I might as well share them...
The Unwinding: The History of the Distant Present
The world is seven billion stories waiting to be told. America is perhaps the only nation conceived on the principle that individual stories are worth telling, but in this era of foreclosure, it's the nation most likely to walk back its promise to tell them.
No matter what America ever aspired to be, we've never come close to living its mythos. The greatness of America was not in providing greater opportunities for its citizens, but in that it aspired to provide them. The world is a cruel enough place that no state before the United States ever believed that individuals had dignity enough to treat as something more than a dot to move to its proper place among a massive collection of dots. But America was, at least in part, founded on the audacious belief that each dot has a unique composition worth appreciation. Even if America was founded on the idea that female dots and African dots were more dispensable, the path of individual rights was set with unalterable momentum, slowed down many times, but never thus far never stopped.
Yet most of the time, the ride feels slow indeed. Despair sets in all too quickly in this nation whose national religion is optimism. If America is so awash in opportunity and freedom, why are its people so consistently desperate? From King George to Vladimir Putin, when a despot sees a country like America who proclaims the rights of the individual so loudly, and violates those rights so often and flagrantly, how can they not think this faux-democracy's unceasing demand for greater human rights is anything but hypocrisy? The greatest insult of all is that this jingoistic American establishment, with so much vested interest in proclaiming freedoms for their citizens they so seldom grant, is the closest thing to a friend these suffering American underclasses ever have. No one has a greater interest in prolonging the hypocritical suffering of the American poor than despots like Vladimir Putin, who want to show the world that it's folly to ever hope for better lives. And no enemy of America has ever been more successful in showing American hypocrisy than this neo-Tsar whose conception of freedom was formed in the Middle Ages.
In eras like ours, mass movements of the Left and Right always emerge to tell us that until now, all American progress has been a mirage. On the one side, people who claim that slavery just took different forms, on the other, people who say that life would be better if we reverted to institutions more like slavery. What instantly strikes you about the nihilism of both movements is their self-defeatism. If all progress until now has been for nothing or regress, why keep struggling? Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, so why should anyone expect there that these struggles will ever result in anything better than before?
Ambiguities like these are the genius of George Packer's non-fiction masterpiece, The Unwinding - An Inner History of The New America. Apparently taking his cue from John Dos Passos's much celebrated and seldom read USA Trilogy (sitting on my shelf for a year), Packer constructs a gorgeously detailed fresco of recent American life - hopes, fears, anguishes, and all too few triumphs. He follows the life stories of Americans who could stand as archetypes for our era - the Southern entrepreneur thwarted into the poorhouse at every turn by corporations, the African-American lady frantically searching for ever-dwindling factory jobs to support a family perpetually on the verge of falling apart, the once idealistic public servant who sold his soul to make millions as a lobbyist, even the story of an entire city - Tampa - built on credit and loans which banks knew their citizens could never pay back, then convinced by right-wing media that the root of their problems is government interference, interference which should have prevented the financial sector from exploiting them. Against their biographies are pitted the biographies of the 'great men' (and women) of consequence whom in their various ways created the circumstances that lead to this moment in American History: Newt Gingrich, Sam Walton, Robert Rubin, Oprah Winfrey, Andrew Breitbart, Jay-Z.
But a year after The Unwinding's publishing in 2013, the air of American life began to feel very different. The relatively subtle authoritarianism of Newt Gingrich became outright in Donald Trump. The unwittingly predatory finance of Robert Rubin's Goldman Sachs became the deliberate predation of Jamie Dimon's JPMorgan Chase. Andrew Breitbart's misleading journalism as entertainment became the monolithic propaganda machine of Steve Bannon. The Unwinding is not the inner history of the new America, it's the inner history of an already old America that we were in denial existed while it did, and created the America in which we're now deposited.
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The Godfather at 45
When you watch Officer McCluskey slug Michael Corleone, it should be impossible for a Jew not to wonder how often small Jews got beaten up in the eras of Henry Ford and Father Coughlin by huge Irishman. McCluskey is the old American alpha male - Scotch-Irish, brawny, mercurial, a little dumb. The old American alpha male is an uneducated guy, a hired gun or goon who gets paid for his strength. Had the movie been made fifteen years earlier, it wouldn't have been far-fetched to cast him with a cameo from John Wayne. But the new American alpha male is a Machiavellian like Michael Corleone - university educated, always strategizing, always deceitful, always consistent, always ruthless, and always careful. The new alpha male is the businessman who realizes that there's more money to be made if you're the one who hires the goons.
Seeing The Godfather with your own father is always a bizarre experience. I've seen it with him at least half-a-dozen times before seeing it in the theater this week on its 45th anniversary re-release; but it's still more bizarre when he's your boss, and still yet more so when your brothers are colleagues in the same business. When you watch The Godfather as an adult, it's impossible not to notice how much of the movie feels like what goes on in any business. Everybody is always going over the laundry list of things which need to get done, again, and again, and again, as though your lives depended on it. It's incredibly striking that the last thing Sonny ever says to Michael is not 'We'll get you back to America' or even 'I love you', but a reminder about how to dispose of the gun.
As the clear Fredo of the family, I should probably pass on any opportunity watch Godfather II with them again. Godfather II warned us of the price of maintaining these traditions, and we all now live with the price of America's Corleone mentality. Even as The Godfather's greatness remains clear as day that takes on new meanings with every viewing, it's impossible not to see ways in which it's started to show its age. In 2017, it's impossible The Godfather seems like an incredibly right-wing movie that has no room for a different moral outlook. There's never a sense that Don Vito is anything but a benevolent shepherd looking after his flock. There's never a sense Michael Corleone exhibits judgement that's anything but infallible, even in killing Carlo. It's no knock on a movie to say that its morals are conservative so long as the conservative points are legitimate, but Godfather II is clearly beginning to seem like a superior movie. The Godfather excuses and glamorizes these figures. Sure, it seems to say, they're ruthless and violent, but they're right. Godfather II has no such excuses for this violence, and demonstrates exactly how such violent authoritarianism begets itself from generation to generation.
If Michael and Vito's judgement in Godfather I seemed less accurate, they would never have the same hold on the Jewish imagination. In 1972, they were new alpha males for our time - dominating other men not because of their strength, but because of their cunning. If they were ruthless, it was all in the service of giving their families better lives. And for a generation whom in childhood watched Israel fight again and again for its survival, it's probably impossible not to see the story of Israel in the Corleones either - particularly because 1972, the year before the Yom Kippur War, was the last year when Israel's judgement still seemed infallible. Indeed, what Jew who's been to Israel can watch Michael Corleone wander around his family hometown in Sicily and not think of Jerusalem or Tzfat?
Many Italian-Americans hate The Godfather, but for Jewish men of the Baby Boom generation, there is no overestimating the earth shattering impact of The Godfather to their lives. In an era when so many Fredos left their cultures behind for protests and Ashrams, this was a movie that stood up to defend family and religion and heritage. It took a stand against the idealism of the sixties generation, arguing that the world would always remain a dangerous place whose benevolent customs developed in tandem with its violent ones as a means to dignify people in a world that consistently conspired to take dignity away from them. Every nice Jewish boy who thought about leaving Judaism but decided to stay put saw himself in Michael Corleone. Pikesville was built by thousands of his foot soldiers.
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Der Rosenkavalier: Modern America in 3/4 Time
Excepting sex, comic opera's the best thing in the world. The reason is simple, comic opera isn't funny, it's just opera without grand airs. All it does is imitate life's flowing moods. Mozart's its great master, every phrase of his operas simultaneously capturing all life's moods. He's the ph7 of expression. Composers tried to bring us back to ph7 ever since, and no one got closer, or further away, than Richard Strauss.
Strauss is exhibit A that mediocrities can be geniuses. No composer displayed more creativity in music's superficialities. Strauss does with 5000 notes what Mozart does with five.
I've always had a pet theory: Strauss was a born entertainer doomed to become an artist. He was musical royalty - son of Wagner's favorite hornist. Possessing infinities of musical talent and no profound thoughts, young Strauss translated the profound thoughts of Cervantes and Nietzsche to their musical equivalents in what we call 'Tone Poems.' His adoring musical public thought him a great intellectual, but Strauss's music parodied intellectuals contemptuously.
In dotage, Strauss became a Nazi collaborator, but his personality was like a Jewish caricature: materialistic, practical, cynical, greedy. To make art worthy of the name, he needed a temperamental opposite.
English readers never read Hugo von Hofmannsthal, but German readers think his early poetry as perfect as Keats or Rimbaud. The latter two were dead by their mid-30's, but when Hofmannsthal began work with Strauss, he was 35 and washed up. Strauss viewed creativity with the banality of a sausage factory, but Hofmannsthal came from one of those wealthy German-Jewish families that viewed art and culture as a substitute for the religion they renounced.
The great secret of creators like Mozart is that there's no distinction between art and entertainment. When you're a transcendent genius, it doesn't matter whether you create art or entertainment because everything you do is both entertaining and meaningful.
When Strauss paired with Hofmannsthal, he found a collaborator who viewed art as something more than banality, and his music glowed with Mozartian light. Rosenkavalier's so true to life that twenty minutes pass while you forget you're listening to music rather than conversation. But even with Hofmannsthal, there are soulstates Strauss never expresses.
To Mozart, happiness is something we deserve, but never achieve. To Strauss, happiness is achievable for some, who deserve happiness at others' expense. Mozart makes low-class characters the scene-stealers, showering them with affection and dignity. In Strauss, lower classes are anonymous masses, footstools onto which aristocrats lay smelly extremities.
To aristocrats of 2017, Der Rosenkavalier could be a manifesto. The 1911 world bequeathed Rosenkavalier was smeared with bullshit that seems as familiar as distant. The rules of social order were unbreakable. No one can say what they mean or mean what they say, and their world cries out for a demagogue who destroys their world by making his rage appear sincere.
Der Rosenkavalier makes you care about the world of aristocrats. It reduces generations of white males like me to puddles of feelings as we watch a woman approaching middle age realize that a whole new generation of privileged women will feel trapped like breeding mares by their patriarchal husbands, and treats it as the world's most consequential issue. Meanwhile a death machine prepares a hundred million early graves.
I'm an opera-loving white male stick in the mud. I've never gotten my nose around the feculence of faux-revolutionary concepts that smell like rage of the marginally less entitled than those whom they fight against. But as I watched the Metropolitan Opera's movie relay of Der Rosenkavalier last week, it was impossible not to see the oafishly villainous Baron Ochs as Donald Trump incarnate - a hurricane of toxic masculinity whose constant sexual harassments mask complete cowardice. It was impossible to view Renee Fleming's Marschallin, her luminous 58 playing 32, her character knowing she's of age for the pasture in a society that only values women for looks, without rage for her plight. It was impossible to view Elina Garanca, a beautiful 40 playing Marschallin's 17-year-old boy lover Octavian, without thinking that maybe, just maybe, the cycle of men raised to do evil can be broken by the purity of adolescent love. For five hours, the world's most aristocratic art form convinced me that patriarchy really is the defining concept of world history, and gender's nothing but a social construct.
When you watch Marschallin selflessly surrender Octavian to the love of the 16-year-old Sophie, you really do believe the future can be better. If adults act better, maybe the next generation can extend the purity of first love all the way through adult love's infinite complications. Maybe young men can be better men, and we can the cycle of toxic masculinity. Such is the stuff which fairy tales are made, and only aristocrats believe them.
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Here's the dirty secret of Jewish Fiction. There's no such thing.
Make a list of the famous modern Jewish fiction writers and movie directors. The vast majority is roman a clef about people they know, narrated from a character who might as well have the author's name. Even Kafka wrote from the point of view of a guy named K. The main character's almost always the book's dullest person, a filter through which the author can process the various foibles and quirks of acquaintances who doubtless were anything but thrilled to know the literary world would read the writer's thoughts about them.
Whether through Star Wars or Game of Thrones, our postmodern generation seems infatuated with myths as only a generation determined to destroy myths can be. Any gentile author could write a book like Catch-22, but usually chooses not to. Meanwhile, will any Jewish author of science fiction or fantasy ever equal the franchise success of Narnia?
Lots of readers avoid realism, thinking it dull next to experiences of violence and distant worlds, which authors make seem exhilerating rather than the dreadful experiences they usually are. But what's more savage? Works that mirror the exciting life you wish you lived, or works that demonstrate the violence in our souls with pains so real they can neither be forgotten nor unread? Realism is hated by many because it tells us the truth: this is the only world we have, and it's not much fun.
Save the Bible, there's no fiction in Judaism. We're not a religion of myths, and insofar as we have myths, we have a 2000 year Rabbinic tradition of deconstructing them - millennia of Rabbis who put all their might and soul into explaining those plot holes which give us no rest; our critical sense becoming ever sharpened by them and finding ever new flaws to explain. Every religion has this theological tradition; what's unique to Judaism is our belief that laymen should school themselves in it.
There are only two famous Jewish science fiction writers: Isaac Asimov and Ayn Rand - one of whom doesn't count. Unless you count Singer and Kafka, there isn't a single famous Jewish writer of fantasy. Perhaps it's too stereotypical to say that there's something in the Jewish temperament that doesn't lend itself to fantasy, but there reality is. Even latter day Jewish novelists and filmmakers who dabble in genre fiction give a more critical bent to their genre work that puts cherished tropes into a balance sheet.
The only innate creators of Jewish fiction are comic book artists: Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Siegel and Shuster. Comic books like theirs are creations of pure, irrational fiction, made by the first Jews since Biblical times who could dare imagine themselves superseding life's rules. But even in comic books, you have to contend with great graphic novelists like Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner, Harvey Pekar whose work was even more autobiographical than their novelistic counterparts.
From Proust to Lena Dunham, Modern Jewish Fiction is essays masquerading as fiction. Plausible characters, clearly based on composites of people the author knows, exposed and critiqued, all their too human virtues and flaws and yearnings and fears. Fiction's inherent mythological code, seemingly present in the literature of all lands, is found almost nowhere in the fiction of a people without a land.
Jews lived in the pre-industrial world like everybody else, but except for rabbinical tales told to illustrate morals, there's nary an example that resembles fiction in post-Biblical Jewish writing. In my reading, the only Jewish fiction writer who seems unironically grounded in the same archetypes as gentile fiction writers from Shakespeare to Stephen King is Isaac Bashevis Singer - an exception deposited in New York after a childhood as a pre-modern Rabbinical student. One might say that Stephen Spielberg is a modern teller of stories whose movies are shot through with that awe primeval, but Spielberg's his own category who can just as easily make Schindler's List as Jurassic Park.
Yet there are many, many examples of goyisher authors who embrace the world of messy, complicated, life. The realistic fiction of Tolstoy and Dickens and Flaubert, are fictions of a relatively healthy society, recognizing itself as it is, gradually improving and putting off dismantlement for another day. Somehow, these periods when realism is 'in' correspond to the moments when Jews' situation gets better. Perhaps that notion's a myth in itself, but a large part of the world's notion that we can improve it by examining reality comes from us. Whenever the world starts knocking its myths down to build up new ones, it's bad news for Jews. The world often can't take an attempt at an honest appraisal, but whenever they can't, it's not just bad news for us, it's bad news for us all.
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