she is locked up, beaten, and flung about the room

April 13, 2018 | A major donor with close ties to the White House resigned on Friday as deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee after the revelation that he had agreed to pay $1.6 million to a former Playboy model who became pregnant during an affair. The deal was arranged in the final months of 2017 by President Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen. Under the terms of the deal, the Republican donor, Elliott Broidy, would pay the woman in installments over the course of two years, and she would agree to stay silent about their relationship, two people with knowledge of the arrangement told The New York Times. The deal was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. From The New York Times.

I look at this man--everything that seems visible about him: the insistent PEPPERDINE photo-op backdrop; the poor physical and social health evident in the skin color, the mirthless pools of black that are his eyes, the grimace which at some point forgot to disguise itself as the signal of a pleasure in the world, which is to say, as a smile, rather than the wincing expression of a forbearance of, a steeling against, the world; I look at that "haircut"--I look at this man and I feel sorry for the "Playboy model," who, with those two words, is surgically caricatured into nothingness, into dismissal, as the barely described but overly present sine-qua-non--the that-without-which--pretext for the humiliation, the failure, the weakness, the desire of another, the barely described pretext for the humiliation of a man, who, as we well know, is the only another, the only other, that matters.

I look at this man, and I see the women not on his arm, in this frame or in any other frame: no surplus of disappointed wives or expensive mistresses or disappointed, expensive mothers will ever be enough to make him believe that he is a success, that he is a man, that he is alive, that he is real, that he is a real boy, alive, and not someone else's fantasy of a man, not some father's fantasy of a boy, not some father's fantasy of himself, made of painted wood and string, a fantasy whose lies are forever revealing, forever announcing, the degree to which they arouse him by his shameful erection, which is as clear as the nose on his face. 

It is, of course, the height to which he has risen; the richness of his investment and achievement; the scope and number of his responsibilities; the reputation and the dignity of--the admiration for--his family, both up (parental, ancestral) and down (spousal, childrel: inherital), which is to say, his very name, its currency and value, its reference and intelligibility; his ability, his dependability and responsibility, his ability to influence others, which is to say his word; his respect, his solidity, his fearsomeness, his strength, his resolution, his intensity, his fecundity, his power, which is to say, his maleness, his manhood, his sex, itself, all coming into question; it is the threatened or actual loss--even just the news of the threat of the loss--of these things that makes the story tragic, that gives it any value at all, that makes the story worth knowing or repeating, because the story's very iterability isn't affected at all by it's depressing and clichéed reiteration that it is news if/that/when a man falls from grace by partaking of his association with a [insert any two words here that describe a woman, but in this case:] Playboy Model. Every time, the loss, the tragic fall, the story occurs to, the story is about, an individual, a subject, a person of interest, or notoriety, of value, a person in whom I should be interested if only by dint of the fact that someone has decided to repeat the story of his loss of value to me. In the story, in his story, the (actual/potential) loss of his status--his value or usefulness in politics, industry, finance, faith, or law; his value as a leader or thinker or role-model; his value as a husband, father, son, and man--is presented as though it hadn't just happened to this other asshole yesterday, it is presented as though it were happening for the first time, when, depending on the timing it is only just happening for the first time today. And the lady--all the women, of course, for the most part--but the lady in question is just the stock character of Fallen Woman, just a two-word dismissal as a description, because it doesn't matter who she is, she doesn't have a story, she doesn't need a story, she is not important, except in one way and one way only: as the pretext for the (threatened, perhaps actual) loss of a man's status, family, fortune, word, name. Her presence in his story--because she doesn't have a story, she doesn't need a story, and no one cares about her story, except that there must be some suggestion, some hint, some suggestion to the suggestible, that she's just the least bit tawdry, or a shopgirl, or a divorcee, or an actress, or working class, or a coed, or a latina, or a european, or a prostitute, or a woman--signals his loss and is the cause of his loss. She exists--she serves--merely as a function in his story. She exists to serve. 

Certain kinds of psychoanalysis have a word for this state, which is often translated into English as a state of "abjection": she is abjected--in truth, before the story is told, she is already in an abjected state, always already--humbled and rejected, ejected outside of accepted, acceptable, informed, available, permissible or possible discourse. He is not. He has many more than two words to apply to his highest level of attainment, or any attainment, in the social spheres. He has many more than one sphere, he has many more than one title, many more than one role, and more than one name by which to call him, but his names, titles, roles, and spheres and his ability to move among them, capitalize upon them, and use them to his advantage and others' is damaged by his association with the storyless, abjected lady in question. Her story is unavailable and unimportant because she is abjected, and she is abjected because of some now-unimportant but singular detail of her now-unimportant and abjected story: she has no story, and it is as though his story, he, himself, takes on some contamination, partakes of some contaminating quanta of her abjection, and thus becomes, in some sense, abjected himself. So, gents, beware of Fallen Women.

But if we're really honest with ourselves, it is not difficult to see that the abjection of which Fallen Woman takes is not due to her fallen state, but due to her state as woman, as her hypothesized-but-the-hypothesis-is-enough fallenness is hypothesized on her hypothesized unreliable, unstable, untrustworthy, weak, flighty, fickle, faithless, unteachable, ignorant, dissembling, dangerous, dark, mysterious, unknowable womaness. The hint of falleness is the addition that is not an addition because it serves to call out what we all know women already to be, or be capable of, which is tacitly the same. The Fallen Woman is all women. She doesn't have the same value as a man, and her as-few-details-as-possible story only exists as a non-story to affect the story of a man. Woman is the property of someone else's story. She is property. That is why she is paid less on the dollar than a man for the same job; that is why she doesn't have her own name but has the name of her father or her husband; that is why she is defined most powerfully by her relationship to men, as daughter, wife, mother, mistress, widow; that is why when she is raped it is because of the way she was dressed or because she has had more than one sexual partner or any sexual partner, or because she is a lesbian, or a woman; that is why our vice president does not allow himself to be alone in a room with a woman who is not his wife; that is why when she is beaten by her husband it is because she must have done something to cause it; that is why we have difficulty encouraging or imagining women in physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, law, law enforcement, the military, sports, music composition or in leadership roles in these fields, or any field; that is why she cannot be elected president because she seems cold, seems untrustworthy, seems ambitious, and doesn't smile enough; that is why, in Virginia Woolf's memorable formulation in A Room of One's Own, she is locked up, beaten, and flung about the room. 

For her to be acceptable, she must be the paragon of fidelity, fealty, faith, compromise, kindness, supportiveness, selflessness, nonexistent opinions, disregarded thoughts, and uncomplaining labor: In the terms of King Lear, she must only be Cordelia, whose back is a bridge for men, for men and children, for male children, a bridge for men; otherwise she is those monstrous other sisters, Goneril or Regen, it seems, by default. It would be best for everyone if she died in childbirth. For there will always be another woman to marry--as they are interchangeable--who will teach the daughter her place, or beat her into it, because she can be counted on not to love her as her own. Because we must always force women into competition with other women, for everything, but especially for the attention of the Man, who is the hero of the story, the narrator, the author, the publisher, the bookseller, the critic, and the reader. And he has made the notion of Fallen Woman--precisely because there is no real distinction from Woman, precisely because Woman is, at every moment, in danger of submitting to her nature, like a scorpion--to distinguish interchangeable women from one another. If you believe that the purpose of sex is not pleasure, a dimension accorded only to men, but solely for the reproduction of men, sons to carry the name only they may keep and to safeguard the property only they may inherit, upon your body, which is the purpose of your body, by the man you were given to by a man, through the painful labor of your body, which is the only labor you are to be allowed; if you are Cordelia and make an incubator of your body, a bridge of your back, and suffer beautifully with your muted voice and your cramped agency, a jealously restricted purview that is mostly the execution, reinforcement, and extension, as their agent, of someone else's interests, desires, prejudices, and will; if you defer to, maintain, celebrate, supplement, and anticipate those interests without question, because they are, and must be, your own; if your every action and expression is toward keeping things the way they are, then you will be called "respectable"--a precarious high-wire act of a designation--and your origins, your class, your poverty, your ethnicity, your foreignness, your sins, your past, your woman-ness will not be held against you. You will not be fallen.

On Memorial Day

Why does God permit suffering?

The State tells us that the murder of ourselves by ourselves is acceptable, or, rather, neccessary. And so, on Memorial Day, in America, we might wonder if we should suspend this question or interrogate it.

In memoriam, in marmoreal memorial, today, our war dead, we remember, and those who made war and lived through it. Even if your sacrifice meant little to you, it means a great deal to me.

We remember you, today.

On the Current Antisemitism

Okay, so this must be the proof in the pudding. 

Since the election, the United States has seen a spike in reported hate crimes and violent acts against a whole array of people--this is reported, countable, legible, provable, and obvious. The high-profile ones are on the national news, but you can see them in your local newspaper, on your city news broadcasts, you can hear about them on the radio, and you sometimes witness them in person, when you are not the victim of them. This is happening.

Obviously, Muslims--or people perceived to be "Muslim"--would be the first recipient of this local (but also executive and, thus, national) aggression: mosques, individuals, islamic organizations.

Then "immigrants"--but not all immigrants, really, just immigrants of, shall we impolitely call it, in that charmingly, antique phrasing, a "duskier hue": apparently that's Indians (from India), Sikhs (turbans: because turbans are exotic and the exotic is unfamiliar and the unfamiliar is frightening and what frightens us is automatically dangerous), anyone suspiciously Latin (i.e. "illegal Mexican" rapist/murderer/au pair/gardener), and anyone else with brown skin ("Go back to your country!"). 

Then we have African-Americans--you know, "Black people"? You've probably heard of them.

This comes as no surprise, since targeting black people is a national pastime and seems to be written into our national DNA, when it is not written into our national Constitution. (The horrible words, the curses, the slurs, the lies, half-lies, statistics, the violent words uttered against African-Americans, Blacks, People of Color, and Negroes in this-great-country-against-itself, need never be repeated again, to my way of thinking. We have all heard them, far too much, in our minds, in our homes, in our beds, on television, in books and magazines, and on the street.)

Okay, there's been a spike in violence against gay people, particularly men ("Trump won! Get used to it!"), which is not that weird, considering the kinds of people we're talking about, and how late the gay have been to the party of even tacit or expected "tolerance"/"acceptance." 

But the one I really can't wrap my stupid, fucking, American mind around is the spike in antisemitism everywhere, and against long-established synagogues (Sure! Why not attack a neighborhood place of worship? Synagogue=Mosque) and Jewish community centers.

When people are clearly other by skin color, the cowards go after them, sure.

Muslim, immigrant, dirty Mexican rapist, black man--I get it. It's asinine and repugnant, but I can at least follow the ham-fisted, racist logic at work, here. 

With our Jewish friends and neighbors, we enter into a strangely different territory.

This is not just because these individuals and communities have been here, on our shores, for so long (Black people, after the First Nations and Native Americans, after the Dutch, are the people who have lived here the longest: yes, they were slaves in New Amsterdam), but because of Jewish assimilation to American-ness, especially during the postwar period; their imbrication with American culture; their strange invisibility and presence--their frequent ability to pass, especially after entering the current period, where black Irish, Italians, Greeks, mediterraneans, and so on, were no longer considered "animals," in America--and the long, difficult history with and against antisemitism in the United States; our experience and non-experience/our knowledge and non-knowledge/our non-complicity and complicity in the Holocaust; our relationship politically, imperially, territorially, and culturally to Israel: for all these reasons, the sudden temerity in the attacks against Jewish cultural centers and people in the U.S.A., after the election, really pulls the mask off the clown.

Oh... It's YOU!

And, even if all the people committing the violence aren't motivated by the same animus, they are each being animated by each others' animus. 

And so, the oldest--the foundational--bigotry in Christendom; that most European of christian hatreds; that two thousand-year-old, murderous rage rises again, after being told to settle down for so long: Jew-hatred; Jew-murder; God-murder; Antisemitism: two-thousand years of death, pogrom, exile-in-exile, status-without-status, nationality-without-nationality. This? Again?

To my mind, this is how we should know it's serious.

What would Jesus do?

Have a nice day in the Patriarchy, everyone!

For a story so disturbing, I loved this wry account from one woman of the world we live in, which is, as many women know, a rape culture. You know you want to read this New Yorker piece by Mary Karr, because it's really funny and has a sort of happy ending.

Or the kind of happy ending we're allowed, these days.

Excerpted:

On a spring day in recent memory, I was strolling up Ninth Avenue alone, after leaving a bistro lunch with a gentleman caller and my soon-to-finish-N.Y.U. son. It was sunny but not yet steaming. Businessmen had their ties tugged loose or suit jackets slung over their shoulders. There were floral frocks and filmy blouses among the adorably pierced and punked-out goths of Hell’s Kitchen. I could almost feel the financial yoke of my son’s college tuition slipping off my neck. 

Then an approaching guy chatting equably with a tall friend dodged at me to grab my crotch. I don’t mean brushed by it maybe accidentally; I mean he grabbed between my legs with a meaty claw, big as a waffle iron. He also called me the C-word with breath that stank of beer. Then he passed on into a sandwich shop with his buddy.

He wore a royal-blue plaid short-sleeve shirt you might find in a J. Crew ad, nicely hemmed jean shorts, and pricey sneakers. He was half my age and twice my weight and had the wide, muscled form cultivated by Equinox aficionados. Translation: he wasn’t dope sick or a flat-out loon. 

In case you haven’t been on the receiving end of this sort of assault, you should know the primal physiological response it evokes—in this woman, anyway. The stomach drops, as if you’ve been shoved backward from a skyscraper and are flailing through space. Time dismantles. There are more frames per second, and people’s facial features become very specific. This guy had a squashed-down forehead, wide-set eyes, and heavy but neatly waxed brows. 

Cops later told me my description was uncannily detailed—the result, I think, of the kind of change in perception post-traumatic-stress experts call “hypervigilance.” The reptilian area of the brain jolts you either to do battle or to bolt. Adrenaline and cortisol juice through you like a hit of meth, so you might find yourself still up and jittery at 4 a.m. (maybe even watching something as god-awful as “Waterworld,” the way I later did). 

I stood outside the doorway of the sandwich shop—pulse pounding in my ears, my heart doing mule kicks in my chest. Inside, the Grabber, as I thought of him, was waiting in line to order a sandwich. He was fine; I was the one with the problem. 

Shame hit, a cold backwash of elemental shame: something bad had been done to me; therefore I was bad. Even though I knew better, I started scanning for how I’d incited this. Pedestrians glided past. A sandwich was being made. I took stock of what I had on: in some ways, I wish I had been wearing booty shorts and Lucite heels and prissing past the Port Authority Bus Terminal holding my décolletage in my hands and saying “hubba hubba.” I should be able to dress that way if the urge possesses me.

Instead, I was wearing a modest dress and platform slides with big cork soles to save the feet from pounding concrete. For an instant, the shoes looked radiantly slutty, the old-maid equivalent of dominatrix spikes. I was drenched in sweat, and part of me wanted to bolt the two blocks to my apartment, scramble up the stairs, double-latch the door, and crawl behind some heavy furniture. But inside all that noise in my head, some space bar got hit, and a moment of quiet opened up.

One good side effect of a childhood as chaotic as my own is that I’ve worked up habits that can pay off in the middle of a butt-whipping. (I take twenty minutes of silence morning and night, and I see a therapist.) While the Grabber paid for his tidily wrapped sandwich, I noticed all the young women passing by—some, yes, in booty shorts, and with bodacious tatas—and I thought, If this sick bastard will do this to me in broad daylight, what’s he doing to these young’uns at 3 a.m.? My mind shuffled through the myriad times that run-ins like this had happened before. Then I came to and shouted from the doorway, “Not today! Not this bitch! You picked the wrong woman to fuck with today!”

The counter guy, bills in hand, craned around the line to see the madwoman outside. As the Grabber half-turned, the size of him shocked me and I backed away farther, to the other side of a parking meter, where my eyes could still shoot flying cartoon daggers at his broad back, albeit with some yardage between us.

Then a voice rose from the sidewalk. “What’d he do?” It was a man on a rectangle of cardboard you might normally step around.

“He grabbed”—polite words didn’t seem fierce enough, and the gross ones struck me as obscene—“my private zone!” This was the name my kid’s grade-school teacher had used for any area covered by a bathing suit: private zone.

So many guys might shrug it off: What’s the big deal? This one jutted his jaw out, saying, “He cain’t do that” with such fire that I started dialing 911. In a moment, I was on with a police dispatcher, describing the Grabber as he got his change and hustled out of the shop with his friend. They ignored me and started to get away, walking fast toward the bus station. My new friend on the cardboard said, “Go, go, go!” and I started to trot. They broke into a sprint, outpacing me right off.

Around Forty-first Street, a cop car pulled up, and I hopped in and recounted it all as they peeled out like they do on “Law & Order.” The female officer riding shotgun radioed the description I gave her to other cops, who nabbed him and hauled him, handcuffed, before me outside the Port Authority. “That’s him!” I said. He was blank-eyed, as if this whole thing were happening to somebody else. His buddy was amped up, though, claiming his friend hadn’t done anything. I shot back that that was horse hockey—yes, he had—and the buddy walked off as an officer put the Grabber in the back of a cruiser.

How satisfying was all this? Very.

En route to the station, the female officer looked back through the cage: Did I need counselling? I told her I’d had enough counselling to chase the sucker up Ninth Avenue.

I only wanted to press charges.

I filed a report. Later they told me the guy was a thirty-something from Jersey. He had a light rap sheet with no record of sexual assault. Nobody ever called me to court, but the cops had cuffed him, dragged him out of the bus station, and booked him. A woman should be able to count on follow-through from the justice system—they’d eventually fail to charge him—but at least he spent a night at Rikers. At the time, I felt somewhat vindicated.

For days after, I kept chewing on what thrill the Grabber got from his move. It just won’t translate to my gender. There are plenty of guys I might fancy kissing on the mouth, but to grab a passing one in the crotch and say, nice package? One pal joked, “Oh, yeah, try it,” suggesting that, for men, any sexual overture is welcome. I asked how he’d feel if a fellow weighing three-forty cornered him somewhere isolated and manhandled him. Suddenly this struck him as way more sinister.

Statistics show that nearly twenty per cent of women in the U.S. have been raped at some point in their lives, and around forty-four per cent of women have reported some other kind of sexual violence. But I suspect that the figure is more like a hundred per cent for women who will have endured things many men might consider minor—an unwelcome penis pressed against your leg at a party; being humped at the water cooler; being fondled, lunged at, felt up, squeezed, rubbed against. Verbal assaults few try to count. I’m glad to have aged out of the days when every street worker or blunt-puffing idler was part of a masculine gantlet I had to clear.

Since ending a ten-year relationship this fall, I’ve been subject to several gropings and gross jibes of the type you’d expect behind a junior-high gym dance, and they’ve been delivered by grownups, putative pals, not one of whom I even dimly considered getting jiggy with. Did they think that coarsely describing some body part or restraining me in locked arms or bending me over furniture would help to bed me? A few tried to say that at my age I should be flattered.

Not all offenses hurt the same way. Crude cracks seldom overwhelm the way a physical attack can. Nor are the sloppy lunges of somebody at a well-lit party as intimidating as some random dude grabbing you in an alley. One girlfriend of mine had a stranger in a first-class cabin turn his computer to show her snakes coming out of a woman’s private zone. It deeply upset her. “Some things you just can’t unsee.” At a Thanksgiving dinner where I hosted my son and his fiancée, a boorish guest showed everybody smartphone shots he’d taken of a woman’s breasts. (I told him that if I wanted to look at boobs, I’d go to a titty bar.) The point is: even a boundary violation mild enough to invoke nudges and winks among less sympathetic people can leave you feeling slimy.

Underlying all these actions exists the apparently unshakable tenet that any expression of male sexuality is somehow normal and every man’s right, whether or not a woman on the receiving end is repulsed or upset by it. All of us—male and female—envision all manner of erotic encounters without acting them out. But many of my male friends brush aside the behaviors that women find truly scary, the kind we know from experience can be the prelude to a nasty or even dangerous run-in. And something in the repetition of these behaviors—and in the culture’s blindness to the insult—wires itself into your body fibres and instills a debilitating sense that you’re not quite safe walking around.

My therapist—less a how-do-you-feel-about-that nodder than a wry commenter on my human comedy—didn’t argue with my estimate that all women have been to some degree sexually assaulted (as she was, as every one of her female patients over thirty-plus years has been). “It’s nothing you’re doing,” she said, adding that guys who force themselves on ninety-year-olds don’t target them for how hot they are but for how easily overpowered. 

My own pet opinion is that the guys who make creepy comments on the street or grab you or constantly seek to reassert sexual possibilities in ways that make you uncomfortable aren’t just oafs. They seem to get a perverse thrill from mortifying you. That’s why I chased the Grabber down. It bothers me to say that it took a man’s urging to give me the gumption. Still, I’ve often wanted to find that guy living on a piece of cardboard, to thank him.

No matter your chromosomal sex, let us all be the wrong woman you picked to fuck with today.

Let us all be not-this-bitch.

It's also International Day of the Girl Child Day.

Think about that.

If you know how to think.

May you only be a man who has only boy children, so you never have to learn how to think. Because thought is hard. And you might have to change your mind. Or learn something. Or learn anything.

I don't need to be a parent or a husband to a female member of our species to value the other sex or defend her against singular or epidemic expressions of sexual predation or assault.

We need to have compassion for women, support, nurture, and celebrate them, because we are all people, they are people, and all people should be given a real chance to thrive. Plus, as Tony Kushner wrote, it's harder for women.

Have a nice day in the Patriarchy, everyone, it's the International Day for the Girl Child Day!--it's like Labor Day for girls! And there never was a more delightfully clunky, cross-multiple-languages expression of support for women--or people--that I can I imagine.

Have a great day.

The World Looks Like This

In the teeny-tiny economy of the baby, the world looks like this:

I get milk.
You get shit.

Think of that overwhelming joy of the infant when it finally is able to give something to The Breast! To give something "back." Indeed, the only object it can give. I made this for you! I love you!

This is why Freud so perceptively equated shit with gifts and money. And, of course, vice versa.

My Problem

Hi. I wanted to explore some of my problems. This won't take up much of your time, but that is my problem.


My Problem


My problem isn't you, my problem is me.


I want you to listen for more then thirty seconds or 250 characters. That's MY problem.


My problem is that I want you to not get bored when it's not about you.


My problem is that I want you to enjoy nuance, difference, difficulty, and long sentences, inclusive of commas and semicolons.


My problem is that you fear the unfamiliar.


MY problem is that you neither know what you want nor have ever explored why you want it.


I don't care why you're overwhelmed by your job, my problem is that you are overwhelmed by the fact that you're overwhelmed by your job, don't have the tools to talk about it, and pretend that you are not and that you do.


My problem is that you are so afraid of the truth about your life that you cling to demonstrably absurd "truths" about your life that hurt and destroy others, daily, rather than consider any alternative.


These are my problems.


What are your problems?

JOTT HAH WEH HAH

JOTT HAH WEH HAH


I am a fragment
A series
A series of
Fragments

I am a thing
A part of
A thing
An

Image
A
Meme
A phoneme

A scheme
A
Gleam a
Dream

A Nothing
A something
A breathing and
A breath

An
Org
anism
A series

Of thoughts
Mistakes
Ideals and
Ideas

I am
A
thing
Made

Of thingness
And
Things
A series

Of Nothings.
I am thine.
I am

A thing

L. Steve Schmersal, JOTT HAH WEH HAH, December 2015.

On The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden Mahagonny

Michael White, writing in the NYTimes on March 13, had one entirely accurate thing to say about the new Royal Opera House, Covent Garden production, in English, of Kurt Weill's masterpiece, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny), which I saw yesterday afternoon at Symphony Space as part of the National Theatre (not exactly, but that's perfectly okay) Live broadcast series: "This is a piece whose chronicling of modern life is so exact, it functions more like reportage than reimagining."

I count this as my sixth Mahagonny (eighth, if you include audio recordings). It's an enormously difficult piece to pull off, and reviewers of it, and much of Weill's work (or Brecht's, for that matter), tend toward expressing disappointment that what they're seeing is not the perfect production they seek, it seems. White does the same, throwing out the baby with the bathwater, instead of appreciating how far and how well a production actually gets it right, and thus turns away potential audiences from this hugely important work.

Every performance is different, of course, so I did not see the particular one reviewed here. Former ingenue, von Otter was wonderful, cold, laser-sharp focused, and frightening as the Widow Begbick, foundress of the pleasure town, Mahagonny, and the rest of the cast was quite strong. The production starts small and grows progressively lavish--if "lavish" includes scores of shipping containers stacked to a horizon-obliterating height--with clever, cutting edge projection effects. The first act showed the most exciting--I mean, riveting--account I've ever seen of this opera. But what blew me away the most was how clearly America (and the world) has turned into Mahagonny. "Prescient" doesn't come close to describing the alignment between what late Capitalism has accomplished--and continues to do so--and the savage world-critique, the weltanschauung-critique, Weill and Brecht fashioned, which still seemed bizarre and off-putting to me a handful of years ago, and now reads like an aesthetically-heightened newspaper, with some of the most gorgeous, thrilling music ever composed for an opera stage.

On Enfranchisement; On Suffrage

enfranchise

verb

en·fran·chise \in-ˈfran-ˌchīz, en-\

Full Definition of ENFRANCHISE
transitive verb

1: to set free (as from slavery)

2: to endow with a franchise: as

a : to admit to the privileges of a citizen and especially to the right of suffrage

b : to admit (a municipality) to political privileges or rights

suffrage

noun
suf·frage \ˈsə-frij, sometimes -fə-rij\

Full Definition of SUFFRAGE
noun

1: a short intercessory prayer usually in a series

2: a vote given in deciding a controverted question or electing a person for an office or trust

3: the right of voting : franchise; also : the exercise of such right


I. On The Law, Marriageability, and The Supreme Court

This begins with a very long sentence, inclusive of serial digressions on the topic:

While I have never had any significant personal interest in getting married and--less topical but still significant--I am critical of the prized, exemplary status accorded marriage culturally, and even more so of the economic and legal advantages awarded by the State to any two adult individuals--formerly white, formerly of the same skin color, and now formerly of differently sexed bodies (is it not interesting how discriminatory animus, as the Law itself, shows its sad obsession with excluding specific bodies from its irregular protections and its unearned patronage in this neat, capsule history?)--who, whether foolish or wise, whether loaded and living it up and leaving it in Las Vegas or sober at St Patrick's, decide, for any reason or no reason, for love or money or loneliness or status or spite, to claim their right to this contract that we call an institution, I nonetheless have never found the curiously overwrought desire in The Law to segregate same-sex adults from this contract (without entertaining even the condescending lip-service of "separate but equal") to be credulous or even intelligible.

I am less perplexed by the impulse two people may have to enunciate a ritual declaration of union between them than I am by the State's longstanding preoccupation with singling out this dual relation for its imprimatur, while other relationships and other adults, paired but unmarried or--Heaven forfend!--single--nearly all by dint of birth not among the 1% that enjoys the wealth of the nation--are effectively punished for their willful failure, or their legal ineligibility, to submit to this contract. And thus this structure makes a demand of the institution, a demand whose call is heard no less by those able to heed it under The Law's latest grudging concession of whom it will accept as a person (even then only under certain conditions and in specific locations) and those still shunned by its embrace and ridiculed by its exceptional promise--a promise it guards jealously in its bosom, as a child does with a secret or rather an old toy, carefully withheld from play by the merest interest from another child.

The value of the Other Body does not derive from the ban placed on its marriageability, rather the Body in question--though unmarked by any outward sign of its intrinsic, alien difference, except, of course, the same difference displayed by nearly everyone: the supposedly unified, immutable sex of the body itself, now cleverly redeployed as the mark of difference, of Cain, by its proximity to another body displaying the same mark--is the very reason for its exclusion from the contract. The spatial dimension, and the arena of the social, are thus conscripted to render the familiar strange, and theorize the discovery of essential difference, of identity, in an otherwise undifferentiatable body. It is through this guilt by association, this conspiracy theory, that the Law discerns the identity that marks this unmarked body. And this is how, as Foucault memorably demonstrated, the action, the crime, the trajectory of the act defines the past and future of the body, becomes an identity, the crime becomes the body itself--becomes the Other Body--or as the Bible clarified so much earlier in the King James, the Strength of Sin is the Law. And in these latter days the struggle for civil rights has effectively removed much of the need for policing, because now we nominate ourselves for the State. The act is eclipsed by the name. And the Law is still catching up to what this means in regard to its strictures, prejudices, and punishments.

But the weakness of the Law in this case is that it is based on the notion of Sin. It is not Sin that determines the Law, and despite the important genealogical relationship between Commandments and Religious Laws and the field of American Law, they in fact are not coextensive, rather they take a very different interest in a series of similar topics and dilemmas. And though under Religion these topics do not represent dilemmas, under the Law, they must.

But let us return to the question of the problematic, intractable, ungovernable Other Body that even though the Law has spent centuries trying to define, detect, dissect, and force into submission, this Other Body keeps slipping away, as the Law realizes and re-realizes that it has never had ethical ground to stand upon in the first place in this matter. The Law of Desire is not subject to the Law of Man. And despite the paucity of reference in history books it is surely as old as the oldest profession, which is not prostitution as the romantics would have us believe, but the profession of love.


II. On Intercession, The Marketplace, Voting Rights, Racism, and The Law

As a kind of late introduction, I should mention that I had always written the first part of this post--which is a repost-of-a-post--as a commentary on the nearly simultaneous release of two Supreme Court rulings, not one: the grudging concession to the unconstitutional status of parts of the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act" (DOMA) and the chronologically precedent evisceration--a much more important and far-reaching and enormously damaging ruling--of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The second always drained any pleasure from the first. I don't care a fig for same-sex marriage when the same week thousands of people are declared second-class citizens, unworthy of the right to vote in racist Southern states, and other places--places put on permanent watch for good reason, as they have shown in this aftermath! As soon as the 1965 law was declared obsolete and unnecessary, the very states in question pursued the exact actions prohibited by the law under which they were formerly bound. This is repugnant and embarrassing to the extreme for all Americans. I feel that today, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches in protest for the right to vote, it is only appropriate that I finally finish this post.

We are watching the fascinating conflict among, and intersection of, a series of Higher Court edicts, Legislative/Executive workarounds, Late Capitalist imperatives, animus-based Religious intractabilities, States vs Federal Rights issues, dilemmas of the Franchise, and Republican-Democratic open questions (not the political parties, I speak here of principles of democratically-elected representatives of a republic: "...and to the Republic for which it stands....") simultaneously coming home to roost. Where will it lead?

Let us begin with a certain kind of franchise, which is the only one anyone seems to care about, which is the business franchise, which allows us to sell to anyone, no matter how depraved they are. This is the foundation of Arizona's gubernatorial veto, which recognized the tacit and provisional LGBTQO "community" as a realistic, even necessary, factor in the marketplace. Yet why is the ability of same-sex couples to marry such a powerful factor in the marketplace of ideas and cash, when the ability of so-called "minority" bodies to participate in the electoral process is not equally or more powerful? I am baffled by this inconsistency. Are gay bodies white and not black? Are gay bodies monied and black bodies negligible? What moronic calculus accounts for this... this unspeakable idiocy? Under what jaundiced optic of The Law are black bodies allowed to marry but not to vote?--an optic that includes one's neighborhood and income bracket?

I realize now why I have taken so long to write about this: it is because my language fails before this pathetic Racism. It is Racism on its face; and The Law should hang its head in shame before this monstrous abdication of its essential role--its protection of fairness--in our society. And let all of you who say there is no Racism in American culture incline your heads in shame as well.

I'll write more later when I've cooled off.

On the Unreliability of Narrators and Other Options

There are no other options.

On the Always-Already of American Racism: Not all black people are criminals. Not all cops are bad.

The text tells us: Not all cops are bad. Not all black people are criminals. Not all white people are racist.

We read this well-meaning text. Of course, we don't want to resort to labeling; of course we don't. But when you think about the news, and perhaps your own limited personal experience, doesn't it seem like the ratio of bad cops to good cops is much higher than the ratio of black criminals to... wait a second, this series of statements is a racist construction to begin with.

The categories offered are cops, black people, and white people, and bad cops, criminals, and racists; and this set-up already contains the subliminal, implicit suggestion that cops aren't black (statistically, this is not even possible, not anymore, but from a macro-perspective, unfortunately, it might as well be true) and--much more insidious--it suggests that blacks are criminals, even while it is trying to say exactly the opposite. If you want to tease this apart on your own--if you even can tease, or tweeze--these awful things apart, try to distinguish the difference between not all criminals are black and not all blacks are criminals. 

Now, to really complicate this even further, if you look at the ratio of the white population, as such, in the United States, to the population of the incarcerated who happen to be white and then look at ratio of the population of black people in the U.S. to the population of those black people incarcerated, you will not only find that most of the incarcerated are black, but that the ratio of black prisoners to white prisoners is much higher than the ratio of white cops to black cops. Does this suggest that black people are naturally, genetically drawn to crime? You are an idiot if you think so. But when the front lines of the criminal justice system proves itself to be mostly white and the actions that are articulated as crimes ensnare and incarcerate mostly those proven to be black, it should give one pause. Unless, of course, all criminals are black, except not all of them are. What a generous designation it is, this not-all....

For the record, I happen to believe that all white people--and I'm speaking primarily of white people in the United States--are racist, but, though the brand of American Racism is special, we certainly aren't unique in the world in this regard. The sinister presence of Racism in our psychological, logical, linguistic, cultural make-up exists in us as individuals through the systemic status and quality of Racism in this country, where it has had a long, complex, and implicit history, and through the signal placement of white people within that structure, within those relations, discourses, possibilities, exclusions, and experiences. It behaves as a trait in a genetic code, not one that codes from our actual chromosomal DNA, but as the codes we absorb from the beginning by being raised in a culture of Racism, both explicit and implicit. This is what accounts for the construction that is ultimately racist in the well-intentioned text quoted at the outset of this post, which could have very easily been written by someone black as by someone white, though I'm banking on the latter, in this case.

This fact of baseline American Racism doesn't meant that Racism--in others, in ourselves, and as it is enacted by The State--cannot be resisted, but I think that the de facto status and placement of white(s) within the environment of American privilege, possibility, and human worth underwrites expectations, investments, and meanings of which we are not even aware because the discourse itself is in us, is us, has always been in us and us, was taught to us, yes, but the discourse is tainted at its essence and has always already been tainted, long before we were immersed in it, by Racism, which exists as sometimes a command, sometimes an enraged explosion, sometimes a feeling of distaste, sometimes a knee-jerk reaction, sometimes an unnoticed current, a subtle drift, an undertow. We are not powerless to resist it, but we have to understand that it is there in order to resist it in the first place, all the same. How can you resist something that you don't believe--or don't know, or don't want to know--exists?

An old friend--her name is Lisa--replies:

I wholeheartedly believe that all people in the U.S. are bigots. I don't think you can be raised in this culture and not be--too many messages bombarding you from your earliest memories. It is incumbent on us to recognize that fact, and consciously try not to be racist. We may not be able to help the thoughts that come into our heads, but we can control how what we do affects other people.

I entirely endorse and agree with this view. 

I agree that if we widen the frame to discuss bigotry and/or prejudice, that view will encompass everyone in the United States. And while I would prefer each individual examine her or his assumptions and real-world, real-time reactions and behaviors with regard to other people, to understand better that and how his or her unreconstructed, unthinking thoughts, words, and deeds do affect others, it seems clear that many enjoy the negative effect they produce in the other, that they seek that effect, as well as that affect. It is not that they don't care if they humiliate or hurt someone else: they do care: they care to do precisely that; they prefer to hurt someone else, and that action, that effect, brings them pleasure, power, and the pleasure that is power. 

This activity, this desire, happens across ethnic groups; it obeys no national boundaries; it seems to be intensified, rather than muted by religious affiliation (though the converse, one would think, should be the case); it crosses time and space, languages, communities, hues of skin tone, hair color and texture, height, weight, gender, sexuality, performativity, age, and any and every possible distinguishing trait or feature that humans can come up with to mark another as the other, as different, weird, foreign, or just not-them, and so reject him--abject him. 

We don't just fear the unfamiliar, we need it. We need the unfamiliar--the not-me, the not-us--for its use-value in order to be ourselves, to differentiate ourselves from the other, and we need it because--and this is the pessimistic view, but I am afraid that it's true--we need it because we like hurting others. 

As my friend, Lisa, says, the test is whether we give in to that desire to mark, distinguish, reject, abject, and hurt the other or not. We don't have to, though in many cases someone is literally trying to make us do just that. 

I would like to distinguish this event and desire from Racism, which belongs to the category of bigotry, though all bigotry is not Racism. 

Racism is not just fear of difference, it is a systematized, large-scale, cultural, historical effort--a national effort--against a particular kind of individual, against a certain group. And about this group the racism has very specific ideas about what should be available--socially, financially, educationally, conceptually, semantically, and materially--to that group and the individuals who have comprised it, and who comprise it, both now, and in the future, and the future of their children. This is not a conspiracy, as such (but, yes, of course, it is; in many cases it is entirely an agreed upon program that doesn't need to be discussed, though it is discussed, here, and there), in which those in power, and especially those not in power, specifically collaborate against the humanity and advancement of a whole group, but it might as well be. Racism is less a program than it is a fucked-up disease of a culture--in a culture--on a scale and pervasiveness bigotry only wishes it could attain. Racism is the child of bigotry. Racism is the perfectest example of bigotry. Racism is the god bigotry prays to.

It's the End of the World as We Know It: I Think I Thought You Were Someone Else

Should we talk about the weather?
Should we talk about the government?
-- R.E.M., "Pop Song 89," GREEN

I am a child of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. It sounds like the call sign for junk, pop radio, doesn't it? In truth, I am, as is everyone of my generation, and the generation before us, and that generation before them, a child--a "product"--of the 19th century. We are all Victorians. We are the new Victorians--"the 'other' Victorians"--as Foucault so memorably described himself, us, and you. 

If you are younger than I am, you, too, perhaps feel unmoored from the 19th century, perhaps do not even know what it is, what that means. I assure you, the only thing that divides me from you is this understanding: We are still living in the 19th century. And we live very much in the 19th century A.D.--"of our Lord," Jesus Christ, though not in any sense he--or even He--would recognize as living during such a time. "We" are "living" it "up"; but we are not living. Friends, we are at the end of days. And it isn't the one indicated to us in Scripture, in the inscription, of The Word--an "in scripture," an inscription, a script, which, as its name clearly indicates, is a writing, a quotation, because all writing is a quotation of something and thus a something subject to misquotation, mistranslation, emendation, animus, amendment, redaction, addition, subtraction. 

No, in fact, the coming apocalypse arrives, at what may be the actual end of the industrial, 19th century, by way of "Science," which is--the public discourse of which is--only another indispensable invention of the 19th century. We are living at the End of Times, during which the agricultural year of dependable, repeating cycles is overtaken by and dissolved into high-speed and the overproduced, entertainment version of high-speed called instant gratification. As the early, seasonal manifestation we are coming to know so well, perhaps even, perversely, getting used to, illustrates; yes, the awkward disturbance in, and disruption of, the seasons, which used to number four, makes so clear--the times of Autumn and Spring are subsumed by Winter and Summer, which then start turning into each other in alternation. Your latest evidence is the Winter of 2014, with snow and freezing temperatures interspersed with 50 degree days, and a Summer in Ohio, traditionally a time of luxuriant, overwhelming humidity and heat, reduced to a bizarre string of 50 degree days and nights during the high summer of July and August, followed by a September heat wave in New York coinciding, exactly, with snow in the Midwest.

Seasonal time is out-of-joint; time is out of joint. And this is just one of the many gifts of the 19th century and its passion for unregulated industry, which has returned to us in the 21st century, a time we live in in name only.

www.peoplesclimate.org

#peoplesclimate, #peoplesclimatemarch, #climatechange, #globalwarming

On Stonewall @ 45, in Brief

Today marks the 45th anniversary of the first night of riots we have come to call The Stonewall Riots. 

Stonewall didn't launch the gay rights movement or launch the first great gay migration from smaller towns and cities to the big ones, but it was a switch point in queer history toward a new awareness of the existence of others and the existence of possibilities--even possibilities you must create yourself, sometimes with violence deemed necessary at the time, in the moment, at the place, on that Sunday in June in 1969, and the nights that followed, and the years that followed that.

Small Town Boy Reprise 2014

To your soul

To your soul 

Crying. 

You leave in the morning 

With everything you own

in a little black case.

Alone on a platform 

The wind and the rain 

On a sad and lonely face.

Mother will never understand

Why you had to leave,

But the answers you seek 

will never be found at home.

For the love that you need 

Will never be found at home.

Run away turn away 

Run away turn away 

Run away 

Run away turn away 

Run away turn away

Run away

To your soul

To your soul

Crying to your soul

Crying to your soul

Cry, boy, cry

Cry, boy, cry

Cry, boy, cry

Cry, boy, cry

Crying to your soul

Crying to your soul

To your soul

To your soul

To your soul

Songwriters: BRONSKI, STEVE/STEINBACHEK, LARRY AKA LARRY COLE/SOMERVILLE, JIMMY

Even the trace of the presence of the global economy affecting a passably local one usually indicates a rise in real estate prices and/or a leveling or drop in wage earnings

A signal piece regarding the Vancouver housing market by James Surowiecki, "Real Estate Goes Global," from The New Yorker's "Financial Page" this week.

Even the trace of the presence of the global economy affecting a passably local one usually indicates a rise in real estate prices and/or a leveling or drop in wage earnings. Alas, I do not invent these ideas, because then they would have the passing fancy of merely unpleasant fictions--or perhaps pleasant ones, if you, gentle reader, number yourself among the extraordinarily wealthy. I, myself, do not. And so, I do not share your enthusiasm for this or that turn of events that benefits you so greatly but continues to make life even more of a challenge for those less privileged than you may be--people such as myself.

I cannot fault myself entirely for my failure to achieve your great fortune. There is only so much to go around, after all, and your teensy percentage of the population seems to be intent on keeping as much of it for yourself as possible. The less you put into any economy, the less that economy grows. This is basic and not of my invention.

No. Rather than invent "statistics" or theorize in some broader, unsupported, sense of the "economic," I prefer to speak of incidences--let us not even raise them to the dignity, the certainty, of causality, of the causal--incidences that seem to keep showing up near each other, either temporally or locally.

And what is this "nearness" of which I speak? Can you see it? Does it happen recently enough for you to notice it, or does its temporal proximity seem to occur repeatedly in relation to a trend you may have noticed in your world--no matter how tiny, personal, local, or global this may be?

I find that most people--and by "most" I mean the larger percentage of the population--tend, most often, to recognize, not even the trends that favor them. Instead, they either recognize the trends that they would like to favor them--some day--or the trends that they believe should favor no one, no matter whether these trends may ever actually apply to them, themselves or their families, or not.

And so, you have people who celebrate the kind of wealth they will never actually ever be able to achieve--not them, not their children. And then you have people who disparage any public support or safety net for the individual, any labor union, wage regulation, fair and even tax code, public healthcare, corporate or environmental standards or regulations, sometimes public education, or anything else that seems to smack of governmental incursion into private property; not privacy--which, of course, has no value--but money, property, children, land and things (because, in case you haven't heard, children are things we invest in) and ownership, as such, and, now, even speech. But in this last place, the government has, through the inverse of freedom, marked its greatest colonization, its greatest mobilization of speech for the few and the greatest silencing of the many.

For you must remember, according to a 5 to 4 Supreme Court decision--clearly a mandate with strong precedent under the law--only the most expensive speech is worth valuing, reproducing, hearing, or discussing. Because, apparently, money IS speech. Money is speech. Think about that, while I say it again: Money is speech. So, the more money you have the more speech you have, and therefore, in a very fucked-up way, the more money you have the more "free" your speech is--more free because free speech is unhampered speech, and the less hampered the speech the freer it is. So, in a very queer sense indeed, the more that any kind of speech circulates, or, at least, finds its audience, the freer that speech is. And so, the freedom of your speech, its ability to reach any audience--much less its intended audience--actually carries a price tag.

So, am I the only one reading this who thinks that access to discourse and an audience; access to a polity for an election; access to speech as a monetary value actually destroys the notion of speech as something "free"? In social media forums, such as Facebook, where we sometimes produce our speech--which we are "free" to do--our speech derives its value from a different kind of payment: that of attention. It's not the number of people who read any post that determines its value and its placement in the, so called, "Newsfeed"; no, it is the popularity contest of liking and commentary that determines its value. And so your free speech, is something no one may never see or ever see, because it is not in fact free to circulate at all in such places. If it is too long, it is not free. If it is too interesting or complicated or critical, it is not free. If it is produced by someone without the organ of a different medium, such as a newspaper, or a lobbyist, or a representative, it is not free. This is a kind of market competition. But as the saying goes, you have to spend money to make money; or rather, to put precisely too fine a point on it: you have to have money to make money. And money is speech. Money is speech.

Late Capitalism has a genius for attaching a price tag to everything. And if it doesn't carry a price tag and a price that can be driven up to increase its value either in the global market of property or the market of ideas, speech, law, and government, it has no value. As your labor has no value. Because your speech has no value.

On The Law, Marriageability, and The Supreme Court

This begins with a very long sentence, inclusive of serial digressions on the topic:

While I have never had any significant personal interest in getting married and--less topical but still significant--I am critical of the prized, exemplary status accorded marriage culturally, and even more so of the economic and legal advantages awarded by the State to any two adult individuals--formerly white, formerly of the same skin color, and now formerly of differently sexed bodies (is it not interesting how discriminatory animus, as the Law itself, shows its sad obsession with excluding specific bodies from its irregular protections and its unearned patronage in this neat, capsule history?)--who, whether foolish or wise, whether loaded and living it up and leaving it in Las Vegas or sober at St Patrick's, decide, for any reason or no reason, for love or money or loneliness or status or spite, to claim their right to this contract that we call an institution, I nonetheless have never found the curiously overwrought desire in The Law to segregate same-sex adults from this contract (without entertaining even the condescending lip-service of "separate but equal") to be credulous or even intelligible.

I am less perplexed by the impulse two people may have to enunciate a ritual declaration of union between them than I am by the State's longstanding preoccupation with singling out this dual relation for its imprimatur, while other relationships and other adults, paired but unmarried or--Heaven forfend!--single--nearly all by dint of birth not among the 1% that enjoys the wealth of the nation--are effectively punished for their willful failure, or their legal ineligibility, to submit to this contract. And thus this structure makes a demand of the institution, a demand whose call is heard no less by those able to heed it under The Law's latest grudging concession of whom it will accept as a person (even then only under certain conditions and in specific locations) and those still shunned by its embrace and ridiculed by its exceptional promise--a promise it guards jealously in its bosom, as a child does with a secret or rather an old toy, carefully withheld from play by the merest interest from another child.

The value of the Other Body does not derive from the ban placed on its marriageability, rather the Body in question--though unmarked by any outward sign of its intrinsic, alien difference, except, of course, the same difference displayed by nearly everyone: the supposedly unified, immutable sex of the body itself, now cleverly redeployed as the mark of difference, of Cain, by its proximity to another body displaying the same mark--is the very reason for its exclusion from the contract. The spatial dimension, and the arena of the social, are thus conscripted to render the familiar strange, and theorize the discovery of essential difference, of identity, in an otherwise undifferentiatable body. It is through this guilt by association, this conspiracy theory, that the Law discerns the identity that marks this unmarked body. And this is how, as Foucault memorably demonstrated, the action, the crime, the trajectory of the act defines the past and future of the body, becomes an identity, the crime becomes the body itself--becomes the Other Body--or as the Bible clarified so much earlier in the King James, the Strength of Sin is the Law. And in these latter days the struggle for civil rights has effectively removed much of the need for policing, because now we nominate ourselves for the State. The act is eclipsed by the name. And the Law is still catching up to what this means in regard to its strictures, prejudices, and punishments.

But the weakness of the Law in this case is that it is based on the notion of Sin. It is not Sin that determines the Law, and despite the important genealogical relationship between Commandments and Religious Laws and the field of American Law, they in fact are not coextensive, rather they take a very different interest in a series of similar topics and dilemmas. And though under Religion these topics do not represent dilemmas, under the Law, they must.

But let us return to the question of the problematic, intractable, ungovernable Other Body that even though the Law has spent centuries trying to define, detect, dissect, and force into submission, this Other Body keeps slipping away, as the Law realizes and re-realizes that it has never had ethical ground to stand upon in the first place in this matter. The Law of Desire is not subject to the Law of Man. And despite the paucity of reference in history books it is surely as old as the oldest profession, which is not prostitution as the romantics would have us believe, but the profession of love.