For the Love of Conflict

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          Let it be said, if indeed it can be said, that the conflict theorist, that lonely ideologue, is in fact a thing of the past. The conflict theorist has gone the way of the Freudian psychologist, that is to say, it was run out by the necessity of a far more stringent and ardent science. The Marxists saw their last victories in the 1960s, which is probably why many dropped ranks in the 1970’s with the New Marxist Left and allied with the likes of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan, perhaps the most Right-Wing Libertarians one could find. The number of existing Marxist scholars, critics, and economists is nominal and declining. Let it also be said and known that this extinction is quite premature. Certainly before the publication of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ Communist Manifesto, the very dangers that Marx and Engels warned of existed in realpolitik. There was no real answer to the exploitive bourgeois until Marx penned the revolutionary pamphlet. John Kenneth Galbraith, the anti-Marxian liberal, knows that he must recognize and attribute to the popularity of Karl Marx the magnitude of Marx’s work on social economics and social theory. It is something to be noted that even anti-Marxian liberal and conservative economists recognize that they would not have a job were it not for Marx’s contributions to the founding of economics as a social science. The influence of Karl Marx is pervasive, his theories, as stated above, made economics a testable science, and have invaded ferociously various other disciplines; Marxian critique is used in economics, in the form of Marxism proper and dialectics, literature, in the form of criticism, and sociology in the form of what is called conflict theory. The name “conflict theory” to a Marxist is self-explanatory; Marxism itself is a near obsession with class warfare. Conflict theory in sociology emphasizes the role of coercion and power, a person’s or group’s ability to exercise influence and control over others, in producing social order. To examine the whole of this theory one must consider the history and why it is quite necessary to keep the theory alive in sociology.

            The history of the term conflict theory, if one may ask, can most likely be attributed to the first line in Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” In the Manifesto Marx writes that the only chance the people have of ruling, of forming a true social democracy, is a proletariat revolution. The proletariat must, politically and physically, overthrow the bourgeoisie. This process is exactly what conflict theory was designed to record. Examining the Russian revolution of 1917 ex post facto, one can notice a pattern, and this pattern follows most, if not all, political upheavals and revolutions. The Russian revolution began in 1852 with Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, and was revived in 1917 with Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Josef Stalin. The order of the names listed above is important, it shows the gradual process the revolution took and its decline from the writings of Marx. George Orwell’s novella Animal Farm took head-on the specter of communism and detailed the steps of the Russian revolution almost immediately after its conception. It should be noted though, that conflict theory and Marxist principles or a Marxist society share little common ground. Conflict theory states that social order is maintained not by consensus but by domination, with power in the hands of those with the greatest political, economic, and social resources. The citizens of a society like the one stated above would be living below an oligarchical government, not a Marxist one. A critic of conflict theory would likely ignore the differences and state that an overemphasizing of inequality shadows shared values and public consensus. However, as the founding fathers of the United States knew when laying out the blueprints for a constitutional republic, consensus does not mean equality, the majority is very often wrong, and shared values can be immoral (take for instance the two rituals adopted by Judaism and Islam of genital mutilation, rituals that went un-battled for centuries and were approved of by the majority with shared values.) An emphasis on inequality is the only way to ensure equality.

            Robert Heilbroner, a Marxist critic (not a critic of Marxism), writes. “I think it is possible to answer these questions in a way that sheds light on the continued survival of Marxism in the face of a hundred debunkings and ‘disproofs.’ It is that Marx had the good fortune, combined of course, with the necessary genius, to create a method of inquiry that imposed his stamp indelibly on the world.” Heilbroner was writing on the necessity of materialism within Marxism, or what is called “dialectics”, which is what conflict theory stems from. Heilbroner continues, “We turn to Marx, therefore, not because he is infallible, but because he is inescapable.” A Marxist must commit to a materialistic interpretation of history to understand the ebbs and flows of economic and social power. Take a modern example, that of the despotic Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. After turning the country into an oligarchical theocracy, Hussein used his control over the military and economy to suppress and subjugate the Kurdish people. The United States’ involvement in 2003 would provide fertile land for a Marxist critic, which is why, though he had abandoned Marxism not long before, journalist Christopher Hitchens had come out in favour of an interventional foreign policy. The more functionalist sociologists, perhaps like the cohorts of Noam Chomsky, would have found a way to blame the U.S. for the state of Iraq, and certainly found just as fertile ground with the U.S.’s involvement in the Middle East as the conflict theorist. The reasons for the necessity of the conflict theorist, the Marxian critic, are as follows: for those who wish to guard and promote equality and freedom of speech, one must display inequality and censorship as an abomination and one must provide an emphasis on inequality. Marx knew this, when he was writing Das Kapital, he was doing so in a second story flat in Germany, looking over the extremely impoverished (Marx himself was quite poor, being sustained only by his longtime comrade and co-author Frederick Engels) lower class and gazing up at the lavishly wealthy upper class. This blatant wealth inequality is what fueled Marx in his writings, and added to his conviction the corruptness of Capitalist society.

            The Marxist critic may be a dying breed, but it is still a necessary breed. Too much is ignored if the underlying economic and social threads go unnoticed. No revolution is ever birthed without an economic and political upheaval, and equality among the citizens of a state may never be attained unless the current inequalities are put in the spotlight and eradicated. As Winston Smith said in 1984, if there is salvation, it lies in the proles. They have a world to win. 

Those Old Queens; The Wilde Vidal

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           Who else but Gore Vidal, a ferocious Wildean wit, could have started a conversation by stating the three most dispiriting words in the English language were Joyce Carol Oates? Christopher Hitchens said of Vidal that he had the rare gift of being amusing about serious things as well as serious about amusing ones and that Vidal had a way of saying the things that one wished one had said oneself. Take for example, Vidal, when speaking of the red-faced and engorged Teddy Kennedy: “he possesses all the charm of three hundred pounds of condemned veal.” While still on the subject of charm, Vidal had choice words for William F. Buckley Jr. while on Firing Line: “…like Hitler without the charm.” Gore Vidal had a way of employing tough-mindedness, sharpness, and a subversive wit in his writing as well as his rhetoric. He wrote that the four most beautiful words in the English language were “I told you so”, that anytime a friend succeeds “a little something in me dies”, and that “no good deed will go unpunished.” During a panel reviewing the life and works of Oscar Wilde, the inevitable question arose, could there be an Oscar Wilde for the 20th century? Gore Vidal was immediately proposed and the name passed without any dissent. This immediate proposition should come as no surprise, the two queens shared an acerbic and mordant wit and a peculiar taste in sex; however, it should not go unnoticed that after 2001 began the fall of the Wilde and the rise of the wild for Vidal.

            In Lady Windermere’s Fan, the titular Lady Windermere asks Lord Darlington, “Why do you talk so trivially about life, then?” To which the Lord replies “Because I think that life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.” Oscar Wilde was, at his core, an epicurean and this philosophy is the basis of the Wildean style and is reflected in Wilde’s writing. So if it was true of Vidal’s character to be serious about amusing matters and amusing about serious ones, then it is true that Gore Vidal held in him the essence of the Wildean wit. And if one is to believe that, as Oscar Wilde wrote in Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, wickedness is merely an invention by good people to account for the attractiveness of others, then Vidal certainly was wicked, and immensely attractive. He, like Wilde, was a critic of whom one would not want to be on the other side of their pen. In the Scots Observer in 1890, Charles Whibley wrote a review of The Picture of Dorian Gray accusing Wilde of “grubbing in muck-heaps” and writing for “outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys.” To which Wilde replied:

 

            Your review[er], sir, while admitting that the story in question is ‘plainly the work of a     man of letters’ the work of one who has ‘brains, and art, and style,’ yet suggests, and apparently in all seriousness, that I have written it in order that it should be read by the         most depraved members of the criminal and illiterate classes. Now, sir, I do not suppose    that the criminal and illiterate classes ever read anything except newspapers. They are             certainly not likely to be able to understand anything of mine… If my work pleases the     few, I am gratified. If it does not, it causes me no pain. As for the mob, I have no desire       to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy. 

 

Wilde’s riposte was sweeping; Wilde knew what the critic did not: that good writing was not meant to be read widely. Wilde continues mercilessly stating the critic “commits the absolutely unpardonable crime of trying to confuse the artist with his subject matter.” (To further prove the guilt of Wilde’s critic, Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, after having the Fatwa placed on his head by the Ayatollah Khomeini, accused the Ayatollah of the same crime, that is, of condemning the author for the acts of his characters.)

            Gore Vidal’s critiques were brutal; take for example his feud with novelist Truman Capote. In June 1979 Vidal set in motion a libel lawsuit against Capote for the claim that Vidal was thrown out of the White House for drunken behavior. With mordant wit and pen in hand, fueling his feud with Truman Capote, Vidal wrote that “Truman made lying an artform – a minor artform.” Vidal in an interview with The Independent said that Capote he truly loathed, the way one might loath an animal. Finally, after Capote’s death, Vidal wrote that it was “a good career move.” Mordancy is innate in the Wildean wit. This particular type mordancy comes not as a practiced artform, or as something attained from years of work. This mordancy is born, (or perhaps borne?) into the soul, if it can be phrased that way, of the Wildean inspired man. Perhaps the soul is too narrow a term though; a man who chooses to identify himself with the Oscar Wildes, the Gore Vidals, the Christopher Hitchens’ of the world must identify within himself at least one physical or sexual trait: pansexuality. With this in mind Wilde wrote it quite right; “those who see any difference between soul and body have neither.”

            The sexuality of the two queens, queens being a title perhaps not-too-telling or vulgar given their profession, is well known and arguably essential to their historical characters. Vidal was of the mind that there are no heterosexual men or women and that all men and women were in fact capable of purely gay thoughts. For Vidal, there was only the pansexual human being. In 2005, Vidal wrote an article for Vanity Fair bringing into the spotlight President Lincoln’s affair with Joshua Speed, the shopkeeper Lincoln has roomed with for four years before his political life. Vidal writes,

 

            What the Kinseyites [referring to those who subscribed to sexologist Alfred C. Kinsey’s teachings] and I had in common so long ago was the knowledge that homosexual and heterosexual behavior are natural to all mammals, and that what differs from individual to individual is the balance between these two complementary but not necessarily conflicted drives. So, what has all this to do with our greatest president? The young Lincoln had a love affair with a handsome youth and store owner, Joshua Speed, in Springfield, Illinois.

 

No one was exempt from Vidal’s ruling of universal sexuality. For Wilde, before his jail time and before De Profundis, there was only pleasure, the aesthetic, the epicurean life. However, in 1895, the Marquess Queensberry had left his calling card at Wilde’s club, the Albermarle, on which the Marquess scribed “To Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite.” Notice the poor spelling of an insecure man. After a libel case against Queensberry that had turned against Wilde’s favour, an arrest warrant was filed for Wilde under the charges of “sodomy” and “gross indecency.” Wilde was eventually arrested for “gross indecency”, almost farcically were it not historical, under a section of an amendment that classed his crime as homosexuality that did not result in “buggery.” During the trial Wilde was probed by his prosecutor, Charles Gill, to answer the question; “what is ‘The love that dare not speak its name?’”, a phrase that originates from Two Loves by Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s friend and partner. As eloquent as a forbidden lover, Wilde replied,

 

            The love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an         elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made        the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and     Shakespeare. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect.

 

Or, the love that dare not speak its name can be found in the pages of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Humbert starts his letters, creepily and provocatively, “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” Bearing his love down even on the pronunciation of the young girl’s name, Lo-lee-ta. Humbert’s love though is a love that is far more justly forbidden than Wilde’s and Douglas’.  Wilde continues,

 

            It dictates and pervades great works of art, like those of Shakespeare and             Michelangelo… It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may            be described as ‘the love that dare not speak its name,’ and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

 

Wilde could only compare the convictions of his crime to that of a charge of blasphemy, that is to say, both are victimless.

            By the time Vidal had left the Army after the Second World War, sodomy was no longer a crime, but still seen as morally corrupt by those who deemed themselves authorities on the matter. In 1948, Gore Vidal had published his novel The City and the Pillar, about the affair of two star crossed, young, “normal” male athletes which had evidently shocked America, or at least The New York Times. This pseudo-news outlet had compared the book to pornography, saying it was too immoral to be worth reading, and blacklisted the next five of Vidal’s books. The shock was due to Vidal making the boy’s affair completely natural despite the convictions and superstitions of Bronze Age religions. Alfred C. Kinsey, who at the time had recently published his Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, applauded Vidal on his “work in the field” because of his novel The City and the Pillar. It was because of the uproar that Vidal saw his sexual preference had caused that he migrated to Italy and lived essentially in exile with his partner Howard Austin. Vidal saw his sexuality as the wall dividing him from popularity, though the literary critic Harold Bloom attributed it to Gores unfashionable association with historical fiction. After 11 September, 2001, Gore Vidal’s popularity rose not because of his literature, or his sexuality, Vidal’s popularity hit a spike because of his criticism of the Bush administration and his pandering to conspiracy theories regarding that day. For Vidal, it was the fall of the Wilde and the rise of the wild.

            If one were to know Gore Vidal in his good days, which were most before 2001, he, like Wilde, was rarely ever “off”, then one was to know Vidal’s less adorable traits. Christopher Hitchens wrote that he had a pachydermatous memory for the least slight or grudge and a very minor tendency to bring up the Jewish question in contexts it did not belong, and that one was made aware that he suspected Franklin Roosevelt of playing a greasy role in the attack on Pearl Harbor, as well as a tight hold on his admiration for the American isolationist Charles Lindbergh. If it is true to say that September of 2001 changed us all, it is easier to say it accentuated a crack pot strain that always existed within Vidal and eventually became dominant. To put it simply, in literary terms, it drove him mad. That year for Vidal was equivalent to Wilde’s non-buggery trials. Where at least Wilde had written the striking and stylish De Profundis, Vidal’s writings after 2001 were muddy, charmless, and uninventive, pushing cheap paperbacks with the slightly disappointing titles of “Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace,” or “Dreaming War.” Take for example this sentence Vidal penned in November 2002: “Meanwhile, media was assigned its familiar task of inciting public opinion against Osama bin Laden, still not the proven mastermind.” Vidal once wrote of the Indian novelist Idries Shah that his books were a great deal harder to read than they were to write, and it seems Vidal had taken Shah’s writing advice for his “polemics”. These were small anthologies that tried to argue, though one had to wonder from where he was arguing, that the Bush administration dealt the same sleazy hand in the September 11th attacks that F.D.R. had dealt over half a century before in Pearl Harbor. In 2008 Johann Hari of the London Independent interviewed Gore Vidal, where Vidal had said the American experiment had failed, we would soon end up somewhere between Brazil and Argentina where we belonged. We would soon be the “yellow man’s burden.” This from a novelist who could at one point summon Abraham Lincoln to the pages as if he knew Lincoln himself. Asking about Vidal’s recently deceased rivals, Hari wanted a few words on John Updike, William F. Buckley Jr., and Norman Mailer. Vidal interrupted before Hari could finish and uttered the following: “Updike was nothing. Buckley was nothing with a flair for publicity. Mailer was a flawed publicist, too, but at least there were signs every now and then of a working brain.” Again, the reader is left wanting any grace, charm, or wit. Vidal had traded his Wildean mind for that of the likes of Michael Moore; cheap, sleazy, and painfully mean spirited. Oscar Wilde was never crude, even while writing his charged and dramatic letter “De Profundis,”

 

            One who is entirely ignorant of the modes of Art in its revolution or the moods of            thought in its progress, of the pomp of the Latin line or the richer use of the vowelled    Greek, of Tuscan sculpture of Elizabethan song may yet be full of the very sweetest          wisdom.

 

Wilde’s charm was pervasive even while writing in a jail cell and writing a letter that was meant to condemn his former lover. Wilde blamed Douglas for Douglas’ negligence and putting Wilde in a situation to be tried and jailed.

            The similarities were strikingly obvious between the two novelists and playwrights, even to the point of dramatic life events. Certainly the adjective of Wilde-like, or Wildean, was borne upon Gore Vidal fittingly and for a while he did well to keep the spirit alive, subversively tying life, love, and sex into fiction in a manner and at a level attained only by a select few in all of literary history. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he said as someone who wrote the best sentences in his time. While he still had some of the Wildean instincts, he certainly lived up to the memory. 

Brandy & Scotch

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I

“I had another dream last night.” I said.
“About what.” This clearly wasn’t a question. He never asked questions. Michael DuManci never asked questions. Ask him, he’d tell you. He only tells. Michael DuManci’s was the only man who followed his own advice, which was just as well, his advice was the worst possible.
I adjusted my position in the chair, readjusted; I ran my fingers through my hair. When I was not much younger it had had a brilliant golden hue. Lately though it seems to have lost that brilliance and turned to a much darker, more serious tone. More recently the hair started retreating. Scalp was taking over the battlefield. The cigarettes and liquor I employed had turned coat and began fighting with scalp, devastating the indigenous population of hair upon the land.
“You were there,” I said, “in a dress though. It really was a gorgeous dress. The color fit you perfectly.”
“Fuck you.”
“That came later. And so did you. Came later, that is.”
Michael DuManci would never admit he had a taste for men. He hated the gay boys in high school. But as they say, the one who whips the whore usually has a need for her. In Michael’s life, he had whipped plenty of whores, and certainly admitted his need for them. We all know, but would never admit in his company that many, if not most of these whores were male. Even men he slept with that we knew, our cohorts, would not admit to Michael’s face the treason he had committed to his sex. Michael DuManci is the type that wears a façade of homophobia, but would stretch his foot longingly in an airport bathroom to the stall next to his.
“Have you published anything lately? You know I hate your writing; I would hate even more to think someone would publish it.” Oh yeah, Michael DuManci is an asshole too, even to his friends. And I am a writer. Or at least I try to be. In the most general sense anyone can be a writer now. All it takes is a keyboard and a primitive skill with the English language. I happened to have both, and initially more time than I cared to do with. Now I have no time at all, and was just as poor as when I started out. I always knew I would produce more than I ever hoped would be published, and even more than I would get paid for. What I didn’t know was just how little publications paid now. In previous generations, the greats (Fitzgerald, Hemingway) could support themselves on the plethora of magazines that would pay generously for capable writers. Now, these magazines are out of print, and I, the modern writer, the aspirator, must rely on obscure publications who can only afford low triple or double-digits. This is what the writer has been reduced to; obscurity.
In fact, I had published something. “Yes, I have published something recently, Michael; a short piece of journalism that the American Prospect had taken up and paid oh so ungenerously for. At least they took it. It shows taste.” Michael looked up from his flask of brandy. He was partial to liquor more than anything else and was rarely without drink. Michael took a swig and lit a cigarette and said, “You know, this writing thing is useless. Writers are useless. There is a reason it’s a minority endeavor and a very unpromising job. You have to waste your life away hoping for what? Hoping for a fuckin’ idea. Just an idea. And then you spend ages writing your heart out, spilling your emotions, wants, and ideas to some imagined stranger hoping that some sleazy magazine will indulge your fantasies. It’s useless.”

We were sitting in a dirty restaurant, the kind we always did because we always loved them. This particular dirt hole served only diner classics. Greasy burgers with greasy fries and a greasier waitress (who I think Michael fucked once, could never tell with him). Even the drinks were greasy. But we loved it.
I always knew writers were useless. That’s part of why I took up journalism. I was born to be an artist, and as Oscar Wilde wrote in the preface to his only published book, all art is useless. The other reason for taking up journalism was Jimmy Cameron. Cameron just wrote an article about leaving the profession. He wrote he was there for the liberation of African countries, swam in all five oceans, and fucked on six continents. Who would turn this career down?
Michael and I were both romantics, two different kinds of romantics, but still romantic. I was the type of romantic who believed Jimmy Cameron’s journalistic life was available to all journalists; all it took was a sufficient amount of bravery. The foolish romantic. Michael was the type of romantic who saw the world as black as white, right and wrong, good and bad. And Michael was quite fond of being black, wrong, and bad. I always hated romantics though. They were truly the useless ones. The utopians, the communists, hell, even the fascists, were all hopeless romantics.
“Look,” I said, “I knew what I was getting into. There just wasn’t enough stress in my life before I made this decision. I always work better under stress. Why do you think I avoid sex?” I didn’t really avoid sex so much as I never got it. I couldn’t let Michael know that. Even now he tries to sell me on trying a prostitute. If he could without more than reasonable stress, I have little doubt he himself would try to get me into bed.
We were both self-loathing romantics. And we shared one thing in common. We both never cared where we got our sex from. I could at least admit it, Michael never could, no matter how open the matter was and no matter how many of our present party knew or were gay themselves. Michael saw his pansexuality as treasonous to his gender. But when it came down to it, as with most men, he could never turn down an opportunity to get off.
I called for the check and it was immediately brought to us with the exacting efficiency that all greasy diners work in. It was only twenty bucks, even with a writer’s salary I could afford that. Michael was the first to rise. He smacked his hand on the table theatrically and suggested that we walk our way back to his apartment for more drinks. “Get up.” he said, “I have a forty year old scotch sitting in a drawer and I’ve run out of brandy.” I knew where this was going. Michael was 5 flasks into the day and he had a look of treasonous longing on face.
I can’t say I was all that opposed to it. It had been 4 months since I had gotten laid by anyone, and even for one who works under great stress, I could use the entheos. When we walked out of the restaurant it was noticeable just how filthy the place was as the sun was large, obnoxious, and blinding upon walking through the door. We had been sitting by the windows for the duration of the meal and the scum worked as a wonderful sunlight repellant.
In New York City everything is within walking distance, which is probably why Michael loved living here. From his apartment he had only several stumbles in any direction before reaching a liquor store, a cigarette dispenser, a cheap diner, or a hooker. Michael’s apartment was surprisingly immaculate. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and one large space that the kitchen, dining, and living room all shared. He lived alone, so one bedroom was his to sleep in and swap various bodily fluids; the other was his office (I never knew what he did. The door remained perpetually closed.)
When we entered his apartment he stepped right, into the kitchen, and opened a solid white cabinet with no handle and produced a box of, as he said, forty year old scotch. He opened the box and pulled the bottle out with ease. I couldn’t see the brand, and didn’t really care to or have time to. Michael opened the bottle, took a large drink, charged at me with a deliberate grace and kissed me.

II

                That would be the last night we made love. We had done it on several occasions before, though we never talked about it. It was, in every sense of the phrase, a dirty little secret. I always thought Michael DuManci loved the feeling of cognitive dissonance. That was why he lived the way he did. No great man is without contradictions, but Michael was certainly no great man. That was 1987, my journalism was in its infancy, probably still is as I never get paid. No one goes into this profession for the money.
The morning after, Michael got up before I did, as he always did. The drink never tired him. It was a junk energy. That was all he lived on. All his friends and family said it was what would kill him, and we were right, in a sense. I never saw him again after that night. I don’t doubt Michael got up before I did, as he always did, and staggered still undoubtedly drunk into the kitchen to fill his flask. We all, all being family, friends, ex-lovers, that he was killed some way or another. It wasn’t in Michael’s character to disappear unannounced. He saw himself as too important. I like to think the commonplaceness of it all might have hurt him a little, hurt him into laughter as there was no record of his death anywhere at any time. As far as he was concerned, he was too important for a commonplace death, it had to be theatrical or even miraculous, though he would never use that word. He was a romantic. His death had to be romantic. I wasn’t sure when I learned it, probably a year after his disappearance; it takes a romantic to make it through this world successfully, and I always hated romantics.

Change of Heart; So what?

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              In 1996, a bill was moved to congress to, not essentially, but effectively ban and make illegal the marriage of two human beings who happen to have the same genitalia. This should be considered laughable due to the sheer absurdity of the bill in lay terms. It was titled, which was undoubtedly thought of as a heroic name when written, the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA. Section three of this bill “codifies the non-recognition of same-sex marriages for all federal purposes, including insurance benefits for government employees, Social Security survivors’ benefits, immigration, and the filing of joint tax returns.” This should be painstaking to read for two reasons, the bureaucratic prose is stale, and the actions the words mean to put forth are blatantly discriminatory. The passing of DOMA meant that the United States federal government can only recognize marriage through “traditional” lenses, that of only a man and woman.

                In 1999, a bill very similar to the Defense of Marriage act aimed to stretch the arms of discrimination even farther, at least in the District of Columbia, but however was (very narrowly) turned down. This amendment was introduced to prohibit same-sex couples from adopting children. (While this was turned down in D.C. in 1999, in 2011 North Carolina voted very positively on an amendment that would allow the state to disregard any civil union; a couple that is not married.) These two bills, sharing other than their tasteless intentions, share a single voter who has now gone back on his stance on the issue of homosexuality.

                Four days ago from my writing this (18 March), an obscure and irrelevant Senator from Ohio, Robert Portman, after learning of his son’s preference for the “long” ham decided it was due time to recompense for his previous actions and come out in favour of a formerly despised stance. His son tweeted that same day that he was “proud of his father” for this change. The realm of the Left has already unified on a single answer; Hypocrite. Narcissist. Wingnut. Bigot. Fair enough, he probably still owes us at least those titles for some other issues. However, here something has been done. A progressive stance was taken by a conservative; he has now rendered himself a dissident among his party. This is laudable to be sure, but in no way is it a suitable outcome for a several year process of discrimination.

                No doubt Portman hopes his public apology and turn-about support of the repealing of DOMA will grant him heavy hands of applause. And he has gotten this; there is a small number in the blogosphere who do applaud Portman for his change in stance, as if it were a significant step forward. Ignoring that it took the issue to hit him in his own lair for his support to be rallied, it could be seen why one would see this as praise-worthy. But it did take that. It took Portman seeing that his own son would be the recipient of his previous vitriolic stance for him to change his mind. In a column for Slate William Saletan likened the experience to President Obama’s change of heart.

“It’s how President Obama explained his conversion on gay marriage last May…. Where were all these critics then?”

Well, right here. Obama’s conversion was a step Forward, sure, but perhaps too strategic for my liking. Saletan also writes “When your parents and peers are liberal, reaching liberal conclusions is no sweat.” Why Slate felt so inclined to publish this is questionable.  Fortunately, these are not exactly liberal conclusions. Nor a conclusion any Republican should disregard. It’s more a matter of human rights, and why a party that screams to be so in favour of them has to have a change of heart on matters of human rights. It is a poor state when the oppression of a fellow homo sapien is considered a viable option under any circumstance.

                Saletan again: “You don’t support SNAP benefits because you know malnourished kids, any more than you support climate-change legislation because you know peasant farmers. It isn’t empathy that leads you to these conclusions. It’s inertia.” Saletan almost gets the point. One does not support SNAP benefits because one may know a hungry child, or climate-change policies for one’s peasant farmer friend. These issues get support, like the same-sex equality issues and policies, because there are those who are being disenfranchised by those who claim to be under a divine order or with charges from a pseudo-science. Support is rallied because there are hungry children, there is a threat of severe climate change, and despite Portman’s change of attitude, there are still fellow humans who are being subjugated because of his and his cohort’s previous and continuing actions.  

Fenton in Exile

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A review of Children in Exile by James Fenton.

My first review, in fact. So please, be tough and grinding with your critiques of my critiques. Perhaps I made a mistake in reviewing a book I enjoyed so? 

 

                There is a dichotomy in modern poetry; poetry before James Fenton and poetry after James Fenton. With the exception of a few, namely Philip Larkin and Robert Conquest, there is no equal.  It should also be noted that these were his contemporaries. Or maybe Fenton’s poetry was simply lucky in its timing?  Roll these few lines around on your tongue and decide for yourself:

What I am is not important, whether I live or die –
                It is the same for me, the same for you
What we do is important. This I have learnt.
                It is not what we are but what we do,’

Says a child in exile, one of a family
                Once happy in its size. Now there are four
Students of calamity, graduates of famine,
                Those whom geography condemns to war,

Who have settled here perforce in a strange country
                Who are not even certain where they are.

Timing may have had a say in Fenton’s success, though certainly his prose could have spoken for itself. In the time this collection of poetry spans, from 1968 to 1984, there was the Cambodia question to be brought up thanks in no small measure to the less-than-laudable Henry Kissinger. That, in Cambodia and Dead Soldiers, is a topic that was in a sense handed to Fenton as coal and made into a diamond through his poetry.

                 In 1973, Prince Norodom Chantaraingsey of Cambodia invited Fenton to lunch (They lived well, the mad Norodoms, they had style) on a battlefield. As a journalist this would have been enough, however, Fenton had his poetic prowess to rely on and wrote one of his, agreeably, most applauded poems. Who else but a man enjoying lunch on a battlefield could refer to empty bottles as Dead Soldiers and rejoice in their piling at their feet? On my left sat the Prince; /on my right, his drunken aide. His drunken aide was Pol Pot’s brother. A surreal experience to be sure. And an equally surreal poem to narrate it back to the reader.

                Fenton certainly has not earned the adjective “fragile”, much unlike his contemporary whom I named above, Philip Larkin. Larkin undoubtedly was fragile, his lack of sexual-charge and obscene (or perhaps vehement) consumption of pornography was something to be gazed upon with pity and admiration. However, I would argue Fenton’s poetry is comparable to refined liquor. Not in any way delicate but timeless, durable, exquisite and quite intoxicating when read in lengthy stretches. It touches on the questions that need be answered and answers them daringly and robustly without fear. Without a doubt, Fenton is one of the most admirable modern poets, in line with William Butler Yeats even, and “Children in Exile” should be on one’s poetic Canon. 

Will the Left Ever Learn At All? A Rebuttal to Maurice Isserman’s “Will the Left Ever Learn to Communicate across Generations?”

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                 The Left has rarely been successful in recruiting younger generations with the exact ideas of the previous generation. It would be a step back, or right perhaps, to do so. Harrington in 1960 had good reason to disapprove of the New Leftist Students for a Democratic Society’s lack of an “anti-Stalinist” zeal. As the saying goes, if you do not speak loudly in the face of tyranny you are in effect aiding tyranny. The “New Left” (a phrase not coined by Harrington in 1958 as Isserman would have the reader believe, but by Herbert Marcuse in 1956) earned its name by rejecting the ideas of the Marxist/Trotskyist old left. It was the disavowing of the vanguard, essentially.

                Isserman writes that Hayden was leaning toward the visionary, wanting to combine “economic and political analysis with an active, open moral pulse.” This may be more Trotskyist than Hayden or Isserman wanted to admit. After all, there are only three words missing from that phrase that would make it a Marxist motto; through dialectic means. With that said, it should be a little off-putting that the SDS would label themselves new leftists. After the Columbia strike, writing on the astounding prosperity of the movement Isserman writes that there was a “… left-leaning liberalism, a counterculturally flavored anarchism, and 57 strands of Marxism.” He also notes that the SDS leaders showed an increasing preference for small vanguard parties. However, Isserman’s favorable light on the radicalism of the new left is spot on. There is a fine line between being a radical and being a fanatic and the new left of the 1960’s (and the new New Left of 2011) often towed that line. The SDS Weathermen and the fanatics who joined the last bits of the Occupy movement are the perfect examples of the lack of cross-generational communication within the left. These movements begin with the zeal of le souixante-huitards and all too often end up falling into irrelevancy, often through no fault of their own, but by the next generation of leftists who put them there.  

Fear. Big, fat, fine fear.

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Fear walks tall on this planet. Fear walks big and fat and fine. Fear has really got the whammy on all of us down here. Oh it’s true, man. Sister, don’t kid yourself… One of these days I’m going to walk right up to fear. I’m going to walk right up. Someone’s got to do it. I’m going to walk right up and say, “Okay, hard-on. No more of this.” 

When it comes to fighting, I’m brave – or reckless or indifferent or just unjust. But fear really scares me. He’s too good at fighting and I’m too frightened anyway.

 

- Money, Martin Amis.

Exporting Democracy

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A precedent was set on 2 April, 1917. President Woodrow Wilson uttered his speech for a declaration of war against Germany, the only memorable phrase being “The world must be made safe for democracy.” The vote was cast, and two days later 385 congressman and 90 senators were overwhelmingly in favour of exporting democracy. Wilson had his hand forced though, due by no small measure to the unrestricted attacks on American and British civilian cruise-liners (carrying unrestricted supplies) by the German U-boats.

The United States’ entry into the war was to mark the New World meeting the Old. It was, in clichéd terms, the triumphant entrance of the U.S. in to global spectrum. The New World was no longer isolated and mystic; it played an integral role in the outcome of the First World War. This did however, set a precedent for future presidents; it marked the United States as a safeguard for and an exporter of democracy.

John Lukacs, the author of the essay titled after Wilson’s famous quote wrote that “….Most Americans had come to regard the war of 1917-18 as a mistake.” He goes on in the next paragraph to state that the public’s opinion changed rather quickly. After 11 September, 2001, public opinion was overwhelmingly in favour of foreign intervention, namely, the exporting of democracy to Iraq (though, most of the States’ recent history was devoted to cradling some of the fascistic mullahs and despots, Khomeini and Hussein being among a few of the vile goblins the U.S. supported and encouraged in 80’s). This view did not last long in public opinion polls and was never prominent in international polls, as the cost and lives spent were very quickly rising.

Had Wilson’s hand not been forced to move in to battle with Germany, it is conceivable that the United States would not be as prominent in the world market, and a precedent of ostentatious jingoism may not have been set. However, had the U.S. remained silent in this fight, it is equally as conceivable that either the Thousand Year Reich may have come to fruition, or the U.S.S.R. would have taken America’s place in the global economy.

The Perks of Being Trapped

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                      A bullet through the brain was very probably the only thing it could have taken for Anders to realize just how much of a critic he was. Martin Amis wrote that [good] writing was a war against cliché (a keen sense of irony is needed here). Anders knew this, engraved it in to his brain and was graced by the critical attitude attached, enough so that it was on his mind even in the few short moments after life and before death. He was trapped by it. Katherine Mansfield used almost the same psychological entrapment that Anders was seduced by. However, Miss Brill’s was far less intellectual and literary. She was cursed by self-fame. Brill thought herself to be the talk of the town, a town monument to be admired and gazed upon lustily. Both Miss Brill and Anders constructed their own mental traps, and even if given the key to the locks, would not likely leave them.

                     Immediately after the bullet danced through Anders’ brain, the narrator thought it important to tell what Anders did not think of; his sullen daughter, his drab wife, the books he read and later hated to review. He remembered instead, of a baseball game, and how entranced he was by his southern cousin’s dialect, they is, they is, they is. A writer is trapped by his principles; it is the only thing one can truly call their own. Anders was trapped by his principles, his own private war against cliché. Anders would have to have regarded the sheer commonness and stupidity of these bank robbers as far more dangerous than the guns they held. For Miss Brill, however, her trappings were less visible to herself and even in the end she has no idea just how deluded she is. She knows very well in her mind that she is a vital part of that town’s social construct. Whereas Ander’s mental cage was caused by a lifetime of mental exercises against the commonplace, Brill’s was most likely caused by old age, dementia, and loneliness.

                 The literary critic Gillian Boddy in Katherine Mansfield: The Woman, The Writer wrote on Mansfield’s style:

                “The story evolved through the character’s minds. As so often in her work, the reader is dropped into the story and simply confronted by a particular situation… it is assumed that [the reader] has any necessary prerequisite knowledge and is, in a sense, part of the story too.

Christopher Hitchens has been accused of this style of writing before as well, simply assuming that the reader knows exactly what he writes. It is less an insult to the reader’s intelligence, and Mansfield uses this style brilliantly to keep hidden from the readers the thick walls Miss Brill has built around her world. Only until the end does the reader realize just how disillusioned the old woman is:

                “She unclasped the necklet quickly; quickly, without looking, laid it inside. But she put the lid on she she thought she heard something crying.”

Even after such a dramatic experience, Brill had managed to tell herself that it could never affect her, which leads one to believe this may continue on in a Groundhog Day fashion. For Tobias Wolff, it is conceivable that Anders was a tool to flesh a deep seated hatred for critics (asking a writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it thinks about dogs). A critic must be devoted in fashion to tearing down the dull, the drab, the boring, and finding the very few gems hidden among coals. Anders could not have been anything other than a literary critic. And given the choice, it would not be far-fetched to say it was a preferable way to die for Anders; in defiance, actively.

                 In this case, the traps were of no real consequence. Neither Anders nor Miss Brill had any real choice in their trap, or whether they could even leave them if they wanted to. It was integral to their character, as it is for anyone who has ever embraced or been freed from a similar cage.