Travelogue 976 – March 28

Crying Children

There’s a relentlessness to the Republican cant. They are incontinent, powerless over their message, powerless over their garrulousness. Their cant has the relentlessness of psychological need. When Baby is very tired, she seizes on some grievance and she cries and cries. She stomps a foot and demands attention. “You aren’t listening to me!” she shouts. This is what the Republican cant sounds like. Part of growing up should be a process of becoming self-aware of what one sounds like.

Apologies to my readers who were waiting for answers to the Scaevolan mysteries that have intrigued us for millennia; I’m needing to think out loud about this upsetting situation in American politics.

I’ve never been a fan of the Republican Party, but the times force us to re-evaluate what we thought was bad before. Reagan and the Bushes do not deserve to be considered as good leaders by almost any objective measure. And yet, we are forced by the extremity of the Republican moral collapse to display them as models of behaviour. It’s extraordinary!

I don’t find it impossible to believe, for instance, that there were moments when G.W. consulted his conscience. Those times may not have been frequent. He may have overruled his conscience, or had it overruled. But I can believe there was some foundation of humanity there. How is it we have become so desperate that that seems a gold standard?

Tucker Carlson agreed with a guest on his show yesterday that the Republican Party would be forced to resort to a fascist candidate "within 10 to 20 years". Oh, really? And why is that? Because “… we’re going to be all treated like criminals, and all subject to every single law, while antifa, Black Lives Matter guys go free and Hunter Biden goes free ….” These are the thoughts that take the place of policy in America’s second party. It’s extraordinary!

What do you advise the child who complains that no one likes him? You advise that child to re-assess his way of relating to the other kids. The Republican cries of injustice are the cries of a bully who’s been ostracized. There are real reasons the other kids don’t like him! What the Republicans are saying when they cry foul is that they want the right to say and stand for offensive things without consequence. “My racist feelings are sincere. They represent deep values for me!” they cry. “You aren’t listening to me!”

So the governor of Georgia signs a law restricting voting rights while locked in a room with six other white dudes, sitting at a desk placed underneath a painting of a plantation that profited from slave labour. A black state legislator knocks on the door of the chamber and is hauled away by police. How does a politician become so blind to optics? By living in a bubble of grievance. “In my heart I’m a good person. If I’m a racist, it’s a good-guy racism.” He stomps his foot and cries that we’re not listening. It’s embarrassing.

The purpose of the political theatre that Republicans claim to abhor is to show us what’s inside a politician’s heart. The rest of us can’t see into your heart. Telling us, in ripe tones of indignation, that you’re a good guy doesn’t cut it.

I’ve never been a fan of the Republican Party, but I do believe there is a place for a viable conservative party. I may never vote with them, but they form a function in political debate. The trouble is the Republican Party is no longer a viable conservative party. There is no constructive policy debate in the Republican Party. There is only grievance, and the grievance of people who have earned their exile. At this point, the Republican Party has to convince the nation and the world that they are not fascists. You don’t get to cry that people call you fascists when you act like fascists. Do the work! Find something positive to contribute to the nation!

Travelogue 975 – March 22

The Word for Suffering

Television is finally a force for good. There’s a show called ‘Number Blocks’ that has inspired Baby Jos with a passion for numbers and maths. She watches the show at every opportunity. The numbers have personalities and voices and colours, and Baby knows them all. When the TV is not on, she draws Number Blocks. She playacts with numbers.

More than knowing what colour the character Number Eight is, she has internalized the math. It’s astonishing. She knows that eight is made of four twos and two fours. She knows that five and three makes eight. Two and six, too. She became absolutely besotted with the idea of big numbers like a thousand and a million. She knows how to write a thousand. She knows it’s ten hundreds. She understand the rudiments of squares. I’m blown away, both by her acumen and her passion.

Youth is a succession of passions. This we know. Watching the unfoldment of those passions is mesmerizing. It’s one of the great joys of being a parent. It’s also something of a mystery. Do we ever understand human passions? We nod at them with wisdom, acknowledging them as a fact of life; we empathize, because we know what passion feels like; but do we understand another person’s passions? Why numbers? Why now? I don’t know. I love it, but I don’t understand it.

Returning to my last topic, the myth of the Passion of Scaevola, I find myself wondering why parents told their children this story. It may seem self-evident: to inspire patriotism. But what emotion did parents expect to rouse? Pride, horror, or aspiration? Each has its purpose, but they might be contradictory purposes. Most obviously, the child was meant to be proud to be a Roman. The child identifies as the same species as Scaevola, an exceptional race of people.

Identification goes further, though, especially for the child. The child imagines him- or herself in Scaevola’s shoes. What feeling ensues? Hopefully a horror at the thought of thrusting his or her hand into the fire. Eventually, the horror may turn into fascination. It was an act of passion, after all, something attractive to the human imagination. The word passion, by the way, derives from a Latin word for suffering. Thence, Christ’s Passion. Strange that it has come to mean desire! The child conceives a passion for the Passion of Scaevola. The child suffers what Scaevola suffers? The child desires what Scaevola suffered? The child desires to be a hero, or the child desires simply to suffer? Have the two become the same, by virtue of the framing of the story? What did the Romans praise when they praised Scaevola, the cold abstraction of patriotism or the fiery sacrificial impulse? What would the child absorb?

I haven’t really provided any answers, have I? Do I get another try?

Travelogue 974 – March 15

Talking Assassins on the Ides

It’s the Ides of March. Last year, I was being initiated into the new world of COVID lockdown. A year later, I’m still working at home. Bars and cafes are still shut. I’ve had exactly one beer so far this year, and, somehow, even though I’m eating at home and never drinking alcohol, I’m still in worse shape than ever. I’m gaining weight. I don’t run anymore, lacking the motivation of races. My eyes are fried from constant computer use. My psyche is in no better shape, though more spare than my flabby exterior, starved as it is by lockdown, haggard, lean, and spooked. I can’t remember the last time I was outside the city limits. I can’t remember the last time I watched a movie in the theatre. Was there ever an Ides of March more fateful? Well, maybe one.

I’ve been listening to a podcast about the history of Rome. The podcast starts at the beginning, of course, and, being a well-behaved auditor, I’m starting there, too. It’s funny how Roman history starts in legend. Even the modern historian of Rome recounts the legends, admitting they’re legends, but having no alternative but the sketchiest archaeology. The legends, says the historian, may serve as a kind of code, betraying some truth behind their colourful dramas. The strange thing is how legend and truth are melded somewhere in the fifth century or so before Christ. For a century or two of Roman history, according to the histories written during the late Republic and later, legendary figures lived side by side with historical ones.

Prominent in Rome’s early history, legendary or otherwise, are the Etruscans, Rome’s powerful northern neighbours. It can safely be assumed that much of early Roman history was played out in the shadow of that civilization. One legend we inherit has its roots in a conflict with the Etruscans, the legend of Gaius Mucius Scaevola. This soldier was sent to assassinate King Porsenna of Clusium, who was attacking the city. Scaevola was captured and brought before the king. The soldier brashly told the king there would be many more assassins, and, when threatened with death by fire, the young man held his left hand in the fire without so much as a whimper, to prove the terrible resolve of his people. Porsenna let him go and promptly retreated, intimidated by the boy’s fervour. Legend or truth, you may be wondering. One clue might be that the soldier’s name, Scaevola, means left-handed in old Latin. What are the odds?

Is this patriotism or extreme predation? Is this passion or psychosis? All the answers in my next blog.

Travelogue 973 – March 10

Bad Art: “Moxie”

It’s embarrassing when your side makes bad art. Liberals and lefties have had it good in recent decades. The greats among the arts have primarily been fellow liberals. It must have been frustrating for loyal right-wingers with any aesthetic taste. What if they didn’t like country music? All that was left was Adam Sandler, reality TV and Expendables. Readers had propaganda, all inspired by the grande dame Ayn Rand. It’s tempting to think that the laws of physics don’t allow right-wing perspectives and good art to inhabit the same space. But it wasn’t so long ago that conservatives were the great patrons, and in some cases, the great artists. Look at T.S. Eliot. Look at what happened to his friend, Ezra Pound, weird convert to fascism and fan of Mussolini.

We watched the film “Moxie” on Netflix the other night, and it left me fearful that our golden age was passing. I realized how delicate the balance was between art made by lefties and leftie propaganda. It was a horrible movie, and not for any lack of talent on set. It was horrible because the filmmakers gave in to excess and demonstrated they were fine with propaganda. I couldn’t disagree with any of the political principles driving the film. But I was left utterly dejected by the mallet taken to the subject matter, and to the heads and shoulders of the audience. My God, it was tiring. Absolutely nothing could be left to the imagination. There was nothing that could be left to chance. There was nothing that could be ambiguous. The bad boy (played by the son of Arnold Schwarzenegger, as it happens) could be left with not a shred of humanity. The good boy was painted with similar subtlety, a caricature of the attentive and selfless lover, who virtually evaporated into the mists whenever female eyes were not upon him. The girls and women (other than a good-hearted but misguided school principal) were all versions of cartoon superheroes. Each had her superpower and each had her cross to bear, but, gosh, when they united, there was no force, terrestrial or otherwise, that could withstand them. And never could they (or we) waver. Miserable.

Defenders of the film could say, “Reverse the casting, male for female, and what you’ve just said could apply to dozens, maybe hundreds, of movies made in recent decades. (See Expendables.)” That may be true, but you don’t defend bad art by referencing other bad art. It only makes it worse that they should have known better. It’s too late in the game to claim “Moxie” was satire.

The type in performance and narrative is coming back (as discussed in my last entry) and there is no better place for the type than in a propaganda piece. The heroes and villains play out our personal morality plays, not to remind us that we are fallible, but to remind us how mighty we are in our righteousness.

We know in our hearts we are the heroes, and we know we will vanquish. The pleasure of the drama is indulging in furious indignation at the villains and in the glory of seeing them smitten. We know that Thanos will be smitten in the final Avengers movie, but that’s a wholly different sensation to anticipating the glorious smiting of an arrogant son of a Republican governor. Rah, rah! Send in the cheerleaders.

Travelogue 972 – March 9

Heroes and Types

Forgive me if I return to Chesterton. I have another insight from his writings about Dickens. It has some tangential relevance to my current meditations on historical fiction. He tells us that the difference between characters of ancient fiction versus modern literature is the difference between types (divine because unchanging) and individuals (changing and mortal). Chesterton claims that Dickens was the last to create divine characters in the modern era. “Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist,” he writes. What makes types appealing is their timelessness. They are ‘divine’ in the sense that they don’t age. Even when their stories demonstrate narrative arc, their essences are unchanging. Pickwick is Pickwick from start to finish of Dickens’s novel.

Discussing pre-modern literature, Chesterton makes reference to “the comic literature”, and my mind automatically reads it as “comic books”. It’s a telling substitution. Forgetting for one instant when Chesterton was writing, I make him a spokesman for a question of my own. Isn’t our century’s fixation on super-hero narratives odd? Isn’t there something medieval or ancient about this falling back into morality tales populated with heroes and types? Characterization has become fairly shallow and formulaic, even in the films that don’t feature heroes and villains in costume. Audiences must be informed which characters they’re dealing with within seconds, identities communicated through signals like costume, gesture and speech patterns. This is a theatre of masques.

When this principle is applied to historical fiction, then what do we get? Is that where Regency romances come from and time travel novels? This is history written for the thrill of interacting vicariously with types. Heroes are types almost by definition. Our historical heroes have become types that live eternally in the imagination. We want to see them alive in imagery. Alexander the Great enters the field of battle. We want to see how he walks, hear what he sounds like, know who his lovers are. It’s like brain candy; it’s simple gratification.

There’s this voyeuristic element to all historical fiction. What matters is whether the gratification is the first purpose of the book or whether there is a story to be told. I mentioned that I had been reading “Circe”. Here’s a book that definitely trades on the thrill element; we get to see the Greek gods walk the earth again! (Did anyone see them the first time?) But there is more going on. The first level of deeper engagement is the ‘what if?’ What would the memoir (in the modern sense) of a goddess sound like? I think Miller was very successful with this challenge. It’s beautifully and thoughtfully written, and the heroine does change and grow. I won’t reveal Miller’s ending, but I will say that it’s made nearly inescapable by the choice to rescue the character from type.

One aspect to the novel seems less successful. Is Miller using Circe’s ‘life’ to teach us about women’s struggles? If so, I don’t find it very convincing. She’s in good company there, since scholars and writers have for millennia been interpreting mythology and projecting pedagogical narratives on tops of the stories of Greek gods and goddesses, despite the very evident chaos that characterizes the world of the Olympians. Miller’s tell is the typing of male characters in juxtaposition to the individualization of the heroine. Circe’s complexity stands in almost humorous contrast to Telemachus’s stasis as the man who listens and also is darn handy. But, there you go: no goddess is perfect.