*
What a homecoming! Her father, a decade
off in distant lands fighting the good war,
expecting open arms, hugs, adulation, parades,
a final end to deployment—one of lucky few
to avoid traumatic brain injury,
or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
And no one to dare to press for details
about civilians shot, homes destroyed,
holy sites desecrated. Electra fails
to let her brother know that their father pillaged
the shrine and corralled a concubine,
not much older than Electra herself,
and crazy as a loon.
Electra fails to mention how, before he set sail,
facing sluggish winds, and because he had insulted
a goddess, he agreed to sacrifice his other daughter,
her sister—Iphigenia. Iphigenia, the real face—
lifeless and drained of blood—that launched
a thousand ships.
~ Leonard Kress, from Inventory of the Everyday Extreme
Iphigenia, the real face—
lifeless and drained of blood—that launched
a thousand ships.
I love the insight that it was Iphigenia's lifeless face that launched a thousand ships. What a fabulous riposte to Marlowe's famous lines.
*
SALLY HORNER, THE “REAL LOLITA”
~ “Sally Horner, a fifth-grade honor student, stole a 5-cent notebook in her local Camden, N.J., Woolworths on a dare by a clique of girls she hoped to join. As she was leaving the store, a "hawk-faced man" in a fedora grabbed her arm, told her he was an FBI agent and threatened her with reform school. Months later, in June 1948, the man, whose current alias was Frank La Salle, intercepted Sally on her walk home from school and convinced her that the government insisted she go with him to Atlantic City. He instructed Sally to tell her mother that he was the father of two school friends who had invited her on vacation. Scared, Sally lied to her mother, who gave her the OK. The next time Sally saw her family was 21 months later, in March 1950, shortly before her 13th birthday.
The man was known to the police as Frank La Salle. He had just been released from prison for raping five girls aged from 12 to 14. He took Sally on a 21-month odyssey from New Jersey to California, pretending she was his daughter. The abuse only ended when she managed to phone her family from San Jose in March 1950: “Tell Mother I’m OK and don’t worry. I want to come home. I’ve been afraid to call before.” La Salle spent the rest of his life in prison. Two years after she escaped, Sally was killed in a car crash. She was 15.
Sarah Weinman [the author of Real Lolita] interweaves the story of Sally's abduction and eventual rescue with Nabokov's writing of Lolita, which he had begun well before Sally's kidnapping and which had stymied him for years. She smartly discusses how the novel's preoccupation with pedophilia and prepubescent girls was presaged in some of Nabokov's earlier work — including Laughter in the Dark, The Gift, and his shockingly graphic 1928 poem, "Lilith," about an older man's intercourse with an "enticing ... unforgotten child." After two attempts to burn the manuscript (intercepted by his wife Véra), Nabokov finished Lolita in 1953, three years after Sally's liberation and a year after her death, at 15, in a car accident. It was first published abroad in 1955, and then in the United States in 1958 — when it became an immediate, incendiary commercial success.
Nabokov always denied that Sally's story influenced his novel, which he insisted was all art. "To admit he pilfered from a true story would be, in Nabokov's mind, to take away from the power of his narrative," Weinman writes. She argues that recognizing the connection doesn't diminish his remarkable achievement, "but it does augment the horror he also captured in the novel." Loaded words like "pilfered" and "strip-mined" clearly convey Weinman's attitude. In fact, Nabokov comes across in her book as an insufferable — if brilliantly inventive — snob, aesthete and egotist.
Weinman approaches her subject as if she were conducting a political inquiry: "My central quest with respect to Nabokov was to figure out what he knew about Sally and when he knew it," she writes. To this aim, she parses notecards on which Nabokov transcribed news of Sally's death in 1952 and Humbert Humbert's parenthetical remark about her in the novel: "Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank La Salle, a 50-year-old mechanic, had done to 11-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?" But she admits repeatedly that her argument relies heavily on circumstantial evidence and indirect proof.
Weinman is also on a mission to correct Lolita's millions of mis-readers, who bought Humbert's suave, wily contention that 12-year-old Dolores Haze was a seductive nymphet — and missed the horror of her nearly two-year ordeal. "Those who love language and literature are rewarded richly but also duped," she writes. "Lolita's trickery and mastery of obfuscation ... continue to make moral mincemeat out of the novel's wider readership."
So, too, does society's tendency to blame rape victims. Weinman reports that Sally suffered taunts and stigma after returning home and flags her mother's tone-deaf statement: "Whatever she has done, I can forgive her." Weinman appreciatively cites Véra Nabokov's diary entry expressing the wish that "somebody would notice the tender description of the child's helplessness ... and her heartrending courage.”
Heinemann unearths plenty of fascinating, often unexpected material, like the fact that the neighbor in the San Jose trailer park who helped rescue Sally ignored her own children's complaints of abuse by the many men in her life.
The Real Lolita stands out for its captivating mix of tenacious investigative reporting, well-chosen photographs, astute literary analysis and passionate posthumous recognition of a defenseless child who — until now — never received the literary acknowledgment she deserved.” ~
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/11/646656280/the-real-lolita-investigates-the-true-crime-story-of-sally-horner
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/15/648214031/a-true-story-of-kidnap-and-rape-in-the-real-lolita
Sally Horner and her mother. Like Charlotte Haze in Lolita, Sally’s mother was a widow.Mary:
I'm sure she was “asking for it.” Stories like this are not at all over. Witness the Kavanaugh debacle. I feel more than that chill. I feel rage.
*
“. . . the stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky rain, and passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer, and all around alternating stripes of quick-silverfish water and harsh green corn, the whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas.” ~ Nabokov, Lolita
Oriana:
Lolita happened to be one of the very first novels I read in English, still in Warsaw. I think I just turned 16. One of my mother's friends had the Olympia edition, and with some hesitation lent the book to me (I was interested in the book strictly because it was in English; I didn't know what pedophilia was). I was so virginal that all kinds of naughty things went over my head, and I didn't even notice that evil was definitely at the core. But oddly enough, I did recognize that stylistically it was a masterpiece, and what particularly delighted me was the irony, and the ruthless descriptions of American pop culture.
What particularly unnerves me now that I bought Humbert's put-downs of Lolita as a vulgar teenager, and instantly fell in love with Humbert's eloquence. Humbert was brilliant, and I was in love with him from page one. Ten years later, it took a painful lesson for me to learn that a man can be brilliant yet evil, and that a good heart is more important than being a sparkling conversationalist.
*
~ “We are not much concerned, Mr. Humbird, with having our students become bookworms or be able to reel off all the capitals of Europe which nobody knows anyway.” ~ Headmistress Pratt in Lolita
Vienna*
Mary:
The story of Sally is a tragedy — not only because she was kidnapped and abused, but because her own mother, along with her classmates and her community, found her at fault for the evil that was done to her. Rape makes her guilty and worthless, someone who can at best “be forgiven” and relegated to the class of damaged property, unlikely to have takers in the marketplace where respectable and virtuous women find men to marry. And these judgements are not at all something we have grown out of. The shame, and the shaming, of sexual abuse victims continues at every level of society, all the way, as we have seen, to the highest levels of the judiciary. The confirmation of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is evidence of many things, none of them good, but most dramatically to how brutally the victim will be treated when her true testimony challenges the victimizer's right to power.
So what about art? What about Lolita? I'm not really interested in whether Nabokov knew Sally's story — of course he did, he even mentions it. But there are many many stories of this type, he didn't need to copy this, or any other particular one. And he had already been working on the book prior to Sally's story. What interests me is — why did he try to burn it? (And why did his wife rescue it?)
He wants to tell us “it's all art,” but that beautiful, elegant, wondrous castle of words is built on a very dark foundation. There is definitely “evil at the core.” And Humbert's verbal performance, his intellectual presence, is very much like the predator's elaborate smoke screens, the grooming and seduction of the reader very much like the grooming and seduction of the victim.
Does art have a moral dimension? I believe it does, like any other human production. And this can be recognized without having to resolve in censorship, even of art with that "evil at the core." The challenge is to see and respond to the whole . . . both the castle and its dark cellar, to understand and appreciate the dynamic between art and what it reflects as well as the dynamic between art and audience. All of which changes with time and culture.
Does beauty have a moral dimension? This seems much less evident to me. Evil can be painted, sung, spoken, with great beauty. There's Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Leni Riefensthal, or even the glories of magnificent churches where child predators were sheltered, and victims abandoned. Beauty is not truth, not when you're talking about moral truth, about good and evil. It has its own truths, in forms, order and integrity, and its own capacities to astonish, delight and persuade . Like beauty, with beauty, art seduces.
Oriana:
Leni Riefenstahl — yes, an example that makes me want to cry because feminists would certainly love to claim this gifted female filmmaker, to say, “Here is another great artist who happens to be a woman” — the way we can point to Georgia O’Keeffe. But an artist is not exempt from needing a moral compass . . .
I don’t suppose that Lolita encouraged pedophiles. It may sound odd, but that book is for the lovers of language. Without a doubt, there is evil at the core, a dark cellar in that wondrous castle — and we should be uneasy. I don’t think that a novel of this sort, written from the male point of view, would be published in our times. We do have a lot more understanding of the lifelong scars of sexual abuse — even though, as you point out, victimized women are often still shamed and blamed. So the majority of rapes are simply not reported.
Interestingly, Vera Nabokov always defended Lolita against the negative views of the “vulgar teenager” that were common after the novel was first published. Vera pointed out that Lolita was intelligent and resourceful, and eventually managed to escape. But perhaps the most interesting moment occurs toward the end of the book, when Humbert experiences a surprising (and perhaps not entirely convincing) insight (I hesitate to call it a moral awakening, but that's as close as he gets to it). He is passing a school; the children are outside at recess, and, being children, they are happily noisy in that high-pitched, chirpy way. And Humbert says to the reader: “Lolita’s voice would forever go missing from that concord.”
Leni Riefenstahl on the cover of time, 1936*
RENÉ GIRARD: THE SCAPEGOAT IDEA UNDERLYING SACRIFICIAL RELIGIONS
~ “The only thing more contagious than desire is violence. René Girard postulates that, prior to the establishment of laws, prohibitions, and taboos, prehistoric societies would periodically succumb to “mimetic crises.” Usually brought on by a destabilizing event — be it drought, pestilence, or some other adversity — mimetic crises amount to mass panics in which communities become unnerved, impassioned, and crazed, as people imitate one another’s violence and hysteria rather than responding directly to the event itself. Distinctions disappear, members of the group become identical to one another in their vehemence, and a mob psychology takes over. In such moments the community’s very survival is threatened by internecine strife and a Hobbesian war of all against all.
Girard interpreted archaic rituals, sacrifices, and myth as the symbolic traces or aftermath of prehistoric traumas brought on by mimetic crises. Those societies that saved themselves from self-immolation did so through what he called the scapegoat mechanism. Scapegoating begins with accusation and ends in collective murder. Singling out a random individual or subgroup of individuals as being responsible for the crisis, the community turns against the “guilty” victim (guilty in the eyes of the persecutors, that is, since according to Girard the victim is in fact innocent and chosen quite at random, although is frequently slightly different or distinct in some regard). A unanimous act of violence against the scapegoat miraculously restores peace and social cohesion (unum pro multis, “one for the sake of many,” as the Roman saying puts it).
[In] Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978; the title comes from Matthew 13:35), he argued that the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Gospels expose the “scandal” of the violent foundations of archaic religions. By revealing the inherent innocence of the victim —Jesus — as well as the inherent guilt of those who persecute and put him to death, “Christianity truly demystifies religion because it points out the error on which archaic religion is based.”
Girard’s anthropological interpretation of Christianity in Things Hidden is as original as it is unorthodox. It views the Crucifixion as a revelation in the profane sense, namely a bringing to light of the arbitrary nature of the scapegoat mechanism that underlies sacrificial religions.
Girard goes so far as to argue that “Christianity is not only one of the destroyed religions but it is the destroyer of all religions. The death of God is a Christian phenomenon. In its modern sense, atheism is a Christian invention.” The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo was very drawn to Girard’s understanding of Christianity as a secularizing religion, and the two collaborated on a fine book on the topic, Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith: A Dialogue (Columbia University Press, 2010).” ~
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/12/20/rene-girard-prophet-envy/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Farmworkers%20in%20fear%20Rene%20Girard%20a%20fathers%20art&utm_content=NYR%20Farmworkers%20in%20fear%20Rene%20Girard%20a%20fathers%20art+CID_ae46916274898ac8a4488f7a37f501da&utm_source=Newsletter
Oriana:
The sacrifice of Iphigenia shows that it putting obedience to an imaginary god first, ahead of obligations to fellow humans, was a mark of archaic mentality in general. The pre-scientific world was filled with invisible beings.
But scapegoating isn’t confined to sacrificial religions. We see it in ideologies as well. Fascism scapegoating Jews is the most flagrant example, but then Jews were being scapegoated in all kinds of crisis situations and by various religions and countries. Whenever a crisis arises, people want to blame someone or a whole ethnic group.
Girard, however, goes beyond pointing out the obvious. To me, the most striking statement is this one:
~ He argued that the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Gospels expose the “scandal” of the violent foundations of archaic religions. By revealing the inherent innocence of the victim —Jesus — as well as the inherent guilt of those who persecute and put him to death, “Christianity truly demystifies religion because it points out the error on which archaic religion is based.” ~
*
ROOTS AND WINGS
A sweet and sad memory swam back into my mind . . . I was in my late twenties, sitting on my bumblebee-striped couch in Long Beach with a certain Long Beach poet — not a lover (too many red flags, including drinking), but a kind of shadowy confidant in the category of “harmless” men. It would often get dark as we talked, but we didn’t bother to turn on the light. One time, in a fit of what I now see as a lack of understanding more so than just self-pity (if only I had a fraction of the looks and health I had back then — but how many of us knew what beauty queens we were . . . ), I lamented to this young man that I knew I was different, I knew I was strange, but still, all this trouble I had finding love, being loved. And he very gently replied, “I am surprised that everyone who knows you doesn’t love you.”
Crazy, I know, both my child-like “Nobody loves me” complaint, and his likewise over-the-top reply. But it did me some good at the time. Just my suddenly remembering this seems a minor miracle. The sad part is that the next big news about this man was that he was found dead in a city park. Lethal blood alcohol levels. He was sitting under his favorite tree, drinking bourbon, maybe reading the anthology of his favorite Spanish poets, Roots and Wings. He passed out and never woke up. While he was unconscious, or perhaps already dead, someone stole his wallet, so later the police had trouble identifying his body.
I wrote an elegy for him, Tristan, that I read during a reading to which his mother had been invited as a guest of honor. She was religious and that was one instance in which I could see that religion could indeed provide solace. Afterwards, she sighed with peaceful resignation and said to me, “His kingdom was not of this world.” And in a way, that was the perfect gentle resolution. That was not the time to discuss the high price of refusing to engage with reality, or to try to dissuade her from using a cloud-motif paper on which she wanted his poems printed. At least I had that much wisdom, even though I was shaken by the death of someone slightly younger than I was — the second time in a row. The other man (who died of cancer) was also the gentle kind, and I also treated him as a “harmless” confidant. My definition of a harmless man was the kind I wasn’t attracted to, so he had no power over me. I could relax and be myself. And if he read a poem to me, yes, that was special too.
I felt so safe with a harmless man that I could tell him anything. It reminds me of the father of William Butler Yeats, a sweet and quiet kind. He wrote to his sweetheart, “I tell you more things than I could tell to myself.” That’s because we judge ourselves. The perfect confidant doesn’t judge us. He enjoys just being with us.
Only now I see the strange sad magic of it all. And the only god I can imagine that I’d enjoy being with would be that kind of gentle, harmless man who’d be the ideal, all-accepting confidant — one with an anthology of Spanish poets, who’d now and then would say, “Let me read something to you.”
*
PS. It has occurred to me that in my youth I learned more about love from these “harmless men” than from my actual lovers, who, with one exception, were simply not good human beings.
*
“Poutocrats — The poor little billionaires pouting that the tiniest fraction of their wealth goes to public welfare.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
Let’s detox with the frozen waterfall outside Pagosa Springs, Colorado; Mark Heideman
*
RUSSIAN-STYLE KLEPTOCRACY IS SPREADING
~ “For two years, in the early 1990s, Richard Palmer served as the CIA station chief in the United States’ Moscow embassy. The events unfolding around him—the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russia—were so chaotic, so traumatic and exhilarating, that they mostly eluded clearheaded analysis. But from all the intelligence that washed over his desk, Palmer acquired a crystalline understanding of the deeper narrative of those times.
Much of the rest of the world wanted to shout for joy about the trajectory of history, and how it pointed in the direction of free markets and liberal democracy. Palmer’s account of events in Russia, however, was pure bummer. In the fall of 1999, he testified before a congressional committee to disabuse members of Congress of their optimism and to warn them of what was to come.
American officialdom, Palmer believed, had badly misjudged Russia. Washington had placed its faith in the new regime’s elites; it took them at their word when they professed their commitment to democratic capitalism. But Palmer had seen up close how the world’s growing interconnectedness—and global finance in particular—could be deployed for ill. During the Cold War, the KGB had developed an expert understanding of the banking byways of the West, and spymasters had become adept at dispensing cash to agents abroad. That proficiency facilitated the amassing of new fortunes. In the dying days of the U.S.S.R., Palmer had watched as his old adversaries in Soviet intelligence shoveled billions from the state treasury into private accounts across Europe and the U.S. It was one of history’s greatest heists.
Washington told itself a comforting story that minimized the importance of this outbreak of kleptomania: These were criminal outliers and rogue profiteers rushing to exploit the weakness of the new state. This narrative infuriated Palmer. He wanted to shake Congress into recognizing that the thieves were the very elites who presided over every corner of the system. “For the U.S. to be like Russia is today,” he explained to the House committee, “it would be necessary to have massive corruption by the majority of the members at Congress as well as by the Departments of Justice and Treasury, and agents of the FBI, CIA, DIA, IRS, Marshal Service, Border Patrol; state and local police officers; the Federal Reserve Bank; Supreme Court justices …” In his testimony, Palmer even mentioned Russia’s newly installed and little-known prime minister (whom he mistakenly referred to as Boris Putin), accusing him of “helping to loot Russia.”
The United States, Palmer made clear, had allowed itself to become an accomplice in this plunder. His assessment was unsparing. The West could have turned away this stolen cash; it could have stanched the outflow to shell companies and tax havens. Instead, Western banks waved Russian loot into their vaults. Palmer’s anger was intended to provoke a bout of introspection—and to fuel anxiety about the risk that rising kleptocracy posed to the West itself. After all, the Russians would have a strong interest in protecting their relocated assets. They would want to shield this wealth from moralizing American politicians who might clamor to seize it. Eighteen years before Special Counsel Robert Mueller began his investigation into foreign interference in a U.S. election, Palmer warned Congress about Russian “political donations to U.S. politicians and political parties to obtain influence.” What was at stake could well be systemic contagion: Russian values might infect and then weaken the moral defense systems of American politics and business.
America could not afford to delude itself into assuming that it would serve as the virtuous model, much less emerge as an untainted bystander. Yet when Yegor Gaidar, a reformist Russian prime minister in the earliest postcommunist days, asked the United States for help hunting down the billions that the KGB had carted away, the White House refused. “Capital flight is capital flight” was how one former CIA official summed up the American rationale for idly standing by. But this was capital flight on an unprecedented scale, and mere prologue to an era of rampant theft. When the Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman studied the problem in 2015, he found that 52 percent of Russia’s wealth resided outside the country.
The collapse of communism in the other post-Soviet states, along with China’s turn toward capitalism, only added to the kleptocratic fortunes that were hustled abroad for secret safekeeping. Officials around the world have always looted their countries’ coffers and accumulated bribes. But the globalization of banking made the export of their ill-gotten money far more convenient than it had been—which, of course, inspired more theft. By one estimate, more than $1 trillion now exits the world’s developing countries each year in the forms of laundered money and evaded taxes.
As in the Russian case, much of this plundered wealth finds its way to the United States. New York, Los Angeles, and Miami have joined London as the world’s most desired destinations for laundered money. This boom has enriched the American elites who have enabled it—and it has degraded the nation’s political and social mores in the process. While everyone else was heralding an emergent globalist world that would take on the best values of America, Palmer had glimpsed the dire risk of the opposite: that the values of the kleptocrats would become America’s own. This grim vision is now nearing fruition.
The warm welcome has created a strange dissonance in American policy. Take the case of the aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, a character who has made recurring cameos in the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The State Department, concerned about Deripaska’s connections to Russian organized crime (which he has denied), has restricted his travel to the United States for years. Such fears have not stood in the way of his acquiring a $42.5 million mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and another estate near Washington’s Embassy Row.
The defining document of our era is the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010. The ruling didn’t just legalize anonymous expenditures on political campaigns. It redefined our very idea of what constitutes corruption, limiting it to its most blatant forms: the bribe and the explicit quid pro quo. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion crystallized an ever more prevalent ethos of indifference—the collective shrug in response to tax avoidance by the rich and by large corporations, the yawn that now greets the millions in dark money spent by invisible billionaires to influence elections.
American collusion with kleptocracy comes at a terrible cost for the rest of the world. All of the stolen money, all of those evaded tax dollars sunk into Central Park penthouses and Nevada shell companies, might otherwise fund health care and infrastructure. (A report from the anti-poverty group One has argued that 3.6 million deaths each year can be attributed to this sort of resource siphoning.) Thievery tramples the possibilities of workable markets and credible democracy. It fuels suspicions that the whole idea of liberal [i.e. unregulated] capitalism is a hypocritical sham: While the world is plundered, self-righteous Americans get rich off their complicity with the crooks.
The Founders were concerned that venality would become standard procedure, and it has. Long before suspicion mounted about the loyalties of Donald Trump, large swaths of the American elite—lawyers, lobbyists, real-estate brokers, politicians in state capitals who enabled the creation of shell companies—had already proved themselves to be reliable servants of a rapacious global plutocracy. Richard Palmer was right: The looting elites of the former Soviet Union were far from rogue profiteers. They augured a kleptocratic habit that would soon become widespread. One bitter truth about the Russia scandal is that by the time Vladimir Putin attempted to influence the shape of our country, it was already bending in the direction of his.” ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/how-kleptocracy-came-to-america/580471/
*
“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.” ~ Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum
That’s like the “meaning of life” — we need to find/create a personal one for our particular life, and not insist that there is THE meaning of life valid for everyone, though of the various answers offered, I like the one that the meaning of life is life itself — just being alive (I think Alan Watts said it). I could go along with that — but then I’d still need my own vocation.
*
~ “In contrast to a monarchy, in a Caesarist regime the institutions of the republic remain intact and all the magistrates retain their old titles. Julius Caesar rejected the trappings of monarchy that his followers wished to heap on him. Nor was “Caesar” his title; that was simply his family name. It’s his adopted son, Augustus, who is considered the first caesar of the Roman Empire.
The regime of the Roman Republic was completely different from a modern democracy. Nevertheless, comparisons between such governments and Rome have been put forward persistently over the years. The sociologist Max Weber argued that mass democracy necessarily leans toward Caesarism, in terms of the existence of a direct connection between a charismatic leader and the people, which undermines the power of parliament.
Modern Caesarism is not entirely distinct from democracy, but springs up within it. A moderate form of Caesarism is discernible in some of the outstanding leaders of modern democracy, such as Abraham Lincoln and Charles de Gaulle. But in its extreme form, Caesarism deteriorates into sheer autocracy, as with Napoleon Bonaparte or his nephew, Napoleon III. The Caesarist ruler becomes an emperor, and the republic an empire. And if all goes well, a new, quasi-royal dynasty is engendered. A “dictator anointed with oil of democracy,” as the historian Theodor Mommsen put it.
It’s been claimed, in recent months, that Caesarism has returned to politics. Donald Trump’s supporters from the alt-right see him as the “American Caesar” they longed for. His election is portrayed as the fulfillment of the prediction made by their prophet, the German historian and philosopher Oswald Spengler, who foresaw a century ago that Western democracy would evolve into Caesarism in the 2000s. In any event, even outside far-right circles, there are those who argue that Caesarism is a more accurate description of the essence of the dominant model of rule of the Trump era than the badly worn term “fascism.” According to this view, the American republic began to crack during the terms of the two past presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who, unable to reach agreement with Congress, resorted to presidential decrees in order to govern. But even before he takes the oath of office, Trump is already showing signs of far more radical Caesarism. His direct appeal to the masses via Twitter and YouTube is only a preliminary expression of this.
Trump is not alone. Political commentators in the United States have noted several other countries in which Caesarism has arisen: Putin’s Russia, Erdogan’s Turkey, Modi’s India and Duterte’s Philippines. It’s interesting, in this context, to consider Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel as a republic skewed by Caesarism. Netanyahu, too, enjoys popular support that only grows stronger the more he clashes with the republic’s traditional institutions: the courts, the media and the cultural elite. He too concentrates in his hands a large portion of the executive roles, and in particular dominates propaganda mechanisms such as the free newspaper Israel Hayom and the Israel Broadcasting Authority. And in his case as well, many forces in society prefer that he hold the reins of power, for fear that without him things would only be worse.
In this connection, particular significance attaches to the rising power of the prime minister’s son, Yair Netanyahu. Already after the last election, in March 2015, Netanyahu began to introduce Yair to the public – for example, when he was positioned behind his father at the Western Wall after the election victory. “Phase II of Sara and Bibi’s plan was launched this week, namely the measured presentation to the public of the intended heir,” Yossi Verter wrote in Haaretz at the time. In recent months, the plan seems to be moving ahead. As reported in Haaretz earlier this month, Yair is deeply involved in the propaganda apparatus of his father’s bureau, particularly with regard to messages in the social networks. Unlike Omri Sharon before him, the young Netanyahu does not draw his power from the Likud Central Committee; the source of his power is his parents.
At a certain stage, the dynasty demonstrates its strength through rulers who are actually idiots, sadists or suffering from insanity. They manifest their power through grotesque behavior and brutal actions. The fact that they continue to rule despite their unfitness proves that the decisive factor is not ability but blood. Thus, two generations after Julius Caesar, the Roman Empire was led by the depressive Tiberius, who closeted himself on the island of Capri, where he pursued his addiction to sexual depravity. He was followed by his insane brother, Caligula, who established a brothel in the palace and dressed and actually fought as a gladiator. Yet, throughout a large part of his reign, Caligula enjoyed great popularity among the Roman masses. They loved dancers, and Caligula knew how to dance – and also how to humiliate the upper classes.
At one point in Robert Graves’ novel “I, Claudius,” the eponymous protagonist extracts a fateful confession from his grandmother, Livia, Augustus’ uninhibited wife. She tells him that she killed Augustus, doing so by means of poisoned figs. The reason, she says, is that her husband intended to restore the republic. “And it’s no use arguing with you republicans,” she tells him. “You refuse to see that one [cannot] reintroduce republican government at this stage.”
It’s noteworthy that Augustus’ poisoning by Livia, “the woman who pulls the strings,” seems not to be based on solid historical evidence. Graves wronged Livia, but also made her the central character in his book.” ~
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-forget-fascism-in-the-u-s-and-israel-caesarism-is-on-the rise-1.5474399?fbclid=IwAR2ATqsZ2euOP8_qwB8HtiCteJcdZj_yEQ73UVLYvONHrp0cezmn
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“I have known in various countries a good many politicians who have attained high office. I have continued to be puzzled by what seemed to me the mediocrity of their minds.” ~ Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up
It seems that already Plato commented that only mediocre minds are attracted to politics. True, there have been exceptions: an occasional Jefferson or Lincoln, but on the whole, alas . . .
I can't resist reposting my favorite image of Somerset Maugham, 1941
DOES CHRISTIANITY HAVE A FUTURE?
“I do think the Church, as I have known it, is dying. But I also see a new Church being born. I prefer to call that new entity, not the Church but the "Ekklesia," which is a transliterated Greek word that means "Those who are called out." I see the membership of the Church of tomorrow to be those who have been called out of tribal identity, out of prejudice, out of gender definitions of superiority and inferiority and even out of religion. That Ekklesia will also be constituted by people who have been called into a new humanity, beyond the primitive boundaries that now bind the Church inside its prevailing cultural prejudices. I expect this new Church to grow as the old Church dies. I have no further desire to seek to stop the death of yesterday's Church. It fulfilled its purpose quite well, but now its day has passed. A new day is dawning, ushering in a new Christian future. I welcome it.” ~ Bishop John Shelby Spong
Oriana:
Ekklesia indeed means being called out, while “church” comes from Kyrios, the Lord — the place of the Lord, and by extension the people who attend that place. For the ex-Catholics here, you are probably also reminded of Kyrie Eleison, a prayer that is (or was, “in my days”) part of the mass.
I love what Spong is saying, but whether Christianity in any form has a future is yet to be seen.
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THE SURPRISING BENEFITS OF THE MEASLES VACCINE
~ “Back in the 1960s, the U.S. started vaccinating kids for measles. As expected, children stopped getting measles.
But something else happened.
Childhood deaths from all infectious diseases plummeted. Even deaths from diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea were cut by half.
Scientists saw the same phenomenon when the vaccine came to England and parts of Europe. And they see it today when developing countries introduce the vaccine.
"In some developing countries, where infectious diseases are very high, the reduction in mortality has been up to 80 percent," says Michael Mina, a postdoc in biology at Princeton University and a medical student at Emory University.
"So it's really been a mystery — why do children stop dying at such high rates from all these different infections following introduction of the measles vaccine," he says.
The team obtained epidemiological data from the U.S., Denmark, Wales and England dating back to the 1940s. Using computer models, they found that the number of measles cases in these countries predicted the number of deaths from other infections two to three years later.
"We found measles predisposes children to all other infectious diseases for up to a few years," Mina says.
And the virus seems to do it in a sneaky way.
Like many viruses, measles is known to suppress the immune system for a few weeks after an infection. But previous studies in monkeys have suggested that measles takes this suppression to a whole new level: It erases immune protection to other diseases, Mina says.
So what does that mean? Well, say you get the chicken pox when you're 4 years old. Your immune system figures out how to fight it. So you don't get it again. But if you get measles when you're 5 years old, it could wipe out the memory of how to beat back the chicken pox. It's like the immune system has amnesia, Mina says.
"The immune system kind of comes back. The only problem is that it has forgotten what it once knew," he says.
So after an infection, a child's immune system has to almost start over, rebuilding its immune protection against diseases it has already seen before.
This idea of "immune amnesia" is still just a hypothesis and needs more testing, says epidemiologist William Moss, who has studied the measles vaccine for more than a decade at Johns Hopkins University.
But the new study, he says, provides "compelling evidence" that measles affects the immune system for two to three years. That's much longer than previously thought.
"Hence the reduction in overall child mortality that follows measles vaccination is much greater than previously believed," says Moss, who wasn't involved in the study.
That finding should give parents more motivation to vaccinate their kids, he says. "I think this paper will provide additional evidence — if it's needed — of the public health benefits of measles vaccine," Moss says. "That's an important message in the U.S. right now and in countries continuing to see measles outbreaks."
Because if the world can eliminate measles, it will help protect kids from many other infections, too.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/05/07/404963436/scientists-crack-a-50-year-old-mystery-about-the-measles-vaccine?fbclid=IwAR2DidhqAQylYr8CSpJ128nnJqgfKHhbOsHub-6MZ4qiGvSlNqdb2akaR14
Maurice Hilleman's measles vaccine is estimated to prevent 1 million deaths per year.
ending on beauty:
Everywhere is home to the rain.
~ Li-Young Lee, Hurry Toward Beginning.
California hasn’t been home to the rain for a while, but this year is different. May the reservoirs fill up.
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