Baise-Moi

Virginie Despentes is a French feminist. Actually that isn't quite the right word. Baise-Moi is her chez d'oeuvre. It's a novel about two women who are brutally raped. They steal cars and go on a brutal tear murdering everyone in sight, men, women and children, including mothers wheeling strollers. Despentes obviously studied Pierrot Le Fou. It's really a timeless book but also a metaphor for the Middle East, particularly with respect to sexual violence. You start off feeling empathic naturally in terms of the anger for the depredation, until the brutality of the revenge begins to set in. Any sense of the humanity of innocent and random victims is lost, but the anger ultimately self-implodes. You see this on a macro level say in the Bosnia Serbian war where both sides ultimately set their country on fire.

Question of the day: Is your life an embarrassment? 

The Circus

Trump's Second Term

One of the signature acts of any circus is the juggler. Having a lot of balls in the air gets even more complicated when you do it on a high wire, so is riding a bike on a high wire or even doing it riding a bike on a high wire with someone on your shoulders doing the juggling. Along with clowning, danger is the lingua Franca of any circus. The Wallendas tragically found that out.  Elon Musk clowns by dancing around grinning ghoulishly as he performs his chainsaw massacre. Trump juggles so many executive orders, it’s impossible to editorially respond or even realize what is going until like in The Apprentice “you’re fired!” There’s value free diplomacy for you. The president claims he will carry the ball (s) and break the record solving Gaza and Ukraine. It’s not surprising he is continually dropping them.

read "Never Brush Again" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Question of the day: Are you embarrassed?

Noel the Coward

Have you ever been convinced you don’t have one brave bone in your body? Climbing in the Himalayas is tough but you have company in the form of Sherpa guides, but what about joining a demonstration in the lobby of Trump Tower and being marched away in a paddy wagon. Say you’re claustrophobic and don’t like being locked up for the few hours before your  annoyed partner bails you out ( “I was terrified,” she screams, “don’t ever do that again!”). Ok you’re in caught in the cross walk as the light is changing and you casually give the bird to the driver of an incoming car. It’s easy to to say “fuck you” to someone to a person or object in motion. But lo here’s a chap who isn’t happy being told to fuck himself and is not afraid to pull up next to you, get out of his car and threaten you with his MMA resume. Might mention there’s liquor on his breath. You stand there like a goof ball with your hands in your pockets as he puts you before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Would you "have not decency" and "welch" on your old communist cellmate? Or would you go to JAIL and fail to collect you $200? You know yourself. Deep down you’re the stuff of Welsh rarebit. Run! That or try to excuse yourself from your local genocide by claiming you’re not the liberal intellectual you seem to be. Cry and lie—thems is your weapons, unless you’re the latest product of Walter Mitty’s or rather Lee Childs’ imagination, a super hero named Reacher!

Question of the day: Should you take it personally when someone rejects you?

Ukraine Light

 

“If you’re not on the table you’re in the menu” was the pronunciamento by a recent CNN guest described as a veteran negotiator. It’s the world of Kissinger, realpolitik which ultimately goes back to Machiavelli and before that Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. One has to smile about the strange bedfellows which derive from a cross-pollination of transactional and humanistic aims. Here’s one. Trump proposed that the United States take over Ukraine’s electrical grid and nuclear power plants. Ha! No need for a standing army to afford protection. The Russians Are Coming was the name of a 60s anti-war satire. While anything is possible, it’s highly unlikely Putin is going to take aim at a Connecticut Light and Power. "Value free politics" is the name of the game. Yet the transaction yields the right result—if you’re interested in preserving  autonomy and democracy both.

Question of the Day: Do people still eat each other?

Decline and Fall

Gibbons famously authored The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Then there were the tomes you may have grown up with, Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich , the six volumes of Churchill’s Second World War, Carlyle's The French Revolution, Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and finally Democracy in America, de Tocqueville’s peripatetic analysis of a political philosophy that ultimately may have outgrown itself. Are populism and democracy fundamentally incompatible? Are the complexities of the constitution its due process and inalienable rights difficult to by a populist base? As January 6 illustrated, it doesn’t take much for a collectivity to turn into lynch mob. Francis Fukuyama discredited his own The End of History and the Last Man, as it became apparent that tribalism would triumph over the notion of a unifying technocracy. The adoption of a precarious citation that some might even regard as tasteless by Karl Ove Knausgaard, in his Min Kamp, illustrates the question mark that hangs over any attempt to encapsulate the politics of the current world. Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz later adopted for television by Fassbinder used place to define Weimar Germany. What’s to be Done was the broadside by Lenin. Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations and Marx Das Kapital. What soubriquet will grace the book about this turbulent period of American history?

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Rumble in the Jungle?

 

"Remember Float like a Butterfly." Then there was Mike Tyson, "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." The Dems have been KO'd. Approval rating low and heading downwards. What is needed is literally some one large. Remember also the Rumble in the Jungle where Mohammed Ali prevailed with his "rope a dope." Mohammed Ali had brawn, but he had brains too. He was really a talented poet. It's not only Musk and Trump, Doge and Russell Vought (who now runs The White House budget office). Have you watched "Reacher." Lee Child's creation is a larger than life figure who throw people through windshields but has a rap that comes fast and furious like that of Ali. Trump once cried "where's my Roy Cohn (which became the title of a film)?" Where is our Mohammed Ali? George Foreman trained by chaining himself to a jeep which he then proceeded to march up a hill, but down he went. It's a tall order, but who's the person capable of delivering MAGA that knockout punch? Or maybe here is the scenario. Trump continues the trade war, which he loses. Russia wins back Ukraine. The nation wakes up. The president is a Quisling. He's siding with the enemy--to the extent that the enemy is literally everything that is bad for the country. Isn't anyone who kills democracy a traitor to American values?

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

The Men in Their Glass Booths

You’ve undoubtedly read about the poor souls who have such compromised immune systems that they have to live their lives in isolation tents. That’s probably but as bad as a body cast. Then there was Eichmann. Robert Shaw wroteThe Man in the Glass Booth and he was Hannah Arendt’s subject (in Eichmann in Jerusalem), whence "the banality of evil."  All of these examples themselves traffic in extremis. Most people like to think they are keeping things close to the chest. Unbeknownst even to themselves they might as well be insects in a terrarium. The female praying mantis partakes of a sexual cannibalism in which they bite off their male counterpart's head. You have undoubtedly heard of women who are accused of being ball busters. The fact is it’s almost impossible to conceal anything. Counter espionage is a far cry, in the age of the digital footprint, from Vidkun Quisling the traitorous Norwegian minister of defense. The advent of AI has put everyone in a goldfish bowl. Disguises are a charade. It’s usually the perpetrator who has the wool pulled over their eyes.

and listen to "The Tracks of My Tears" by Linda Ronstadt