No More Politics: On To Movies!

I am about to post a five-part blog (short parts!) on movie-going, and pleasure, and what to do about that annoying friend who asks you, “So, what did you think of it?,” before you’re halfway up the aisle.

But first, I've had few entries on my blog in the past several months, and I feel that an explanation is due to the all the friends and relatives and colleagues who aren’t reading it. I thought I’d be writing mostly about politics–what else should a political scientist/theorist do? At the present moment, however, this seems to me to be just about impossible, at least for a paid-up inhabitant of the United States of America.

This is a stupid society and very often a lunatic society. The opening words of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground–“I am a sick man; I am a spiteful man; I think my liver is diseased”–could easily be adapted to describe an entire nation of 300 million people: not all the people, but the nation as a whole. Nothing intelligent or sane can get done, only stupid or insane projects can go forth. This may change in 2009, though I strongly counsel against optimism on that score, for the institutional and social roots of national stupidity and insanity run too deep by now to be easily uprooted: not to mention that for the first time in American history, a genuine Fascist has a 50-50 chance of becoming president. Real political debate or discussion cannot take place, in that there is really nothing to debate, and nowhere to debate it if there were anything resembling serious ideas.

There is one seriously asserted idea, which consists of one part outright lies and one part ideological madness, and the mere fact of my saying that demonstrates the point, if you agree with me. You can’t debate with liars and lunatics, and when they own or control so much of the institutional spectrum where talk is permitted--but not encouraged, never encouraged–and have established such institutional hegemony that no practicing politician is allowed to tell the simple truth about their duplicitous imbecility or madness, what is left to be done or said? So I’ve stopped writing about politics. Anyone who might be reading this already knows all there is to know about the Occupation, or the health-care system, or the destruction of the welfare state, or or or... No one needs another run-through from me. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about–well, I would have nothing to say to you anyway.

Before getting to movies, though, I do have a story to tell that might be interesting both to old and more recent friends, and family, just as a matter of historical record.

My mother hired Norman Podhoretz as Editor of Commentary, and set him on the path to becoming who he is: the leading advocate of neo-totalitarianism in the United States. Of course he would furiously deny the appellation and insist that he’s the one great opponent of totalitarianism (“Islamofascism”), but that’s like Hitler saying he was the one real anti-Stalinist.

Though she later castigated herself for, as she put it, knowing Podhoretz was an opportunist and yet going ahead anyway, and though she was expressing despairing regret almost on her deathbed, it was really a no-brainer at the time. As the founding editor of Commentary, Elliot Cohen, declined into deep depression, there were only 3 serious candidates to replace him: Podhoretz, Clement Greenberg, and a lightweight New York intellectual named Marty Greenberg. Greenbergs had the numbers but not the weight. Marty was the kind of editor who belongs at a publishing house, not an intellectual journal, and Clement had settled into the role of High Priest of Abstract Expressionism; there was little reason to believe that he could take the kind of generalized intellectual approach to other subject matters that the job required. Norman seemed at least like a somebody with generalized interests and a dedication to keeping the magazine on the same path that Cohen had charted. To be sure, technically it was up to the American Jewish Committee’s supervising Editorial Board to make the decision, but as the AJC’s representative on the magazine, General Manager of it, and de facto CEO, it was my mother’s recommendation that would govern. And so it was.

Years later we would discuss–to the extent that years later she could still engage in linear discussions–what happened to turn the Pod into a monstrous Pod Person. With Irving Kristol the explanation was simple, or so she thought–he was a corrupt social climber who fell in with the ruling-class types who could make him money, lots of it, and never looked back. The Pod was not so easy to explain, though you could always go with the malevolent force of his Svengali, Midge Decter. Still, Norman was no Trilby; he had always been full of some inexplicable rage of the kind that when I encounter it always leads me to look back with nostalgia at Else Frankel-Brunswick’s classic and (wrongly) much maligned study of The Authoritarian Personality.

I know the anti-Right conclusion of that study is out of keeping with the kind of shoddy intellectual relativism that these days posits “Left” and “Right” as “extremes” within whose boundaries moderate liberal realism falls, but that’s the way it is. For a long time genuine rage has had almost nowhere to go on the American Left, except the convulsive violence of late SDS and its Maoist successors: and these are simply not in the American grain, nor do they promise anything but total exclusion from American life (and maybe a prison sentence). The rage of race, or of thwarted power, including sexual power and the power of patriarchy, is entirely of the Right, and indeed explains the persistence of the Right even as it descends into genuine madness. It is also, sadly, very much in the American grain.

To see not the psychological (who knows?) but the chronological origins specifically of the Pod’s rage, you have to look back at the essay everyone looks back at (most recently Ian Buruma, in reviewing his book on “World War IV” in the New York Review of Books), “My Negro Problem and Ours.” “Ours” indeed–unless “we” consists of the Pod and that other Norman, the postal clerk, who had a similar problem. The “problem” was this: Negroes were tough, and nice Jewish boys weren’t, and Negroes were scary and nice Jewish boys were scared, and we were all supposed to be together in one big happy liberal family, and under such circumstances that just couldn’t work. My own tough-guy problem was with Italians, but that didn’t call one’s whole liberal pluralist upbringing into account (especially if it was founded in anti-Catholicism, to which I still cheerfully plead guilty).

The Pod has usually been acquitted of racism in that article, on the grounds that he advocated racial intermarriage (miscegenation) as a solution to American racism: perhaps following the notorious Hannah Arendt article on Little Rock that Commentary had been going to publish until my mother vetoed it, on the grounds that its opposition to school integration would lead to a fracturing of the Jewish/Negro coalition. (I won’t even mention all the historical ironies there.) But in his seeming recognition of the virtues of blackness, chief among them physical prowess, he was exactly like the kind of anti-Semite who insists on having a Jewish lawyer when big money or long prison terms are involved. More revealing, perhaps, this is the man, after all, who once said that the decline of Western civilization was due to the prevalence of homosexuals. Just substitute the word “Jews” in there and we know exactly where we’re at.

In the end it’s the same syndrome: the thwarting of “masculinity,” or rather of the wistful expectations of masculinity, and the rage that being thwarted–read “the real world”–produces. In women too, it must be said, since the pleasures of patriarchy are promised to male and female alike; more to the former, but who am I to say why people should believe or not believe, or what price they pay or compensation receive for their beliefs? In any event, you can find this kind of out-of-control masculinism everywhere in the world, of course: but in the so-called West, it is strong enough to exert real power, sometimes even hegemony, only in America. Yes, Harry Golden, Only In America. Why, who knows? but what and how, is at the present moment all too clear. Read Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream.

So, no more politics. On to movies, and pleasure.