Travelogue 1170 – 17 February
A Quote from Mel
Part Five

Polite and softening language are standard parts of the curriculum in Business English. Polite language shows respect. You say, “would you please?” instead of “give me that!” because it establishes respect. It lends power to your counterpart, establishes equality and camaraderie.

More important is the softening language: “I’m afraid that won’t be possible” and “we were thinking differently” instead of “never going to happen.” It signals regret and a willingness to negotiate. It signals an acknowledgement that adversaries in a negotiation have valid concerns and interests. That keeps people at the table.

Students balk. How is this lesson useful? Why can’t we speak directly? I like being blunt, they say. “Blunt” has become a favourite word of mine. Dutch people deploy it quite frequently, and with pride. Yes, you enjoy being blunt, don’t you? How do you think your interlocutor likes it? Answer: everyone likes it. They know where they stand. Yes, I say, indeed they do. They stand next to someone who will always go through the door first, who will never offer a seat on the Metro, and who is never going to think about a conversation a second time. So how do you think that will influence their business decisions about you moving forward?

I’ve been picking on poor, happy-go-lucky Mel Gibson, who let drop his wide-eyed observation about Trump coming to California after the fires, that it was like daddy arriving, “and he’s taking his belt off.” There is something sweet and innocent about Mel, even when he’s letting these sorts of inanities fly. Rogan and his ilk indulge poor fools like Mel, milking them for every half-thought. The right sets these fools up to be shamans because they live in a stream-of-consciousness dream. In Mel’s press packet, “blurt” is his official verb of attribution. One moment he seems profound, the next we’re cringing. And Mel is just shaking his head at the wonder of it all.

There’s privilege to being a right-wing shaman. You get to shout down your network interviewer with savage righteousness. You get to swagger into government offices, chase employees out, and shut them down. You get to call people names. Not only do you get to victimise innocent people, tearing up their employment or procurement contracts, you get to circle back and call them names, encouraging your bros to rain terror down on them. How cool is that?

“So cool,” murmur the basement-dwellers who idealise Trusk and Mump. They shake their heads with wonder and call them master politicians. In reality, the two co-queens have no idea what politics is. They play to exclusively to their own audience. They reach out a hand to no one. They burn every bridge. There’s no coalition. There are the rich bros, their sweaty shamans, and there is the mob.

Obviously, these guys don’t expect any real election in the future. They have made clear that they think the age of democracy is over. But the people haven’t spoken. Who is tracking all the enemies made in only one month in power? Even among their own audience. Most of their constituency are simple-minded ticket-holders to the circus. What happens when the big tent gets cold because there’s no one manning the heater? What happens when the wild animals get loose because the trainers have taken a NASCAR break? If they start grumbling, is daddy going to take off the belt?

Travelogue 1169 – 11 February
Do I Love?

My country, open plains hours long in the night. They are most dark during my daylight hours here. Underneath the plains, there are glass wires crackling with danger. The little black spiders of someone’s broken psyche are skittering along them, quick with their poison.

I feel something like my Ukrainian students now as I monitor the news from my home country. The news is war news. It’s not as bloody, not so classic in its story structure as the horrible Russian invasion, the empire sending an army to burn villages and kill children. The suffering in the Ukrainian war zones is keen; the story is horrific, and it’s not fair to make the comparison.

But we wait for reports, raids on the cities and on the offices, no sirens going off, just the shuffling of boys with laptops. But the mind of the expat pictures the laying down of bombs, those flowers opening far below across the target zone. And there are casualties. There will be stories of the innocents far afield who died, abandoned by my compatriots who had promised them food or medicine. The stories will emerge, and it will feel like war.

It's always night there for me. The country lies quietly, in something like innocence, prosperous land, alluring for pirates. It tries to sleep, but the raids keep coming, day after day since the inauguration. The King of the Bandits ran for president. He said he wasn’t the bandit; those people were the bandits. People were confused. It’s Kyiv. It’s Topeka. There is definitely war afoot.

Travelogue 1168 – 9 February
A Quote from Mel
Part Four

Form matters. There, I’ve said it. I’m something of an aesthete. I believe in paying attention to how things are done. I was the nerd in university more interested in Renaissance humanism than in the dashing philosophers of other ages. The latter seemed too explosive, too strident. Truth should demonstrate the quality of self-evidence; it only required the subtlest gesture. I was always suspicious of revolutionaries, zealots, and evangelicals. Passion in a cause led to aggression: the truth was required of you, even if it had to be introduced violently. And there is never a third party in these transactions. The purveyor of truth is in charge, simply because truth has authorised all means necessary.

The very urgency of King Dweeb, our South African toy soldier, the very urgency of his agenda is an indictment. It’s the behaviour of the IT guy at work who impatiently pushes you aside and commandeers the keyboard. There’s no pathos or humanity driving it. It’s a screaming neurosis wrapped in plastic. It cannot explain itself. The owner of the social media platform doesn’t know how to communicate human-to human. Hundreds of tweets a day, and he connects with no one.

That’s the trouble with the “genius” label. One skill, refined to absurdity by the white-hot compression of psychological disturbance does not a genius make. It’s only the Trumpian “mandate” at work. Genius in history was not a synonym for success. It was a term for the mind that had transcended our sets of ideas and brought back something really new, and something crystal clear. Leonardo and Einstein gave us visions of life and beauty, art and science, that revolutionised our ways of thinking and seeing. That does not mean they had a ketamine flash, and then aggressively took hold of the wheel of your car. The real genius has the skills of their art, and they also have the skill of inspired communication. It is we, the people, who are moved to respond to their visions.

All of this is so inelegant. A part of me thinks, if only there could be a dictator with some style, I might go in peace. Imagine if Stanley Tucci were a dictator. At least he would make the terror palatable because he was, well, Stanley Tucci. The aesthetics would be right. Even if I didn’t fit the décor and had to go, I could admire it wistfully as the door closed. Instead, we have the clumsy and the ill-formed, the shambling tire salesman with the orange face, and the reptilian, middle-aged boy-prodigy, still locked in a battle with his own adolescence. Everything about them is ugly and carnivalesque, and the insult to injury is the most painful part of losing to them. One’s last word is, “Really?”

Travelogue 1167 – 4 February
A Quote from Mel
Part Three

The MAGA origin story seems to be something like this: Democrats turned evil somewhere in the recent past. Specifically, they became paedophiles en masse, and, in order to cover their sudden predilections, they developed the “deep state”. That’s a sinister name for something, well, sinister, and something defying description. Discussion of it requires the methods of medieval theology. You cannot say what the deep state is, only what it is not. It is ineffable. Since the deep state was engineered by masters of governance and law, then the heroes of the resistance must be unschooled and unsystematic.

Enter Trump, who never really manages to strike a higher note than a drunken bigot at a Midtown bar. Enter the likes of Mel Gibson, who has the same tic as Rudy Giuliani of being amazed by what comes out of his mouth. “It’s like daddy arrived, and he’s taking his belt off.” Mel is the perfect avatar. He’s charismatic. He says whatever comes to mind. He denies evolution. The MAGA movement needs its shamans, the personalities inspired only by spirit and never by logic.

Let’s consider the “genius” of the movement, our friend Elon. I am baffled by the stubborn insistence, even by political foes, that he is a genius. I struggle for signs of it. Of course, the broader Republican movement had always worshipped rich people. The richer they are, the more surely they are “geniuses”. Mean, pushy, avaricious, aggressive, manipulative, even savvy, I can admit. But where are the signs of genius?

Lately, the Great One seems incapable of reasoned thought. I include a few samples: here he affirms that workers in the office is a moral issue. The interviewer tries to throw him a line back to shore – maybe you can refer to productivity as a concrete measure. No, he dismisses it. Then there’s Elon with a goofy smile telling advertisers to go f themselves. What a charming imp! Now he takes peremptory and unlawful action against USAID. He must have a reason. He must have a thoughtful way to communicate his misgivings about USAID and the work they do. A key to business communications is intelligent persuasion. Well …

So this is what falls under the behavioural rubric of genius? Maybe MAGA should stick to the bug-eyed pronouncements of Rudy and Mel.

Travelogue 1166 – 2 February
A Quote from Mel
Part Two

Please, teacher, how can I learn? The question is sincere, but asking it outside class implies one of two things. Either the student wants to do extra work to advance, which is admirable, or the student is thinking magically: class is great, but there must be a quicker way. I answer with the unpopular voice of expertise. There are things you can do, but they are laborious and painful. I offer tips, and I can sense how disappointing they are. If they listen to common sense, they know I am right, and it quiets their anxiety a bit. If they are impatient, they politely thank me, but dismiss what I have said. I am the voice of an entrenched establishment or profession. Even if I believe what I have said, I am blinded by my interests. There are always short cuts. That is the glory of human nature, they think.

I can cite my own failures in the Dutch language, and I often do during class to make them laugh. I have tried some of the new AI programs. I have tried most everything, but haven’t got the time, industry, or intelligence to conquer this language! And that’s where its stands.

People cast about for short cuts, special guidance, insider knowledge, tips and tricks, immersion, miracle treatments, magical links between diet and success. They want their trips to the gym to unlock secret potential. They want to look like movie superheroes because there is a magic to mimicry.

By mastering mimicry, Trump has become the model for mimics. In the back of his followers’ minds is an unsolvable paradox: they know he is not the man he poses as, and yet the pose itself is successful. He is powerful, and he is rich, which corresponds to the pose he has struck. The crimes, duplicity, betrayal, corruption, and Mephistophelean trade of his miserable soul lie in the shadows, occupying the space between the pose and the man, but shadows don’t register in binary thinking. Is he or is he not successful? Is he or is he not our darling orange Jesus?

All the sweaty bros in their Star-Trek-Captain seats at tech companies and behind podcast mics have taken the cue. Self-doubts have vanished as they realise, wait, we are Masters of the Universe! We wasted years feeling guilty because our riches were so obviously coincidence, meanness, happenstance and bullying, landing us on the biggest wave of wealth creation in a hundred years, while we secretly played role games and indulged in fantasies of an age of demi-gods. But look! It was all real! Look at the orange spectre in the White House. It was all real, after all! Where are my num-chuks? Where is my wizard hat? Where is my protein powder? It’s time to roll up our sleeves! We will save this world! There is no death!

Is it wild kismet that one of the MAGA heroes of J6 was the QAnon Shaman with his horns and spear? He wasn’t a bug in the big, weird system, but a feature of the system itself.

Travelogue 1165 – 29 January
A Quote from Mel
Part One

People look to authority. It’s natural. They identify a need, and they cast about for help.

I filled in for a colleague last night, teaching a class of English learners. It was such a nice class. About half the class were new to the Netherlands. All of them were new to English. When you are a beginner in a language, you are helpless. You look to the teacher for help, with a childlike innocence in your eyes. I’ve been there, multiple times. I know what it feels like. I’ve been the student in many language classes; I’ve been the immigrant. Their hopes are high, but the task is overwhelming.

I know that every one of those students has a specific set of reasons for being there. The course a shrewd calculation on their part. Their resources are limited, in both time and money, and this is way they have chosen to spend them. I take that seriously because I know they do. It’s not a frivolous decision to invest in a language. It can be a key to economic freedom, self-sufficiency.

One young man walked me all the way down the stairs after class, asking desperate questions about how he could master the language in the quickest possible way. He had come from Syria. He was married, though very young. He was eager. He believed that English would be instrumental to advancement, through study and through work.

I measure what I say. I have taught for many years. I know what it will take for him, how long it will take. I am positive and supportive. I want him to succeed. But I also have to be clear and transparent. Language study is a long road. I can explain how language learning really happens. There is no magic bullet.

Pundits have created a shorthand analysis for this last American election, repeating that it was all about the price of eggs. But there is precious little being said about prices during the grand Trump 2.0 rollout.

The new American president flies to California to survey the fire damage, and Mel Gibson says in an interview, “It’s like daddy arrived, and he’s taking his belt off.” Setting aside one’s gut reaction to another embarrassing quote from Gibson – wishing briefly one were a daddy who could collect all the microphones in the Republican daycare centre, – there are a few troubling levels to this statement, a statement that no doubt had a few boozy Trump voters cheering.

First is the sentiment that the people need a daddy. If the president is daddy for libs, he is daddy for red states, too. Is that somehow a comfort? The questions it raises about democracy are obvious. It ought to raise psychological questions. The metaphor Mel reaches for as California starts its recovery is, yes, a slimy 78-year-old man giving them all a spanking. Hearing it gives one a shudder. Delivering it and applauding ought to mandate intervention.

Another interpretation of Mel’s gross statement is that, for the gangsters managing this administration, governance is punishment. None of them would have been caught dead voting for assistance for anyone worth less than a hundred million, but those aid systems are a handy stick with which to beat vulnerable libs about the head and shoulders.

They survey the land, from the windows of the country club, and they see no one they want to help. They see only enemies. Is every window a mirror?

Travelogue 1164 – 25 January
Cruelty in Paradise

Before the inauguration, as L.A. was ablaze, Paul Krugman wrote a few articles for his substack analysing the role of California in the nation’s economy. It’s a huge economy, and it contributes mightily into the national pool. Going further, he showed how much more the blue states contribute than the red states, even to the extent that the blues could be said to subsidize the reds. In a quick tally of recent national disasters, it becomes apparent that red states have received much more relief than blues. The blues had not been complaining. Now, red-state Republicans tease California with national relief, holding it up like the treats they are withholding from their younger brothers. They want to attach conditions.

When children do it, we call it bullying. Why change the vocabulary when it’s politics? Who are we fooling? When bullies on the playground do it, they do it because they don’t believe in consequences. Is it different now?

What is behind the rise in public cruelty? I don’t require the chain of events, the blow-by-blow of Trump’s ascent. I want the mass psychology. If we meditate Krugman’s blue-state-red-state story, we understand that red-staters see no consequences to their behaviour. Their blindness operates on several levels. On the level closest to the surface, they are sure that nothing is likely to happen to red-staters for punishing blue states. The very stability of the postwar order has made us doubt even the concept of consequence. Red states will be fine. Disasters are another day, and the Fed is always there. Furthermore, even without their relief, California will be fine, right? It’s all a kind of magic show. Nothing onstage is real.

There’s a deeper level to their motivation, something more significant. The prevalent postwar stability has served to mask the delicacy and complexity of modern society. I see it on the streets. In a city population highly integrated and multi-functional, in which everyone contributes to a dynamic whole, and in which an intricate web of reliance exists, individuals are surprisingly callous and cavalier in their treatment of each other. The woman you push out of the way at the Metro turnstile might be the nurse who treats your child. The man whose music you hate might deliver the parcel you absolutely need to arrive on time. The driver you cut off in traffic might prepare your food. But none of that matters. We take each other for granted, and we have done so for a long time now.

It has gone further. Taking people for granted has advanced to a perverted state of innocence, a belief that we don’t need each other at all. And what does human nature do when liberated from … each other? Apparently, other human beings become as objects to be shunted about like stage furniture. If we judge by the Musk-Trump model, people are to be bought (Greenland), moved out of the way (immigrants), dismissed as inconvenient (inspectors-general), sadistically put in harm’s way (Fauci, Cheney), or made to dance for the price of a few empty promises (J6 protesters).

Liberation! This is the bro-call of the tech lords and the sweaty, right-wing podcast set. How is it that the landscape of their paradise is so arid and joyless and void of love?

Travelogue 1163 – 22 January
A Hint

Returning home from dropping the girls at school, I was startled to see a slanting line across the brick, cutting across the second floor of the building. Above the line was a discoloration, a lightening, a yellowing.

I stopped and looked up into the sky. Indeed, the mist was clearing, and the clouds above were broken. I had become so unaccustomed to seeing the sun, I was actually puzzled by the sight of a morning shadow thrown across the face of the building. It was an unsure line, watery and indistinct, but the sunlight had undeniably come!

Temperatures had stubbornly held around zero Celsius, so I stayed inside all morning, correcting exams. By the time that noon had passed, the scrap of sunshine had dissipated. Glancing outside, I saw that the pavements were wet. The clouds had returned and brought with them some showers.

My joints ache just thinking about the wet and cold city outside the window. The bicycle seats will be wet. Each one will have to be towelled off quickly. The damp will make the bike locks recalcitrant. My keys will be secured away under layers of rain gear. I will have to fiddle with those keys with bare, red fingers before I wrestle on the gloves. The gloves will be wet from the handlebars. My fingers will be hurting by the time I arrive at the school. I will arrive early and wait under the drizzling sky, studying the brick façade of the school, all grey with weather, showing no hint of sun.

Travelogue 1162 – 20 January
Cold on the Track

Yesterday, I was travelling between cities. It was a Sunday, and it was a cold day. There were disruptions in the train service. I was not sure which trains were running and when. The transportation system here is commendably transparent; one can check on the trains at any time. But I was also having trouble with my phone. The battery was not charging properly. I couldn’t be sure that I would find a clear path home. There was no pressing reason to be home early, but I felt adrift.

I stood on the platform at a small station on the outskirts of Leiden. The sun had set; the temperatures were dipping below freezing. A few people milled about on the platform, secure that a train was coming. I could have placed myself on a map, but I could not have assigned any value to the place, other than the name, other than the association with a friend who lived in a nearby high-rise. Across the track rose one of the buildings that make up the cluster of malls and apartment complexes that define the neighbourhood. It rose like a green animal that a giant child had made of Legos, a hammer-headed cow grazing, with stout legs and stretches of high floors suspended in the air, forming bridges above us. It had that industrial, tiled look of modernity. It had the effect of making a cold Sunday evening colder.

Being lost is a vanishing sensation. Our little phones tell us where we are at all times. The internet explains every place to us, offers pictures and tips and guides. It’s a pity, though, because there’s something pleasant in being lost. If you can allow the silence of being forgotten into your heart, it somehow comforts as it hurts, affirms one’s humanity. Being small in a big world can mend some things.

Each alone, we the cold wait on the train platform, waiting for the gears of the great modern project to click. A train will appear. And what if we are abandoned? All the efforts to make the vast machinery of transportation and communication reasonable and transparent are, at the end of the day, only a one-way transmission. It’s remarkably efficient, but it never quite salves the fear of abandonment. The trains could just stop. The phones could blink off. I wonder if the terror inside us doesn’t just build, the longer we are well-served. Because we are helpless.

There was trouble on the track somewhere that morning. There was an electrical disruption. There was maintenance. It was common sense, and it was alien at the same time.

The more successful the machine, the more we fear. Some elementary part of the mind rebels. We weren’t consulted; we did not participate. I shouldn’t wonder if this formed a part of the populist reaction against “elitism”, the urge to apply hands to the world we inhabit.

Travelogue 1161 – 16 January
A Monster Looms

Musk has entered my subconscious as a monster. He haunts my dreams, a monster you never see clearly, but lurks beyond the horizon. He has the dimensions of a Japanese monster, one you would catch glimpses of over the horizon, lurching through the bay, smirking at the planes buzzing around him. He’s the size of history. The film script requires lots of heroes because they are small, human size. They have grit and humour, but they are doomed.

In the book I’m finishing, a character wonders why recent generations have manifested in their entertainment such a need for superheroes. That character in the book has no answer, but I wonder now if it’s the product of history asserting itself in the generational mind, like a monster on the horizon. The Japanese imagined the biggest monster in postwar cinema, the kind that crushed city blocks beneath its feet. This is the culture that had looked into the face of horrific losses, of a defeat as epic as Troy’s, seen cities incinerated by the atom bomb.

History isn’t alive the way we are alive. It isn’t dead either, in the parallel sense that our parents are not dead, but are active in our minds and morals, shuffling around in the attic, as it were. History asserts itself in the imagination. If it isn’t given proper time and perspective, it moves from closet to closet, polymorphous and faceless. We catch sight of it in mirrors; sometimes it flatters us and sometimes it simply stares. When we think we are thinking about history, we are actually reviewing montages we have viewed in TV movies, montages in shadow.

Even in forgetting history, we never shake it. Remembering it, our negotiations never reach more than momentary agreements. History won’t stand still. It asserts itself in the mind of a people, half-digested stories that demand some lodging in the mind, stories that yield wisdom with time and contemplation, with the perspective of our own years. Too often, received history is TV montage, vignettes on the moors. While, down in the bay, a monstrous shadow looms.

Travelogue 1160 – 3 January
The Alien Speaks

Someone manufactures a video for social media. It is black and white and captions itself as recorded in 1964. The camera never moves; it is an interview scene. The subject is an alien, grey, big-headed, with glowing eyes. It speaks English somehow, though in a spooky, gravelly voice. I wish it were smoking a cigarette. Its demeanour is submissive, as an enemy captive’s should be, and it is longsuffering. But it is wise, and it is willing to talk. Naturally, the interviewer is less interested in where the monster came from or its technology than he is in philosophies of life and death.

The two have spent many hours in that room. Time has stopped. The alien explains in a languid manner how unjustified our existential fears have always been. Everything the gurus have told us is true. Death is an illusion, and love is the force that binds the universe together. The alien stares at the camera, docile, resigned, enlightened, and bored. This is what this particular life has come to. Captured by a benighted species of ape, his dashing days as an interstellar explorer have been cut short, and he will grow weak in a poorly lit prison light-years from home, tutoring his ill-mannered hosts in the basics of the spiritual sciences.

All right, I have the few minutes that the video requests. It is a successful bit of fiction: I am moved by the piece, acknowledging it as sophisticated schlock. I wonder who made the video and why. How long did it take? What was the motivation? I suppose it would be fun to animate a creepy alien figure. Then you have to figure out what it would say. The more the figure moves, the more you challenge belief, and thus the attitude of resignation arises. It is an alien; it is smart. It must say something wise. And the product is obvious. This is exactly the kind of thing we would like a wise and hard-bitten old pilot from Planet X to tell us. Relax, it says, the universe is a game, and you have won before you even started.

The video is posted in the manner of a leak. The audience knows it is fake; the author knows that the audience knows it is fake. We all enjoy the process. Inside, we reserve a secret space from doubt. It might be real. But “real” isn’t the issue, if we are to be honest with ourselves and each other. Social media was never a place to find truth or reality. It is a discursive medium. It is, in potential, a place to discuss truth or reality. That distinction is where our alien video finds its traction. It is a rhetorical ploy; it offers a proposition. Though the video is obviously a fake, it says to its audience, “this might be real”. And even though we all know it is fake, we respond with, “this might be real”. An exchange about reality has taken place, and we feel strangely satisfied.

Going further to examine the evidence that the video is fake misses the point. And it doesn’t affect whatsoever the conditional conclusion of the audience that “this is real”. Furthermore, going on to unpack the argument that “this is real”, to analyse the philosophy, to analyse the implications of captured alien intelligence, also misses the point. It misunderstands the method of social media. It’s not discursive in that way. Social media is made for call and response only. It posits a thought, elicits an emotional response. All other comments are meant only to echo and amuse.

Travelogue 1159 – 1 January
Return to Janus

Once again, we have slid through the gates of Janus. On this side of it, we witness a quiet morning. Only the wind by the door. But around the gate, there were such kinetics and noise that one wondered what purpose remained in the minds of the celebrants. People shouted, and people danced. There was joy, and there were noise-makers. In a snapshot of it, one searched for any sense.

In spite of the excess, the movement across the threshold was silent and internal. It happened, quite without volition, without knowledge, and, despite the atomic clocks, it happened without precision. One blinked to find the other side.

Now people sleep. I am left with the image of the Metro ride home yesterday, grim and portentous. It was four in the afternoon, and the many passengers around me were solemn. There was little sense of celebration, and if there was anticipation, it was the sort that dreads. They were people preparing for a storm.

But all right, let’s find some cheer. I stop by the café on the way to the barber. It’s a new year. The morning is quiet, but the line at the counter is long. Most cafes and shops are closed. Here, the customers wait patiently, and even with good humour. It’s a holiday ritual, of sorts. They stand, and they smile. They chat. After the long wait, there’s a table for me. Next to me is a couple of young women who haven’t seen each other in a while. They hug, and they exchange gifts. They catch up; they check their phones. They run out of things to say, but they are happy to see each other. A family settles at the long reading table. They are loud; their energy contrasts sharply with the subdued morning outside. No one is bothered at all.