Of all the many reasons I have never been "one of the guys," maybe the most pressing is that I imbibe in absolutely no popular culture, sports or the currency of modern amerkin, gossip. I couldn't care less about the latest series on this streaming platform or that. In fact, until three months ago I didn't even have a tv, nor did I miss it. As for sports, which eats up so much time and energy for so many people, I simply do not understand. Every game now seems a money game. The team with the most buys the best players and they win. Even college sports, is populated by multi-millionaires. I would like someone to tell me how many of these "student-athletes" ever do any student-ing.
As impenetrable as I am to the lures of popular culture, my few remaining friend are similarly impenetrable to my reading suggestions. I often recommend books and get nothing back other than a polite sort of funereal nod.
All that said, and know that, in the words of my father, I'm just pissing up a rope, I wish every one--yes, I mean every one--would read Ian Buruma's new book, "Stay Alive." First let me start by explaining the title, which is not an ode to the BeeGees.
Amid massive Allied bombings, state murder and abductions, and god-knows what else, "[A ]common way for Berliners to say goodbye was no longer auf Wiedersehen, or Heil Hitler, but bleiben Sie übrig, stay alive.”
BTW, you can read reviews of Stay Alive here: From the Wall Street Journal. And from the New York Times.
No one knows right now, we might not know for years or decades what kind of horrors amerika's horror of a president has propagated in the Middle East and when that horror will strike us in amerika. I don't know if the Iranis, masters of swarm/drone warfare will attack the US with 100,000 drones. I don't know if they'll jerry-rig a way to kill with their nearly 700 kilos of bomb-grade plutonium. I don't know what comes next. I don't know what supremacist hatred all this will evoke and where it will all end, if it ever does.
But what I do know is this. And I am saddened and deeply upset by it.
When you live (as you and I do) under a criminal regime, you become complicit, you become a criminal. We can wear our sarcastic anti-trump t-shirts, and go to every no-kings protest from here to eternity, but we are complicit.
The criminal regime takes about 70-cents out of every dollar you earn and spends that dollar on criminal pursuits. Fake wars, kidnappings and disappearances of emigres, killing protestors and calling them domestic terrorists. There's no way out of this. He is us. He is our man.
In Buruma's book, even at the peak of the Gestapo surveillance state, there were protestors. Before too long they were usually hung on meat hooks to die. Women were decapitated--that was deemed more humane.
Of course, some people remained decent. They helped feed the Jews who were given no rations, even hide the hunted. But more and more, as the noose around every neck inexorably tightened, decency became suicide. If you spoke, you died. If you found news not propagandized by the state you died, if you mourned the death of a loved one, you died.
That stuff isn't happening here yet. But it seems ever closer. The noose--that is the consequences of living in a state where foul is fair and fair is foul, where war is not war, where illegal is legal will grow ever more severe.
If an when amerika is struck, anything less than goose-stepping revenge will be regarded as disloyalty. Doubters will be called traitors. Questions are dissent.
A madman, bound by no morals, following no rules, beholden and checked by no one has spun the world off its axis.
WH Auden, in his great poem, September 1, 1939--called out the "low dishonest decade." I cannot think of a more brutal an accurate punch in the nose way to sum up the trumphorror.
Low dishonest...killing.
September 1, 1939
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
All we can do is hope to bleiben Sie übrig, stay alive.
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