Sunset in a Trailer Park - Attempt at a Daily Poem #1

posting a daily poem as an attempt to break me of the habit of sharing excerpts of my perfectly perfect novel which is going so well that everyone is falling over themselves with praise for whatever of it they read....

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 Montana, springdale, columbus, mint, catalina, winnebago, ultralite, carbon, flagstaff, cougar, apex

Did any of these people vote Hillary?

Fishers, teenage girls in sweatshirts with gymshorts, kids biking next to the water without helmets, all there to see the reflection of the setting sun on the bay.

Their own personal Battery Park. A slice of Red America living like Blue America, chasing the American sublime within their budget on Bethany Bay, near the summer home of a president they loathe.

Near them their bosses hold the beach mansions where you see the best views, watching Fox News along with the sunset while their employees fish between surfings of townhall.com

The road to the mansions has a Dead End sign.

The seagulls chirp and shit all through it like the assholes they are.

On the way out you see a beautiful forty-something walking her terrier and Maltese in biking gear; giant nerd glasses and a pixie cut.

If we can make it here, we'll make it anywhere.

New Mariamneia - A Bit More

  HEROD:

Everyone has a mother-in-law, even Herod. All the time I was communicating to Anthony in Rome, she was communicating to Cleopatra in Egypt. Cleopatra summoned us both, all involved parties: me and Alexandra, to Anthony's base camp in Laodicia--Turkic soil where Cleopatra could adjudicate the rival claims to our throne, quietly wielding the authority of Rome, where true authority lay, without the trappings of Egyptian splendor to conceal her lack of power. 

One must give the witch credit. She is a loyal partisan who always rewards her friends. Not even Anthony could be a better friend to Cleopatra than Alexandra. Through half a dozen kings and civil wars, Alexandra worked her corrupted wonders so that Egypt would get a steady supply of Judean fruit and grain under nightfall's cover. Every year, the harvest's bottom line was subtracted by 14% because a seventh of our farmgrowth would disappear to Egypt. 

 I knew I would leave this meeting a king or a corpse. However good a friend to Anthony, Cleopatra needed me dead were Alexandra installed because I could simply halt the harvest shipments whose roads pass through my home province of ldumea. So I would not come out of this meeting alive unless I presented something immediate more valuable to Cleopatra than all of Judea's fruited grain. Not just the usual jewels and raiment, but something that would keep Egypt secure for all time. There was one thing in Israel Cleopatra coveted more than our crops, and it was the palm trees of Jericho. 

The second I saw Cleopatra in Laodocia, I presented her with a notarized deed to all Jericho's balsam, in perpetuity. We'd make no claim to all those flowers' essential oils, and employ a continual daily transit of balsam to the Egyptian capital, pre-pressed in vats. 

But just in case that plum humiliation wasn't enough, I had one other insurance premium. I put Alexandra's daughter, Mariamne, under the charge of my barbaric uncle Joseph - it's my right to do as her husband. Should word reach Joseph that Herod was executed, I told Joseph to murder Mariamne immediately. 

It would be a shame, I've grown to love the sweet girl. Perhaps I can console myself with the thought that she could be mine again in the great sheol to come.

ALEXANDRA:

I am the queen of Judea. Herod may call himself sovreign, he may subordinate Judea within his yoke and burden, but no Phillistine will ever rule the Jewish state in legitimate deed. For Herod's sake, I have buried both father, father-in-law, brother-in-law, husband and son, and vengeance will be mine - vengeance will be all Judea's, for the people know Judea is mine and whom among them wouldn't welcome me freely? 

Herod offers Cleopatra all the balsam of Jericho, but he cannot offer legitimacy. It is only a matter of time before the Jewish people rise up against their Palestinian occupiers, and at such a moment the friends of Herod will be Judea's enemies. Like any sovereign, Cleopatra rules at Rome's mercy, and Rome will tire of Egypt the moment after Anthony tires of her. Cleopatra needs firm allies, and her firmest ally is Judea and her one true queen: Alexandra Maccabee. 

It is with solemn vengeance and exquisite pleasure that I plan with Cleopatra to poison Herod at the adjudication. Herod has so many enemies that Anthony could never be certain who poisoned his friend, and even if I am the prime benefactress, the poisoner could just as easily be Octavian in Rome who'd wish to restore Judea to the Macabee line who so benefited that dear Uncle Julius. 

Of course Herod had his insurance plan, but still, he was Herod: murderer, tyrant, organized criminal. What guarantee can Herod now make that anyone would believe? 

Surely Cleopatra did not believe it, but as a formality, she delayed us for an hour to consult her oracle. And as I stood there with Herod, the tyrant showed me what tyranny really is. The godfather of vice left my naive Mariamne under the auspices of that hideous uncle Joseph. Herod's fingers point to the man, and with Joseph's hands the man becomes a cadaver. My sweet little daughter, so much younger than her heinous spouse, will never outlive him. She's a dead woman, walking this palatial monstrosity as prisoner when she should be Judea's next imperatress. 

I could do nothing but rescind my claim. 

MARIAMNE

Mariamneia Attempt #23434567346745684 - Beginning

 HEROD:

Everyone has a mother-in-law, even Herod. All the time I was communicating to Anthony in Rome, she was communicating to Cleopatra in Egypt. Cleopatra summoned us both, all involved parties: me and Alexandra, to Anthony's base camp in Laodicia--Turkic soil where Cleopatra could quietly wield the authority of Rome without the might of Egyptian splendor to accentuate her power. 

One must give the witch credit. She is a loyal partisan who always rewards her friends. Not even Anthony could be a better friend to Cleopatra than Alexandra. Through half a dozen kings and civil wars, Alexandra worked her corrupted wonders so that Egypt would get a steady supply of Judean fruit and grain under nightfall's cover. Every year, the harvest's bottom line was subtracted by 14% because a seventh of our farmgrowth would disappear to Egypt. 

However good a friend to Anthony, I knew I would not come out of this meeting alive unless I presented something immediate more valuable to Cleopatra than all the fruited grain of Judea. Not just the usual jewels and raiment, but something that would keep Egypt secure for all time. There was one thing in Israel Cleopatra coveted more than our crops, and it was the palm trees of Jericho. 

The second I saw Cleopatra in Laodocia, I presented her with a notarized deed to all Jericho's balsam, in perpetuity. We'd make no claim to all those flowers' essential oils, and employ a continual daily transit of balsam to the Egyptian capital, pre-pressed in vats. 

But just in case that plum humiliation wasn't enough, I had one other insurance premium. I put Alexandra's daughter, Miriam, under the charge of my murderous uncle Joseph - it's my right to do as her husband. Should word reach Joseph that Herod was executed, I told Joseph to murder Mariam immediately. 

It would be a shame, I've grown to love the sweet girl. Perhaps I can console myself with the thought that she could be mine again in the great sheol to come.

ALEXANDRA:

New TCP - Scene 1

I. 

 (there is a bed shaking from the next room)

Rabbi Hillel: I'm afraid it's a blood disease called anemia. Has the King ever opened his veins then clotted them with wool?

Captain of the Guard: Not to my knowledge. 

Herod (the bed still shakes): MARIAMNEEEEEEE!!!!! (the shaking stops)

Rabbi: If Rav Shammai comes to know that Mariamne's honey preserves body sleeps next to the King on occasion, Herod's reign will descend into civil war and few will survive. But Herod clearly will kill anyone who means to part him from it. So long as the body stays preserved in honey when not in Herod's chamber, it should be free of any maggoted infection and there is no true harm in Herod taking comfort in her, but he is clearly not of his own mind, so keep a vigilant watch else we all must fear. 

Captain: Is the King's illness brought on by proximity to the corpse?

Rabbi: I'm inclined to say no. The honey preserved Mariamne well and the body clearly provides him consolation. 

Captain: Is he going to survive? 

Rabbi: I'm not willing to say. 

Captain: You're not willing to say that he's going to die or you're not willing to say because there's still a chance he might live?

Rabbi: Both. 

Captain: Ochen vey no captain would know what to do in a situation like this. 

Rabbi: Then don't do anything. 

Captain: You know that's not an option. 

Rabbi: I know that. If he dies his sons will kill each other one after the other to get the crown. After all this it will just be more of the Aristobules and Antipaters. 

Captain: Then we should...

Rabbi: Yes. If you have to, call in a person who isn't Herod's son. 

Captain: One that can be easily disposed of.  

Rabbi: I didn't say that. 

Captain: You didn't say that we can dispose of an heir should Herod come back? Or you didn't say we should prevent any of Herod's children of being the new king? Or you didn't say the new person we call in should be the new King?

Rabbi: I didn't say that...

Captain: I see. 

Rabbi: Yes... I suppose you do. 

Captain: Who do we call in?

Rabbi: There's only one option. 

Captain: Reb Hillel, she testified against her own daughter! Isn't there some sort of ruling pro-

Rabbi: After all you've done you're choosing now to get squeamish?

Captain: But she's such a viper. 

Rabbi: Is she any more viperous than our king?

Captain: Well no. 

Rabbi: Does she have her own army?

Captain: Yes. 

Rabbi: Does she have a substantial following among the people?

Captain: Yes. 

Rabbi: Does she have powerful international allies?

Captain: Yes. 

Rabbi: Would she win a civil war against all Herod's children? Even if they banded together for more than five minutes? 

Captain: Yes. 

Rabbi: Is she the very last of the Hasmoneans who can ensure that rule of Judea stays Jewish?

Captain: Yes. 

Rabbi: You know we have no choice. 

Why I Went to Israel

 

Fall 2005 to so summer 2006:

One interpretation is that I was teetering on a nervous breakdown after college and had no idea what to do with my life so I went on the first artist's program I could find and checked out for a year to delay adulthood.

Issue solved.

The other reason is that I was looking for something very specific that I could not find anywhere but Israel.

It had very little to do with the propaganda I'd heard every day of my life about how Israel was our Jewish home. It had everything to do with the personal anecdotes I heard. the land where Yiddish speakers could go to the store without getting beaten up or mugged, where old Germans could still go to the opera without worrying they'd be banned from it, where young Israelis were free to innovate and travel to an extent no Americans do, where a dozen languages were spoken in the streets, where democracy was kept alive in a region where democracy was the exception, where existential issues were discussed in a place where existence can't be taken for granted.

I never fit in Baltimore: Jewish Baltimore or urban. In Pikesville, Baltimore's 90% Jewish neighborhood, everybody's crazy and thinks themselves sane. In urban Baltimore everybody's sane and thinks themselves crazy. Both places think themselves the acme of liberal tolerance in diametrically opposite ways, and nobody is truly free to be themselves unless themselves fits in a truly narrow rubric. I felt much more free to be eccentric lil' me in DC, a city where freedom comes at a price nobody can afford.

In Israel, I sought out a place where a Jew is free to be a Jew who can't stand being Jewish. Nobody has as much contempt for religious superstitions as secular Israelis, who head to the beach on Rosh Hashana and picnic on Yom Kippur. I sought out a place a cultured person is free to be as pretentious as he likes without worrying that the European smart set's tolerance for Jews and Americans is next to nil unless they top Europeans in badmouthing both the US and Israel--an impossible task because nobody hates either the US or Israel quite like rich European socialists whose entire lifestyle is based on the benefits they most derive from the US and Jews.

The stories I heard about Israel made it seem a place where an underachieving Jewish boy from Baltimore was more free to practice the best values of both the US and the EU than anywhere in the physical places. I pictured a life in a small, beautiful country where everything I valued was possible: a place that valued used books in multiple languages and local art exhibits, local pop musicians and American box office hits. A place where the bars stayed open till 5 when the afterhours started, good physical shape was built into the lifestyle and the best restaurants weren't too expensive (my how things change...). A place where history could always be studied and the present always makes new history. A place where ideas and actions were virtually the same thing. Every country has its ideals, but Israel seemed closest to mine.

And tragically, I found in Israel just about everything looked for, and what a fucking price you pay for it.

Israelis have so many options that they have no idea what to do with them, and they are the most miserable people on earth: rude, arrogant, constantly aware of their dangerous existences and international pariahdom, which gives them chips on their shoulders as big as Jacob's older sons against Joseph. It's a whole country existing on history's biggest faultline, and it simultaneously makes them free and enslaved. It is precisely the rudeness of Israelis which creates the endless dynamism of the society. It's a place where people hold nothing back, and as such, the aggression creates a greenhouse of innovation and progress that I've never seen in any other place except the similarly aggressive New York.

I went in with huge plans and went out heartbroken--not socially or romantically, heartbroken for the life I hoped was possible and would never have.

Israel is a country just like any other country, and yet it isn't. Israel is the proof that living your dreams isn't any better than not living them. Some ideal worlds are real, but they're always disappointing. Whether Israel lives or dies, Jews will always live with the gates up, and living the dream may not be worth the price.

Is the threat to Israeli democracy the natural byproduct of how Israel treats Palestinians? Is Israeli democracy threatened because liberal Jews have collaborated with conservative Jews in making Israel too free from accountability? Is Israel worth defending anymore? I have no idea, and to a certain extent it doesn't matter. It is what it is, and it experiences the same right-wing authoritarianism that threatens every first world democracy on the planet, only Israel's further along.

As Mark Twain said: Jews are like everybody else, only moreso, so whatever happens to Israel first is what will happen elsewhere. If the most militarily trained society on earth has a civil war, expect that here next. If Israel is unable to preserve its borders and ill-intentioned native peoples come pouring into Israel sponsoring their violence with legitimate grievances, expect that here next. And however doubtful, if Israel again shows that liberals and conservatives can overcome unbridgeable gulfs to still live in peace, expect that here next.

Israel is the freest and the most chained place on earth. It's everything we are but to the nth degree. They are the guinea pigs for every historical trend that comes to you next. It has all the glories and agonies you have, it's simultaneously the most livable and unlivable place on earth. It's evidence that the impossible is always possible.

So maybe they'll pull it out and democracy can still thrive, even with its existence threatened as it always is. Any rational projection says that Israel is fucked right now in a hundred different ways; but in a hundred different ways, Israel is the impossible nation. It is a place where nobody sane would ever want to live, and yet life goes on.

I am endlessly fascinated by Israel, but I find it an endlessly frustrating place. I think that's precisely what it's supposed to be.

Why write a book nobody will read

I'm writing a book. Unless tastes change dramatically, everybody's going to hate it. The more I write, the more abstract it gets. Every idea I have makes it ever more off the wall, more difficult to market, more difficult to comprehend, more difficult to read. With every new idea, the reader has to do tons more work, while I, the writer, am just lucky to have ideas.

I have no idea how to write a book. I just think of whatever I can then throw word-darts at a board that may miss the bullseye by a factor of yards. The ideas are all in my brain, and yet the moment the ideas hit the page, they become fragmented. The nerve and confidence leaves the page, and all that's left is the kind of fragmented story that bores the shit out of everybody but academics.

My editor tells me 'be more considerate to the reader.' I have no idea how to do that. Everything that comes out in these essays with relative clarity becomes incredibly avant-garde when they come out as fiction. Nobody will want to read this. I write it to please me, if one can even call it pleasure. I have no audience and too little to do with my life. If I'm not creative, my mind will leave me.

And yet I have no idea if I truly have an audience for these essays either. Perhaps most people respond to them out of a sense of pity or well-meaningness, but the fact that I seem to have readers means I can imagine the sort of reader I want to read this and communicate to them. I want readers who are 'friends', not 'fans.' I hope, at least, that readers struggling with their lives or watching others struggle can read essays like mine and feel a little less lonely.

"The book", however, has only an editor and a few friends whom I irregularly ask to read, all of whom give me contradictory feedback. So this book has no ideal reader, just a flotsam of a thousand ideas conceived during a period when I was at my craziest, felt as though I was getting ideas from the ether, and imagined myself a kind of mystic who could inspire the world. But really, this novel is just following the basic record of what happened over 4000 years of (Jewish) history. What happened in history is sufficiently dramatic that if you do this right, you just need the barest framing devices and you can bring thousands of characters to life - or at least a better writer than me can....

I've worked on this giant book for well over ten years and started over at least six or seven times. Where are the ideas derived? They're derived from a clearly fucked up subconscious, a subconscious explosive enough that it's gone through periods of my life controlling my conscious mind. I have a terrible suspicion that the few who read it sometimes think I write from my personal life, but it's these essays where I put my personal thoughts - they are literally where I organize the conscious self in battle with a subconscious that takes parts of my brain over for years at a time. I once tried what's now called 'autofiction' (presumably "autobiographical fiction" takes too long to type). In two different versions of this book, it produced one good 90% autobiographical story about a family row over Pesach, and one time that I tried to write in a voice that was clearly my father's, but both times, the quality died a quick death and I put the auto into storage.

Fiction is a place of the subconscious. The mind can only take dictation, not be dictated to. The subconscious is ever appeased only temporarily before it demands more attention lest it explode with obsessive and sometimes delusional thoughts. Thoughts from my own life do not come intentionally from the personal, and any potential resemblance would serve no didactic purpose. They are random brainwaves from a brain that is particularly beset with the noise of random brainwaves.

Like the music I wrote that few people listen to, the fiction I write is the product of a subconscious. This subconscious may not be particularly interesting, but it is mine, all too close to my conscious mind, and ever blackmails me with threats unless I give it space for conscious release.

The last few weeks I've managed to calm down the unconscious thoughts imbuing my brain with terror much more than I have in... years?

Nobody likes to accept that they've been through trauma, particularly because when one explains what's traumatic to others they may well not agree that it was. But whether the many 'triggers' were trauma or not, living in this head is frequently traumatic, and all the moreso if you force yourself to consider that everything the head believes may be correct. Once you let yourself think of these thoughts as a very deep sort of mental abrasion, perhaps one can truly begin the process of clearing one's head of an enormous mental load that no one should have to bear.

Will greater peace calm the subconscious or free it to be more creative and outrageous? I don't know, but what I do know is that it's still here, and I'm doing everything I can to give it a proper place that lets it explode to the outside rather than letting it continue trying to implode this head.

I don't know what my future holds. Hopefully I'm in the second half of my worst physical health crisis for a long while, and when your body is dysfunctional, you can't afford to get too depressed or anxious. It can kill you, and I want to complete this book nobody will read. Whether anybody does, the record that I did something with my life, however tawdry, and will be there for anyone who wants the challenge. I hope, I pray, that one day I'll have readers to appreciate me for what I've done, what I've written, and the blood it took to make me write. But even if not, at least I know there is a record of what I've done, and even if I'm writing a stupid book, I will have tried my best to create something worth living a life for.

Amen

The Mariamneia - first part

 Melvyn Bragg: Hello. The French mandate forces remained in Syria throughout the Second World War, representing at times the Third Republic, Free France, Vichy France, and the Provisional Republic through governments liberal, conservative, socialist and fascist. Stationed in Damascus during all twenty-three years of the French Mandate was an Alsatian consul and amateur Assyriologist named Richard Westenbach who came to French Syria in search of a work long regarded as a mere grandmother's tale: the Tales of Classical Perversion by Sharlappius of Palmyra - a telling of power's wares in the classical world so revolting it puts to shame anything in Tacitus and Gibbon. So shameful were the tales that they were burned and banned by the Prophet Mohammed. For 1300 years, the only mention of the work which survives to this day is in Pyrrus Menander's Chronicle of Historical Shame, and yet oral tradition of its tales persisted among Syrian tribes for centuries - entire tales recounted in detail from first word to last. 

Yet as Europe burned, this government clerk used his off hours to toil in search of a text that would rewrite the entire history of antiquity. Pyrrus Menander makes mention of a multivolume work with separate texts for the eras of Pharaonic Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Hellenic Greece. Yet after twenty years of search, Westenbach found an enormous scroll within the stone seat of a Syrian church pew. While a sizable portion of the contents are illegible, many of the remains corresponded to Syrian folk tales about Judea word for word. 

What Westenbach found in 1945 was not merely a work that rewrites the entire cultural history of antiquity but something far more disgusting. A work which claims that Julius Caesar enjoyed Cleopatra shitting in his mouth and would have us believe that Herod spoke Greek in patois that switched between Shakespearean grandeur and Quentin Tarantinoesque vulgarity. 

But missing until 1989 was the supposed crown jewel upon which the entire volume sat. All we knew of the Mariamneia came from Pyrrus Menander who mentions a dramatic triptych of this name which he calls 'Judea's greatest gift.'  Contained in the Tales of Classical Perversion is only the briefest fragment of the Mariamneia, a work of literary quality as negligible as the rest of the volume. And yet the Mariamneia arrived upon the world like a hydrogen bomb of sublimity that sold out runs in every major metropole around the world, revived classics studies for a new century, and reduces even schoolchildren to tears. Every city schoolboy now knows the quote 'Caesar's dead but the Jews won't leave,'

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   Scott Gruenberg

4/20/2023

Mrs. Feder 

Grade 12

In this assignment about the beginning part of the Mariamneia by Sharlappius of Palmyra I will show that Herod is actually the hero of the story, and the women are the villainesses. Herod is oen of the great leaders of Jewish history who made the Jews into a great power again while Rome made the rest of its empire into slaves and he undergoes the hero's journey. Whenever he undrestimated the cleverness of woman characters, he learned from his mistakes and didn't think they were stupid anymore. 

When Herod learned that Mariamne's mother Alexandra was smart because she was talking to Cleopatra while he was talking to Anthony, he knows he needs to give Cleopatra something she wants to stop Alexandra and Cleopatra from being friends. So he gives her the ballsam in Jericho, but is clever enough to knwo he knows he can get it back. 

Herod knows he has to keep Mariamne a prisoner or else Cleopatra might kill him, so he has his Uncle Joseph take her as a prisoner and tells his uncle Joseph to kill her if he gets killed. I think Herod loved Mariamne and he knew he wouldn't get killed and Uncle Joseph wouldn't kill her. 

When Cleopatra agreed with his plan, Alexandra still tired to get Cleopatra to kill Herod, so he told Alexandra that her daughter was kidnapped and would be killed if Herod got killed. So she stopped trying to get Herod killed. This shows that Herod was smart enough to outsmart Alexandra and that he learned from his mistakes. 

In conclusion, I think Herod is the hero of the Mariamneia and he was a good king. Alexandra was a bad person and Cleopatra understood that. 

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"There is no projective finality in Sharlappius, particularly in that Euripidean masterpiece within the masterpiece: the Mariamneia. To read Sharlappius in the original Latin, with its untranslatable embrace of colloquial Hellenisms and Hebraicisms, is to enter history at an era of Rabbinical paradoxes: of classicism at its close and medievalism at its inception. It embodies the Hebraic paradox of the dialectic, of philosophy become poetry, and embraces both the sensuality of classical reason and the phenomenology of medieval irrationalism. It is a simultaneous statement for God and a forsaking of him. A world of constant historical recursions where events distant from even Sharlappius's lifetime become forever new with regenerative possibilities of meaning for new eras to decipher.  

The passage of exchange between Joseph and Mariamne is a love story so rich with unique resonance for our time. The dialectic paradoxes continue within the Shakespearean richness of Joseph's language against the unstinting sparseness of Mariamne's speech, so reminiscent of the articulate silence of Corneille and Racine which express that which cannot be expressed through a paucity of speech, which implies the continuous battle against totalitarian vacuity in the form of expressing its leavetaking to the classical era of Greek rationalism, so geometric in form yet hermetic in content. Joseph teaches the ability to become love itself, and articulates the possibility of a greater, more knowing poetic optimism within the predeterminism of the fates. In this post-Holocaust agony of knowledge, when the horror of organized noise assaults the ear with unremitting mercilessness, such silences imply possibilities of meaning unknown to our era of barbarity." 

George Steiner - In the Garden of Regeneration - 2000

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"The path for us is so rough,

Oh baby, like Mariamne and Joseph

The princess and the jailer tell tales

But love gets hunted down like white whales"

Bob Dylan - Skywriting of Louisville - 1997

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"In Sharlappius's unconscious agon with Shakespeare Herod prefigures the war on the cosmos of Iago and Edmund. Yet the Mariamneia lacks Shakespeare's prophetic force. Herod cannot self-overhear after the manner of Hamlet and Falstaff, but Mariamne's tragic eloquence retains a metaphysical projection of gnostic splendor." 

Harold Bloom - The Prophets and the Kings, 1999

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"There are those who presuppose that asserting a woman's right to choose whether to carry her child to term is something inherent in the constitution, and an assertion of autonomy as brave as Mariamne's monologue of defiance against Herod." 

Antonin Scalia - Nirenberg vs. Irving, 2009

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Graduate thesis proposal of 

"Mariamne acts the part of a woman and queen but in fact she is truly performative in the sense that Herod's generation of capital produces a hegemonic projection of power upon Mariamne's body through a vast succession of performative acts which are accepted as the normative standard of Herodian court life. Mariamne assumes a the only performative role available to her within the superstructure of courtly life and over time her ability to maintain her performance disappears, whereupon Herod feels compelled to kill her, and even in death she has insufficiently submitted to Herod's will. The sodomization of her corpse in death is a means by which Herod requires her in an eternal submission prefigurative to the eternal submission of sinners in Christianity. In each act of sexual dominance, Herod reasserts his hegemony and rearticulates his power, but the totality of his superstructure remains unfulfilled against Mariamne's sole act of rebellion."

Judith Butler - Recursions and Dispersions in the Mariamneia, 2007

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Melvyn Bragg: Until 1989, all we had was an outline of Sharlappius's Mariamneia in Byzantine Greek in with some dialogue corresponding to the full script but with different handwriting, perhaps summarized from stage notes or from Sharlappius's assistant, or perhaps even from an early monk of Byzantium. Here we have the first play acted out from the stage notes: with Emma Thompson as Mariamne, Vanessa Redgrave as Salome, Kenneth Branagh as Herod and Brian Blessed as Joseph. The name of the first play is "Listen, Whore." 

1. Solilioquy of exposiition from Herod in which Herod tells of how he had underestimated Mariam's mother, Alexandra, who was communicating the entire time separately to Cleopatra in Egypt while Herod was communicating to Antony in Rome. All involved parties were summoned to  to explain what happened to Cleopatra, who summoned him to Cairo to Laodicia (in Turkey). Knowing that Cleopatra is venomous in her pursuit of justice for her friends, he may not make it out of this meeting alive, Herod knows he has to offer Cleopatra something inordinately valuable, not just jewels and rainment (though he must present her those) but something of great advantage. He therefore presents her the deed in perpetuity for all the balsam in Jericho, a city with enormous numbers of palm trees - and as a token of its esteem, presented her with huge vats of its essential oils. Knowing, however, that he had to rescind the command for his death, Herod put his wife Mariam under the charge of his uncle, Joseph. Should word reach Joseph that Herod was executed, Joseph should murder Mariam immediately "It is a shame, for I have grown to love the sweet girl. Perhaps I can console myself with the thought that she could be mine again in the great sheol to come." Even after Herod's offer of good will to Cleopatra, Alexandra refuses to rescind her claim and reminds Cleopatra of her oath to avenge Aristobulus's murder. Cleopatra calls for a recess during which she will consult her oracle, during which Herod tells Alexandra of Mariam's secret captivity and what will happen if Herod is murdered. Alexandra, humiliated in horror, announces at the reassembly that she withdraws her claim on Herod. 

2. In Joseph's house, Mariam was, of course, the soul of winning politesse. Joseph is clearly quite taken with her, much to the discontent of Salome, his wife and Herod's sister. It needs to be established that Salome is mean and Mariam is nice and understanding. Joseph, after yet another row with Salome, finds solace in talking with Mariam, and after a while he confesses his mission to her. He tells her that if rumor should be heard of Herod's death, they must immediately sue for Roman protection and Joseph must go into hiding or else he will be held responsible by Ishmael and murdered himself. Mariam takes Joseph by the hand and places it directly on her heart, saying "Why don't we go into hiding together? Just you and I..." After lingering on her breast for a few seconds with closed eyes, Joseph withdraws his hand and exhales "There are no words for how deeply that wish goes to my heart, but I do not dare cross Herod, even in death." 

3. Alexandra's caravan is spotted riding in the distance at the Jerusalem ramparts. Joseph immediately runs to Mariam. Your mother is here! Herod is dead. Run to the Roman garrison. RUN! You will be free in moments. "Does this mean?" "There may be time to discuss that later. RUN!" Mariam runs away. Salome however had heard the same and saw Mariam run out of Joseph's palace: "She's supposed to be dead! What plot is this? Herod's dead and you mean to keep her alive so that you can kill me in her place and take Mariam as a better wife!" 

4. But in fact, while the caravan is riding under Alexandra's sigil, Herod is riding back to Jerusalem with her caravan, as a show of good faith and confidence in his relations with his mother in law. Joseph comes to receive Alexandra with news of what happened before he stages the 'loss' of Mariam, but from Alexandra's carpentum, out steps Herod. The only person ready for this turn of events is Salome, who immediately shouts 'Mariam has run away after being unfaithful to you with my husband!" "Silence Machshefah (witch)!" "Search our palace! Seeing only Alexandra's sigil we thought you dead! Mariam is not here, and I heard my husband command her to flee at once!" "Joseph I honestly should make you high priest. You did the greatest of all possible services by taking as your wife the Whore of Babylon." "He commanded her to go to the Roman garrison!" "I am Rome and Rome is me. So long as I am alive, no one in Judea avoids the justice of Herod." "But they thought you were dead!" "There's no way they thought me dead! Joseph, I never thought you'd actually have to kill her. How could anyone possibly doubt my powers of persuasion on Antony and Cleopatra whom I've persuaded so many times in situations precisely like this!" "You literally instructed them in the case of your death..." "I was never going to die!" "How were we supposed to know that?" "Sister do you doubt your brother and king is so unloved by his friends that they would stoop to kill him?" (this silences Salome) Herod: "...Fine, Joseph send your valet to the garrison and retrieve Mariam... IF she's even there...."

5. Mariam returns from the garrison and immediately pounces. "Did you retrieve me finally to kill me? Is it bad enough you possess me in life do you have to possess me in the Gates of Sheol too?" At that moment, Herod eyes grow cold, he draws his sword and with one swift stroke beheads his uncle Joseph to everyone's screaming and weeping. He immediately calls in Joseph's slaves, calmly instructs them to clean up the blood of their master and dump his body into the valley of Gahennim. Six Roman soldiers escorted them into Joseph's palace. He tells three to escort Mariam back to the Royal Palace (such as it is...), and three to escort Alexandra to Praetorium Prison, where she is to be lodged for the foreseeable future. 

6. Herod and Salome alone. "Listen whore, I know not what you say is true. What I do know is that if Joseph told Mariam, if he even told you, if he even told someone who told you, he's capable of everything you say. If I find out that from which you are capable, you will join your ex-husband in Gahennim more swiftly than Herod meted justice to Joseph." Salome weeps and Herod leaves the room.  

 

Beginning of new TCP

(there is a bed shaking from the next room)

Rabbi Hillel: I'm afraid it's a blood disease called anemia. Has the King ever opened his veins then clotted them with wool?

Captain of the Guard: Not to my knowledge. 

Herod (the bed still shakes): MARIAMNEEEEEEE!!!!! (the shaking stops)

Rabbi: If Rav Shammai comes to know that Mariamne's deceased body sleeps next to him preserved in honey, Herod's reign will descend into civil war and few will survive. But Herod clearly will kill anyone who means to part him from it. So long as the body stays preserved in honey when not in Herod's chamber, it should be free of any maggoted infection and there is no true harm in Herod taking comfort in her, but he is clearly not of his own mind, so keep a vigilant watch else we all must fear. 

The Mariamneia - More

Melvyn Bragg: Hello. The French mandate forces remained in Syria throughout the Second World War, representing at times the Third Republic, Free France, Vichy France, and the Provisional Republic through governments liberal, conservative, socialist and fascist. Stationed in Damascus during all twenty-three years of the French Mandate was an Alsatian consul and amateur Assyriologist named Richard Westenbach who came to French Syria in search of a work long regarded as a mere grandmother's tale: the Tales of Classical Perversion by Sharlappius of Palmyra - a telling of power's wares in the classical world so revolting it puts to shame anything in Tacitus and Gibbon. So shameful were the tales that they were burned and banned by the Prophet Mohammed. For 1300 years, the only mention of the work which survives to this day is in Pyrrus Menander's Chronicle of Historical Shame, and yet oral tradition of its tales persisted among Syrian tribes for centuries - entire tales recounted in detail from first word to last. 

Yet as Europe burned, this government clerk used his off hours to toil in search of a text that would rewrite the entire history of antiquity. Pyrrus Menander makes mention of a multivolume work with separate texts for the eras of Pharaonic Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Hellenic Greece. Yet after twenty years of search, Westenbach found an enormous scroll within the stone seat of a Syrian church pew. While a sizable portion of the contents are illegible, many of the remains corresponded to Syrian folk tales about Judea word for word. 

What Westenbach found in 1945 was not merely a work that rewrites the entire cultural history of antiquity but something far more mediocre and disgusting. A work which claims that Julius Caesar enjoyed Cleopatra shitting in his mouth and would have us believe that Herod spoke Greek in the patois of Quentin Tarantino. 

But missing until 1989 was the supposed crown jewel upon which the entire volume sat. All we knew of the Mariamneia came from Pyrrus Menander who mentions a dramatic triptych of this name which he calls 'Judea's greatest gift.'  Contained in the Tales of Classical Perversion is only the briefest fragment of the Mariamneia, a work of literary quality as negligible as the rest of the volume. And yet the Mariamneia arrived upon the world like a hydrogen bomb of sublimity that sold out runs in every major metropole around the world, revived classics studies for a new century, and reduces even schoolchildren to tears. Every city schoolboy now knows the quote 'Caesar's dead but the Jews won't leave,'

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   Scott Gruenberg

4/20/2023

Mrs. Feder 

Grade 12

In this assignment about the beginning part of the Mariamneia by Sharlappius of Palmyra I will show that Herod is actually the hero of the story, and the women are the villainesses. Herod is oen of the great leaders of Jewish history who made the Jews into a great power again while Rome made the rest of its empire into slaves and he undergoes the hero's journey. Whenever he undrestimated the cleverness of woman characters, he learned from his mistakes and didn't think they were stupid anymore. 

When Herod learned that Mariamne's mother Alexandra was smart because she was talking to Cleopatra while he was talking to Anthony, he knows he needs to give Cleopatra something she wants to stop Alexandra and Cleopatra from being friends. So he gives her the ballsam in Jericho, but is clever enough to knwo he knows he can get it back. 

Herod knows he has to keep Mariamne a prisoner or else Cleopatra might kill him, so he has his Uncle Joseph take her as a prisoner and tells his uncle Joseph to kill her if he gets killed. I think Herod loved Mariamne and he knew he wouldn't get killed and Uncle Joseph wouldn't kill her. 

When Cleopatra agreed with his plan, Alexandra still tired to get Cleopatra to kill Herod, so he told Alexandra that her daughter was kidnapped and would be killed if Herod got killed. So she stopped trying to get Herod killed. This shows that Herod was smart enough to outsmart Alexandra and that he learned from his mistakes. 

In conclusion, I think Herod is the hero of the Mariamneia and he was a good king. Alexandra was a bad person and Cleopatra understood that. 

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"There is no projective finality in Sharlappius, particularly in that Euripidean masterpiece within the masterpiece: the Mariamneia. To read Sharlappius in the original Latin, with its untranslatable embrace of colloquial Hellenisms and Hebraicisms, is to enter history at an era of Rabbinical paradoxes: of classicism at its close and medievalism at its inception. It embodies the Hebraic paradox of the dialectic, of philosophy become poetry, and embraces both the sensuality of classical reason and the phenomenology of medieval irrationalism. It is a simultaneous statement for God and a forsaking of him. A world of constant historical recursions where events distant from even Sharlappius's lifetime become forever new with regenerative possibilities of meaning for new eras to decipher.  

The passage of exchange between Joseph and Mariamne is a love story so rich with unique resonance for our time. The dialectic paradoxes continue within the Shakespearean richness of Joseph's language against the unstinting sparseness of Mariamne's speech, so reminiscent of the articulate silence of Corneille and Racine which express that which cannot be expressed through a paucity of speech, which implies the continuous battle against totalitarian vacuity in the form of expressing its leavetaking to the classical era of Greek rationalism, so geometric in form yet hermetic in content. Joseph teaches the ability to become love itself, and articulates the possibility of a greater, more knowing poetic optimism within the predeterminism of the fates. In this post-Holocaust agony of knowledge, when the horror of organized noise assaults the ear with unremitting mercilessness, such silences imply possibilities of meaning unknown to our era of barbarity." 

George Steiner - In the Garden of Regeneration - 2000

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"The path for us is so rough,

Oh baby, like Mariamne and Joseph

The princess and the jailer tell tales

But love gets hunted down like white whales"

Bob Dylan - Skywriting of Louisville - 1997

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"The Mariamneia lacks Shakespeare's prophetic force. Herod cannot self-overhear after the manner of Hamlet and Falstaff, but Mariamne's tragic eloquence retains a metaphysical projection of gnostic splendor."

Harold Bloom - The Prophets and the Kings, 1999

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"There are those who presuppose that asserting a woman's right to choose whether to carry her child to term is something inherent in the constitution, and an assertion of autonomy as brave as Mariamne's monologue of defiance against Herod." 

Antonin Scalia - Nirenberg vs. Irving, 2009

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"Mariamne acts the part of a woman and queen but in fact she is truly performative in the sense that Herod's generation of capital produces a hegemonic projection of power upon Mariamne's body through a vast succession of performative acts which are accepted as the normative standard of Herodian court life. Mariamne assumes a the only performative role available to her within the superstructure of courtly life and over time her ability to maintain her performance disappears, whereupon Herod feels compelled to kill her, and even in death she has insufficiently submitted to Herod's will. The sodomization of her corpse in death is a means by which Herod requires her in an eternal submission prefigurative to the eternal submission of sinners in Christianity. In each act of sexual dominance, Herod reasserts his hegemony and rearticulates his power, but the totality of his superstructure remains unfulfilled against Mariamne's sole act of rebellion."

Judith Butler - Recursions and Dispersions in the Mariamneia, 2007

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Why Sondheim is Our Best Artist

 Watch Pacific Overtures: THIS is a musical???

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ546PASgHI

I've written about Sondheim so many times that I'm loathe to write about him again, but like Shakespeare and Mozart, he insists on himself, and the work is genuinely so great that he invites comparison. If such a comparison seems grandiose, it is.

What artist in American history can compare to the most titanic giants of the arts? Is there a single novelist who can? Is there a single novelist who gives us the full gamut of the American character in all its hundreds of manifestations? Just one? You can't just do it in one book, it can only be done over an entire career. Our greatest novelists, the Faulkners, the Henry James's, the Cathers and Bellows and McCarthys and Morrisons, they all return time after time to the same few themes and character types. Perhaps only Mark Twain can be said to reach that kind of diversity, and while I don't have reading that wide, I don't think anyone is making claims that grandiose for any novel of his but Huck Finn. As for film directors, we have more greats than any other country. But who has Sondheim's diversity? Whether from personal or business limitations, is there any golden age studio great who was allowed to stretch to that kind of infinite diversity of utterance which one would think a great American artist should particularly reach in this melting pot of a country? Certainly no studio director I can think of could do it. The three real candidates? Spielberg, Scorsese, and Altman. Spielberg is so much better than his critics condescend to rate him as, but no, he's not an artist of infinite reach any more than Verdi or Victor Hugo. He has such a diverse output full of completely different sorts of characters and situations, but it's true, he nonetheless does go all too often for the easy sentiments, the simplistic message, the escapist thrills. Scorsese alike is far more diverse than his New York machismo reputation, but he has a few modes and obsessions to which he always returns: New York machismo, sexual inadequacy in the face of beauty, Catholic suffering and God's silence. I want to see a parallel universe Scorsese where made as many historical pictures as Spielberg - but where Spielberg made so many movies about 20th century history, Scorsese's are about the longer history of religion: Scorsese on the crusades, Scorsese on the Protestant-Catholic wars, Scorsese about early Christians trying to convert pagans and Jews. Those were the movies from him we needed most. Altman, frankly the truest artist of the three, was a commendably risky artist, infinite in his aspirations, baroque in his complexity, who risked everything on every movie and could be as risible as he was great. His greatest movie: Nashville, might be the greatest movie ever made in this country. Others like Short Cuts and McCabe & Mrs. Miller, MASH, Thieves Like Us, California Split, might add up to the truest exploration this country ever got in fiction. But I think everybody agrees that Altman could also be as bad as he was good. Such are the risks you take when you're a real artist feeling your way against a system that routes for your failure.

Sondheim was not that. He was an artist who got every major break and was taught how to create great musical theater by the father of adolescent best friend from the earliest age: Oscar Hammerstein himself. He knew just about everything there was to know about making theater by the time he was in his early thirties, and simply had to put pen to paper thereafter.

So I went last Sunday to see a very good - nevertheless inadequate - production of Sweeney Todd - Stephen Sondheim's most overrated musical.

Even Sondheim at his most overrated is still just that extraordinary. Even Sweeney Todd is, ultimately, a better work of theater than it can ever be performed. You need a Sweeney who can inspire the terror of an uncaged lion and simultaneously be vulnerable enough to inspire our pity. It is a literally impossible part. The actor was in no danger of capturing any facet of Sweeney's character to the point of obscuring other facets, that is perhaps a strength.

Just as it might be better to read Shakespeare among friends to avoid the disappointment of an inadequate staging, perhaps it's best to hear Sondheim's musicals in concert or played through a score at home, where you can think of his musicals as cantatas, or 'passion' plays. So unreachable are the heights of Assassins or Pacific Overtures that perhaps they're simply impossible to mount on stage.

Two of the greatest productions I ever saw of Sondheim didn't even try. When a director named John Doyle mounted Sweeney Todd (which I saw live) and Company (which I saw on youtube), the concept was as small as possible. No real staging, no orchestra, just the actors singing, and when they weren't singing, they simply played the instruments to accompany the other actors. Only in Shakespeare and Mozart have I ever seen theater so raw and intense and moving. Not even the Greeks got here, and yet these productions felt profoundly Greek - more a sacred rite than a theater production, and yet they too were utterly contemporary - funny, street wise, erudite and warmly friendly.

As I said, I've written about Sondheim far too much in relation to so many other deserving creators. But Sondheim is one of the very few artists who cannot possibly be overrated. Even in his non-American musicals, every single American type can be found within its pages from the highest to the lowest, the smartest and most sublime to the stupidest. Like Shakespeare with England, or Verdi with Italy, even when the setting isn't America, he's talking about America. Sweeney Todd was really about New York, and Sweeney was created and produced in the wake of the Summer of Sam.

He is the one creator in America who truly bridges that divide between the classical and the popular - never throwing out the lessons of old Europe even as he sees the incontrovertible need to move on to a new world, a demotic world, in which the concerns of the low matter just as much as the high.

Movies may be the American artform, but if Sondheim is not our answer to Shakespeare, then movies are still waiting for the American Shakespeare. No American has ever presented America the way Sondheim has, and no creator has ever, perhaps can ever, presented to us the United States of America as it truly is.

Slow Dancing to Ellington

Lately on Friday nights I go alone to a swing dance ballroom in one of downtown Baltimore's dicier neighborhoods to recapture my lost youth of 1938. It's a surprisingly diverse crowd, but certain demographics are clear. The female dancers are mostly beautiful and intelligent young women, many of whom drive from hours away to be there, while the male dancers are mostly the sad old men I'd prefer to avoid becoming.

For better or worse I hurt my back as I danced on Friday, so I ended up not able to dance except during the slow songs, and I found myself just listening to big band standards in a ballroom full of fantastic dancers, exactly the way this music was supposed to be listened to.

The experience is like a time warp from a different America - no matter how modern the shirts, you watch people dance to Ellington and Basie and you feel the exuberance of a country in its prime, with so much optimism for its future that how could this roar of energy not conquer the world?

Like so much great classical music, however much or little you like it, you haven't really given any piece of music a chance until you've heard it live. And no matter how white the band, when you hear Ellington's music, the sound picture with live dynamics and cleared away from all its compression and hiss, you realize that this is music as vital as anything in Haydn.

I use the Haydn metaphor deliberately. Like Ellington, Haydn thought of himself as a workman, not a genius, providing entertainment for a social order he dared not critique. And yet from his unique perch, he could innovate as many ornamentations of meaning as anything in Byzantium.

Like Stravinsky, Ellington is meant to be danced to, but like Stravinsky, the music works just as well as pure music. There are so many innovative chords in Ellington's music that I wonder if music theory has ever come up with names for some of his progressions. You can listen nearly as well without the context of dance, and yet the dancers makes it an entirely different experience.

All music can, I think, be divided into four elemental categories: song, dance, conversation, and painting. All music has qualities of all four, but while Ellington's music is primarily of the dance, when you hear a slow song like Mood Indigo, you feel as though you are in the middle of a sung painting.

And as I slow danced with a far too pretty woman I felt as though I was something intrusive about our intimacy. So beautiful was the music that I felt as though I should never dance a song that beautiful with someone whom you're not on intimate terms with. I remembered dancing to it in my college dorm room with a girl I had an on-again-off-again thing with - mostly off. She treated me like crap, but at least I have good memories like that.

Ellington has that dual meaning which only great art has. He's obviously had his many uses in moments of seduction, and yet works like Mood Indigo and I've Got It Bad speak just as well to loneliness and heartbreak. You go to things like this hoping to meet 'somebody,' and of course, there's nobody there. The sensible people 'your' age are busy at home with their kids, the 'insensible' are still getting drunk, and after 40, bars can be a profoundly sad place.

So I found myself sitting at a table alone, and yet again, listening to great music with just myself for company, and regretting it less than I thought I would.

Two Good Books: The Handmaid's Tale and The Dean's December

It's a little insane to write about these two books, but they're both near-masterpieces published in the mid-80s and have even more to say to us today than they ever did in their own time. One defines the spirit of our time and one is the zeitgeist's literal opposite. If you say anything uncomfortable about The Handmaid's Tale, you're in trouble. If you say anything nice about late Bellow, you're in trouble. So let's get to it (sticks up middle finger).

Nobody needs to champion The Handmaid's Tale. It's one of my lifetime's most beloved works of literary fiction (if 'beloved' is something you can call it). I still haven't seen the series, but the novel is one of fiction's most claustrophobic visions. As you probably know, it's about women whose options are completely restricted to reproduction or illegal whoredom. The only escape is a still worse place - a place of internment which seems uncannily like the death camps.

The Handmaid's Tale is not just a political pamphlet against fundamentalist Christianity, misogyny, and toxic masculinity. It's a vision of the world that is at once distant and very, very familiar. In the Trump era, it speaks to our fears of what fundamentalist Christianity may become, and we fear it because of so many times already when Christians were like this. But the more difficult truth of The Handmaid's Tale is we fear it because we see it today, and the place we see it is Islamic countries, where being a woman is a dystopia so far beyond anything seen by recent American eyes. The fact remains, there are people whom we're trained to view with sympathy who are the least sympathetic people on earth. If you want to know what life is like in those countries: read The Handmaid's Tale.

The problem of The Handmaid's Tale, if its a problem, is the condemnation it omits. Not the male characters, though the men of this book are viewed with weird sympathy. The missing condemnation is fellow travelers around the world who excuse these fundamentalists because their own goals align with fundamentalist Christianity. In the real world, they're the same Western conservatives who view Putin with sympathy. They're Middle Eastern Muslims, they're even Chinese communists. What they all hate is Western liberalism, Western secularism, Western permissiveness, and however fundamentalist this fictional Christian regime, there are a billion people at least who'd say 'their heart is in the right place.'

How do we know? Because their opposite numbers say the same about Western colonialism, and have justified any amount of totalitarian rule in the name of ending modern imperialism. It's even in my lifetime that Soviet backed dictators killed their countrymen with a speed only the Belgians could match. To be sure, there were individual American-backed dictators just as bad as any Soviet, but statistics don't lie: the Soviets were worse.

This is half the point of The Dean's December - the half which takes place in Bucharest. We think we have it bad, but 'they' have it worse. The plot is pretty simple: a man goes with his wife to her country of origin to visit her dying mother who did everything to get her girl to America. The bureaucrats prevent the daughter from seeing her, the mother dies, hundreds come to her funeral and treat her as a hero because she did similarly heroic things for them. Her funeral becomes a silent protest against the Caucescu regime: the only protest which can't be censored.

Was Caucescu's Romania as terrible as Gilead? Of course not. Romania wasn't even as terrible as America-backed dictatorships like Congo and Indonesia, but Romania is a real place and Gilead is not. Communist Romania was a tyranny of fear that your own relatives could put you in prison; your own friends, your own spouses and children. Betrayal in Eastern Europe was a fact of life, and everyone lived in terror of saying the wrong thing in front of the wrong intimate, all of whom might ruin their lives. And if you knew who your informant was, you simply had to welcome them and treat them as though particularly beloved, else as revenge they could even lie to the government about what you said or did.

But there are people in America who have it just as bad. This is The Dean's December's other half. It's not 'us,' the privileged readers of literary fiction, it's the murdered, many of whose last moments are full of horror and pain we can neither endure nor imagine. The murdered in America are a whole class of people: over a half-million in the last 50 years. These don't count soldiers or police. This is just the stark fact of American life, perhaps the starkest. We respond with horror to mass shootings and police killings, yet to every other type of murder we're conspicuously silent. To solve murder we like to say that soft power is the key, social work is the key, education is the key, better housing is the key; but the truth is, we don't know that. All we know is that gun death kills 30,000 people every year, and there are only two solutions everybody knows kinda work.

One is the force nobody wants to countenance: hard power. Police work. Police presence. Police enforcement. Police force. We can insist on higher standards of policing and still understand that police work is one of the cornerstones of any functioning society. If you want better policing, treat police officers more respectfully, not less. Pay them more. Be nice to them. Stop treating them like the enemy and stop making their change of tactics a higher priority than stopping murder itself. The alternative, we already see, is more murder, more injustice, more danger. Any policeman smart enough to get other options is leaving the job, knowing that their lives are that much more endangered for lack of tactics available to them and no new tactics put in their place. Replacing them will be exactly the corrupt lowlives we want off the beat.

The other solution is that 'thing' nobody thinks is important but defines everything: culture. Everybody says that culture isn't important when the other side makes the argument, then uses it without apology when it's their side who makes the argument. Culture matters. Everybody agrees so long as it's their culture.

But culture only works when included is a culture of agreement and compromise. A culture where people have the same motives is a culture where people get protected. The three sides of American life all have to concede enormous things. The right has to value education, the left has to value policing, and the center has to fund them both. It's all well and good for Republicans to look back to the mid-20th century when we had the world's entire economy and taxes for the highest earners at 94% (marginal), but they willfully misunderstand the circumstances which enabled it. it's nice to dream of the socialist paradises of Scandinavia without realizing that they're only possible with a racially homogenous population of a few million people and some defense money from the US so they can spend everything on social programs. The minute a few Muslims come over, northern Europeans start sounding like Nazis. The minute they need their defense needs taken care of, all that European contempt for us melts into American flags again.

Bellow is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and in his home country he languishes forgotten - more remembered in Europe than he's been here for twenty years. What Bellow represented was the mid-20th century liberal consensus, and because that's what he represents, his books are uniquely unsuitable for our time because of the unpleasant truths that come with him. He was an American liberal bordering on socialist who almost met with Trotsky in Mexico (the day of Trotsky's assassination), and then turned neoconservative in the wake of late-century urban decay.

Like so many of us, his great strengths were his weaknesses. And Bellow's great insight is that culture is what saves us, and that by letting go of the aspirations to middle class American white picket fences with good public schools, we succumbed to a nihilism from which we still haven't freed ourselves. With that insight came a disrespect for people who did not share his concept of culture; and his worst book, Mr. Sammler's Planet, has an unforgivable scene of breathtaking racism.

But the solution, as always, comes from meeting in the center, and its to the center that we have to look. But which center? A liberal center or a libertarian center? One cares enough to fund schools and police, the other doesn't care. So if you want better, the center has to be liberal, not libertarian, not conservative nor moderate. By managing this compromise, centrists cannot compromise on their own behavior. The 'well-meaning' center can't just sit back and stay affluent, they have to raise taxes through the roof and pay for education, social programs, defense, and policing to the quantity of hundreds of billions each. Either you share the wealth, or you consign a society to dystopia.

I don't know how to end this one.