a pretty disgusting scandal how much of the academic, literary discussion of Black experience and history rests on the fictitious character of Jim written by a white man when real people and THEIR ACCOUNTS OF THEIR REAL LIVES could have taken up that time.
One of the most interesting things about Pudd'nhead Wilson is that the switched babies, one born to the slave Roxy the other to the Judge's slave owning brother's wife (who as so many mothers in American fiction, then conveniently dies) looked almost identical (as the Italian twins are almost identical) which certainly must have indicated to all but the dullest readers that they were half-brothers, perhaps closer than that considering the liklihood that Roxy was more closely related to the father of the white baby as so many slaves raped by their owners, the fathers, brothers, grandfathers and uncles of the owner rapists, would have been. But I doubt Twain could have gotten away with writing too explicitly on that theme in Jim Crow America. If I could write and I was a Black American writer, I'd certainly be tempted to take the material that Twain left in that book and tell a truer story than he managed to tell with it. I'd leave out the Pudd'nhead stuff, entirely and the Extraordinary Twins. I'd try to make it truer to the period than Twain did with that fingerprint trickery. If he hadn't shoved that into the story he could have saved himself the embarrassment of having written that awful writing of the courtroom scene. Sometimes the junk in that book reminds me of nothing so much as the incoherent improvisation of an Ed Wood movie.
------------------------
In looking more at the idea that his inability to come to a view of Christianity that got past the unreconstructed Presbyterian Calvinism of his youth colored everything he said about religion in general and Christianity in particular and, as it is with Calvinism, it was the extreme form of eternal damnation doctrine mixed with predestination to eternal damnation that was the central issue with Twain. It is a shame that in his extensive reading - Twain was a great reader - he didn't read the Greek theologians who were being translated and published in such volume in English during those years, especially Gregory of Nyssa.
I don't recall him talking about the Universalist Church which had been one of the stronger Protestant sects in 19th century America but which was probably fairly considered to be in decline by the early 20th century, They could have steered him to the texts that refuted the ideas Twain found so difficult, though I think by that time it was probably more a matter of how to be seen as manly.
There's always a struggle between Twain the moralist - his anti-racism, anti-sexism (understanding he maintained a rather romantic view of women) anti-imperialism and pro-unionism prove that he had a sincere and deep moral sense - and Twain the barroom cynic and agnostic.
Certainly the organized churches earned a lot of the derision he gave them, it's not as if there isn't a constant history of internal self-criticism, struggle and division even within sects and denominations. But I think Twain thought of religion as more properly women stuff and an opportunity for a man to reveal himself as an easily conned fool. He certainly knew that there was more to Christianity than that - one of the problems with the "social safety net" of his time was that it was mostly the work of Christian churches, not the secular government or institutions. And it was certain that like Pudd'nhead Wilson, he could get easy laughs and the approval of those he wanted to think well of him among men by ripping off cynically about pretty much everything. I think a lot of his work is more damaged by his humor - much of which is more than just dated, a lot of it was never very good to start with - than helped by it, there is more dross among those gems than there are gems.
Update: Oh, sorry, I intended to include this as a footnote:
A young boy approached Mark Twain one day, after spotting the famous author standing alone on a stone bridge in Redding, Conn. Twain was a familiar presence in the community, and the boy had awaited such a chance to express his admiration. “I was glad that he was alone,” Coley Taylor recalled years later in an article in American Heritage. “I had wanted to tell him how much I had enjoyed Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.”
But Twain’s response to the young boy’s praise was shocking. “I had never seen him so cross. I can see him yet, shaking that long forefinger at me,” Taylor recalled. “You shouldn’t read those books about bad boys!” the author scolded. “Now listen to what an old man tells you. My best book is my Recollections of Joan of Arc. You are too young to understand and enjoy it now, but read it when you are older. Remember then what I tell you now. Joan of Arc is my very best book.”
Twain made similar comments in other settings. “I like Joan of Arc best of all my books,” he wrote shortly before his death, “and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none.”
If Twain had just used the story of Roxy and the two boys and given it a more realistic narrative conclusion and relegated Pudd'nhead Wilson to his own book he might have produced a book that was better than Huckleberry Finn. Roxy, even in that bad book, might be the fullest female character Twain ever invented or imagined, though he could have cut down on the dialect to better effect. I have never been able to warm up to his treatment of Joan of Arc though he, himself, considered it his finest book.
From what I read in this paper by Anne P Wigger (inventing my own "institution" in order to get Jstor access, I'm sure Twain would have done it if he were in my position) I was right that his ridiculous fingerprint plot device was inspired by him reading Galton's book on fingerprints. The concluding court scene for which he used it is some of Twain's worst writing, it was pretty clear to me that he wanted to get the thing done and dusted as expeditiously as possible - he claimed writing the first draft was easy, the revision almost killed him. The idea that fingerprint evidence would have been produced in a court in a murder trial in the period of the story is absurd enough, the idea that untrained judges, lawyers and jurors would have been able to discern their individuality as described in the story even so absurd that Twain must have known that even as he rushed to be rid of it so he could use Pudd'nhead and his cynical aphorisms.
The paper notes that the book began as a planned farce on the topical topic of a pair of Italian conjoined twins who had toured the United States and as Twain found that topic to be less useful for a book length treatment he expanded the two stories of Roxy and the switched babies and David Wilson and Judge Driscoll gluing together bits of all three to sell in serial form to a magazine even as he, as he said himself, "pulled the twins apart". The first book form of Pudd'nhead was, at Twain's direction, published with the story of the conjoined twins "Those Extraordinary Twins."
The paper is very interesting in that it notes that Twain's correspondence with his publisher and others about the novel as well as the manuscripts and published versions of the two works the first draft became gives an extensive insight into how Twain was writing in his later years.
Twain's carelessness in his final revision is notable, in the published version of Pudd'nhead Wilson, for instance, the twins are still described as "side-show riff-raff, dime museum freaks" - terminology which is meaningless once the twins have en separated. The twins are in fact, superfluous to the plot, and a more suitable character could have been introduced to serve as the murder suspect. Leslie Fiedler, in an article on Pudd'head Wilson, attributes these remnants of the earlier story to Twain's reluctance to separate the two stores. Lamenting that the "most extraordinary book in American literature" does not exist as a whole, Fiedler argues that Twain, on the verge of creating a "monstrous poem on duplicity," lost his nerve and separated the Siamese twins farce from Puddn'head's story, the vestiges of the earlier story pointing to his "lack of conviction" about the revision. But twain could have suffered no loss of never, for not only did he finish the "monstrous poem," which is, of course, the Morgan manuscript, but he also attempted to publish it. It is relevant here to remember that Twain, particularly during the 1880's and 1890's was motivated by financial as well as artistic considerations, and his desire for a profitable sale from Pudd'nhead Wilson runs like a refrain through his letters during the period in which Pudd'nhead was being written.
I think as extraordinary and evidence that Twain, himself, must have felt like he had to explain the mess he produced, was his introduction to Extraordinary Twins and the post script is an attempt at exoneration.
Looking at a list of the literary product of Mark Twain it is remarkable how much of it there is and how little of it has lasted in common culture. I doubt much more than the original Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Prince and the Pauper and a few of the short works are read in their entirety except by Twain Scholars. The later books in which Tom and Huck and Jim appear - such little read things as Tom Sawyer Detective, Tom Sawyer Abroad - did nothing to make me look more kindly on the original.
I have read that Twain left a number of unfinished books in which Huck was to have appeared - I've never read the existing fragments - which pretty much indicates that he was trying to recycle them for some purpose, probably hoping to repeat the success he had with them. Perhaps in terms of money as well as inspiration. Looking at the chronology of his published work, I think it's pretty clear that after Life on the Mississippi (1883) his best years were behind him.
I can't think of a single piece, book length or short, that stands up in full. Huckleberry Finn almost does till Tom Sawyer reappears - the beginning with him isn't the best part of the book, either. And that's his best novel. Some of it is great writing, there are some great chapters, perhaps, there are some good stories but most of the best of it lasts the length of an aphorism.
There are certainly better American writers. I'd rather read the writing, particularly the non-fiction, of Black authors to get Twain's main theme directly from them. It is a pretty disgusting scandal how much of the academic, literary discussion of Black experience and history rests on the fictitious character of Jim written by a white man when real people and THEIR ACCOUNTS OF THEIR REAL LIVES could have taken up that time.
One of the most interesting things about Pudd'nhead Wilson is that the switched babies, one born to the slave Roxy the other to the Judge's slave owning brother's wife (who as so many mothers in American fiction, then conveniently dies) looked almost identical (as the Italian twins are almost identical) which certainly must have indicated to all but the dullest readers that they were half-brothers, perhaps closer than that considering the liklihood that Roxy was more closely related to the father of the white baby as so many slaves raped by their owners, the fathers, brothers, grandfathers and uncles of the owner rapists, would have been. But I doubt Twain could have gotten away with writing too explicitly on that theme in Jim Crow America. If I could write and I was a Black American writer, I'd certainly be tempted to take the material that Twain left in that book and tell a truer story than he managed to tell with it. I'd leave out the Pudd'nhead stuff, entirely and the Extraordinary Twins. I'd try to make it truer to the period than Twain did with that fingerprint trickery. If he hadn't shoved that into the story he could have saved himself the embarrassment of having written that awful writing of the courtroom scene. Sometimes the junk in that book reminds me of nothing so much as the incoherent improvisation of an Ed Wood movie.
------------------------
In looking more at the idea that his inability to come to a view of Christianity that got past the unreconstructed Presbyterian Calvinism of his youth colored everything he said about religion in general and Christianity in particular and, as it is with Calvinism, it was the extreme form of eternal damnation doctrine mixed with predestination to eternal damnation that was the central issue with Twain. It is a shame that in his extensive reading - Twain was a great reader - he didn't read the Greek theologians who were being translated and published in such volume in English during those years, especially Gregory of Nyssa.
I don't recall him talking about the Universalist Church which had been one of the stronger Protestant sects in 19th century America but which was probably fairly considered to be in decline by the early 20th century, They could have steered him to the texts that refuted the ideas Twain found so difficult, though I think by that time it was probably more a matter of how to be seen as manly.
There's always a struggle between Twain the moralist - his anti-racism, anti-sexism (understanding he maintained a rather romantic view of women) anti-imperialism and pro-unionism prove that he had a sincere and deep moral sense - and Twain the barroom cynic and agnostic.
Certainly the organized churches earned a lot of the derision he gave them, it's not as if there isn't a constant history of internal self-criticism, struggle and division even within sects and denominations. But I think Twain thought of religion as more properly women stuff and an opportunity for a man to reveal himself as an easily conned fool. He certainly knew that there was more to Christianity than that - one of the problems with the "social safety net" of his time was that it was mostly the work of Christian churches, not the secular government or institutions. And it was certain that like Pudd'nhead Wilson, he could get easy laughs and the approval of those he wanted to think well of him among men by ripping off cynically about pretty much everything. I think a lot of his work is more damaged by his humor - much of which is more than just dated, a lot of it was never very good to start with - than helped by it, there is more dross among those gems than there are gems.
Update: Oh, sorry, I intended to include this as a footnote:
A young boy approached Mark Twain one day, after spotting the famous author standing alone on a stone bridge in Redding, Conn. Twain was a familiar presence in the community, and the boy had awaited such a chance to express his admiration. “I was glad that he was alone,” Coley Taylor recalled years later in an article in American Heritage. “I had wanted to tell him how much I had enjoyed Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.”
But Twain’s response to the young boy’s praise was shocking. “I had never seen him so cross. I can see him yet, shaking that long forefinger at me,” Taylor recalled. “You shouldn’t read those books about bad boys!” the author scolded. “Now listen to what an old man tells you. My best book is my Recollections of Joan of Arc. You are too young to understand and enjoy it now, but read it when you are older. Remember then what I tell you now. Joan of Arc is my very best book.”
Twain made similar comments in other settings. “I like Joan of Arc best of all my books,” he wrote shortly before his death, “and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none.”
As True Here As It Is There
We can't return to normal because the normal that we had was precisely the problem.
Graffiti posted in Hong Kong
Graffiti posted in Hong Kong
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