“Sleep, my dear
Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone
who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of
gifts; and I must say, between ourselves, I have strong doubts whether the new
Kingdom will have many gifts for us in its luggage. All Sicilian expression, even the most
violent, is really wish-fulfillment: our sensuality is a hankering for
oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our laziness, our
spiced and drugged sherbets, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is,
for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinize the
enigmas of nirvana. That is what gives
power to certain people among us, to those who are half awake: that is the
cause of the well-known time lag of a century in our artistic and intellectual
life; novelties attract us only when they are dead, incapable of arousing vital
currents; that is what gives rise to the extraordinary phenomenon of the
constant formation of myths which would be venerable if they were really ancient,
but which are really nothing but sinister attempts to plunge us back into a
past that attracts us only because it is dead. […] Two or three days before
Garibaldi entered Palermo I was introduced to some British naval officers from
one of the warships then in the harbor to keep an eye on things. […] They came
to my house, I accompanied them up on to the roof; they were simple youths, in
spite of their reddish whiskers. They
were ecstatic about the view, the light; they confessed, though, that they had
been horrified at the squalor and filth of the streets around. I didn’t explain to them that one thing was
derived from the other, as I have tried to with you. Then one of them asked me what those Italian
volunteers were really coming to do in Sicily.
‘They are coming to teach us good
manners,” I replied in English. ‘But they won’t succeed, because we think we
are gods.’”
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The
Leopard (Il Gattopardo), translated
by Archibald Colquhoun (Pantheon: New York, 1960, 2007), pp. 177-178; 182-183.
*
Although I am insufferably enough about to begin an essay yet again—for
the umpteen-to-the-umpteenth-power time—on a personal note, this time I shall
not even bother trying to contrive the wispiest ghost of apology for such a
beginning, inasmuch as the personalness of the note is purely contingent,
inasfurthermuch as the phenomena (sic
because plural) I am about to report on from a personal point of view should by
all rights be familiar at the barest-bones minimum to the totality of
still-living sentient adults over the age of forty and the majority of all
still-living adults whether they are old enough or not to have experienced them
at first sensorium. Admittedly the
by-all-rights-ness is going to be a bit of a hard sell vis-à-vis the second subclass
of the second class of adults—viz., those who are not old enough to have
experienced the phenomena in question at first sensorium, inasmuch as current
received opinion seems bizarrely to maintain that no human being, however
intelligent or inquisitive he or she may be, is able, let alone willing, let
further alone eager, to acquire even the most cursory understanding of any
historical epoch or micro-epoch antedating his or her birth. I personally—but only contingently
personally, mind you—flatter myself that I have an understanding of the forces,
personages, and events in play during, for example, the so-called McCarthy
period, which ended nearly two decades before my birth, that is sufficiently
near-comprehensive to allow me, supposing I were transported back to that
micro-epoch, to acquit myself persuasively as either a booster or a detractor
of the HUAC in any soda counter or juke joint in the then-48 states. And there are even more distant micro-epochs
(and not only of American history) on whose signature institutions and
hot-button issues I flatter myself I could weigh in with comparable
persuasiveness as a temporal transplant; I flatter myself that I would have
something both intelligible and plausible to say about the retention or
rejection of the gold standard during the 1896 U.S. presidential campaign, the
comparative desirability of a Stuart versus a Hanoverian succession in the Britain
of the first decade of the eighteenth century, and the comparative desirability
of a Stuart restoration versus a continuation of the Cromwellian protectorate
in the Britain of the late 1650s. And I
flatter myself that I am within my rights to flatter myself on the score of all
these micro-epochs because like virtually every other literate person in the
recent-to-present United States, I have free or at worst very inexpensive
access to reputable historiographers’ accounts of these earlier periods, and
further, for fact-checking purposes, to a vast archive of documents dating from
these earlier periods themselves. Hence,
I am not by any means a prisoner of my age, let alone my so-called generation,
in any epistemologically substantive sense, and I am effectively no more
compelled to derive my overall or basic Weltansicht from current
received opinion than I am to derive my musical tastes from the latest
Billboard pop singles charts. But
inasmuch as received opinion is after all received opinion, and received
opinion now holds that we are all prisoners of our respective so-called
generations, although the phenomena I am about to expound on were among the
most mediatically conspicuous, the most electronically hyper-hyped, of their
day, I effectively have no more right to expect any reader born since 1976 to
be conversant with them than I have to expect him or her to be aware of, say,
the artist and song-title associated with, say, Billboard pop singles
chart-position No. 54 in the second week of
July 1985 (please don’t ask me of all 46-year-olds for the names
of that artist and song-title, as my personal 54th-favorite track in
that week was Ferenc Fricsay’s version of Smetana’s Moldau). As for readers born in or before 1976,
although even current received opinion would probably vouchsafe me the right to
expect them to be conversant with the phenomena prospectively in question, I am
highly disinclined to exercise this right in the light of a certain super-sized
matzoh ball-sized empirical datum--v iz., my observation that virtually every
person in the Anglosphere whom I know either personally or by reputation talks
and behaves as though he or she were utterly oblivious of these phenomena, and,
indeed, as though in some sort of hypnotic state he or she had had these
phenomena erased from his or her memory and then been force-fed a collection of
utterly logically incompatible pseudo-phenomena (although for reasons that may
become clear in the further course of this essay, I am no great fan of The
Manchurian Candidate, I shan’t be so arrant a chicken thief as to forbear
acknowledging that movie as the sole source of the forgoing mini-conceit). The phenomena in question are the opinions
received some thirty to thirty-five years ago regarding the country or
federation of countries then known in the Anglosphere variously as the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics, the Soviet Union, and (always contentiously but by
no means always naively) Russia. My
presumptively unaltered memory avers to me that back then, in the
early-to-mid-1980s, although in the Anglosphere attitudes towards this country
or federation of countries varied greatly across the so-called political
spectrum (or perhaps, rather, gamut of so-called political spectra, supposing
that even within the Anglosphere every country or federation of countries has
its own scalable yet infungible political spectrum), from an equation of the
USSR autc. with the dominion of the Antichrist and its leader with the Dark
Lord himself on the so-called far-right (or Far Right) to an inclination to
drop every semblance of an adversarial stance to the USSR autc. and embrace its
political system H,L&S (or L,S&B) on the so-called far left (or Far
Left), a set of assumptions about Russia autc. was shared by virtually
everybody, by each and every man, woman, and child Jack and Jill père, mère, fille, und fils
of us. It was assumed by everybody that
the USSR autc. was an important demographic-cum-geographical-cum-political
entity, and indeed for everybody the question whether the USSR autc. or the USA
was the most important such entity in the world was very much a tossup, given
that although the USA undoubtedly enjoyed an appreciably higher so-called
standard of living than the USSR autc., the USSR autc. undoubtedly enjoyed a
much bigger landmass than the USA (and indeed was the most geographically
extensive demographic-cum-geographic-cum-political entity in the world), a
comparably sizeable (ca. 200 million souls-strong and at minimum unshrinking)
population, a significantly larger standing army, and last but assuredly not
least, an always competitively sizeable and often substantially larger arsenal
of domestically designed-and-built nuclear weapons (q.v.). It was further assumed that the Soviet (or
Russian) people, or the average Soviet (or Russian) citizen, or Vanya or Masha
Stolichnaya, was or were not to be blamed for his, her, or their country’s or
federation of countries’ geopolitical or domestic-political shortcomings and
that these shortcomings were entirely the fault of the Soviet (or Russian)
State’s enthrallment to (so the Anglophone right/Right) or perversion of (so
the Anglophone left/Left) the Marxist-Leninist political philosophy upon which
the USSR autc.’s government had been founded way back in 1917; that if this
philosophy should ever be either extirpated from the Soviet government’s
constitution (r/R-ight) or actualized along non-repressive lines (l/L-eft), the
Soviet (or Russian) people’s inherent and ineradicable kindness, magnanimity, gemütlichkeit,
and all-around savoir-vivre would then come gushing forth like, well
(admittedly I am getting a bit ahead of myself via the vehicle of this-here
simile) a veritable geyser of life-giving petroleum from the world’s most
munificently girthed and tumescent oil pipeline. Whatever the intrinsic shortcomings of their
political system (r/R-ight) or of the paltry handful or so (or, po russki,
kuchka) of kleptocrats lamentably and contingently then standing at the
helm of their fundamentally admirably redoubtable Socialist Ship of State (l/L-eft),
the Soviet (or Russian) people autc., so it was universally averred, were at
bottom completely indistinguishable from us Anglophone Occidentals even in the
very mitochondria of their ethical makeup.
The establishment and cultivation of a pen-palship with some Soviet (and
Russian) near-to-exact contemporary was encouraged in every schoolroom and VFW
hall from Juneau, Alaska to the Dunedins of both New Zealand and Florida, and
many, many a cis-Iron Curtainian epistolary Genosse thereby begotten was
heard to aver that were by some well-nigh-divine-cum-natural law-defying cause
the USSR autc. to become a properly democratic country or federation of
countries, he or she would engage in coition with his or her Soviet (or
Russian) counterpart no fewer than five times regardless of his or her (i.e.,
the cis-Iron Curtainian’s) degree of corporeal attraction or aversion to him or
her (i.e., the trans-Iron Curtainian) and purely as a series of manifestations
of his or her (i.e., the cis-Iron Curtainian’s) uncontainable jouissance at
the quasi-literal tectonic shift in the ethical infrastructure of the
geopolitical landscape (or the geopolitical superstructure of the ethical
landscape). The entire apparent Weltgeist
of the inhabitants of the so-called developed West (a.k.a. the so-called
Free World) vis-à-vis their fellow earthlings living under Soviet (or Russian)
dominion was epitomized by and in Gordon Sumner (a.k.a. Sting)’s 1985 Billboard
chart near-topper (it peaked at No. 16, which rather surprises me, as at the
time it seemed to be on the radio constantly and consequently remains one of
the very few songs of 1985 I remember as well as Smetana’s “Moldau”)
“Russians,” which repeatedly voiced the whinging categorical assertion
masquerading as a tentative “hope” that “the Russians love their children
too.” Five to six years later, the
well-nigh-divine-cum-natural law-defying cause supervened, at least formally:
the USSR suddenly morphed into the Commonwealth of Independent States which no
less suddenly (and after a period of existence not much longer than that of one
of those artificial chemical elements that Soviet and Anglo-American physicists
alike had such a knack for concocting and holding together for a millisecond or
two in their laboratories) effectively disintegrated into a mere congeries of
geographically contiguous but politically completely mutually unaffiliated
nation-States, and every single one of these nation-States, including the
former Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic was at least nominally a
non-denominational parliamentary democracy—meaning a republic with a
legislature answerable to the will of the electors regardless of that will’s
degree of conformity to a political philosophy such as socialism or
communism. But the great supposedly
immediately attendant intercontinental love-fest did not subsequently
materialize: indeed, in hindsight, one is struck by the fact that although the
USSR was both the headquarters and Big Kahuna of international Communism, in
the West its political dissolution was greeted almost with apathy by comparison
with the tsunami of orgasmic elation that (had) swept over us all the instant
the first pickaxe hit the Berlin Wall two years earlier. In the memory of the present writer, the fall
of the Berlin Wall was signalized by the mandatorily (yet gratefully) viewed
telecast of that remarkable ad-hoc intermural performance of Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony under the baton of Leonard Bernstein, a performance in which the
maestro audaciously—yet at the time quite seemingly justly—substituted Freiheit
for Freude in the vocal finale; and the fall of the Soviet Union by one
of the present writer’s college classmates’ announcing with lackadaisical
matter-of-factness between bong-hits that the name of Leningrad had reverted to
St. Petersburg. And the contrast
in the scale of reaction to the two events was very much just that stark. “And quite rightly so,” the (present) reader
may be tempted to interject, “given that throughout this decade-straddling
period it was the dissolution of the Communist system that was being
welcomed in the West and that that dissolution happened to begin at the
Brandenburg Gate rather than in Red Square.”
But such an interjection would merely bespeak the reader’s abject (or
perhaps proud) supineness towards current received Anglospheric opinion on
Russia and his or her utter incapacity to recollect or apprehend the Spirit of
’85, for as I have already made clear enough to anyone willing to remember or
apprehend that Spirit, in 1985 it was not the Communist system as such, but
rather the Communist system qua enchainer of a great and loveable nation or
people, the Russian nation or people, that we Anglo-Saxons wished to see
abolished. In 1985 (here I am launching
into a second attempt to persuade the reader to enter into the Spirit by delving
into the geopolitical fine grain) the citizenry of East Germany and other
Warsaw Pact countries’ enchainment by the Communist system, while undoubtedly
lamentable, was of peripheral significance because as nations or peoples or
quasi- or semi-peoples, the Poles, East Germans, et al. were but the smallest
of small fry to us Anglophones. This
small-fryishness is evident when one takes cognizance of the considerable
liberalization (or Westernization) of the laws and policies governing civil
rights and liberties in certain of the so-called Soviet satellites in the years
leading up to the fall of the BW. I
remember round about 1987 hearing some pundit on National Public Radio remark
that in Poland you can get away with saying pretty much anything, and
from the Polish so-called cultural artifacts of the 1970s and 80s that I have
since become acquainted with—notably the music of Lutosławski’s late
period and the movies of Kieślowski’s middle period—I infer that this
assertion was well-founded. Certainly
L’s wildly aleatoric orchestral works were much weirder and hard-listening than
anything in Shostakovich’s corpus, and in his Dekalogs (at least in the Trilog or Tetralog thereof that I have so
far seen) K. certainly did not go out of his way to make Poland seem an ideal
tourist destination. In Hungary there
seems to have been even greater license to criticize the governing political
dispensation, as witnessed by the novels of Laszlo Krasznahorkai and the movies
of his pal and eventual collaborator Bela Tarr.
Tarr’s early (ca. 1977-1985) films were apparently domestically hailed
as masterpieces of socialist realism, and inasmuch as they dealt with the
quotidian life-situations of so-called ordinary people they undoubtedly were,
but insofar as socialist realism entails the presentation of such life-situations
in a positive and encouraging light, and thereby as an affirmation of the
socialist powers that be, they were anything but: in Tarr’s films the
life-situations of average Hungarians are almost uniformly depicted in such
unremittingly grim and hopeless colors (or, more often, grayscales), and with
such meticulous attention to the bureaucratic minutiae with which these average
Hungarians have to contend perpetually—and almost invariably futilely—that the
viewer cannot help concluding that the filmmaker is ascribing the brunt of the
blame for his characters’ misery to the entire so-called system, in this case
an avowedly and inalterably socialist (i.e., Communist) system. (At one point in one of these early Tarr
flicks, a middle-aged father attempts to give his preteen son a kind of lecture
on the geopolitical facts of life, a lecture on the difference between
Capitalism and Communism, only to trail off in a mixture of boredom and
confusion within a half a minute.) As for Krasznahorkai’s two novelistic
masterpieces of the 1980s, Satantango and The Melancholy of
Resistance—well, let’s just say that their joint depiction of the Hungarian
populace and political system makes Deliverance and All the
President’s Men look like triumphal tributes to the American way of
life. And it must not be forgotten that
the closest thing to the fall of the Berlin Wall’s immediate efficient cause—namely the
opening of the Austro-Hungarian border, which effectively allowed any Eastern-Bloc
resident with the wherewithal to make it to Hungary to defect to the West—was
initiated by the Hungarian government. And
it must not be forgotten my embarrassed mouth-embedded foot! The truth—as in all candor I realized only
after typing the last full sentence—is that barring an admittedly not
especially improbable onset of dementia praecox I am guaranteed not to forget
about the Hungarian government’s catalytic role in the fall of the Wall anytime
soon, having learned of it only some five years ago. The truth is that the fall of the Wall struck
me like a so-but-in-this-case-aptly called bolt out of the blue (blue being the
classic symbolic antithesis of red, which is, or rather used to be, the color
of international Communism [its recent transmogrification into the signature
color of conservative domestic Republicanism is not the least sad of scads of
attestations to our collective oblivion of even the most conspicuous semiotic
paraphernalia of even very recent history])—as I suspect it did every other
Anglosphere-inhabitant not in the grip of a hobby-horsical obsession with the
domestic policies of extra-Soviet Warsaw Pact countries. The proof of this
bolt-out-of-the-blue-ish-ness resides in the fact that for me the Wall-Fall was
one of those events about which, as they say, I can remember exactly where I
was and what I was doing when I learned of it—viz., lolling in bed after
having slept in, as they say, presumably on the morning of Saturday, November
11 (I had evidently missed all the previous day’s news broadcasts), and hearing
an announcer on our local so-called community radio station, WMNF, to which my
bedside wireless had been tuned overnight, say something to the effect of,
“Next, in celebration of the fact that the Berlin Wall is now open, we’re going
to play [some extremely famous celebratory pop song whose name escapes me after
the reliable fashion of the at-first-blush most memorable components of these
sorts of memories].” Thitherto like
those of all other Americans in the grip of a, shall we say?, hobby-ponyial
interest in goings-on behind the Iron Curtain-cum(shall we say?) heroin-horse-like
dread of nuclear annihilation, all my hopes for an East-West
reconciliation—still very faint hopes, to be sure–had been actuated by certain
recent changes in the USSR, by General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev (not to be
confused with Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar)’s agreement
to substantial reductions in the Soviet nuclear arsenal and his institution of
domestic political and economic reforms under the auspices of two things called
glasnost and perestroika (respectively, I believe, but please
don’t cite me as a source). Although we
Americans in the grip of this obsession-cum-dread had little or no notion of
what glasnost and perestroika concretely entailed for Vanya and
Masha Stolichnaya, we were confident that they were making everyday life
substantially easier for the couple and, what was even more significant,
enabling them better to express and embody their innate and radically
incorruptible goodness—their indomitable moral and intellectual virtue—in every
conceivable field of human activity. And
if even as late as November 9, 1989, we had been asked by, say, a betting-shop
owner to describe the process most likely to eventuate in an end to the
so-called Cold War, we doubtless would have described a scenario wherein
ever-weightier and fattier dollops of glasnost and perestroika
administered from above would gradually—very gradually, over a period of
perhaps twenty years—transform the Soviet Union into an utterly wholesome and
quiescently productive modern Western nation state-cum-territory-cum-society,
its heartland studded with prosperous mid-density cities entirely
indistinguishable from Mayfield, Levittown, and Milton Keynes barring the
Cyrillic lettering on their shop-fronts and traffic signs. Events, or, rather, pseudo-events, in the
so-called satellite countries were worthy of no notice in our eyes, for after
all, we assumed, would not the governments of these countries simply follow
each and every cue and toe every line-segment supplied to them by Moscow? Quite self-evidently right up until November 9,
1989 we were all sorely afflicted with a gargantuan geopolitical blind spot, or
perhaps, to put it more justly if less elegantly, with a fairly sizeable
geopolitical blind spot acting in concert with a fairly serious case of
geopolitical tone-deafness—for we were all aware, to some extent, of the glasnost
and perestroika-dwarfing liberality in full-flower in certain of the
satellite States (of, e.g., the Polish government’s above-mentioned de facto
chartering of freedom of speech), and merely failed to give it its
world-historical due. “In other words,
you are at last acknowledging the justness of my earlier interjected assertion
to the effect that in the Anglosphere the collapse of the Soviet Union was
greeted with all the enthusiasm it deserved—namely precious little.” Not quite, or perhaps not in the
slightest. For it by no means follows
that merely because the death blow to the international Communist dispensation
was not ultimately administered by glasnost, perestroika, START I, or
indeed any other element of the Gorbachevian project, that this project was
inherently wrongheaded or that its admirers either within the Soviet Union or
without were simply simpletons—partial ignoramuses, undoubtedly, but
simpletons, not necessarily. Yes, the
collapse of the Soviet Union in the late summer and early autumn of 1991 was
effectively greeted in the Anglosphere with a mere collective shrug, but this
may testify more eloquently to the collective egocentricity of the shruggers
than to the intrinsic triviality of the shrugged-about phenomenon. It is in point of fact conceivable that the
Anglosphere’s comparative apathy toward the Soviet Implosion of mid-to-late ’91
was owing to an event that the Soviet Union had had nothing to do with, that
indeed might as well have taken place on another planet as far as the Soviet
domestic political situation was concerned—namely, the first so-called Gulf
War, whose jaw-drop-inducingly eloquent (albeit ultimately wearisome and
offensive) demonstration of the overwhelming telegenically spectacular
technological might of the United States’ armed forces—a demonstration these
forces had not been so unreservedly vouchsafed since the Second World
War—effectively preemptively rendered every succeeding geopolitical event of
1991 a nonstarter public opinion-wise.
In the aftermath of the first so-called Gulf War, the entire
geopolitical landscape could have been reshuffled—with France reverting to a
Bourbonist monarchy, Turkey to a sultanate, North Korea transmuting into a
Swiss-style republic, Switzerland into a North Korea-style totalitarian
dictatorship, etc.–and not elicited the obtusest eyebrow arch from the North
American or British public, provided that none of these revolutions involved
the obliteration of any large buildings by so-called smart bombs. “Again, I say, this just proves that the
Soviet Union deserved every inch of Occi-occidental cold shoulder it
received. If in the autumn of 1990
(i.e., the period of consolidation of the at least nominally multinational
coalition that ousted Iraq from Kuwait in January 1991) the USSR gave a genuine
tinker’s tosslet about retaining its telegenic hold on the Anglospheric viewing
public, it should have stepped up to the plate and joined in the festivities,
either by assuming its traditional (at least by comparison with the US’s
ever-changing, weather-cock like disposition to Saddam &co.) role as Iraq’s
foremost champion or becoming the U.S.’s senior junior partner in Operations
Desert Shield and Storm. As it did
neither, it had only itself to blame for the occultation of its own restaging
of the 1989 revolution qua multi-media spectacle.” Here, again, and specifically for the third
time, I am aghast at and exasperated by my default reader’s—or, as I have
addressed him or her for literally micro-ages (i.e., much more than a decade)
in numerous contexts, Dear Gentle Reader (DGR)’s—enthrallment to post hoc
propter hoc-driven Whiggism, by his or her assumption that whatever course
of action in the past would have proved most expeditious to the realization of
“our” own designs (I employ our in so-called scare-quotes in preference
to naked roman their because in my present Lebenswelt their
interpellation of me as one of them is far less eluctable than,
say, my interpellation as a man by another man) was perforce not only the only
prudent but also the only morally justifiable CoA for other parties to pursue,
and that the subsequent success of “our” designs—however rickety (i.e.,
provisional and equivocal) that success may be—is proof positive that those who
pursued designs in any way not assimilable to “our” designs—no matter how
Cracker Jack and splendiferous these other designs may have been in point of
both intrinsic desirability and realizability—were unregenerate suckers,
chumps, losers, rogues, scoundrels, and, indeed, only barely figurative dung
beetle-shunned turds. And this
seemingly de facto terminal recurrence of craven Whig-humpery on the part of
the DGR impels me to conclude that I am going to have to dispense with his or
her services for the duration of the present essay, which is a pity because
contrary to what a plurality if not outright majority of my empirical readers
doubtless think, the DGR is not merely some twee device for showing, or rather
attempting to show—presumably ever-more futilely—what a clever fellow I
supposedly am (via, say, a practical appropriation of the Bakhtinian concept of
heteroglossia), but rather the most efficient and productive engine I have yet
alighted on (admittedly there may be more efficient and productive engines that
I happen not to have alighted on yet) for advancing my argument in every
conceivable family-friendly sense of the gerund—moving the argument along
towards its conclusion, making a case for it, and taking it to a so-called
higher level (doubtless among several other equally pertinent senses that
happen to escape me now). The DGR
advances my argument in all these senses by enabling me to forestall or obviate
misinterpretations—presumably not all misinterpretations but quite likely most
of the most obvious and devastating ones, which—admittedly
counterintuitively—are quite often one and the same. If I am (or were) penning a philippic
against, say, tigers in the obsolete and recondite Balzacian sense—i.e.,
a philippic against sexually aggressive young male aristocrats habitually on
the prowl during the Bourbon Restoration micro-epoch—it is (or would be)
naturally imperative to establish in the empirical reader’s mind that I am (or
would be) referring to tigers neither in the primitive zoological sense
nor in the derived emblematic sense as the name of the aggregated members of
Detroit’s senior (or perhaps even sole) professional baseball team, because of
course both of the last two senses are almost inevitably going to be more
familiar and obvious to him or her than the Balzacian one (yes, even if he or
she is neither a zoologist nor a resident of Detroit and at the same time the
world’s most dedicated Balzac scholar or fan).
And the DGR can help me effect this needful blinkering of the empirical
reader’s hermeneutic horizon by simply asking me at the virtual outset if I am
not writing about tigers qua animals or tigers qua Detroit baseball-team
members. Of course I could simply
explain that I am not writing about tigers qua either non-Balzacian entity-set,
and in the case of something so quickly explainable I doubtless would do just
that (the essaying of a case actually typically exacting a DGR-intervention, a
case of something only very slowly explainable, is not practicably
adducible here, inasmuch as its adduction would itself almost ineluctably exact
the intervention of a DGR), but were I to do just that at each and every moment
such hermeneutic blinkering was required, my already syntactically
hyper-involuted and digression-sclerotic prose idiom (for which I shall tender
no apologies, as the involution and sclerosis, although lamentable in
themselves, are peremptorily exacted by the Ding an sich [the
physiological analogues chez the organisms of such-and-such persons engaged in
such-and-such activities are both too obvious and numerous to enumerate]) would
overtax the most indulgent empirical reader’s patience. So even more fundamentally than as an aide-explication
(or aide d’explication),
the DGR functions as a kind of prosodic safety valve interspersing my
hypotactic longueurs with a bit of doubtless much-craved if not
necessarily even ever so little-needed paratactic brevity. And so it is with some commiseration with the
empirical reader that I am dispensing with the DGR’s services for the balance
of the present essay—with some commiseration, yes, but admittedly not with a
great deal let alone shed loads thereof, for thus far in the present
essay the DGR has been behaving atypically like a spot-on statistical composite
of my prospectively actual empirical readers, or to put it another way, like
almost everyone to whom I have tried to air my views on the ought-to-be-even if
it isn’t-so called Russian situation in the past, say, nine years—since, in
other words, some indefinable point between the poisoning of Alexander
Litvinenko and the Russian military intervention in the Ossetian part of
northern Georgia—he or she has been behaving, in other words, like a knee-jerk
Russophobe-cum-unregenerate Russo-ignoramus who is quite simply utterly
undeserving of interpellation-cum-acknowledgment as a fellow quasi-enlightened
adult and who must accordingly be treated as an utterly alien, refractory, and
benighted schoolchild. “Conceivably fair
enough, but if I may be vouchsafed one parting interjection in the character of
an old-school DGR—“ –Most certainly (he said with insufferably
manifestly self-indulgent affected good grace)— “Thank you (he or she
said with insufferably manifestly unaffected selfless good grace). My question (and I am confident, in the light
of the hundreds of words you have devoted to establishing your didactic
prerogative in “Against Intralingual Diversity,”
that you will not take the question amiss) is quite simply, ‘Given that you
intend to treat my empirical counterparts as mere schoolchildren, on what
ethical (in the rhetorical sense) grounds have you assumed the position of
schoolmaster on all subjects or topics bearing (pun very much intended) on
Russia?’—or to put it another way, ‘Whence the s***ing f**k do you get off
berating the most Russo-ignorant members of the great Anglospheric reading
public for their opinions on Russia (nay, whence do you even derive the s**ing
side to assert that Russian is important enough to have a much-coveted situation
appended to it)?’ Have you
perchance—and perchance on the grounds that if you told us you would have to
kill us—been concealing a longstanding appointment as a senior fellow of
Kremlinology at the Armand Hammer-Hoover Institute?’” No, I have not, and the source of my
side-cum-off-getting on these Russoursine topics is simply that furnished by a
pair of Anglospheric eyes and ears trained fairly attentively, to the extent
that the various distances entailed by my position have permitted, on the
Soviet Union and its contributing and succeeding political entities over a
period of some thirty-six years.
“Meaning since you were the age of ten?”
Although that is one more question than I vouchsafed you, I shall
condescend to vouchsafe it with its candid, frank, and truthful answer—namely, Yes. And before you leap in with a this-time
utterly impermissible second post-permitted question to the effect of “Are you
sh***ing me?” let me assure you that I am by no means sh***ing you and express
no small amount of bemusement at the supposition that I even might be sh***ing
you. If it is within the capacity of a
ten-year-old to maintain and cultivate a collection of hundreds of so-called
action figures based on characters, sub-characters, and mere bits of animated
flotsam from the top-grossing summer
sci-fi or cartoon zoological schlockbuster franchise, or to follow the
playing-field statistical fortunes of each and every one of dozens of teams and
hundreds of team-members comprising the core personnel of a professional
athletic organization, it should also be within his or her capacity to follow
the domestic and international political situation of a single country as
reported on in and by the traditional so-called media outlets. And not only is such a pursuit within a
ten-year-old’s capacity, it is also certainly no more intrinsically perverse a
pursuit for him or her than are the more traditional tykish avocations–for
whereas the killing off of some fictional dayglo scimitar-wielding
pseudo-samurai or the sacking or outstriking of some schlub of a quarterback or
designated hitter can have no immediate material bearing on a ten-year-old’s
well-being, the activities of a foreign State, particularly one as powerful as
the USSR in the early 1980s, do more than occasionally bid not unfairish to
ruin his or her whole day. All that is
really requisite to the average ten-year-old’s becoming as much of a lay authority
on a given country as that country’s most zealous forty-year-old
non-professional fan is the will to direct as much attention to that country as
he or she might otherwise be directing to athletics or toys or movies or
whatever else. And I am certain that at
some point less than six months and a fortnight after my tenth birthday I
acquired at least the rudiments of that will vis-à-vis the then Soviet Union or
USSR. How can I be so sure that this
acquisition took place before I turned 10.5342(…)? Why, because I distinctly remember seeing
Leonid Brezhnev’s photograph on the front page of the Tampa Tribune and
asking my mother who he was, and her replying, “He’s the General Secretary of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [or USSR {or possibly even Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics].” It
may very well have been the sheer portentous verbosity of Mr. Brezhnev’s job
title that drew me into the hobby or pastime of–well, what shall one call it?—Russeme-
or Sovieteme-spotting, I suppose.
At any rate, whenever this inaugural encounter with the image of the
living Mr. Brezhnev occurred, my Sovieteme-spotting jones was certainly in full
flower by the date of his death (whence the terminus ad quem of my
10.5342[…]th birthday, which fell on Mr. Brezhnev’s Todestag of November
10, 1982), because I can remember avidly taking in one of the big three U.S.
television networks’ coverage of the aftermath of that death, on either
November 11 or 13 (depending on whether Veterans Day, the eleventh, which fell on
a Thursday that year, was a school holiday in my county-cum-district that year,
for I am sure I saw the broadcast at home [according to the usual source, Yuri
Andropov was appointed the new General Secretary on the 12th, but I
have so far not been able to be a**ed to track down the date of the official
announcement of that appointment]) and in particular its inclusion of a brief
eavesdropped live satellite feed of the big one Soviet television network’s
coverage of that aftermath, a feed which showed a symphony orchestra in full
evening dress performing what the American commentator described as “somber
Tchaikovsky music” (again, as with the radio song commemorating the fall of the
Berlin Wall, I have lamentably forgotten the name of the performed piece if I
ever knew it—although in this case perhaps that information is more easily
recoverable and perhaps will be recovered when I can next be a***d to G****le
away a half an hour or so at Y** T**e).
Even at the time it was obvious to me that the feed was being included
in order to make a political point, to demonstrate the unpardonable
secretiveness-cum-administrative inefficiency of the Soviet leadership: if, the
commentator implied, the surviving members of the Politburo had trusted the
Soviet people as any confidently legitimate governmental regime ought to trust
its governees, they would have contrived to fill the airwaves with something
more revelatory of the procedures leading to the selection of a new general
secretary than the round-the-clock Tchaikovsky, which was effectively serving
as a giant DO NOT DISTURB sign incorporating a gargantuan glyph of an erect
middle finger (my conceit, not the commentator’s). And in hindsight, it also seems to me that
there was an additional subtext to the feed-inclusion, a mediatic
subtext perhaps no more subcutaneous than the political one, a subtext to the
effect that if the Soviet broadcasting executives had really known how to
produce a proper television program, at such a moment they would have come up
with a much more resourceful or creative idea than simply dragging a
camera down to the Bolshoi or the Mariinsky or wherever and pointing it at the
house band; that they would instead now be affording their viewers visually
lavish chapel-to-graveside coverage of a State funeral liberally interlarded
with, say, interviews with the late executive’s political cronies, high-school
football coach, et al.; a subtext indicative of a general assumption that has
long been pandemic chez nous Anglo-Saxons and that I shall have occasion
to address at length in these pages, the assumption that in every profession
and walk of life the Soviets, and the Russians after them, were and are worthy
of immeasurable scorn and ridicule simply for doing things in a less
spectacular, less up-to-date, and above all less expensive manner than
their Anglospheric counterparts. But at
the time (remember—November 11 or 13, 1982) the prevailing impression made on
me by the feed was one that cut quite across the grain(s) of both the political
and the mediatic subtexts in being an entirely favorable impression: as
a budding if not burgeoning classical music buff (see “Weasel Goes the Pop” for the
so-called back-story) I was entirely favorably impressed by the fact that the
Soviets were seeing fit to mourn the death of their leader exclusively through
the music of Russia’s greatest composer.
Whether I was then yet at all aware of any of the decidedly culturally
downmarket typical products of the Soviet cultural mill, of any of the socialist-realist
murals, novels, movies, cantatas, etc. unalloyedly and unremittingly
celebrative of the collective Soviet Socialist Way of Life, is impossible to
say from this temporal distance, but whether I was or not, the Tchaikovskyan
obsequies to Brezhnev implanted in my mind a supposition that no subsequent
acquaintance with the actual quotidian cultural diet of the empirical Soviet
citizen could ever shake–a supposition, namely, that the Soviets—meaning
prevailingly but by no means exclusively the Russians—had laudably held on to a
kind of society-wide, subculturally transcendent reverence of so (and for the
most part rightly)-called high art that we Anglo-Saxons had long since blithely
and perhaps even enthusiastically renounced in favor of the deplorable (and
entirely rightly called) mass-cultural likes of Beatlemania, Star Wars-mania,
multiprefixball-mania, and Dallas-mania.
From November 11 or 12, 1982 until at least a half-handful of years
after the events of August 1991, I took it for granted that upon touching down
in not only Moscow or Leningrad, but even in some provincial burg such as
Tblisi, Kharkov, or Novosibirsk, on any early afternoon of the week, one would
be hard-pressed without pulling a number of extremely hefty and stubborn strings
to obtain even standing-room admission to that evening’s performance by the
local symphony orchestra, corps de ballet, opera company, or senior
string quartet. Since the
late-middle-1990s at the latest, I have ceased to take for granted any such thing
about the Moscow, Leningrad, Tblisi, Kharkov, Novosibirsk, etc., of either the
present, November 11 or 12, 1982, or any intervening chronological points, and,
indeed, I have come to assume that on the whole the Soviets-cum-post Soviets
have been at least as apathetic or antipathetic to so (aftMPR)-called high
culture, and at least as deplorably enthralled to (entirely rightly called)
mass culture as us Anglo-Saxons for quite a bit longer than 3.6 decades. The supposition that Russia and the other
now-former Soviet republics are or were more hospitable greenhouses (a.k.a. conservatories)
for the cultivation of the fine arts has of course been supposed by other
Anglo-Saxons than me or I; indeed, in many ways idée-reçue-istically speaking
it is but the complement of the other pan-Anglospheric supposition (or
assumption) that I have already stroked, the supposition-or-assumption that the
Soviets (or Russians [and by now by all means exclusively the Russians])
are incapable of doing anything in a properly up-to-date way, and like that
supposition-or-assumption, it will be subjected to condign extensive
interrogation [apologies for any inadvertent evocation of the practices of the
KGB and FSB] herein in dew coarse; for now, though I must continue with the
outfilling of my ethos qua would-be Russian studies prof in fulfillment of my
pledge to the retiring DGR, as follows: thanks to the Aufbiggung of
Tchaikovsky in the Brezhnev obsequies, my interest in the Soviet Union expanded
beyond the ambit of its political doings to encompass its so-called cultural
life as well. I was not satisfied with
the pre-revolutionary-originating strains of Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov; I
also wished to get to know the music of Prokofiev and Shostakovich. But because the so-called literature on these
two composers—the LP and CD liner-notes, music-reference-work-entries, and
critical monographs devoted to them—was (and indeed still is) heavily laden
with accounts of their respective numerous tussles with Soviet officialdom, and
in particular with the Stalinian phase thereof, in becoming acquainted with
their music I also received an ample—albeit highly tendentious—education in the
Soviet Union’s political history, a history venomously rich with the cruel
machinations and generally no less cruel (if also often condign) fates of the
likes of Kirov, Tukhachevsky, Beria, and Zhdanov. And as a result of the coition of this
two-stranded education there was born in my mind the favorite baby of a notion
of the first-rate Soviet artist as an indomitably plucky and resourceful
individualist determined to be boldly experimental and expressive and honest no
matter how devastating the potential cost to his health, safety, or retirement
plan. Concurrently, from the broadcasts
of Radio Moscow, which I listened to on my portable shortwave radio in a spirit
and with a frequency (and at a number of frequencies) that both defy adverbial
expression (both avidly and religiously would suggest that I was actively
and regularly seeking out RM, whereas the truth was that it was almost
impossible for any shortwave listener to avoid RM, as it had the strongest
signal, longest schedule, and largest number of frequencies of any
English-language shortwave station barring the BBC and manifestly not barring
the Voice of America [which of course makes sense, as RM was trying to win us
over and the VOA was trying to win them over]; on the other hand, both fitfully
and casually would fail to do justice to the several-dozen minutes over
which I am known by my present self to have lingered more than twice at a(n)
RM-occupied meter-band subdivision) I was getting a decidedly mixed picture of
the then-current Soviet regime’s attitude to Geist in the
Matthew-Arnoldian sense. On the one
hand, although RM’s propagandistic mission never retreated into the fully
ignorable background, and all its programming had a decidedly pro-Soviet slant,
none of its broadcasts had anything of the smug, hectoring quality of Lord
Haw-Haw or Hanoi Hannah. As near as I
can remember, there were two typical genres of Radio Moscow programs. One was a kind of cultural-anthropology
correspondence course of the air wherein the presenter would read aloud
letters from listeners inquiring after
Vanya and Masha Stolichnaya (or their counterparts in one of the non-Russian
Soviet republics)’s manner of attending to some politically neutral facet of
everyday life and then deliver oral replies liberally inclusive of
acknowledgments of his or her debt to RM’s fact-checking team (in other words,
liberally partaking of the same disarming, implicitly officialdom-abjuring
“Shucks, it’s just li’ol-old-me up here talking to you”-type ethos that has
ever been the stock-in-trade of on-air personalities in the Anglosphere). So, for instance, I recall some query about
the preparation of tea being answered with the factoid that people in some
Gosh-awfully hot corner of the Union counterintuitively preferred their tea
extra-hot in the summer, as the heat induced sweating and thereby cooled them
off. The other typical RM program was a
panel talk show wherein three or four pundits of at least ostensibly divergent
political outlooks would at least go through the motions of debating some
non-politically neutral topic—say state ownership of the means of production
versus private enterprise, on which one of the panelists (probably invariably
the perfect-American-accented and part-time New Yorker Vladimir Posner, whom I
also seemed to see every other week fielding flak for the Kremlin on Phil
Donahue’s daytime television talk show) would be broad-minded enough to point
out that State-owned production did rather tend to restrict the consumer’s
range of choices—only of course to be gently put in his place with the rebuttal
that the Soviet State was working diligently and competently at diversifying
its product lines. So this was the nice,
the cheery liberal, the free-thought-facilitating, glasnost-affecting side of
Radio Moscow. The station’s coverage of
the Chernobyl nuclear disaster revealed a very different side; a dour,
secretive, prevaricating, mistrustful side—in short, a traditional or
old-school Soviet side. It was more than
figuratively chilling to hear RM’s almost robotically affectless female
newsreader merely announcing that there had been an incident at the
Chernobyl power plant and that details about this incident were not yet
available when I had already learned from American media sources that the
reactor was in full meltdown and hemorrhaging torrents of lethal radiation into
the atmosphere. Meanwhile (we’re talking
here about a period almost exactly coextensive with the calendar years 1987
through 1991), I was acquiring a not-unextensive if highly selective (and
translator-filtered) acquaintance with both the pre-and post-revolutionary
Russian-language literary canons—an acquaintance comprising, on the
pre-revolutionary side all the major Dostoyevsky novels save The Idiot
(which after several attempts I managed to read through to the end only in
2008–having at last been able to stomach its Christology [q.v. below {Lord
willing}]), several of D.’s shorter works, including notably Notes from
Underground (from which I derived facets of my authorial persona that
survive intact to this day and in the present essay), the first part of Gogol’s
Dead Souls and most of G.’s famous tales (though not G.’s famous play The
Inspector General, which I was inspired to read only in about 2010 after
watching the wildly unfaithful but palpably superior Danny Kaye cinematic
adaptation), a smattering of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Turgeneev novellas, and a
fairly heaping helping of Chekhov short stories (though none of Ch.’s plays);
and on the post-revolutionary side Ilf and Petrov’s Golden Ass,
Zoshchenko’s Before Sunrise (of which the slightly inferior Richard
Linklater movie of the same name would appear not to be even a wildly
unfaithful adaptation) together with some of Z.’s ultra-brief humorous tales,
Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, and Yuri Olesha’s Envy. Notable lacunae in this syllabus include
(doubtless not exhaustively), all the works of Russia’s second-greatest
Romantic, Lermontov (whose A Hero for our Time I eventually got around
to in about 2002 and now revere), Goncharov’s Oblomov (of which I still
know only as much as whatever portion of the original made it into the BBC’s
Toby Jones-starring radio adaptation), all Russian poetry on either side of the
boundary apart from poems set by composers (e.g., the handful each of Blok and
Tsvetaeva poems in Shostakovich’s cycles), the two big (sic on big
for great) Tolstoy novels, the one big (sic ditto) Turgeneev
novel, and everything written in Russian after about 1950. By my seventeenth year, towards the end of
1988, I had become enthusiastic enough about Russian literature—that is to say,
literature written po-russkii regardless of the geographical provenance
or native tongue of its author—to study the Russian language, as I did
informally on my own for a year-and-a-half (or at any rate over a period of
a year and a half, for I can’t imagine I devoted more than an average of ten
minutes a week to it) and then formally for three semesters in college. By the end of that third semester I felt as
though I had had my fill of Russian.
This was mainly on account of the intrinsic qualities of the language,
and in particular on account of the distinction between perfective and
imperfective verb forms, a grammatical feature that Edmund Wilson perceptively
pinpointed as the chief stumbling block for English-speaking would-be
Russophones. Russian’s multiplicity of
inflections, its dozens of noun and verb endings, in having near-exact
parallels in Latin, presented me with few problems, but the whole business of
perpetually having to deal with two stems for a single verb both perplexed and
annoyed me to extra-figurative distraction.
But if I am to be honest with myself (and with the retiring DGR), I must
concede that my throwing in of the J-Cloth on my study of Russian was also
materially actuated by if not an absolute waning of interest in Russian
literature, then at least a relative waning thereof occasioned by my growing
fascination by or with other literatures originating in other languages—notably
French, German, and my native English.
It was probably not then the case that I had actually become bored with
Russian literature eo ipso, but rather (and yet conceivably no less
damningly to Russian literature’s discredit) that these other literatures were
still patently disclosing new vistas to me while Russian literature seemed to
be failing to do this; or, to put it another and more brutal way, that I was
getting the sense that I had essentially gotten the gist of Russian literature,
that whatever as-yet-unread Russian novel, poem, short story, autc. I might
subsequently read would not teach me anything I had not already learned from
other Russian novels autc. And if I am
to be totally honest with myself and the retiring DGR, I must further
concede that the course of Soviet and former-Soviet history post-August 1991
(August 1991 marked the beginning of my third and final semester of official
Russian study, by the way) also contributed materially (if secondarily) to the
radical downscaling of my scholastic Russophilia; I must concede, in other
words, that at some moment during my selection of classes for the spring
semester of 1992, I more than likely reflected something along the lines of
“Well, if the next chapter in the grand [grand as in great
and not merely big (or, indeed, merely bolshoi)] roman of history
isn’t any longer going to hinge on this standoff between the U.S. and the
Soviet Union, I had better get out of this scholastic Russophilian racket like
[some amusingly Russocentric cod-variation on “a rat off a sinking ship,” a
cod-variation probably ineluctably centering even more specifically on the Potemkin
and the Soviet Union’s answer to Mickey Mouse {for I cannot but
assume there was such an answer, knowing as I do that there were Soviet answers
to the likes of James Bond}].” And yet
yet again (or yet again again), I shan’t be so perversely self-abasing
vis-à-vis the present meta-ethical context as to pretend that every last drop
of my interest in things Russian and peri-Russian simply evaporated in January
of 1992. Indeed, in all frankness and
candor, I can assert that this interest simply reverted to its 1982 levels,
which is to say that while I stopped reading Russian books and trying to learn
the Russian language, I kept listening to Russian music and following the news
from Russia. And in about 1999, I began
to cultivate a fandom in (or of) Russian-language cinema (my almost total
ignorance of which thitherto had been owing not to any lack of curiosity on my
part but merely to the unavailability of rentable video versions of the movies
[which my neighborhood video shop started carrying only in the expiring moments
of the millennium {It is something of a puzzle of a fact—one that I shall
subsequently have occasion to take a crack at solving—that Russian-language
cinema’s commercial profile in the Anglosphere has been steadily rising all the
while that Russia’s political stocks herein have been plummeting.}]) Russian cinema is here by no means to
be read as simple shorthand for Soviet-period so-called art cinema,
for while I did indeed school myself first and ultimately most thoroughly on
the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and subsequently sought out Soviet movies of
comparable falutine altitude to his—e.g., Grigori Kozintsev’s King Lear
and Hamlet and Larisa Shepitko’s Wings and The Ascent—I
also watched a fair number of Hollywood-style Soviet dramas (e.g., The
Cranes Are Flying and Letter Never Sent) and even broad
crowd-pleasing comedies such as The Irony of Fate, Ivan the Terrible
(a.k.a. Back to the Future [groan]), and Kidnapping Caucasian Style,
as well as some commercially successful if more than vaguely arty features from
the post-Soviet period—most notably Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return, Elena,
and Leviathan.
It is under the aegis or auspices of the immediately above-delineated
ethos that I presume to lecture the reader: I presume to lecture him or her, in
short, in my capacity as a moderate Russophile-cum-Sovietophile-cum
former-Soviet-realm-ophile of thirty-six years’ standing who knows a
more-than-modest if hardly formidable amount about Russia and the other former
Soviet republics although he has never been to Russia or any of those other
countries, and, indeed, has met very few Russians and former-Soviet
republicans—so few, indeed, that it would be extremely impertinent in him
(a.k.a. me) even to extrapolate the most tentative of generalizations about the
Russian or Former-Soviet-Republic-X-an national character from my appraisals of
their individual characters; nay, even to attempt to bring home to the reader
the precise flavor and piquancy-point of the impertinence by tendering an
Anglospheric analogy along the lines of “It would be like generalizing about
Brits or Americans based on the habitual comportment of Famous or Notorious Brits
or Americans X, Y, and Z.” Doubtlessly
this lack of firsthand geographical and social experience has occasioned—or,
rather, in conformity with the metaphorical equation of knowledge with vision,
left in place—certain epistemologically significant blind spots. For instance,
back in the Soviet epoch I heard (and only heard) that in Russia (or
possibly even in every Soviet republic) the circus was a much more important
cultural phenomenon-cum-institution than it ever had been in any so-called
Western country; that, indeed, the average Russian (or possibly even average
Soviet) devoted at least as large a proportion of his or her leisure hours to
circus-attendance as to sporting-event attendance and movie-viewing. Now, as a ca. fifteen-year-old American who
thitherto had been utterly oblivious of the existence of Soviet circuses but
had had many a pair of Toughskins whisked off his lower extremities by his
unalloyed boredom by various American circuses, I could not help imagining the
average Soviet circus as an act-by-act clone of the average American circus
(only with ringmasters, clowns, lions, etc. that boasted, laughed, roared, etc.
in Russian [or Georgian, Armenian, autc.] rather than English) nor,
consequently, being utterly bemused by the average Russian or Soviet citizen’s
reputed enthrallment thereby; and as a forty-six-year-old American who has
still not spectated on a single Russian, Soviet, or former-Soviet circus (nor
been capable of being a**ed to see if any footage of such a circus is available
on Y**-T***) I continue to imagine the average Russian autc. circus as a mutatis-mutandis
act-by-act clone of a Toughskins offwhiskingly boring American circus. And in consequence of my total ignorance of
the Soviet or Russian circus I have doubtless failed to understand some salient
facet of the Soviet or Russian character and have most certainly by default
ascribed a doubtless unjustified nadirishness of naffness to the leisure-time
proclivities of Vanya and Masha Stolichnaya aut al. Doubtless there was and possibly still is
something about the Soviet or Russian circus that set and possibly still sets
it head, shoulders, and nineteen-foot stilts above the American circus and
indeed elevated or even still elevates it to the level of sublimity equal to
that of the works of Tarkovsky, Tchaikovsky, and Dostoyevsky—but in consequence
of my firsthand geographical ignorance of Russia and other former Soviet
territories I have yet to learn what that something is. And even if by now I had been capable of
being a**ed to see if any footage of a Russian or Soviet circus was or is on
Y**-T*** and had discovered there a complete video archive of circus
performances in Russia and other former Soviet territories from the dawn of
cinema to the present and had spectated on every single minute of that archive,
I am sure some wag of a traveler of former-Soviet climes would call me out for
or on my obliviousness of some facet of Russian or Soviet circus-spectatorship
accessible only to those with buttocks planted in the bleachers—e.g., as
follows: “How can you claim to begin to say the simplest goshdamn thing about
the Russians or other former Soviets when you know nothing about the
perennially preferred snack or popcorn-analogue of Russian and other former
Soviet-republic-an circus goers—viz. deep-fried Kabardian mountain goat
mountain oysters drenched in Kabul sauce?”
(Not that I know anything about Kabardia except that it’s some part of
the Caucasus mentioned in A Hero of Our Time, or about Kabul sauce
except, thanks to Yevgeny Yetvstushenko’s poem “In the Store” [which I in turn
know only because it served as the text to a movement of Shostakovich’s
Thirteenth Symphony], that you could buy it in Soviet government stores in
1962. [Naturally the linguistic fortunes
of the term Kabul sauce since the 1980 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
spring{s} to mind in its own right as a subject on which I might be more
enlightened if I had ever been to Russia autc.]) And that well-traveled
out-calling wag would doubtless be well within his rights to lord it over me
like some pre-1861 Russian landowner, and I would doubtless be obliged to take
his lordliness on the chin like the lowliest of pre-1861 muzhiks. All the same, travel is surely not some
fixed, top-ranking epistemological t***p card or epistemological vacuum cleaner
that irrefragably and indefeasibly hoovers up each and every particle of
demurral gleaned from other registers of experience, and on two or more
occasions the present untraveled semigluteal Russophile has enjoyed the by no
means dubious pleasure of putting a well-traveled steatopygiac Russophile in
his or her place. I recall, for example,
that in 2009 I met a person with a professional political-policy-orientated
interest in Russia (doubtless he would have had to kill me, as they say, had he
disclosed the precise nature of this interest) who reported that he had lately
spent an extensive and intensively professionally orientated interval in the
city of Astrakhan. “Ah, Astrakhan,” I
reflexively shrieked in uncontainable delight at simply being in the presence
of a person who had been in the place after which such iconic articles had been
named (I apologize for the clunkiness of this construction, but regrettably the
term eponym applies only to people and namesake to paired named
entities in the Kripkean sense—e.g., Odessa, Ukraine [formerly though not
originally Odessa, Russia and Odessa, U.S.S.R] and its namesakes Odessa, Texas
and Odessa, Florida), “as in the hats?”
Alas, the dude or gentleman had no idea of what I was referring or
alluding to. I might as well have been
in the presence of a recent sojourner in Buffalo, New York who had never heard
of Buffalo wings, or a recent sojourner in Pisa, Italy who had never heard of
pizza, or, indeed, a recent sojourner in Delhi, India who had never heard of
delicatessens. After all, the Astrakhan
hat was and is at least as intimately conjoined to or with Russia as the bowler
hat to or with the City of London and the ten-gallon Stetson cowboy hat to or
with the State of Texas, for what scene of outdoor Russian winter life, what
view of Red Square or Nevsky Prospect at Christmastime [or, in the officially
heathenish Soviet days, Newyearstime], would be complete—at least in cis-Ural
eyes—were not every last masculine head therein surmounted by one of those
bulky, towering black-fleeced-out superfezzes?
Why, one would as soon countenance a bare a**e or b*s*m as an
Astrakhan-hatless male pate in such a tableau.
And yet this dude or gentleman who derived not only his daily bread but
also his weekly circus-cum-sack of deep-fried Kabul sauce-drenched Kabardian
mountain goat mountain oysters (qua quasi-synecdoche for disposable income,
natch), from his supposed—and in most registers doubtless actual—expertise on
Russia, had never heard of the Astrakhan hat.
Presumably throughout his sojourn in Astrakhan he had been so thoroughly
absorbed in the nitty-gritty of public policy (committee meetings; nodding,
chin-stroking spectations of or on maps, graphs, diagrams; etc.) that he had
not had a moment to pop by the local local history museum, which doubtless
centered and still centers on an extremely expensive (by local history-museal
standards) and multi-sensorily arresting and therefore inescapable exhibit on
the hat to which the town owes its fifteen million minutes of low-key,
soft-white 60-watt bulb, fame (but fame rather than obscurity
nonetheless). So, to reiterate and
acuminate the point I made before the adduction of this example: while caeteris
paribus the well-traveled person is more enlightened than the untraveled
person, caeteris inparibus—i.e., specifically in the well-traveled
person’s disfavor and generally because the well-traveled person has been less
curious about or attentive to the traveled-to place—the well-traveled person’s
epistemological edge over the untraveled person may be slight, nonexistent, or
even negative. Such being the case, the
reader should not by default set a lesser value on my assertions than on those
of any official expert on Russia etc., and by the same token I should (and
indeed will) stand ready to be corrected by any officially accredited expert on
Russia etc. whose curiosity and attentiveness thereunto equal or exceed my own. And I confess to standing especially
vigilantly ready to be corrected by officially accredited experts on the
non-Russian parts of the etc. as these parts have developed (or stagnated or
regressed) over the past 15 years or so, for the following reason: throughout
this roughly 15-year-period the respective internal political situations of the
former Soviet republics other than Russia have been by default quite marginal
contributors to the overall geopolitical situation, such that by whatever (if
any) time the BBC, CBS, CNN, NPR, et al. aut c. find occasion to report on one
of these nation-state-territories, the various forces, factions, personages,
and interests materially germane to the historical moment have already been in
play (or at war, loggerheads, autc.) for some time (that some time being
a unit that is axiomatically always increasing in length), such that the
Russophile-cum-Sovietophile-cum former-Soviet-realm-ophile who relies, as the
present one does, on the BBC et al. aut c. for his intelligence of the former-Soviet
realm is apt to be unaware, at least for the short term (i.e., until such time,
if ever, when the former-Soviet republic in question has been close enough to
geopolitical center -stage long enough to elicit so-called in-depth
documentaries, panel-discussions, etc. from the BBC et al. aut c.), of the
precise anatomical position of either the principal political bone that is
being picked within any given former-Soviet republic or the principal political
bone that the dominant and significant would-be dominant political agents and
would-be agents wish to pick (or share [if sharing a bone indeed be the
cooperative complement of picking one]) with Russia. For example [CENSORED DGR INTERVENTION IN
OBJECTION TO MY UNDENIABLY CLOYING ADDICTION TO ‘FOR EXAMPLE’ + PERSONAL
ANECDOTE IN THE PRESENT ESSAY], it was only in September of 2016, when Islam
Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan since 1989 (hence, since Soviet times)
died and consequently received a few-dozen minutes of news coverage on BBC Radio
4, that I was compelled even slightly to disentangle Uzbekistan as a political
entity from the neighboring stans.
The last I had heard of Uzebkistan before this necrological episode
(barring the hilarious [albeit—if the DVD commentary is to be believed—completely
uninformed, let alone fact-checked] SCTV mock-Soviet television public service
announcement warning the presumptively upright non-Uzbekistani Soviet citizens
against the subterfuges of the wily though shiftless Uzbeks, which I had first
seen in ’07 or thenabouts) had been way back in the autumn of ’01, when, during
the ouster of the Taliban from the pilot’s or helmsman’s seat of the ship of
state of Afghanistan, U-stan had been repeatedly publicly described by White
House and State Department spokespeople as a key ally in the war on
terror(ism). In the meantime I had
interpellated U-stan by default as a “typical corruption-ridden ex-Soviet
State-cum-territory other than Russia” in which a nationalist or Islamist-orientated
party, a retro-Soviet-orientated party, and a so-called progressive so-called
free-market orientated party were recurrently triangling off against one
another in paper-rock-scissors matches that recurrently brought one of the
three into nominal ascendancy for a year, or, at most, two years in succession
out of a decade of incessant actual political anarchy and economic torpor. The Karimov death-coverage revealed to me
that to the—or, at any rate, a—very surprising contrary, since the dissolution
of the U.S.S.R. Uzbekistan had been functioning very much like an old-school
Soviet satellite state on penuriously rationed steroids, with Karimov
constituting a Ceaușescu-like omnipotent and unbudgeable chief executive
presiding over a government-monopolized economy centered on the extraction and
exportation of indigenous natural resources—notably gold and natural gas. Doubtless two or more among the other former
Soviet republics about which I have lately happened to hear next to
nothing—Azerbaijan, Moravia, Armenia, etc.—evince comparably wide and striking
divergences from my “typical corruption-ridden ex-Soviet State-cum-territory
other than Russia.” And doubtless
intelligence of the internal political situation of at least one of these two
or more republics would occasion some far from trivial modifications of my
overall appraisal of the former-Soviet sub-geopolitical landscape, as my recent
briefest of briefings on Uzbekistan has in fact done. Before this briefing I had tended to assume
that a given former non-Russian Soviet republic’s degree of Russophilia varied
in direct proportion to the percentage of its population comprised by so-called
ethnic Russians (the admittedly cumbrous precise designation for such types is people
who like to think of themselves as Russians), and Uzbekistan has shown me
that such an assumption is by no means well-founded, that, indeed, in a
political-ethical rapprochement partly reminiscent of the mutual attraction of
the Axis powers in World War II (“partly” because I am as yet unaware of any
upsurge of Russophilia among the Uzbekistani populace [not that I am not
essentially unwarrantedly taking it for granted that a preponderance of the
German, Italian, and Japanese populaces were enthusiastic about the Axis]) a former
non-Russian Soviet republic statistically devoid of so-called ethnic Russians
is quite capable of becoming bosom buddies with Russia merely in virtue of
pursuing (or being prey to) a political-cum-economic program that is
ever-so-broadly Russia-esque. And this
Uzbekistan-catalyzed refinement of my default conception of non-Russian former
Soviet republics has not failed of having knock-on effects on my appraisal of
present-day Russia herself or itself; for now that I know that he has had at
least one genuine dependable ally-cum-imitator (although, in the light of the
chronology, role model might be the more appropriate word for Mr.
Karimov) in the president of Uzbekistan, Mr. Putin’s uniformly cocksurely
domineering comportment towards the remaining non-Russian former-Soviet
republics seems to me slightly more rational, slightly less megalomaniacal,
slightly less pie-in-the-skyish than it did as recently as two years ago. Perhaps, I am now inclined to reflect, Mr.
Putin is not entirely foolishly hoping that even the most prevailingly
Russophobic among these countries will be coaxable back into the Old Kremlin
Corral after their respective feckless teenager-like dreams of hosting “the
Silicon Valley of the Armpit of Nowhere” and transforming every last
porcifutuoaceous peasant within their borders into a gig-entrepreneur pulling
in eighty-thou (euros, dollars, or pounds—take your pick [after all, the
value-differences among the three currencies are negligible as of this
writing]) a week by taking the pooches of well-heeled Parisians, Londoners, and
New Yorkers for walkies in nonets by remote-control robotic video-link, have
finally spent themselves, leaving them finally to realize (so at least the
P.W.’s conjectural V.P.) that they would be best served by transforming
themselves into oversized three or four- aisle company stores on the current
(and well-established) Russian floorplan.
So in short: inasmuch as such bits of non-Russian former Soviet
republic-iana have proved enlightening if chastening so far, I welcome further
instances thereof from whatever enlightened quarter or party can supply them,
even knowing as I do that my privity to them may compel me to revise or even
retract some of the sentiments I will have aired by the conclusion of this
essay. At the same time, knowing as I do
that my fuller knowledge of the political-cum-economic habitus of Uzbekistan
has not compelled me to revise by so much as a jotlet, let alone to retract, a
single one of the assertions that constituted the main so-called talking points
of the then-prospective and now present essay (to which I really must start
sp*d*-a-sp*d*-calling-ishly referring consistently as a lecture) even
some months before I learnt of Mr. Karimov’s death, I see no sub-casuistically
compelling reason for not forthwith itemizing these assertions and then
expounding on them as blithely, cavalierly, and indeed insouciantly, as though
it were still ca. March 2016 both chez moi and chez the whole gosh-damn
kit-and-kaboodle of a Russian-cum-non Russian former Soviet Republican state of
affairs, as follows:
1) Russia,
as it subsists within its present borders, is indisputably a great power, and
indeed the world’s third-greatest power after the United States and China,
although Japan (another unjustly now démodé-cum-formerly catwalk-dominating
nation-state) and India certainly have plausible grounds for contesting the
bronze with it. Admittedly this title of
Great Power No. 3 (of, say, five to seven) is a less illustrious—or, perhaps,
rather, less pompous or blingy—one than that of Superpower No.2 (of only two)
that the U.S.S.R. was universally conceded even during the most torpid
micro-stretches of the Brezhnev micro-epoch and the unremittingly embarrassing
two-and-a-half years of the Andropov-cum-Chernenko micro-micro epoch. But the comparative dinginess of the title is
owing far more lavishly and exigently to the indisputable post-1989 ascent of
China to the position of Great Power No. 2 than either to whatever degree of
diminution of its absolute stature Russia has suffered since the dissolution of
the Soviet Union or to whatever absolute augmentation of its own absolute stature
the U.S. has enjoyed since that selfsame historical milestone. And for all its dinginess, the title’s
still-stratospheric position in the geopolitical league table (or Billboard
Chart [q.v.]) means that for the so-called immediately foreseeable future the
third question any entity of worldwide presence-cum-influence—be it a
nation-state government, a multinational corporation, or a superquango—ought to
ask itself before taking any action of potentially global reverberativeness
will remain “How will this play in Moscow, and, indeed [in the light of certain
centrifugal post-1991 tendencies within Russia itself], in such Peoria-esque
Russian burgs as Novgorod and Novosibirsk?”
2) The historically-dubious-beyond-belief and ever-volatile congeries of
countries that now styles itself the West with a curious mixture of smugness
and desperation has precious little ethical or prudential grounds for looking
down its lorgnette at Russia. This
so-called West’s arrogated supposed edge over the Russkies derives solely, in
the ethical register, from its recent liberalization of legal codes governing
practices of super-marginal and therefore negligible ethical import, and in the
prudential register, from its peremptory fetishization of a bastardized version
of a system of political economy that has always been legitimately contestable
and that by now has proved downright untenable.
3) The U. S. S. R. may have had its faults, but its sublation and
subsumption of an only barely figuratively myriad national, ethnic, peri-national,
and peri-ethnic-identification tags in and under the single portable
identification tag of Soviet Citizen was a very good thing, a VGT that mutatis
mutandis really ought to be revived. 4)
With the exception of the three Baltic nation-states, the non-Russian former
Soviet republics now at various sizes and temperatures of loggerheads with
Russia are axiomatically not merely striving to hold on to some pre-Soviet status
quo ante reestablished in 1991, because the territories coterminous with
them were already a part of the Russian empire before it turned Soviet. Their respective beeves with Russia therefore
should be understood preeminently as Russophobic beeves—as beeves with
Russia qua Russia—rather than as beeves actuated principally by the fear of
once again losing whatever liberties they were deprived of as a consequence of
the institution of the Soviet regime. 5)
The principal principle upon which the so-called West founds its
contestation of Russia’s interference with the nation-states in its propinquity
is identical to the principal principle upon which Russia founds that
interference. This is the principle of
national self-determination. And
inasmuch as this principle is at bottom a barrel of bl**dy bullocks’ b**l*cks,
the cry of any enlightened soul vis-à-vis the friction between Russia and these
other countries must at bottom be A plague o’ both your houses (or dachas
or whatever the local s*dding equivalent is)!—although at least to the
extent that vituperation by the likes of the BBC, CNN, CBS, NPR, etc.
constitutes the plague, Russia has had enough of it to last a good, say, five
years, and the non-Russian nation-states are long overdue for a dose of
it. 6) Any and all present-day
Anglospheric pathos about the discrepancy between “Putin’s Russia,” and some
other Russia, whether that Russia is understood as the Russia of an earlier
epoch (e.g., Russia in the time of Nicholas II or Russia in the time of Lenin)
or as a more “liberal,” “intellectual” stratum of present-day Russian society
than the one frequented by Putin and his myrmidons (i.e., essentially, the one
frequented by the likes of Gary Kasparov and Pussy Riot), is blinkered to the
point of clinical blindness. To be sure,
today’s Russia is a trashy, degenerate travesty of the Russias of 50, 100, and
150 years ago, but today’s world as a whole and every single country in it are
trashy, degenerate travesties of their former selves. Accordingly the morally, intellectually,
aesthetically etc. (and it is a long, long adverbial cetera) dubious elements
of today’s Russia are but an amplification of such elements in the Russia of
old, and they are and always have been indissociable from those elements of the
Russian Volksgeist that Anglo-Saxons most and rightly admire; or, to put
it in ad-homineminal terms, the likes of Pussy Riot and Gary Kasparov, just
like the likes of Tchaikovsky, Tarkovsky, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky, are all
possessed of character traits that a classic Anglo-Saxon liberal would balk at
adopting. Thus the quasi-Solomonian
question that confronts every would-be or half-hearted classic Anglo-Saxon
liberal of a Russophile is whether the Russian baby is a nice enough one to
forbear throwing away despite the noisomeness of its bathwater, for at least in
the historical medium-term any separation of the one from the other is a
virtual impossibility. 7) Even the most
full-hearted non-would be (because long, long-since is) Russophobe who
is convinced that Russia is all bathwater and no baby (the very biological
meta-incomprehensibility of this metaphor is suggestive of certain conceptual
defects chez the present-day Russophobic outlook that I hope to elucidate)
cannot in any good faith deny that present-day Russia is in every salient
respect closer to us—at whatever level of specificity below the entire human
race one chooses set the us-from-them dividing mambo-stick—than to
China. Accordingly, unless he cherishes
the Pollyanna-in-the-sky fantasy that through the magic of commerce China will
transform itself into a kind of archipelago of American-style Chinatowns—a
fantasy that I hope to put paid to via my elaboration of Item No. 2 in this
list—he or she needs must welcome, nay, yearn for closer ties between Russia
and Anglo-Saxia, and at minimum in the very short term nurture the hope that
Russia will not become any more buddy-buddy (or droog-tongzhi) with
China than it already is.
Now on to
the expounding, starting with No. 1, Russia is Great Power No. 3 in
the present world. This is very
probably something of a problematic assertion in the eyes, ears, etc. of
present-day received opinion, which tends to view greatness in a
geopolitical sense as a direct function of the political-economic concept of gross
domestic product (GDP), and Russia is as of this writing ranked sixth
rather than third in all the competing U.S. News and World Report-style
rankings (cf. and contrast “Billboard chart” and “league table”
[q.q.v.]) of the respective GDPs of the world’s countries. But GDP is not the only plausible index of
geopolitical greatness, and, indeed, until fairly recently—specifically, since
1934, when the phrase gross domestic product was coined—it could not
have served as any kind of index of geopolitical greatness. To be fair to the fetishists of GDP, though, geopolitics
is itself a word of almost comparably recent coinage, and even the notion of a power
as “a state or nation from the point of view of its international authority or
influence” may not be much more than 116 years old. (With gallingly unhelpful vagueness, my Oxford
Universal Dictionary, a 1950s abridgment of the original OED, gives the
just-quoted definition as a “late” sub-sense of a usage first recorded in 1726
and in illustration of this sub-sense cites a source from 1901.) Accordingly, unless one is willing to concede
that great-powerdom is something of no deeper historical profundity than, say,
ragtime or the bicycle (and who, apart from the most unregenerate
ephemeron-gourmandizing churl would be willing to countenance, let alone
champion, such a scandalously banausic notion) one must dispense with philology
and conceive of powerdom and greatness in the simplest and grossest notional
terms—to conceive of a power or potential power as any territory or collection
of territories answering to a single name and governmental body and greatness
as an abstract noun subsuming all the sorts of accoutrements of territorial
dominion that people have tended to regard as great across the ages. Let us take the sub-geopolitical situation of
Europe and its North American annex at the time of the Seven Years War
(1756-1763) as a case in point in illustration of the compellingness of such a
realistic (in the strictly philosophical sense), non-philological treatment of
great-powerdom. At this time France was
universally regarded as the greatest European power, and Great Britain as
running behind France at a fairly distant second (with Prussia panting close on
its rear hooves). The principal material
grounds of this pride of place seem to have been demographic and geographical:
with at least 25 million souls France was a much more populous country than
Great Britain, which at most contained nine million; and France’s North
American colonial dominions were much more extensive, comprising all of
present-day Quebec and most of the present-day American Midwest, as against the
comparatively minuscule present-day I-95 corridor-minus-Florida then comprised
by Britain’s colonial holdings in the continent. To be sure, the French colonies were much
more thinly populated than the British ones (such that, in contrast to the
latter, they never acquired a fraction of the demography-fueled side requisite
to declaring independence from the mother country), but their possession was
seemingly solidly underwritten by the protection of the French army, famous for
more than a century as the largest and best-trained in Europe, in abashing
contrast to its puny, ad-hoc, perpetually press gang-dependent British
counterpart. All this while, it was no
less universally acknowledged that Britain was an altogether more prosperous
and comfortable country than France—that its poor were much better fed,
clothed, housed, and educated; its class of persons of the middle station
much more numerous; its commodities of everyday use both much more copious in
number and variety and much more easily acquirable; its distribution of both
commodities of everyday use (e.g., coal, butter, candles, milk, and sugar) and
luxuries (e.g., tea, lace, china services, harpsichords, and whalebone corsets)
much more extensive. In
short-cum-fatuously anachronistic terms, everybody was willing to grant that
Britain had a substantially larger GDP than France. Nobody was blind to France’s economic
shortcomings, and yet everybody regarded France as a greater power than
Britain, because they regarded military strength, breadth of territorial
occupation, and demographic abundance as superior to economic magnitude qua
indices of greatness. It was only when,
in the very early nineteenth century, Britain achieved parity with or
superiority to France in these other areas, that it began to be regarded as a
greater power than France (albeit while furnishing the cult of GDP with its
creation myth by being the first intercontinentally great power {in
favorable contrast to the Mediterranean-bound Venice of the immediate
post-Middle Ages} to have trafficked its way into greatness).
That I have
not adduced the preceding scenario as a full-fledged geopolitical allegory with
mid-eighteenth-century France standing in for present-day Russia and
mid-eighteenth-century Britain standing in for…well, virtually every
present-day country of more than negligible geopolitical sway except
Russia (and very much including Britain) should be evident (at least to those
who have not written me off as a complete-ignoramus-cum idiot) from one glaring
discrepancy between France back then and Russia today: Russia is manifestly not
more populous than any of its geopolitical rivals save Japan and is less than half
as populous as the United States and a tenth as populous as China and
India. But inasmuch as I am merely
trying to make a case for regarding Russia as the present globe’s third
great power this discrepancy should not be regarded as fatal to my argument,
for in other registers present-day Russia can more than hold its own in a
comparison with France of 250 years ago.
Of these I shall mention the military register first, partly
because I find it the most boring and it is nice to get the most boring things
out of the way early on, but also because despite its boringness it is not only
arguably but certainly the one of greatest material weight—the one about
which we should…how do you say?...give the largest s**t. I am not even going to bother looking up
statistics on the relative personnel volumes of the Russian, American (or, for
those who would sacrifice both euphony and grammatical parity to Hispanophilia,
U.S.), Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Brazilian, Indonesian, etc. armies; or
even on the number of aircraft carriers, fighter-jets, battleships, bombers,
frigates, tugboats, etc. in the respective combined fleets of these countries;
for at bottom (and with sincere apologies to the million or so people who have
been injured or killed by them in the past decade alone) these endowments are
all so many wooden soldiers and pop-guns when considered alongside the 7,300 warheads
in Russia’s nuclear arsenal, which is evidently if not substantially larger
than the United States’ 6,970, and positively lap-dogs the 260 in China’s
(along with the 140 or so each in India’s and Pakistan’s). Of course I know that in the eyes and minds
of all the present-day supposed experts on geopolitics a nuclear arsenal is
merely the whitest and most massive white elephant a nation-state can ever
acquire and that in real military terms a purely nuclear-armed State would be
virtually interchangeable with a ten-year-old child armed with, well, wooden
soldiers and pop-guns. “The deucedly
ironic thing about a nuclear arsenal,” these grizzled pundits (who by no
means are to be mistaken for DGRs) aver while puffing away with insufferable
smugness at hookah tubes filled with their own anal flatulence (to be fair,
they really have nothing else to puff away at now that pipe-smoking is banned
in television studios), “is that it’s too potent to use, inasmuch as any
commander-in-chief or head of state of any State who did presume to launch a
nuclear attack on a foe would be met with a retaliation massive enough, at
minimum, to prevent his or her continuing hostilities and quite possibly to
eventuate in the utter annihilation of his or her own country’s population and
infrastructure. Ergo, a nuclear attack
is effectively an act of military-strategic suicide.” To which averral I am, in the first, most
boring but again—at least in certain senses—most materially weighty place
inclined to retort, “If these gosh-d**ged nuclear weapons are so
paperweightesque in their military utility, why are so many countries who
haven’t got any of them so eager, so gung-ho, to acquire them, and even more
strikingly, so eager-cum-gung ho to acquire the power to manufacture them ad
libitum, and why are we Anglo-Saxons so eager to prevent these countries
from acquiring both the weapons and the power?”
But as this retort has no bearing whatsoever on Russia, I really ought
swiftly to move on to my second retort, which has as much bearing on Russia as
on any other country, and hence a great deal of bearing indeed, viz.: since
when has the effective suicidal nature of any action categorically precluded
its execution on any conceivably adduceable grounds? If and only if suicide were as statistically
rare an occurrence as, say, that genetic disease that causes children to turn
into wizened biological centenarians by the age of ten, why, then and only then
would I concede the reasonableness of the fart-hookah-puffing pundits’
complacency (albeit not their smugness) vis-à-vis nuclear arsenals; then and
only then would I spirit away my dread of a nuclear apocalypse as speedily as I
routinely do my dread of the annihilation of humankind by the earth’s collision
with an asteroid. “Sure, it could
happen,” I would in that case apostrophize myself while making my toilet of a
weekday morning: “After all, virtually anything’s possible. But what are the chances of its happening in
my lifetime? A zillion-trillion to
one. Why, the odds of my dying of a fall
in the yikes! (I really should
have picked up that bar of so-o-o-a-p […]).”
But suicide is quite evidently not so rare an occurrence. It would much surprise me if fewer than one
out of a hundred deaths were caused by a deliberate act of suicide—in other
words, as an immediate and dedicated consequence of the die-er’s conscious and
diligent contrivance-cum-employment of an instrument of self-destruction (e.g.,
a noose, gunshot, or unventilated car-exhaust {or anal hookah} pipe). And if one regards the ambit of suicide as
being broad enough to include deaths occasioned by the performance of routine
but potentially self-destroying acts in a wantonly reckless manner—one (or at
any rate I) immediately thinks here of that veritable icon of rock-solid
American stiff-upper-lip-dom Ed Asner’s shaving with an imperfectly mounted
non-disposable safety razor [no, bless
his soul, he didn’t actually die, but he very well might have done]—why, the
figure surely rises to at least one in ten.
One could, of course, make a watertight-cum-ironclad argument that
virtually every death, or, let us say, 9,999.7 out of every ten thousand
deaths, is a suicide provided one broadened the ambit to include every death
conceivably traceable to an act the die-er deliberately engaged in despite his
or her knowledge that it was not a so-called healthy choice–say, the ten-minute
utilization of a non-non smoking bar (back in the days when there still were
non-non smoking bars)’s sanitary facilities, or the one-off consumption of a
cheeseburger with bacon or extra mayonnaise (or even of a
baconless-cum-mayonnaiseless cheeseburger instead of a mere hamburger, or even
of a hamburger instead of a mere lettuce-and-tomato sandwich, or even of a
lettuce-and-tomato-sandwich instead of a mere dressing-less lettuce-and-tomato
salad)—one could do that, but this one, a.k.a. I, shall and will
not, lest I find myself in the heart of the camp of my arch-enemies, the vile
Whigs (q.v. below, Lord willing). In
any case, I don’t think one needs to grant that suicide is a near-universal, or
even common, occurrence to be bemused by the pooh-poohing away of its
geopolitical manifestation as a virtual chimera. Suppose the figure of suicide-caused deaths
is only one in a thousand, or one in ten thousand; why, then, it is perforce
far too high to be tolerated at a geopolitical resolution, for the
eye-burstingly obvious reason that however statistically rare it is, it somehow
manages to translate into a phenomenon with which we are all familiar–every one
of us has heard of someone’s committing suicide in the past year, most of us
(including the present writer) have been within two or three degrees of remove
from personal acquaintance with a suicide, and quite a number of us have been at
zero degree(s)—or one degree, if the suicide himself or himself contributes to
the count—of such remove. For each of
us, suicide is an event-genre chez les autres that is slightly less
probable than divorce or so-called gender reassignment and slightly more
probable than sharing an airliner banquette with a so-called B-list
celebrity—its occurrence chez un parmi ces autres elicits from each of
us a physio-semiotic reaction more ardent than a shrug or yawn yet a du*n-sight
less frenzied than a shriek or gasp.
“What did you just say? [pauses with coffee cup held within inches of
lips] Jenkins in accounting offed himself with a so-called Magnum 44
revolver last night? Well I nev…well, at
least only very seldom. [takes generous sip from coffee cup].” The preceding bit of stage patter pretty
much, I fancy, captures the precise temperature, flavor, and texture of the
average present-day Anglo-Saxon’s reaction to news of a suicide in his or her
personal Umwelt. And by all
rights his or her reaction to hearing that Putin, the Russian branch
manager, offed himself in a mushroom-cloud steam bath ought not eo
ipso to be a microjoule more animated or heated. For Mr. Putin is after all only human, as
they say, and even in the improbable event that he (along with all his
fellow-members of the multi-gigaton club) is ultimately as sane, prudent, and
even-tempered as the average accountant, we axiomatically cannot take it for
granted that he will never—or even only very seldom—commit nuclear suicide,
inasmuch as we know from our own quotidian experience that many a person as
sane, prudent, and even-tempered as the average accountant has committed
suicide by the most potent and spectacular means at his or her practicable
disposal. This is why any
affective-cum-somatic disposition towards a prospective nuclear apocalypse more
than a few angst-degrees short of outright panic is outright wanton ostrichism
and indeed as delusive as the wildest persecution-fantasy sufferable by the
most paranoiac of nuclear-armed commanders in chief-cum-heads of state. It is well enough to say, “We must keep our
fingers crossed and hope that cooler State-heads prevail in this matter”;
indeed, I myself am enough of a Whig-cum-Pollyanna to hope and indeed nearly
presume that cooler State-heads will prevail in this matter, inasmuch as
I do not believe a natural or genuine or full-fledged
hot-head (as against an affectedly hot-headed person such as Mr. Putin or Mr.
Trump [after all, we mustn’t conflate hot-headedness and fatuity]) is likely to
assume control of a nuclear arsenal of world-annihilating strength. But in this matter confidence in the coolness
of individual commanders in chief-cum-heads of nuclear armed States cannot be
suffered to expand and transmogrify into confidence in the safety of those of
us (i.e. all of us) within vaporizing distance of a multi-gigaton
nuclear arsenal, inasmuch as quotidian experience has proved to us that the
coolest of heads are not arithmetically, let alone geometrically, less prone to
self-destruction than the hottest of them.
And if to this assertion it be objected by a grizzled,
fart-hookah-puffing pundit that a nuclear arsenal, in staggeringly belittling
contrast to a noose, gun, autc., cannot be operated by a single human
individual, that while it is indeed easy to imagine even one of our most
cool-headed commanders in chief-cum-heads of a nuclear-armed State momentarily
getting hot-headed enough (or falling into a blue and slap-bass-heavy enough
blue funk) to press the biggest and most imposingly red of all buttons, that
button is after all effectively but a room-service bell-pull linked to, oh, at
most, a gross of silo-wardens and sub-captains, each and every last one of whom
can surely be counted on not to have flown or fallen into a suicidal passion or
blue funk on the same day as his or her superboss and hence be further counted
on to do the right thing with all the altruistic valiance of Cornwall’s
servant shielding Gloucester’s eye; why then, I cannot but counter-object that
collective suicide is no more uncommon a termination to the lives of
collectives than individual suicide is to the lives of individuals, and that
out of all genres of collectives it is perhaps those of a specifically
military stripe that or who most often meet their ends at their own
Hindoo-deity-like gaggle of hands. Who
among us—and perhaps least of all among us, grizzled, fart-hookah-puffing
pundits—can forget such brazenly suicidal military adventures as the Alamo
(which I admittedly might have forgotten by now, had it not been and
were it still not for the insane ubiquity-cum-catchiness of the familiar
adjurative mnemonic formula), Little Bighorn, and, indeed, virtually every
campaign in the first half of the First World War? To be sure, it is at first blush rather hard
to imagine the esprit de kamikaze-corps of an intensity requisite to
such adventures springing into being among the assemblage of highly
geographically mutually disparate individuals requisite to launching a
multi-gigaton nuclear attack, but the feeblest second-blushial exertion of the
fancy—an imaginative analogue to reaching for an object as near to hand as the
TV remote in one’s bathrobe pocket—will churn up a semi-veritable myriad of
plausible scenarios eventuating in such a genesis; scenarios all more or less
centering on the blokes and blokesses in the subs and silos’ being whipped up
into a jingoistic frenzy-cum-lather by a series of reports and statements
transmitted by the organs of mass communication—reports on this or that egregious
and unprovoked attack made by some enemy power, and statements from the
head of state expressing his or determination not to let such egregious and
unprovoked aggression go unpunished; why one can scarcely refrain
from picturing one of these dozens of lathered-up sailors or soldiers strutting
about his or her cabin or office like a sex-starved bantam cock (or game hen),
pumping the air with one or more of his (or her) fists, and repeatedly
ejaculating, “I just cain’t wait to get the call from on high and mash
that wee plastic disc with my middle fanger.
Soowee!” All this—i.e., the ca.
2,000 words I have typed since “Of these I shall mention the military
register first”—has been a way of saying that however little we may respect
Russia as a geopolitical agent, however bumblingly incompetent or flagitiously
vicious we may find their actions on the so-called world stage, we really
should fear Russia more than any other geopolitical agent full stop
(which Briticism reminds me that for the benefit of my non-American readers, I
really must add including the United States [i.e., qua possessor of the
world’s second-largest nuclear arsenal] to the preceding clause) and
accordingly always treat its government’s representatives with something a good
deal more civil than flippancy in diplomatic and peri-diplomatic settings. To be sure, received opinion (perhaps not
only today but also in the recent and perhaps even distant past [for the
opinioneme in question has the air of something Shih-Tzu or some other
ultra-ancient far-eastern wiseacre would have said]) holds that the very most
foolish thing one can do when confronting some anal sphincter
dilatingly-fear-eliciting entity—in the pertinent exempla almost always a dog,
for some reason—is to betray to him, her, or it the merest soupçon of a
suspicion that one fears him, her, or it; and indeed, maintains that during a
standoff with such an entity there is no surer-firer stratagem for getting him,
her, or it to turn around and run away with his, her, or its tail (or most
tail-like available appendage) between his, her, or its legs than to file one’s
fingernails with sublime detachment while whistling “Dixie” (or whatever other
ditty served as the anthem of the losing side in one’s native country’s most
recent civil war). Even as applied to standoffs
with mere non-human beasts armed with nothing but their nature-given armaments
this opinioneme has always struck me as absolute b*l**cks, inasmuch as it seems
to impute to these mere brute critters a power of divination (or paranoia) not
often found in even the most sagacious (or paranoid) of human beings—viz., the
power to envisage ways in which a nail-file may be employed as a deadly weapon,
or in which something even deadlier than a nail-file may be concealed in some
hidden receptacle or orifice on or within the person of some puny, utterly
unprepossessing bare forkèd (tho’ to all appearances non- fork-possessing)
animal. But as applied to
standoffs with artificially armed human beings, and more particularly human
beings armed with artificial weapons that can kill instantly and from a
distance—why, it strikes me as tantamount to whatever the ne plus ultra of
b*l**cks is or are (any attempt to get at this NPU solely via the
generally trusty rhetorical technique of amplification gets one nowhere, or,
rather, gets one to a certain ultima thule that cuts quite against the
grain of the upshot of the present argument, as such hyper-macho monstrosities
as blue whale’s b*l**cks and b*l**cks on a dose of steroids
equivalent in mass and volume to a blue whale’s daily plankton intake eloquently
attest). For why should a bloke or
blokess who has the immediate power of life and death over one care whether one
is afraid of him or her at all, inasmuch as one’s lack of fear is powerless to
harm him or her, inasmuch as it is incapable (at least for the micro-epochal
nonce, while the arts of biological and chemical engineering are doubtless
desperately—and yet almost-doubtless not futilely—collaborating towards the
realization of grotesquely terrifying psychogenetic events of this very kind)
of precipitating the instantaneous germination and maturation of, say, a fully
loaded and functional so-called AK47 at the actual tips of one’s fingers? My own sense of the most prudent way to
behave in such anal sphincter-dilating face-offs differs quite stridently from
received opinion’s and to its presumptive discredit is indubitably traceable to
a much more modern source than Shih-Tzu–namely, a certain dude or bloke,
interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air about five (or, more likely—in conformity
with the rule, my rule [here, incidentally, is a rule that in contrast
to certain others of my devising I should be all too proud to have named after
me {q.v. “On the Golden Age of Videotape and 16mm
Film”}] that after the age of 40 one should double one’s intuitive
estimate of the temporal remoteness of phenomena from one’s own past that
incontrovertibly post-date one’s adolescence and yet cannot incontrovertibly be
pinned to specific dates—ten) years ago; altho’ to its presumptive credit it is
also much more streetwise (or, more properly speaking, sidewalk-wise)
than any apothegm devisable by Shih-Tzu or any other ancient far-eastern
wiseacre. Anyway, this dude or bloke,
whose name escapes me but is presumably quite easily retrievable (although I am
not going to bother to try to retrieve it, partly because it—along with almost
all of the bloke’s or dude’s other biographical particulars [including, truth
to tell, the bit in the because clause to the immediate right of the final,
right-curved bracket of the present parenthesis]—is presumably rhetorically
otiose in the present setting, partly out of resentment [resentment of the same
flavor as the resentment that peremptorily dissuades me from cooking for myself
{q.v. “The Return of Every Man His Own George D.
Painter”}] at my financial incapacity to retain a full-time
fact-checker) because I remember from the interview that he was the fellow or
chap who came up with the now-notorious “Try me: Fly me” advertising slogan for
the now long-since-defunct National Airlines, worked for a time as some kind of
crime reporter (this biographeme, incidentally, is the raison d’être of the almost
all in the immediately preceding parenthesis) and in this capacity
was often required to view the bodies of people who had just been killed by
gunfire, and he remarked that by far the most common expression on the faces of
these hapless individuals (metaphysical scruples preclude my referring to them
as ex-individuals {q.v. “Kripkean Metaphysics and Personal
Eschatology”}) was not one of overwhelming pain but rather of surprise,
surprise that he inferred had been occasioned by their immediate prehumous
expectation that they would not be shot despite having just addressed to their
firearm-armed confronters words to the brazenly insolent-cum-provocative effect
of So you want to shoot me, typo duro? Go ahead: shoot me. As if I give a fetid futuacious fuller’s f**k.
And from this inference he induced
the staggeringly counterintuitive yet ultimately ineluctably compelling
so-called rule of thumb (it really should be christened That Guy or Cove Who
Came up with the Now-Notorious “Try Me : Fly Me” Advertising Slogan’s Law in
the light of its originality and potentially world-changing character) that
when tête-à-tête with a firearm-armed person one should invariably and
preeminently be polite. And
surely whatever politesses, whatever bienséances, are owing to a
mere bullet-laying regular-sized goose are due in at least equal measure to a
warhead-laying Godzilla-sized one; surely at minimum our various foreign
ministers and their various envoys ordinary, extraordinary, and
plenipotentiary, all of whom are, like the rest of us, compelled incessantly to
stare up the, erm, vent of such a Godzilla-sized goose, should not be
hallooing words to effect of So you want to shoot me, typo duro? Go ahead: shoot me. As if I give a fetid
futuacious fuller’s f**k up that vent as a mere matter of diplomatic and
peridiplomatic course. And yet mutatis
mutandis (specifically the substitution of a bear for a goose) our various
foreign ministers et al. have been hallooing just that up that very vent as
just such a matter of course at least since 1999—a year that seems particularly
eligible as a watershed because the aerial bombardment of the soon-to-be-former
Yugoslavia that took place therein, was the first military intervention by NATO
that proceeded according to plan despite having been vetoed by Russia at the
United Nations Security Council. The
then-president of the Russian Federation, Mr. Yeltsin, bellowed at “us,”
meaning every last man, woman, child, dog, cat, gerbil, et al. and etc. in the
NATOsphere, that such wanton snubbage of Russia could very well precipitate a
nuclear war, but “we,” meaning the a(*)**(*)holes in charge of the foreign
policies of the governmental bodies to which every gerbil etc. and et al. in
the NATOsphere were (and still are) obliged and compelled to pay either direct
or oblique financial tribute, ignored him with a mildly exasperated
smile-cum-head-shake, because (so these
soft-spoken, Armani-clad teetotalers reasoned), he was a buffoonish
alcoholic with no fashion sense, and therefore utterly harmless despite his
immediate access to a multi-gigaton nuclear arsenal. And “we” were immediately subsequently
infinitely obliged to Mr. Yeltsin for his boundless
condescension-cum-indulgence in letting “us” have our way in and with the
Balkans without discharging a single sub-microton of that arsenal into the
NATOsphere, let alone annihilating every last gerbil etc. and et al. therein
outright as it was well within his power to do.
And how did “we” respond to this boundless condescension-cum-indulgence
from Mr. Yeltsin? Perchance by
prostrating “our”selves at his feet a hundred times in succession in the
Kremlin’s counterpart to the Oval Office (as Moscow has its own Byelii Dom or
White House, I shouldn’t be surprised if this counterpart to the OO were or was
actually styled the most literal Russian translation of oval office)? No?
Why, then, presumably by at least sending him a bouquet of stoplight
roses and a kiloliter of top-shelf vodka (naturally, if perversely, the vodka
presumably would have had to originate from one of the trendy NATOsphere-sited
distilleries like Rembrandt’s or Gray Goose rather than a Russian one like
Standard or Stolichnaya, as during that fiscally very dire microepoch the
Russian government’s treasury presumably needed every kopek of customs revenue
it could get). Not even. “We” responded, rather, by acting as though
“we” had never heard his remonstration and blithely flouncing “our” way through
the next decade-and-two-thirds as though Russia was or were effectively utterly
diplomatically mute and utterly militarily impotent. I suppose from an-Emily Post-or-Miss Manners’
eye perspective, the perspective of etiquette in the broadest yet purest and
ethically most material sense, the low point of this high-hatting of Russia so
far has been the Obama administration’s assurance some six years ago that the
umpteenth proposed revival of Ronald Reagan’s nuclear defense shield was not by
the stretch of the wildest imagination to graphene-ic thinness intended to be a
fortification against a nuclear attack from Russia; that it was in fact to be
directed at protecting the United States from a nuclear attack by such
so-called rogue states as North Korea and Iran—by countries, in other words,
that at maximum (then) had no practicable nuclear warhead delivery system
faster than fourth-class mail and in some cases had no nuclear weapons at
all. The apparent impossibility of metaphorizing
this assertion in terms both naturally plausible and adequately evocative of
the scale of the forces in play testifies most eloquently to its
as-yet-unsurpassed bumptiousness, chutzpah-hood, and testicular-cum-gluteal fortitude. In naturally plausible terms, it is perhaps
adequately evoked by the image of a white resident of an overwhelmingly black
neighborhood in the so-called Deep South’s surrounding his house with an
electrified barbed wire fence under the pretext of protecting himself from an
invasion of Canadian Eskimos. But in
order adequately to capture the scale of the forces in play, one must posit a
scenario of a type perhaps hitherto only stipulated in animated cartoons of the
Warner Brothers type—a scenario in which, say, the stockpiler of a kiloton of
DDT remonstrates with an asteroid-sized nest of hornets in his attic that he is
merely protecting himself from an invasion of ants from some piddling
average-sized anthill two miles up the road.
And yet for all the jaw drop-triggering rudeness of the Star Wars
revival high-hatting, certain more recent hyperoccidental snubbages of Russia
have bade (and continue to bid) even fairer to eventuate in geopolitical
disaster. I am thinking here of the buildup
since early 2017 of NATO troops in the Baltics in alleged response to alleged
“recent Russian aggression.” That Russia
has aggressed in a militarily strong-cum-geopolitically unignorable sense in
recent years cannot be denied. Most
significantly in this sense he, she, or it has annexed Crimea and concurrently
taken it away from Ukraine (a.k.a. The Former the Ukraine [and even-more
formerly and scandalously The Former Little Russia]). And while many or perhaps even most of the
scads of command-chains and money trails allegedly involved therein often break
or turn cold at the most tantalizing places along the way, it does seem almost
inconceivable that Mr. Putin and Co. are not actively directing and supporting the
Russian quasi-insurgency in southern and eastern Ukraine to some lengthily
extensive extent and in some grossly material manner—in other words, that the
Russian government is not effectively aggressing in Ukraine in a geopolitically
unignorable albeit militarily weak sense.
But as Ukraine is not a Baltic republic, and, indeed, the most
Baltic-ward cities in Ukraine, namely Lviv and Rivni, are some 500 miles’
distance from the most Ukraine-ward city in the Baltics, namely Vilnius, it is
hard to discern what immediate material bearing Russia’s weak or strong
aggression in Ukraine could have on NATO’s militarily strong—and
ever-strengthening—defensiveness in the Baltics. As near as I can tell, this defensiveness has
been solely instigated and justified by an argument from analogy, wherein it
has been alleged that because as in Ukraine there are large minority Russophone
populations in each of the Baltic republics, it is not unlikely that sooner or
later each of these republics will have its own Ukraine-style Russophone
quasi-insurgency shadily masterminded and bankrolled by Moscow. Even to a person like the present writer who
is almost wholly ignorant of the flavor and temperature of relations between
Estonian, Lithuanian, and Latvian speakers, respectively, and Russian speakers
(I refuse to dignify any of these aggregations with the mawkishly kitschy
honorific of community) in these three nation-states, the scenario
envisaged by this argument is plausible enough, because by default one expects
any aggregation of Russophones anywhere outside Russia to have something of a
chip on its collective shoulders, but qua justification of NATO’s troop buildup
in the Baltics qua defensive maneuver it is pure and arrant poppycock. A defensive maneuver by its very definition
is an act directed at a blow that is at minimum already unmistakably aimed at
an unmistakably identifiable target. So
in order for NATO’s present Baltic troop buildup in to be justifiable as a
defensive maneuver, Russia would at minimum have had to have begun its own
Baltic troop build-up, a troop-buildup in the Russian side of the
Russo-Estonian, -Lithuanian, or –Latvian border, in advance of the embarkation
of even the first jeepload of NATO soldiers for the Baltics (and, more
specifically, only the Baltic republic against whose border the Russian buildup
was taking place [e.g. {verging on i.e., owing to the geographical isolation of
the bit of Russia bordering on Lithuania}, Estonia). And as such a buildup had not been begun and
still (touch ever-diminishing piece of wood) has not begun, the present NATO
buildup must be seen if not as an offensive act then at any rate an act no more
remote in character from an offensive act than a defensive one; it is probably
best termed a provocation. In the
ordinary course of international affairs, Country A does not build up troops
along one of the borders of Country B because it, Country A, has formed a mere
supposition of what Country B will do on the evidence of what Country B has
done before near one of its, Country B’s, other borders; but rather because it,
Country A, is itching for a fight with Country B and smugly believes that it,
Country A, can win that fight. And the
combined powers of NATO have no right to be smug about winning a fight with
Russia, inasmuch as even with the inclusion of France and Britain’s combined
total of five hundred nuclear warheads in addition to the United States’ 6,700,
NATO’s nuclear arsenal barely stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Russia’s. It really is just that brutally simple. And the same calculus really should be
applied to any preparation for military engagement with Russia by any
geopolitical agent, and indeed I am inclined to believe that it has been
applied vis-à-vis certain Russian extra-domestic political maneuvers in very
recent history—notably the aforementioned 2014 annexation of Crimea. In international-legal terms that annexation
was absolutely unwarranted, or at any rate no more warranted than Saddam
Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait in 1990 or, indeed, Hitler’s annexation of the
Sudetenland in 1938. But Vladimir Putin
in 2014, in contrast to Saddam Hussein in 1990 or Hitler in 1938, had a
6,700-warhead-strong nuclear arsenal at his disposal; whence, it seems to me,
the then highly prudential lack of enthusiasm on the part of the NATO powers
for scaring up a multinational anti-Russian military coalition in the teeth of
highly vociferous cries of Appeasement! chez their respective bienpensant
mobilities. To be sure, as I have
already implied, these cries of Appeasement! were entirely well-founded
vis-à-vis the international-legal deserts of the appeasee; but at the
same, and ultimately hands-down more materially weighty, time, they were
entirely ill-founded vis-à-vis the prospective effect of the appeasee’s
full employment of the military resources at his disposal. The admittedly lamentable FotM is that in
present-day geopolitical terms appeasement is a full-fledged anachronism
of no more moral weight or moment than wergild or fiefdom in any
so-called value judgment pronounced on any political agent’s comportment
towards a nuclear power. Contemporary
Britain disapprovers of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in 1938
were morally entitled to denounce NC’s concession of Hitler’s annexation of the
Sudetenland because the very worst that Hitler could have visited on Britain
with all the military might then at his disposal was the partial obliteration
of a handful of city-centers and an administratively headache-inducing
usurpation of the government–cum-occupation of the Kingdom—in short, a cost
quite conceivably worth paying in protest of a morally inexcusable act. Present-day NATOsphere-residing denouncers of
Russia’s belligerence possess no such moral entitlement because if Mr. Putin
wishes to he can obliterate not only every city but every jerkwater town,
village, and hamlet—and hence every last human being, dog, cat, and indeed
gerbil—in the NATOsphere; because, in short, he can compel us to pay a cost
that—unless we wish to subscribe LS&B to the fundamentally un-occidental
(q.v., Lord willing) principle that death is worse than dishonor always and
in every extremity—in annihilating us qua payers would void the transaction
of moral significance. The admittedly
lamentable FotM is that a country in possession of a substantial nuclear
arsenal can and indeed must be allowed to do pretty much whatever the fudge it
wants, and in point of fact throughout the overwhelmingly large portion of the
so-called Cold War in which the U.S.S.R. possessed such an arsenal, it was
allowed by the U.S. to do pretty much whatever the fudge that it wanted, with
nary a cry of appeasement’s consequently being heard from any
hyperoccidental to the so-called left of Barry Goldwater (and probably not even
by Mr. Goldwater himself in that exact word [at least not very often]). It is indeed very pleasant to observe that
the Berlin Airlift, the single largest and most defiant defiance of Russian
military might by the United States to date, concluded in May 1949, a mere four
months before the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, and that the
erection of the Berlin Wall twelve years later, by which time the Soviets had
exploded many a hydrogen bomb and embarked on an intercontinental ballistic
missile-building program, essentially provoked nothing more belligerent than a
spell of finger-wagging from the United States.
And the U.S. reacted with comparable material indifference to such other
intrinsically unpardonable Soviet military initiatives as the quelling of the
1956 and 1968 revolutions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the 1980 invasion
of Afghanistan. At immediate present the
prevailing attitude to Russia in the hyperoccident bizarrely seems to favor
“our” rolling the clock back 68 years and comporting “ourselves” towards the
Russkies as if we were all once again living in the days of the Berlin Airlift,
when Russia et federated al. were powerless to lift an unvaporizable finger
against “us” qua host of the world’s sole nuclear power. By the “immediate present,” I suppose I mean
since no more recently than about three years ago, when for reasons that are
completely opaque to me Russophobia started to become one of the three or four
main planks of the general bienpensant political platform. (To chalk the
change up to the centrality of Russophobia to the specific political platform
of the Democratic party during the most recent presidential campaign is to beg
the question in the most technically unimpeachable sense of the phrase, for Russia
was not then up to anything substantially more nefarious than it had not
already been up to during the so-called run-up to the 2014 elections, and even
vis-à-vis Mr. Trump’s alleged Russophilia-actuated high crimes or misdemeanors
it is reasonable to wonder why none of his business activities in even dodgier
nation-States than Russia have received comparable scrutiny.) To be sure, for a
long time before then it had been extremely bad form to be ever so faintly or
equivocally sympathetic to Russia (what with whatever Putin had done to Pussy
Riot and whatnot), but until then it had not been politically mandatory to
spend a substantial proportion of one’s waking hours railing against Russia; it
had been acceptable to regard the checking of Russian ambition as a niche
political program of much less urgency than the pan-sexual integration of
restrooms, the defecation of crypto-racists from law-enforcement agencies, and
of course that perennial yawn-inducer-cum-a*(*)*(e)-chafer, the retardation of
global warming by international, national, regional, local, and above all
hyper-local legislative fiat. Such
having been the case, in 2014 the so-called appeasers (who really should be
called those playing with at least a so-called bog standard full pinochle
deck) in the various hyperoccidental ships of state managed to forestall a
hyperoccidental counteroccupation of Crimea that very probably would have
touched off the nuclear Apocalypse. Now
that the Russophobes have a sizeable chunk—and possibly even a majority—of the
hyperoccidental mobility on their side, it is probably only a matter of the
briefest time (barring the obliging supervention of some other daemon qua
principal conduit of the hyperoccidental mobility’s fury [I term the
supervention obliging because no threat posed or wielded by any daemon,
however formidable he, she, or it may be in his, her, or its own person, could
be more menacing than a 7,300 warhead-strong nuclear arsenal]) until that
selfsame Apocalypse is touched off, until, that is, the Russians—or, to be more
precise, at least probabilistically, some individual Russian or
other—do(es) something to incense the government—or, to be &c.—some
individual human constituent—of one of the hyperoccident’s
by-now-seemingly-innumerable traditionally Russophobic national-political
fosterlings, and thereby elicit(s) an unignorable several-hundred-larynx-strong
ululation of diplomatically unslakeable Russophobic bloodlust from the
hyperoccidental mobility. There are any
number of hypothetical scenarios all-too-plausibly descriptive of the
eliciting-cum-off touching event; my favorite is a variation of the
Anglosphere’s most mythically antediluvian (meaning not necessarily and indeed
very probably not the oldest, but the one that is universally regarded as the
oldest) joke formula, which goes as follows: this uniformed Russian soldier
walks into a bar in downtown Tallinin and orders a shot of Standart or
Stolichnaya garnished with a soupcon of ordinary table-pepper (naturally
according to the supposedly organic mixological wont of natives of whatever
Podunk or indeed jerkwater Russian town he hails from). As he raises the jigger-glass to his fatally
formidably nostrill’d shnoz he unfortunately happens to be inhaling so that a
pepper-flake or two is sucked into his inner-nose and precipitate(s) a sneeze
whose mistified snotty contents happen to end up on the shoulder of his
immediate neighbor, a mufti-clad bloke who thereupon asks him in Russian, but
in the fittingly yet fatally nasal tones of some sort of Estonian accent
peculiar to certain Estonians who have never learned to speak Russian even
half-a(*)*(*)*edly fluently, “I say, old cove-cum-c***t, aren’t you in the
Russian army?” Whereupon the sneezer
genially replies in Russian, Yes, i.e., Da, i.e., Да; but
unfortunately his geniality is thwarted by his accent, which happens to sound
exactly like that peculiar to Lasnamäe, Tallinin’s most heavily Russophone and hence
most Estoniophobic neighborhood or district, so that the sneeze-victim feels
duty-bound to hop forthwith on to his mobile-blower, ring up NATO HQ (whose
digits he has speed dial-programmed against just this sort of exigency), and
say to the receptionist (in impeccable Etonian [yes, Johnny Yobbo {not to be
confused with any previous DGR of mine (tho’ who knows what might be in store
for him in the improbably non-Apocalyptic future?)}, that’s Etonian not Estonian]
English, natch), “Would you please put me through to Herr Stoltenberg?” And the rest, as they say, or should say, is
the very-end-of-human-history-cum-mere beginning of the history of mushroom
cloud-patterned curtains. Doh!-stroke-What
a congeries of pointlessly mutually affiliated cahntrees, or, rather, c**teries! One (i.e., I, albeit probably no
other living human being) might well (i.e., really do) wonder what
miasma, will-o’-the-wisp, or phantasmagoria could be sufficiently potent to
persuade every last member of the hyperoccidental mobility that he or she had
in geopolitical terms been spirited away back to early 1949. And the only plausible contender for such an
office that has so far occurred to one is the hyperprosaic but serviceable
miasma autc. of lack of media coverage of the existence of the two extant
multi-gigaton nuclear arsenals. In
other words, it seems likely to me that because these two arsenals are hardly
ever mentioned in the news (if, for instance, to impart a sense of their
effective mediatic nullity, each and every mention by a major news service be
analogously equated in rhetorical force with the atomic bomb dropped on
Hiroshima, these two arsenals would be rhetorically dwarfed by Arsenal Football
Club perhaps five times as dramatically as the Hiroshima bomb is dwarfed in
point of brute TNT-tonnage-yield by the paired nuclear arsenals themselves) the
weit(e[r/s]) if not accablant majority of the hyperoccidental
mobility is or are but dimly aware of them, and a substantial plurality of that
mobility is or are entirely ignorant of their existence. To be sure, nuclear weapons tout court are in
the news not all that infrequently, almost invariably in connection with the
wily shenanigans of the Iranians or North Koreans, but in these cases one is at
most-cum-worst being asked to contemplate an embryonic nuclear arsenal of
ultimately no greater immediate destructive force than the U.S.’s in, say,
1950. And as it has been probably more
than a full quarter-century—i.e., the interval separating us from the signing
of the START II treaty—since the two big nuclear arsenals were even
intermittently in the headlines, is it not reasonable to suppose that there are
enormous numbers—say, tens of millions—of purportedly educated and
well-informed hyperoccidentals under the age of 30, or even as old as 40, who
are entirely unaware of these arsenals, or at the very least, unaware of the
sheer destructive power thereof? For all
the asperity of my preliminary strictures on those who cannot be a(*)*(*)ed to
brief themselves on historical periods antedating their own births, I am not
entirely unsympathetic to these so-called millennials’ ignorance on this score,
for I can remember a micro-epoch quasi-consubstantial with the present one when
I was wholly ignorant of the existence of these arsenals (which were then
substantially larger than they are now), and owing perhaps to exactly
consubstantial causes. I am thinking of
the very early 1980s (cf. Whit Stillman’s Last Days of Disco), and my
certainty of my ignorance on the present score during that micro-epoch is owing
to a memory of the lamentation of purportedly imminent nuclear war by
some nutter of a drunk-tank inmate in an episode of the classic mid
mid-70s-through-late early-80s cop-sitcom Barney Miller. As at the time my only association of the word
nuclear with anything remotely baleful hailed from the then-quite-recent
and meta-Arsenal FC-scale coverage of the partial meltdown at the Three Mile
Island nuclear power plant, I could not but picture a nuclear war as
some sort of reciprocal deliberate synchronized induction of meltdowns in all
the nuclear power plants within the warring parties’ dominions—a wildly
inefficient modus belli gerendi, to be sure, by comparison with an
exchange of bombs, and yet also an eerily quasi-plausible one now that
State-sponsored so-called cyber-terrorism is all the rage as the next big thing
in sub-Apocalyptic war-making. Anyway,
it seems to me quite likely that I thought of a nuclear war along such China
Syndrome-ian lines rather than along Dr. Strangelove-ian ones at
that time simply because the news media had not lately been feeding us much
reportage on or many images of nuclear weaponry proper and its prospective use
in military conflict—this probably largely as a legacy of so-called détente,
the relaxation of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union
beginning not long after the Cuban Missile Crisis and continuing, despite such
long-simmering potential nuclear-Apocalyptic flashpoints as the Vietnam War and
the well-nigh actualized nuclear-Apocalyptic flashpoint of the 1973
Arab-Israeli War, until the very late mid-70s.
Of course, now, in the long present—meaning since about 1994—the
so-called Cold War is conceived of as a single ummottled hard cheese-block of
uniformly mutual geopolitical animosity tidily book-ended (or vice-gripped) by
the years 1949 and 1989, but the residents of the micro-epoch of détente took a
markedly different view of the epochology.
In their view, the perdurance of the Cold War was largely a lingering
but thankfully moribund holdover from the so-called McCarthy era. To be sure, the détente microepoch-residents
acknowledged, the hyperoccidental and Communist blocs were still governed along
radically mutually incommensurable political lines, but now (so the détente
microepoch-residents asserted) that no hyperoccidental politician of any
geopolitical consequence believed or even faintly feared that the Soviet Union
was trying to take over, let alone destroy, the non-Communist semi-world—now
that Senator McCarthy himself and his State-Departmental counterpart John
Foster Dulles were long dead and Mr. Goldwater and his Red-bashing crew
(consisting partly of the Pentagon hawks whose influence had made the Kennedy
administration much more hawkish than it would have liked to be) had given over
their national-governmental ambitions—the danger of an outright military
confrontation between the U.S.S.R. et al. and the U.S.A. et al. had been
greatly reduced and was creeping asymptotically (and presumably inexorably)
ever closer to zero. Why, if memory
serves me faithfully—and I see no reason for mistrusting it as the memory in
question hails not from my détente-microepoch early childhood but from my
immediately post-START II early adulthood, when I most recently consulted the
texts in question—the period of détente even saw the publication of diplomatic
and military policy analyses that referred to the Cold War unreservedly in the
past tense, as in such constructions as “at the height of the Cold War, in
1953,” or “at the very end of the Cold War, in 1963.” Of course, in 1981 the hard-line
Goldwater-style Republican Ronald Reagan was elected president and immediately
altered the tone, if not the substance, of the U.S.’s disposition to the Soviet
Union, such that the Soviet and American nuclear arsenals started regularly
appearing in the headlines once again, and the Cold War ceased to be a
prospective anachronism, but the détente microepoch residents had not known or
even expected this, and there is no sane reason to blame them for not having
known or expected it, because then as now the U.S. polity and public were
virtually evenly divided (or uniformly befuddled) on so-called key foreign
policy issues, such that at least inasmuch as the executive branch of the U.S.
had any say in the matter, détente might very well have continued well into the
1980s and indeed well into the 21st century; but by this or that
same token, there is no sane reason to pardon the détente microepoch residents—or,
at any rate, those of them old enough to have known better (for fudge’s sake,
the present writer was only eight years old at the very end of détente
micro-epoch and therefore at least a year-and-a-half younger than the
comparatively grizzled youngster who learned that Leonid Brezhnev was General
Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union autc.)–for having ever
taken their eyes off the multigigaton matzoh-ball, for having regarded the
geopolitical program, official or otherwise, of the Soviet government as being
of greater material geopolitical weight than that government’s 45-to-65 percent
share in that matzoh-ball, and the long present’s reflexive appraisal of Mr.
Yeltsin’s and then Mr. Putin’s geopolitical habitus in feigned or actual
ignorance of that share, though equally eminently comprehensible, is equally
damnably unpardonable.
Like
or as I said or was saying, I find the military register of Russia’s present
geopolitical grandeur superlatively boring, and thirteen single-spaced pages
later, I trust the reader (DG or otherwise) shares my boredom. But our fellow-feeling-cum-unanimity
vis-à-vis this one index of Russia qua third-greatest great power is certainly
no guarantee that we shall be of one heart-cum-mind vis-à-vis the next index
thereof that I shall adduce—viz., the admittedly hypernaff, shopworn,
moth-eaten, and indeed downright corny one of brute geographical
expansiveness-cum-capaciousness. At
some point in the 1980s—not the very early 1980s, mind you—the Canadian-American
sketch comedy show SCTV devoted an episode to a supposed satellite feed
from Soviet television, and one of the phony Soviet programs included therein
consisted solely of the presenter (Dave Thomas)’s bombastically boastful
demonstrations of how many smaller countries could be fitted into an outline
map of the U.S.S.R. “Look,” he would
triumphantly remark while pointing at the map, “Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey, West
Germany, and Zaire [not that I can remember the names of any of the countries
actually in-fitted or have been able to be a***d to try to find them out via
You T**be beforehand; I include the last two by way of imparting an air of
period verisimilitude to the catalogue] are now in map. But map still has much room for other
countries. How mighty is Soviet
Union!” The scenario was silly enough to
be funny but at the same time rational enough to be an object of satire: there
was indeed no getting round either the fact that the U.S.S.R. was the world’s
most geographically expansive and capacious country or the conclusion that
merely maintaining this brute geographical supremacy was something the Soviet
State was entitled to take some more than negligible measure of pride in. Of course, the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in
1991 left the Russian Federation bereft of its watertight political affiliation
with three handfuls (minus a finger whose selection I bequeath as an exercise
to the reader) of former Soviet republics turned independent nation-States,
each of which carried away along with it a portion of the U.S.S.R.’s former
geographical bulk. But so huge a share
of that bulk had been occupied by the Russian S.F.S.R. (they don’t or didn’t
call the largest of the former S.F.S.R.s, the former The Ukraine, “Little
Russia” for nothing), that the new Russian N.(S.)F.N.(S.)R. was still the biggest
country in the world by a staggering margin—viz. nearly
two-and-three-quarters-of a million miles or 71% of the land-mass of the
second-biggest country, Canada. Of
course, the Soviet Union had never been the world’s most populous country, and
the severance of the former S.F.S.R.s substantially albeit not dramatically
reduced its standing in that alternative reckoning of greatness. (I have already touched on Russia’s
helplessness on the score of the third and now-most-fetishized RoG, that of
GDP, and I shall not touch on it again until I reach my explication of No. 2 in
the above itemized list of assertions, without which explication this
helplessness is not worth any further ontouching.) And so athwart the physical-geographical
argument in favor of Russia’s greatness there runs a counterargument that most
of Russia’s corporeal bulk is effectively empty space inasmuch as it is
devoid of human inhabitants. And even to
a prevailingly misanthropic creature such as the present writer this argument
is in a certain register quite plausible and even compelling; for inasmuch as
despite my prevailing misanthropy I concede that caeteris paribus (and
of course the caeteris are hardly anywhere near to being paribus)
every patch of land is made more estimable by its occupation by a human being,
I am compelled further to concede that, say, India is in a certain way a
greater country than Russia simply because it has more than several times as
many human inhabitants. But I also
believe that tenuity of human habitation has a peculiar grandeur of its own, a
grandeur akin or at least analogous to that of the sun, which for all its size
and incandescent brilliance is after all nothing but a big ball of gas—a state
of matter much more full of empty space than the liquid and solid ones. Consider, if you will, Russia’s easternmost
and westernmost major cities, St. Petersburg and
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy. The former
city lies at the approximate longitude of Cairo, the latter at that of
Sydney. A scant 1,200 miles separate the
former from the Prime Meridian, and an even scanter 600 separate the latter
from the International Dateline. In
short, the distance between these two cities spans seventeen-twentieths of the
eastern hemisphere and a quarter of the circumference of the entire globe as
measured at the equator. Terrestrial
distances between two points simply and literally cannot get more than
one-and-a-third times as long as the distance between St. Petersburg and
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy. When one
ponders the virtual practical insuperability of this distance, the confounded insolence
of former President Barack Obama’s description of Russia as a “regional power”
becomes starkly, risibly apparent. But
in the present instance I am not adverting to St. Petersburg and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy
qua two intrinsically and mutually impartial geometrical points but rather qua two
mutually partial Russian cities—two sizeable agglomerations of people
within whose confines Russian sovereignty is generally acknowledged and the
Russian language is generally spoken and understood. Of course, of the pair only St. Petersburg in
comprising more than five-and-a-quarter million inhabitants, is a proper
metropolis, a big city in the strong sense, but Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy is
certainly no mere glorified village.
Comprising as it does more than 180,000 inhabitants, it is
demographically larger than such formidable hyperoccidental middleweights as
Macon, Georgia; Bern, Switzerland; and Guelph, Canada—cities that all enjoy the
amenities of road and rail communication with the so-and-rightly-called outside
world, amenities that Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy has been compelled to forgo
from its foundation onwards. (I daresay
that if bereft of these amenities, the present inhabitants of Guelph, Bern, and
Macon would high-tail it to Toronto, Zurich, and, Atlanta [or, indeed, if these
cities let them down on the same score, to Buffalo, Strasbourg, and El Paso] as
fast as their legs or wings would carry them.
And yet for all its brute physical-geographical isolation
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy somehow contrives to be a city inhabited almost
solely by people who style themselves Russians as unabashedly as
tenth-generation St. Petersburgers and speak as their native tongue a language
universally known as Russian. For
a sense of the scale of political grandeur of this instance of
physical-geographical transcendence, one need only compare it to its closest
analogues in the United States. The most
obvious such analogue is of course the pairing of Nome, Alaska, our
northernmost and westernmost incorporated city, and Key West, Florida, our southernmost
and easternmost one. But of course Nome
with its piddling 3,800 inhabitants is a city in legal name only, and Key West,
though a sizable burglet of 26,000 souls, is certainly in no danger of being
twinned with Guelph, Bern, or Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy. If one even dreams of rendering demographic
justice in the analogue one must scale it down so that it is bounded by the two
most mutually distant 100,000-inhabitants-plus-sized cities in the so-called
lower 48 States, namely Seattle, Washington and Miami, Florida. Here, of course and imprimis, one
notices that the intrametropolitan distance of 3,300 miles is risibly small by
comparison with that between St. Petersburg (Russia not Florida) and P-K, but I
do not wish to make very much of this shortfall because 3,300 miles is still
jaw drop-elicitingly long by most intranational standards, and notably by
comparison with certain other maximum caliper-compasses attainable in certain
other polities that I wish to belittle even more disparagingly than I am now
belittling the United States (more on these anon). At present I think it most fitting to draw
attention to the analogue’s shortcomings in the linguistic register as
manifested by the fact that while (at least to the best of the present writer’s
knowledge) English is the only first language spoken by any demographically
substantial proportion of the population of Seattle, a highly significant
proportion, and possibly even a majority, of the population of Miami speak
Spanish rather than English as their first language. And of course one may delineate if not quite
a myriad then at the very least a hemi-hecaiad of shorter crow’s-flight
trajectories disembarking from Seattle and alighting in some comparably hefty
or appreciably heftier Stateside metropolitan conurbation in which Spanish rather
than English is the first language of a highly significant proportion of the
conurbation’s populace (including, incidentally, a demographically substantial
proportion of that conurbation’s U.S. citizens)—Seattle to Los Angeles, Seattle
to San Diego, Seattle to Brownsville, Seattle to El Paso, Seattle to Las
Cruces, etc. Such trajectories, mutatis
mutandis, are virtually undelineable within the present borders of the Russian
Federation. Place one tip of your
calipers on any indisputably Russophone Russian city such as St. Petersburg or
P-K, and you are as safe as houses to bet hundred-ruble-notes to bubliki that
the first named cis-Russian border dot that will present itself as a
touchdown-point for the opposite tip will be a town or city inhabited almost
exclusively by Russophones. And it
should not be forgotten that the language spoken by these Russophones in these
cities is named Russian after the country of Russia, the country in
which these cities are all sited. By
contrast, the language prevailingly spoken in Seattle (though not in Los
Angeles, San Diego, Brownsville, El Paso, Las Cruces, etc.) is not named American
or United Statesian but English after the country of England
sited some 3,200 miles from the nearest point to it in the United States. Of course, many times more people speak this
language in the United States than in any other country including England, but
this demographic fact does not in any way or to any extent alter England’s
proprietorship of this language. (In
this regard the Scots [and no, as “Against Intralingual Diversity”
makes plain,
I do not consider Scots a language], Welsh, Irish, Australian, New
Zealand, and Canadian Anglophones are obviously all in scaled-down versions of
the same sad boat as the one occupied by us Yank Anglophones.) No matter how many people speak English in
the United States relative to England—and no matter, indeed, whether or not
England as a political-cum-geographical entity continues to exist—unless or
until English is rechristened American or United Statesian or
some other nominalized toponymic adjective pairing it inalienably with the
United States and with no other political-cum-geographical entity (and the
failure even of an American Anglophobe as famous as H. L. Mencken to effect
such a rechristening—and this at a time when Americans were generally much less
well-disposed to the English than they are now—suggests that it is not likely
to be effected anytime soon given that no American Anglophobe of any fame
whatsoever seems to be agitating for it now), it will be incapable of serving
as what one may term a hard signifier of the United States’ ontological
integrity. I have no interest in
asserting either that this
utterly-contingent-but-for-all-that-seemingly-utterly-obdurate nomenclatural
obduracy is a good thing or that it is a bad thing. Hang about-stroke scratch that: I actually
have a great deal of interest in emphatically asserting that it is a
good thing—partly as a semi-Anglophile and partly as a Johnsonian Tory who
obdurately believes that change qua change is always a bad thing. But at least at the present moment this
interest is not in play, at least not qua detractor of the United States qua
headquarters of Anglophonia. At the
present moment I merely wish to point out that the United States’ logical
inability to declare itself the eponym of a language spoken more or less
universally within its own borders makes it, the United States, a much more
loosely ontologically constituted entity than Russia, and consequently a lesser
power than Russia in at least one non-trivial respect. To be sure, linguistic eponymity is not the
only, or necessarily even the most formidable, tool of hard signification at
the disposal of a territory-qua-polity seeking to establish or shore up its own
ontological integrity, and at least at the present moment the United States
wields a number of such tools with considerable, or at least conceivably
super-Russian, skill, panache, and aplomb.
The most eloquent of these tools now in operation is probably our Interstate
Highway System, with its inalienable and unmistakable sans serif white-lettered
and red white and blue shield-surmounted green signs, which are indeed
conspicuously present all over this land, including in each and every
one of the aforementioned prevailingly non-Anglophone conurbations. While Jose Seis-Tecate-Pack in El Paso or Las
Cruces may know (or fail to know) his culo rather than his ass
from un hoyo en la tierra, he is as abjectly dependent as his gringo
fellow-ciudadanos on the signage of the interstate highway system to get
from Mesa Vista to Durazno or Paseo de Onate to East Madrid Avenue. And yet the present sweep, solidity, instant
identifiability, and pervasiveness of the U.S. Interstate Highway System is no
cause for outright smugness about the ontological integrity of the United
States qua polity-cum-territory, for systems of parallel sweep, solidity,
instant identifiability, and pervasiveness all over this land have
proved or bid fair to prove as evanescent as a dodo masquerading as a
mayfly. Consider, for unignorable
ready-to-hand example, the more ancient non-limited-access U.S. Highway
System. A combination of
intrametropolitan assimilation into local throughways and intermetropolitan
desuetude has effectively annihilated this system qua anything more substantial
than a(n) historical relic, and indeed, the famous continent-spanning Route 66
has been so ruthlessly cannibalized and negligently left to rot that it may
justly now be reckoned a kind of American Appian Way. Consider, too, a less ready-to-hand yet for
all that perhaps no less chilling example, that dictionary-margin-worthy
illustration of the idiom ghost of its former self, the United States
Postal System. For the nonce, its
familiar arch-topped navy-blue boxes remain fixtures of our urban landscapes
and its slightly less familiar (because forever morphing in make, model, and
label-design) white-blue-and-red (sic [I have listed the colors in descending
order of visual-field-occupation]) delivery trucks and vans fixtures (though roving
fixtures) of our suburban landscapes as well, but now that Seinfeld’s
USPS carrier Newman’s highly reluctant (and in its time scandalous) admission
that nobody needs mail has been actualized as an idée reçue, the USPS’s
days as an ontological signifier of U.S. sovereignty are probably more than
figuratively numbered. And recent
proclamations by even the most disinterested sources that after a long identity
crisis the USPS qua rapid package-delivery service is now fairly thriving and
that indeed in its fulfillment of this rapid package-delivering function the
USPS’s best, or at least most remunerative, days may still lie ahead of it,
have absolutely no detractive bearing on this glum prognosis of mine, at least
in the short term; for at least for the nonce the USPS qua rapid
package-delivery service is an Uncle Sammy-Come-Lately in a crowded field of
wholly non-governmentally affiliated rapid package-delivering firms, notably
Fed Ex, UPS, and, most troublingly of all from the perspective of a would-be
maintainer of the United States’s ontological integrity, that Germany-headquartered
(and color-schemed) Paketlieferunggesellschaft, DHL. Indeed, as of this writing it is not only
conceivable but entirely plausible (though admittedly not very probable) that
DHL will trounce all its rivals including the USPS and thus become the sole
rapid-package-delivering-firm operational within the borders of the United
States. Why the scenario is enough to
make Benjamin Franklin qua first postmaster-general turn in his grave. This is not to say that I am saying that even
if every cubic inch of cardboard delivered from Seattle to Miami and between
and among all points in between were swathed in the Vaterland-evoking
red-and-yellow DHL livery Americans would ever come to suppose that they lived
in the seventeenth German Land.
Indeed, more than likely in such a case most of them would not even
realize that DHL was not an American company, just as most of them probably do
not know (inasmuch as the present writer himself has only recently learned
this) that their aspirin-manufacturer of first resort, Bayer, is headquartered
in Germany. What is to say that I
am saying is merely but not trivially that the ontological integrity of a
polity not inalienably because eponymously bound up with a language is perforce
a piecemeal affair that is necessarily subject to—and in the course of time
invariably if not inevitably subjected to—erosion in all sorts of registers by
all sorts of agents, and that such a polity must never smugly depend on its
official institutions abstractly considered to shore it up against a collapse
into absolute nullity in the most strictly conceivable (albeit conceivably
trivial) sense. To particularize this
point: we Americans must not rely on, say, the mere uninterrupted functioning
of our Federal government to insure that something called the United States of
America continues to exist inasmuch as the ontological footprint of our Federal
government eo ipso is certainly much tinier than that of our Interstate Highway
system and very probably at least a bit tinier than that of Federal Express and
UPS, albeit at least a wee bit bigger than that of DHL and Bayer. The present writer has enjoyed and exploited
ample opportunity to observe and marvel at the tininess of this U.S.
Federal-governmental ontological footprint thanks to his
22-year-long-and-counting residence in the sub-Federal State of Maryland. In gross gross domestic productive terms,
Maryland is a virtual colony of the U.S. Federal Government owing to its
immediate abutment on the District of Columbia (if the Providence that is
merely the eponym of the capital of Rhode Island and not to be confused with
that city itself allow[s] I shall have more to say on the indispensability of
geographical propinquity qua administrative lubricant semi-anon). Despite this, my sightings of material
exhibits of evidence of the Federal occupation have been few and rare. Here in Baltimore City, my place of residence
in the strong sense, I can think of only one such exhibit that I have ever
clapped my eyes on—viz., the vertically rather low-slung if horizontally not
unimposing George H. Fallon Federal Building in the city center, more
specifically on the north side of Lombard Street and across Hopkins Place from
the Royal Farms Arena. (It could not
implausibly be argued that Federal Hill, at the southern end of the Inner
Harbor, merely in virtue of its name, and the Star Spangled Banner House and
Fort McHenry, in virtue of their association with the consecration of the flag
of the federated republic as a national emblem, also constitute bits of Federal
footprintage; but I am inclined to reject this argument on the grounds that
Federal Hill does not conspicuously advertise its own name in situ, and
that at least since the proscription of the display of the so-called Stars and
Bars in most former Confederate states, the flying of the so-called Stars and
Stripes has signified an at-most half-hearted endorsement of the federal system
of government tout court, and no sort of endorsement at all of the U.S. Federal
government specifically.) And even
during my on-average-biyearly traversal of the so-called Baltimore-Washington
corridor, a cluster of mutually parallel transportational arteries alongside
which are parked such formidable organs of the U.S. Federal government as Fort
Meade, the Goddard Space Flight Institute, and the National Security Agency, I
have yet to catch a glimpse of so much as the tiniest scrap of architectural
evidence, to be vouchsafed the briefest of shuftis of the lower ankle of a
cornice or cornerstone, capable of convincing me that the Federal sub-entities
in question are not utter chimeras, veritable Potemkin villages or staged moon
landings without the houses or the moon; indeed, had my trusty Rand McNally and
ADC atlases (or the signage along Interstate Highway 95 and Maryland Highway
295, visible only during the minority of occasions on which I have traversed
the corridor in question by bus or car rather than by train) not informed me otherwise,
I never would have supposed central Maryland to be a jot more richly or
oppressively occupied by the Feds than the most states-rightsist tract of
Fedaphobia in the so-called Bible belt or so-called Deep South; and, indeed, it
is only several minutes after I have penetrated the limits of Washington City
itself, and the Washington Monument and Capitol dome finally elbow their way
into view from behind hundreds of acres of mid-rise commercial and residential
real estate, that I get any sort of sense that I am in the quasi-municipal
headquarters of the U.S. Federal government rather than in any old (with the
emphasis on old) small-to-mid-sized Atlantic city, be it Baltimore,
Washington [DC not PA], Wilmington [DE not NC] Newark [NJ not DE], or Philadelphia
[PA not AM]. In short-stroke-at bottom,
even in its most established precincts, in locales wherein a plurality of the
population must call it its (or their) employer and bread-giver, and wherein
scarcely a living human individual does not depend at least indirectly on it
for his or her livelihood, the U.S. Federal government seems to be doing its
best to keep a low profile, as they say.
Its away-tuckedness even in these precincts in which it holds greatest
sway reminds me of Longinus’s admittedly disputable aperçu on the retired
situation of the genitals on the human body and suggests that somebody of some
perduring influence (exactly who is difficult to pin down [for if one flags
this somebody either as the American people or the Federal government
itself one is attributing to some quite gargantuan-cum-nebulous
collective entities a kind and degree of moral-cum-political calculus of which
they hardly seem capable]), far from wishing to boast of the U.S.F.G.’s
grandeur and might, is actually and painfully ashamed of its very
existence. In gross economic terms the
Tea-Partiers and their even more Whiggish successors have doubtless been well
within their rights to rail against the k***u-like growth of big government,
for there is no denying that the U.S. Federal government is a substantially
larger entity by all salient economic measures—viz. the number of agencies
under its umbrella, the amount of money it takes in and expends, and the number
of people working for it—than it was a hundred or even fifty years ago; such
that if one wishes to defend the U.S.F.G. one really must do so on purely
utilitarian grounds; one must, in other words, argue that the American people
are materially better off for all this Federal-governmental growth than they
would have been without it, for in order to defend the U.S.F.G on the grounds
of the unreality of the expansion, one must descend to such a minutely
microhistorical level—to the fleetingly frugal fiscal policy of this or that
Congress or this or that half-term of a presidency—as to invite and indeed
secure trouncing by anyone who takes even the most modestly long view, the view
of, say, a single decade (i.e., five Congresses or two-and-a-half single-term
presidencies). All the same, if (heaven
forfend!) shove is ever accosted by push—if, that is, the Fed-bashers ever
start properly feeling their oats and genuinely thinking they can get away with
throwing their weight around, if they ever get it into their heads to call upon
a thousand torch-wielding mobs of peasants (i.e., twenty such mobs per state)
to incinerate the nearest totem of U.S. Federal sovereignty, the nearest
Bastille-analogue, as it were, it would seem that they are going to be rather
hard-pressed to get more than two-or-three-fifths of a handful of these mobs to
their targets without resorting to highly detailed directions—e.g., “Take I-68
to Exit 53, take a right on to U.S. 27, follow it to State Road 46, take a
left, follow SR46 to County Road 49 (a.k.a. Bent Spoon Lane [a.a.k.a. Uri
Geller Way]), take a left, and a half a mile farther along, just past the Dairy
Queen, you’ll espy a gray two-story building.
That, my fellow friends of liberty, is the district office of the
god-awful bloodsucking Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement”—which is
as good as to say that they won’t manage to get them there at all, because
nothing takes the wind out of the sails (i.e., torches) of a torch-wielding mob
of peasants more efficaciously than having to pull off the road every five
minutes to consult a sat-nav map. But
the prospective fecklessness of the would-be Fed-torchers is certainly cause
for smugness on the part of any would-be (and presumably firehose-or water
bucket-armed) Fed-defenders, for the more than figuratively myriad sites of
Federal-governmental activity are as out-of-the-way, obscure, and recondite to
them as they are to their adversaries; meaning that if word got round in their
camp that torch-wielding mobs of would-be Fed-destroying peasants were a-car,
they (the presumably firehose-or water bucket armed would-be Fed-defenders)
would likewise have to rely on their leaders and personal sat-navs to reach
their posts and would consequently be just as vulnerable to throwing in the
towel on the whole thing and heading back home for pizza, TV, coition,
autc.
All
this since my mention of Nome, Alaska has essentially been by way of building
up to a cautionary meta-ontological-cum-meta-rhetorical comparison of the
United States since the mid-twentieth century to the European Union since its
foundation. Admittedly the present
moment is not exactly a salutary one for drawing this comparison either
tactfully or non-hysterically. Now that
nobody in the European Union apart from the core membership of the British
Liberal Democratic Party (whose Europhilia, as it basically amounts to
Francophilia, would collapse in a trice if France withdrew from the EU) seems
to be positively enthusiastic about the EU, and that all energies within
it seem to be directed towards simply holding the gosh-d**n thing together for
another year or so, the suggestion that any political entity that has managed
not only to subsist intact but expand both territorially and demographically
over a period of more than a century-and-a-half bears any comparison whatsoever
to such a political rattletrap-cum-tatterdemalion cannot but seem—well, not to
put too fine a point on it, both barmy and bonkers. Nevertheless, I believe that the comparison
must be drawn because there really is no other currently extant polity
that bears any credible comparison whatsoever with the United States in terms
of its raisons d’être et de ne se faire foutre pas immédiatement—or less
credible comparison with Russia in those selfsame terms. Granted: the EU doesn’t have a
polity-spanning limited-access highway network, and the U.S. does. Granted: the EU doesn’t have a
polity-spanning mail-delivery network, and the U.S. does. Granted: the EU doesn’t even have a
polity-spanning currency, and the U.S. does.
But beyond these admittedly powerful bonding agents, on the
formidableness of the strength of two of which I have already expatiated, what has
the U.S. really got holding it together?
The Constitution, you (by no means a DGR) say? But the EU has got and does have a
constitution of its own. To be sure, its
constitution is barely a quarter as old as the U.S. Constitution, but it is no
less legally binding within the borders of the EU than the U.S. Constitution is
within the borders of the U.S. And then
of course we must remember that the U.S. Constitution is always subject to
alteration or, in constitutional-legal terms, to amendment. The ever-self-renewing tribe of
anal-hookah-huffing boosters of our polity never cease praising this subjection
under the incantatory auspices of the word flexibility, but in material
legal terms the constitutional attribute so called might no less aptly (if
admittedly much less elegantly) be dubbed toss-out-a/i-bility, because
it effectively amounts to a blank check to the citizenry to alter the
constitution, or even to abolish, it whenever they durn-well please. To be sure, since the incorporation of the
Bill of Rights into the U.S. Constitution amendments have been rare events, and
the two most recent of them, the twenty-seventh and twenty-sixth (prohibiting
sitting members of Congress to vote themselves raises and allowing
eighteen-year-olds to vote, respectively) were and are so ancient, equitable,
and equable that one cannot help inferring from them that the old USC (not to
be confused with the vintage battleship of the same name) is in absolute
shipshape. All the
same, one must acknowledge, first, that the process of Constitutional amendment
has brought about some pretty far from equable, and indeed downright radical,
changes in the law of the entire polity, changes that were far from universally
popular and that were consequently implemented at best (or worst, depending on
your attitude to the amendment in question) halfheartedly in substantial
subdomains of the polity and that in one case—the 18th Amendment, prohibiting
the manufacturing and sale of alcohol within the polity—were even ultimately
subject to reversal by counter-amendment; second, that the U.S. Constitution,
however it has happened to stand at any given historical moment, has always
been something of a hermeneutic Rorschach blot in many of its paragraphs, such
that hair’s-width demographic majorities have contrived to insinuate de facto
amendments into it (here I am of course thinking mainly of the legalization of
abortion via a highly controversial interpretation of the fourteenth amendment);
and finally, that the Constitution itself stipulates that the entire process of
amendment can be circumvented by the calling of what it (the Constitution)
terms “a convention to propose amendments to the U.S. Constitution,” and that
all sorts of famous and notorious individuals and collectivities of both narrow
views and substantial influence have been clamoring for such a convention in
recent decades, and that that clamor is almost certainly as loud now as it ever
has been. In short, to the extent that
one views an ideal polity as a polity in which everyone living under its
auspices finds his or her existence at least minimally tolerable in every
significant register, one must view the U.S. Constitution as a failure qua
guarantor-cum-administrator of those auspices, inasmuch as it has quite handily
and skillfully, and indeed with the delicate precision of a deli-meat slicer,
seen to it that very nearly exactly one half of the U.S. population will
perpetually feel itself (or themselves) to be living under (or in) a ruthlessly
implacable tyranny, inasmuch as it (or they) will perpetually feel itself (or
themselves) to be legally compelled to defer to the will of an
at-best-technical majority and in some cases (notably those determined by the
outcome of a presidential election) outright minority with whom it at least
purportedly passionately disagrees on some issue that it regards as being of
paramount moral significance. Such being
the case, our only present quasi-guarantors against an instant instant-replay
of the American Civil War are, first, the geographical, and consequently
political, dispersal of those peremptorily committed to this or that
purportedly morally un**umpable issue—by which I essentially mean the well-nigh
dropsical plethora of so-called pro-choice, anti-gun, &c. types in the
urban centers of even the reddest of the so-called red states (the appalling
displacement in the American political imagination of the color red qua
dedicated synecdoche of Communism by the color red qua dedicated synecdoche of
Redneckism will, it is to be hoped, be addressed at due length in a more
seasonable passage within the present essay) and the complementary
superabundance of so-called pro-life, anti-gun, &c. types in the rural
hinterlands of even the bluest of the so-called blue states, such that a
demographically representative solid regional political bloc would seem to be
difficult albeit not quite impossible to assemble; and second, the probability
that the prevailing mass of all the immoderately self-righteous talk about
issues such as abortion and gun control amounts to what Samuel Johnson termed cant,
a mere “mode of talking in society” that for all its outward shews of
passion is incapable of making its exponent “sleep an hour less or eat an
ounce less meat,” such that even if the
Second Amendment is repealed (or, more likely, modified to exclude Gatling
Guns, howitzers, etc. by another amendment) and Roe versus Wade is overturned
in the Supreme Court, the very hardest of the hardcore NRA members and
pro-choicers will betake themselves to the nearest shopping mall (or to the A****n
website) with their pocketbooks as usual rather than as per unprecedented to
the nearest district office of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement or Roman
Catholic parish church with torches (incidentally, by torches I have all
along meant actual old-timey flame-sporting torches and not what we Yanks term flashlights). Such, I say, are the only quasi-guarantors
against a second American Civil War, and I term them quasi-guarantors because
vis-à-vis the first one I suspect that it could have been (and indeed was)
adduced mutatis mutandis by various Whiggish personalities and interests
vis-à-vis the plausibility of a first American Civil War, and that in hindsight
the present enclaves of bluestate-ism in red states and vice-versa will appear
as nugatory and ineffectual as Atlanta’s chapter of the Anti-Slavery Society
and Boston’s chapter of…well, I won’t be so flippant for mere parallelism’s
sake as to let fall the name of the most notorious consonantal analogue to the
American Automobile Association, but I trust there were certain well-heeled
white Bostonians sympathetic to Southern slave-owners qua fellow
quasi-patricians; and vis-à-vis the second it must be out-pointed that although
people (or, if you insist, the people) do indeed tend not to care about
even the supposedly most burning issues enough to sleep an hour less or eat an
ounce less meat just because their way of handling those issues has not been
ratified by whatever powers happen to be being, the act of ratification itself,
being more or less instantaneous in each of its phases, however slowly the full
sequence of phases may play out, exacts no such Johnsonian-cum-Frankfurtarian
degree of commitment, such that people (or the people) tend very readily
to set in motion legislative changes that in the fairly-to-very short run do
cause them to sleep less and eat less (or more likely, under the sway of the
current mental-hygienic orthodoxy of gluttony-as-so-called self medication, more)
meat and that may indeed put the acts of sleeping and eating entirely out of
their power. The probabilistic logic in
play here is essentially identical to that which I have described as being in
play vis-à-vis the heads of State in charge of nuclear arsenals: while at all
times every version and tributary of self-interest peremptorily
counter-indicates pressing the button, the mere ready-to-hand-ness of the
button makes its pressing all too likely owing to the intermittent yet
ever-recurring supervention of impulses recklessly heedless of all versions and
tributaries of self-interest. In short:
in the light of the inherently politically divisive character of the one entity
holding us-stroke-the U.S. together, we should not be altogether surprised by
the irruption of a genuinely vexatious lesion of Texit or NExit into the
American body politic. For my part, as a
lifetime resident of the Eastern Seaboard and virtual adulttime resident of the
so-called I-95 (and, more recently, Acela) corridor, I can’t imagine
lifting a finger, let alone both a(*)**(e)-cheeks, to stop Texas from saying
sayonara (or its equivalent in Tejano Spanish [perchance Adios, y’all?])
to the Union, much less to prevent Maryland, New Jersey, New York,
Massachusetts, etc. or et al. from jettisoning their collective fiscal,
military, and judiciary obligations to the raffishly parvenu likes of Wyoming,
Hawaii, California, and the Dakotas.
Now, as for the relevance to Russia of all this from the last mention
(barring the one in this paragraph) of “all this” onwards, it consists in the
following: that such an EU-like scenario of disintegration through voluntary
mutual disaggregation, however improbable it may be in the United States’
present case, is more than figuratively impossible in Russia’s present
case. It is impossible in Russia’s
present case because it has already happened to Russia, and indeed happened to
it (or her [for Russia is after all a self-styled mother]) more than a
quarter-of-a-century ago, when the U.S.S.R. ceased to exist and both Russia
itself and the non-Russian Soviet republics ceased to participate in a larger
polity. Indeed, perhaps uniquely among
the former-great powers of the long twentieth century (i.e., the twentieth
century proper, spanning the years 1901 through 2000, in contrast to the
historians’ short twentieth century, spanning the years 1918 [by which year
Russia had ceased to exist as an independent polity on account of its
absorption into the U.S.S.R ] and 1989 [a year whose historical significance
need not be recapitulated]) Russia now enjoys the privilege attributed to the dead
by Lemmy Caution in Alphaville (and presumably by some classical [and
more specifically pre-Socratic] author or thinker with whom Jack L. Godard was
[and perhaps still is] better acquainted than I am): it cannot die. To be sure, even in the present long-post-Soviet
microepoch there are still quasi-nationalities (or for all I know actual
or authentic nationalities [after all, one doesn’t want to make enemies
gratuitously]) living under the Russian political umbrella who long to break
free of that umbrella and shelter (for what such shelter is worth) under a
smaller political umbrella of their own.
I suppose the Chechens and the Tatars (a.k.a. Tartars, an
alternative nation-label that I really think they should plump for in the light
of the popularity of the sauce of the same name [minus the ess] in the
hyperoccident, as attested to by its yeoman service as a condiment applied by
default to each and every last McDonald’s Filet o’Fish sandwich ever compiled)
are the demographically largest such collectivities; at any rate, they are the
only such collectivities who spring to my mind by name at the moment. But at their utmost geographically
desiderated compasses the dominions pined for by these conceivably authentic
nationalities are positively dust-mited by the chunks of land ceded by the
Russian S.F.S.R. upon the dissolution of the U.S.S.R; such that even if each
and every one of these collectivities acquired a nation-state-territory of its
own carved out of the quasi-living flesh of the present Russian polity, Russia
would still be the biggest darned country in the world by many a long
chalk. Complementarily, and as mentioned
before, in many of the non-Russian former Soviet territories there are
so-called enclaves of so-called ethnic Russians who at least intermittently
affect to feel aggrieved that the burglet, village, or potato-field they live
in or on is not officially a part of Mother Russia, that it has, so to speak,
been assigned to the belly of the wrong matryoshka, to a Ukrainian,
Byelorussian, Estonian autc. nesting-doll rather than a Russian one. And yet even if each and every one of these
burglets, villages, and potato-fields were assimilated to Mother Russia, that
mother’s girth would not be visibly increased sub specie satellites;
Russia would indeed consequently be an even larger country, and consequently
outstrip the rest of the world’s countries in terms of landmass more than it
presently does, but not by so much as a single nub of a single short chalk. Admittedly if the Asiatic portion of Russia
really started feeling its geographical oats and took it into its highly oblate
head to secede from the republic and start up an entirely new polity called,
say, Pansiberiana, and stretching from Novosibirsk to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky,
then it would be the largest country in the world, leaving the consequently
engendered rump Russia just ahead or behind Brazil at the fifth or
sixth-largest (I confess I can’t be back-bottomed to do the maths), but such a
secession is scarcely imaginable for the perhaps utterly infantile but
nevertheless highly efficacious reason that from their very foundations all the
urban and semi-urban centers of this massive mass of steppe and tundra have
been inhabited effectively exclusively by people who called and call themselves
Russians and were and are native speakers of the Russian language. I guess what I’m saying in the immediate here
may be divided into two gentle adjurations, one addressed to Russia and the
other to the hyperoccident: I would ever-so-gently adjure Russia to relax a bit
and stop giving both the various internal separatist collectivities so much of
a hard time and the various external Russian integrationist collectivities so
much encouragement; and I would no less (or more) gently adjure the
hyperoccident to give Russia at least a modicum of its due as a geographically
incredibly large and demographically quite respectably substantial political
entity that, in contrast to most of the political entities within the hyperoccident,
has managed to accomplish the well-nigh-miraculous geopolitical feat of remaining
a polity unto itself neither beholden to any larger polity nor readily
analyzable into any congeries of self-sustaining sub-polities. I realize of course that such an adjuration
is almost certain to go unheeded by either party in the present geopolitical
climate, a climate in which Russia feels itself (excuse me: herself)
obliged, in words mostly originally written for Chico Marx by S.J. Perelman, to
play for French-fried potatoes as if they were large steaks, in other words
to treat the insurgencies on either side of her border as matters of
existentially determinant import because the hyperoccident cannot be awed by
mere ontological integrity-cum-perdurance, and because, moreover, she knows
that she cannot hope ever to compete with the hyperoccident on the only
non-military front on which it will unreservedly salute success–viz. a certain
version of international commercial activity.
In mentioning this version of international commercial activity I am
of course segueing to the illustration of Item No. 2 in my catalogue of
assertions (which in hindsight [sorry to shatter the illusion that I composed
this entire essay at a single mental-cum-temporal moment à la the painting of
the Mona Lisa as described by Steve Martin] I am inclined to think I should
rather have styled theses on account of that word’s instant evocation of
a pair of persons who are perhaps preeminently pertinent at present, namely,
Martin Luther and Karl Marx), specifically to the bit at the end about “a
bastardized version of a system of political economy that has always been
legitimately contestable and that by now has proved downright untenable.” I don’t suppose any ailurophobes will be
alarmed in the slightest by my specifying that the system of political economy
I had and have in mind is the one most generally known as capitalism,
but I also suppose few ailurophiles will be much heartened by the specification
because it tells us nothing about what is defective in Russia’s
political-economic practice from the hyperoccident (a.k.a. so-called West)’s
point of view, inasmuch as this practice is itself almost impossible to define
except as a form or version of capitalism, or at any rate as a form or version
of a political-economic system that is emphatically not anti-capitalist. To be sure, in the Soviet days Russia’s
political-economic practice was definable as a form or version of a
political-economic system that was emphatically anti-capitalist, a system
that styled itself communism (or more typically and bumptiously Communism),
and that did indeed comport itself in ways that were difficult indeed to
confuse with those most signally cultivated and flaunted by the capitalism of
its day. Under Communism (I use the
preposition under under—or rather, in cooperation with—protest, as its
ineluctable implication of subjection stacks the cards against the poor Commies
from the outset) every Russian citizen was an employee or some other kind of
dependent of the Soviet State, whether his or her daily routine centered on
teaching kindergarten or arguing cases in court or screwing in widgets onto
bits of machinery or sitting in a prison cell or going down to the local
drugstore (or GUM) to sell flair pens (another Steve Martin reference, natch)
or their nearest analogue right of the Wall (interesting how geography often
confounds the usual spatially grounded political metaphors, no?). Complementarily, under Communism every Russian
was at least quasi-officially (for there was after all a thriving
so-called black market whose existence Soviet officialdom seemed to be at no
great pains to deny [more on this at a more seasonable moment], let alone
negate, whence the quasi) a dedicated and exclusive consumer of goods and
services produced and proffered by the Soviet State; such that if he or she
wanted a suit of clothes or a car or a cup of tea or a glass of beer or (for
all I know, as I have been given to understand that prostitution has always
been legal in all polities barring the extra-Nevadan United States), a b**w
j*b, he or she would almost always perforce repair to a State-owned department
store (perchance one of the aforementioned GUMs) or car dealership or tearoom
or juke joint or hooker/rent-boy. This
is not—and was not—to say that all such commodities were pedaled and flaunted
under the imprint of a single brand—say, a friendly, grinning
Balloo-like hammer-and-sickle wielding cartoon bear, or a winking-cum-beaming
cartoon V.I. Lenin instantly identifiable by his bum-fluff moustache-cum-chin
whiskers and peaked newsboy’s cap—stamped (or tattooed) onto a given piece of
merchandise’s most conspicuous patch of plastic, steel, or skin. In the domain of cinema, for example, the
Soviet consumer economy was at times perhaps even more diversified than its
Stateside counterpart, with an artistically ambitious Lenfilm movie being no
more mistakable for a crowd-pleasing Mosfilm flick or a Gorkyfilm period
classic adaptation than a Universal monster mash for an R.K.O. gumshoe opera or
a 20th-Century Fox “issue” film.
But it is hard to know now (and not only in the hyperoccident but
perhaps even in Russia, where most quotidiana of Soviet life are perhaps
unascertainable even by those who had attained the age of discretion by 1991
[for after all, the present writer would be hard-pressed indeed to quote the
price of a cinema ticket in 1991, or to specify how he went about punching in
his hours at the supermarket where he then worked]) how visible the glum, dusky
features of the sole, ultimate buck-stopping paymaster—i.e., Comrade Stalin,
Khrushchev, Brezhnev autc.—were beneath the various brightly parti-colored
brand icons spray-stenciled atop them.
At the very least, the Soviet-period Russians would have recognized
these brands as home-grown (or -drafted, or whatever other past-participle best
describes the mode whereby brands are generated) and distinctively Soviet, in
stark contrast to, inter alia, the Marlboro, Levi-Strauss, and
Ronco brands they would have encountered only in officially unsanctioned
settings, or whenever a product bearing such a brand was included in an
officially sanctioned photograph or movie by mistake or deliberate
the-other-way-looking (q.v., at the above-mentioned more seasonable moment). Flash forward twenty-seven or more years, and
however closely the producer side of the Russian economy may resemble its
Soviet predecessor (and I shall try to establish the extent of this closely
presently), on the consumer side that economy is virtually indistinguishable
from its hyperoccidental counterparts.
The flagship GUM in Moscow’s Red Square has been converted into an
upscale shopping mall housing retail outlets of such nauseatingly hyperoccidental
chains as Armani, Samsonite, and Hugo Boss.
And if to my assertion of the salience, and indeed revolutionariness, of
this transformation it be objected that the overwhelming majority of
Russians—a.k.a. Vanya and Masha Stolichnaya—are too fetidly poor to avail
themselves of any of the myriad-to-the-g*****lth power brand-choices paraded
before their terminally purchase-starved eyes, that they have to make do with
tatty own-brand handbags, blue jeans, sunglasses, etc. from the Russian
equivalent of Walmart (which may, for aught I know, actually be Walmart)
I say to the objector, Let Vanya and Masha join the fetid club of which the
present writer along with Jean et Suzette Courvoisier, Hans und Greta
Bährenjäger, José y Maria Rioja (or José y Maria José Cuervo [yes,
the reduplication of the J-name is a bit awkward]) et al. have been
involuntary and begrudging members since no more recently than ca. 1990. For brand-name proliferation without
consumer-power expansion has in fact been the norm in the hyperoccident for
more than a generation or quarter-century.
And whatever the so-called media of whatever self-styled political
persuasion may have us believe (for in wishing to have us believe this,
Breitbart and Fox News join hands with Pacifica and the Guardian), the
experience of one’s own material utter irrelevance to the most high-profile
brands in the consumer side of one’s domestic economy is by no means confined
to those who “refer to fifth grade as my senior year” (J. Foxworthy,
natch) and whose Saturday-night calendars alternate between hot dates with
their respective kid siblings and quite literal rolls in the hay with the
choicest porkers in their respective pig-seraglios. For proof of the verity of this admittedly
scandalous assertion one need look no further (or farther) than the case of the
present writer. The present writer is a
college graduate with a master’s degree conferred by a supposedly (i.e.,
universally reputedly) elite university.
The present writer possesses a well-nigh-infallibly accurate command of
irregular past participles. The present
writer even enjoys an annual income only two or three percentage points below
the national average (although admittedly eight or nine points below the average
of the state in which he resides [Worthington’s law naturally and infallibly
dictates that five of my six remaining empirical readers will have turned away
with handkerchiefs clutched to their nostrils at this revelation]). And yet whenever the present writer is
compelled to visit any mid-to-upmarket subdivided shopping emporium in the
United States—whether the Galleria in downtown Baltimore or CityCenterDC in
downtown Washington or the International Mall in midtown Tampa—he is confronted
on all sides by articles of merchandise whose purchase(s) is or are
stratospherically beyond his means—meaning, I suppose, that if each week he
purchased just one such article chosen entirely at random he would be bankrupt
within a few months. Not that he is
particularly resentful of the inaccessibility of these commodities; to the
contrary, on the whole while sashaying or flouncing past them he is inclined to
ejaculate, “How full the world is of things that I do not want!” like Socrates
at the Athenian agora on a market day (not to be confused with Diogenes
ejaculating in a different sense at the same site). He is, however, particularly and indeed
rabidly resentful of received hyperoccidental opinion’s laughably outmoded
contention that in the second decade of the twenty-first century the hyperoccident,
in contrast to Russia, remains a place or consumer zone awash in brand-name
luxury goods that all but the poorest of its population may acquire without
availing themselves of the so-called five-finger discount, a place or consumer
zone in which an office secretary can still be “soigné and chic on forty-five
[or seven hundred to a thousand in today’s dollars] a week” as Ogden Nash put
it in the early-to-mid-twentieth century.
For the overwhelming minority-to-faintly whelming majority of old-school
hyperoccidental commodity-gourmandizers, the hyperoccident is in point of fact,
and like Russia, a vast commercial desert chock-full of tantalizingly life-like
mirages and utterly bereft of genuine oases.
To be presumably sure, in Russia the proportion of the population with
purchasing access to high-ticket name-brand items is probably slightly smaller
than in the richest and most economically energetic hyperoccidental countries,
the countries that still deserve to be considered first-world (if that
term still enjoys any currency) by one or more standard economic standards
[e.g., unemployment rate, inflation rate, medium-term rate of growth of GDP,
and productivity-level of labor force], i.e. (not e.g. [and note how short the
list is!]), the U.S., the U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Lichtenstein,
Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, New Zealand, Austria, the
Scandinavian countries (including Iceland), and Australia; but it is also
probably slightly larger than in the most economically sluggish hyperoccidental
countries—e.g. (not i.e., because in the light of Worthington’s Law one feels a
bit of a jerk naming any but the most notorious member of this club, a polity
which unlike most of the others was hardly a poster child for so-called free enterprise
even at the acme of its post-WWII heyday), Greece. In other words, in broad terms, the situation
of the average consumer is pretty nearly uniformly wretched throughout the
hyperoccident-plus-Russia; the hyperoccident has absolutely nothing to be smug
about qua exponent, champion, or embodiment of a political-economic system
catering munificently and efficiently to the will of the consumers of its
respective polities; and the median income-earning American residing in a
Stalin (or, if you insist, Truman)-period mid-rise in the South Oakenshawe
neighborhood of Baltimore is essentially in the same cramped, bilge-inundated
boat as the median income-earning Russian residing in a Stalin-period mid-rise
in the Vyborg district of Moscow; which is to say, he spends the bulk of his income
on non-negotiable quasi-necessities like rent and utilities and has precious
little left over to lay out on the gewgaws, gadgets, and fripperies that
received opinion in the hyperoccident fatuously regards as our
pseudo-civilization’s greatest triumphs, and indeed as sufficient reasons for
being happier to be alive now than at any preceding moment in human
history. How received opinion—by which I
mean what virtually everybody in a given population, and not
merely some influential fraction or faction thereof, believes to be true—in the
hyperoccident could take such possessive pride in a congeries of gewgaws,
gadgets, and fripperies legally inaccessible to nearly half-to-almost all of
its receivers, is a subject not for a separate essay, or even a separate module
or section of the present essay, but indeed for a separate sub-module or
sub-section of the present essay, the one in which I shall devote all my
discursive energies to tearing (or attempting to tear) the hyperoccident not
only a proverbial second but also a proverbial third waste-disposal chute on
the score of its entire officially espoused system of political economy. For the nonce, i.e., the present sub-module
or sub-section, I am trying to seal up, to cauterize, the second and third
proverbial waste-disposal chutes that hyperoccidental received opinion has with
bumptious ruthlessness carved out of the living abdominal tissue of the Russian
system of political economy. (The extent
of Russian officialdom’s espousal or even comprehension of this system is
difficult or perhaps even impossible to ascertain, but in my view this lends it
a certain irresistibly naïve charm that the hyperoccident’s system has lacked
since whatever day in 1775 or 1776 Adam Smith handed the final set of galleys
of The Wealth of Nations to his printer.) I believe I have already cauterized one of
these factitious wounds, the one on the consumer side, serviceably
enough by demonstrating that the present-day Russian consumerist landscape is
far closer to the consumerist landscapes of hyperoccidental polities than to
that of Russia in the Soviet period.
Unfortunately, the cauterization of this wound as an isolated
pathological phenomenon is no guarantee against its eventual suppuration and
indeed terminal gangrenization because, at least as bourgeois-economic
superstition insists on having us believe, consumption is at least strongly
dependent and perhaps even prevailingly parasitic upon production, such that
this consumer-side wound is always frighteningly vulnerable to contamination by
the producer-side wound (I leave the out-working of the details of the conceit
to the professional gastroenterologists and proctologists among my readership),
and it is a much bigger ask to cauterize that wound than it was to cauterize
the consumer-side one; in other words, to demonstrate that Russia as an
economic locus of production is substantially different than it was in the
Soviet period. For it is said by people
who are said to know something about this (and I have no choice but to cite these
people as infallible authorities, for the scene of production is ineluctably
[albeit perhaps wholly contingently] much more occult, much more hidden from
view, than the scene of consumption) that on the side of production the
present-day Russian economy is prevailingly and/or essentially a two-commodity
economy, an economy that sustains itself mostly or perhaps even effectively
solely on exports of petroleum and natural gas, an economy wherein, moreover,
the possession, refinement, and distribution of these two mainstay resources is
contentiously shared between the Russian State (quasi-i.e., Mr. Putin and his
rich bosom cronies) and a kuchka or handful of wealthy individual
Russian citizens (the so-called oligarchs; quasi-i.e., the rich non-cronies of Mr.
Putin), such that it is not entirely implausible to argue that on the side of
production the Russian economy is not even superficially very different from
its predecessor in the Soviet period. To
be sure, the exponents of this not entirely implausible argument maintain,
State control of the mainstay industries is no longer as in Soviet days an
attribute of official policy, such that in the unlikely but not inconceivable
event that one or more of the privately owned oil or natural gas companies
became geometrically more profitable than its largest State-owned rival, one
would no longer be within one’s rights to describe Russia even as a partial
de-facto site of State capitalism (otherwise known dirigisme). But even in such an event (so these exponents
expound), most of the worst, the most undesirable, characteristics of a
Soviet-style State-run producer-side economy would still be in place, because
control of the mainstay-resource possession, refinement, and distribution would
remain in the hands of a very few individuals—because, in other words, there
would be very little competitive diversity on that side. This argument strikes me as quite a specious
one in the old, only half-pejorative Johnsonian sense—by which I mean that it
has a great deal to recommend it at least on the surface, a surface that may
amount to a serviceable enough succedaneum for depth, just as a lake that is
merely frozen in its top x inches is sometimes (if not even often, let
alone always) as serviceable for skating as one that is frozen to its very
bottom. I concede that in certain
productive settings, competitive diversity is a good thing and indeed a much
better thing than uncompetitive homogeneity.
Certainly in the early stages of a given commodity’s heyday, which is to
say the period wherein even its most state-of-the-art manifestations are
manifestly short of technical perfection, it is best for there to be a large
number of producers working in knowing competition with one another to design,
manufacture, and distribute the best version of that commodity. Thus in the early days of the automobile it
was undoubtedly a good thing that Messrs. Stanley, Benz, Ford, et al. were each
and all trying to design, manufacture, and distribute the best version of the
automobile. If only one of them had been
at work on that project, we (or rather you all, as I do not own a motor
car and am not even licensed to drive one) would probably still be puttering
about in individually crafted (and therefore phenomenally expensive)
steam-driven cars (which on balance would probably be a very good thing as far
as a car-hater such as the present writer is concerned, but for the present
sub-argument’s sake [and only for its
sake, as will become clear much later in the essay] I am writing from the point
of view of an automobilophile). But the
desirability of a large number of mutually competing producers of any
well-established and settled commodity, a commodity in whose design and construction
only marginal improvements are capable of being made, is highly debatable at
best. The present state of the
automobile industry is a case in illustration of this at-best high
debatability: at present there cannot be many more than ten car-manufacturing
companies that are not subsidiaries of larger car-manufacturing companies, and
I can perceive neither much intrinsic value in increasing their number nor any
evidence whatsoever of lobbying or agitation in favor of such an increase by
any political constituency or so-called interest group.
To be sure, in the present race to build a reliable and affordable
driverless car, there is presumably a great deal of competition among dozens or
hundreds of firms of which we have yet to hear (alongside the one huge firm of
which we have heard more than quite enough), and a handful or two of which are
doubtless destined to become the Chrysler, Ford, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz etc. or
et al. of the driverless car industry.
But as for the old-school driver-operated car industry, because people
have essentially accepted that a driver-operated car is never going to move
comfortably or legally faster than 80 miles per hour and that it never even
ought to cost much less than a half a year’s wages (because they are
fundamentally unregenerate masochists [q.v. below, Lord willing]), they
are content with choosing from the offerings of a mere half-dozen firms. There is no need for a hundred models of
luxury cars to choose from when the known price tag of a Rolls Royce or a
Bentley alone certifies that you are several times as rich as a person who can
only afford a Jaguar, BMW, or Mercedes—and so on down a conspicuous-consumption
ladder comprising no more than ten rungs and occupied even at its bottom rung
by no more than a half-dozen car-models.
And in industries where there is no prestige whatsoever to be derived
from choosing one version of its appropriated commodity rather than another,
the utility of competition diminishes virtually to zero. The oil and natural gas industries are
obviously loca classica of such industries. While there may be a minuscule modicum of
traditional conspicuous-consumerist cachet to be garnered from choosing premium
rather than regular gasoline-stroke-petrol, no driver prides himself or herself
on being a Shell man or woman rather than a BP or Exxon
one, except perhaps as a function of his or her views of the company’s record
of relative environmental friendliness.
And as for natural gas—well, here in the United States, the alleged
foremost bastion of no-holds-barred free enterprise, the public’s lack of
interest in competitive offerings of this commodity eventually and anciently
(i.e., well over a hundred years ago) reached such a near-absolute-zero point
of lassitude that virtually (or perhaps even actually) every last serviced
population in the land (i.e., the then at-most 48 contiguous states) cheerfully
allowed its local private natural gas supplier (often or perhaps even usually
also its supplier of electricity) to operate as a monopoly, i.e., as a
company operating in the complete and utter absence of competition from other
firms. And for perhaps as long as
slightly over a hundred years, nary an American soul affected to voice the
smallest soupçon of dissatisfaction with this commercial arrangement. Then, round about the turn of the millennium,
some Whiggish dickhead (or dickish Whighead) or other got the asinine idea of
legislating consumer choice in the matter of basic utilities and thereby
precipitated nothing of greater interest or appeal to Bob and Suzy Focckuck
(i.e., the average American natural gas consumers) than a torrent of bulk paper
mail into their U.S. Postal Service (q.v.)-ial mailboxes and a horde of incredibly
uncivil door-to-door teenage sales-pitchers onto their front doorsteps. After getting on for two decades of this
utterly unwelcome and obtrusive Whiggish rain-dance, I have yet to hear, let
alone make the acquaintance, of a fellow-Baltimorean who has switched over from
the former monopoly holder, Baltimore Gas and Electric, to any of its newly
chartered competitors. And assuming my
own desire-mechanism as a consumer is not radically different from that of my
fellow Baltimoreans, I conclude that the reason they have not bothered
switching over is that their electric-cum-gas bills have not risen very much at
all or ever very sharply over the 17-odd years since the introduction of
competition into the electricity-cum-natural gas market, and as long as one is
not expected to pay substantially more for something this month (or whatever
else the billing interval is—although in the case of continuously supplied
goods or services it is rarely anything other than a month) than one was paying
for it last month, one is not going to bother seeking out an alternative
provider of that something–this on the seldom-falsified assumption that the
amount of time one would have to spend looking for a more competitive vendor
(or hearing out the sales pitch of one of its incredibly uncivil teenage sales
representatives) would not be repaid by the savings netted by the switch to
that vendor (and I mean repaid in the coarsest yet most precise
pecuniary sense: one infers that the alternative vendor would save one, say,
$200.00 over the course of five years and thereby concludes that $3.33-1/3 per
month is not too hefty a price to pay for never again being obliged to think
about that vendor). To be sure, if
electricity or natural gas ever became sexy again (for nothing could
have been sexier than electricity in its ca. 1890 heyday or natural gas in its
1830 one), prices of the newly resexified commodity would indeed spike and
vacillate widely from vendor to vendor, and Americans would find it worthwhile
to shop around for alternative electricity or natural gas vendors, as they very
recently still did in search of alternative broadband mobile phone interweb
coverage (the jargon is bound to be imprecise when echoed by a mobile phone
non-owner such as the present writer).
But failing (not that I have any desire for such a catastrophe to succeed)
a genuine energy crisis (i.e., one precipitated by an ineluctable
natural shortage rather than the ever-eluctable pipeline-squeezing shenanigans
of a human supplier), neither electricity nor natural gas nor petroleum will
ever be sexy again, and so no consumer of any of these commodities is ever
going to yearn in good faith for access to a more competitive market in any of
them. At the same time, of course, the
terminal utter unsexiness of electricity, natural gas, and oil has by no means
either emanated from or led to their becoming superfluous, let alone worthless;
to the contrary, each and every representative national couple in the world or
on the globe undoubtedly needs (in a relative sense, of course) these
commodities much more exigently than its or their ancestors ever did at these
commodities’ aforementioned apices of sexiness (admittedly I did leave out
petroleum, so let me date its apex of sexiness now, viz. to 1924, as that was
the year in which the greatest number of Ford Model T cars, the most popular
cars [and hence the most popular gas-guzzling entities] ever, was or were
manufactured), and so any person, corporation, or other entity with large stores
of any of these commodities, these natural or quasi-natural resources (TBS,
stores of electricity are usually factorable down to more basal natural
resources like natural gas, oil, coal, and radioactive metals) and control of
their refinement autc. and distribution is sitting pretty pretty for the
nonce. To be sure, the god-awful
tree-huggers are desperately fain to get Bob and Suzy Focckuck, Vanya and
Masha Stolichnaya, Hans und Greta Bährenjäger, et al. to light and heat their
so-called homes exclusively with their own fecal excrement, nasal mucus, and
seminal and vaginal discharge; and they are also gunger-ho than a 1986 Michael
Keaton-starring Ron Howard movie to get Bob, Suzy, Vanya, et al. to ditch their
motorcars and propel their own malodorous carcasses to work, school, church,
tanning salon, and back aback purely acoustic bicycles every day; and for aught
any of us know these god-awful tree-huggers may ultimately succeed, and if they
ever do, the suppliers of the classic heating, cooling, lighting, and
propelling commodities will indeed no longer be sitting pretty, at least not
qua suppliers of such commodities. But
not even the tree-huggers’ most enthusiastic boosters—viz. Bob and Suzy
Religious Bottle Recyclers-cum-Hybrid Compact Car Owners-cum-Triannual
Intercontinental Airline Pleasure Voyage-Takers—to say nothing of their
detractors (i.e., basically, everybody who hopes the driverless car really
takes off often in two or more senses [and just imagine what a godsend to some
sort of natural resource-hawker a flight-capable driverless car would
almost ineluctably turn out to be]) believe that they will succeed in the next
half-century, that personal-environmental autocoprophagia and acoustic
bicycling will become normative rather than exceptional modi vivendi,
and such being the case, Russia as a mass of biologically living people can
look forward to a future that will never dim.
This of course is not to say that prosperity for the Havana-puffing
oligarchs and grand state functionaries, the tolstiye koti, in
charge of the petroleum and natural gas producing firms has ever necessarily
spelled or ever will necessarily spell prosperity for their shop-floor
employees, Vanya and Masha Stolichnaya, but merely that the failure of
such prosperity can never be attributed to the noncompetitive structure of the
Russian petroleum and natural gas industries eo ipso. There are in point of fact neither solid a
priori nor solid a posteriori grounds for regarding the remunerativeness of the
wages of the shop-floor employees of a given industry as being directly
proportional to the number of mutually competing productive organizations
involved in that industry. Indeed, it is
manifestly clear that caeteris paribus a competitive production-market
in a given industry tends to drive down the wages of its shop-floor employees,
inasmuch as a firm with many competitors is under constant pressure to reduce
its production costs in order to sell its products at the lowest profitable
price, and labor is almost invariably the most costly of production costs. To sum up my appraisal of the productive side
of the present Russian economy: there would appear to be nothing about its
fundamental structure that is intrinsically inimical to the welfare of the
Russian citizenry. Natural gas and
petroleum are among the most highly coveted commodities in the present and
foreseeably prospective geoeconomy, and Russia possesses both of them in
abundance. Such being the case, there is
evidently nothing but a lack of political will—the will, in other words, on the
part of the oligarchs and grand functionaries to let the great mass of Russians
in on a greater share of the wealth inexorably accruing from the sale of
petroleum or natural gas, either via an industry-wide wage hike or via a kind of
universal annual allowance on the Alaskan model—to prevent Vanya and Masha
Stolichnaya qua economic quanta from standing toe-to-toe and brow-to-brow with
the average native married couple in Switzerland (I regret that the linguistic
heterogeneity of Switzerland, acting in concert with my complete ignorance of
Swiss wine, beer, and spirits, precludes my coming up with the requisite
complementary national couple), the national polity undoubtedly most celebrated
and notorious for lavishly looking after each and every one of its own at the
greatest exactable expense to the rest of the world. To be sure, even if the profits of the
Russian petroleum and natural gas industries were evenly shared amongst the
Russian citizenry as a matter of policy, there would still be extrinsic threats
to the well-being of that citizenry, because the Russian petroleum and natural
gas industries would continue to face competition from these industries in
other parts of the world—notably, the Middle East and the Americas. But there is nothing intrinsic to the Russian
petroleum and natural gas industries to preclude their holding their own in an
international market, nothing to preclude their keeping up with, say, the
United States, Saudi Arabia, or Venezuela in terms of either productivity or
affordability. The only material
obstacles to Russia’s prosperity as a net natural resource-exporter are of a
political—and hence at least conceivably removable—nature. Now that so-called fracking has made the
United States a net exporter of natural gas, the Germans are much less inclined
to buy natural gas from the Russians, but this is not in the main because
American natural gas is cheaper (if it even is) but because the American gas is
being supplied by the Americans, whom the Germans regard as an ally,
rather than by the Russians, whom they do not.
If by what doubtless would seem to everyone but the present writer to be
some miraculous turn of the geopolitical tide Germany came to trust Russia as quasi-implicitly
as it now trusts the United States, it would have no disincentive whatsoever to
importing all its natural gas from Russia and a very powerful disincentive to
importing it from the United States in the U.S.’s much greater geographical
alienation from Germany than Russia, as expressed both by pure distance and by
the lack of a continuous stretch of dry land between the two countries. (If there is a single humane principle I wish
to inculcate in this essay—and the present exemplum of Germany and Russia qua
commercial trading partners is but the first and least trenchant one whereby I
hope to inculcate this principle before my peroration—it is that physical-geographical
propinquity and contiguity ultimately matter every bit as much in the
twenty-first century as they did in any earlier age.)
But received hyperoccidental political-economic opinion seems to hold
that there is something intrinsically and ineluctably evil about the productive
side of the Russian economy’s centeredness on natural resources eo ipso,
such that even if each and every one of Russia’s petroleum and natural
gas-producing firms adopted a policy of absolutely impartial and uniformly
egalitarian profit-sharing and even if all political obstacles to Russia’s
frictionless, fully competitive participation in the world petroleum and
natural gas markets were removed, Russia would still be a geoeconomic miscreant
or a geoeconomic infant—or perhaps a combination of both; say, a geoeconomic street
urchin; in other words a country that was still refusing to play by the
rules and refusing to grow up, to behave like a decent, law-abiding, prudent,
potty-trained, enlightened geoeconomic adult.
And in what does the behavior of such a decent, law-abiding, prudent, potty-trained,
enlightened geo-political adult consist, according to received hyperoccidental
geoeconomic opinion? To my mind the
pithiest and most compendious answer to this question—pithiest and most
compendious, that is, in its conveyance not only of the desiderata of
geoeconomic adulthood themselves but also of the nauseatingly smugly didactic
attitude in which they are characteristically stipulated—was provided just over
four years ago on NPR’s All Things Considered by some American foreign
policy wonkess with some sort of professional accreditation in something having
to do with Russia who censoriously remarked (quasi-apropos of the
just-consummated annexation of Crimea, unless that annexation had not just then
been consummated, in which case her remark was quasi-apropos of the generally
fractious state of relations between Russia and Ukraine [in either case the
apropos-ness was merely quasi, inasmuch as the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is not
at all about economics as hyperoccidental received opinion now understands it
{even if that conflict is very much about economics in a more basal sense
ignored by hyperoccidental received opinion}, as I hope I shall get round
persuasively to arguing]) something to the effect of [if somebody will only
give me my own wonk’s chair, “air-conditioned cell at Kennedy,” and
upper-mid-six-figure annual emolument, I shall be only too happy to hire a
fact-checker!!!]: “Russia needs to develop an economy that’s centered on making
things that other countries want to buy.”
The emphasis here is manifestly on the madeness and the thingliness
of the things rather than on their cravedness by foreign buyers, as indeed it
needs must be in the light of the secure international high-ticketed-ness of
petroleum and natural gas, which I have already pointed out and which cannot
have been or be unknown even to the most troglodytically benighted foreign
policy wonkess. On or by this account,
the Russians are childish and evil because they make their collective living by
simply selling amorphous uncountable stuff that they happen already to
have sitting around on or beneath their turf, and their only hope of being
grown up and good lies in shaping this amorphous uncountable stuff and other
kinds of amorphous uncountable stuff on or beneath their turf into previously nonexistent,
discrete, countable things; it lies, in other words, in their
collectively transforming themselves into a polity-cum-economy prevailingly
devoted to what I cannot seem to avoid calling (for there are few if any
things that I would more eagerly avoid doing than typing or uttering the most
soporific and at the same time most inflammatory of em-words) manufacturing. This implied prescription needs must pose
something of a poser (qua conundrum not qua 1980s subcultural
bugbear) to any would-be talent agent of the hyperoccident keen on saving his
or her client from being cast in the role of the kettle-denigrating pot in some
sort of Toy Story-style kitchen pantomime, for as every hyperoccidental
schoolchild knows or ought to know, it has been well over a full half-century
since any hyperoccidental nation-state (with the possible admittedly unmarginal
exception of Germany) has signalized itself as a geoeconomic player via the
manufacturing sub-sector of the productive sector of its economy; and indeed in
the hyperoccident’s flagship polity, the United States (which of course also
happens to be our wonkess’s home base and probable [to judge by her accent]
native land), the moribundity of domestic manufacturing has been taken for
granted for so long that by now it is virtually a module of the national
folklore curriculum like the Great Awakening or the Closing of the Frontier or
the Birth of Jazz. If the (non-DG)R
presumes I exaggerate, let him or her only consider the antiquity of the
epithet the Rust Belt as a collective term for the former urban
industrial American northeast. The
coinage of the epithet dates from no later than the early 1960s, hence well
over a half-century ago. Jump another
half-century-and-change back into the past and you are in the 1890s, when most
of the big industries in the region were just getting into gear and some of
them—notably the automobile industry—had yet even to be founded; when, in
short, whatever sort of unrusted metal belt the region comprised before it
started rusting did not yet even fully exist.
In short the Rust Belt has been the Rust Belt substantially longer it
ever was the Unrusted Belt, such that the very term Rust Belt now has a
palpably absurd ring to it in the ears of anybody who has reflected on the chronology;
such a person inevitably yearns for the region to be rechristened after
whatever rust turns into once it has crumbled away, or what the non-rusted
remnant of metal left behind after the crumblage is called, but alas!—he or she
lacks the requisite metallurgical vocabulary.
Calling Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, etc. “Rust Belt cities”
is every bit as preposterous as calling the present historical moment “the
postwar period,” inasmuch as the Belt started Rusting more or less exactly when
the Second World War finished ending.
But hey, unlike “the postwar period,” “the Rust Belt” generates revenues
in the coffers of municipal governments, who will seemingly be able to get away
with carping dunningly to Uncle Sam about the economic hardship our town has
suffered since Biblical City Aleph Steel shut down its operations here until
a team of Biblical archaeologists will be needed even to make it clear to Uncle
Sam what sort of entity Biblical City Aleph Steel was, and who am I to demand
the amputation of one of the most grossly distended udders of these
governments’ communal cash cow?
Obviously not any non-bovine creature, but I am very much of a
non-bovine creature to beg these municipal governments of the erroneously
called Rust Belt to parley with Uncle Sam in slightly more hushed tones,
inasmuch as the sheer decibelular amplitude of their sales pitch seems to be
misleading many an American (and by no means only an unregenerately
historically uninformed one) into supposing that the demise of the Rust Belt
began a mere six rather than a full sixty years ago and thence to supposing
that manufacturing is still the normal order of the day chez the productive
side of the U.S. economy. Such I am at
least residually inclined to gather from the smug lording over the Russian
economy indulged in by our wonkess, although I am probably prevailingly
inclined to gather therefrom that she was mistaking an unflagging profusion of
new names chez the productive side of the U.S. economy for an unflagging
profusion of new things thereat—a misprision of the true lie of the
economic land which, inasmuch as in the words of Edward Gibbon mankind
is governed by names, would certainly be enough to conjure up the
mirage of a vital, thriving manufacturing economy in the mind of any wonk or
wonkess of any but the highest genius and most ruthless intellectual
self-command. Now what do I mean by a profusion
of names chez nous Americains?
I mean by this nothing more occult or mysterious than the large number
of proprietary names that did not exist at all, or were visible only in
small subnational or subcultural pockets, as recently as the turn of the
millennium—names like N****x, A*****n, F****k, U**r, and the butcher’s-dozen I-prefixed
products bearing the logo of the A***e corporation (whose most lucrative strand
of cunning [I wouldn’t dream of calling it inventiveness, let alone genius]
has probably been its periodic refreshing of the master-name of its
product line, from A***e itself to M******sh in the mid-1980s,
and from M******sh to I-this and that in the
mid-20oughties). Some of these parvenu
proprietary names are indeed affixed to manufactured products: such is patently
the case with the I-P*d, I P*d [sic on the repetition, though I daren’t expect
any reader to have a memory retentive and extensive enough (i.e., to call to
mind consumer fads of more than five years’ antiquity) to understand why],
I-P***e, etc. But it is no secret that
few to none of these products is or are manufactured in any State or territory
of the United States, that virtually each and every one of them is assembled in
China (or, as Chinese labor becomes increasingly costly, in more commercially
marginal Asian countries like Vietnam) out of materials hailing from places
less heavily trodden by hyperoccidental feet than even the proverbial-if-actual
Timbuktu and more celebrated-if-mythical B*mf**k, Egypt. To be sure, the corporate headquarters of the
most illustrious (or notorious) of the proprietors of the proprietary names
affixed to these products are sited in the United States, but it is difficult
to ascertain to what extent, if any, these nominal geographical presences
signalize or mandate an inflow of domestic revenues. If, for example, one orders an I-P***e online
directly from A***e, what are the chances that the I-P***e one eventually
receives was stored in a warehouse in Bowling Green, Kentucky rather than in
one in Ya’an, Sichuan and consequently contributed its hyper-minuscule share of
property taxes to the treasury of Warren County rather than to that of Ya’an
Prefecture and was packaged by a pair (or trio autc.) of Kentuckyian
wage-earning hands rather than a pair (or trio autc.) of Sichuan(i) ones? Having never ordered a single I-anything from
A***e I honestly cannot say. I can
honestly say that on most if not all occasions on which I have ordered
something directly from A****n (as against one of its so-called partners, many
of whom have turned out to be based in Timbuktu-stroke-BFE-esque places), the
almost-(although-admittedly-not-always)-invariably-foreign-made ordered
commodity or bundle of commodities has been conveyed to me from some location
within the United States—and more than often enough some heartlandish, or
peri-heartlandish locale like Bowling Green, Kentucky. So to the extent that at least the United
States’(s) sphere of circulation, its sphere of getting already-made things
from place to place, is well represented by A****n, a certain sub-sub-sector of
the pre-rust Rust Belt economy is still thriving here. The toting and packaging functions being
followed and fulfilled at A****n’s shipping warehouses may not be manufacturing
jobs in even the loosest of senses, but they are most certainly blue-collar
jobs of the same genus as the one subtended by a vocation whose demise is
bewailed very lachrymosely indeed by pre-rust Rust Belt nostalgia-ists—namely
that of the doughty, horizontally striped-shirted, Popeye-forearmed longshoreman
who was an unbudgeable mainstay of this country’s ports (I apologize if this
use of the nautical vehicle mainstay in a perinautical context
constitutes a mixture of metaphors) before the advent of containerization. But of course and as everybody knows, most of
the most illustrious proprietors-cum-bearers of newly minted American
proprietary names are neither directly nor indirectly involved in manufacturing
things at all, and it is indeed highly debatable whether they are even
participating in the so-called services sub-sector of the U.S. economy
that according to certain parties more enlightened than our wonkess (albeit far
from fully enlightened) has more than taken up the slack left by the
moribundity of the manufacturing sub-sector.
For it is after all a notorious fact that for many years G****e, F****k,
and T****r, despite their global name-recognition, were unable to become
profitable—this, most obviously and also notoriously, because they rarely if
ever charged their users (for one can scarcely call one who spends no money a customer)
a dime, but also much less notoriously (if equally obviously to those with a
functioning pair [in both upper and lower-body senses]) and indeed downright
back-page-ishly, because they were not providing anything for the sake of not
being without which anybody in his or her right mind would ever a sacrifice a
dime. By now all these companies
(perhaps barring T****r) are of course in the black to the tune of milliards
per annum, but this is only because back in ’08 or thenabouts they all bit a
certain bullet that had doubtless been lying ready to hand and in non-Texan
plain view on a silver plate (do I hear the howl of a wolf?) since the very
first hour of the very late nineties-to-very early oughties day their
respective founders devised them (i.e., the companies) in between bong hits in
their (i.e., the founders’) respective ever-so-mandatorily cramped and smelly
dorm rooms—namely, that of hosting aggressively conspicuous advertising by
deep-pocketed third parties (i.e., for the most part, the same old rogue’s
gallery of proprietary names by which we were assailed via television twenty,
thirty, and even forty years ago [e.g., M* D****d’s, F**o L*y, O***r M***r, and
D****y]). And of course in a
received-opinion-sphere in which Worthington’s Law ultimately reigns supreme
(even among those who affect to contemn it), the present profitability of
G****e et al. constitutes irrefutable proof not only that their founders and
runners have alighted on a brilliant short-term get-rich scheme (an assertion
that not even the present writer would contest), but also that these founders
and runners are geniuses of unprecedented intellectual fecundity whose business
prospectus (plural—fourth declension, natch) and indeed entire modi vivendi
must be followed with hyper-realistic fidelity of detail by each and every
hyperoccidental man, woman, ambulant child, and uncute animal who or which
would fain not be torn into shark-feed (a.k.a. chum) by the
remorselessly ineluctable one-way rip-tide of commercial history. Each and every one of us, so hyperoccidental
received opinion now maintains, must be striving 3600/60-360,000/1,000 to be in
on the so-called ground floor (tho’ I prefer Dean Acheson’s more upmarket
metaphor present at the creation) of the next F****k, T****r, U**r, etc.,
and accordingly must strive to be the next Mark Sugarwalls, Sergei Brineshrimp,
or Travis
SomenamethatsnotbickellandthatIcantbearsedtolookupletaloneparodicallyalter, and
sub-accordingly spare no expense in having our noses and coiffures remodeled to
match those of Dustin Diamond, Ringo Starr, or Charles Bronson. But the abject dependence of G****e, F****k,
and T****r on advertising is or should be a so-called red flag announcing to
every rational being that these companies’ days as viable commercial concerns
are numbered. For insamsuch as people
are still loath to pay for the these companies’ offered pseudo-services as
things in themselves, the ineluctable implication of these companies’
profitability is that what is drawing people back to them is not these
pseudo-services eo ipso but rather the phantasmagoric appeal of the
products on display in the hosted advertisements. And why should this come as anything of a
surprise to us, given that intrinsically considered, the pseudo-services in question
do not even require the mediation of the interweb and could not only subsist
but positively thrive in a global social nexus utterly devoid of electronic
communication networks of any kind. That
email (and hence G****e) merely electronically reconstitutes the interpersonal
intelligence-bearing department of the world’s postal services is evident from
its very name, and the same mutatis mutandis is true of the leading
pimps of the so-called social media, F******k and T****r, although the
redundancy is less easy to detect in their cases because for socially rather
than technologically contingent reasons their arrogated functions did not exist
in the pre-interwebbial world. If people
had really been interested in supposed friend-collecting after the manner facilitated
by F******k—in other words, interested in simply publicly registering an
awareness of the existence of as many and mutually far-flung people as
possible, and of being capable of epistolary commerce with them—there would
have been nothing to prevent them from doing so by, say, the late eighteenth
century, by which point it was certainly technically possible to circulate
printed materials to each and every urban center in every quadrant of the
globe. Indeed a perfectly technically
feasible scenario for such a horfe, wind, and elbow greafe-powered F*****k is
by no means hard to devise: one imagines residents of the participating
municipalities supplying their names, street addresses, and brief
self-descriptions to a local printer; the printer collating the names etc. into
a registry and printing the registry several thousand times in broadsheet
format; the post and the packet-boats conveying the broadsheets to other
participating municipalities; the residents of those municipalities
selecting the names of people they wish to befriend as correspondents; the
printers compiling a new and more detailed registry grouping each addressee
together with his or her chosen correspondents (and with those who have chosen
to correspond with him or her), breaking that registry down by addressee,
communicating the down-broken sub-registries by packet and post to all the
participating municipalities, etc. Of
course the whole wretched business of getting people in touch with each other
and one another would have taken much longer at a maximum data-transportation
speed of twenty miles or eighteen knots per hour per 100MB (assuming each
broadsheet to contain 10K of data, each carriage or ship-run to carry a
thousand broadsheets, and a hundred ships and carriages to be in transit at any
given moment), but after the first few months (assuming one month to equal one
complete transatlantic post-and-packet cycle) that would not have mattered
much, for by then the average participant would have garnered several dozen
correspondents (assuming each participating municipality to contain at least one
dedicated fan of faro, Hank Fielding, Joe Haydn, ballooning aut
al.-stroke-c.)—easily many times more than enough to fill a leisure schedule
devoted to nothing but reading and writing letters. The reason F****k-style social networking did
not take off two hundred and fifty years ago was of course that people back
then had as many friends as they needed—or, at any rate, cared to have—in their
home municipalities and tended to find it a chore to stay in touch by letter
even with close relatives residing more than a half a day’s carriage ride away;
and F****k itself would never have taken off in our own time had not the
picture-screened mobile telephone—the so-called smart phone—made the fetishism
of bandwith-driven data transmission-speed, formerly an obsession confined to
so-called tech geeks, into a universal neurosis afflicting even the most
technically ignorant-cum-apathetic teeny-boppers and centenarians. No F*****k user actually takes a scintilla of
pleasure in corresponding with his or her so-called friends in such mutually
far-flung locales as Bandar Seri Begawan, Ulaanbaatar, and Sheboygan, but the
act of uploading to F******k a 10-gigabyte movie (say, some Warhol-esque
video-diary of the user himself or herself picking his or her a(*)**(e) for
eighteen hours straight) that can be viewed by each of these mutually far-flung
so-called friends is enormously gratifying to every F******k user in
demonstrating to him or her the fantabulous data-transporting capabilities of
his or her present phone by comparison with the old candlestick he or she was
obliged to shift with way back in the Paleolithic days (quasi-literally
days—i.e., actually a mere trio or, at most, quartet of months) of very-late
2016 to very-early 2017 (to say nothing of the lumbering cretaceous-epoch
2015-manufactured phones fumblingly manipulated by his or her mum and dad, or
almost infinitely less than nothing of the proverbial pre-Cambrian computer
that was obliged to put the first human on the moon all by its feeble
transistor-driven stadium-filling lonesome, and thereby demonstrating that
putting a human being on the moon is a much smaller step for man than
the uploading of an a(*)**(*)-picking video to F******k). So the ostensibly socially-oriented raison
d’être of the platform is a ruse, and one that is bound to be undermined
and indeed eroded into untenability and ultimately nonexistence as the
platform’s sustaining advertisements, in incorporating more and more supposedly
sophisticated—and consequently more greedily bandwith-hogging—son et lumière
effects in their own right come to usurp the so-called friend-to-so-called
friend electronic shipments qua demonstrations of telephonic virtual
horsepower. Of course (and here I am
partially quoting myself) probably very soon—say, within the next decade—the
famous Moore’s Law will reach its atomic limit and phones will be incapable of
getting any faster and the whole phantasmagoric apparatus, like a de-hived
swarm of bees, will have to find an entirely different and as-yet-unimagined
(at least by the present author) material platform—unless, that is, by then the
so-called quantum computer processor has been both effectually engineered and
manufactured in sufficiently numerous numbers to fit into a mass-marketed
mobile telephone, in which case there is no telling how long hyperoccidentals
will continue to confuse the epiphenomena of technical improvements in the
infrastructure of the circulation of intellectual sewage (wherein, in contrast
to the circulation of biophysical sewage, the material rather than being
purified is allowed to ferment and become ever-more-noxiously feculent) with
economic productivity in an old-school sense, with or without the supplementary
delusive assistance of F******k-like entities.
Proprietary entities like U**r (of which there are many besides U**r,
the most famous of these probably being A** *&*) are even more ludicrous
than F******k in adding nothing more than an unwarranted aura of safety and
respectability to practices that have been engaged in throughout the world
since the dawn of human civilization.
The most obvious, because the most widely geographically evident,
precedent for U**r is of course hitch-hiking, but there are certainly others
that even more closely hew to its core mission of providing more affordable
alternatives to taxis in urban centers.
I can attest, for example, that here in Baltimore it was—or rather,
probably, has been (for although I have not seen evidence of the practice in a
few years, in the light of its refreshingly completely red-tape-free
informality it would greatly surprise me to learn that it has been superseded
by U**r completely)—an extremely common custom to hail rides from unliveried
private vehicles driven by people not licensed by the city to convey
passengers. The practice is or was so
well-established that the local argot even has or had a word to distinguish
such vehicles categorically from official liveried cabs (your Checkers, Diamonds,
Red Balls, and so forth)—viz. a hack. To be sure, the term is neither autochthonous
nor judiciously applied—historically and geographically speaking, throughout
the Anglosphere hack, being derived from Hackney as in Hackney
cab or carriage, is merely a slightly downmarket term for a cab or taxi, but
here in Baltimore, where a taxi or cab by any other name apparently does not
count as such, it, hack, does serviceable enough yeoman service in
setting apart the carruchial goats from the carruchial sheep (or
vice-versa). There is or was even a
semiotic protocol for hailing a hack, or, more precisely, for signaling that
one is interested exclusively in the services of a hack, that unliveried
vehicles alone should heed the summons and that all liveried vehicles should
seek their fares elsewhere. This
protocol consists or consisted in pointing one’s arm-cum-hand-cum-extended
index finger not at a forty-five or even fifty-degree angle from one’s
shoulder, as if drawing an actual or imaginary companion’s attention to a
notable bird in some treetop across the street, as one does when hailing a cab,
but rather in pointing it directly at the horizon and then repeatedly jerking
the index finger nervously and indeed almost spastically towards the pavement
(in either a British or an American sense, depending on how close to the curb
[or kerb] one is standing), as if drawing some presumably imaginary
dog-walker’s attention to a particularly voluminous deposit that he or
she has had the confounded effrontery not to scoop up. No fancy-schman(t)zy apps were or are
involved, and yet at least in my presence the gesture has very seldom failed of
meeting its mark, of smoothly drawing the passenger-side back door of an
unmarked mid-’70s-to-early ’80s Impala, Bonneville, Cutlass, autc. level with
the hailer’s legs within a matter of a very few minutes. In the light of such a potent combination of
simplicity and efficacy one at first blush wonders how U**r ever came to
flourish in this town, or why one began to notice a diminution of the presence
of taxis on its streets only after U**r’s local advent. But then on second blush one recalls why one
oneself has not so far sought out the services of a hack—viz., that one does
not trust some presumably louche character driving an undeniably louche vehicle
like a mid-’70s to early ’80s Impala, Bonneville, Cutlass, autc. to transport
one to one’s intended destination in one unmolested piece and without having
shaken one down for one’s every last penny on earth plus a cool grand or so in
IOUs secured with the kneecaps of one’s next of kin beforehand—and the
recent-to-current local prosperity of U**r at the expense of the officially
licensed taxis becomes an eye-burstingly self-evident foregone conclusion. For after all, the demographic profile of the
typical U**r driver is—or at least until very recently was—that of a decidedly
unlouche and indeed superlatively nice person—a college student,
middle-bourgeois mater- or paterfamilias, or wholesomely bohemian artist
looking to pick up a bit of extra cash in between classes, school runs, or
gallery viewings. Such a nice
person, so the assumption must run among habitual U**r users, would never
charge a passenger a penny more than the rate exacted by the meters of officially
licensed cabs, let alone do anything untoward to his or her person–or at least
so it must have run until the louche mobility got wind of U**r as a lucrative
base on wheels for their louche activities, as they seem to have done round
about four years ago, to judge by the “List of U**r Horror Stories” that
appeared at the Daily Beast on November 19, 2014. (For the record: in this matter the present
writer is in virtually no position to furnish any anecdotage drawn from his
personal experience, as he does not own a mobile telephone and therefore cannot
use U**r, although he feels obliged to disclose that he has exactly
once, in October 2015, taken an U**r-sponsored ride as a fellow-passenger of
its securer, that the securer gave no sign of regarding the fare as being
unfair, and that neither the securer nor the present writer was physically,
emotionally, or spiritually assaulted by the driver, who seemed to be a very
nice sort of chap.) And of course one
assumes that there is an equally voluminous list of horror stories associated
with A** *&*-lodgings and all the other interweb app-enabled and branded
forms of self-whoring that have emerged in the past butcher’s half-decade. And how could it be otherwise, given that not
even the least opprobrious of these despicable practices is materially
distinguishable from some imposture that every decent, would be-self-respecting
now-living hyperoccidental over the age of, say, 25, was sternly adjured to run
like heck from by his aut al. mother or wet-nurse from his aut al. or her
earliest infancy? And yet such exercises
in wanton chicanery are (at least so the present writer hears tell) now held up
as literal textbook examples of good old-fashioned Yankee gumption-cum-know
how-cum entrepreneurship by every schoolmaster or schoolmistress in the
hyperoccidental congeries of lands. And
I have not even begun to lay into these meretricious practices from the
point-of-view of the hapless chump of a c*m-d***pster (or, in rightpondial
parlance, c*m-sk*p) who is stupid or desperate enough to engage in
them—from the point of view of Joe or Jill College Student, Middle-Bourgeois
Mater- or Paterfamilias, Wholesomely Bohemian Artist, or (since at least 2014)
Louche Grifter-aut/cum-Psychopath.
Imagine, if you will, my decidedly undear reader, what it must be like,
after having put in one’s eight-and-a-half hours in the quite conceivably
literal salt mines, to don a black vinyl-visor’d yellow hat and listen with
patience to a seemingly interminable succession of whinge-fests while dodging a
seemingly endless succession of errant dump-trucks, so-called smart cars, and
fire engines; or a tailcoat and black tie and be sent scurrying back into one’s
own kitchen a hundred times over the course of an evening-cum-night-cum-early
morning in the futile aim of getting a morsel of steak or salmon the
spectroscopically undetectable shade of pink demanded by the ugly American’s
ugly American to whom you have granted the privilege of calling your house his
or her home for as long as he or she is willing to pay a penny more per night
than the rate exacted by the nearest Motel 6.
Short of round-the-clock utter prostration by an excruciatingly painful
illness, I can conceive of no mode of existence on offer in the present world
that more closely approximates the fate of some damned soul in the Hell of the
Dantean or Edwardsian type. Nor can I
conceive of a mode of breadwinning more degrading. And last and certainly not least and indeed
probably most in this setting, this mode of existence, far from producing
anything in a pre-Rust Belt sense, is not even generating new services; rather,
as implied in earlier assertion herein, it is merely reapportioning previously
delivered services among a new aggregation of servants (and let there be no
outraged nose-crinkling at my dubbing Bob or Suzy U**r-Driver or Air *&*-host(ess) a servant,
for what other word in our language more charitable than slave is there
for a person who performs a service in person at the grotty, smelly, bedpan-emptying
level?). And yet this so-called gig
economy—along with the pseudo-or downright anti-social media that I have
already shown up for the glorified battery tester-cum-ad rag that they
collectively constitute–is revered by hyperoccidental received opinion as the
pinnacle of American political-economic achievement, and is purportedly more
revolutionary than steam power, electric power, cinema, radio, television,
nuclear power, train travel, car travel, air travel, and space travel combined. Why, the sheer lunacy and insolence of the
whole notion is enough to make Eli Whitney, Thomas Edison, Philo Farnsworth,
the Wright Brothers, and all the other classic great American inventors spin in
their aggregated graves with a combined kinetic force potent enough to displace
solar, wind, etc. as the next great source of energy (i.e., the first such next
great source actually bidding fair to imperil a traditional energy
source-driven economy like Russia’s).
But what hope have we Americans of extricating ourselves from our
delusive infatuation with our own wanton fallowness of invention when the
remainder of the hyperoccident unremittingly deluges us with encouragement of
our fatuity by praising to the skies (and into the so-called cloud) the
nonexistent wonders of F******k, T****r, U**r, etc.? When is this remainder of the
hyperoccident—which after all, in collectively comprising perhaps as many as a
milliard-and-a-half souls (if one includes in that remainder not only the other
traditionally English-speaking countries and the EU but also the remainder of
the Commonwealth and all the former French colonies), demographically dwarfs
our mere third of a milliard—going to realize that these proprietary
will-o-the-wisps are materially indistinguishable from all the blustery and
intellectually toxic persiflage it (or they) rightly contemn(s) in the United
States? The locus
classicus-cum-horribilis of this attitude of abject Yankophilia—in my
eyes-cum-mouth it indeed counts as the other or crowning slice of bread in the
gargantuan shit sandwich whose first or foundational slice is our wonkess’s
denunciation of Russia as a non-producer of things that other countries want to
buy—is a comment made by some Labour MP whose name escapes me (as it obviously
has every right to do given that I am not a member of his constituency in Bury
St. Cumbert, Bilgewater on Ouze, autc.) on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions
within a few weeks of the inauguration of the 45th American
president. “How can it be,” the
presumptive front bencher-cum-non shadow cabinet member sententiously queried,
as if having just alighted on the most piquantly provocative paradox since
Bertrand Russell’s one about the barber, “that the country that has produced
Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg has also produced Donald Trump?” To my seemingly antediluvian ears this
question had—and in my seemingly antediluvian mind’s ears now has—all the
piquantly provocative paradoxicality of such questions as “How can it be that
the country that has engendered the invention of the whoopee cushion and fake
dog poo has also engendered the invention of farting powder?” or “How can it be
that the country that countenances the publication of Hustler and Jugs
also countenances the publication of Club International?” In other words, heretical as this may sound
to the at least comparatively postdevluvian mind’s ears of most if not all of
the hereunto most sympathetic segment of my readership--each constituent of
which has presumably vouchsafed my imprecations against F*****k etc. a
sympathetic right-on, jude! but also has presumably regarded the
cofounder of A***e as a secular saint since 1984 or the year of his or her
earliest memory, whichever is more recent, and now regards Mr. Trump as a, or
rather, the Antichrist (for there can after all be but one of him)—I
regard Messrs. Jobs and Zuckerberg essentially as woodcocks of the same
gormless and unsightly feather as Mr. Trump, united as they are with him in
being dedicated peddlers of meretricious trash.
For am Arsch the entire umpteen-trillion-dollar produce of the A***e
empire is as contingent, superficial, and adventitious in its relation to what
if any Geist-furthering work computers actually accomplish as Mr.
Trump’s network of cheesy casinos and hotels and blowhard table-thumping antics
on The Apprentice are in their relation to whatever Geist-furthering
work is actually accomplished by so-called entrepreneurs and captains of
industry (or indeed even commerce or finance [for I have no inclination
whatsoever to engage in the fatuous and fractious old practice of lambasting
the supposed superfluity of the so-called middle man of business {cf. Samuel
Johnson’s spirited apologia for the tacksman in his Journey to the
Western Isles}]). To be sure, it is
awfully nice to be able to see one’s own words (or at any rate the words one
has been impelled, by whatever efficient or final cause, to commit to paper,
whether actual or virtual) immediately rendered in graceful serif characters
(not that I myself am well-heeled enough to be typing the present essay on an
A***e machine, but I concede that in the absence of Mr. Jobs’s obsession with
such cosmetic effects they probably would not now be achievable via cheaper
reckoners) without the dilatory and expensive intervention of a printing shop
(which intervention, it must be noted, did keep a number of pairs of hands
besides the writer’s gainfully employed for at least a tiny fraction of an
hour), but in point of the bottom-line mechanical essentials of the writer’s
c**ft, in point sheer speed and ease of typage and untypage (i.e., the
correction of errors), a green or amber-screened ca. 1983 IBM PC would work
every bit as well as a top-of-the-line 2018 M******sh (or, rather,
I-Whatever-the-Name-of-an-A***e-Made-Desktop-or-Laptop-Computer Is Nowadays
[supposing A***e still makes—or, rather, causes to be made—anything so
abjectly unhip {yet utterly indispensable to anyone wishing to compose anything
longer than a t**t or T***t} as an ordinary laptop or desktop computer]). And even in its prize bailiwick, the
bailiwick of aesthetics, A***e falls abysmally short of the standards of any
aesthete who does not crassly reduce aesthetics to the immediate palpation of
the senses, to a combination of smooth contours, soothing colors, rich
Corinthian leather, and the like.
One could site examples of this shortcoming on the aesthetic front
dating back to the early years of the A***e II, but for textual economy’s sake
([both DGR-like interjection charging the present writer with indifference to
and indeed outright contempt for textual economy and author’s spirited defense
against the charge omitted for that selfsame TE’s sake]), I shall stick to an
illustration taken from the present A***e-verse, viz. the ineluctable I-T***s. My principal objections to I-T***s are not
directed at the look or feel of the thing, to its aesthetic
shortcomings in the vulgar sybaritic sense (though, to be sure, I am no fan of
the virtual brushed stainless steel that frames all of I-T***s’ windows at
least by default) but rather to what one might term its ideal aesthetic
habitus, i.e., the sort of musical outlook and collection of listening
preferences that it seems to assume is shared by all its users. As the world’s default recorded music-playing
platform, I-T***s is used by music-listeners of every conceivable age and
taste-orientation—I shall eschew the
at-such-moments-as-the-present-one-obligatory cascading from…to
catalogue because filling it out to its requisite amplitude would perforce
exact the naming of a number of pseudo-schools-cum-genres (e.g., emo, grime,
and tam-tam and treble) that by all rights should be reduced to the
single rhetorically deflationary yet utterly just appellation of pop. Now, as the ideal reader of this b**g will
already know, the present writer has hardly any interest whatsoever in pop
music and is almost exclusively interested in serious or real music; i.e., the
music vulgarly known as classical, but it is not the mere bigotry (if
extremism in defense of merit can ever rightly be called bigotry) of a
classical music buff that actuates my principal objection to I-T***s’ ideal
aesthetic habitus; it is actuated, rather, by my bipartite awareness as an
Anglophone and a person of the world in the broadest and least snooty of
senses—the sense in which every compos-mentis present-day human over the age of
10 should be a person of the world regardless of his or her so-called
socioeconomic background—that a song is a musical composition that
involves the human voice [chowder-headed DGR-ish Mendelssohn-centered demurral
and sagacious authorial retort thereunto omitted ob multissimas causas]
and that not every single unit of music ever committed to some aurally echoic
medium is an instance of such a composition.
To be sure, a great many, and perhaps even the majority, of such
recorded non-songs—all those overtures, symphonies, concertos, etc.—hail from
the so-called classical repertoire, but a great many other musical corpora are
dominated by them—jazz, for instance, and bluegrass, not to mention hearty chunks
of the recorded output of most extra-Occidental musical traditions. The pre-nebular epoch of hi-fidelity
recording—i.e., the period stretching from the advent of the LP in 1948 to the
beginning of the out-bowing of the CD in ca. 2002 (I refuse to aver that the CD
was superseded by the various MPs inasmuch as the sound quality
available on the highest-end CDs has always outpaced that of the average
I-T***s download by a considerable stretch)—enjoyed the currency of a catch-all
noun denoting any unit of music distinguished on the platter in question’s
label by a number followed by a title or some other sort of name and separated
from both its predecessor and successor on the platter in question by a
decorous interval. This noun was track, and no listener, were he or she
the lowest-browed teeny-bopper or the highest-browed classical music buff,
seemed to have any complaint with the denotation of such a unit by this
particular noun. To be sure, most
teeny-boppers of that baker’s half-century very probably had never heard of any
mode or genre of music that did not center on the human voice, but their
ignorance on this point had not put them off cuing up tracks rather than
songs on their Panasonic phonographs or Sony Discmen any more than had
the presumably universal absence of a likeness of Fabian, Debbie Gibson, or
Britney Spears on the turntables or casings thereof. Such having been the case, it came as not
only an unwelcome change but also a genuinely surprising one when the present
writer, upon using I-T***s for the very first time, in 2003 or 2004, discovered
that every single sound-unit in his musical library, which then as now
consisted overwhelmingly of purely instrumental works, was now ineffaceably
termed a song. But he has had to
lump the misnomination and submit to cuing up nothing but songs on his
laptop and I-P*d, all because back in 2001 or 2002, the shot-calling louts at
A***e HQ, presumably up to and including Mr. Jobs himself, either were
teeny-boppers of larger growth themselves, or assumed that everybody but
themselves was a teeny-bopper, or (worst and yet most probably of all) assumed
that everybody either was a teeny-bopper or wanted to think of himself or
herself as one and was therefore mortally mortified at the notion of being
interested in non-vocal music of any kind.
One has of course been hearing philippics against our so-called
culture’s worship of youth for decades, and while the seemingly
unchallengeable prevalence of such youth-worship is undeniable, the polemicists
have all too often gone for the sitting-duck of a meta-target of youthful
physical beauty and consequently left themselves all too vulnerable to the
charge that their resentment is actuated by mere envy actuated in turn by pure
vanity. “Why can’t we see older
models in our fashion and porn magazines, older anchorpeople on our
evening news programmes, older CGI enhanced cat-suited actors in our
summer comic book superhero blockbuster movies?” these de facto pruned-faced,
pabulum-sucking Zimmer frame-pushers incessantly whinge. The present writer, by contrast, despite or
perhaps because he was not even remotely photogenic even in his youth, but most
likely because he consumes neither the mags nor the movies nor the shows in
question, flatters himself that he is happy to cede every pixel of the
so-called media’s photographic fetishism of young flesh as youth’s
quasi-sempiternal birthright; and in his resentment of I-T***s’ fetishism of
the teeny-bopper aesthetic habitus he flatters himself that he is getting to
the core or gist of the noxiousness, the viciousness, the perniciousness, of
pandemic youth-worship, inasmuch as this resentment is at least in unsmall part
disinterested, or perhaps rather, and even more commendably, interested,
on behalf of young people themselves qua at-minimum-conceivably autonomous
subjects. I would like to think that
even Chet and Caitlin Teeny-Bopper are at least marginally aware of and not
completely contemptuous of non-vocal music and would appreciate the semantic
precision of a playlist incorporating both songs and non-songs under the
auspices of a single, vocally neutral designation, be it track, chunk,
clod, or whatever non song-synonym the louts that be at A***e
will suffer. I would like to think,
moreover, that even if Chet and Caitlin Teeny-Bopper are either not even
marginally aware of non-vocal music, or if aware of it completely contemptuous
of it, they are appreciative of the aesthetic integrity of units of music
transcending the confines of a single track (or, rather, song), to think
that they at least occasionally enjoy listening to an assorted succession of albums
by their favorite butcher’s half-gross of flash-in-the-pan guitar-shredding
ensembles or boy bands, and accordingly at least occasionally bristle at having
to hear the first song on one of these albums followed not by the second
song thereon but rather by, say, the ninth song on an album by a completely
different flash-in-the-pan guitar-shredding ensemble or boy band. Alas, I T***s affords them no means of
speedily gratifying their fastidiousness on this score in that it does not
allow the user to treat albums (let alone such generally sub-album-length yet
multi-song entities as symphonies, sonatas, and concertos) as integral
unpartitionable units either in a playlist or in a so-called shuffle mix. To be sure, it is easy enough—at least when
the pathetic s*ds who update I-T***s’s database gratis have done their
perversely voluntary sixteen-ton job of slave labor properly—to listen to one
Fabian or Felicity Twinkle or Testicular Atrophy album after another by simply
sorting one’s library by album-title; but in order to listen to an entire Fabian
album followed by an entire Felicity Twinkle album and an entire Testicular
Atrophy Album, one must laboriously assemble a playlist including only the
songs from the desired albums; and the possibility of listening to a succession
of albums at random—to an entire Felicity Twinkle album followed at hazard by
an entire Walker Brothers album and in turn, and equally at hazard, by an
entire Assück album—is foreclosed by the so-called shuffle function’s automatic
atomization of every album into an agglomeration of infinitely mutually
alienable songs, each of which is juxtaposible in the mix with a song
hailing from any album ascribed to any so-called artist hailing from any sphere
of music-making; such that in listening to one of these I-T***s random mixes one
invariably finds oneself having to sit, stand, dance, or snooze (or indeed any
or all of the above in alternation) one’s way through, say, four minutes of
Frank Sinatra followed by thirty seconds of Assück followed by eighteen minutes
of the Gamelan Son of Lion followed by four minutes of Liszt as played by
Charles Rosen, &c. It is enough to
make any halfway grownup person turn his back on and a deaf ear to the entire
musical cloudscape. (The recent-to-present craze for LPs among young hipsters,
while prevailingly upchalkable to the fatuously misplaced fetishization of what
has after all always been a thoroughly mass-produced and standardized commodity
as though it were as artisanal an object as a Fabergé egg or a Chippendale
cabinet, probably owes a modicum of its intensity to such sane and laudable
anti-nurseryism.) And yet it is, after
all, entirely of a piece with the pre-pre-pre-pubescent ideal aesthetic habitus
imagined by the nominally productive sector of the U.S. economy en bloc—with
the utterly unapologetic (and unprotested) elbowing of advertising into places,
both virtual and actual, wherein its absence was formerly taken for granted;
with the incorporation of so-called emojis into communications of the most
impersonal nature from the most po-facedly institutional communicators; with
the posting of so-called spoiler warnings in every context in which the least
imaginative and most ignorant creature on the planet could conceivably derive
the tiniest scintilla of pleasure from not being apprised of the outcome of a
narrative in advance [e.g., in a plot synopsis of one of the four gospels, the
reader will be vouchsafed a spoiler alert before being informed that Jesus is
crucified towards the end]. The sheer, naked,
brazen, shameless vacuity, asininity, and infantilism of the supposed vanguard
of the present nominally productive sector of the U.S. economy is an
embarrassment of c**ptacular proportions, an embarrassment that does not so
much make a mockery of the old-fashioned sleeve-uprolling, grindstone-sniffing
model of Yankee brawn-cum-know-how as utterly submerge that model from the view
of living memory in a barrow-mound of excrement. In all truth—or at least the preponderance of
truth that so far bids fair to carry the day—the only material commodity that
the United States produces entirely within its own borders and “that other
countries want to buy” in sufficient quantity to make or break our domestic
prosperity is dollars, and the market for dollars is in turn buoyed largely if
not entirely by the mobility of other countries’ infantile and gormless
belief—or, rather and at-best, against hope-hoping hope—that F*****k, T****r,
A****e, et al. (or etc.) are up to something substantial after all. Of course, it may be plausibly argued (and
indeed the argument is so plausible that in all candor and frankness I cannot
pooh-pooh it as yet another blockheaded confabulation of a counterfactual DGR),
for more than a hundred years the United States has been making money H over F
via its propagation of insubstantial illusion via cinema and television to
every C of the G; and in all frankness and candor I concede to the promulgators
of this argument that our domestic illusion-factory may yet have just enough
juice in it to keep us out of the political-economic doldrums long enough to
spare us a complete socio-econo-political train-wreck (brazenly unapologetic
[sic] on the metaphor-mixture); but by that same or some other uncannily
similar token, it must be acknowledged, first, that the United States does not
enjoy some sort of spiritual monopoly-cum-royal charter on illusion-mongering
any more than France enjoys one on the production of fine wine and cheese or
Italy on the curing of spicy sausages, that there have been periods when
Hollywood was threatened by the cinematic produce of other countries [more on
this specifically in connection with the Soviet and Russian cinemas anon], and
that just as we now tend to rate certain French and Dutch vodkas more highly
than the leading Russian ones and are coming to appreciate certain Italian pale
ales and Japanese scotches, so we may soon enough cease thinking of Hollywood
as the dream-factory of first resort [the most obvious harbinger of such a
decentering is of course the increasingly global profile of so-called Bollywood,
but the popularity of so-called Scandi-noir detective television series in
Anglo-Saxia is probably ultimately more telling]; and second, that historically
the United States’s hegemony in cinema has been superstructed on its
film-industry’s successful and in some measure authentic depiction of a
so-called American way of life, a way of life that has always generally been
depicted as superstructed in turn on a combination of the industrial activity
of the old so-called Rust Belt and the agricultural activity of the old
so-called Heartland. To be sure,
audiences around the world have always enjoyed a movie centered on the fortunes
of some young enterprising Madison Avenue copywriter or some would-be movie
starlet waiting tables at some greasy spoon sited within a stone’s throw of the
MGM, Columbia, or Warner Brothers back lot, but the scenario of such a movie
generally had one of its feet firmly planted in some provincial locale where
some humble, unglamorous, unspectacular, and yet emphatically productive
activity was being engaged in with great alacrity and success by the
locals. In today’s Hollywood the norm is
to depict metropolitan American office life as a kind of sanitized,
air-conditioned, business-casual cocoon entirely cut off not only from the
provinces but even from the so-called street life of the city in which the
office in question is purportedly sited (I say “purportedly” because nowadays
even a movie set in Los Angeles itself is apt to be filmed in some incredibly
un-L.A.-like place like Vancouver or Des Moines [and while this lack of
resemblance may in itself account in part for the infrequency of exterior shots
in such a movie, one must for all that consider that the movie’s producers
would never have settled on Vancouver or Des Moines in lieu of L.A. if they had
not regarded the other city as being at bottom the same f***kin’ place
as the City of Angels]).
Complementarily, when today’s Hollywood opts to shoot on location,
whether amid the row-houses of Baltimore or the cornfields of Kansas, it
generally seeks out the most economically and spiritually depressed spots and
does everything in its considerable rhetorical power to emphasize the misery,
economic unproductivity, and all-around ultimate futility of the existences of
the people supposedly unfortunate enough to live there. On being presented such a stridently
bifurcated depiction of American life, one in which neither side of the divide
is ever-so-remotely appealing, why would any Indonesian, Kenyan, or Albanian,
let alone a German, Chinaperson, or Liechtensteiner, want to live here, or even
continue to shell out his or her hard-earned (or otherwise acquired) rupiahs,
autc. on such rebarbative kinetic representations of such a demoralizing Volksdasein? But the studios—or, rather, perhaps, the
multi-myriad so-called independent production teams that have nominally
replaced them—relentlessly keep churning out such unpalatable castor
oil-saturated pap under the Sundance and Oscar-blessed label of biting
social commentary, and why should they do otherwise when their so-called
target audience is not the mass of starry-eyed overseas cinema-gourmandizing
youngsters of yore, but rather the phony Stateside middle class of
pseudo-accredited mock-functionaries (i.e., the recipients of the academic
equivalent of vanity publishing deals who constitute the
at-minimum-adequately-whelming majority of so-called college graduates in this
country) and gig-economy workers whose genitals become engorged at the sight of
all those dreary gray so-called open-plan offices staffed with dreary hordes of
open-collared and blue-jeaned twentysomethings, because they mistake them for
the smithies and smiths (respectively) of progress, and whose “withers are
unwrung” by the crimes and vices of urban and rural bottom-feeders because
their own quintessentially suburban version of whoredom happens to be pandered
to and pimped by the latest model I-ph*ne.
In point of fact, whoredom is far too kind a word for the modus
laborandi of the gig-worker, inasmuch as a dedicated full-time whore, just
like a dedicated, full-time cabdriver, hotelier, courier aut al., is compelled
merely to engage in a single repertoire of self-debasing gestures,
maneuvers, calculations, etc., that may be repeated, with very minor
variations, from client to client; such that while he or she is technically and
to all outward appearances servicing
anywhere from several to hundreds of anuses in the course of a work
week, from a private or spiritual point of view (or taste) he or she is effectively servicing a single
anus with a predictable repertoire of flavors, textures, and flexures; whereas
the gig-worker—i.e., the part-time cabdriver cum part-time hotelier cum
part-time courier et al.—is effectively in the decidedly unedifying and
unenviable position of an unwilling guest at a sort of anilingual or even
coprophagic all-you-can-eat (or, rather, all you must eat) smorgasbord
featuring dozens of mutually incommensurable anuses, each of which must be
humored according to its own unique and infungible set of desiderata. To be sure, the typical deludely alacritous
gig-worker will contrive to persuade himself or herself that there is something
highly and fundamentally (in two or more ways) redeeming about this oro-proctological
juggling act; he or she may even come to fancy himself or herself a kind of
connoisseur of the various vintages and varietals of anus, to persuade himself
or herself that the pungent alkalinity of the anus of an octogenarian heavy
black coffee drinker is infinitely preferable to the bland saccharineness of
the chocolate starfish of a vigintigenarian sweet-tooth; or perhaps, rather,
that while each of them is excellent in its own way, neither may be savored to
the fullest except when prefaced or succeeded by its ideal gustatory complement—a
sniff and a lick at the poo-chutes of, say, a quadragenarian oenophile and a
quinquagenarian vegetarian, respectively.
And far be it from the present writer to assert that the cultivation of
such a discriminating coprophagic palate is either impossible or undesirable;
to the contrary, he is much of a mind to conjecture that the United States
already teems in the tens if not hundreds of thousands with coprophagic
connoisseurs and that inasmuch as the ranks of such anilingual gourmets bid
fair to outnumber those of aficionados of craft mead, cupcakes, home-grown
cale, and artisanal shoelaces combined within the next five years, these tens
if not hundreds of thousands are residing on the very acme of the cutting edge
of the biggest and most inexorable tsunami of the future. Howbeit, he, the present writer, will and
shall be bold enough ever so humbly to crave from his very-near-future
demographic overlords some infinitesimal modicum of slack in accommodation of
what he cannot but regard as an irremediable organic defect in his organism
occasioned by his having not only grown up and come of age but also ripened and
gone all but entirely to seed in a (or, rather, because there is no pretending
that there is any hope [or, rather, dread] of going back, the) pre-gig
economy; inasmuch as, according to his seemingly irreparably damaged lights
(and nose and tongue) an anus is an anus is an anus, and all anuses look,
smell, and taste uniformly and mutually indistinguishably awful. Not that he, the present writer, is some sort
of po-faced, clothespin-nosed, corncob-rectum’d prissy-boy who fancies that he
is above all that, who fancies that one may go to one’s grave as
blissfully ignorant of the taste of others’ anuses as one (or at least he,
the present writer) has always been of one’s own; to the contrary, ever since
he was a wee bairn knee-high to an Etruscan shrew he has been aware of and has
reflexively acquiesced in the not particularly encouraging notion that every
kind or line of remunerative work universally and ineluctably if contingently
exacts a certain amount of anilingis; and, indeed, at least since he has been
in long slacks (a watershed or milestone that admittedly will mean little or
nothing not only to his juniors but also to most of his contemporaries and
elders), he has been willing enough—albeit not exactly game—to countenance the
downright demoralizing notion that such work no less universally or ineluctably
(albeit no less contingently) consists of nothing but anilingis. All the same, in hailing from the pre
gig-economy macro-era he cannot manage to shake himself free of the delusion
that once one has done one’s bit of remunerative labor for the portion of the
day allocated to it—a portion never to exceed eight hours, or, at any rate
(once one has thrown in one’s ever-interruptible lunch) eight-point-five hours,
or rather (once one has also thrown in one’s ever-dilating commute)
ten-point-nine-and-counting hours—one should not be expected to have any
further commerce with anuses (apart from the absolutely unavoidable manual
commerce with one’s own), that from that point onwards until the start of the
next workday one is entitled to regard one’s Lebenswelt as a veritable
anus-free zone. Naturally, he realizes
that such a clear-cut bifurcation of anilingual and non-anilingual phases of
the day is out of the question now, at least for anyone spineless enough (as he
concedes he is) to desire and seek off-the-clock social intercourse with his
fellow-living hominids; that given that an ever-increasing plurality of the
verbiage spewed from the north-anuses of these F-LHs consists of the
unremunerated promotion (a.k.a. up-b*****g) of the gig economy, and even
more offensively, of adjurations to join in the gig economy oneself, to liaise
lingually with this or that anus of especially auspicious purulence, he will at
least have to spend a goodly proportion of his nominally non-working and even
non-work-pertaining hours licking ass, if only by proxy (not that a proxy
ass, in virtue of the term’s inevitable evocation of certain industrially
[albeit regrettably not domestically] produced succedanea, should be confused
with a synthetic ass, i.e., a latex ass, i.e., a pleasant-smelling
ass; for not unlike a proxy server it retains every aroma-particle
of its client’s unendurable rankness).
Naturally, or rather unnaturally if eminently understandably (at least
by any admittedly empirically virtually nonexistent rational nice person),
he would much prefer to spend if not the bulk then at least the third class of
these nominally non-working-cum-non-work pertaining hours sedulously abrading
the derma of his nose with a presumably pedally powered grindstone as his quasi
or pseudo ancestors of a century or so ago did, but as nowadays such
hyper-old-school diligence not only never receives a penny of financial
remuneration or an Etruscan shrew’s Zen handclap of acclaim but is actually
greeted uniformly and universally by contempt and ridicule, he, the present
writer, cannot forbear entertaining fantasies deriving from the only
pre-gig-economy-originating classic American scenario of material
self-actualization that still enjoys a modicum of currency (even if it never
has enjoyed a modicumette of respectability), viz. that of suddenly striking
it rich through some complete windfall—i.e., an event to whose precipitation
neither one’s own labor nor one’s own ingenuity has contributed a jot. The most prevalent version of this
scenario is of course that of winning the lottery (a designation that
really ought to be expanded to something like winning the jackpot of one of
those really big multi-state lotteries, inasmuch as in a lottery it
is never the lottery itself that is up for winning, and as the average return
on a winning lottery ticket—viz. ca. $10—cannot make anybody rich), but
inasmuch as nice people (rational or otherwise) don’t play the lottery and the
present writer has at least not quite yet resigned himself to being an un-nice
person, he is fain to have recourse to a less popular (albeit still eminently
entertainable) version, viz. that of some poor s*d simply stumbling upon
something incredibly valuable whilst going about his quotidian business—the
version enshrined in the example of Jed Clampett, that poor
mountaineer who whilst shootin’ at some food alighted upon a
massive field of bubblin’ crude—i.e., oil, black gold, or Texas
tea—and consequently became one of the 90210 ZIP-code’s wealthiest
residents. I have concluded that
inasmuch as it is utterly impossible for me to participate productively in the
economic life of my country of citizenship and residence, my only hope of
contentment lies in accidentally becoming a fulltime rentier; i.e., a person
living entirely on or off what he already owns; for then, Worthington’s Law
will ensure that no matter how ridiculous, antiquated, or just plain barmy my
fellow-countrypeople regard my outlook and utterances, they will be
obliged—nay, compelled—to hold their peace and treat me with more respect than
they deign to vouchsafe any gig-worker, or indeed gig-tycoon, whose net worth
is a penny less than my own, just as the ultra-snooty banker to the stars
Milburn Drysdale was compelled to pay court round the clock to Jed Clampett
despite the latter’s obdurate adherence to his pigf***erly mountaineerin’ ways. And naturally it will not have escaped the
eye of any discerning reader that this unabashedly sedentary rentier’s ethos,
this feudalism for dummy’s dummies (albeit filthy rich dummy’s dummies),
that I am unapologetically espousing, is tantamount to a reduction of
present-day Russia’s political economy to the proportions of a bachelor’s
household; such that at least on the political-economic plane I am obliged, nay
compelled, to confess myself very much a present-day Russian rather than a
present-day American in spirit.
Of course it will also not have escaped the eye
of a certain kind of discerning reader—namely, a discerning reader with
no knowledge of pre-late nineteenth century history (hence empirically speaking
any discerning reader once again) that the portion of my argument
advanced in the preceding section contains or seems to contain what he or she
cannot but regard as a gaping hole. The
gaping hole consists in or of this—that in b**ging up the present-day Russian
political-economic habitus merely as a pis aller and in clinging to
nose-to-the-grindstone-ism as an ideal political-economic habitus, I have
merely set myself up as a kind of contingent, fair-weather Russophile who
would, if he had his druthers, desert to the hyperoccidental side at the drop
of one of his beloved Astrakhan hats, a man who must indeed be regarded as more
fundamentally an Amerophile than a Russophile inasmuch as his ideal economic
habitus has never flourished better than on American soil and has never
flourished at all on Russian permafrost.
“That it—the nose-to-the-grindstone habitus—is either moribund or
extinct in the U.S.A. of the present is certainly persuasively arguable” (so
concedes the worthy hole-espier [who is by no means to be confused with a
DGR]), “but this extinction or moribundity, no matter how ineluctable or
irreversible it may be, is certainly no grounds for embracing a quasi-state
capitalist political-economic habitus such as that of present-day Russia, for
however unilikely-ly nose-to-the-grindstone-ism is ever to flourish again,
there is surely no polity on the globe in which it is less unlikely again to
flourish than the U.S.A.—this, of course, because nose-to-the-grindstone-ism is
after all inextricably associated with free-market capitalism—nay, would be
completely unthinkable without free-market capitalism—and capitalism has
famously and notoriously never been freer in its market, or rather, erm,
marketedness, than in the United States.”
This hole is not wholly (groan) factitious, inasmuch as I myself am
strongly inclined to suppose that nose-to-the-grindstone-ism really did reach
its acme as a sustainable political-economic habitus here in the United States
in the late nineteenth century when capitalism (to the extent that there is
such a thing) was in its least regulated state, and much as I abhor capitalism
(at least to the extent that it is shameless enough to embrace a belief in its
own numinousness, to be proudly self-conscious of being capitalism with
a merely typographically lowercase C), I am sufficiently hard-bitten as a
student of metaphysics not to pooh-pooh the economic historians’ attribution of
the parentage of nose-to-the-grindstone-ism to free-market capitalism as so
much self-interested plutocratic twaddle.
And yet I am also sufficiently hard-bitten as a student of history in a
certain broad, nebulous, and, above all, backward-looking (a.k.a. retrospective)
sense to pooh-pooh the aforementioned attribution of parentage qua parentage;
for qua such a student I would describe free-market capitalism vis-à-vis
nose-to-the-grindstone-ism rather as a top-notch midwife (or, perhaps, rather
still [for I am after all pooh-poohing here, and midwives and home-birthing are
all the rage nowadays], as a top-notch indisputably male obstetrician of the
old school [and so incessantly swearing, smoking during deliveries, nipping
liberal lashings of hooch in between them etc.]). This is to say, and more specifically
quasi-concede, that while the politico-econo-c****ral conditions that prevailed
in the United States in the late nineteenth century were perhaps more favorable
or conducive to the flourishing of nose-to-the-grindstone-ism than the
prevailing politico-econo-c****ral conditions in the U.S. or any other country
in any earlier or succeeding mini-epoch, it is utterly wrongheaded to suppose
that nose-to-the-grindstone-ism originated in the U.S. of that mini-epoch as a
consequence of that polity-cum-mini epoch’s unprecedentedly free free-market
capitalism, or even that nose-to-the-grindstone-ism sprang from the loins of some
less full(y) fledged version of free-market capitalism (e.g., and effectively
i.e., that of James Watt and co.’s late eighteenth-century Britain) and
subsequently grew to maturity and efflorescence in lock-step with the
ever-improving fortunes of its progenitor.
For in the first place there is more than one bullet-vector along which
to cross-section a cat, and the bullet-vector principally traversing the organs
appertaining to free-market capitalism in the cat that is the United States in
the late nineteenth century is not necessarily the one that takes in the
largest proportion of the animal’s total length or mass. To my mind, a much more capacious vector for
such a cross-section of that animal has been supplied to us by the
lawyer-turned-sociologist David Riesman, who in a book published in 1950—in
other words, at the very height of old-school (albeit by then highly
State-regulated) industrial capitalism, and just before the advent of the Rust
Belt—succinctly if somewhat clunkily (because ungrammatically) termed the
signal characteristic of the late nineteenth century U.S.’s exponents of
nose-to-the-grindstone-ism inner-direction, a tendency to be governed by
one’s own inner impulses rather than by external or outer impulses—whence his
term for the antithesis of inner direction--“Outer direction?—no, other
direction. And by inner impulses
Riesman most certainly did not mean impulses necessarily originating
from within the individual; to the contrary, he believed that these impulses
were generally derived from the individual’s formative experiences and most
often specifically from principles inculcated in the very young individual by
his or her parents. The inner-directed
individual (so Riesman) was directed from within only inasmuch as he or she did
not adjust his or her aims, attitudes, and conduct to bring them into line with
the aims and conduct of his or her immediate neighbors and contemporaries. In short (so Riesman, mutatis verbis
mutandis), in all aspects of his or her orientation to the world, the
inner-directed individual was more or less the antithesis of a dedicated
follower of fashion or trend-humper.
While a plurality or perhaps even a preponderance of Riesman’s cases in
illustration of inner-direction hailed from the U.S. in the late nineteenth
century, he emphatically did not regard the late nineteenth-century
laissez-faire capitalist U.S. as the birthplace-cum-birth mini epoch of
inner-direction; indeed, he traced ID as far back and away as to
sixteenth-century central Europe, to a time-cum-place in which all polities and
political economies were organized along decidedly feudal or pre-capitalist
lines. Now of course the early sixteenth
century was the mini-epoch that witnessed the beginning of the Protestant
Reformation, and of course there is an unbudgeable bit of orthodox sociology
that maintains that the triumph of capitalism was an inexorable consequence of
the Protestant Reformation’s introduction of monastic ascetisicm and
routinization into the secular world, that Martin Luther was essentially the
David to Hank Ford’s J. Christ, and to the extent that capitalism is defined by
the habitus of those involved in its productive side qua producers, this bit of
orthodox sociology is more or less spot on as far as I am (and probably also
David Riesman was [for I am afraid the worthy gentleman has not been with us
for some time]) concerned—in other words, I am willing to concede that inner-
direction (a.k.a. nose-the-grindstone-ism) never would have flourished, never
would have become the hegemonic habitus, at any historical moment in any
portion of the Occident (hyper or otherwise), had the political-economic
quasi-system known justly or otherwise as capitalism not afforded
inner-directed types a means of simultaneously focusing like a laser on
some pet project and making ends not only meet but also meat and meet2
(i.e., the archaic sense meaning fit, proper, suitable). But of course chez capitalism the producer
cannot simply produce as much as he likes on his hermetic lonesome in onanistic
bliss without either drowning in his own exudations or running dry; and indeed
it takes not two mere tangoers but three full-fledged thuringoers for any
quasi-functioning capitalist quasi-system to quasi-function—in other words, in
such a quasi-system, not only must there be a congeries of producers but also a
congeries of consumers who absorb the producer’s products and circulators who
move the producers’ products to the consumers.
From the point of view of a champion of inner-direction or nose-to-the-grindstone-ism,
an ideal not-only-macroeconomic-but also macrogeographic arrangement is one in
which producers have no intercourse or commerce with the consumers and
circulators of their products and consume nothing more than they need to
consume in order to keep producing; for from this point of view, the allure of
the product to circulators and consumers is of no intrinsic interest, the
product being either actually or potentially present as something to be
developed and perfected for its own sake, as something worthy of being
developed and perfected in its own right.
From this point of view, an automobile assembly line may be as worthy an
object of a producer’s productive energies as a painting—or indeed even worthier
of them, if the year of production is 1920 and the best one can hope to attain
in the painting is an obsolete and therefore gratuitous photographic
realism. So as far as a lover of
inner-direction is concerned, whether the producer in question is Beethoven or
James Watt, Picasso or Henry Ford, the norm is very much that of the lonely
artist or artisan toiling away in his workshop 24/7, 7/52, and engaging with
the worlds of circulation and consumption only when he becomes so hungry that
he has to write or phone for a delivery of pizza, sandwiches, or Chinese food,
at which point it is a matter of sublime indifference to him whether the pizza
in question hails from Domino’s, Papa John’s, or Pizza Hut; whether the
sandwiches in question hail from Subway, Potbelly, or Quizno’s; whether the
Chinese food in question is Cantonese, Szechuan, or Hunan in manner of
preparation (or indeed, whether the source restaurant uses the traditional
foodie-depreciated big-nose orthography or styles itself a Gwandong, Sichuan,
or Xiang eatery). He quasi-literally couldn’t
give a fig about any of these considerations-cum-distinctions, because he is
only incidentally a consumer, because he is interested in the pizza,
sandwiches, or Chinese food merely as matter with which to stoke his stomach so
that he can continue producing.
Consumers and circulators, on the other hand, very much do care about
such considerations-cum-distinctions between and among products; indeed, it
could be persuasively argued that en bloc they care principally about
such considerations-cum-distinctions, and it is indisputable that en bloc they
care much more about them than about such brute use-values as
stomach-stoking. To refine this analysis
ever so slightly but obligatorily, the circulator is intrinsically and
necessarily interested only in speed, or perhaps, rather, to be more
precise and avoid confusion with the drug in one go, expediency, in
making the products he is circulating move along more quickly and securely and
in larger loads, so that he can reap larger and more frequent revenue-packets
from their circulation. In principle he
is indifferent to whether he is circulating (in the nifty phraseology of a
former U.S. president or his speechwriter) computer chips or potato chips as
long as the chips in question are more widely available and can be
shipped faster now than they used to be.
In practice he cares a great deal about the specific products (I am
trying ever so desperately hard to stick to the p-word and avoid the c-word,
for reasons that seem exigent even though they are as yet unclear) he is
circulating and is keen to circulate an ever more diverse range of
products and to be constantly introducing at least ostensibly new
products into his product line. He
hankers for diversity because come what may, each of his circulating vessels
must contain something before it sets off for its destination, and he
cannot count on bumper crops of potato chips or computer chips each and every
year, and he hankers for novelty because that is what the people at the other
end of the circulation pipeline—namely, the consumers—hanker for above all
else. Of course, common sense of a very
durable and by-no-means-to-be-sneezed at sort will argue that there is one
thing that consumers desire more in a product than novelty, namely utility,
or perhaps more precisely the facilitation of everyday living, and in
asserting that consumers desire novelty above all else I by no means wish to
reject this commonsensical line of thought outright, but rather to modify it in
saying that at least chez a pure
consumer (i.e., somebody whose consumption is never merely a means of improving
his life as a producer, e.g., through the acquisition of the latest model of a
certain kind of machine-tool to be used in his widget-factory) in the
not-so-very-long run utility or the facilitation of everyday living converges
with and is absorbed by novelty. To
essay a case in point derived—most appositely, for reasons that will soon
become clear—from the dawn of the so-called industrial revolution: a
householder of the middle station who has just earned (or otherwise acquired)
his first 10 disposable pounds (or 80 [?] or so dollars) and who has an
old-fashioned open fireplace in his sitting-room is patently guided by
considerations of everyday living-facilitation (and thrift [which can of course
in turn be ascribed to a desire for greater comfort in the form of other
comfort-giving commodities to be purchased with the money saved]) in laying out
those 10 pounds autc. on a freestanding stove of the type designed by Dr.
Franklin. But once the stove has been up
and running for, say, a few months, he (the householder, not Dr. Franklin),
provided he has since acquired more disposable funds, will be on the lookout
for other products to improve his creaturely domestic life—perhaps a set of those
fancy new sash windows to replace the creaky and drafty old casement windows
that he has been resentfully contending with since he bought the old
half-timbered pile of wood and plaster.
And once this domestic improvement has been effected he will, as hinted
in the immediately above square-bracketed parenthesis, be looking to make other
such improvements—the addition of a kitchen garden, the acquisition of a
sorrel-mare-and dog-cart, the deepening of the well-cum-upgrading of the pump,
etc. All of these improvements doubtless
facilitate the everyday life of our householder and his household, but the
facts, or, any rate, extreme likelihoods, that they are not absolutely
essential to the maintenance of that household and that they are being
effected in an entirely arbitrary sequence means that they should in all
extreme likelihood be viewed principally as expressions of our householder’s
craving for novelty and only secondarily as expressions of his craving for
everyday life-facilitation; and corollarily, that one should in all extreme
likelihood view the producers and circulators enabling these improvements
principally as facilitators rather of novelty than of utility. But even after conceding the partial
redeemability of Franklin stoves, sash windows, etc. in the eyes of utility,
one must acknowledge that a great many of the very-early industrial age’s star
products were object-classes whose sole selling point was their novelty,
their never-before-seen-ness, at least in the Occident (yes—hyper or otherwise)—viz.
tulips, proper Chinese (or at least Chinese-looking) china, patterned silk
fabrics, grotesquely shaped lapdogs, and the like. And yet again, from a booster of inner
direction-cum-nose to the grindstone-ism’s point of view, the utter otiosity of
such products must yield shame of place to their statically hermetic autonomy,
to the lamentable fact that while they undoubtedly drew upon the sedimented
accretions of dozens of generations of dedicated, undoubtedly
grindstone-sniffing Oriental (no—no, not hyper or otherwise, but rather
hyper-exclusively) artisans, they did not exact an iota of ingenuity or
resourcefulness from living producers, that they required nothing more than Bob
and Suzy Tsingtao’s repetition of the same actions that they and their forebears
had been performing for however many umpteen-thousand years our sorry age’s
execrable mandatory Sinophilia exacts from me in tribute to the incomparably
ingenious and virtuous Chinaperson’s all-around superiority to the ridiculously
slow-witted yet irredeemably wicked and unsurpassably pernicious
Westernperson. And I submit that the
hermetic autonomy of such products combined with the above-described
assimilation of utility-craving into novelty-craving constitute(s) sufficient
grounds for rejecting L, S, and B and with every impolite gesture in one’s
arsenal (bad pun-cum-pocket Morrissey homage entirely intended) the whole
K&C of the quasi-system known as free-market capitalism. The orthodox mythology about this
quasi-system holds that production has always (or at least since the
off-casting of the shackles and blinders of the supposedly
commercially-cum-industrially clueless feudal-agrarian system in ca. 1750)
necessarily existed in an indissoluble and symbiotic bipartite relationship
with consumption, a relationship governed by the authentic and immediately
palpable needs of both parties, vis-à-vis which circulation is a mere mindless
pack-mule or pimp neither able nor authorized to add so much as a literal
two-cents’-worth of its own to the attendant series of transactions. According to the logic of this mythology and
via one of its favorite topoi, the consumer is plagued by mice owing to the
inadequacy of the state-of-the-art mousetrap; the producer produces what he
believes to be a better mousetrap than the state-of-the-art one; and the
consumer, after purchasing and testing one of the producer’s mousetraps, either
buys a hundred more of them, in which case the producer strives to produce an
even better mousetrap, or refrains from buying a single further one, in which
case the producer goes back to the so-called drawing board and redesigns his
mousetrap from scratch, thereby coming up with one that is actually
better, etc. In reality, the consumer
has never much cared about catching mice and has always been content to choke
on mouse droppings (or drown in mice p*ss) provided that he or she is, was, or
were surrounded by the latest knickknacks, gewgaws, gadgets, and doohickeys
from the remotest circulation-accessible locales as he or she is, was, or were
drawing his or her last mouse p*ss or sh*t-saturated breath. Of course, the orthodox mythology affects to
concede, capitalism has always been vulnerable to fads whipped up by the
occasional cocaine-addled loose cannon-cum-rotten apple in the fundamentally
indispensable and irreproachable domains of advertising and marketing—fads such
as the mood ring, the pet rock, jelly shoes, and the tamagotchi—but (so the OM
avers) these fads have always been mere marginal and economically trivial
adscititious excrescences of the system; excrescences that could easily be
lopped off and undoubtedly would be were the off-lopping worth the effort—as it
patently is not, owing to the aforementioned marginality and economic
triviality. The truth is that owing to
the sheer arithmetical minority of the sphere of production vis-à-vis the
libidinously united spheres of circulation and consumption, fad-obsession was
an essential attribute of the quasi-system of capitalism from the very
beginning, when James Watt, Ben Franklin, Eli Whitney et al. were receiving a
pittance of the Occident’s capital by comparison with the tens of millions (of their
pounds and dollars, not ours) pouring into the coffers of the utterly
unproductive, grindstone dust-allergic purveyors of Chinese fans, screens, and
lapdogs; and that the mood ring, pet rock, jelly shoes, and (yes
indeed-stroke-lest we forget) F****k, T****r, and U**r were or are but
apotheoses of the original fad (or trend)-humping anti-genius or Ungeist
of capitalism. “In destroying they –F ****k, T****r, and U**r—fulfill.” To be sure, at numerous points along the way
a serendipitous complementariness-cum-synchrony of the enlightenment-craving
impulses of the sphere of production with the novelty-craving impulses of the
spheres of circulation and consumption has eventuated in well-nigh-universally permeating
quality-of-life-improving innovations from the Franklin stove to the electric
light bulb to the zip-fastener or zipper to the undisposable safety razor to
the disposable safety razor. And to be
further sure, at numerous points along the way producers have benefited from
so-called input or feedback from circulators and consumers, have actually had
their attention drawn thereby to shortcomings in their products and
consequently remedied those shortcomings.
But the official mythology’s cardinal notions that such so-called input
or feedback constitutes an indispensable non-electric old-school torch to the
backsides of producers—i.e., that in the absence of such so-called I/F Ben
Franklin, Eli Whitney, Thomas Edison, et al. would simply have spent all their
days picking at the respective apertures of their respective backsides—and that
it (the so-called I/F) is bound to lead to everyday-life-improving changes in
products; both these notions are, I say, pure poppycock in the non-proprietary
sense (for there are surely few better examples of serendipitous
complementariness-cum-synchrony of production of and with
circulation-cum-consumption than Poppycock in the proprietary sense [although
yet again the perdurance of the older Cracker Jack brand in the caramel and
peanut-impacted teeth of its manifest and well-established inferiority to
Poppycock points up the perversity of the whole gosh-damn quasi-system]). The sad or not-so-sad
truth-bearing-complements to these two mythemes are that 1) once a product has
been designed and patented, its effective production—that is to say, its
fabrication as something that actually exists in multiple incarnations (or
inplastations, inlignations, autc.) in the world, its passage from the
single quasi-Platonic Franklin Stove, electric light bulb, autc. to a gazillion
countable Franklin Stoves, electric light bulbs, autc.—shifts from the control
of the producer in a strong sense—from the person who actually thought up the
dag-blasted thing, a person who generally, along with his investors, has the
greatest material and libidinal stake in seeing the dag-blasted thing thrive in
the world—to the control of hundreds, thousands, or even a semi-gazillion
subproducers—the factory managers and workers, warehouse shipping clerks and
dogsbodies, internal accountants and inspectors, et al.—each of whom, as his
individual material and libidinal stake in the prosperity of the product is
almost incalculably small, finds the prospect of that prosperity about as
powerful an epipygial stimulus to diligence as a lighted Etruscan shrew fart;
and consequently cannot be expected to work especially diligently at their
contribution to the product’s production (TBS, they will work fairly
diligently out of the fear of losing their principal source of income,
but much less diligently than they would out of the hope of getting
rich) and that 2) beyond a certain generally appallingly early stage in their
lives in the so-called marketplace and in the quotidian existence of consumers,
not only the infamously proverbial overwhelming majority but even the obscurely
unproverbial virtual entirety of everyday-life improving products tend to become
unamenable to substantial improvement qua everyday life-improvers, such that
consumer input or feedback ceases to eventuate in a better Etruscan shrew-trap or
what have you, or indeed and even more significantly from the producer’s
material-cum-libidinous point of touch and desire, a more popular or more
sellable Etruscan shrew-trap or what have you.
And yet, i.e., despite the virtual absence of any material incentive for
the effective producers of all those well-established everyday-life improving
products and the unimprovability of all those products, these products have got
to continue to be made—for after all, it would surely be unreasonable to expect
Bob and Suzy Shiraz et al. to learn how to shave with straight razors and button
their trouser-flies and so forth just so Bob or Suzy Entrepreneur (I’m thinking
here of genuinely enterprising entrepreneurs, not the fart-producing likes of
Zuckerburg et al.) could go off and work on the grapheme oil-spill catcher or
quantum dildo-quantifier or whatever product bids fair to be the next genuinely
everyday-life improving product. And
yet, of course, Bob and Suzy Shiraz et al. demand novelty in everything they
purchase; nothing appalls or disgusts them more than the notion of buying an
electric light bulb or acoustic toothbrush or disposable safety razor that is
in all respects identical to one they themselves might have purchased three
years ago, let alone one their parents and grandparents might have purchased
thirty years ago. And so the producers
of these well-established everyday-life-improving products are compelled to be
constantly fiddling with them, to be making improvements in them that
are either so trivial as to be unnoticeable by the consumer or that are not
improvements at all but merely cosmetic changes—and all, of course, for
ever-diminishing returns even for those at the top-of-the-chain-cum-reins of
production—all the senior engineers, controlling stockholders, and boardroom
executives. And of course from the
consumer’s point of view-cum-pocket, the principal effect of all this fiddling
has been a gratuitous proliferation of superficial diversity on the shelves and
racks at the supermarkets and special(i)ty stores. One is no longer merely obliged to choose
among a handful of competing brands of toothpaste, brands almost unabashedly
advertising themselves as no better or worse than any of the others (one was
never really hoodwinked into supposing Aqua Fresh offered anything beyond the
pleasure of seeing three different colors on one’s toothbrush at a time, or
Colgate the bracing austerity of an impenetrable white paste as against the
gaudy translucent blue and red gels offered by Aim and Close-Up), but among
double-handfuls of paste-varieties within brands, each of these varieties
allegedly catering to a specific facet of oral-hygienic care—one of them to the
whitening the teeth, another to the freshening of the breath, another to the
controlling of cavities, and yet another to the off-staving of the build-up of
tartar (in the non-ethnic [q.v., Lord willing]-cum-non-condimental sense). In the light of the monomaniacal terms in
which this departmentalization is couched in or on the tube-encasing boxes, one
cannot help wondering if in using a paste dedicated to one facet, one will be
exposing oneself to substandard care in all the others—wondering if, say, in
order to acquire dazzlingly white teeth one must resign oneself to having a
mouthful of cavities that will ultimately necessitate the extraction of all
thirty-something of those dazzlers, or if in order to avoid cavities one must
resign oneself to being fled from like Godzilla each time one dares to flash an
open-lipped smile (whether the fleeing is principally owing to the sight of
one’s turd-hued teeth or to the stench of one’s sewer-scented breath one
tragically will never know). But there
are other lately hyper-diversified everyday life improving-products about which
one need not wonder along such lines, inasmuch as one’s recent experience has
proved that the purchase of the wrong line of a given brand can have palpable
and even arguably disastrous everyday life-depreciating consequences. I am thinking here first—on account of the
intimacy of access to one’s own person vouchsafed to the product in question as
properly used—of my experience with certain disposable razors produced by the
Gillette brand of Proctor und Gamble (yes, I will name proprietary
names, and not at all because I am hoping for a sack of propitiatory free stuff
from the Proctor et Gamble corporation [although, to be sure, I wouldn’t turn
my nose up at a sack of sufficiently upmarket free stuff therefrom]). In the old days—meaning, perhaps, as recently
as the middle of the last decade—there were essentially three tiers of Gillette
men’s razor (and no, I’m not the sort of bloke to use a woman’s razor just to
make some sort of statement qua feminist-cum-consumer advocate; although I
don’t doubt that the difference is almost invariably undetectable by a blind
person)—Sensor, pivoting Good News, and non-pivoting Good News (having very
probably not been “present at the” presumably mid-1980s “creation” of the Good
News line even in a weak sense—i.e., as a decidedly post-pubescent regular male
shaver on the lookout for innovations in shaving technology—I am unable to
comment insightfully on the evangelical overtones of the line’s name). From the Sensor—the highest-end of the
three—one got the undeniably genuinely visceral pleasure of an extra-smooth
shave and the undeniably genuine if unvisceral pleasure of holding onto a
single razor-handle week after week and even conceivably year after year
(although these handles, in being made of plastic rather than stainless steel,
did tend to get a bit grotty after a few months) as one’s grandfather had done
(although in my specific case this pleasure was somewhat attenuated by my never
having seen my maternal grandfather shave with anything but an electric shaver
and heard my paternal grandfather talk hyper-explicitly of shaving with
disposable razors); pivoting Good News denied one both these pleasures while
still getting the job done and retaining the Sensor’s pivoting razor-head and
thereby saving one’s elbow a bit of labor, and non-pivoting Good News was
indistinguishable from pivoting Good News apart from the eponymous elbow
labor-saving pivot. After a phase of
principled and exorbitantly costly Sensor use in his late teens and early
twenties (i.e., the early-to-middle 1990s), the present writer switched over to
non-pivoting Good News on the grounds that as a member of the have-nots he must
take the rough instead of the smooth as long as the smooth was substantially
more expensive, and that (perhaps owing to his thitherto lifelong non-participation
in team sports) he had never suffered from pitcher’s elbow. And for at least a good full decade, the
present writer got on quasi-literally super-famously with the Good News line,
inasmuch as if he had been a paparazzo-mobbed celebrity during this period,
many if not most of the photos then snapped of him would have included within
its borders a Good News razor, whether in active use at the lavatory mirror or
encased with its fellows in its cardboard wrapper on the kitchen counter during
a grocery-unpacking session. To be sure,
he could have done without feeling every single hair follicle resiling in agony
as each of the unlubricated twin blades passed over it, and he was too jaded a
soul to rationalize away this agony as bracing, but as the whole
tonsorial operation was unfailingly completable in the same
five-to-seven-minutes as had been exacted by the Sensor and left his face as
baby-monkey’s bum-smooth as it had done under the auspices of the more
expensive shaver, he did not even feel entitled, much less obliged, to
complain. Then at some point not long
after the dawn of the present decade, he noticed that although the price of the
non-pivoting Good News-razor five-pack had been keeping pace with, if not
overtaking, the rate of inflation, the quality of service delivered by the
non-pivoting Good News razor had sharply—or, perhaps, rather, dully—declined;
for in the first place, the experience of raking the twin-blades across one’s
north-cheeks was not only agonizing but also alarming, in that one could
not help suspecting from its abrasiveness—an abrasiveness less akin to the
older GNR’s sandpaper-chamois rubdown than to a so-called Colombian facial
(wherein, I should explain for the benefit of any unstreetwise [and therefore, was
mir betrifft, DGR-trouncing] readers, one is dragged face-down and at
walking speed along a tarmac surface)—that one was inflicting subcutaneous and
therefore not only scarifying but also potentially gangrene-inducing damage to
one’s puss; and in the second, and more material, place, the twin-blades had
manifestly ceased to be capable of getting the job done, for at the end of the
aforementioned five-to-seven minutes, one’s face was every bit as rough and
prickly, as middle-aged monkey-bum-esque, as it had been before its
up-lathering. Sportingly, if one
happened not to have any appointments on one’s calendar that day [for if one
did, one stoically resigned oneself to explaining to one’s appointment-mates
that one was going for the Don Johnson look, and hoping against hope
that none of them would confuse Don Johnson with some smooth-faced
partial namesake {e.g., my beloved Dr. Samuel J.}], one would re-up-lather and
apply the razor for another five-to-seven-minute interval, only to end up as
stubbly as before the previous attempt; then for a third such interval, and
possibly even a fourth (by the end of which one would be beginning to suspect
that one’s beard was actually getting thicker as indeed it probably was,
what with its growth having effectively gone unchecked for a full half-hour)
before resigning oneself to going unshaved for the day. The whole ordeal was an exact tonsorial
analogue to washing oneself with a bar of that joke-shop soap that despite
being as white as ivory (and Ivory) left everything it touched as black as
pitch (and also as Pitch, if perchance there is an unabashedly black soap of
that proprietary name). But after the
first of these futile struggles with a single Good News shaver one sportingly
gave Gillette, or, rather, P&G, the benefit of the doubt, surmising that
one had alighted on a dud shaver that had slipped past the inspectors; but then
the next shaver in the pack proved just as inefficacious, and so one sportingly
(albeit teeth-grittingly) extended the radius of the doubt-benefit in the hope
that one had alighted on a dud pack, and picked up another one—but no such
luck—and so one affectedly sportingly surmised, or affected to surmise, that
one had alighted on a bad batch of packs, and picked up a pack at a drugstore
in a foreign ZIP-code, and so on, until at length (in two or more senses) one’s
beard had assumed well-nigh Rasputinian dimensions, at which point one
alacritously, albeit entirely figuratively, threw in the towel (for what with
not having had a proper shave in months, one had no ready-to-hand literal towel
to throw in) and resigned oneself to re-upgrading to Sensor. But on returning to one’s shaver emporium of
first resort and raising one’s eyes above the bottom row of the pegboard for
the first time in a donkey’s decade, one was astonished and dismayed to see the
nameword Sensor on none of the Gillette products depending from those
loftier heights, and so one reflexively lowered one’s eyes to their old haunt,
the bottom row, and was even more astonished and dismayed to see the nameword Sensor
printed on a Gillette product that apart from the presence of that nameword and
the absence of the old evangelical namewords was to all appearances exactly
identical to the old Good News five-pack.
Was one dreaming? Was one
alternatively in one of those alternate (sic) universes in which all men (save
oneself, of course, at least so far and last one had checked) sported
eye-patches and green membra virilia?
One rubbed one’s eyes and took a discreet peek down under. Es war kein Traum, und auch kein
Augenklappenundgrüneschwänzeszenario.
And so, incorrigible sucker that one was, one gave the stinkin’ Proctor
and Gamble corporation the benefit of the doubt yet again, and simultaneously
gave the world’s first proprietarily named razor—viz. Occam’s, natch—a
two-finger salute, in hoping against hope that this bottom-row Sensor was
indeed a proper old-school Sensor in Good News’s undergarments rather than a
degenerate new-school Good News in Sensor’s overgarments, that P&G had
actually been inscrutably perverse enough to retrofit the Good News
razor-handle with proper, self-lubricating, smooth-shaving Sensor blades rather
than brazenly, straightforwardly a***holish enough to put a pair of un-self-lubricating, un-depilative,
Columbia-facial administering Good News blades and a Good News razor-handle in
a wrapper retrofitted to display the nameword Sensor. And naturally enough, a week or so later one
once again found oneself Rasputin-bearded and standing back at the old
drawing-pegboard and compelled this time to consider each of the higher-pegged
Gillette products as a potential purchase—compelled, in other words, to select
among a finite yet still proverbially dizzying array of Gillette products with
names utterly unknown to him. But the
names were the least obnoxious of the unfamiliarities, for none of these
products was available in packs of more than three units, each of these units
flaunted at least five blades, and each of these blades cost at least a
dollar-and-a half or slightly more than half of what a five-pack of old-school
serviceable Good News shavers had cost one barely a year earlier. But what choice did one have, being a
confirmed abhorrer of beards, a man for whom beardiness was ten times closer to
devilishness than cleanliness to godliness, a man who could never be convinced
by the most esteemed etymologist in history that the orthographic propinquity
of barba and barbarian was an historical accident? And so one resigned oneself to living on
lentils and water thenceforth and purchased a two-pack of one of those ghastly
Mach-something-or-others. Naturally one
was expecting in exchange for such an exorbitant capital outlay a shaver that
simply wiped away one’s beard while one slept and took out the bins/trashcans
afterwards. Instead one got an implement
that was as heavy and unwieldy as a two-handed battle-axe and consequently
exacted a thousand times more arm-labor than the any of the old-school Gillette
shavers, pivoting or unpivoting, had ever done.
The quintet of blades seemed to do (barely) about as good and
painless a job as the old-school Good-News pair had, but it was difficult to
judge this quintet dispassionately, given that merely getting the dad-blamed
object in which it or they was or were encased within reach of one’s stubble
occasioned such overwhelming discomfort and fatigue on its own. Confronted as he was at his emporium of first
resort by this unenviably stark choice between tonsorial deadness-on-arrival
and tonsorial pyrrhic semi-success, the present writer was impelled to venture
to larger emporia, to the sorts of places that had entire aisles devoted to
shaving equipment in general and Andre-the-giant-dwarfing shelf-columns devoted
specifically to Gillette shaving equipment.
Finally, after a half-year’s experimentation with sundry shavers,
blades, wordnames, and package-sizes, he arrived at a version of Gilletteism
that proved just barely both tonsorially and financially viable—although to
this day, some three years after his arrival at this half-a(*)**ed tonsorial
solution, this pis se raser, he cannot peg it to a specific wordnamed
Gillette product line. He knows that the
product must have the word sensitive displayed on its wrapper, and yet
not every Gillette product labeled sensitive will do, for both some of
the aforementioned battle-axes and new-school Good News reduxes (or reduces)
are thus labeled, and he knows that so far a combination of the sensitive
label with a smattering of light green on the blade-handle itself seems to
betoken something both affordable and usable, and yet he is unable to make the
leap from this seemingly dependable yet irritatingly vague combination of word
and color to the unambiguous and more versatile wordname (versatile in, for
example, being employable in sentences of the form Sirrah, pray hand me one of those five-packs of Gillette Wordnames [the
reader must bear in mind that many of the present writer’s razor-emporia are
sited in the sorts of neighborhoods in which everything pricier than own-brand
toilet paper is kept behind the counter]) because the wordname seems to be
different each time he has to make a new purchase. As for the quality of the shave delivered by
these partially light green-handled sensitive shavers, it is, to the best of
his mind’s north-cheek’s recollection, at worst not much worse but certainly
not a jot better than that of the shave he was afforded at a much more
affordable price—viz. 75 cents per shaver as against two dollars per shaver—by
the old-school Good News razor. And all
this misery has been inflicted on the present writer qua Bob Everyshaver merely
for the sake of allowing the Proctor and Gamble corporation to keep the most
niggling and tremulous of toeholds in the ultra-low (and ever-ultra-lower)
prestige shaving equipment market. So at
least the present writer might have concluded in a semi-Whiggish vein had his Dasein
as a consumer (i.e., Konsumentsdasein) been confined to the purchasing
and utilizing of shaving equipment, if all along he had simply been able to
procure every other amenity of quotidian existence by clapping his hands or
wiggling his nose like some practitioner of the black arts in a 1960s
sitcom. But alas, his ineluctable
experience of dozens of other consumer product-lines in recent years has led
him to surmise that there may be even less salubrious, less redeemable motives
at work in this gratuitous diversification in the sphere of production. I am thinking here—and consequently, second,
qua palpable and even arguably disastrous everyday life-depreciating consequence-inducing
experience—of my recent history as a user of disposable ballpoint pens. In the old days—again, not much more than a
decade ago—I qua disposable ballpoint pen user would more often than not settle
for the bottom-tier product—quasi-i.e., the transparent cum polygonal-shafted
Bic or the opaque cum tapering cylinder-shafted Paper Mate. I was not insensible of or to the charms of
the more expensive disposable ballpoints—their easy-grip handles, their
retractable tips, their much smoother rapport with the writing surface, and
perhaps above all else their sturdier construction (many a woeful hour indeed
did I spend picking bits of crushed budget-Bic-cum-Paper Mate shaft from the
interior bottoms of my book-bags)—but in the light of the notorious misplaceability-cum-filichability
of ballpoint pens I did not believe that these pricier models were worth the
extra capital outlay. In those days, I
would buy a ten-pack of the budget pens and leave one or two of out of the ten
lying about wherever I happened to expect to be again soon, such that until the
moment, a year or two after the purchase, when the ink had run out of all five
of the ten that had not run out on me, I always had a serviceable writing
implement ready to hand. The only
attention-exacting tactical complication of this elegantly simple meta-scribal
strategy was occasioned by the caps of the pens, which, on account of
the afore-implied unretractability, had to be placed back atop the tips at the
end of each writing-session, lest the (ahem) ball should dry out and
consequently be alienated from the ink-reservoir, to which contact could be
reestablished (and then only momentarily) only if one happened to be a smoker
of the sort who always carried a lighter (as I was not, being a smoker of a
sort who generally lit his cigarettes with whatever matchbooks he had been
thoughtful enough to snatch from bar-top fishbowls during nights out [this
because budget disposable lighters were scarcely less readily loseable and
appreciably more expensive than budget disposable pens {incidentally, I cannot
forbear from conjecturing, perhaps to the detriment of the seaworthiness of my
argument, that the fact that the pens and the lighters shared a number-one
manufacturer-cum-purveyor—namely, Bic—bespeaks some kind of deliberately
intracorporationally engineered metacommercial ecosystem wherein and whereby
ballpoint pen-users were compelled to be as dependent on smokers as flowering
plants are on bees (and perhaps even vice-versa, although at the present moment
a budget ballpoint-pen user’s smattering of small talk is striking me as a
rather meager analogue to a hive-cell of honey)}]). In any event (or perhaps, rather, at all
events), imperfect though this meta-scribal strategy was, it was to its
ultimately redeeming credit fairly painlessly routinizable within the Alltag
of a regular ballpoint-pen user of negligible disposable income: though pens
were often lost thanks to the user’s habitual negligence, there was never any
need to whip the “gentle breeze blowing through” the user’s “bank account”
constituted by the repercussions of the ten-pack purchase into a so-called
gail-force wind by buying supplementary pens one at a time (and hence at a
higher per-pen price), because each full-reservoir’d ten pack-pen that supplied
each lost ten-pack pen’s place was always in good writing condition. If pursued or implemented in the present day
by the present writer, whose disposable income is if anything even more
negligible than back in the Golden Age of Disposable Ballpoint Pens [this
despite the fact that he is now both a full-time non-smoker and a virtually
full-time night out-eschewer], such a meta-scribal strategy would
not-especially slowly and most certainly surely end in his bankruptcy. Why?
Why, almost self-evidently, because most if not all of the constituents
of the budget ten-packs (supposing the budget ten-pack is even still issued)
presumably would not be in good writing condition, or indeed in any sort of
writing condition, long enough to earn their respective keeps. You see, duct tape-gagged non-DGR, to a non
gender-specific unit, each and every one of the budget ballpoint pens of the
present features the defect of running dry after only one, or at most two,
writing-sessions, be these writing-sessions ever so un-verbose, pithy, or
laconic. By this I mean neither that the
pens’ ink reservoirs are shockingly punier than those of their forebears nor
that the pens have seemingly picked up some condition analogous to hemophilia
but that their ink simply stops flowing from the (ahem) shaft to the (ahem)
ball. “MMM-mm mm-mm-MMM mm mm-MMM-mm mm
mm mm MMM mm mm.” What’s that,
non-DGR? I’ll remove the duct-tape just
long enough to allow you to repeat that utterance. “Maybe it’s because you’re forgetting to put
their caps back on.” I see that I did
well to gag you. Obviously I have not
been forgetting to put the caps of the pens back on because the resetting of
the caps was an indispensable element of the old budget ballpoint strategy and
consequently could not but have become a matter of habit by the time I first
noticed the ludicrously premature up-drying.
“Goshdammit!” the non-DGR should have registered that I needs must have
exclaimed at that necessarily bewildering and exasperating moment, “Here I am
doing my bit, fulfilling my end of the bargain as it were, by conscientiously
putting the cap back on after every use, and the goshdamn pen is still not
cooperating. What (in) the fabled name
of Frank Finlayson’s f**k gives?” What
gave, and still gives to the this day, is, I conjecture, a willful act of
spite, an exercise in targeted sadism, directed by the ballpoint
pen-manufacturers at a certain segment of their customer-base—namely, the
maximum thrift-oriented segment—whom they regarded and still regard with an
explosive mixture of resentment, outrage, and contempt. At some point a few years after the turn of
the millennium the ballpoint pen-manufacturers evidently got so fed up with
declining sales-revenues that they gave up on trying to win over their thrift-oriented
customers and opted rather to punish them with all the subtlety of a
cane-wielding snubbed panhandler. “If,”
the aggrieved manufacturers must have stroppily mused, “these cheapskates won’t
have the common decency to upgrade to one of our mid-market models, we shall
and will do them the condign bad turn of selling them pens that are unusable
almost from the very beginning, pens in which only the bottom .0379% of the ink
reservoir contains standard semi-liquid ink and the remaining 99.9621% is filled
with bone-dry desiccated ink resin.” Do
I espy you surmounting the expressive restrictions of the gag via an all-too-
eloquently skeptical eyebrow-arch, non-DGR?
Why, I ought to make sure you don’t get a second go at such supercilious
eloquence by shaving both your eyebrows clean off—but I dare not and
shan’t, for every nanometer of blade-keenness in my exorbitantly expensive
unnamable Gillette sensitive shaver must be vouchsafed to the depilation of the
subcilious sectors of my own face. In
any case, once you have duly considered the ironclad logic behind my imputation
of such cussed maliciousness to the ballpoint executives, your eyebrows will
doubtless be only too content to mind their respective places. Consider, if you will, the only conceivable
alternative explanations for the non-functionality of those umpteen-milliard
pens. Consider, first, the possibility
that the manufacturers or their lackey boffins have simply failed to cinch the
formula for ink that retains its liquescence and flows infallibly downwards in
conformity with the law of gravity.
Given that they did cinch the formula at least four-fifths of a
half-century century ago as evidenced by all the perfectly functioning budget
ballpoints used by the present writer beginning in the late 1970s, this
explanation can only be entertained as a corollary of the supposition that they
have somehow forgotten the formula in the meantime. Such intracorporational oblivion is
undoubtedly possible because it is undoubtedly not unprecedented—the Egyptians’
inability to decipher their own hieroglyphic writing system for those
semi-umpteen centuries between the arrival Alexander and the arrival of
Napoleon is a handily notorious example of it.
And if the world is allowed to pursue its present course (a.k.a. Weltlauf),
at least a milliard-and-a-half people now living will undoubtedly see examples
aplenty of this phenomenon—perhaps most spectacularly, temporally proximately,
and nevertheless perhaps ultimately felicitously, in the case of the artisanal
(yes, the very same artisanal that is an inalienable metonym of the
granola-slavering postpositional adjectival phrase handed down by word of
mouth from generation to generation) body of knowledge requisite to
maintaining and operating the earth-ball’s two great arsenals of nuclear
weapons—by which I mean that I suspect that owing to the flagrant unsexiness of
nuclear weapons in both the Hyperoccident and the Hypoccident since the
pseudo-end of the Cold War, the global pool of Occidental boffins who know their
way around a nuke has been both aging and dwindling for some years
already. But at least for the nonce, I
believe we may safely trust that the ballpoint-pen industry has not been and
will not be afflicted by such a case of collective proprietary amnesia, for
although the present writer is the last (and perhaps only) person in the world
to disparage any discipline or body of knowledge, however manifestly
uncomplicated and intellectually untaxing, on the grounds that it isn’t
[let alone ain’t] rocket science, he is only fain to conjecture
that rocket science is at least a smidge more complicated and intellectually
taxing than ballpoint-pen science, and that although in the Occident ballpoint
pens have been only slightly more sexy than nuclear weapons of late, the
formula for a functioning budget ballpoint pen is simple and intellectually
untaxing enough to be kept afloat and intact in the respective ballpoint pen
manufacturing companies’ respective corporate memory banks by a fairly small
pool of fairly lazy and fairly stupid boffins.
What, then, are we to make of and do with the second conceivable
alternative explanation of the recent-to-present non-functionality of budget
ballpoint pens—viz. that the manufacturers are simply trying to increase
their respective profit margins by cutting costs? On the non-proprietary north-face of it, this
explanation is more plausible. After
all, cutting costs necessitates using cheaper materials, which may very well
seem to necessitate resigning oneself to turning out shoddier products. But cutting costs even more fundamentally
necessitates not simply throwing away productive materials, and that is exactly
what the ballpoint pen-manufacturers are doing by producing all these milliards
of stillborn pens. If the ballpoint
pen-makers were seriously interested in increasing profit margins and cutting
costs, they would plough all the dye and polyethylene goo they are now
squandering on all those stillborn pens into accelerated production of the
at-least-slightly-usable pens that they are now selling as their mid-market
models, thereby spending less on production per mid-market pen and allowing
themselves to lower the price of these models, thereby encouraging their
thrift-oriented customers to buy them repeatedly in bulk, and thereby accruing
more generous profit margins. Their
present practice, by contrast, at best encourages their thrift-oriented
customers eventually to upgrade to the mid-market model as cautiously and ad
hockishly as possible–one grossly overpriced one-pack at a time. At worst, yet perhaps most typical, it drives
these customers (inter alia, the present writer) to renounce writing by hand
virtually altogether, even in contexts wherein it is appreciably more
convenient than typing. (Here I
incidentally wish to bud-nip any Whiggish impulse to toss the manufacturers a
non-proprietary lifesaver in the form of the ascription of their declining
revenues to the rise of the various keyboard-equipped phones, tablets, and pads
that have emerged in the past decade-and-a-half by pointing out to the would-be
tosser that writing by hand was technologically eclipsed as anciently as
sevenscore and nine years ago with the invention of the typewriter, and that
decades before the advent of word-processing software, the world was already
teeming with people who preferred to type even their grocery lists and most
intimate billets doux.) What is
worse, the latter-day efflorescence of producer-evinced sadism would appear not
to be confined to the bottom end of the consumer-product scale and indeed to be
no less pronounced towards the opposite end thereof, chez upmarket products
with ticket-prices upwards of several-thousand dollars. Admittedly the present writer, being stinking
poor, cannot boast of having a very extensive acquaintance with such products,
and indeed qua consumer thereof in the strong sense, the sense of being a sole
user if not outright sole proprietor thereof, he is a virtual ignoramus, but
qua consumer in a weaker sense, the sense of being a non-sole user of such
products as are assigned to a community of users, he flatters himself he knows
a hawk from a handsaw—not that any of the products in question have been hawks
or handsaws (prime specimens of either of which can doubtless both fetch prices
upwards of several thousand dollars and be employed in collective settings
[e.g.., bird of prey-managing master classes and carpentry surgeries]), and
indeed the most saliently vexing of them is about as un hawk like-cum-un
handsaw like an object as one can imagine, viz. the post-millennial digital
photocopying machine, specifically the one that I have had to contend with
business-day in and business- day out at my place of work since about the dawn
of the present decade. Of course
photocopying machines have been almost a byword for unreliability since, well,
presumably long before the early 1990s David Letterman joke about the one with
the built-in (or probably rather, built-on) Out of Order sign,
and the reader, gagged non-DG or otherwise, doubtless being no less conversant
with this mytheme than the present writer, doubtless presumes that I am on the
point of simply slathering a fundamentally gratuitous and redundant, albeit
much more up-market, bilious descriptive layer onto my previous bilious
description of the non-workings of the post-millennial budget ballpoint pen
(which is, after all, at least in terms of the two engines’ shared purported
function—viz. the propagation of the ocularly absorbed word—a sort of humble
cousin of the photocopy machine, much as the tiniest marmoset is a humble
cousin of the most hulking gorilla [vis-à-vis their not only purported but
demonstrated shared functions of poo-flinging, public onanising, etc., natch]),
that I am about to launch into a crapulous philippic against stillborn toner cartridges,
toner-delivery mechanisms, paper-shuttling mechanisms, etc. But few if any presumptions could be wider of
the mark of their presumptees than this one, for the vice of the
state-of-the-art (or perhaps rather, in the light of what we or you lot will
presently see, hyper-art) photocopier that I am about to decry is in
fact the hyperantithesis of the deliberate shoddiness of construction that I
have decried in the state-of-the art (or, certainly rather, in the light of
which we or yinz have already seen, anti-art) budget ballpoint,
ineluctably inalienable as it seems to be from manufacturing specifications
that are altogether too refined, self-preservative, and self-preening
for the user’s comfort and sanity. We
may term this vice Pygmalionism,
inasmuch as it seems to arise from producers’ excessive enamorment with their
own products. This vice is a kind of a kind of cyborgically embodied pedantic
valetudinarianism manifested in the fact that the indisputably well-constructed
machine (for after all, it has been up and running—or, rather, mostly
sulking—for about seven years) refuses to do a dad-blamed thing until the
would-be user has assured it that each and every one of its real or factitious
desiderata, however irrelevant to the user-desired result it may be, has been
supplied. Thus, if you put a ream of
plain white 8-1/2”-by-11” (Brits: read ~A5) paper into one of its
half-dozen trays, it will insist on your “confirming” that this is what you
have just done before it slides the tray into commission with all the alacrity
of a sedated slug—this as if it had been physically possible for you to insert
an 800-1/2”-by-1,100”-sized ream, or as if you might have just tried to slip in
an 8-1/2”-by 11” unsliced tofu loaf, or as if, on the offest of off chances you
had put in a ream of black paper, the copier, despite being unequipped with a
toner cartridge filled with pulverized White-Out (Brits: read Tipp-Ex),
could have done sweet Fanny Adams towards making the copies it produced a jot
more readable. If you place any document
a nanometer smaller than an 8-1/2”-by-11” sheet of paper on its flatbed
scanner, it will whinge that it doesn’t “recognize the size of the document”;
whereupon you will have to trick it by placing an 8-1/2”-by-11” paper-sheet
behind the document. If you are enough
of an egomaniac to leave it without something to do for more than half a
minute, it petulantly queries you whether you wish “to continue working
or not” and perversely—at least for a purportedly insentient machine—insists on
your replying “Yes” before being obliging enough to do a further microjoule of
work itself. And if you are
unfortunate enough to have need of its services when it is in so-called energy
saver mode—why, then, you had best have brought along a book of Old Testament-al
dimensions, for you will have geological eons of time on your hands as you wait
for the dad-blamed thing to rouse itself from its pedantic slumbers. But don’t you dare get at all deeply absorbed
in your reading of that book, lest you miss the crucial ninety-second interval
between the machine’s revival and its descent back into somnolence in protest
of what it will perceive as your flagrant lack of interest in pushing its
buttons. In sadistic substandard
construction and sadistic superstandard function, as exemplified by the
bottom-of-the line ballpoint pen and the top-of-the-line digital photocopier,
respectively, the critique of capitalism’s most celebrated topos—that of the
human being made utterly subservient to the machine ostensibly conceived and
built to serve him, the topos compellingly literalized in early cinema by Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis [iconic image: young Frederson crucified to the hands
of the clock-face-like doohickey of unexplained purpose] and Charles Chaplin’s Modern
Times [iconic image: Charlie bodily implicated in the cogs of the assembly
line-mechanism]–has come full circle or been stood on its head (take your pick,
consumer). In the old topos, it was the
human subject qua implement of production who suffered; now the victim is the
human subject qua implement of consumption.
In the old topos, the machine, having been transformed into a subject,
was the direct inflictor of the suffering; now it is at best a proxy subject, a
mighty scourge or cat-o’-nine milliard tails wielded by the frustrated and
by-now terminally insatiable subjective cravings of the producer—not, to be
sure, qua inner-directed would-be inventor of a better Etruscan shrew-trap but
qua abject dyed-in-the-wool worshiper of exchange value. Towards the bottom of
the productive hierarchy, the end occupied by the ballpoint-pen and razor
manufacturers, the producer, ashamed of his wares merely in virtue of their ultra-low
price tag, deliberately and wastefully foists on the consumer products that
fall far short of the most advanced technical standards; at the upper end, the
end occupied by the digital photocopier-manufacturer, the producer, besotted as
he is by the ultra-high price tag of his product, convinces himself that it is
destined to replace sliced bread (or tofu) as the thing than which nothing can
ever be greater, and is hell-bent on “taking” each and every individual
consumer “with him” by forcing him or her to lavish more time on the product’s
use than he (the producer) devoted to its production. The whole Dag-blasted
state of affairs is “far, far worse than Detroit” at any point before the turn
of the millennium. Penultimate if not
necessarily second-least in the present quasi-digression, I must make
depreciatory and deprecatory mention of a phenomenon that is visible mainly if
not exclusively at the most prestigious strata of production—viz. schematic
or meta-conceptual regressiveness.
By this I mean the atrophying or even outright disappearance of certain
basal and essential features of a product in concurrence with the addition,
proliferation, and refinement of more superficial and less essential
features—i.e., in terms of the most familiar and vivid metaphorical vehicle,
the rotting of the trunk and roots of the tree despite the (presumably
temporary) fecundity of its branches, leaves, and flowers. The present writer is afflicted by this phenomenon
each and every day of his existence in the domain of that existence most vital
to his perdurance qua present writer in the fullest sense (i.e., qua present
writer present in the present setting)—viz. his transactions with his own and
others’ personal computers. While there
is scarcely any module or aspect of these transactions that is not without its
rotten trunk-cum-root-rooted woes—for example, his contentions with the
ever-so-cramped horizontal axis of Gmail’s lists (wherein “Important
Things—A-O”, “Important Things—P-Z,” and “Important Thing-like Non-Things”
become indistinguishable from one another by all being abbreviated “Important
Thi”)–it is undoubtedly the Windows 7 operating system that occasions him the
most Alltag-disrupting of these woes.
Windows 7 undoubtedly looks much nicer than any earlier Windows
operating system and probably at least a smidge nicer than any earlier
personal-computer operating system full-stop (not that I have ever been the
sort to squander precious navel lint-removing time on comparing the aesthetics-cum-ergonomics
of computer operating systems); and indeed, the present writer would perhaps
expatiate on these superiorities until the start of the bovine homecoming dance
were he not fully sensible of what a trifling bean-hillock they collectively
amount to beside the mighty Everest of hoit induced in his organism by
Windows 7’s shortcomings, shortcomings that are most aggravating precisely
because they had been surmounted in earlier versions of the OS. Wireless networking via Windows 7 is a
virtual impossibility for the present writer, even though he owns a wireless
modem, because within a half an hour of establishing his wireless connection he
loses it (i.e., the connection, not his self-control—though since the five
hundredth-or-so occurrence he has tended to lose that as well) and is impelled
to seek succor from the Windows robət troubleshooter, which, after gratuitously
cycling through a dozen other possible explanations for the problem over the
course of a half-dozen minutes, invariably concludes that his “wireless network
adaptor needs resetting” and reports that it is resetting that selfsame WNA,
whereupon working order is restored for another whopping half-hour, whereupon
the whole troubleshooting do-si-do has to be gone through yet again. In vain has the present writer searched for
some means of fixing the problem once and for all and permanently circumventing
the troubleshooter’s intervention—in vain because all the inline sources,
whether Microsoft-sponsored or independent—that make mention of the problem of
a shaky wireless connection simply explain it away as an instance of “a
wireless network adaptor in need of resetting” and refer the user to the
troubleshooter. These sources all seem
to regard the need for resetting as something that simply and ineluctably happens
to a wireless network adaptor in the course of its use, after a fashion not
merely analogous to but exactly consubstantial with the coarsely physical
process whereby the filter on an air conditioner or clothes-dryer becomes
clotted with dust or lint. To not one of
these sources has it seemed to have occurred that a wireless network adaptor,
however hard a piece of hardware it may be, is after all a component whose
functioning, inasmuch as it can be restored by an operating system’s robət
troubleshooter, is in the last instance governed by software—in other
words ultimately by verbal instructions on what it is to do, and that in
consequence the malfunction must be attributed to the operating system’s
delivery of inadequate or erroneous instructions to the component, and in
further consequence it is ultimately up to the operating system’s developers
rather than to its users to fix the glitch.
If these developers simply can’t be a(*)*(*)ed to fix it because it
afflicts a portion of the personal-computer using mobility too poorly heeled to
give a rat’s a(*)*(*) about—viz. those running the antepenultimate version of so
naff an operating system as Windows on machines whose exact human
contemporaries are already whining for their fifth I-p***e or C*****b**k,
fine—or, if not quite fine, at least s***ty in a completely familiar way—but
the universal maintenance of the pretense, or perhaps rather gormless Gerald
Ford-esque presumption, that there is no such thing as a software-induced
wireless network adaptor malfunction, is, to say the least, either extremely
irksome or not only extremely irksome but extremely creepy. But at least eo ipso this malfunction is
at least comparatively bearable in centering on an element or aspect of
so-called information technology that has been in vigorous play only since the
dawn of the present millennium and around which there has meanwhile gathered a
sort of halo or Oort cloud of received imprecation. Dans nos jours, one is expected to
expect wireless connections of each and every sort to c**p out on one for some
never-to-be-explained reason, and while there is certainly no excuse for
such out-c**ping, insofar as there is no ante-millennial precedent for general
consumer-end acquiescence thereunto (one can hardly imagine, for example, the
multi-million-strong legion of Model T-drivers equably coping with a breakdown
every five miles by adding water to their Tin Lizzies’ to-all-appearances
brimful and leak-free radiators just because their user’s manuals instructed
them to perform such a to-all-appearances utterly gratuitous ritual), the
shakiness of wireless networks, in being a problem that has yet to be even
provisionally solved at a so-called macro level, does not pose a so-called
existential threat to the Whiggish worldview, which can doughtily cope with the
deceleration of progress even to a complete standstill on the metaphysically
unchallengeable grounds that the mighty all-redeeming breakthrough is just
around the corner. To be sure, earlier
versions of Windows dealt with local wireless networking more capably than
Windows 7, but the Whig’s withers are unwrung by Windows 7’s incapable handling
of local wireless networking because wireless networking tout
court-stroke-across the board has yet to be consigned en bloc to what we may
term the anti-pantheon of de facto simple machines, to the assortment of
technologies that we have come, however irrationally, to expect to behave as
predictably as the wheel, inclined plane, etc.
The two bugs in Windows 7 that I am about to animadvert on, on the other
hand, do pose an existential threat to the Whiggish worldview in marking a regression
in Windows’(s) functionality to pre-millennial levels and thereby constituting
a regurgitation-cum-expulsion of certain technologies from the just-mentioned
anti-pantheon. The less irksome and Alltag-thwarting,
if slightly more spectacular, of the bugs is 7’s tendency to freeze—a tendency,
in other words, not to register any of the user’s mouse or keyboard-delivered
instructions. The user clicks on an
icon-button, and the icon button fails to register the click; he or she tries
to turn the arrow cursor into a typing cursor, and it obdurately remains an
arrow—i.e., it fails even do him or her the bare-bones courtesy of changing
into the rotating hourglass’s successor, the so (by certain of the present
writer’s fellow users [for obviously he cannot be a(*)*(*)ed to look up its
official name])-called whirling doughnut or wheel of death. The present writer can scarcely remember the
last pre Windows-7 time he had to contend with such impertinent catatonia from
a computer operating system, but presumably it was at some moment to the fore
of the introduction of the Windows task manager way back in…well, ’95,
assuming the correspondence was no mere coincidence (for the single
digit-postfixed Windows 7 has thrown all
such chronogenetic assumptions into confusion) and Gill Bates &co. were
running a reasonably tight ship by then.
The significance of the task manager qua allayer of the user’s anxiety
or frustration or anxiety-cum-frustration can scarcely be overestimated; for
however little the TM was (or is) typically able to do towards extricating the
user from his or her plight short of recommending ending the process
wherein the plight is sited (and thereby more often than not effectively
recommending his or her committing to the virtual flames every character or pixel
of what he or she has been working on over the course of the previous
several-dozen hours), it (in salutary contrast to the above-dwelt-upon robət
troubleshooter) always gave (and gives) the user the sense that the operating
system was (and is) present as a sort of fellow-subject trying to do
something, that it has not simply packed up and shuffled off to Buffalo (or
perhaps rather Seattle) without so much as a BYL. And at least in the old days (i.e., the days
between the advent of Windows 95 and the advent of Windows 7) any failure of
the task manager to yield to the usual three key-actuated summons spelled a
calamity chez one’s machine that was far too deep-seated and organic to be
remedied by a simple reboot. Why, I
remember with particularly acute pathos a particularly baleful moment at my
place of work back in ’07 or ’08, when my trusty old [consult paper files at
place of work for computer model number, to omit which would be tantamount to
the withholding of a mention of a Betamax videotape recorder or Wizard personal
organizer qua guaranteed elicitor of thigh-slapping laughter at my red-nosed,
trouser-dropping Luddite’s expense] had been attacked by a particularly
virulent and peremptory strain of so-called malware and required a partially
non-remote intervention by the IT personnel; a moment when the onsite component
of that intervention, a taciturn, hard-bitten toothpick-chomping, pocket
protector-sporting quinquagenarean bloke of the oldest of old IT schools,
having just chinned the mouthpiece of my [consult workplace desktop phone for
model number qua elicitor of doubly raucous version of thigh-slapping outburst
(doubly raucous because ten years on, the corded phone in question is still my
phone of first workplace resort {and second resort overall})] desktop phone,
calmly but decidedly grimly reported to his colleague down the line-cum-stairs,
“I can’t even start the task manager”; a moment that could not but immediately
put me in mind of the final chilling seconds of that darkest of dark comedies,
Werner Herzog’s 1977 film Stroszeck, when a rural policeman or state
trooper likewise stymied by the implacably, sublimely unholy misbegotten union
of man’s artifice and nature’s gormlessness intones, “We can’t stop the dancing
chicken” into his walkie-talkie. But the
Windows 7 task manager is no longer the task manager of that hard-bitten
ultra-old-school IT bloke (or, indeed, of the present writer’s former, 35-or-36-year-old,
self). No: under the ultra-shabby
auspices of Windows 7 you will almost diurnally find yourself pressing Control
+ Alt + Delete repeatedly and insistently enough to keep the three involved
digits [in the present writer’s case the index and ring fingers of his left
hand and the index finger of his right] reflexively twitching in waltz time for
a fortnight after you give up on the so-called shortcut without eliciting an
appearance from the old tee-em. The
non-appearance never means that anything is seriously wrong with your machine
or any application running on it, but it almost always does mean that you can
kiss goodbye to any hope you may have had of devoting the succeeding twenty
minutes or so of your life to anything other than waiting for your computer to
reboot and for all umpteen-hundred of its now-indispensable bits of preliminary-establishing
software to snap back into gear. But
system crashes of this sort—crashes that have essentially the same phenomenal
texture as a city-center traffic jam and would seem to arise from exactly analogous
and partly consubstantial causes—are at least not utterly unprecedented—rare
indeed, but not utterly unprecedented—in the present writer’s experience in the
pseudo-era of post-DOS WYSIWYG personal computing. Amazingly enough Windows 7 is also prone to a
kind of crash that the present writer cannot recall having encountered since
the early 1980s and his transactions with that generation and market-level of
machines known not as personal but home computers—the Commodore 64, TI
99-4A, Atari 800XL et a very small cetera—a generation and market-level of
machines distinctive in virtue of lacking an integrated monitor and therefore
needing to be plugged into a conventional television set. Associated with these machines were certain
magazines that featured line-by-line printouts of the code for arcade
game-knockoffs of the publishers’ own invention, knockoffs that users such as
the present writer would then laboriously type into their machines over the
course of an entire weekend afternoon and then attempt to run on those selfsame
machines. Typically one would only have
gotten as far as having the game’s backdrop—a two-dimensional Lego-ized
depiction of an ant-farm, coalmine (yes, yes, yes—proleptic shades of M***c**ft),
abattoir, or what have you—on screen and taking a purposive jab at some bit of
the backdrop with one’s joystick-actuated ant or miner or butcher when
everything would stop happening, when one’s television would effectively simply
become a frame for a pixellated still photograph (not that there had been a
great deal going on within that frame beforehand)—this, naturally, because in
the tedium of all the hours of typage one had allowed a fatal,
machine-nonplussing typo to creep in. I am
describing my experience of this very minor episode of a very minor byway of
information-technological history so circumstantially—albeit much less
circumstantially than is my wont across the descriptive board—not out of
anything like nostalgia–for I feel nothing but the most searing regret in
connection with all those dozens or perhaps even hundreds of unpaid data-entry
hours—but rather out of a desire to bring home to the reader a sense of the
ultra-primitive and laughably slapdash material conditions under which the
strong freeze or hard crash was most recently suffered as a matter of
course. We are after all forever being
told by our sub-simian technophile masters that the humblest computerized
toaster of today is umpteen-quadrillion times more powerful (whatever
that means) than Deep Blue-to-the-power-of-the NASA computers that guided Mr.
Armstrong &co. to the moon. If such
is truly the case, then surely we have the right to expect the average personal
computer of today to avoid the sorts of c**k-ups that the sub-personal
computers of a (human) generation-and-a-half ago lapsed into only when their
otherwise robust coding instructions were corrupted by the digital (in the
ultra old-school pre-digital sense) ineptitude of mere tots with barely enough
knowledge of BASIC to run an endlessly looping “Hello [or, in more historically
accurate phraseology, Fuck You] World” queue. And yet it is a c**k-up of one of these
selfsame sorts that I must contend with virtually every time I run the newest
version of Microsoft Word under Windows 7, on each of which occasions an active
window within which I a have an active document open can be virtually
guaranteed to turn into a cursor-inaccessible so-called screen shot at least
once. Admittedly, if bizarrely, one can bring
such a window back to cursor-responsive life by simply activating and then
minimizing another window, but why should one be expected to perform such an
eldritch ritual—a ritual less reminiscent of such wholesome analogue-era pis-allers
as thumping the side of a television set with an inefficacious horizontal or
vertical hold than of such kooky perennial old-wivesish superstitions as
crushing eggshells to prevent witches from using them as boats—at all? And worst of all, Windows 7 is prone to a
certain particularly vexatious bug that I cannot for the L of M recall having
been harassed by even in the quasi-pre-Cambrian jungle of early-1980s
home-computerdom, a bug whose pandemic prevalence makes a mockery of the very
notion of the computer as the dedicated agent-cum-facilitator of a continuation
of a paper and filing cabinet-centered modus vivendi by other means, the notion
onto which our entire system of life has long since shifted its very
moorings. I am referring here to W7’s
ever-so-laggardly refreshment of its…how do you say?...directory listings
or temporal file hierarchy or whatever the industry cum company-endorsed
term is for the bit of directory-governing code that allows the user to see an
up-to-date list of files in a given folder; such that after revising and saving
a file labeled Bob Fockkuck at 7:52 a.m. on July 25, 2017 he or she can
subsequently count on seeing that up-to-date version of Bob Fuckuck
represented as the most recent version of Bob Fockcuck and on not seeing
the previously revised version—a version dating from, say, 8:42 p.m. on January
17, 2015—at the top of the “Date Modified” queue. This is something that the user can by no
means count on under the auspices of Windows 7; and, indeed, quite often he or
she must simply take it on faith that some beneficent angel of a background
operating-system process is keeping his or her files up-to-date, because no
amount of waiting or clicking on “Refresh” in the “View” pull-down menu will
compel the folder-window in question to put the most recent version of the
document in question at the top of the list.
It quite simply is not to be endured. And yet endured it must be by each and every
man Jack, woman Jill, and trans, transitioning-or-gender queer Pat of a Windows
7 user (tho’ TBT, I can scarcely imagine anyone progressive enough to be
trans, transitional or gender-queer’s settling for such an antediluvian,
retrogressive operating system as Windows 7), inasmuch as amid the hundreds of Alltag-annihilating
mandatory updates they or it have or has visited on us Windows 7 users each and
every year, Microsoft has or have not seen fit to introduce a so-called patch
for this Weltall–annihilating glitch.
As surely as the sight of the full moon does a lycanthrope this
patch-omission must give us pause. The
axiomatically Whiggish apologist for Microsoft will doubtlessly conjecture that
the glitch has not been repaired because it is quite simply and literally
irreparable within the architecture of Windows 7 because that architecture is
not designed to support instantaneous file hierarchy-refreshment–in other
words, he or she will effectively argue that my metaphor of the efflorescent
tree with rotten roots is inapplicable here because we are dealing with a
completely different tree, a tree of completely separate plantation from the
one constituted by DOS-through-Windows NT.
To this defense I would rejoin that it is no intelligible, let alone
legitimate, defense at all, inasmuch as the architects of Windows 7, to the
extent that they thought of themselves as ethically consubstantial with their
counterparts in the world of so-called bricks and mortar, were duty-bound to
reproduce all of the most taken-for-granted features of earlier operating
systems in their blueprint for Windows 7.
The reason that they did not reproduce these features (at least so I
conjecture) was that they were solely interested in achieving
aesthetic-cum-ergonomic effects in Windows 7 and gave no thought to whether the
means by which these effects could be most expeditiously achieved were
squarable with the achievement of much more basal and much less blingy effects
like instantaneous file hierarchy-refreshment.
To extend and expand the architectural quasi-metaphor to its requisite
conceptual height and girth: these conjectural Windows 7 architects were like
bricks and mortar-world architects who, upon discovering that ice (yes that
ice—viz. solid hydrogen hyrdroxide) is a much more pliant and expressive medium
for the production of architectural ornaments—Gothic revival-revival gargoyles,
Corinthian leather textured-Corinthian capitals and whatnot—than reinforced
concrete, proceed to have their most recently commissioned record-toppingly
tall skyscraper, including each and every one of its foundation piles and
load-bearing walls, made entirely out of ice.
So in short: while the impracticability of effecting the patch for
instantaneous file hierarchy-refreshment is entirely plausible as an explanation
for or of the omission of the patch, it is by no means redeemable as
an excuse therefor, and accordingly if this explanation is the correct
one, the omission by all rights ought to be regarded as a scandalous and
prospectively ineffaceable black eye in or on Microsoft’s reputation as a
vendor of even minimally functional software.
But inasmuch as even now it does up to a point take two mutually
consenting parties to engage in the act of coition contentiously known as
consumer capitalism—I say even now and up to a point in the light
of all the latter-day wanton producer-inflicted sadism I have remarked in
recently preceding paragraphs [sadism that I believe to be less in play in the
domain of computer OS-dom on account of the still relatively high prestige
quotient of PC-orientated IT]—the real or ultimate culprits of or for the aforesaid
omission may in fact be the prevailing mass of Windows 7 users. By this I mean that it is entirely
conceivable and not altogether implausible that Windows 7 users have not
complained about the omission sufficiently vociferously or in sufficiently large
numbers to drive it up into the Microsoft bug-correction team’s Top 10 (or even
Top 100) list of Windows 7 bugs to be corrected, and if such is the case, who
can blame the team particularly censoriously for not having corrected it? To be sure, qua artisans or craftspeople they
ought to correct it solely out of professional pudeur, but qua
producers-cum-businesspeople they have precious little, if any, incentive to do
so. And epipygially vexed to the point
of ulceration by the omission though he is, the present writer concedes that
inasmuch as he is most likely not the ideal casting choice to play Bob, Suzy,
Jack, Jill, or Pat Windows 7-Everyuser (because he is most certainly not the
ideal casting choice to play Bob, Suzy, Jack, Jill, or Pat present-day computer
user tout court), he is most likely not entitled to assume that a
substantial proportion of his fellow-Windows 7 users share his vexation with
the omission. For after all, in what
capacity is the present writer most sorely epipygially vexed by the omission;
in what capacity does he most keenly feel its unrelenting sheering of epidermal
tissue from his fundament-cushions? Why,
essentially in the capacity of an archivist, a keeper of documents that
must be sorted by age—in his case an age that already often exceeds that of the
present chronological threshold for voting and that within a very few years
(touch would [sic]) will often also exceed the chronological threshold for
serving in the U.S. House of Representatives.
And while the accurate dating of archival documents was undoubtedly
regarded as a categorical necessity by the virtual totality of the
first-and-a-half human generation of users of personal computer operating
systems, the users of DOS through Windows NT, because in one way or another they
were all using their machines principally to track phenomena that developed
over time—phenomena ranging from corporate budgets to software applications to
genealogical charts to literary opera–this feature is quite conceivably not
even regarded as the most trivial and dispensable of frills by the largest
majority of users of such systems today.
After all, what is it that Bob, Suzy, Jack, Jill, or Pat Personal
Computer Operating System User principally uses his, her, their, or its
personal computing device—whether this be a desktop, a laptop, a s***t phone,
or a t****t—for? Why, for securing a
rendezvous with his or her latest T***r-mediated f**k-buddy, plotting a travel
route to that selfsame rendezvous, uploading s*lfies of himself or herself
standing alongside some flash-in-the-pan pop star, downloading the latest
version of Cow-Chip Gourmandizer—in short, engaging in activities of the most
transient, ephemeral, evanescent nature; activities vis-à-vis which
chronological accuracy is of no importance whatsoever because there is scarcely
if ever any need to refer to any past occurring-or-originating phenomenon
because in turn one is always moving relentlessly, unreflectively, and
remorselessly into the future.
END OF PART
ONE
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