The New Psychopathy

Bored already with Jon Ronson's investigation of psychopathy, and tired of his once-charming wide-eyed routine, I have moved on to a new psychopathy. A very alert reader has informed me about Hotness Delusion Syndrome. Apparently, according to the Australian demographer who discovered the condition, middle-aged men are mistaking a demographic quirk of fate for an assessment of their hotness: because there are more available middle-aged men than middle-aged women, middle-aged men are getting more attention than they would based on any sort of objective assessment of their qualities but they think, erroneously, that they are getting this attention due to their hotness.

The topic was broached with respect to the Weiner scandal by Clarence Page, an op-ed writer on the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune. Page, by the way, has Intelligence Delusion Syndrome, which is rampant amongst the op-ed writers in the United States, and whose most pitiable victims include Bob Greene, Richard Roeper, David Brooks, and anybody who writes "commentaries" on cnn (I'm avoiding looking at you, Ruben Navarrette, Jr). Because papers and web-sites are desperate to fill their empty spaces, they'll publish the drivel of any lower-middle-brow hack with something that resembles an opinion and spellchecker, and suddenly that hack thinks he or she is much more intelligent and insightful than he or she actually is.

Anyway, back to Hotness Delusion Syndrome. It does not only pertain to available men. It also pertains to hitched men. Readers, I'm going to tell you something that might be hard for some of you to hear. Brace yourselves. I'm taken. That's right. I'm not on the market. "But why are you blogging then?" you ask. "Why are you even using a computer?" Good question. And before we go any further, I want you to know that this doesn't change a thing in those sexts I sent you. When I said I was "engorged with desire" and "panting like an Alsatian in the Belgian Congo", I meant every word of it.

But I also have Hotness Delusion Syndrome. I realised it this morning.

Some time after dawn, I was standing in the living room-kitchen of my apartment, nursing a tea, looking out the windows. A group of construction workers repairing the exterior of the building ascended past the windows on their platform. They glanced in to see me standing there, stately, plump, and buck naked. And my first thought was, "You lucky Mexicans."

Of course, that is a symptom of Hotness Delusion Syndrome. I suspect that their eyes were not averted with illicit desire. I suspect that the suppressed smiles tugging at the corner of their lips were not shy flirtations. I suspect that the words they exchanged were not references to a particular passage in an Alan Hollinghurst novel they had all admired.

Anyway, I grabbed the nearest cat to cover my shame and raced to the bathroom where I had to look in the mirror and confront my malady, which now, at least, has a name.

Burlesqoni

In last week's New Yorker, there was an article about Silvio Berlusconi, which has all the qualities of journalistic sex tourism without any of the guilt: it's deliciously voyeuristic and titillating, but the target is a rich vulgar world leader. Similar issues were covered by Zizek in his LRB piece two years ago. How does the buffoon, the clown rise to power? Zizek did not cite Foucault, although Foucault addresses this passingly, as you well know, in his Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975: Abnormal. Playing the clown is not merely a populist tactic to appeal to the man-on-the-street and a refutation of a presumed hierarchy; it is a disabling power play.

Few people have mastered this role as well as Berlusconi, who has bulldozed his way to the top with (please stop reading this if you live in a country with strict libel laws) all sorts of flagrant, rambunctious, phallic spectacles of greed and criminality in the tradition of some of Rome's greatest, and worst, rulers, a vivacious spectacle that governs in part through the suppressive effects of the vivacious spectacle itself. (Those of you living in countries with strict libel laws can start reading again.) In the New Yorker article, we get one of Berlusconi's rambunctious, phallic jokes:

Berlusconi has been far from contrite. A week before the opening of the Rubygate trial [on charges of prostitution with a minor and abuse of power], he travelled to Lampedusa, a tiny island off the coast of Sicily where tens of thousands of North African refugees have come ashore in the past few months. He told the crowd assembled there, “Did you hear the latest poll? They asked women between twenty and thirty years old if they want to make love to Berlusconi. Thirty-three per cent said yes! Sixty-seven per cent said ‘Again?’”

The poll must have taken place in Italy, because if it had been anywhere else Berlusconi would have been competing with my friends, who have the 20-30 female demographic in the rest of Europe and North America well covered.

Now, on the one hand, this joke is pure bravado: he's laying claim to the accusation of philandering hurled against him; he's mastering the charge, owning it, toying with it and playing with it. It is, in the parlance of the 1990s, appropriation. In effect, he's saying that he is being accused of a moral crime, and by insisting that he is guilty as charged, he's refusing to see the crime as a crime at all. The joke functions by creating a certain expectation and then shattering it not just with its opposite but with a wry allusion to the opposite: if 33% say "yes", we'd expect a typical poll to go on to report that some higher percentage say "no" and some smaller percentage have "no opinion"; instead we get the wonderfully ambivalent "again?"

"Again?" is a lovely little concession to ambiguity, and gives the joke some of its aesthetic impact: "again?" could be perkily expectant but it could also be wearily resigned. Berlusconi repudiates any concern for the charge of philandering and promiscuity, he embodies machismo in a country where, according to the New Yorker, 95% of men have never operated a washing machine (the other 5% are porn stars who play washing machine repairmen); but he allows a tone of ambiguity to appear in the majority female voice with "Again?" I'm definitely not arguing that this makes the joke a feminist one. But I'm going to come back to this.

So, also within the joke, is a lovely attack on the media-political apparatus working against him: the irrelevance of polls on topics like this and the failure of his opponents to realise how much women actually love him (for surely the expected implication of such a poll would be that, first of all, the poll question is of some importance, and, second, that it would uncover resentment). Put another way: the joke trivialises polls not by caricaturing them but by basing the joke on what could be a very real poll, demonstrating how risible they are; taken a step further, the irrelevance of polls and the typically banal divisions they uncover are saved by Berlusconi, whose vivacious populism can surmount the chattering, chittering pseudointellectualism of the politcal-media classes. (And this is not in any way contradictory because Berlusconi is also the leader of the political-media class; the clown and the buffoon can play both roles, as we saw so clearly in the figure of George W. Bush who converted blue blood into soda pop).

And, on the other hand, we can see the joke do some really dirty work. Vonnegut talks about how jokes relieve you from the burden of thinking: the punchline comes in and rescues you. You might hesitate over the precision of Berlusconi's demographic in the joke, "Women aged 20-30", which excludes those on the cusp of adulthood and certainly excludes minors, even though the whole scandal revolves around whether Berlusconi has been so carefully selective on the age of his paramours; you might wonder whether "make love" is implying the most romantic, generous, and emotional encounter (indeed, he re-moralises the debate on his own terms: he's not rutting or fucking, he's not exploiting, he's making love). And, of course, he does not release ambiguity in "Again?", he captures it, trades in it, makes it subservient to his masculinity; the possibly resistant female voice he pretends to echo, the intimation of ambiguity in the ersatz poll, is rendered grotesque, in just the same way that Berlusconi does not empower women but makes them grotesque even when they are given power.

Remembering Foucault:

Political power, at least, in some societies, and anyway in our society, can give itself, and has actually given itself, the possibility of conveying its effects and, even more, of finding their source, in a place that is manifestly, explicitly, and readily discredited as odious, despicable, or ridiculous. [snippety-snip] The grotesque is one of the essential processes of arbitrary sovereignity. But you know also that the grotesque is a process inherent to assiduous bureaucracy. [snippety-snip: Foucault mentions Balzac, Dostoevsky, Courteline and Kafka] And what I say about the Roman Empire, what I say about modern bureaucracy, could also be said about many other mechanical forms of power, such as Nazism or Fascism. The grotesque character of someone like Mussolini was absolutely inherent to the mechanism of power. Power provided itself with an image in which power derived from someone who was theatrically got up and depicted as a clown and buffooon.

This is not, Foucault says, a ritualistic process of "limiting its effects and of magically dethroning the person" in power, as if it is a democratising of power, humbling it in the figure of the goofball to whom the man-on-the-street can relate.

Rather, it seems to me to be a way of giving a striking form of expression to the unavoidability, the inevitability of power, which can function in its full rigour and at the extreme point of its rationality even when in the hands of someone who is effectively discredited.

The notion that comedy is fundamentally heroic, on the side of the oppressed against the oppressor, is sentimental and dangerous.

Gagging for it

Yesterday, The Daily News went with "Where's Weiner" and The Post went with "Hide the Weiner". (For those of you who don't know, The Daily News is ever so slightly to the left of The New York Post, although both are fundamentally reactionary rags; nevertheless, it is of some passing interest to those of us with a curiosity about comedy that in terms of headlines, The Post is almost always more clever than The Daily News, very circumstantial evidence against any conclusion that the left is funnier than the right; but enough of that for now.)

The headlines are obviously referring to something most of my readers have followed closely: no, "Weiner" is not Iranian for "Nuclear Bomb", "Weiner" is Anthony Weiner, an often-liberal congressman for New York, who... I don't really care. I guess there's some sort of sex scandal and now he's taking "full responsibility" and is very contrite (I would link to cnn.com for an article about it, but I hate cnn and will starve them of my traffic!) I believe the scandal involved him tweeting a picture of himself with an erection to some college student in Washington. And people ask why I don't use twitter! Do you really want photographs of my torso and my crotch cluttering your twitter feeds? Don't answer that. I know.

Yesterday, or recently, I don't know, I don't really follow the news anymore... you know why I don't follow the news? In the article I linked to at the outset, Tom McGeveren writes the following:

To be fair to the congressman, and putting aside all of the underminey advice the papers are soliciting from political consultants (with friends like Roger Stone, who are Weiner's enemies?), the best piece of advice I can give him is to hope that a piece of important news happens soon.

First of all, is hoping for something a piece of advice? Second, is this a joke about important news? I don't know, and that's what makes it all so painful. It could be a joke, because with what's happening in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, and the deterioration of the climate, and the death of one of the last white rhinos, there's quite a lot of news; but then again, he could be saying it straight: what's happening in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, and the deterioration of the climate, and the death of one of the last white rhino is not the kind of news that's important.

Anyway, as I was saying, yesterday or recently, Rick Santorum said he was running for president. All you need to know about Santorum is here. Please do click on that link. Seriously. He's a vile figure, really amongst the vilest American politicians, and Dan Savage has contrived with the help of his readership to create a definition for his name that haunts him as the number one google search result for "Santorum".

But with a name like "Weiner"? I mean, come on. You'd say the jokes write themselves, but somehow, when the jokes write themselves, they're never as funny.

But tomorrow, we're going to talk about a sex scandal that doesn't involve an American politician, and so there's not going to be oodles of contrition, and tough discussions with my wife, and apologies to the American people but most of all to my family. There's actually going to be a very interesting little joke.

S-Schtroumpfs

While the world burns, a few of us remain distracted. Today, I'm closely following a pseudo-furore in The Guardian, where a journalist is cheerfully, if frantically, striking an academic flint against the stone of public outrage in the hopes that the inevitable sparks catch something on fire.

Apparently, an academic has written about The Smurfs, invoking Stalin, racism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism. There is little evidence that the journalist has read the book and less evidence that the outraged masses have read the book, but when has that ever stopped anybody? It certainly won't stop me either!

The author, Antoine Buéno, believes that some of the outrage is merely sentimental:

He believes the emotional nature of the responses stems from the Smurfs' place in fans' childhoods. "It's linked to childhood – it's 'don't touch my Smurfs! Don't touch my Proust's madeleine!'," he said.

"Don't touch my Proust's madeleine!" . . . "Don't touch my Proust's madeleine!"???

Not only does this French academic not trust his audience (which might think he was talking about Hugo's madeleine or perhaps Sartre's madeleine? Or about this Madeline?), but he has now created the world's best euphemism for the prostate gland. "Make sure you smurf my Proust's madeleine when you smurf me" now means something.

Anyway, then we're fumbling over The Serious.

But despite its serious purpose, the book "does not take itself seriously", he said.

Lightness of touch, forays into the comedic, the academic tone that is not always stentorian and authoritative . . . these are too confusing, and the cloth-eared howling of the outraged should be afforded the attention they demand. The whole message seems to be that you don't smurf with the smurfs. Sadly, though, there is little exploration of Antoine Buéno's own little shuffle away from responsibility when he, along with everybody else, argues that Peyo, the creator of the Smurfs (and who probably also played for the Brazilian football team), was not political. Buéno justifies his willingness to perform a political analysis of the smurfs despite Peyo's political innocence by calling upon the "unconscious": "Peyo was not at all politicised; this was all unconscious." But isn't that a definition of "politicised"? That it has been so ingrained and incorporated and embodied that it has submerged itself into the fabric of being and is no longer a conscious, cognitively-organised process? Or is this just another lazy use of "politicised" to imply that bothering to vote is the only political act most people engage in? Bloody smurfs, all of them.

But what I'm really interested in is this:

"When there were elections, he would ask my mother, 'what should I vote?'" said Culliford [Peyo's son], adding that he has not read Buéno's book. "He can interpret the stories how he likes – even if I do not endorse his interpretation, which is situated between the grotesque and the not very serious – as long as he does not attack my father."

His filial loyalty is admirable and as understandable as his reticence to read a book by an academic about his father. But did you notice how he has created a space, a conceptual terrain "between the grotesque and the not very serious". I have never thought about such a space before and yet I suddenly realised . . . it's the homeland I never knew I had. [Snip]

I just removed a line after "it's the homeland I never knew I had." The line drew upon all of the themes evoked by Buéno and yet was grounded in the "grotesque and the not very serious". Why should I censor myself? The answer is easy. You may not want to enter the land between the Gulf of Grotesque and the Peaks of Not Very Serious. I respect that decision. And how would I know if you did want to enter? Why, you'd give me the special handshake, usually known only to the inhabitants of this land: you clutch one another's right hand, and with the left, you palpate the other's Proust's Madeleine. Then you know you both belong.

Serious about Dylan

I know you’ve all been waiting to hear about the Bob Dylan conference in Bristol on May 24th. Your wait is over.

If you want the official report, you can read it over at The Guardian, which sent a journalist to report on the conference and to root out the youngest, hippest people there to provide comments. It turns out that the youngest, hippest people did not include me; I was probably captured in the soul-murdering phrase "middle-aged music fans in soft-soled shoes". The BBC presented a slide show of Dylan photographs under the caption "Academics celebrate Bob Dylan at Bristol University". In some circles, being called an academic is not meant to be flattering, but it's life-affirming and vaguely respectable compared "middle-aged music fans in soft-soled shoes".

Several things about the conference stood out. First, I thought I was going to have a good laugh at beer-bellied old guys with longish greying hair, wearing their favourite Dylan t-shirts printed with images from obscure performances or lesser albums, but those guys all looked really cool. In fact, they looked exciting and interesting compared to those of us who were "middle-aged music fans in soft-soled shoes", and they probably had a smirk at our expense. Second, I was expecting to enjoy despising the pedantic sods who, whenever there was time for questions, would take the microphone and drone on for twenty minutes espousing their own personal theory of what Dylan meant by "a Siamese Cat" in Like a Rolling Stone; instead, people were really gentle and thoughtful and asked good questions that invited the presenters to expand on what they had talked about. In some ways, then, it was all terribly disappointing.

But a couple issues did come up. First, it is fairly well established that Dylan's lyrics, for the most part, are just that: lyrics. Poetry put to music. Various traditional forms of poetry, still oral, but unaccompanied by lute or hammond organ, have an integrity and constraint that lyrics can and at times should lack; "I'm a poet/ And I know it / Hope I don't blow it" says the man himself in I Shall Be Free No. 10. Even a radical post-Warholian might accept that just because we can bring the critical techniques of high art forms to low art forms doesn't mean that there is no difference between high and low art forms; even a radical post-modernist (is there any other?) questioning the nature and historicity of the hierarchy in "high" and "low" art forms might accept that the popular and the populist can be qualitatively different from the elitist and exclusive. But these issues barely came up. People tended to focus on lyrics as word-poems that can be extricated from the songs. Fair enough. If it's true that Dylan is a bard and a minstrel, a poet who sings his songs from court to court, and is therefore operating in the same vein as Homer, then why should we not look at his lyrics without their songs? After all, nobody's refusing to read The Iliad because we don't know the tune. ("Yeah, I'll read the Odyssey when I know how it's supposed to go . . . And I'm not talking about the Zombies album"). Nevertheless, one of the most mindblowing moments in a conference that did less mindblowing than a little bit of gentle mindrubbing here and there was when one guy, talking about floods, played some way-old blues, in the middle of a couple of Dylan tracks. Now, I knew that Dylan, if you'll allow me this, re-thought folk singing, then rock vocals, then country singing, and possibly maybe gospel singing; but despite all the signs he set-up along the way, like playing blues music, I only thought that he was singing the way he sings now because he can't sing any other way. But when you put Dylan's singing now side-to-side with an old blues track, you see that he is reviving, changing, and re-thinking blues vocals.

Let me offer you a possible example to consider:

Check out this.

And then listen to this.

But one topic was strikingly absent, even as there were cursory discussions of Dylan's identity, cursory discussions of pity and cruelty, and less cursory analyses of his lyrics: that topic is Dylan the joker, Dylan the comedian, Dylan writing gags in his songs or spitting out venomous put-downs.

Why was this? Well, when people want to take somebody seriously, or be taken seriously themselves, they tend to avoid comedy. Girding the "serious" is a conviction about its formal stability and its endurance; comedy is whimsical, fleeting, and unstable. But more relevant to Dylan is this: when people want to take seriously somebody who is terrifyingly complicated, who demands to be taken with the utmost seriousness just when everyone thinks they're in on the joke, or dismisses as joking the most serious things he's done, trying to figure out what one can safely say is very hard. Dylan has defied his fans and his critics so many times that it is far safer to approach him with respect, which may be spurned from a distance, than with a keen eye for trying to get in on the joke, where dismissal is a personal affront. Or, to put it another way, deference may be humiliating, but it comes with its own meagre rewards and its own anaemic values; but few things are more personally and centrally humiliating than trying to share a joke and being told that not only do you not get it, but you're the butt of the joke. It would take a very brave man or woman to make a sustained argument about Dylan as a joker. Am I that brave man or woman? Time will tell. Meanwhile:

Thraft Undone

One of the most exciting developments over the past day, other than being part of a winning team at a Bristol film quiz, rampaging to victory across clammy, huddled groups of greasy-haired Tarantinians and old, bearded men who live and breath Hitchcock and who have seen every film ever, has been learning that the identity of Dr. Peter Thraft was revealed! It was in the papers on Friday. I missed it. Because I’m travelling. Hence I’m in Bristol going to film quizzes and preparing to attend a Bob Dylan conference tomorrow.

Close readers of this blog—well, I only have close readers, so all of you—will remember that Dr. Peter Thraft’s identity has come up before here and here. I suspected that the good Doctor was none other than Peter Serafinowicz, and I know I was not alone. However, it is quickly apparent that far more people thought Thraft was Steve Coogan. I will explain, in a post to follow, why I never thought it was Coogan. And in doing so, I will come back to the promise I made in an earlier post about Thraft to discuss “the real”.

But right now, while you’re waiting, I want to direct readers to the article in The Guardian where all is revealed. Go on, read the article. It's by Ben Dowell and Vicky Frost, whose names are only slightly more convincing that "Peter Thraft".

Are you done? No, seriously, did you go read it? Look, go read it, and then come back here.

Okay. Good. Did you see who is quoted there?

What the—? Who’s this “blogger” called “privatematters4publicthings”? Well, I can tell you it’s definitely somebody who evidently did not create a tag based on how it would look in print. I pity the poor sub who had to edit the piece: “Are you sure that’s the handle? What’s it mean? Is there really a number in it? Oh for fuck’s sake.” Sorry!

Anyway, stay tuned for my wrap-up on Thraft; it’ll be coming later in the week. Right now, as the film quiz victory fades into memory, I have to prepare for a whole day-long conference on Bob Dylan. I considered live-blogging, but then thought I could only push the "Z" button about four hundred times before I either got carpal-tunnel syndrome or really did fall asleep.

Panic in the Streets of London

I decided I had to blog as quickly as possible, because I wanted to make sure I got at least one more post in - I don't know if I'll make it through the night. I just came back from a private screening of Cruising, the 1980 William Friedkin film with Al Pacino and Paul Sorvino, which was frightening enough, but I'm staying in the heart of bustling Soho, so I've bolted my door, barricaded it with a chair, and am sorely regretting telling that guy in shades, a leather jacket, and peaked cap where I was staying. But he seemed so nice! Christ, walking down Old Compton Street, I felt like Dominique Strauss-Kahn entering Riker's Island.

Anyway, at some point, I must deal with the comedy in Cruising, because it's very, very interesting: the cops' non-jokes ("Cork-soaker?") in their squad car as they amuse themselves by insulting and assaulting the drag queens; Steve Burns' choice of the yellow bandana; the standard funny-entry gag when the beat cop meets the unamused, gruff captain, which is revisited at the end when the two of them share the gag again, but this time with mutual respect. All of these are very strange and powerful, if disorienting, moments in a weird, unsure film.

But right now, I want to move away from Gay Panic (and for all its flaws and ambiguities, Cruising scrupulously, if not always successfully, steers away from Gay Panic), and instead turn to something we should all be panicking about: the state of today's youth. Let's face it: today's youth are complete flops as humans. Yes, we know they're socially better than we are - they dance better, they dress better, they have cooler films and cooler music - but we also know we're intellectually and morally superior. Today's youth can't read anything that isn't an acronym, they think it's okay to shoot priests and nuns in video games without a wink of guilt. But science has now proven once and for all that they're also physically inferior! And I don't just mean compared to us. Almost all of my readership can beat 10-year olds at arm wrestling. No, compared to youth of yesteryear or, in this case, yesterdecade.

The Observer's front-page headline says it all: "Modern Life is Producing a 'Generation of Weaklings'". On their homepage, The Observer entices its readers with: "Computer games making people weak"; and the on-line article itself is titled, "Children growing weaker as computers replace outdoors games." According to Denis Campbell, a study in Acta Paediatrica has shown that children can do fewer sit-ups and are less able to hang from wall bars in a gym than children 10 years ago.

Now, in addition to being for all intents and purposes a lawyer and a philosopher, I'm also a scientist. I will assume that when the authors of this study, Sandercock et al., conducted the study, they controlled for such things as gender; and I'll assume their populations of Essex children are comparable in all potentially confounding ways across time; and I'll assume this population is an adequate reflection of this nation's and, indeed, this world's children: in other words, I'll assume there is an internal validity to the comparison and that the results are generalisable. I will also assume that in the reporting, we are being given the full facts, and that it wasn't found that, say, the children were equal in most tests of strength, and only different in these two. And I will assume the raw data is compelling, and that we're not only being given a few differences that are only "statistical differences" (I notice that Campbell doesn't include any statistics, much less any confidence intervals, whereby we might judge the strengths of the association over time). I suppose I could look this all up in Acta Paediatrica, but that would be working. This is blogging, not work.

Okay, I looked - I can't get in. It's protected. I'm not going to pay money to see the study; I'm just going to trust the reporting. We can safely say that it's proven that children today are weaklings. But we knew that.

There are a few little worrying things, though.

"This is probably due to changes in activity patterns among English 10-year-olds, such as taking part in fewer activities like rope-climbing in PE and tree-climbing for fun," Sandercock said. "Typically, these activities boosted children's strength, making them able to lift and hold their own bodyweight."

The fact that 10% could not do the wall bars test and another 10% refused to try was "really shocking", he added. "That probably shows that climbing and holding their own weight was something they hadn't done before."

Yes, it could mean that they had never done it before. It could also mean that they couldn't be fucked to do it either - in which case, today's youth may not be pussies, they may be little pricks. And I'm sure that's true too. But I have no doubt the authors of the study ascertained why the youth refused, and didn't just assume that it was because they were too weak to do it.

And I'm a little bit worried that there is absolutely no mention of how the authors of the study assessed such things as how much time the youth actually do spend on computers and in front of the television; that the authors based their conclusions on an assessment that looked at the children's lifestyles, their proximity to parks, who is working at home and for how long; and I'm sure they're also looking at how much money local schools are spending on physical education and sporting opportunities, what sort of access to sports and coaches and swimming pools these children have, whether children walk and bike to school or whether they are driven, and other aspects that might factually support what we all know to be true: that today's youth are wasting away like forgotten larvae in the ambient glow of a computer screen. As the headlines tell us, it's the fault of computers and modern life, so all that information must have been part of the study. They didn't need to include it in the reporting; that would have been overkill.

At least we definitely know one cause of their wasting-away:

"Climbing trees and ropes used to be standard practice for children, but school authorities and 'health and safety' have contrived to knock the sap out of our children," said Tam Fry of the Child Growth Foundation.

"Falling off a branch used to be a good lesson in picking yourself up and learning to climb better. Now fear of litigation stops the child climbing in the first place."

Yes, it's all that 'health and safety' rubbish. Bring back lead in the petrol, bring back the lash, put the sap back in the whippersnappers, and we'll soon have these children scampering up trees like sap-filled squirrels, instead of a nanny-state producing anaemic, blob-like amoeboids slowly leaking sap as they dissolve into the white light emanating from their computer screens. One thing is very clear: today's children are feeble not because we're not investing enough money and time and energy in childhood - it's because we're doing too much for them!

But I will say this, there is good news for us in the report: when these 10-year olds get a year or two older and try to mug us, we'll be able to kick their weak-armed little butts or, at the very least, we know what to do: run to the nearest tree and climb it. We'll be safe up there.

Pity the Fool

France is undoubtedly a great nation, although we all know it peaked as a place, as a concept, as une histoire almost two thousand years ago, when a small band of indomitable Gauls held off the Roman Empire. Since then, there have been highs (Diderot, Serge Gainsbourg, Zidane) and lows (Vichy France, the sacking of Africa, Henry); the recent arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the extension of his New York visit at Riker's Island is unlikely to be recorded as one of the high points in French history.

This blog is not devoted to z-list celebrities, much less to the Nixonian gnome, Ben Stein, but we did recently dwell upon the question of his comedy and sexism, Parte Une and Parte Deux; although I thought I firmly closed the door on him, he's slipped back into our consciousness by writing a wretched little piece for The American Spectator in which he rushes to defend the honour and reputation and presumed innocence of Dominique Strauss-Kahn by slandering hotel maids, crying class warfare while evoking the image of the guillotine, and saying that, Come on, a short fat guy can't sexually assault a woman.

Much more interesting is the case made by Bernard-Henri Lévy, who, like me, is a philosopher, and, also like me, tends to go by his initials: BHL. In fact, BHL and I are like two peas in a pod, and might even be mistaken for twins were it not for his far better hair and his inimitable capacity to arch a single eyebrow.

In The Daily Beast, his piece is prefaced by a little blurb:

No one knows if the IMF director is guilty of sexual assault—and by dragging him through the mud, politicians and the press are committing gross acts of injustice, says French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Yes, no one knows what really happened, except, of course, for the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and a widowed refugee mother. But other than them, nobody knows. I would encourage readers to find BHL's piece to dwell on his epistemological scrutiny of what it is we know. And do not know.

If readers do not wish to dwell, I will start the dwelling off for them.

BHL's piece begins with a fact, an irrefutable fact.

"Monday morning."

Yes. Monday morning. Not Tuesday, not Wednesday, definitely not Thursday. I laugh at the thought it might be Friday or Saturday, and cast a melancholic glance at those who think it might be Sunday. And nor is noon, much less afternoon; do not deceive yourselves: it is not evening or night. "Monday morning."

That established, he goes on: "I do not know--no one knows, because there have been no leaks regarding the declarations of the man in question--if Dominique Strauss-Kahn was guilty of the acts he is accused of committing there. . ." We have come to our first epistemological insight from the philosopher. In the world before, the world that precedes ours, in the past, we might have asked whether it is possible that the alleged perpetrator or the alleged victim knows, but this is the world of Julian Assange, and all we can know must come through leaks. A foolish reader of BHL, a real idiot, might say that the implication is that there is "no one" and there is Strauss-Kahn, there is the "no one" who knows, and there is Strauss-Kahn who knows, and that this formulation submerges the alleged victim into "no one." But such a statement would betray a real lack of philosophical insight.

Those who are not philosophers should stop reading now, because it's about to get complicated. Having established not only the epistemological limits of who can know, but also the rhetorical patter of the epistemological question itself, he goes on: "I do not know--but, on the other hand, it would be nice to know, and without delay--how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York's grand hotels of sending a "cleaning brigade" of two people, in the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet." The opening of this sentence could have come straight out of Derrida: the sly introduction of "on the other hand" without presenting the first hand, the double-barrelling of the question with both epistemological and ontological urgency, all couched in a homely but spry spirit of inquiry from a position of ignorance. The next part of the sentence could also have come straight out of Derrida, or Foucault, or Deleuze and Guattari, or anybody else who has ever spent a night in a New York hotel, especially a grand one: it is simply a fact that chambermaids never walk alone into rooms. To doubt this is something that even Descartes would have considered outre. Chambermaids, like presence and absence or power and truth or being and time, are never without their double.

Having demonstrated that nobody can know what happened, except that nobody can explain the sheer impossibility of a single chambermaid entering a hotel room, we are invited to share what BHL does know: that dime-store psychology is not helpful, that "nothing in the world can justify a man being thrown thus to the dogs", that no suspicion should allow the entire world to revel in this man's disgrace, that no earthly law should allow another woman to be exposed to this slime. Passing through the unknowable into the known, BHL drives towards one truth that stands above all others, an insight that justifies the hyperbole, the aroused rhetoric, his impassioned and devastating study of the inflamed epistemologies of the contemporary soul: the New York tabloid press is a disgrace to the profession.

Oh he is so right! They so are.

BHL goes on to talk about other things he knows about the exploitation of this scandal and the politicking, with a sensuously righteous sneer at those who righteously sneer. What we see in Ben Stein's hack-handed attempt to weasel his way back into the limelight and BHL's priapic defence of his friend is the failure of boorish politics and quasi-philosophical musings to address the sheer nastiness of this situation, however close they stumble to real, fundamental problems about publicity, presumptions of guilt and innocence, to questions of class, race, friendship, politics, and legal process that affect how and what we know; why this nastiness is exploited and enjoyed is a question both men veer away from investigating and answering seriously.

This, on the other hand, begins to say some interesting things:

IMF Chief tried to fuck New York chambermaid after mistaking her for a small financially crippled country.

It's crude, perhaps Onion-quality? But it's infinitely more damning than either Stein's or BHL's analyses as a reflection of those real, fundamental problems about publicity, presumptions of guilt and innocence, those questions of class, race, friendship, politics, and legal process that affect how and what we know, and how nasty this publicity, these presumptions, and these questions are.

Waterboarding = Results!

I just thought I would link to this cartoon, by Gary McCoy:



It's clear, it's succinct, it makes a connection between the practice of torture and the very brief capture of bin Laden by way of flat surfaces and water. I'm not so interested here in rehearsing the lies that undermine the fallacious assertion in the side-panels; the factual inaccuracies erased by the concision of wit are numerous and well-documented.

The depiction of the torture is fairly interesting. There's some muscularity and some tension in the drawing - the victim's back is arching, he's straining against the faceless, moustachioed torturer - but not a lot; it doesn't make waterboarding look pleasant, but it doesn't make it look so terribly bad.

But what really interests me is the depiction of the torturers. One is gloved with a cropped but moustachioed face, the other very much has a face: in fact, his tongue has come out of his mouth as he concentrates on the task at hand. It's a lovely little detail. It suggests that this act is one of conscientious and even quiet, if mildly-strenuous, focus and not a slapped-together act of violence, gruesome and cruel and messy; and at the very same time, it's childish and homely, lending the torturer an almost touching innocence and familiarity. The fact that they're burly, fat white guys dressed in quasi-military colours suggests a certain comfort with the notion that they might be contractors, or it might be another homely touch: these are two guys who like barbecues and drink a few too many beers after work with their buds.

Once again, torture does its work. It invites us to presuppose the recognisable humanity of the torturer but not the faceless victim, to disavow its complete wretchedness and violence, to look at it as a mechanism for making people talk even when it prohibits talking (who can talk while being waterboarded?).