Faction Paradox

OK, so I don't, as a general matter, blog politics. That said, the recent events in the Republican Party have roused the Poli-Sci adjunct prof in me after a multi-year slumber. With the Republican Establishment (What's left of it, anyway), combining to torpedo the campaign of the party's own front-runner (No, really), the stage looks like it's set for a grim caricature of the disastrous (for the GOP) 1912 election, in which the charismatic insurgent who tapped into the working class's discontent was deprived of the nomination by the Old Guard uniting around a weaker but palatable (to them) candidate.

Now, before I go on, let's be clear: Donald Trump is no Theodore Roosevelt. After Lincoln, TR was, to my mind, the greatest Republican in the history of the Nation. And the Progressive Party platform represents an important road not taken in American political history, and a document the promises of which were only partly realized by the New Deal and the Great Society. TR's "Bull Moose" Party offered a distinctly Republican take on populism and reform worthy of honor, and of being read today.

I cannot say anything remotely like that about the appalling Trump. And that's putting it with, to steal a line from C.P. Snow, the "maximum of charity, which is probably, as usual, uncalled for." Still--leaving aside the obvious differences in the candidates (and, to be fair, I have long winced at TR's convention speech, where he declared "We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!")--well, this looks a bit like a replay, this time as farce.

In 1912, the Stalwarts (as they called themselves) united around the less charismatic but hardly laughable William Howard Taft. Although Roosevelt had won the primary states, Taft had the delegates and the party machinery.

But Roosevelt had the enthusiasm.

And--here is the point--Roosevelt left the Party, because he felt that he had been treated unfairly, the rules manipulated, the processes tampered with, and the voice of the people ignored.

And he took his voters with him.

Conservative Rod Dreher suggests that Trump garners much of his enthusiastic support from working class white men who feel they are falling precipitously behind. They see Trump, Dreher suggests, as the one candidate who is speaking to their frustration and fears.

Now, the Stalwarts in 1912 waited until the convention to make their play. Here, the Establishment is trying to sabotage Trump before the convention. Now, doesn't this give Trump grounds to rescind his loyalty pledge to the eventual nominee? I mean, not like I expected him to keep it, but this gives him a credible reason for violating it.

And, well, whether he runs as a third party candidate or not, how do you bring his voters back into the fold, if they believe their champion (I know, the mind reels), was shivved by the very Establishment selecting the not-Trump candidate?

Myself, I can't help but view this dilemma as karmic retribution for five decades of the Southern Strategy. Faust's bargain has come due. Trump is the bill collector.

Ooh, That Was brilliant!

Well, descending from a cloud, not unlike a certain dark Mary Poppins figure, Camille Paglia is back:

In most of these cases, like the Bill Clinton and Bill Cosby stories, there’s been a complete neglect of psychology. We’re in a period right now where nobody asks any questions about psychology. No one has any feeling for human motivation. No one talks about sexuality in terms of emotional needs and symbolism and the legacy of childhood. Sexuality has been politicized–“Don’t ask any questions!” “No discussion!” “Gay is exactly equivalent to straight!” And thus in this period of psychological blindness or inertness, our art has become dull. There’s nothing interesting being written–in fiction or plays or movies. Everything is boring because of our failure to ask psychological questions.

So I say there is a big parallel between Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton–aside from their initials! Young feminists need to understand that this abusive behavior by powerful men signifies their sense that female power is much bigger than they are! These two people, Clinton and Cosby, are emotionally infantile–they’re engaged in a war with female power. It has something to do with their early sense of being smothered by female power–and this pathetic, abusive and criminal behavior is the result of their sense of inadequacy.

Now, in order to understand that, people would have to read my first book, “Sexual Personae”–which of course is far too complex for the ordinary feminist or academic mind! It’s too complex because it requires a sense of the ambivalence of human life. Everything is not black and white, for heaven’s sake! We are formed by all kinds of strange or vague memories from childhood. That kind of understanding is needed to see that Cosby was involved in a symbiotic, push-pull thing with his wife, where he went out and did these awful things to assert his own independence. But for that, he required the women to be inert. He needed them to be dead! Cosby is actually a necrophiliac–a style that was popular in the late Victorian period in the nineteenth-century.

It’s hard to believe now, but you had men digging up corpses from graveyards, stealing the bodies, hiding them under their beds, and then having sex with them. So that’s exactly what’s happening here: to give a woman a drug, to make her inert, to make her dead is the man saying that I need her to be dead for me to function. She’s too powerful for me as a living woman. And this is what is also going on in those barbaric fraternity orgies, where women are sexually assaulted while lying unconscious. And women don’t understand this! They have no idea why any men would find it arousing to have sex with a young woman who’s passed out at a fraternity house. But it’s necrophilia–this fear and envy of a woman’s power.

Oh, as usual, dear. This is the sort of stuff that has deflated Paglia's once-high standing, and, quite frankly, that's a shame.

Paglia's Sexual Personae is an interesting melange, a series of genuinely provocative close readings of classic literary texts to bring out transgressive and sexually laden content that all too often was lost under a heavy coat of academic varnish, but tied to an overarching thesis that welded genuine insights into a proposed Unified Field Theory of Culture. The book's macro theory doesn't hold, to put it kindly, but along the way Paglia shines a spotlight onto the underside of cultural icons (her chapter on Emily Dickinson alone is worth the price of the book).

But, re above: Oy.

Paglia excels at the long-form, deeply steeped, literary analysis that uncovers lost darkness, and its value, in literary eras and genres that are too often sanitized, and taken at the surface of their starchy self-images. I once asked her to be an expert witness in a case, and she turned me down, with some kind words for the quality of my analysis. (Pity, she would have been superb in the role. Still, we landed the late, great, Arthur Danto, who in fact was superb, so I can't complain). Her punditry is the worst of her--quickly sketched off the cuff reactions of the political-social world as observed by a cranky contrarian. Her literary analysis is sometimes like that in some ways, but is far better thought out, and the work of a scholar who is, for all of her quick-draw superficial takes on Salon, capable of so much more.

What really made me think of Missy and her Poppins moment? Because, unlike her rather statements about politics, I think Paglia could have a field day doing an exegesis of Moffat's use of victorian iconography, especially that surrounding death and sexuality, in Season 8 of Doctor Who. Someone's got to give Philip Sandifer a run for his money, after all.

The Rest is Silence: End of An Era

It's often forgotten that the iconic '60s anthem is, in Milos Forman's 1979 telling, as well as in the original, in fact a dirge.

A dirge that sees the good-natured hippie, Claude, swept into the mincing machine of the Vietnam War, and then a dirge for all the lost, and then, only then, the outbreak of high-spirited, but ultimately serious protest we know. Shorn of this context, it becomes anodyne, even trite.

The film was released, of course, just at the time the 60s movement--the "Long Sixties" if you will--was about to expire. Hair was released on May 9, 1979; six months later, almost to the day, November 4, 1979, the Iranian Hostage Crisis began.

The Age of Reagan had begun with it.

For all its comedy, liveliness, and spirit, Hair was a dirge for itself, and its era.

***

We starve, look at one another, short of breath
Walking proudly in our winter coats
Wearing smells from laboratories
Facing a dying nation of moving paper fantasy
Listening for the new told lies
With supreme visions of lonely tunes
Singing our space songs on a spider web sitar
Life is around you and in you
Answer for Timothy Leary, dearie

***

I thought of this because we have taken a first step away from the Reagan Era status quo--the outsize importance our politics give Iran, and the seething hatred for that autocratic and theocratic regime that was inbred into so many of my generation and our elders. Vietnam was a national trauma, but it unspooled over a decade. The hostage crisis was concentrated and my 13 year old self was swept up in the emotion swirling around the hostages. My friends will be surprised to know that I, then an apolitical youth, rooted for Reagan, as did my parents, in that first election.

It was only living in the Age of Reagan that turned me into the liberal I became in my high school years, and that I remain today.

I became a dissenter from the Long Island conservatism that surrounded me, and in which I was formed, if only by opposing it.

And so I wonder what the generation will become that has been raised in the sclerotic years of the Long Age of Reagan, which, I think, is finally setting at last. We have battled against each other in a time dominated by an absolutist idealized vision of Reagan that lacks the occasional pragmatism that was the Gipper's saving grace.

It has been, I think, the Obama Presidency's burden to try to maneuver through the interstices of the now long-stale battle between orthodoxies of the Right and Left that no longer address the conditions or issues of the day--the felt necessities of the time are not summed up in the 1980s anymore. The battles between Democrats and Republicans these last years have a weirdly formulaic resonance--we know what each side will say before they say it, and it's done with so much less conviction than before. The generations of Reagan and Carter, of Clinton and McCain, have battled themselves to exhaustion. (And what of Hilary Clinton? Will she, if she ever takes the stage, fit either or neither?)

Whatever else one may say of him, Obama has, in one way, succeeded; he has modeled a role for government that does not fit the post World War II, High Cold War paradigm of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, nor the late Cold War "shrink it" paradigm of Reagan. We've been so caught up in the stale old kabuki drama that we haven't noticed it, but something new has been done, whether for weal or woe.

Yes, I think it's more for weal--but I would, wouldn't I, as Mandy Rice-Davies might remind me.

Whatever. The long 80s are coming to an end. On their way out, we're all winning and losing the battles that defined the era. Marriage Equality? Chalk one up for the liberals. Austerity in Europe, and only a partially Keynesian response in the US? Tie. The Right to Bear Arms sacralized? Conservatives on the board. You get the idea.

But somewhere under the ice, again, whether for weal or woe, is stirring a new Era to replace the long 80s.

***

Somewhere, inside something there is a rush of
Greatness, who knows what stands in front of
Our lives, I fashion my future on films in space
Silence tells me secretly
Everything
Everything



(Quotes from Let the Sunshine In (Lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni and music by Galt MacDermot.)