Gotham Diary:
Exquisite Spleen
January 2016 (III)
Tuesday 19th
Still afflicted by a cold — a cold, mind you; not congested sinuses with sniffles and coughs but a sense of being cold, almost all the time, even when the room is almost unbearably hot for Kathleen — I am indulging corresponding eccentricities. Once again, I went back to bed after reading the Times this morning. I wrapped myself up like an invalid in a deck chair, and fell asleep, napping for nearly two hours. During the nap, I dreamed furiously about a book that, I decided, I must re-read. Parts of the novel (which came in four boxed, paperback volumes, with interior fire-escapes and brick walls on the covers) came to me unbidden, but it was very hard to connect them, and there was also an uncomfortable feeling that the novel was about me. That it told the whole truth about me. As I woke up, and realized that I had dreamed the book up, disappointment gave way to relief.
The novel that I had fallen asleep while reading was Theodor Fontane’s Irretrievable (Unwiederbringlich, 1891). A few years ago, NYRB republished Douglas Parmée’s 1964 translation, and I bought it on the strength of somebody’s review. But almost at once, my idea of the characters clotted unattractively — they would not be worth caring about, I feared. It took a deliberate policy of reading neglected NYRB volumes, combined with the success of Stoner, another such, late last year, to get me to take Irretrievable down from the shelf. Even then, it languished for a few weeks with the bookmark tucked into the third or fourth page. The book opens at a seaside mansion, recently built by a count. But what kind of count, and which sea? That’s to say, were we in Germany or Denmark, on the North Sea or the Baltic?
When I picked up the novel again last week, I learned that its tale is set in 1859. But it was only yesterday, when I took up Irretrievable in earnest — I have now reached the two-thirds mark, and should much rather be reading Fontane’s novel than sitting here writing — that the significance of the date registered. In 1859, Schleswig-Holstein, a pair of provinces north of Hamburg, still ran up into the neck of mainland Denmark; a few years later, it would be torn away by Prussia, in the first of Bismarck’s little German wars. I know about this war because it caused no small embarrassment at the British court. The queen’s oldest child, also Victoria, was the Crown Princess of Prussia; her brother, the Prince of Wales, had just married Princess Alexandra of Denmark. (I don’t really know what to do with little wars, memory-wise, until I have an embarrassing scene to attach them to.) As usual, Bismarck made cunning use of the accidents of history, which in this case threw up some uncertainty about the inheritance of the duchy of the provinces. I remember reading somewhere that Bismarck joked — but I’ve recently written about this, in connection with Syria.
I’m trying to do better about avoiding such repetitions. Last week, wasn’t it, I wrote about Shakespeare’s Sonnet 95. Only when I was done did I search the site for a previous reference, and then I found that I had already said much the same thing about my favorite lines, but put it slightly differently in each case, such that I should be hard put to decide which one to keep. (I was also reminded to renew the struggle with William Empson’s 7 Types of Ambiguity.) Within the space of a week, then, I have repeated myself twice, or nearly. Perhaps I have run out of material?
Anyway, Irretrievable is very good. It begins in what was Denmark at the time, and much of the action takes place in and around Copenhagen, involving an aunt of the then king whom I think Fontane made up — a worldly and amusing princess of seventy to whom the hero, as it were, is a Gentleman in Waiting. When I asked Kathleen if she had ever heard of gentlemen in waiting for princesses, she declared that they would be most inappropriate, but I had not learned the princess’s age when I asked. A worldly old lady definitely needs gentlemen in waiting, even if “being younger” puts them in their fifities and sixties. The trouble is, the princess has a very fetching, twenty-nine year-old lady in waiting, a very clever woman whom I instinctively cast as a blend of Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alicia Vikander.
***
Thanks to a piece in Sunday’s Review section, the weekly potpourri of Op-Ed pieces, I learned about a Web site that I’d never heard of. I visited the Web site and read the latest entry, which is basically about the importance of dates in the study of history. Specifically, the author, who seems to be roughly the same age as the temptress in Irretrievable, felt obliged to insist that the only thing that is certain in history is the lifespan of historical figures. You can argue about the importance/virtue/depravity/&c of Innocent III, Copernicus, and Marie Antoinette, but you cannot argue about their dates of birth and death. The wonderful thing about knowing these dates is that they tell you who was alive at the same time. Josef Haydn and George Washington, for example, were very close contemporaries. (They were born in the same year, but Haydn lived for another ten.) Also a contemporary was the Qianlong (Ch’ien Lung) emperor of China (1735-1796). More interactively, Pitt the Younger and Napoleon were contemporaries, closer in age than, say, Churchill and Hitler. Nobody today needs reminding that Churchill and Hitler were alive at the same time, but just you wait. My point is that Pitt was the Churchill of his day, or Churchill the Pitt of his. (I also trust that you know what I mean by “nobody.”)
There is no getting around the importance of dates. And there’s no pretending that dates aren’t a nightmarish nuisance for anyone who isn’t really interested in history. The trick isn’t to make dates interesting, somehow; it’s to make history interesting. The history of anything will do. For me, it was classical music. Classical music is much easier to grasp if you know its history. For general purposes, that history, although it strictly begins much earlier, deep in the Middle Ages, covers the three centuries that run from 1650. The history of classical music consists of knowing what composers grew up hearing, or, more important, not hearing. The symphonies of Mahler did not inspire Bach or Mozart, but Mahler’s Fourth Symphony was explicitly inspired by Haydn’s symphonies. The dates will explain how this was so. Brahms wrote in a highly personalized version of what was for him a contemporary idiom, but it was deeply informed by music of the past, even though that inspiration does not show through stylistically, but only glimmers on the printed score. It is difficult to connect the turbulent, still-urgent operas of Verdi (who died over a century ago) with the relatively pallid court entertainments that Haydn and Mozart had to contend with. (Haydn was old enough to be Mozart’s father, but he outlived him by nearly twenty years. Their artistic primes, however, coincided.) But the links in the chain not only illuminate the connection but demonstrate its power, which it took the young Verdi about ten years to overthrow. With classical music, you have a choice: it can be either a jumble of “100 Best-Loved Hits,” in which case most of it will be complicated and boring; or it can be a development, with composers mining a few seams of musical possibility against the background of shifting audiences — a story, a history, told in music.
So it is with the history of everything. Everything that happens is the result of accidents. The man who would grow up to be Charlemagne was born in and shaped by, as we all are, the world he grew up in. That world was, in turn, shaped by him. (And how.) But if you want to understand Charlemagne’s works beyond the confines of the mere statement that he was a military leader who conquered a lot of territory — a statement that applies to Alexander the Great and to Genghis Khan as well, but so what? — then you have to know his dates. Happily, Charlemagne has left us one of the easiest dates in history: he became the first Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day, 800 CE. Once you nail this date, the accidental quality of Charlemagne’s existence diminishes considerably. The establishment of the Holy Roman Empire is itself much less of an accident than Charlemagne’s birth (sometime in the 740s), and, with a little work but a lot of interest, a host of other dates can be nailed nearby.
There ought to be a Nobel Prize for the genius who devises an app that insinuates all the dates into the minds of eager young gamers.
As to the Web site that was mentioned in the Times, I can say that it seems to be very popular. But I’d rather not say more until I’ve had a longer experience. I’m told to expect two to four new postings in the mail every month.
***
Wednesday 20th
In today’s mail, a notice from Facebook reminds me that today is the birthday of my old friend from radio days. Alas, he died shortly before his last birthday, a year ago. What is the protocol for dying at Facebook? And while we’re talking about dates, let me to my shame confess that two days ago, when I was thinking of my late friend, I neglected to do the same for my father, whose birthday (102nd) it was. Year after year, I am mortified to remember him on the 19th or the 20th, but never on the 18th. Some sort of remembrance of one’s parents on their birthdays is the plainest form of piety, and I am a perennial disgrace. Me with all the talk about the importance of dates. Mozart’s birthday, which will probably not pass by without my thinking on it, falls a week hence; ‘twould be his 260th.
Thanks to Google, I was ready for the fire. I’d looked at the pictures and seen the ruins. On 16 December 1859, Frederiksborg Castle, then an hour by train north of Copenhagen, was consumed in flames, and that is why Theodor Fontane set his novel, Irretrievable, at that time — not, as I expected, because he wanted to make some interesting use of the imminent conflict between Denmark and Prussia, with its Holsteiner hero caught in the middle. Publishing in the novel in 1891, Fontane may well have expected his German readers to expect the same — why else make use of what was by then a “historical” setting? Fontane’s resort to history is more subtle. Doubtless other great buildings had burned to the ground in living memory, but it is hard to imagine a disaster that would have suited his story nearly so well.
Irretrievable is billed as the story of a failed marriage. Both the late Douglas Parmée, in the introduction to his translation, and Phillip Lopate, in his Afterword to the NYRB reissue, call it such. But the novel may well be the first fictional representation of what we call the mid-life crisis, with all its pain and foolishness. It is only the outer chapters that portray the married couple in their unhappiness. After sixteen years, they have simply grown tired of accommodating one another. She thinks that he is frivolous and he thinks that she is a prig, and they are both right. Some readers will have no trouble sympathizing with one over the other, but I wasn’t even tempted to take sides. At the beginning of the book, it is true, the wife, having been counseled by all her friends to soften her rigors and to exercise her superior intelligence with greater discretion, is about to embark on a project of self-reform, but this is interrupted by a summons to the capital. Count Helmut and Countess Christine Holk are Germans, but their duke is the King of Denmark. This late-feudal, pre-nationalist arrangement was about to be “corrected” by Bismarck, who would take advantage of the death of the king (and duke) to interpose a German claim to the territory. But all of that is a red herring, nothing to do with the novel beyond keeping the informed first-time reader on edge.
Count Holk is a gentleman-in-waiting to an aunt of the king, the Princess Maria Eleanor — a creature of fiction. I could never figure out whether the Princess is a widow or a spinster. It doesn’t matter. She is a genial sister of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades, a royal who remembers the ancien régime for its aristocratic liberties. Although no less virtuous than anybody else, the Princess rejects the patina of nurturing respectability so thoroughly that she struck me as an Edwardian figure — as having thrown off Victorian propriety in disgust, rather than as having refused to take it on. To Count Holk, a country gentleman of good breeding but astounding naïveté, the Princess is a wonderful old sinner. Why he appears on the roster of her gentlemen-in-waiting is another mystery that Fontane can’t be bothered to clear up. Just as Countess Holk is about to try to be a nicer wife, her husband learns that, because So-and-so has the measles, while Whatsisname is on a scientific expedition, waiting for Mount Etna to belch, he will have to fill in at the Princess’s little court. In the past, Christine has accompanied him to Copenhagen, but she declines to do so this time, claiming the need to place her children in suitable boarding schools — a bone of contention between husband and wife — as an excuse.
So Holk goes off to Copenhagen by himself, thoroughly prepared to enjoy the city’s amusements, as well as the comforts of his excellent landlady, Frau Hansen. In the interest of concision, I shall say only that it is at Frau Hansen’s that Holk is softened up, so to speak, for his mid-life crisis, which we already know will involve extensive internal mutterings about Christine and what fun she isn’t. Although a beautiful woman is all but catapulted into Holk’s room at the boarding house, the danger lies elsewhere, at court. The Princess has a new lady-in-waiting, Ebba von Rosenberg. Ebba is twenty-nine and a saucy mix of Voltaire and Oscar Wilde — and pretty to boot. She sizes up Holk immediately as a man who has no business being a courtier, and she tells the Princess so; nevertheless, she plays with him. The Princess worries from the start that things will get out of hand, but, aside from a mild word to Ebba, she does nothing. Holk’s fellow gentlemen warn him that he understands nothing about women, but this, as you might imagine, only piques him, for he is not aware of needing to know anything about any woman other than his wife, to whom he has always been effortlessly faithful.
It is of the essence of midlife crisis for a man to find himself caught in a trap that, not having foreseen it, he regards as an insulting act of treachery. It never crosses Holk’s mind that his blameless record in the past is no guarantee, given his current state of grievance against Christine. He fails to see that this grievance encourages him to indulge in courtly games from which he might formerly have withdrawn. He becomes, at the worst possible time, daring. All the while, the words of the woman who increasingly fascinates him, spoken not to him but to the Princess, ring in our ears.
It’s his character that is his basic weakness. And the worst of it is that he doesn’t even know it. Because he looks like a man, he considers himself one. But he’s only a good-looking man, which usually means not a man at all. All in all, he hasn’t had the proper training to develop his very modest talents in the line that would have suited him. He ought to have been a collector or an antiquarian or the director of a home for fallen girls or just a fruit-grower. (132)
There is an astoundingly funny exchange in which Holk tries to impress Ebba with his knowledge of genealogy. Is she a Polish Rosenberg or a Czech Rosenberg? Neither, she replies; she is a Meyer-Rosenberg, descended from Gustav III’s “pet Jew,” ennobled by his king only days before the king’s notorious assassination. “Holk could not repress a slight movement of shocked surprise…” (97) We can just imagine.
As Christmas approaches, the Princess moves her court, as is her custom, to Frederiksborg, still a royal castle. After the fire, it would be rebuilt with contributions from the (new) king as well as from the state, but the lion’s share would come from the brewer of Carlsberg, J C Jacobsen, and the castle would be re-established as a museum. Fontane mentions none of this: he leaves his readers will a royal ruin, as in one sense it remained; there would be no more Christmas house parties hosted by princesses. And of course the new structure would have windows that closed shut and fireplaces that didn’t smoke and whose chimneys did not spark — complaints abundantly made in the novel.
Rather than spoil Fontane’s masterful but light-handed interplay of romance and catastrophe, I should like to point rather to his answer to the question that pestered me from the moment of the party’s arrival at the castle. I’d been asking it earlier, but now it became pressing. It also involved sparks: how would Holk wake up to his obsession with Ebba, hitherto so obvious to everyone but himself? How would he realize what was going on? Just as Holk didn’t know, so neither did I: I was terrified that his awakening would be prosaic, disappointing, and somehow unconvincing. But Fontane does not disappoint.
One day, there is a skating party. The Princess is installed in a sled, and the party sets out upon the frozen part of a vast lake that in fact opens to the part of the Baltic known as the Skagerrak. Holk pushes the sled, while Ebba and two officers follow; the local preacher leads the way. It is a handsome picture. The journey takes the skaters from the edge of the castle grounds to the bank of a small hotel, where others await them.
Holk, with one hand resting on the back-rest of the sleigh, raised his hand with the other and in a second they came to a halt beside a small wooden jetty leading to the hotel. Pentz had come up meanwhile, and offering the Princess his arm, he assisted her up the bank, followed by the two captains. Only Holk and Ebba remained standing by the jetty as they watched the others going ahead and then they looked at each other. There was something very like jealousy in Holk’s eyes and as Ebba’s seemed only to reply with a half-mocking challenge which said: “Nothing venture, nothing win,” he seized her hand violently and pointed out to the west where the sun was sinking. She gave an almost arrogant nod and then, as if the others’ amusement were only an additional spur, they sped away together towards the place where the narrow gleaming strip of ice between the receding banks was lost in the wide expanse of Lake Arre. (191)
Of course! It would be a physical challenge, a carnal exhilaration that would shock Holk into awareness of his forbidden desires. Holk’s mind has nothing to do with it, mediocre organ that it is. It is his body that awakes to itself. After that, he is helpless and, of course, ridiculous.
Also very interesting is the way that Ebba deals with Holk’s laughable picture of their future together. While she is ill for a few days, recovering from the stress of the conflagration, he takes the opportunity to burn his bridges, but she does not laugh at him when he comes to her with the unwelcome but expected news. I should say that I have never seen a fire put out so quickly.
Irretrievable rather spoiled me for other novels. For elegantly formed, gently funny fiction, it can’t be beat. As Phillip Lopate suggests, Montaigne would have loved it.
***
Thursday 21st
The latest Reviews arrived yesterday, both of them. I dipped into the London, but read nearly everything in the New York. There’s a piece by David Maraniss about football, as in the future of, in which the author describes a spell of giving up watching the game on television. He wonders what it would be like to be Garry Wills, who told him once that he (Wills) had never seen ESPN. I can’t claim never to have seen ESPN — it’s onscreen (if muted) at too many luncheon spots. But I’ve never watched it, certainly never at home. But it is not given to man to imagine what it would be like to be somebody else, much less somebody who never does what you do all the time.
Maraniss quotes someone as saying, We’re in the gilded age of football, but the thing about gilded ages is that they collapse on themselves. Somebody else notes that college students are showing up at football games with their smartphones, leaving at halftime, and not coming back. I should forgive smartphones a great deal if they put a damper on stadium events of any kind.
***
Then there’s Janet Malcolm on Jonathan Bate’s biography of Ted Hughes — the one from which the Hughes Estate’s permission to quote anything was withdrawn. I read Malcolm’s book on Sylvia Plath not too long ago, but I’d forgotten what an admirer of Hughes she was. Or perhaps she has become one. She execrates Bate’s book with such exquisite spleen that you come away wondering if sales will plummet to zero. As a literary biography, she insists, it is a washout: Bate’s comments on the poetry are jejune and his interest is clearly in the sexual gossip. These are her closing words:
He [Hughes] emerges from his letters as a man blessed with a brilliant mind and a warm and open nature, who seemed to take a deeper interest in other people’s feelings and wishes than the rest of us are able to do and who never said anything trite or obvious or pious or self-serving. Of course, this is Hughes’s epistolary persona, the persona he created the way novelists create characters. The question of what he was “really” like remains unanswered, as it should. If anything is our own business, it is our pathetic native self. Biographers, in their pride, think otherwise. Readers, in their curiosity, encourage them in their impertinence. Surely Hughes’s family, if not his shade, deserve better than Bate’s squalid findings about Hughes’s sex life and priggish theories about his psychology.
Hear, hear! If anything is our own business, it is our pathetic native self. This is not merely a moral claim, but the driest of truths, in that we cannot be known except by our deeds — the things that we do in public. The things that we do in private — which, certainly, we ought to do our best to keep private — are often incomprehensible to ourselves, and never intended to be comprehensible to anyone else. The minute sexual activity is intended to be anything it is no longer private or really even sexual. Some of Hughes’s lovers found him “forceful”; others, “sadistic.” Does this information help us to understand his poetry better? Or will it simply confuse us? Who knows, so long as no unfortunate is taken from the scene of passion to a hospital, what forceful and sadistic mean? The fact that everyone is naturally curious about everybody else’s sex life is the best reason in the world for excluding such tittle-tattle from literary biography. They ought to toss Bate out of Oxford.
A corollary that I can’t quite frame seems to emerge from Sue Halpern’s piece about Steve Jobs and Apple. Strictly speaking, it emerges from something that I read a long time ago, something that comes to mind every time I read about Jobs. I seem to have known something rather awful about Steve Jobs before I knew anything else, but that’s not possible, given the dates of Mona Simpson’s novels. A review of one of them mentioned that a certain character was based on Simpson’s “biological brother” — Steve Jobs. It went on to relate an anecdote about this character, who was so self-absorbed and heedless of others that he never flushed the toilet. (Never? Rarely? Sometimes didn’t? Doesn’t matter.) How I wish that I had never come into contact with this revolting information! But I don’t blame the reviewer, and I don’t blame Simpson, either. The blame falls squarely on Jobs, and his sociopathic disregard for the boundary between private and public. As to the corollary, I suppose that I’ve already expressed it: we have a duty to maintain our privacy — we owe it to everybody else. Impertinence works both ways.
Halpern, by the way, nails what’s wrong about Jobs and Apple.
Steve Jobs had an abiding interest in freedom — his own. As [the films and book under review] make clear, as much as he wanted to be free of the rules that applied to other people [ahem!], he wanted to make his own rules that allowed him to superintend others.
Earlier, she quotes something that Joe Nocera says in one of those films, Alex Gibney’s documentary, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine.
The myths surrounding Apple is for a company that makes phones. A phone is not a mythical device. It makes you wonder less about Apple than about us.
Indeed. How long will Jobs go on being the superintendent?
***
The cover story in the Times Magazine over the weekend was about the Center for Applied Rationality, in Berkeley, California. In a nutshell, the Center’s goal is to help us all to overcome the wrongheaded biases outlined in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Jennifer Kahn reports on the ordeal of undergoing a four-day workshop there. Along the way, she comes into contact with immortalism, the belief that becoming immortal is humanity’s most urgent objective. If there is a distinction between immortalists and transhumanists, I’m not yet aware of it, but, as a humanist, I am committed to death. We must all die, so that humanity can evolve. The evolution of humanity is not the same thing as the evolution of the human species. Humanity is human society, and it evolves much faster than DNA. Whatever “human nature” really is, its expression at any time is governed by humanity, which is to say the human society of the moment. Humanity changes as newborns “invade” the world and old people leave it. If people started living forever, they would slow and possibly halt the evolution of humanity. Ask any Millennial how keen he or she would be to have a lot of Baby Boomers still hanging around in fifty years.
(I say this as one of the older Baby Boomers.)
It seems that the Applied Rationality movement is spurred by the fear that machines endowed with artificial intelligence will take over, and exterminate human beings. The only way to prevent this is to acquire superpowers oneself. No matter how you look at this, it amounts to self-hatred, or what I should call inclusive misanthropy, in which you really do hate yourself, or despise your weakness, more than you hate or despise anybody else. It’s an adolescent outlook, an easy way out of dealing with a complicated world. It is more difficult for mature, engaged adults to dismiss humanity as a failed undertaking. Whether or not we have any faults as human beings — it is arguable that we don’t, that we’re just humans — we certainly do suffer the disappointment of feeling faulty. It is easy to imagine an improved humanity. That’s what immortalists and transhumanists are after.
What appeals to me instead is the idea of making the world a better place for faulty human beings. There is still a lot to learn about education. It probabaly wouldn’t hurt to teach Bayesian probability instead of, say, trigonometry. But we are more apt to create environments in which accidents are unlikely than we are to think statistically. Babylonian libraries of self-help books to the contrary notwithstanding, nobody really wants to live life as an experiment — as a project, that is, of self-improvement. We all just want to live. We want to do the things that we like to do, and we want to love the people we love. We need help with these things, not lessons. We need to be steered away from such pleasures as devising rules that allow us to superintend everybody else, or to appropriate other people’s property; and we need to be shown, convincingly, that is is mistaken to love people (and I’m speaking about romance here, not Christianity) who do not love us back.
We need a world that does not require us to be entrepreneurs. We need a world that shelters us from addictions. I’m thinking not of drugs here but of power and wealth-amassment. Nor am I thinking about a nanny state. I’m thinking of a butler state. A butler doesn’t keep you out of trouble, but he performs tasks, or oversees the performance of tasks, for which you are not particularly skilled. He might balance your checkbook and offer sound financial advice. He might accompany you on dates, so as to have a good chat with your date’s butler. Above all, a butler must have a withering stare that you would do anything to avoid.
Listen, these daydreams are lot less silly than transhumanism. After all, we have already invented self-flushing toilets.
***
Another thing that Sue Halpern mentions is Eric Pickersgill’s suite of photographs, Removed. Pickersgill poses people with handheld devices, which he then removes, asking the “sitters” to hold their stare as well as their posture. The results are interesting, but I’m not sure that it wouldn’t be more compelling to edit something else out of the picture. For example, imagine a colorful street scene in which those pedestrians holding and staring at devices would be presented in black and white, or in some sort of semitone. Imagine interactivists standing in empty space, or, to borrow a joke from A Night At the Opera, in front of wildly dangerous or inappropriate backdrops. Even easier: remember Albert Brooks breezing past the Taj Mahal, on the phone and unseeing, in the underappreciated comedy, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2005).
In terms of the evolution of humanity, everybody holding a device as if no one else were present has won a Darwin Award.
***
Friday 22nd
In the new LRB, I read something so arresting that I must get right to it, without all the preliminaries. One day long ago, presumably in the halls of the University of Chicago, Allan Bloom was overheard to say, “Well, you know that the ancient Greeks, even Plato and Aristotle, had no concept of ‘power’ as we know it today.”
I have sedulously quoted from anthropologist Benedict Anderson’s mini-memoir about his intellectual formation. It was he who overheard Bloom, and his reaction was the same as mine, except that he actually did it: he ran to the library for a dictionary of Classical Greek. “I could find tyranny, democracy, monarchy, city, army etc, but no entry for any abstract or general concept of power.” (LRB 38.2: 16)
How could this be? How did Allan Bloom find it out?
A cautious scholar would take months to answer the question. I’m content to take Bloom’s word for it. The power that men exercise politically was thought — I surmise, perhaps rashly — to inhere in them as men. It was like muscle: some people have more than others. But free-floating power, existing on its own, probably never did occur to classical minds, or to medieval ones, either. My thinking is that our idea of power, “as we know it today,” is Newtonian. A kind of gravity, which I think is the model for our ideas about power, it is “out there,” and it would exist even if the human race did not. Political power requires human beings for its expression and exercise, but it is a natural force, given humanity. Especially as regards vacuums: when an array of political power collapses, chaos ensues but is soon arrested by a new array. Where the ancients might see political collapse as an opportunity for new men to exercise their inherent power, we’re more likely to see the opportunity to seize power, and to grip it tightly, or else to die.
“Power” is one of our many doubled words. It comes from the Latin word for strength. We also have the English word for strength: “strength.” For the purposes of rough translation, the words are synonyms. But of course synonyms exist only at that rough level. Over time, every distinct word accrues its own special connotations. “Power” and “strength” are not words that can be used interchangeably. We may say that an athlete is powerful, but we’re more certain to say that he is strong. Whereas machines are not “strong”: machines have power. Or they are powered. As is usual in English, the twin with the Latin root has an abstract coloration. We can’t really see power, whereas we can see strength in the bulge of a bicep. You might go so far as to say that, in English, it is power that gives strength.
That is how we use the word in politics. Power comes from somewhere — voters? grass-roots movements? campaign contributions? — and gives politicians the strength to run things. As we understand it, power does not inhere in the politician.
I’m trying to describe power here, not to analyze it. I’m curious about how we use the word, not about what power really is. And yet I am interested in what power really is, because our way of talking about it may be — must be — mistaken. We do not really know what political power is: we are often surprised by its manifestation. (Consider the Donald!) We try to erect frameworks within which power must be exercised according to certain rules, but these frameworks are all more or less fragile, vulnerable to emergencies. (Consider Lincoln and habeas corpus.) We believe that power ought to be bestowed for limited terms, but we don’t know how long those terms ought to be, and we’re not sure about rules allowing politicians to extend their terms. (Consider FDR; consider Bill Clinton, who almost certainly would have been elected to a third term in 2000.)
***
Holding these questions about power in mind, I consider the portrait of Iowa that Richard Manning paints in the current issue of Harper’s. It is, to say the least, extremely unflattering. Any notions of Iowa as a bucolic cornfield dotted with well-kept farmhouses will be washed away by Manning’s report on the state’s terrible problems with dirty water, polluted by fertilizer and hog excrement run-offs that would bring down federal sanctions if they did not issue from farms. Iowan evangelists may claim that they want the government to leave them alone, but their monoculture of corn depends on federal subsidies that were intended to encourage the renewable energy source of ethanol.
I say that the federal subsidies were intended to encourage ethanol production because I doubt very much that they were intended to cause the pollution of Iowa’s rivers or the increased dependence upon fertilizers that accompanies any monoculture. To talk of monoculture is perhaps misguided, because Iowa’s farmers rotate corn with soybeans. Manning isn’t clear about the extent, if any, to which soybeans do the work of fertilizers, but soybeans are just as problematic as corn. Whereas corn processing gives us high-fructose corn syrup, soybeans give us linoleic acid, a fat that not only triggers inordinate obesity but also impairs cerebral development. Nor are hogs a monoculture: Iowa has been “Tysonized” by the vertical sharecropping system that produces chickens designed more for processing than for nutrition. (Chickens, also like hogs, produce excrement in multiples of human output.) Assuming that Manning’s piece is accurate, everything about Iowa’s agriculture is wrong. The state ought to be shut down as a biohazard and its farmers (and their corporate overseers) deported to Patagonia.
Only a cynic, however, would imagine that any of this awfulness was ever intended by anyone. Once upon a time, Iowa was old-fashioned farmland. Only bit by bit did agribusiness invade; only bit by bit was Iowa’s ecology subjected to the application of industrial heedlessness. One step at a time, subsidies were floated; one step at a time, they became guarantees. (They say that Ted Cruz is going to have to change his mind about the ethanol subsidy if he wants to win in the caucuses, despite some exalted endorsements.) I should venture that the biggest shifts in Iowa’s farming occurred during the Sixties and the Seventies, when national attention was focused on Vietnam and oil. Regrettably, no one was paying attention — except, of course, Iowans with a brain. That’s a recurrent problem with running a big democracy, where political opportunists can turn any crisis into a magician’s misdirection.
So: who has the power in Iowa to prevent the United States from enforcing its environmental laws? The United States itself is on both sides of the equation, what with those “renewable energy” subsidies. Merely to render the nation’s positions in Iowa consistent would be an heroic achievement. But that would be just the start. In an essay studded with trenchant observations, this is Manning’s most piercing:
There is no doubt that conservatives would like to win the presidency, but they don’t actually need to. We have a naïve sense that to correct wrongs in our country, we simply need to elect the right president, pass the right laws, and that’s that. Politics in a state such as Iowa, however, teaches us that laws are only the beginning of the process, the opening bell for litigation, lobbying, and defiance. Faced with a federal mandate to regulate hog manure, [Iowa governor] Branstad simply cut the budget that paid for inspectors. Likewise, he roundly criticized William Stowe, urging Des Moines Water Works to address its issues with collaboration and volunteerism.
“What we see every time we hear ‘collaboration’ is buying time, a defense for the status quo,” Stowe told me. “The status quo will ultimately bankrupt our rivers and seriously jeopardize the public health of our consumers.”
If the Water Works prevail in the suit that William Stowe has brought against the state’s rural drainage districts, we will have another chance to see the exercise of power in Iowa, whoever has it.
Bon week-end à tous!