The Three Weeks

Halloween always marks the beginning of my least personal least favorite holiday, 'The Three Weeks.' The three weeks between Halloween and Thanksgiving are, for me, the worst time of every year. The lack of sunlight and eternal gray, the dying of the trees and absence of birds, the wet rain colder than any snow... I find November so much more difficult than winter, when we've all adjusted to this new world and have occasional outbursts of snow, color, good cheer, and light.

Bad things just seem to happen to me during The Three Weeks in manners that seem almost occult. I won't give many examples... but last year's Three Weeks were made still much worse by an unexpected and very messy breakup, devastating enough to make me move into my childhood home for nine months because the general loneliness of a small apartment was just too much to bear. I'm now back home for three months, and the mess I left last 'three weeks' is still not picked up - dishes, trashbags, bedsheets... it's just a wonderful life to come back to... and very difficult to resume in any way that invests faith that things can improve.

Judaism has its own 'Three Weeks of Mourning' in the three weeks before the Ninth of Av, the summer holiday that commemorates the destruction of the two Israelite Temples in Jerusalem. On the one hand, it's very difficult in a modern context to mourn what our more skeptical era would perceive to be a malodorous slaughterhouse. On the other hand, it is a commemoration of all the time immemorial destruction of imperial occupiers, who slaughter for glory rather than sacrifice.

Can the world exist without this kind of senseless domination and subjugation, or is there just a wheel of humiliation, where some people are inevitably up at the expense of people who are down? History so far would seem to show the world can't, and yet no decent person could get out of bed in the morning without believing that it can. It's a very cruel paradox, and one with no real resolution.

Tomorrow I will be kicking off the festivities with a visit to the cardiologist to investigate my omnipresently accelerated heartbeat and shortness of breath, even after losing roughly twenty pounds in twenty weeks. This is roughly par for the course. I suspect the news will not be all great. We're all not supposed to believe in hexes but sometimes it's difficult...

Due to a mixture of health, disenchantment, and anxiety, I barely socialize anymore, my once extremely social self finding that all but the closest friends and family are extremely anxiety inducing unless indulging in substances that are clearly deleterious to my body.

There aren't that many consolations left to me, and the paradox is that the more you isolate yourself, the more you ask yourself 'where did it go so wrong?' and 'was there ever a way to right this ship?'

And so I grit my teeth, put my head down, bare whatever bad news comes - as it does every single year..., and await the end of The Three Weeks and the coming of Thanksgiving and Holidays, hoping that my resolve to not indulge in food and drink will hold, and at the same time any celebrations coming my way will give any satisfaction without the haze of food and drink to abet it.

What shitshow is in store for me this year?

Tale 8: Paris 1899 - First eighth or so

 The chef was not quite French and not quite German. He'd been in her employ since childhood when she was just Mademoiselle Bloom. His father Ludwig was chef to Monsieur Bloom, his grandfather Ludovic cuisinier to Herr Bloom. The Blooms were in Alsace since the 12th century, and as far as the Wolfshunds knew, a Wolfshund cooked for a Bloom when the Blooms entertained Emperor Barbarossa. Every Wolfshund knew how to make that egg-noodle monstrosity they called 'kugel' and that wretched apples nuts and wine dip they forced themselves to eat every Passover. 

But now that Madame Bloom was Baroness Bloch, Louis Wolfshund was in Paris, ordered to move with with new Baroness so her children would know how a decent Baekoffe and Shiffala taste. Once in Paris, Louis cured meat at the feet of the Bloch's formidable executive chefs, two brothers and Italian kitchen tyrants named Ebreo, and whom together taught Louis by the spoon how to make Paris's best Beouf Bourguignion, Coq au vin and Cassoulet, along with some worthlessly fried ball of bicot merde called 'falafel.' And yet upon retirement the Ebreos recommended a different executive chef with Louis as the mere chef de cuisine. Fortunately, the young and facile Chef Rosenthal had a better offer: the kitchen of Baron de Rothschild, and therefore Louis was made executive chef to what he knew he'd soon raise to Paris's best kitchen in any house or restaurant. 

And still, when Le Cordon Bleu opened in 1895, the Bloch ordered him to enroll immediately, Louis, an executive chef of Paris for nineteen years whose food was served to Zola, Rodin, Clemenceau and Rothschild a dozen times each was taking instruction on how to crack eggs. The Rothschilds never made Chef Rosenthal enroll... The other servants explained to him that this was meant as a great honor. Imagine being the first scientist to graduate from l'Ecole Polytechnique! 

The truth of the matter was the Blochs were concerned that all their friends had younger chefs who'd be trained at Le Cordon Bleu, and they didn't want anyone to comment that the Blochs employ a chef with credentials any less than immaculate. Jewish or gentile, the Blochs knew they would find no better chef out of Le Cordon Bleu's graduates than Louis already was, so Baroness Bloch hit upon the magnificent idea to send Louis to Le Cordon Bleu, where he could stun the students and faculty with his quality and become known to a wide gastronomic public as one of the finest chefs of the Third Republic. 

Louis always suspected the idea was not the Baroness's but rather the lady's maid, Lisette. Louis had always flirted in ways designed to make Lisette mal at ease; he thought the way she looked embarrassed deeply charming, and of course, thought Lisette's protestations of disinterest the lies of a teasing flirter who took pleasure in drawing out Louis's seduction, only to be told one day in 1895 that he would spend six hours every day learning to cook like a first-year dishwasher when he knew everything better than his maitres, and have no free moment for Lisette to play with force for the next two years.  

For the first year, the young students at Le Cordon Bleu laughed at Louis like serpents in a vegetable garden, as he knew they would - a Baron's executive chef forced to take lessons in remedial cooking, and from teachers who had not half his experience or skill. Just his mere presence in a place like this ensured no professor would appreciate his professionalism or gift. And while the students snickered at his presence, the maitres critiqued his kitchen technique as though he were a first year sous chef when he hadn't burned a Sauce Bearnaise in thirty years and could make the clearest Consomme to be found outside the kitchen of Auguste Escoffier at the Savoy in London. Surely, were these amateur gourmands true chefs themselves, they would be employed in a grand house like the Maison Bloch, to which he had to return every evening and prepare the night's meal he'd assembled that morning before class.

But in Louis's second year at Cordon Bleu arose a student group inflamed on the eclat of French glory and incensed there would be any French chefs who polluted their cuisine with international influence: discussing with outrage that any French chef would serve a Ratatouille on pasta or drench a Coq au vin in Riesling, and repeat with outrage the oft-repeated claims that omlettes and pates were Tuscan in origin rather than French. Their consciousness of the foreign encroachment sharpened by the subversive threat on display in the trial of Lt. Colonel Dreyfus.  

Obviously these students were passionate about food, and Louis finally made time in his assiduously occupied schedule to attend a group meeting of "Cuisine Francaise pour la France," where he quickly discovered these students to be so incompetent they could barely hold together a Croque Madame. Louis immediately began banging the pots and shouting at these culinary infants like a proper chef and shoved them out of the classroom stoves' way to demonstrate their every error. For this fanatical histrionic he received not jeers but a hail of applause. Over the next six hours, Louis neglected the Bloch's dinner and showed them all the mistakes with which their maitres were instructing them. A student finally asked him in which kitchen he learned, and when he said that for twenty years he's been executive chef in the kitchen of Baron Bloch, the room went completely silent, until someone called out: "Only a Jew would force a servant as loyal as me back to training." the students followed by approving nods of 'd'accord.' A year's worth of rage came venting forth about all the luminaries whose compliments he received, all the absurd dietary demands by Bloch relatives (and all the times he secretly disobeyed them), and how two years of remedial culinary training was his reward. 

It seemed quite sudden that Louis was hailed as the glory of Le Cordon Bleu's first graduating class, but there he was, the head of faculty suddenly taking his instruction on how much raspberry sauce Escofier put on top his peche Melba and how La Varenne's bisque and Bechamel was more butter and fat than the official recipe ever called. 

When a representative of the military was called in to talk about the Dreyfus case and the importance of maintaining the honor and purity of France in all her endeavors, Louis needed no convincing. When he returned to Maison Bloch, Louis Wolfshund was hailed as France's finest executive chef short of Escoffier and Rosenthal, and he'd made up his mind that never again would he serve falafel, charoset. No more brassado bagels, no more Provencal breast of veal served in chicken soup, no more water challah with potatoes, no more carp a la juive in a parsley sauce, no more smoked beef tongue, and no more apple pudding made with matzoh. 

When Louis returned, the Blochs tripled his salary along with septuple overtime for holidays, and he went right on making that revolting food a la juif. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tale 8: Paris 1899 - Rewritten Beginning

  The chef was not quite French and not quite German. He'd been in her employ since childhood when she was just Mademoiselle Rosheim. His father Ludwig was chef to Monsieur Rosheim, his grandfather Ludovic cuisinier to Herr Rosheim. The Rosheims were in Alsace since the 12th century, and as far as the Wolfshunds knew, a Wolfshund cooked for a Rosheim when the Rosheims entertained Emperor Barbarossa. Every Wolfshund knew how to make that egg-noodle monstrosity they called 'kugel' and that wretched apples nuts and wine dip they forced themselves to eat every Passover. 

But now that Madame Rosheim was Baroness Hachmei, Louis Wolfshund was in Paris, ordered to move with with new Baroness so her children would know how a decent Baekoffe and Shiffala taste. Once in Paris, Louis cured meat at the feet of the Hachmei's formidable executive chefs, two brothers and Italian kitchen tyrants named Ebreo, and whom together taught Louis by the spoon how to make Paris's best Beouf Bourguignion, Coq au vin and Cassoulet, along with some worthlessly fried ball of bicot merde called 'falafel.' And yet upon retirement the Ebreos recommended a different executive chef with Louis as the mere chef de cuisine. Fortunately, the young and facile Chef Rosenthal had a better offer: the kitchen of Baron de Rothschild, and therefore Louis was made executive chef to what he knew he'd soon raise to Paris's best kitchen in any house or restaurant. 

And still, when Le Cordon Bleu opened in 1895, the Hachmeis ordered him to enroll immediately, Louis, an executive chef of Paris for nineteen years whose food was served to Zola, Rodin, Clemenceau and Rothschild a dozen times each was taking instruction on how to crack eggs. The Rothschilds never made Chef Rosenthal enroll... The other servants explained to him that this was meant as a great honor. Imagine being the first scientist to graduate from l'Ecole Polytechnique! 

The truth of the matter was the Hachmeis were concerned that all their friends had younger chefs who'd be trained at Le Cordon Bleu, and they didn't want anyone to comment that the Hachmeis employ a chef with credentials any less than immaculate. Jewish or gentile, the Hachmeis knew they would find no better chef out of Le Cordon Bleu's graduates than Louis already was, so Baroness Hachmei hit upon the magnificent idea to send Louis to Le Cordon Bleu, where he could stun the students and faculty with his quality and become known to a wide gastronomic public as one of the finest chefs of the Third Republic. 

Louis always suspected the idea was not the Baroness's but rather the lady's maid, Lisette. Louis had always flirted in ways designed to make Lisette mal at ease; he thought the way she looked embarrassed deeply charming, and of course, thought Lisette's protestations of disinterest the lies of a teasing flirter who took pleasure in drawing out Louis's seduction, only to be told one day in 1895 that he would spend six hours every day learning to cook like a first-year dishwasher when he knew everything better than his maitres, and have no free moment for Lisette to play with force for the next two years.  

For the first year, the young students at Le Cordon Bleu laughed at Louis like serpents in a vegetable garden, as he knew they would - a Baron's executive chef forced to take lessons in remedial cooking, and from teachers who had not half his experience or skill. Just his mere presence in a place like this ensured that no professor would appreciate his professionalism or gift. And as the students snickered at his presence, the maitres critiqued his dishes as though he were a first-year waiter when he hadn't burned a Sauce Bearnaise in thirty years and could make Consomme a thousand million times clearer than any of these amateur gourmands ever could. Surely, were they true chefs themselves, they would be employed in a grand house like the Maison Hachmei, to which he had to return every evening and prepare the night's meal he'd assembled that morning before class.

But in the second year, a student assembly arose: Cuisine Francaise pour la France, which  

(Louis becomes their star by sharing dirt on the Hachmei's)

When he returned, he did everything he could to show Lisette withering scorn, and Lisette Charlappe matched his contempt, ridicule for derision. 

no longer an Alsatian but a Frenchman who had even more reasons to hate Jews than every other decent Frenchman. 

The Thing About Yuja Wang

So now that yet another row has developed about Yuja Wang's clothes, here's the thing: on the one hand, you don't have to listen with your eyes open. Just close your eyes or put on a CD, open a video in a window you don't look at, and listen to what she's offering. The problem is that what she's offering is incredibly shallow and robotic.

Without looking at her, listen to this performance of the Chopin preludes. The Chopin preludes contain some of the sexiest, most romantic music ever written. It is literally the music of love in both its joys and heartbreak, but nearly every note sounds brittle and cast in steel. She still plays like she's in conservatory and every note is being played to impress a faculty jury. I can't find a single wrong note, there are deeply impressive soft dynamics, but every single bend of the phrase sounds coached and forced. No inner voices are brought out and there is no sense of the piano's infinite variety of color. But except for #8 in F-Sharp Major, which is genuinely impressive, it's all just monochrome and dull, loud or soft. She's playing as though she's just reading symbols on a page. There phrases have no rise and fall, the rhythms have barely any ebb and flow, and her sound in the loud passages is so brittle and percussive that it's just ugly.

Technically, Yuja Wang may be the single most formidable pianist in the world, but in the head, heart, and soul, where is she? Occasionally she gives glimpses of the human being within, and what's inside is not that attractive either. There are the shows with Igutesman and Joo where she does comedy that plays to all kinds of yellowface stereotypes. Perhaps she just doesn't know better, but to not know better than that at 35 is indicative of an immaturity that will stay permanent.

As far as I'm concerned, Yuja Wang can wear whatever she wants. She can come onstage wearing a swan like Bjork, and she'd still deserve to be judged by the ear alone rather than the eye, but to anybody who's really listening, what comes to the ear is so lacking that her approach to clothes is indicative of her artistic approach, which is so on the surface that the clothes almost seem like a deliberate distraction from her lack of substance. She may be the most technically formidable pianist in the world, she's also a pianist who'd have no reason to get an international career if she looked like Yefim Bronfman.

I admit, unless they're gay, I have a lot of distrust and contempt for attractive artists. Perhaps the problem is me, but I don't really think so. My experience has always been that attractive people are completely unaware of how charmed they have it and attractiveness can stunt compassion as much as whiteness or maleness. People just give them things and attractive people rely on their aesthetic appeal as much as white people rely on their whiteness. It is so easy for people who have never known daily rejection to simply perform heartbreak without having really experienced it. Ugly people are subject to all the same sexual pressures and terrors, perhaps not as consistently, but because ugly people have known so much rejection, the relationships, when they happen, tend toward a kind of dysfunctionality attractive people really, really don't understand. I could try to explain it but I'd be here all week.

So since we're now in an era when so many people believe that identity matters in every interaction, I do believe that an objectively measurable aesthetic identity influences the way people live their lives as much as any other form of identity. When I hear Myra Hess, Guiomar Novaes, Gina Bachauer, the Marias Yudina and Grinburg, I hear that inner depth that comes from an artist communicating substance rather than effect. One is a naked communicating from the heart, the other clothes a lack of heart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSpf9bKK_Zk&fbclid=IwAR348-Mw6eHW6gb5cRNZmR_F9zp95rmgB9KeOiOUV9FXy_jSDVcV7KXDLL4

Tale 8: Paris, 1899 - Beginning

 The chef was not quite French and not quite German. He'd been in her employ since childhood when she was just Mademoiselle Marceau. His father Ludwig was chef to Monsieur Marceau, his grandfather Ludovic chef to Herr Marceau. The Marceaus had been in Alsace since the 12th century, and as far as the Gerhardts knew, they'd cooked for Marceaus the whole time. Every Gerhardt knew how to make that egg-noodle monstrosity they called 'kugel' and that wretched apples nuts and wine dip they forced themselves to eat every Passover. 

But now Madame Marceau was Baroness Bloch, she was in Paris, and Louis Gerhardt was basically ordered to move with her so her children would know what decent Baekoffe and Shiffala taste like. And once in Paris, Louis went to work with the Bloch's chef de cuisine, a kitchen tyrant named Halevi who taught him by the spoon how to make Paris's best Beouf Bourguignion, Coq au vin and Cassoulet, along with some egg noodle monstrosity called 'kugel' and still he recommended a different chef to take his place when he retired. Fortunately Monsieur Rosenthal was offered the top spatula in the kitchen of Baron de Rothschild, and therefore Louis went about about running what he knew was Paris's best kitchen in house or restaurant. 

And still, when Le Cordon Bleu opened in 1895, the Blochs made him enroll, a chef with forty years experience, taking classes on how to use eggs. Nobody made Chef Rosenthal enroll... The other servants explained to him that it was a great honor. Imagine being the first scientist to graduate from l'Ecole Polytechnique! The truth of the matter was the Blochs were concerned that all their friends had younger chefs who would be trained at Le Cordon Bleu, and they didn't want anyone to feel their chef was in any way inferior. Jewish or gentile, the Blochs knew they would find no better chef out of Le Cordon Bleu's graduates than Louis already was, so Baroness Bloch hit upon the idea to send Louis to Le Cordon Bleu. 

Louis had always suspected that the idea was not the Baroness's but rather the lady's maid, Lisette. Louis had always flirted in ways designed to make Lisette mal at ease, he thought the way she looked embarrassed deeply charming, and of course, thought her protestations of disinterest in Louis the lies of a teasing flirter who took pleasure in drawing out the seduction, only to be told one day in 1895 that he would spend six hours in school every day and have no free moment to play with force for the next two years.  

When he returned, he did everything he could to show Lisette withering scorn, and Lisette matched his contempt ridicule for derision.  

no longer an Alsatian but a Frenchman who had even more reasons to hate Jews than every other decent Frenchman. 

Good Books #2: Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

 

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The world doesn't have to like Thomas Mann, but the world has to reckon with him and his grim, deterministic view of humanity that believes every human's fate is their character. One might call it tragic if his vision had humanity, but Mann's novels sometimes read like military campaigns which proceed from an outline hewed to as strictly as an iron cast; he sees humans as little more than animals with a language - biological organisms whose every articulate thought is a mere extension of animal instinct. Like a model student in Bismarck's Germany, everything in Mann is seen as either strength or weakness, and weakness is something Mann views with a fascination that borders on pornographic. He sees in every human indulgence a corrupting worm that weakens body and spirit, which he views as indivisible, and lovingly documents human decline at every phase from the mountain's peak to the ocean's floor. Like Nietzsche and Wagner and Marx, he is one of those troublingly uncompassionate artists whom we are free not to like, but we can't simply ignore, because as dark as their view of humanity is, they have a lot of evidence to back up that they're right. Even if you disagree with them, you have to know them well enough to argue with them, because even if their worldviews are wrong, they are compelling enough to convince millions.

Buddenbrooks is, by a long shot, my favorite book by a writer I don't particularly like. Mann was a genius who wrote one of the greatest of all novels by the time he was 25. During his early 20s, Mann created a 770 page portrait of a family, of an age, of a city, a country, of families the world over, of history itself, that showed an entirely new world-perspective. The work begins as though it's Jane Austen, and ends with all the tragedy of King Lear, and in between documents a process of entropy with a clinical eye much more accurate than anything in Freud. It begins amid the sense of purpose which so many 19th century denizens found in the belief that all things were improving, only for every expectation of progress to be dashed along the seashore's rocks. It was a new kind of novel from a new generation, who realized that something in European society had come terribly unmoored, and every secure expectation with which their parents lived their lives would not be the expectations of their own. Thomas Mann's first novel, in its oblique way, was a prophecy of everything imminent.

Just as people die, just as civilizations die, so too do families. The novel begins amid the prosperity of the post-Napoleonic peace, an era when German speaking lands flourished because France was crushed and Germany had learned all the lessons of modern France. Families like the Buddenbrooks were free to experience all the benefits of French culture and none of the drawbacks of French dominance. They lived free from expectation and were free to newly create themselves during an era when noblemen no longer dominated them. They were not only free, they were whole. They were more than merely happy, they were fulfilled - they knew exactly who and what they were supposed to be.

And yet in every rise is an original sin that begins an irreversible process of decline. All that rises falls. For those fortunate enough to rise, the rise is usually very quick, and it's very arbitrary whom among the millions of hard workers is chosen for great things. The fall is so much slower, it has so many stages along the way, and is far more observable:

First comes the materialist generation who rises because they have a realistic view of the world and uses it to their advantage - today we call them the 'Greatest Generation.' Then comes a spiritual generation who sees an invisible hand in all things which always clears a way to their prosperity - today we call them the 'Baby Boomers.' Then comes a generation of expectations, for whom the way of life is so codified that they find the expectations with which they grew up impossible to meet, or so all-consuming that maintaining their identity becomes a prison with no escape, today we call them 'millenials.' And then comes a generation who never has a chance to develop their identity at all.

And from the solidity of that first generation who knows exactly what their lives are, comes a process in which the consistent expectations of one generation give way to a world where nobody knows what to do anymore; a process where consistent work and expectations gives way to a roller coaster of boredom and overstimulation, until many in the later generations have no idea how to live without overstimulation, and expend all the energies of their lives before they can truly meet their potential and purpose.

Hopefully, all this reminds you of someone. Whether it's over four generations or nine, this is the process by which civilizations decline. This is, almost unquestionably, the process by which prosperity dissipates and warps the perceptions of those who live within it. We, the Americans born between my age and 1996, are the generation of Thomas and Christian Buddenbrook - either so beset by expectations for our lives that we're entombed by them, or so desperate to run away from our life expectations that we ruin our lives in the process.

It's obviously not the whole human story, and still greater novelists like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky can show how those seeming dissipations carry the seeds of a new rise, and also that prosperity itself is a false, arbitrary state of affairs. Life and history are cycles just as all nature is. What makes Thomas Mann great is that he is a great documentarian of the life cycle's declining half. What makes him deeply troubling is that he does not document the rise. It's up to the greatest of the great, like Shakespeare or Goethe, to document the whole life cycle.

But Mann, like us, has the sense that he arrived too late to really experience prosperity and security. He, like us, are living witnesses to a civilization in its late phase. We only came onto the stage when the play was more than half over, and all that's left to do now is watch the final act. The poor new generation may not even get to experience the final act and can only watch as the scenery gets dismantled. All things that rise do fall, and the US-lead world is now full of millions of Buddenbrooks-like families, worried they are at the high tide of their prosperity, with a crash imminent and a tragic decline soon to follow.

But during World War II, Thomas Mann came to America, the country where the life cycle was renewed. Mann's own own personal life was a shambles - he was a closeted and celibate homosexual with six children, and his children's lives were a bizarre intermingling of tragedy and colossal achievement. But within that mess, Mann stood in the world's eyes, rightly, as a symbol of everything that was great and healthy about Germany. A artist bordering on prophet who saw the civilization's rot for what it was fifty years before Europe itself had to acknowledge its extent. In spite of Mann's fatalism, in spite of Europe's terrible fate, life muddled on, civilization muddled on, prosperity and freedom endured - even if it journeyed to another part of the globe for a while, and eventually, within the seeds of that decline was the glorious future of modern Germany, modern Europe, and modern families. All things of this earth are meant to be destroyed and rebuilt. Whatever Buddenbrooks were born after 1877 probably made their fortune over by 1905 only to lose half their children in World War I and their money in the hyperinflation that followed; and then remade their fortune in the Nazi era only to lose more money and progeny in the accompanying wars, only to make their money back in the economic miracle following the war (if they stayed around Lubeck and Hamburg), and keep it for a lifetime.

The next American lifetime is probably going to be a far greater roller coaster than the last one. It's likely we'll see terrible things we wish we'd never seen, both things done to us and things we do to others, and in whatever comes, it's quite possible that for all we've suffered, we will be the worse villains... But whatever is coming next for 'US', the world rebuilds back better, and for whomever is left, there is a secure future in store for more fortunate generations just as there's been for modern Germany

Meaning

I have always felt like an advance scout for my generation. I don't know if mental illness aged me horribly from the first moment I experienced it thirty years ago, but I always looked older, felt older, and apparently seemed older, and since nobody ever realized how tactless it was to remind me of it every single day, why the fuck should I have ever attempted tact towards them whose hypocrisy is as visible as all the things my various illnesses wrought upon me?

I went crazy from the earliest age, I had an endless litany of resentments from the earliest age, and I had every expectation upended of what my life was supposed to be while my years on earth were still in their single digits. My whole life has been what my generation has become as adults, and I'm beginning to expect I will be an advance scout for illness and the hereafter. There was no inherent blessing in anything I endured except to say that for all my mental obsessions and delusions, I do think it makes me see certain things more clearly, at least in some sense, and see where struggles lead from my vast personal reservoir of suffering decades which no upper-middle-class kid of my generation was ever supposed to experience.

I have spent three plus decades now dealing with a battery of mental illnesses that are frankly more agony than any white collar job could ever be. My capacity to be anything but a semi-invalid is next to none, and while I suppose I've maintained a figleaf over that reality to many people who knew me superficially and for all the obvious neuroses saw the hyper-eloquence and savant capacity for remembering facts, anyone who cared to look closely enough could figure out the truth, which is that life as most people experience it was over for me before it even began.

I won't speak the details of the physical health scare I had today, but it was terrifying. Even if it turns out to be nothing, it was still terrifying and makes me wonder if I won't be around much longer and that I have a limited amount of time to get all my ideas out on paper so that, some day at least, people might read it and think that my life had some meaning and value. The rest of my body is beginning to resemble my brain, and I must brace myself that whether the remaining days of my life are a short or long period, I was born with an inbuilt genius for suffering. Even if I manage somehow to cure my brain late in life, it seems stress's damage on my body is already done, and it will be a series of debilitating physical illnesses from here on out, any one of which could carry me off as easily as wind carries off the pedals of a dandelion. And, of course, even if that's not true, then that is yet another mental delusion coursing through my brain, and one day the delusions themselves could claim me forever, and this is yet another one among millions of ways the neurological labyrinth turns with ever more misdirections.

Life is obviously not supposed to be a place where everybody treats each other with dignity and respect. Life is obviously not supposed to be easy. The point of life is not harmony or even love, the point of life is life. Life is only lived through finding meaning in our experience, and only half of experience is objective. So therefore, meaning is only arrived at through struggle and stress, much of which is self-generated. Life is supposed to be a place where we never get what we wish for, and in those few moments when we get what we wish for, we realize almost immediately that we wished for the wrong thing. And yet if we don't pursue it, we'll go crazy - believe me, I know...

What makes us happy is something both deeper and shallower than any goal. All that makes us temporarily happy is lodged deep within the animal brain, the limbic system which responds instinctively to certain activities with endorphins and dopamine: music, sports, movies, books, food, outdoor activity, bedroom unmentionables, whatever it is to which your brain is oriented by physio-chemical wires, that is what gives you satisfaction.

But meaning is almost the opposite of happiness. Meaning is what we arrive at by putting ourselves through hell. Meaning is the struggle that we'll never know is worthwhile, but nevertheless is seared into our brains to pursue at every moment precisely because none of us are meant to be happy, we inevitably wonder why, and we inevitably pursue cures for it, only to find that the vast majority of the cures we pursue are no cures at all. And yet nothing at all makes us unhappier than not pursuing what may give us meaning.

I have always, somehow, had the thought in my head that I will die just in time to be spared the disaster I feel in my bones is coming for my generation. What we all are experiencing now may just be the tip of an iceberg within a world that every year departs further and further from solid ground. Will it be Global Warming? Will it be nuclear war with China or Russia? Will it be civil war? Will it be electronic attacks or biological weapons or authoritarian dictatorships? If any of that is coming, some of us are going to die. It's that simple, and people like me would be dead weight from the first minute.

The point of life is life, and what makes life meaningful is the idea that some of us, some group of us, some version of us, survives the great unmooring to the other side, and that there is some continuity. What may prevent misery for us all is the idea that some version of everything we are has a future and continues. Lots of people say that the past and the future is an illusion, and there is only a present. I have come to be a fervent believer in the opposite. The present is so fleeting and meaningless - all for me that prevents an eternal present of anxiety and depression is the thought that the past and future of everyone I know and love will still have meaning, and we have endured our struggles so that the life of the past can be remembered, so that one day the life of the future can contribute their chapter to our continued human stories. Whomever you are, whomever is reading this, what will fill us all with the most emptiness and anxiety is the idea that we've struggled for nothing, for no one, and we're just another meaningless life who endured the colossal things we endured to the benefit of no one at all.

Whatever will be in our best interests to get us there may be what gives our lives the most meaning and satisfaction. I so often wish I was anyone but who I am and could live a completely different kind of life from the one I live, but as I am, all I have is my pen, it's all I can do even remotely well. I wonder how well can a person beset by mental hardships really do it, but whatever time I have left, be it seven days or seventy years, that seems to be all I can do to give my own life meaning, and I have to get it all down on paper every day as though it's my last, because my body is beginning to tell me that my last day may be sooner than I think.

I obviously don't know what my future holds or anyone else's, and as always, it's extremely unwise to publish my thoughts on this, but such is the mental diarrhea that if I hold it in, the bad thoughts only scream louder. Such may be my life from near birth to death, and such it seems to be from year to year as decline, decrepitude, and decay declare their intent to run their course through me.

...Perhaps this is just the lack of sunlight talking....

What Stewart and Obama have Wrought

It should tell you exactly how far discourse has shifted in five short years when Jon Stewart and Barack Obama are both sounding profoundly old-fashioned and un-woke. Stewart is putting all his credibility on the line to defend Dave Chappelle and Obama is going around the campaign trail railing against the politics of division.

The truth is that both Stewart and Obama are not different than they ever were, what's different is the country they left behind, the country that they've arguably done more to shape than any two Americans of the 21st century. The problem is that neither they nor uncritical acolytes thought much about the unintended consequences of their particular progressivism, and we're only beginning to reap its whirlwind.

When, as Stewart did, you spend fifteen years going after the bullshit of the right, the only way to not have any bad consequences is to make sure on every one of your 2500 episodes that you're focusing on the greed of the leaders rather than the idiocy of their followers. But Stewart couldn't help it. Stupidity is really, really funny, and some of the followers of Bush and McConnell are really, really stupid. Stewart is not a politician, he's a comedian, and it's really hard to find good comic material for 160 episodes a year. He couldn't help that there was so much good material on the Right, and he couldn't help that the Democrats of 20 years ago were so much less ridiculous than today. He was a victim of his cosmic success. He never asked to be the voice of a generation, but by 2000, the Republican party had gone so far off the rails that there was room for a cultural voice who drew blood and spoke up with a megaphone for urban, progressive values, particularly because the left wing of the country had no leader. Howard Dean briefly was that, but he was neither a good politician nor strategist. Barack Obama semi-became that leader, but he was too large to be contained by any one movement, and Elizabeth Warren arrived to Presidential politics four years too late to assume that mantle.

Instead, one year after Jon Stewart, that mantle was assumed by Bernie Sanders, who pulled Stewart's generation much further left than Stewart ever intended to guide them.

Economically, both Stewart and Sanders are fundamentally socialists who believed in the importance of economics far more than they ever believed in any cultural arguments, but the reason both of them were successful had very little to do with economics. Culture was what made them successful. What made them successful was that they inflamed people's contempt for the 'other side', they didn't just give voice to rage, they were the rage.

Jon Stewart is not Bernie Sanders. For all the red meat he threw the left wing base, he never said 'we need a revolution in this country' or 'the business model of Wall Street is fraud' as Bernie Sanders did. And for all the economic worries of the current left-wing, their economic worries are still only cultural worries in disguise as economics. People are worried about their debts and lack of opportunities, but they're not worried about famine, and if they're worried about getting killed, it's usually not a gunman from rural areas they need to worry about. What they're worried about is not economic problems, they're worried about problems of dignity, and these are cultural worries from an educated urban class promised more opportunities than we ever got.

And then there's Obama, who had exactly the opposite problem. Obama was not rageful, he was naive. After five years, it becomes more clear than ever that Obama's belief that people are reasonable at heart was colossally naive. He really did believe that people can be convinced to pursue their rational self-interests, so if he spent eight years trying to make an irrational party listen to reason, the other side would eventually be reasonable.

Obama wanted to change the tone of America's conversation. Speech after speech after speech that explained the plight of one side of America to the other. Everybody wiped a tear, and nobody applied Obama's lessons to their own lives. Right-wingers simply got angrier than ever, more convinced with every overture that Obama had contempt for them - and why did they believe that? Because they had contempt for him. And because they treated Obama and his supporters with such hatred, the Left's answered their hatred with hatred.

Part of Obama hatred was racism, but part of it was also classism: they couldn't believe that any urban liberal who believed in government solutions could solve their problems. And part of it was simply a poisonous ideology, an ideology even more basic and tribal than racism - the ideological sickness of complete individualism which states that with enough hard work, individual Americans can build anything they wish, communities only get in the way and are the way that weak people leech themselves off great individuals. And from that philosophy which glorifies a delusion worthy of being called a mental illness, gut hatreds get strengthened like racism, sexism, and sexual phobias, because, of course, these people already believe that only white men are strong and smart enough to achieve great things. The evidence? Only white men seem to have achieved great things in the past. Why did that happen? Not because white men were more evolved than the rest of humanity, but because humanity itself was less evolved and it took a million years for human beings to achieve any historic accomplishment at all.

Obama refused to indulge rage at all, Stewart indulged rage too much. We had no leadership that best exemplified what it really means to get angry in good faith, because both of them operated under idealistic delusions about human character.

The best example we've had in 21st century America of a person who understood how to put rage in its proper proportion was Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is the world as it really is, where getting your hands dirty is just part of living; so course Hillary got that equation right, and America didn't want to hear it from that source.

And now we're living in an entirely different world shaped by children of Obama and Stewart who've rebelled against them both. On the one hand the woke generation expanded Obama's idealism to the nth degree - believing that a world can be enacted that is even remotely free of structural problems and takes into account all the various nuances of identity and class and maltreatment. On the other hand, they believe that social justice can be enacted that reveals the truth about people's private behavior that doesn't result in a colossal wave of retribution by powerful people who want revenge for their humiliations and still have billions of dollars to make it happen.

And all the while, they've raised an authoritarian demon who holds one-third of the country in a death grip, and they wondered how it happened.

The children of Stewart and Obama believe we can change the beliefs of the country, they believe you can change everything from the conversation to the power balances to the realities, and you can do it free of colossal bloodshed. But that is not possible. You were never going to change the conversation, or the beliefs. And you're never going to change the power balances without killing millions.

You are never going to change the minds of racists, sexists, or homophobes. Period. These are people whose ignorance is going nowhere, and even if we disabuse some people of their ignorance along the way, the other side will eventually recoup their losses - every generation has their neoconservatives culled from the ranks of disillusioned progressives. But you can put better laws in place, you can increase the efficacy of social programs from raised taxes, you can build civil organizations that better organize community life.

Even ten years ago, memories of the Soviet Union were still vivid enough that it would be considered sinister to believe that proclaiming one's allegiance to feminism, antiracism and LGBT allyship is the bare minimum of human decency. It's one thing to demand people's tax money and laws to put people's inalienable rights into place, it's another to demand our convictions be adapted into the souls of people who disagree. That's Orwellian - it's the same tyranny we claim to revile.

So now Obama is talking about ending the politics of division and Jon Stewart is defending Dave Chappelle from accusations of transphobia. It's as though Obama's become Susan Collins and Jon Stewart's become Bill Maher.

But they haven't, the world has just changed that much in five years. Obama has spoken at length on prejudice and bigotry so many times that his credentials on the subject ought to be impeachable. But not once has Obama ever spoken in sympathy with the ideas of structural racism or critical race theory or intersectionality or any equivalent identitarian ideology. He has never even given a hint of sympathy with the wider aims of 'social justice' movements.

The reason is pretty simple. The chilling contemporary parlance for all things which are considered anathema is 'problematic', an ingeniously Orwellian term whose true meaning is 'unacceptable', but sounds so mild.

Well, if indifference to bigotry is problematic, then Structural Racism and Critical Race Theory and all the like are well beyond merely 'problematic.' They're militant ideologies going to get lots of people killed, millions of whom could be the very people it means to benefit.

I shouldn't have to put in that last proviso about whom it might kill, but I inevitably have to qualify it; because the point of social justice has never been justice, the point has always been retribution. The point of utilizing terms like 'microaggressions' 'safe spaces' and 'trigger warnings' is not to make the world free of the micro-oppressions that seem to necessitate terms like these, because that sort of world will never, ever happen, and I have to believe that even most people of the intersectionalist left aren't that naive... To make spaces truly safe and eliminate microaggressions you would have to pre-script the entire world's interactions in ways that only a totalitarian dictator can.

The reason such terms exist is not for the sake of justice. The reason is that minority identitarians feel that they have been on the losing side of structural interactions and are sick of it. The point is not to equalize the playing field, the point is beat the playing field. The point is to finally make victims of the 'other side.' Perhaps they're right to feel that way, but all one has to do, as ever, is to gaze five minutes into the piggy eyes of twitter to see that in social justice movements, the far greater emphasis has always been on means of justice rather than their ends.

The problem with structural racism is not the belief that racism is everywhere, the problem is believing that societal structures can ever be equalized. The problem with Critical Race Theory is not the Race, it's the Critical Theory. The problem with intersectionality is not with the "inter" but the "section." The problem is the belief that there is a hidden, invisible, quantifiable system of disfavor baked into every part of our discourse, from our language to our art to our history and philosophy. All these movements are predicated on the belief that civilization itself is irredeemably corrupt at its foundation, and rather than evolve to include new concepts, they have to be destroyed and rebuilt at their roots.

To believe that culture, not law, is the basis of society is not reality, that's religion, and an extremely fundamentalist one at that, and fundamentalist religions are never truly happy unless they have an enemy to declare war on. And what wins wars is the opposite of ideals, what wins wars is will to power - killing people, and killing more of them than your enemy does. That's the end game of what you're proposing, and don't be naive about the price tag.

So allow me to propose what now seems an extremely subversive, radical solution... Perhaps the way to solve all this is not yet another in an infinite series of conversations or wars about culture, the way to solve this is laws and money so that the bigots in every generation can be prevented from all the damage they could do forever after.

That's pretty much everything I have to say on all of this so I don't really have a conclusion. ...except that there is only one thing Chappelle's been right about in his recent diatribes.

...

Hannah Gadsby is not funny.

Tale 7: Madagascar 1902 Rough Draft

  (CW: this contains all manner of extreme slurs and violence. I have determined not to spell out the offending words themselves in full, because while I consider the current necessity of doing so an abomination - artistic integrity might as well shoot itself in the head, such is the nature of today that I could become person non grata from thousands by spelling slurs out, which is misery inducing because, of course, the people would have no sense of the context and, of course, a mob wouldn't care. I'd be cancelled without having even been subscribed to. On the other hand, it would be the first attention I've ever gotten from a wide public in my entire life - maybe I should just do it and if I'm hated by thousands at least I'd finally get some readers...)

...The company commander's a gentleman named Hastings, queer upper class chap, clearly of the original Norman lineage whose very name showed his family's been ruling Old Blighty since 1066. Every sentence of his starts with 'dear boy' and every word has a hundred vowels; and though we're in Madagascar his office has a library with a thousand books. When he saw my papers said I was born in Poland he asked me if I know a writer friend of his named Conrad. Of course I don't know English books from Egyptian bokhers but he told me to take some book called Heart of Darkness; second shelf, third row down, fifth from the right. I've been trying to read it every day since I got here but I still can't get past page 3 or 4. Then he starts reciting some poem called 'Jerusalem' and gives me some speech about how the Empire accepts all people and I'm an Englishman now and we're the light unto nations who has to save the world from itself. Then he goes on about Disraeli and how he was the Empire's great champion who stabbed us in the back about the Belgian Congo. I know what he's saying but of course I stay respectful, and then he starts on the 'bloody Boers' and how every savage is a Shakespeare compared to them so the Empire has to take every part of Africa 'from Cape Town to Cairo' to stop the slaughter.

Then I meet the soldiers, from every part of the Empire - limeys, scotches, micks, orientals, w**s, even a few n*****s. It doesn't take two minutes for some cockney arsehole to identify me as a k**e from my name, which doesn't sound particularly Jewish but they sure know their Yids in London Town. They know I'm a Yid, I know I'm a Yid, but I have to pretend I'm not and they have to pretend they believe me while every other sentence I hear is "thief this" and "cheat that."

It's not five minutes before more Boers arrive and we have to register them, and it's not five more minutes before one of them does something that makes the on-duty sergeant beat some poor Boer lad in front of his family. The first few times you're gobsmacked, half the times the lads end up dead and I could only think of the pogroms. After the third or so time I said to one of the n****r soldiers "won't these Boers respond better if we earn their trust?", the n****r just laughed at me "You don't know the Boers yet, but you will." Of course you get used to it eventually; it's just the way things are done in these camps. There are thousands of them against a hundred of us. Who knows how they'd rise up if we didn't make examples?

After about a month of this, the night sergeant is feeling particularly stroppy. The lad looks dead, and he orders me and two n*****s to tie the Boer to a fence as an example. The lad looks dead but the moment we tie him up, he starts convulsing. He might die, he might live. One of the n*****s says we should shoot him and not draw it out, the other says we should bring him to the infirmary, fuck the sergeant's orders, he's always piss drunk and'll forget he said anything the next day. They look at me as though I'm the whitey with authority - for all I know they've both been here a hundred times longer than me, but the lad is looking a little better so we might as well tie him to the fence and leave him there.

So the n*****s and I get to talking, they say they see there's 'something different about me' and soon they get to arguing with each other like I'm not there. They're disputing like Rabbis about what's the Brits' fault and what's the Boers', turns out they might be the only guys who know what's what in this war and give me any rundown of the events that led this war to shambles. One of the n*****s thinks Brits are the one thing saving Africa, the other thinks Brits are a curse, but then a bomb goes off and I wake up the next morning in the infirmary. Not a trace of the Boer is left, one of the n*****s is dead and the other's lost an arm and a leg.

So the question is, did the Boer hide the bomb on himself all the while he was being thrashed or did someone plant the bomb right where he was. Who knows who cares I think. These Boers are in Madagascar, 2000 miles from home and kept on starvation rations so that they can't do anything or think straight. Ain't not more than one bomb coming in or out per Boer terrorist and ain't no way correspondence is coming in or out which we don't never see.

I've got a small concussion but the doctor tells me I'm ultimately none the worse for wear and tells me the worst thing I can do is stay off my feet and work. I'm feeling dizzy but I'm obviously not the doctor so i'm put back on my feet and Hastings calls me into his office; tells me that the officers are handling the interrogations but I'm the lead on it. I ask him why, he says he needs someone with brains and some sense. I don't know why he thinks I have any brains except that he thinks I'm a K**e, and I have to pretend he doesn't think that I'm a Yid even though he's right, and now I'm stuck figuring out how to get the soldiers to scare the information out of the prisoners without hurting them too badly. I need this like a hole in the head, which apparently I already had.

And of course by the time I get there, the guards have already walloped the shite out of every prisoner they want to talk. It's one thing to bruise the prisoners or even break an arm, but they all come out missing a couple fingernails and a couple of them no longer have two eyes. The fact that the Commander is making them do all this for the sake of a disappearing Boer and a dead n****r makes them that much more harried, which makes them thrash the Boers even more. Finally, I come up with a solution that makes everybody happy: beat them up less, threaten them more. There isn't a single Boer in the camp who doesn't know what we'll do to them if they don't cooperate, so I busy the men coming up with all sorts of new ways to threaten torture without actually torturing any more prisoners, while I go to the barracks, ask some questions and try to settle on a few suspects.

Before they can even threaten anybody, all the answers that night point to this guy named Botha. Everybody in Boerland is named Botha, but Botha is not your usual Boer. Everybody in the camp seems to know that Maarten Botha was a smuggler who ran guns in the First War to Praetoria from here in Madagascar.

So we drag Botha in. I suppose I expected one of those strapping Dutch farmers who look too large to ride a horse but Botha's kind of a short bloke: thin, balding, glasses (which the guards of course broke), and then he opens his mouth and you instantly realize this is the type who reads a new book every time he plows a field. He doesn't look like the he'd know how to build a bomb any more than I do. Scotland Yard teaches that the smart ones are the ones who kill the most people with no conscience but this lad sounds like he has more conscience than any soldier in my army. Talking to me before I can ask any question about how they're not getting no medicine and more than half the kids in the camp are dying, and of course we know all that but we just keep our heads down, orders is orders and we'd have to be daft to let these Boers run free after what they done to us.

And of course his English is perfect, which he learned at some old Dutch university then moved to the Transvaal to be a doctor. Put him in Knightsbridge and he'll seem like a proper English gent long before I do, but this is not your usual farmer. I don't know what guys like this go out into the wilderness for, but it's not to grow wheat or even to find diamonds.

I don't know how we got on politics but I figure it'll be good to let him talk and let a guy like this sound off because he might tip us off on in a fit of pique, but he baits me right away.

He says the Brits are no better than the Boers, worse even. We don't care about the land, we already have the whole world and all we want is blood diamonds. The Boers are here to make a state of their own where they can live unoppressed as free men. So I told him it only seems like the Boers want to conquer the Africans and enslave them, and repeated what Commander Hastings told me that one in five blacks dies in Johannesburg every year. I expected him to deny it but instead he says 'And you limeys are gonna liberate those k*****s by conquering them? You might as well tell the girls you guards rape they can be virgins again." So then I talk to him about all the progress we brought to South Africa and the world, and being obviously being a smart gent he brings up the famines in India, and having a Yiddish head it occurs to me to say that our famines weren't any worse than the ones under the old Mughal Emperors, but he bested me: "So you admit then that your precious empire is no more competent than the w***s!"

By this time, I've done a right bodge job of the interrogation. I'm in such a quagmire that it isn't even about the bomb anymore, it's about winning. At this point, if I don't come out of there with both information and an unscarred prisoner, the other guards get more proof positive they should be as violent as they always were.

So I bring up all the things the Empire did for them: roads, sanitation, medicine, farmland, schools. I thought he'd deny it but he agreed with it all and says "You men have no idea how evil you are. You're so much worse than us because you can hide your greed with good deeds. We only want the southern tip of Africa, you want the whole continent and the rest of the world besides, and you've almost got it."

I had no idea what to say but he plowed through my silence: "We Boers admire you so much! We wish we knew how to hide the stink of our shit the way you do." I thought I would wear him down, but he completely wore me down and before I knew it he caught me a slight "Oy..." in a sigh I should never have let out and he pounced right away:

"Mijn God you're a Lijp!"

What?

"We have all kinds of Joden in Holland! You Yids should be on our side!"

At this point I was too exhausted to keep going.

"We don't want anything different than you k***s want in Palestine! And do you Jews think you're going to get a state without killing off the native population and putting them to work?"

"I'm not a Yid."

"You're going to kill off your natives just like we kill off ours, and if you don't do kill them off soon enough you might end up in a place like here."

"I'm not a Jew."

"Sure you are, you're not a Brit, I should have seen that on your nose from the other side of the camp. You think they don't know?"

"I'm not a Jew."

"They know you're a Yid just like they know I'm a Boer, and to them we're the same thing. No matter how much you you think you're one of them, no matter what rank they call you, no matter how many shiny piles of shit they pin on your chest, to them you'll always be a bloody k**e."

And then I beat him to death and spent the night in the brig.

The next morning I was called into Hastings office. Hasting pours me a brandy, gives me a cigar, sits me down. "I know what happened without reading any report."

He knew exactly who planted the bomb, it was the drunk sergeant who beat the man. He's an undercover 'Irish Commando' helping the Boers, "but we can't have the Boers knowing there's dissension in our ranks" so he files the report saying that the two n*****s planted the bomb themselves on a suicide mission and the disfigured one will spend the rest of his life in jail. "Prison is the best thing that can happen to that poor chap."

He asks me about my family name, Charlap, and says that my papers say I was born in Poland but my name indicates I'm from Portuguese Jews. I'm of course horrified that he has evidence of my family. I knew he knew, everybody knows, but nothing could have prepared me for what he told me next.

His name is Hastings, but his mother's name was Montefiore, his grandmother was Abravanel, Spanish Jews all the way back to the first millennium. "Whatever happened in the interrogation room, nobody out here's a Jew, and the British Empire never loses control. Mr. Botha fell off a wall, accidental circumstances. This never happened dear boy. You're an Englishman now."