Ahab and Cockwomble Trump

 I’ve been rereading _Moby Dick_, or rather reading it really for the first time because I last went through that tome back when I was a wee tyke in HS, and that sort of doesn’t count some 55 years after the fact. Anyway, I came across this passage in the chapter 41, titled “Moby Dick”:

certain it is, that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were ben on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.

 

The passage made me immediately think of cockwomble, raging away in his cockwombly way. And then it made me wonder what cockwomble’s White Whale might be. What is it in his history that led to the “unabated rage” that makes him “intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge”?

 

To be sure, cockwomble’s is not a “supernatural revenge.” All too natural, alas. But to pursue the parallel, it must be America itself that is the source of that “unabated rage,” since it’s America itself that cockwomble is voyaging to destroy, as Ahab the whale. Is the revenge fueled by his New York billionaire peers' refusal to take him seriously? To see him as anything more than a bloviating cockwomble, rich to be sure, but rich by naked chicanery and deceit? Is it their disdain that leads to his monomania?

 

But then, America is not just the whale. It’s also the Pequod that cockwomble navigates to destruction. And those idiotic “old acquaintances on shore,” eager to make profit on cockwomble’s mad scramble for revenge, will be destroyed along with him and the nation.

Intergenerational Elasticitiy

             I've discovered a new term, intergenerational elasticity, IGE. IGE is “a measure of how strongly a parent’s economic status is linked to their child’s economic status. . . . A higher IGE indicates a stronger link between generations, suggesting lower social mobility, while a lower IGE suggests greater social mobility.” In turn, greater social mobility suggests a “better” life, presumably in economic terms, for the offspring.

            I looked up the term because I was curious about how accurate it is to say that “every American generation has done better than its parents’ generation.” That’s the story we tell ourselves, anyway. And certainly for us lucky SOBs born into the Baby Boom, it’s absolutely the case. We certainly benefitted from the fact that, having destroyed the world economy in the course of WW II, humanity was obliged to rebuild it. The US was ideally situated to benefit from the rebuilding simply because its economic infrastructure had not been destroyed during the war. So we happy few, we band of Boomers did much much better than our parental units.

            But then I wondered if that was always the case, as the story we tell ourselves has it. I thought, for one thing, that the “greatest generation,” the one that endured the Great Depression and then fought in WW II, probably didn’t have it so good.

            So I looked. And I found a study, “In the Name of the Son (and the Daughter): Intergenerational Mobility in the United States, 1850-1930,” by Claudia Olivetti and M. Daniele Paserman, which argues that, with the exception of the Boomer generation, the story we tell ourselves is entirely mythic, sort of like the myth that all it takes to succeed economically is to keep a clean nose and watch the plain clothes—I mean, keep the nose to the grindstone.

            A key finding: “Our results indicate that the intergenerational elasticity between fathers and sons increased by 30% between 1870 and 1930, with most of the increase occurring after the turn of the century.” Earlier in the 19th century it’s quite likely that IGE had decreased, simply because the nation had been inventing itself. From the Civil War onwards, on the other hand, the reverse seems to have been the case.

            Boomers lucked out. But the luck seems to underscore the reality of how the capitalist universe we inhabit in this country wags its finger at us. Work hard, we’re told, and you’ll succeed because that’s the way the history of the country has always gone. Sure. Uh-huh. Yeppers. Belief in the myth produces a powerful incentive to keep the rich richer and everyone else bound to the grindstone and a high IGE.

            Meanwhile, say Olivetti and Paserman, in those nasty socialist countries, “Recent research reveals that today intergenerational mobility in the U.S. is lower than in most other developed countries.”

            To quote a famous dead white man, “So it goes.”

Who's the Bully?

            In 1898, the US intervened in the Cuban war of independence, and after the defeat of the Spanish Empire and the passage in the US of the Platt Amendment, which in effect gave the US veto power over Cuban legislation, supported government after government that served American interests and the interests of the upper bourgeoisie that dominated the Cuban economy at the expense of the average citizen and the poor. Sixty years later, the Cuban Revolution did away with that sequence of US-supported governments and installed the Castros and their epigones as presidents and supreme leaders. Elections? A joke. Relations with the US? Abysmal.

            In 1953, the US instigated, supported, and funded the coup that removed the elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh and firmly established the direct, authoritarian rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi. Twenty-six years later, in 1979, the Islamic Revolution overthrew Pahlavi, and from then till now Iran has been ruled by supreme leaders, ayatollahs, who come to their power by divine intervention, so it seems. The elected prime minister? A figurehead at best. Relations with the US? Abysmal.

            In 1984, the US became dissatisfied with the results of an election in Nicaragua that brought Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista party into the presidency. Despite a Congressional law prohibiting aid to resistance aimed at overthrowing Ortega, Ronald Reagan and his regime funded rebellion on the part of so-called Contras. In subsequent elections US-supported candidates won the presidency, until in 2006 Ortega was reelected to the presidency, where he has been in power since then.

            In 2003, the US invaded Iraq, defeated and had its president, Sadam Hussein, executed by the government that the US installed in power. After the US abandoned Iraq, a sequence of governments, each more inimical to American interests, succeeded. Elections? Sure. Relations with the US? From bad to worse.

            There are many many many many other instances of the US attacking countries, either covertly via CIA intervention or overtly via military incursion. Almost invariably all those instances have led to less-than-ideal relations between the given country and the US. To be sure, not all results have been as fraught as those I’ve suggested. But also almost invariably the reason why the results have not been so fraught has to do with what amounts to economic bullying by the US. Vietnam is a good instance, as are almost all the countries in Central and South America and the Caribbean. El Salvador is, at this point, an exception to the rule. The repeated interventions by the US in the elections and the governments of El Salvador have yielded benefit for the US in the government of Nayib Bukele. So far.

            But keep in mind that the US had peachy keen relations with Iran from 1953 to 1979. It’s the long run that is fraught.

Masculinity

            What then is this thing called “masculinity”?

            I could have started with an assertion instead of a question—the search for, not the certainty about “masculinity.”

            Between the question and the statement lies one of the major fault lines in the culture wars of the twenty-first century. A query puts the other person, the interlocutor of this imaginary dialogue, in the position of knowing and so of controlling the discourse. The questioner is therefore subordinating the self to that other, making the self a provider of service—here the question itself, which provokes the interlocutor to the assertion of a point of view. It is, in short, not a very masculine way of starting off this essay because to be masculine is always to be assertive, always to know, always to control.

            Or so they say, those people who take what I’ll call the masculinist side in the culture wars. From that perspective, to grant primacy to another is to feminize oneself, on the understanding that “femininity” is passivity. A little stroll through the index of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents underscores the point of view. The reader who looks up “feminine” in the index will be directed to the lemma, “masculine and feminine.” Already “feminine” is made passive, subservient to the index power of “masculine.” Under that heading, then, the reader will be further directed to consider as well “active and passive.” Go to the page indicated for “masculine and feminine” in the index, and Freud pulls the other finger, as our British friends might say: “For psychology the contrast between the sexes fades away into one between activity and passivity, in which we far too readily identify activity with maleness and passivity with femaleness.”

            Freud doesn’t only pull the other one. He also seems to pull his punches a bit when he adds that the characteristics of activity and passivity that he has just associated with “maleness” and “femaleness” is “a view which is by no means universally confirmed in the animal kingdom.” Apparently “maleness” and “femaleness” do not trace activity and passivity “in the animal kingdom.”

            To make the punch-pulling even more definitive, Freud adds that “every human being displays both male and female instinctual impulses, needs and attributes.” Psychology and biology are simply not commensurate.

            It follows therefore that the lemmas in the index do not quite match the terms of Freud’s discussion. What he calls “maleness” and “femaleness” is ultimately the “anatomy,” as he says, the biology of male and female. But the “instinctual impulses, needs and attributes” of every human evidently do not coincide with the anatomy of the sexes. The psychology expressed in the notions of passivity/femininity and activity/masculinity does not coincide with biology/anatomy, maleness and femaleness.

            Passivity and activity are, as Freud explicitly says, a matter of psychology. Those characteristics may well incorporate questions of anatomy as one element of masculinity and femininity, but biological/anatomical sex is simply one aspect of gender, masculinity and femininity. Although the index subsumes gender into sex, the analysis of male/female and of masculine/feminine in fact radically distinguishes between the two categories. Reading Freud’s comments carefully suggests that he is uncomfortable, at least, with distinguishing sex from gender. Nonetheless, it is also the case that psychology leads to questions of gender, of masculinity and femininity, and not of sex, “maleness” and “femaleness.”

            What seems to be a pulling of punches, in other words, is Freud’s constant, uncomfortable elision of sex and gender. It’s an essential element of that troubling chapter four of Civilization and Its Discontents, in which Freud establishes the origins of male supremacy and activity—gendered categories—in the biology of sexual difference. In that chapter he concludes with what to him is an inevitably female subordination and passivity within cultural practices—the “civilization” of the books title. In biology we have sex; in cultural practice we have gender. But then Freud essentializes gender, making it essentially indistinguishable from sex.

            It turns out, then, that in the current culture wars that we endure thanks to the desire on the part of some people to make America great again, which amounts taking the country back to the social realities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the right-wing essentialists are taking a Freudian approach to sex and gender. Without exception, over and over and over again, people in the right-wing camp conflate sex and gender. The conflation is omnipresent. The reporter who asks if there are more than two genders really means to ask whether there are more than two sexes. But the question is couched in terms of gender, and the respondent answers also in terms of gender: No, of course not—there are only two genders. And then the doubling down with the observation that one has either XX, “female,” chromosomes, or XY, “male,” chromosomes. The erroneous, reductive account of genetic variability aside, as with Freud, the right wing subsumes the psychology of gender into the biology of sex.

            The conflation then takes the same direction as does the index of Civilization and Its Discontents. The male/masculine dyad is assertive, aggressive, dominant; the female/feminine dyad is passive, docile, subordinate. And to finish off the right-wing fantasy, that’s the way God planned it—Adam and Eve, you know.

            What follows from those conflations is the assumption that culturally determined behaviors and attitudes are assumed to be the inevitable result of sexual rather than psychological differences. Male assertion/aggression/dominance means that men love weapons and violence and powerful cars and relations in which acquisition rather than relation is important. Historical practices in the marriage markets of the past demonstrate the point. Marriage is a matter of alliance—“Hey ho for alliance,” as Beatrice says in Much Ado About Nothing—and not of love or affection. Love, in fact, weakens the man, who then demonstrates that weakness much as Benedick does, also in Much Ado, by shaving himself so his cheeks are as smooth as a girl’s, and perfuming himself, and washing himself, and painting himself—with all of which Benedick’s friends, Claudio and Don Pedro, mock him when he comes to seek permission to woo Beatrice.

            Before he falls in love, Benedick maintains the excellence of masculinity by observing how love has transformed Claudio himself:

I have known when there was no music with him [Claudio] but the drum and the fife; and now had herather hear the tabour and the pipe: I have known when he would have walked ten mile a-foot to see agood armour; and now will he lie ten nights awake, carving the fashion of a new doublet. He was wont to speak plain and to the purpose, like an honest man and a soldier; and now is he turned orthography; his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes.

Clearly love is dangerous to male assertion/aggression/dominance. The transformation is so radical that Benedick cannot conceive that he will ever be overcome with love—"love may transform me to an oyster; but I'll take my oath on it, till he have made an oyster of me, he shall never make me such a fool.”

            It’s easy to miss in all this, but the transformations that Benedick ultimately exhibits—shaven, perfumed, washed, and painted—as well as what he perceives as Claudio’s transformations are in effect the feminization of the male. In point of a male’s behavior, love transforms the men, not into oysters but into feminine men. In other words, the play demonstrates repeatedly that sex, the maleness of Benedick and Claudio, is not the same thing as the gender that the men exhibit in their behavior and attitudes—in their psychology, in short.

            The same thing works in relation to Beatrice. After the falling out of Claudio and his wife-to-be, Hero, caused by the very assertive, masculine manipulations of Don John, Beatrice expresses precisely the intersection of sex and gender:

O that I were a man for his [Don John’s] sake! or that I had any friend would be a man for my sake! Butmanhood is melted into courtesies, valour into compliment, and men are only turned into tongue, andtrim ones too: he is now as valiant as Hercules that only tells a lie and swears it. I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving.

In the language of our current century, “manhood” has become feminized while “womanhood” remains bound by the gendered rules of behavior.

            The feminization of men that Beatrice underscores is, perhaps, an effect of what Freud would call “civilization.” There is no doubt that the assertion/aggression/dominance of men has become increasingly less acceptable. At the same time, “feminine” behaviors have become more and more acceptable, even required for men. Benedick scorns Claudio’s love of “the tabour and the pipe,” but in the court of Louis XIV, just some fifty or sixty years after Shakespeare wrote his play, a shaven, perfumed, washed, and painted king, in his high heels, would dance to music of Lully, Couperin, Charpentier, all more refined than the tune of a tabour and a pipe.

            Men retain their social power, of course, from which stems the real basis for masculine assertion/aggression/dominance. As Mary Wollstonecraft points out in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the impetus of social training and expectations works to support the conflation of sex and gender. Even though Benedick and Claudio, Louis XIV and Cardinal Mazarin, and all the other “feminized” men of the past might be rendered weak by love, as Benedick puts it, or by the refinements of civilization, at the same time social practices recuperate masculine assertion/aggression/dominance.

            Focused on the realities of how female behavior and attitudes are gendered “feminine,” Wollstonecraft writes,

I attribute to a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men, who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than rational wives; and the understanding of the sex has been so bubbled by this specious homage, that the civilized women of the present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.

In short, the curriculum of female education forces a gendered femininity on the women who otherwise would be as capable of “masculine” behavior and attitudes as the men.

            Wollstonecraft goes on to argue that some men “who are, like them [i. e. women], sent into the world before their minds have been stored with knowledge or fortified by principles,” end up, like women, “practic[ing] the minor virtues with punctilious politeness.” The men Wollstonecraft has in mind, paradoxically from a twenty-first century perspective, are soldiers, who

from continually mixing with society . . . gain, what is termed a knowledge of the world; and this acquaintance with manners and customs has frequently been confounded with a knowledge of the human heart.”

Wollstonecraft is describing the peculiar education of an aristocratic soldiery in late 18^th and 19^th century Britain. The younger sons of aristocrats, absent any hope of inheriting title and property, bought their way into the officer class and, with no training, no preparation, and no education to speak of, spent most of their time in the sitting rooms and ballrooms of high society, mixing with women, finding themselves “civilized” by their encounter with women. The result, then, is the feminization of the officer class that Wollstonecraft underscores. Wollstonecraft’s point is that social practice produces the psychology associated with femininity even though the sex/biology is male. Social practices in education work to construct gendered behavior.

            Oddly, right wingers recognize the point that Wollstonecraft makes. They regularly mock feminine males and masculine women. That has been the case for a long long long time. One example, published in 1620: Hic Mulier: or, The Man-Woman. I’m attaching an image of the title page, both to get the full title in here as well as to highlight the frontispiece that substitutes for a colophon, showing a woman about to be shorn of all her hair and so made to look like the an in the portrait held by the woman on the right.

The title plays on the “false Latine” that combines the masculine demonstrative article hic, “this,” with the feminine pronoun, mulier, “woman.” The point is to demonstrate that

since the daies of Adam women were never so Masculine [as they now are]; Masculine in their genders and whole generations, from the Mother, to the youngest daughter; Masculine in Number, from one to multitudes; Masculine in Case [i .e clothing], even from the head to the foot; Masculine in Moode, from bold speech, to impudent action; and Masculine in Tense: for (without redresse) they were, are, and will be still most Masculine, most mankinde, and most monstrous.

The text goes on to mock women who take on  masculine gender behavior and identities. As always with texts like this the implication is that the man who wrote it feels that his own masculine authority is undermined by such women, and that he is addressing an audience of men who feel similarly threatened. Think the bro-sphere of our modern world.

            At the same time, the writer explicitly acknowledges that sex and gender are two different things. The woman is sexed female, as Jeannette Winterson might say in Sexing the Cherry, but their “case,” their clothing, their behavior, their attitudes—all of those are couched in terms of masculine identity.

            I’ll point out in passing that Moll Cutpurse, the hero of The Roaring Girl, one of Thomas Middleton’s and Thomas Dekker’s city comedies, is masculine in exactly the same way as the pamphlet describes the “man-woman” that it mocks. But Moll is not mocked. She is a good human being, a woman who prefers to enact masculine attitudes and behaviors. And here she is, from the title page of the 1611 edition.

Not all men, it seems, felt as threatened by such women as is the pamphleteer.

            At any rate, what our current right wingers don’t understand is that their mockery in effect acknowledges that sex and gender are two different things. In the end, then, the right wingers undermine their own reductive conflation of sex and gender.

            And so I come back to the initial question: what is masculinity? From what I gather in Freud, Shakespeare, Wollstonecraft, Hic Mulier, and Middleton and Dekker, it is exactly parallel to femininity—a set of attitudes and behaviors imposed and policed by social discourses from which psychological identities derive.

            What attitudes and behaviors fall in which category changes as discourses and practices change. Once upon a time childbirth was a quintessentially feminine activity, undertaken by women obviously, but overseen by midwives, aunties, gossips—all the women who might be of use. And then childbirth became a masculine activity, not because men gave birth but because male doctors arrogated the practice to themselves and made it a matter of domination and control. And now childbirth is swinging back—not so much to a feminine activity but to an ungendered one, over which women more than men have influence. So too so many other practices. Attending to the tabour and pipe is feminine until the king begins to do so, and then it's masculine—and eventually also ungendered. Cooking is feminine so long as it involves hearth and home, but when it intersects commerce and status it becomes a masculine endeavor undertaking by male chefs—until now, when in the orbit of commerce and status cooking too is a neutral activity.

            So gender is infinitely malleable, and perhaps the binary of masculine and feminine is slowly dissolving under the influence of new discourses and new practices. In that context, of course male and female sex represent a discourse associated with gender. But not to make a mystery of things, sex and gender are not the same thing, not by a long shot.

Esteem: Love in Wycherley's The Country Wife

William Wycherley’s The Country Wife is one of those Restoration comedies that you either hate or love. I fall in the latter category, which may reflect more on my sense of humor than on my strict adherence to expressions of so-called virtue. I acknowledge that the play presents humans as fairly vicious animals, more interested in acquiring money and power and in the gratification of their sexual desires than in almost anything else—except, perhaps, for due attention to the social standing that, in the play and in the world that it depicts, is called “honour.” But then that’s the job of a satirist, to strip away the masks that hide the reality of existence. In Hamlet’s more expansive way of putting it, the task of art is “to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” Satire’s mirror always reflects scorn.

I also acknowledge that Restoration comedy is often a stew of misogyny. There are obvious exceptions, of course, as in the plays of Aphra Behn where women’s agency is foregrounded. I think, however, that the best Restoration comedies are not so much misogynistic as they are misanthropic.

 

The Country Wife is clearly scornful, gently so perhaps, of ignorant women such as Margery Pinchwife, the “country wife” of the title. Unlike the subtler, more penetrating comedies of Shakespeare, among others, the play suggests but does not analyze the reasons for Margery’s ignorance. The satire does not directly address, but rather simply presents the gendered inequities of the seventeenth century. More ruthlessly, the play focuses squarely on sexual viciousness. The coterie of sexually starved women—Lady Fidget and Mrs. Dainty Fidget, Mrs. Squeamish—who people the play will do anything they can to get a good fuck so long as it doesn’t entail loss of “honour.”

 

That is why they so admire Mr. Horner. They abhor Horner when they think he has become entirely impotent, but they adore him when they discover that the report of his impotence is his ruse to convince husbands to leave their wives in his company. As Lady Fidget says when Horner reveals the truth to her,

But, poor Gentleman, cou'd you be so generous? so truly a Man of honour, as for the sakes of us Women of honour, to cause your self to be reported no Man? No Man! and to suffer your self the greatest shame that cou'd fall upon a Man, that none might fall upon us Women by your conversation; but indeed, Sir, as perfectly, perfectly, the same Man as before your going into France, Sir; as perfectly, perfectly, Sir?

In France the cure for the clap—loads and loads of mercury—would have made Horner “no Man” indeed, and the good Lady Fidget is in awe that he provulgates that falsehood so that he can enjoy women’s “conversation” without destroying the ladies’ “honour.”

 

But Wycherly does not limit the satire to women. The men are in for as much scorn as they are. The women have good cause to be dissatisfied with the bargains they made in marrying their mates.

 

There is Mr. Pinchwife, who marries ignorant little Margery according to his principle, that “he's a Fool that marrys, but he's a greater that does not marry a Fool; what is wit in a Wife good for, but to make a Man a Cuckold?” Under that principle lies the truth, which Horner worms out of him when he asks why, if he is so worried about becoming a cuckold, he doesn’t simply keep a mistress. “A Pox on't, the Jades wou'd jilt me, I cou'd never keep a Whore to my self.” Horner draws the proper conclusion, that “you only marry'd to keep a Whore to your self.” Why the whores would jilt him is left unexamined, but the implication is that when it comes to sexual performance he is at least a bit insufficient.

 

Pinchwife’s sexual self-doubt acts as the catalyst for much of the comedic plot of the play. He does not believe in Horner’s self-proclaimed impotence, and so that part of the plot hangs on Horner’s maneuvers to deceive the husband, Pinchwife, as he tries to get the wife, Margery, in bed—or at least in compromising positions. In short, Mr. Pinchwife is so thoroughly sexually inferior that he is the major image of scorn in the play.

 

And there is Sir Jasper Fidget, a city knight, as they said back then, a newly rich urban merchant of some sort whose goal in life is to keep making as much money as he can. Eager to get business, he is happily willing to believe in Horner’s impotence so he can leave his wife and daughter alone with Horner while he hies off to Whitehall to ingratiate himself with king and courtiers and so manage his financial affairs. Another locus for scorn, then, is the venality of the men.

 

And there is Sparkish. In his case, the mirror of satire presents two images of scorn. Venality is one element of the scorn. Sparkish is meant to marry Alithea, the wonderfully heroic hero of the play, not because he loves her but rather because he will be getting five thousand pounds in dowry from Pinchwife, Alithea’s brother, to do so. One aspect of Alithea’s heroism is that, although she is not ignorant and naïve as Margery is, nonetheless she trusts in the good will of others. When Mr. Harcourt, the male “hero” of a play where there are no male heroes, tries to woo Alithea away from Sparkish, the action at the heart of the romantic plot of the play, she rejects him because, she says, Sparkish “loves me, or he wou'd not marry me.” To be fair to Sparkish, he seems to have equal faith in Alithea’s truth and virtue. Alithea thinks so, at any rate, and asserts that “'tis Sparkish's confidence in my truth, that obliges me to be so faithful to him.”

 

As it turns out, it’s not so much Sparkish’s confidence as it is his foolishness that makes him so accommodating to Alithea. Indeed, the other element of scorn in the image of Sparkish is his profound folly. As Dorilant, another man about town, says, “to pass for a wit in Town, [Sparkish] shewes himself a fool every night to us.” A wit-wannabe, Sparkish demonstrates how easily men descend into idiocy. Sparkish is not ignorant, as is Margery, but he is so full of himself as the icon of the latest fashion and the purveyor of the latest gossip, that he is easily, and repeatedly, mocked, scorned, fleeced. Ultimately, when Harcourt’s machinations convince Sparkish that Alithea has betrayed him, Sparkish shows that he can be jealous: “Cou'd you find out no easie Country Fool to abuse?” he asks Alithea, “none but me, a Gentleman of wit and pleasure about the Town”?

 

At the heart of Sparkish’s relation to Alithea is the untenable position that Alithea finds herself in. Yes, Sparkish seems to trust Alithea, who in truth is a virtuous young woman. But on the other hand, Sparkish also takes as gospel truth the default general notion about women that animates the sexual games of the play. As he says to Pinchwife, “Cuckolding like the small Pox comes with a fear, and you may keep your Wife as much as you will out of danger of infection, but if her constitution incline her to't, she'l have it sooner or later by the world.” In short, all women are or will be harlots. Harcourt paints Alithea as just another woman, and therefore Sparkish comes to see her as cuckold-maker in waiting. Recognizing that Sparkish is no different from the run of the mill “gentleman” who can never trust a wife, then, Alithea is happy to change her mind. Pinchwife is as happy to have Alithea marry Harcourt as Sparkish—indeed, Harcourt is socially and financially a better catch than is Sparkish. And so, says Alithea, “I find my Brother would break off the match [with Sparkish], and I can consent to't, since I see this Gentleman can be made jealous.”

 

The sexual malaise of the society that the play reflects is nowhere clearer or sharper than it is in Horer, a “true” wit. Horny as his name indicates, he deploys his wit to fulfill all his sexual desires. Witness the wonderfully funny scene where Sir Jasper Fidget warns his wife, who has locked herself into Horner’s chamber, that Horner is about to penetrate Lady Fidget “the back way.” Ostensibly the good lady is selecting the best “china” that Horner owns. But behind the closed door, as the lady says, “Let him come, and welcome, which way he will.” There is no doubt that Horner comes indeed, so that when eventually he and Lady Fidget exit his chamber, she holds up “the pretti'st piece of China” that she has taken from him. Seeing the prize, Mrs. Squeamish says, “Oh Lord I'le have some China too, good Mr. Horner, don't think to give other people China, and me none, come in with me too.” The depleted Horner demurs, however: “Upon my honour I have none left now.”

 

The question the character of Horner raises is whether the expenditure of energy in the pursuit of a fuck is worth the effort. Horner himself defines the kind of women that his claim of impotence is designed to prey on: “Why, these are pretenders to honour, as criticks to wit, only by censuring others.” Women like the Fidgets or the Squeamishes are female versions of men like Sparkish and Pinchwife. All of them, men as much as women, are simply proper objects of satirical scorn. If that is the case, then Horner is a much debased as is Lady Fidget.

 

Alithea is the counter to so much debauchery. Until Sparkish proves himself to be just another accuser of women, she is steadfast in her loyalty to him. It’s obvious that Harcourt attracts her. He is, after all, exactly what Pinchwife understands him to be: “His [Harcourt’s] estate is equal to Sparkish's, and his extraction as much better than his, as his parts are.” Alithea does not even think of Pinchwife’s first consideration, Harcourt’s estate. But she does recognize that Harcourt is infinitely superior to Sparkish in wit and grace.

 

Although it is not absolutely clear in the play, it seems as well that Harcourt is not so thoroughly misogynistic as are the other male characters. He certainly admires Alithea, not just for her beauty but also for her wit and for her virtue. At the first meeting of Alithea and Harcourt affirms the truth that the play presents, that “Marriage is rather a sign of interest, then love; and he that marries a fortune, covets a Mistress, not loves her.”

 

At no point in the play does Harcourt expressly accept Alithea’s watchword, that “Love proceeds from esteem.” But his behavior from the first meeting limns out the fact that he does indeed esteem Alithea.

 

The climax of the comic plot involves Margery putting on Alithea’s clothes and, in that disguise, going off to an assignation with Horner. In the mish mash of identities that ensues, Alithea’s “honour” comes under suspicion. Alithea is distraught because, newly engaged to Harcourt, she assumes that he will reject her much as Sparkish has: “O unfortunate Woman! a combination against my Honour, which most concerns me now, because you share in my disgrace, Sir, and it is your censure which I must now suffer, that troubles me, not theirs.” Alithea’s concern for Harcourt’s reputation, and her fear that he will no longer esteem her, are evident. But Harcourt is a man of a different stripe. “Madam, then have no trouble,” he replies, “you shall now see 'tis possible for me to love too, without being jealous, I will not only believe your innocence my self, but make all the world believe it.”

 

Harcourt does not use “esteem,” the word that underlies Alithea’s ideal grounds for the flourishing of love. But it’s clear enough that Harcourt so esteems Alithea that he cannot even begin to believe that she has in fact lost her “honour.” When the two marry it will, without a doubt, be a matter of mutual esteem that underlies the union.

Too Immature for a Democracy

            It was sometime in the 1960s, early on in that decade, when some disturbance in some Central American country took place. I was too young to notice what or where the event was. But I do remember what one of my aunts said: “Those people are too immature to handle a democracy.”

            I’m not sure who “those people” were supposed to be. After all, we all were sitting comfortably somewhere in Coral Gables, where we found ourselves after we were incapable of handling our own democracy back in Cuba. I’m pretty sure that I came to think of “those people” as meaning all Latin Americans, all of  us too immature to manage the delicate politics of a democratic polity.

            Later I started to think more carefully about the idea of “democracy” in a Latin American context. Certainly in Cuba what we had lost in our move to exile was not a democracy. Fulgencio Batista, the “president” of the country, was straightforwardly a strong man who had led an initial rebellion against a duly elected president back in 1940, and then, after a period out of the country, returned in 1952 to halt an election and appoint himself president. Not exactly the most democratic of polities, it turns out—and perhaps evidence that “those people were too immature to handle a democracy.”

            In a myriad of ways the same strong-man politics, caudillo power, governed the realities of almost every single Latin American country, from Trujillo in Santo Domingo to Rawson and Perón in Argentina and the coffee baron Paulistas in southern Brazil. Except for Costa Rica, where the actions of the military led to the abolishment of the armed forces and so the end of caudillo politics, all of the Latin American world was “too immature to handle a democracy.”

            Or was it only Latin America? The framework of European colonialist traditions in Latin as opposed to non-Latin American countries suggests otherwise. In North America, French and British ways of governance militated against caudillo politics. To be sure, the French Revolution was late enough so that some vestiges of European latifundism wriggled its way into French colonies. But the pressure in France, as in its colonies, was away from strong-man rule and towards liberté, égalité, fraternité. Certainly that spirit invested the slaves of Haiti, who successfully deposed their colonists—only to have France set out systematically to oppress, repress, depress the new nation so that, two hundred twenty years later Haiti is still incapable of sustaining itself.

            Fortunately for the British colonies in the New World, the English Civil Wars and the Glorious Revolution had taken place early enough so that the idea of strong-man rule had become anathema to British subjects everywhere. Of course, the idea of being British subjects did not include the natives of the lands the British conquered, or the slaves they imported to support their economic interests. But from the perspective of the polities they established in the New World, democracy was the default state of affairs.

            Or so it seemed. There were exceptions to the rule of a more or less egalitarian polity even in what became the United States. The latifundist impulse is clear enough in the plantations of the American South, which echo the same phenomenon in the Latin American world. But even in those circumstances, the latifundists saw themselves as privileged in the same way that the landed gentry and aristocracy of Britain were privileged. So the franchise was restricted to the land owners and the rich.

            From that sense of privilege, anti-egalitarianism wormed its way into the American polity. In the American context, rotten and pocket boroughs that give the landed gentry so much power becomes the inegalitarian two-senators-per-state rule and the domination of presidential elections by the inegalitarian Electoral College. Americans celebrate the idea of one man one vote, but in practice the Constitution, not to mention the rulings of the Supreme Court from Citizens United onwards, dictate that the rich and the landed control the government. It is a late postmodernist version of latifundism.

            In Britain much the same thing applies. To be sure, rotten and pocket boroughs no longer exist in law. But the next best thing is the domination of public spaces by the wealthy and well-heeled, whose power and authority is as dominant in the 21^st as it was in the 18^th century. The same kind of reality obtains in India, in China, in South Africa, in Russia, in Japan, in Nigeria, in Australia, in New Zealand, in Indonesia, in the Philippines—the world belongs to the latifundists.]

            Except for the initial demonstrative adjective, my aunt was right. It’s not “those people,” but rather “we people are too immature to handle a democracy.”

Harvard

I suspect that a great many Americans are ambivalent about Harvard University. It is an elite institution in a country that does not fancy elitism. It is unashamedly academic in a world that mistrusts academics, intellectuals, and experts. Huck Finn had America in his sight when he expressed his dislike of book learning. 

 

I’ve had mixed emotions about Harvard ever since I went there. To be sure, I had a wonderful experience. I met some great people. I dove into and swam in the libraries, which are stupendously great. I remember coming across an edition of Father Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du vieux testament, translated into English in 1685, in the open stacks. I brought it to the attention of the staff at Houghton Library, the repository of rare books at Harvard. They told me that they had the first edition, 1682, already in Houghton and didn’t need the 1685 version. Of course I availed myself of that open stack copy for my dissertation. But I still marvel.

 

I also encountered the self-conscious superiority of the place and of some of its students. 

 

Two examples and then a generalization, entirely partial in all senses of that word, as I hope I can go on to argue.

 

First example. A midterm exam in one of the big lecture halls. Time was up. We teaching fellows in process of collecting blue books. The leader of the teaching fellows, a very sweet young man who died from a brain tumor soon after this episode, demanding from one kid that he turn in his blue book. Said kid loudly proclaiming, “Do you know who my father is? I’m going to report you to the president.” Idiot child, to be sure. But still.

 

Second example. Being a poor grad student, I work-studied my way to a brighter future at Widener Library, in the Preservation Section of the Department of Collection Development. My work entailed sustained and constant use of the card catalog—yes, I’m that old. At the time of the incident the Harvard libraries were migrating to an online catalog, what became HOLLIS, which meant that the old card catalog room was discombobulated and topsy-turvied.

One alphabetical section of the catalog had been shoehorned into a narrow, square corner of the room, with a table in the center to rest the catalog trays as they were being used. Because space was at a premium, it was imperative that the corner be kept uncluttered—no pulling a tray halfway out and riffling through the cards while you blocked everyone else’s access. And having removed a tray and finished using it at the table, it was essential you return the tray to the catalog to open up space at the table.

 

That’s the context for the experience.

 

So there I was, working my way through a tray along with two or three other library workers when a kid—maybe a sophomore?—pulled out a tray, used it, and then was about to leave it on the table as he hurried off. I asked him to replace it in the catalog. In one of those Brahmin accents that you have to learn to tolerate, he responded: “I don’t have the time. I’m a scholar.”  I suggested that were he to leave the tray in situ he might find his scholarship rammed up his rear end sooner rather than later. He replaced it. But the attitude remained.

 

From these two, really three examples, then, the general case. Harvard institutionally and as a conglomeration of individuals is almost insufferably cock-sure of itself. It is arrogant. It is relentless in asserting itself and its interests. It is self-satisfied to a fault. My finding Father Richard Simon’s book in the open stacks, it turns out, was much like my discovering the arrogance of the student in that exam or my encountering the self-absorption of the “scholar” in the catalog room of Widener.

 

Still, Harvard as an institution of higher learning is irreplaceable. It is the source of much that makes American science, medicine, scholarship paralleled only by a handful of universities in the entire rest of the planet. It has given so much to America that, in its absence, America would have been an entirely different country. That greatness—a word I hesitate to use, but in this context must—has not always been for the good, to be sure, any more than the history of the United States has been always for the good. But the influence of the university has been and continues to be overwhelmingly beneficial to the country and to the world at large.

 

The most recent evidence of that contribution to American greatness is the university’s response to the Trump administration’s root and branch effort to take over the running of the institution—whom it hires, whom it admits as students, what it teaches, which direction its many-headed research efforts take. Without resisting those dictates, the university, and by force of the university's significance in the life of America, the whole of American society and culture, would become a mere appanage of the federal government.

 

Harvard is not an object to be given to the children of a king. Indeed Harvard’s resistance reminds us that there is no king who occupies this "shining city on a hill." That phrase derives from the Gospel of Matthew. It is first applied to what would become the United States in 1630 by John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, even before he and the settlers of the Bay Colony had left Old England and come to the New one.

 

In the spirit of that phrase, only six years after Winthrop used it, the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony established the New College, soon renamed Harvard College, with a mission to “advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity.” In other words, to set up the light of truth, Veritas as the university’s motto puts it. The initial direction of the learning was par for the course in what John Milton called “the Wars of Truth” of the seventeenth century, to prevent the “leav[ing of] an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”

 

Since then the wars of truth have expanded far beyond the theology of the Puritan ministry in the Bay Colony. What the Trump administration wants to do is to put out the light of truth and substitute the will-o-the-wisp gaslight of dogmatic ideology.

 

To paraphrase the writings of another academic, English rather than American, this will not pass. And I, finally, find myself proud of an institution that I’ve found so difficult wholly to embrace.

"Remediation" in Colleges and Universities

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, in 1920 22% of Whites and 6% of Blacks had a high school degree; 4.5% of Whites and 1.2% of Blacks has a bachelor’s degree. It has no data for Master’s or higher degree until 1995.

In 2013, the last year for which I can find data, 94.1% of whites, 90.3% of Blacks, 75.8% of Hispanics, 95.4% of Asians, 95.5% of Pacific Islanders, and 84.7% of Native Americans had a high school degree; 40.4% of Whites, 20.5% of Blacks, 15.7% of Hispanics, 60.1 of Asians, 24.7% of Pacific Islanders, and 16.6% of Native Americans had a bachelor’s degree.

Do a great many people, of all races and ethnic backgrounds, need help with their educational aspirations? Absolutely. A parallel bit of data: PISA scores for kids who go to the highest SES schools outdo the scores for the most impressive national scores, like those of Finland or South Korea: 545 for the highest SES schools in the US and 541 for Finland. But the PISA scores for kids who go to the lowest SES schools are abysmal—in the lowest of the SES schools the scores amount to a measly 434. Those numbers are from 2009, when I did the research.

To be sure, in the US SES is so closely associated with race/ethnicity that it’s not surprising that only Asians and Whites have PISA score in the range of Finland. You can of course attribute the difference to race. I attribute the difference to SES.

By the time my kid had graduated from college, he had been to innumerable museums, had seen innumerable plays, had travelled overseas, and as a little kid had had book after book read to him until he picked up the reading habit for himself. He graduated from a very low SES school in PA. But his family, my wife and I, had the wherewithal to make up for what the school may have lacked—and I emphasize the MAY because in fact, with a couple of exceptions, the school district did pretty well by him and his cohort in the highest “track.”

It's always a matter of SES.

Given all that, I think maybe instead of bitching about the support that some of our students need, we should be celebrating the fact that, overall, 89.9% of American kids have a high school degree and 33.6% have a bachelor’s degree. That doesn’t mean that the education they’ve achieved is stellar. That will come when the SES evens out.

Sweat and the Single Boy

 When I was a tiny tyke the barber would come to our house to cut hairs for all the males on the premises—nine of us when everyone was around. I hated to have my hairs cut—or rather, I hated to have someone handle my noggin in aid of cutting my hairs. So I would hide wherever I could. Once I hid under the barber's car. Fortunately, I guess, I was removed and shorn before he could run me over. I suspect I'd have preferred death. But there you go.

 

But it wasn’t only the noggin-touching of the barber that I disliked. When I was still a wee lad, and well into my adult life, any body to body contact, with sib, friend, or stranger, put me off almost entirely. Fortunately in my Marist Brothers school, where I was a studious little brat through the beginning of third grade, we were not physical educated. At some point one of the brothers did institute a set of basketball teams during recess, to be sure, but that was for fully clothed kids, required essentially no bodily contact, and so no real threat to my contact phobia.

 

But then we became exilic, and in that cauldron of bodies called the public schools, where—mirabule dictu!—there were people of the female persuasion cheek by jowl with boys, phys ed became a requirement. Again, we were all fully clothed, so very little infringement of the bodily contact exclusion. Except when we had sessions of square dancing. Ay me! Swing your partner and do-si-do indeed. A coincidence, to be sure: it was during one of those square dancing sessions that we all learned of JFK’s assassination.

 

And then came the move to junior high school. There we were obliged to change from regular clothes to phys ed gear. I didn’t mind the nudity in the locker room. In fact, it was interesting in its own way—the visible differences, the comparisons, the strutting and fretting. Still, the boys’ locker room gave onto the phys ed teachers’ office, with expansive, wall to wall windows overseeing the whole cadre of naked boys while the adults gazed on. That was a bit of a put off, particularly because the gentlemen kept their college frat paddles, which they used from time to time to warm some of those naked bottoms, adorning the top of the windows.

 

But there was worse to come.

 

In that junior high school we were instructed in the fine art of wrestling. We all know what wrestling entails. Bodies locked together in mortal—or what passes for mortal—combat. Limbs locked, fingers fumbling, torsos tortive. We kept our gym shorts on, praise be, but had to remove our shirts. And all of us in seas of sweat—this was Florida, after all—we grappled. Compared to wrestling, the square dancing of elementary school was anodyne. Shangri-la. Eden itself. After so much body against body, I welcomed the shower, even as the phys ed teachers gazed on.

 

Wrestling continued through the end of high school, and always the shower was more than welcome. College was a different story. We were required to have graded credits in phys ed back in those days, so phys ed was kismet.

 

My initial experience with the phys ed department was less than stellar. We had to prove that we could swim and float in the water, so we boys—in the days of sex segregation such exploits demanded separation—dutifully showed up at the indoor pool to perform our natation. I automatically took my swimming trunks because it seemed a gimme. A number of kids did not, however. And they learned that they would have to perform in the nude. I suspect that would not happen nowadays.

 

We also had to prove that we could run a certain distance, perhaps a mile?, in seven minutes or less. At the time I was a smoker. Of tobacco. As well. I went through two or three packs a day, and did so until I couldn’t afford the cost, when I started to roll my own cigarettes. I couldn’t keep track of my consumption then. At any rate, there was no way that I could possibly run for anything like a mile in seven minutes—or half an hour, for that matter. So I was obliged to take remedial phys ed for my first credit. Since all of us up for remediation were equally dead physical losses, we didn’t do much for that credit beyond show up and walk around the track that we were supposed to be running. Every now and then an instructor would crack a verbal whip. With no notable effect. One result of that experience was that my otherwise perfect 4.0 average for the year was marred by the C I got for the class. It was a gift.

 

Such demonstrations of prowess aside, we could choose what activity to experience. And I learned that I could game the system. I chose to take exhausting classes, like bait casting, which entailed us standing on one side of the gymnasium, elevating our school-provided rods and reels with a plumb weight at the end of the line, and aiming to hit a bull’s eye target on the other side of the gym. I did not sweat a great deal in that class. But I did get pretty good at the task, and ended up with an A, no less. The first and only A ever in a phys ed class for me. I got a little more adventurous and signed up for a class in fencing. That was fun, except that all of the instruction was for right-handed people. Oh well. And I took a class in ice skating, which was fun as well. I can still skate fairly well.

 

The point of all those choices was that they required absolutely, positively no body-to-body contact at all. Glorious! And yet square dancing came my way again. I chose to take a class in folk and square dancing—not to relive my elementary school nightmare, but rather because by that point in my life I’d learned to make exceptions in the bodily contact exclusion rule when it came to people of the female persuasion. I may not have known the young lady with whom I danced, but invariably she, a series of shes, seemed cheerful and attractive. A little hand-to-hand contact was OK, I thought, especially since the gym where we danced was nicely airconditioned, so sweat was minimal at worst.

 

But square dancing would rise up again for me, alas not in airconditioned comfort. One hot July night, for some unknown and possibly unknowable reason, the woman I loved, who not much later became my wife, decided that it would be neato keano if we went to a square-dancing venue out in rural Massachusetts, somewhere west of Boston, at any rate, and rural insofar as the dancing took place in a real live barn. Not airconditioned, to put it mildly, in the heat of that hot hot July evening.

 

I was prepared to dance and enjoy myself, not just because I had the college phys ed class under my belt, but also because I’d be dancing with my beloved, with whom bodily contact was absolutely not to be avoided in dance or in any aspect of life. What could go wrong? What my soon-to-be wife had not told me was that the rules of the dance required that no one partner the person they came with. Lordy lordy. The whole evening was a nightmarish mishmash of sweaty palms and a stream of sweat every time partners swung. But I endured. Ain’t love grand?

A Foreign Country

 

William T. Vollman's review of This Is Not Miami, by Fernanda Melchior—in the New York Times Book Review for 14 May 2023—juxtaposes two phrases that seem to me to require more than the mere pass through implied by the only conjunctive statement:  "And never mind."  First Vollman correctly says that Hernan Cortés is a "conqueror-torturer."  Then, on the other side of the "never mind," equally correctly, he says that the people whom Cortés conquered-tortured were "human-sacrificing Aztec overlords" (13).

What I think needs unpacking in those two phrases is the alienness of the past, which seems to be impossible for contemporary folks in the US to consider, accept, and contend with.  From the left side of the political spectrum, the past is always the subject of outraged moral judgments that make the behaviors of the past so reprehensible that they are perceived to be entirely alien to the present—so beyond the pale that the only possible response to the past is pure opprobrium.  From the right side of the political spectrum, the past is an anodyne story of greatness, when men were men and women weren't, and America—or, if going back far enough, Europe—was great.  The inevitable conclusion to that perspective seems much like Buck Turgidson's response to Soviet ambassador Alexi de Sadesky's description of the Doomsday Bomb:  "Gee I wish we had us one of those."

Maybe because I come to the question of the relation of past to present from the perspective of the left, it seems to me that the right side of the equation is simply nonsense.  Just one day of living in the past as it really was would make even the most rabid of the MAGA crowd think again.  Smallpox, anyone? Bubonic plague? How about the complete subordination of women to men, so that a woman could not own property under her own authority, or have her own bank account, or . . . fill in the blank for whatever right you value the most.  Want to return to the day when a Black man even glancing at a white woman led to a lynching? Or to a time when Native Americans who objected to their own exploitation were slaughtered and then their bodies dumped in an oil barrel?  If you see those behaviors as fine and dandy, then you're welcome to join the neo-nazis. But please stay out of the present.

From the perspective of the left, it's important to recognize the validity of L. P. Hartley's comment in The Go-Between, that "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." That truth just cannot be dismissed by the cursory "And never mind" of Vollman's review. Seeing things from the left, as I said, I know only too well that it's difficult to curb the impulse to judge the past by terms that are current in the present. But the past, in its different epochs and its different cultural milieus, has its own evaluative criteria.

Michel Foucault argues that history proceeds by discontinuities rather than by narratives of the same. And that's the grounds on which I see the connection between Cortés and the Aztec overlords. It is a necessary and uncontested aspect of Aztec ways of being, not only that humans should be sacrificed to the gods, without which practice the whole universe would be endangered, but that the struggles of the gods should be reenacted in the game of ulama, a "ball" game in which the heads of the losers of the game became the "ball" used in the game.

No doubt we in the present recoil at that practice, just as we recoil at the practices of the Spanish conquistadores, whose actions against the natives of the so-called New World are disgusting. And yet, just as the practices of the Aztecs were necessary for maintaining the universe, so too the practices of the conquistadores were essential to the expectations of their culture. I am not at all persuaded by the idea that Europeans came to the New World in order to spread the truth of Christianity and save the souls of the poor benighted "natives." Pelf and wealth seem to me the clear underlying motives, as is the case with Cortés, certainly, whose exploits converted him from mere soldier to the Marqués del Valle. But the way that the Spaniards approached the natives simply reflected the way that the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula took place, in the same way that the treatment of Native Americans by the English settlers of North America reflected the way that the "Plantation" of Ireland took place.

The underlying point is pretty simple: people do what people are supposed to do, and what they are supposed to do is given by the complex intersection of what Foucault calls discursive practices that form the grounds from which a culture springs. Our discursive practices arise from moments of disruption, again according to Foucault, which make the past the "foreign country" that Hartley describes. If Cortés or Montezuma had behaved as we do in 2023, they would have been housed in an insane asylum—of which, of course, there were none in 1520. Instead, they would have been treated by their respective priesthoods for possession. Conversely, if St. Joan of Arc were with us today, she would be in an insane asylum rather than in the panoply of Catholic saints.

The problem of a proper evaluation of the past becomes a serious problem, then, because it seems inevitably to lead to an ethical relativism that smacks of weak-kneed liberalism, in the older, mid-twentieth-century sense of liberalism as something that makes it impossible to make any judgments at all.

Perhaps that is true.

But I like to think of it differently. A solid consideration of the past requires very careful study of the past and its difference from the present. I think of Ta-Nehisi Coates's problematic response to Queen Nzinga, Queen of Ndongo and Matamba, in Between the World and Me as a case in point.  His initial response to her power is to admire her because, when the Dutch ambassador with whom she was negotiating tried to humiliate her, she showed "her power by ordering one of her advisers to all fours to make a human chair of her body" (45). In the ruthless power games of the 17th century, Nziga outperformed the Dutch man. She was for Coates, then, "a weapon" to wield against the equally ruthless power games of twentieth-century American race relations.

In his first response to the Queen, Coates was a bit like the MAGA crowd, seeing in the practices of the past a mirror to what the present ought to be.

And then Coates thought again—or rather, he took a class in which his professor, Linda Heywood, reframed Queen Nziga's behavior. When Heywood "told the story of Nziga," says Coates, "she told it without any fantastic gloss, and it hit me hard as a sucker punch." What hits him is that, in the realitiy of the present, he would not be Nziga's avatar, but rather he would be like her adviser, "broken down into a chair so that a queen, heir to everything she'd ever seen, could sit" (54). That idea runs so deeply counter to the practices of the modern world that it produces a response equivalent to my response to Cortés or Montezuma.  Revulsion.

I think, however, that neither the initial nor the secondary response is a full one. Yes Cortés and Montezuma and Nziga behave in reprehensible ways. But they behave in ways that are essential and necessary. If Cortés is going to perform as he is expected to perform; if Montezuma is going to act as his religion requires him to act; if Nziga is going to overwhelm her antagonist, then all three must, absolutely must behave as they do. My judgment that such behavior is simply unacceptable in the modern world is, ultimately, irrelevant to the historical moment of 1520 or 1640. I am not being a relativist, in other words, but a contextualist, fully aware of the evil of the past but also fully aware that such a judgment is couched in terms of the present.

Free Speech 2

All the BS talk about free speech in social media made me think of a sad but all too true matter of fact. My local newspaper, owned by a conglomerate that operates “local” newspapers throughout the southeast of Pennsylvania, has a strict policy that it will not accept nor publish letters that express any criticism of the management of the newspaper.

The stricture is very broad. I’ve had letters summarily rejected because I’ve pointed out the grammatical and logical solecisms that appear in the paper. Just today, for instance, a column headed “Today’s birthdays” begins with the following entry: “1547—England’s King Henry VIII died at age 55.” As errors go, that’s not in the range of a Mount Everest; but it is ridiculously stupid and as good as erases whatever seriousness the paper might lay claim to.

 

Still, I’ve never thought of the paper’s policy as being in restriction of free speech. It’s a private enterprise, after all, and its owners can choose to publish what they decide to publish and exclude what they decide to exclude. So too printing presses, magazines, journals, encyclopedias, radio stations, TV channels . . . all of them are guided by editorial principles that are congenial to the owners’ point of view.

 

When Zuckerberg or Musk make the argument that they will not allow fact checkers to vet the posting on their online versions of publications, I am therefore more than skeptical. It’s obvious that the rejection of fact checking is entirely partial. If I were famous enough to be followed by several million Twitter users, and if with such a following I were to ridicule Musk, I know that I would be banned. So much for free speech—except that it seems to me entirely within Musk’s right to censor his site. So too Zuckerberg and any other owner of a private publication of any sort.

 

The First Amendment is crystal clear: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” The key term in the amendment is “Congress,” and because the power to make laws is explicitly the purview of Congress, the point extends to the government as a whole. In short, then, the government of the United States is constitutionally prohibited from abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.

 

It's not Zuckerberg or Musk who are prohibited from silencing speech, in other words. It is the government. In light of that fact, therefore, the newly imposed restrictions on the speech of government agencies and employees strikes me as profoundly unconstitutional. There can be no reference in government documents to “woke,” as they call it, issues, like gay rights or the historical contributions of Black Americans or climate change, or anything that troubles the buzzing brains of the president’s MAGA acolytes.

 

Where does the right of the government to censor speech come from? Is that not simply an unconstitutional prohibition? And if we simply let that unconstitutional act slide by, what other unconstitutional act will we accept?

Tin Foil and Meaning

All the recent brouhaha about the flock of drones besieging New Jersey, and more generally the east coast, produces some real winners. It is an alien mother ship sending out scouting vessels. It is a foreign power whose mother ship is just off the Atlantic coast. It is a cabal of our own government and technology companies preparing us for a complete take over. It is . . . . Fill in your own blank to give it meaning beyond the probable truth, that some jokers in Jersey and other places on the coast are whooping it up over the trick they’ve pulled off.

Those “explanations” of the phenomenon are much like the “explanations” that come from all the tin-foil hat conspiracy theories. The commonplace, the everyday, the ordinary, the events that deserve no explanation because they are simply random accidents in the flux of experience—all of them become grist for the mill. Pennsylvania law does not allow counting of mail-in ballots before the polls close on election day—therefore the surge of votes that comes late on the day after election day must be an attempt to steal the vote. Area 51 is top secret because it’s where the armed forces develop their most advanced weapons system—but obviously the secrecy means that there are captured spaceships from alien cultures that are being reverse-engineered to produce those weapons system. Photographic evidence for Big Foot, for Nessie, for Chupacabras, for . . . is available and denying it is obviously the government denying truth. And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut might say.

The phenomenon reminds me of a chapter, “Serpents and Skulls,” number 3.1.2 in Italo Calvino’s complex arrangement of experience in his Mr. Palomar, a book—novel? collection of stories? meditations?—that should be read repeatedly by every human. The numbers indicate that the chapter is meditative (3), but about sensory experience (1) in a social context (2).

Because Calvino invites it, I’ll be using terminology from Ferdinand de Saussure’s great invention of structural linguistics, and so I want to define four of the terms that Saussure deploys. The first is “signifier,” by which he means any sensory experience, whether aural, visual, or tactile. Saussure says that signifiers bind to “signifieds,” by which he means some conventional concept that denotes the sensory experience. So, he says, a visual image such as this

is bound to the concept “dog,” and we can speak of dogs without having recourse to the visual image and conversely when we hear or read “dog” we have the visual, olfactory, tactile, auditory experiences that the concept entails. The bound duality, sensory experience/concept, says Saussure, is a “sign.” Finally, Saussure posits that the meaning of signs depends entirely on the system of signification within which the sign appears. What that means is that the meaning of any sign is conditional on the system within which it appears. It doesn’t mean that the binding of the sensory experience to the concept is variable. The sign remains the same regardless of the system in which it appears. Rather the meaning of the sign is absolutely variable. So, for instance, in English a good buddy can be your “dog,” and no insult is understood. But in French, to call that same buddy a “chien,” the French word that denotes the sign, a dog, is definitely an insult. The meaning of the sign depends on the system in which it appears. So in what follows expect signifier, signified, sign, and system of signification.

“Serpents and Skulls” begins as Mr. Palomar visits a Toltec temple located in Mexico. He is guided by a learned friend through the collection of sculpted reliefs, sculpted columns, and chac-mools—free-standing statues—that constitute the decorations, if that is what they are, of the structure. They are the signifiers that Mr. Palomar and his friend encounter. The signifiers in the reliefs express a language that has been completely lost in the passage of time since the Toltecs disappeared. In effect, then, the signifiers are unattached to any signified. There is, therefore, no concept to which the signifier can be bound, and without the system of signification that is Toltec language and culture, there is no way that the meaning of the images can be deciphered. Nonetheless Palomar’s friend, “an impassioned and eloquent expert on pre-Columbian civilizations,” expresses what the images must be and what they mean.

 

The language that the learned friend uses indicates whence the explanations derive. He tells Mr. Palomar that the temple they’re visiting is “a step pyramid.” He notes that at the top of the temple stand four “caryatids,” and that those figures are known as “Atlases.” The narrative voice—one of the glories of Mr. Palomar, points out that “All this has to be taken of faith,” but the friend’s methodology is obvious: each Toltec visual experience becomes meaningful only as it is subsumed in a European category. Europe becomes the system of signification that the friend applies even though the linguistic and cultural vacuum in which those signifiers now exists makes the cognitive content as well as the meaning of each image entirely undetermined and undeterminable.

 

The problem is infinitely complex because, says the narrator, “In Mexican archeology every statue, every object, every detail of a bas-relief stands for something that stands for something else that stands, in turn, for yet another something.” From the perspective of the modern human, all of those visual experiences amount to nothing more than a series of accidental collocations of signifiers without any signified in sight. In practice, making one of the chac-mools a sign, i. e. binding the signifier to a specific signified is akin to seeing a tree, giving it a scientific name and then giving the sign a specific meaning by putting that scientific name into the pattern of Darwinian evolution. Or it’s like seeing a tree and saying that it denotes the nymph Dryope and then giving Dryope a specific meaning by placing her within the full the system of the Greek pantheon.

 

Mr. Palomar’s friend, then, does exactly what the tin-foil-hat conspiracy theorist do. He binds the signifiers, the visual experience, to a more or less arbitrary signified and then puts the thus newly created signs into a system that produces meaning.

 

While Mr. Palomar and his friend are wandering through the Toltec temple, another voice impinges on their awareness. The voice belongs to a schoolteacher who is taking his students, “stocky boys with the features of the Indios, descendants perhaps of the builders of these temples,” through the temple. As Mr. Palomar’s friend descants on the meaning of the visual experiences that surround them, the teacher points to the image and says, “Esto es un chac-mool. No se sabe lo que quiere decir.” Like the narrator, I’ll provide the translation from the Spanish, knowing full well that to translate is to assign meaning when, perhaps, meaning is undeterminable: “”This is a chac-mool. We don’t know what it means.” In Saussurean terms, the teacher says, “This is a signifier. It is bound to no signified. Meaning cannot be determined.”

 

Of course Mr. Palomar “is fascinated by his friend’s wealth of mythological references: the play of interpretation and allegorical reading has always seemed to him a supreme exercise of the mind.” The attribution of alien secrets to Area 51 indubitably fascinates. But at the same time, as he listens to the schoolteacher repeatedly assert, “No se sabe lo que quiere decir,” Mr. Palomar also thinks that “The refusal to comprehend more than what the stones show us is perhaps the only way to evince respect for their secret; trying to guess is a presumption, a betrayal of that true, lost meaning.”

 

As they pass by the most spectacular frieze in the temple, the teacher states what they are seeing—“This is the Wall of the Serpents. Each serpent has a skull in its mouth.” And then restates his conclusion, this time presented only in English—or in Italian in Calvino’s original: “We don’t know what they mean.”

 

Mr. Palomar’s friend blows up at this point, asserting that the frieze denotes “the continuity of life and death; the serpents are life, the skulls are death. Life is life because it bears death with it, and death is death because there is no life without death.” The friend’s statement is an exact representation of Saussure’s linguistics. The signifier, skull or serpent, is bound to a signified life and death, and the sign thus created is given meaning in a system of signification that expresses a not particularly unusual philosophical point of view.

 

Mr. Palomar meditates on his friend’s excursus into meaning. “He asks himself,” says the narrator, “What did death, life, continuity, passage mean for the ancient Toltecs? And what can they mean today for these boys? And for me?” In effect Mr. Palomar is granting the possibility that the visual experience, the signifiers that they’re all observing, is indeed bound to the signifieds that his friend asserts. Let’s assume that the friend’s association of signifier with a given signified is correct, that we now have signs—serpent/life, skull/death, and so on. But then, wonders Mr. Palomar, what do those signs mean in the system of signification in which the world came to have meaning for the Toltecs?

 

Here the insufficiency of translation, even from one known system, Spanish, to another known system, English (or Italian) seems to me a faint analogue to what Mr. Palomar contemplates. Yes, “No se sabe lo que quiere decir” means “We don’t know what it means.” But literally the signifiers of the Spanish expressly say, “We don’t know what it wishes to say.” In a more expansive sense, what exactly is it that the world of sensory experiences, the sensorium, wishes to say to us? Can we simply assume that the meaning we “discover,” or rather attribute to the sensorium is what it “wishes to say”?

 

The chapter ends with the supremely human touch that characterizes Mr. Palomar in every single chapter. As the narrator tells us, Mr. Palomar “yet . . . knows he could never suppress in himself the need to translate, to move from one language to another, from concrete figures to abstract words, to weave and reweave a network of analogies. Not to interpret is impossible, as refraining from thinking is impossible.” We simply cannot tolerate the absence of meaning. Inevitably, it seems, we humans provide a a system of signification to every signifier/signified, every sign, every sensory experience, even when there is no possible system within which we can put those signifiers.

 

Conspiracy theorists are just as human as is Mr. Palomar, his friend, and all the rest of us. Having no coherent system in which to put Area 51 or the post-election-day batch of votes from Pennsylvania or the shadow on the surface of the loch that surely must be Nessie—lacking a full context for the sensory experiences that they encounter, they create a system of signification out of whole cloth. Belief in the meaning thus produced is essential to avoid the vacuum of sense. The stronger the belief, the more solid and powerful the meaning. As Neil Gaiman says in American Gods, it’s not so much that Zeus doesn’t exist, but rather than no one believes in him any more.