The Art of Getting Away With Things

photograph: White House Press Office

Arguably JFK’s greatest contribution to politics was to do the things he did and get away with it. Politics is 99% presentation and 1% inspiration and the Kennedy White House was Camelot with the president as a venerable Arthur who radiated power and equanimity. The electorate ate it up. But power was the key word. Kennedy fucked the kind of women who had no need to rat on him. Marilyn Monroe didn’t require celebrity or money for that matter. Look at Bill Clinton’s choices and now we have Trump who's simply reduced to having his self described "locker room talk" inspiring the beginnings of another reality series. What should we call it, Animal House? Ike and FDR all had their fabled dalliances, but as with JFK, they operated with a certain nobility, probity and shall we say savoir faire that enabled them to get on with the business of state. “It’s good to be the king “ was the famous Mel Brooks line, but the problem with Trump is that he doesn't behave like one. In order to have noblesse oblige, you require the doit de seigneur and that in turn depends on a sense of true entitlement and nobility. Trump is giving male chauvinism and misogyny a bad name; under the right conditions, it’s true that any man of power can get away with a great deal. Trump said "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters." But you can’t get away with murder unless you’re Henry the VIIIth. And you can't be Henry the VIIIth or JFK when you sport the kind of blow dried hair that makes you look like a used car salesman.

Chantix Dreams

Chantix is a drug that is advertised on television to help people stop smoking. However, in addition to suicidal thoughts, one of the commercials warns  “common side effects include... unusual dreams.” Caveat Emptor! One wonders what these dreams might be and more importantly what they mean.  Freud famously saw dreaming as  “the royal road to the unconscious” while more contemporary researchers like Alan Hobson reject the idea of dreams harboring mysteries and secrets of the mind. In the bible Joseph interprets Pharaoh’s dream about the seven fatted and lean cows. That’s an example of a prophetic dream. Then there is the kind of dream you used to have in high school, where the prom queen magically appears in your bedroom, pulls up her gown and says “I want you to fuck me now!” This last is an example of what is commonly known as a wet dream. Some people might regard such a dream as good, but others could consider it as so out of the ordinary as to be delusional. Moreover it leaves its own after effect which is one of despair (due to the disparity between the wish contained in the dream and reality). Then there are those dreams in which graduation is coming up and you haven’t done your work. It’s hard to know if this is something the Chantix people would consider an unusual dream since it relates so clearly to the anxieties which most people feel. If this is a dream that doesn’t qualify as unusual then it is probably not related to Chantix. It’s one thing when Chantix does what it says its going to do which is to help you stop smoking and then cause some weird dreams in the process and another when Chantix simply produces any old dream. Remember the dreams you’ve had about finding yourself standing in a public place in your underwear. That’s an example of the kind of dream you might have on Chantix, along with those dreams of your hand going limp when you try to punch an authority figure, but such dreams are not the stuff of which Chantix is made. On the other hand if you are a Chantix user and dream that you are Monica Lewinsky and that Bill Clinton has left Hillary for you and that you are the new first lady, then you can wake up and say, “It’s a strange dream, but I can fully understand it (and don’t need any psychoanalytic interpretations). I must have had the dream because I've been taking Chantix.

Who Wants to Play Second Fiddle?

                      United States Department of State

Bank of New York Mellon has produced a laugh out loud funny commercial. Audience members are waiting to hear Itzhak Perlman begin a concert. You can see the look of anticipation on their faces and then all of a sudden, it’s announced the comedian Rhea Perlman will be sitting in for him. A few bars of cacophonic violin playing follow. The idea is that you don’t want surrogates handing your money. Rhea is, of course, the wife of Danny DeVito and not  the famed musician. However what is most interesting is the shared name and the not so subtle implication infusing the comedy and relating to marriage. However, glamorous it is to be married to a successful person, no one likes to play second fiddle. But, let’s imagine if Bank New York Mellon’s advertising agency had chosen the Clintons for their  commercial. This scenario might be slightly reversed in terms of the sexes. The audience is waiting for Hillary to appear, but at the last moment it’s announced that Bill will be taking her place. What would the equivalent of the out of tune violin in the context of a political campaign. Remember Monty Python’s, “Nudge nudge. Wink wink. Say no more.” But that’s too obvious. What could really happen would be something even more discordant with Bill, as he has on some previous occasions, acting like a runaway horse. For instance here is a Times report “Now on the Campaign Trail, a Reined in Bill Clinton,” (NYT, 2/27/08) dealing with how Clinton botched up Hillary’s earlier campaign for president. No one wants him to play that tune again.

The Two Francois: An Essay in Criticism

Here’s a quote from a TLS review of Philip Short’s Mitterand: A Study in Ambiguity, (TLS, “Skilled at Distance,” 5/30/14): “Alongside his official family, and the inevitable retinue of mistresses, Francois also shared his life with Anne Pingeot, who was twenty years younger than him and with whom he had a child, Mazarine. Her existence was revealed to the wider public only in late l994, when Paris-Match published photographs of the President with his daughter.” This little paragraph written by the reviewer Sudhir Hazareesingh is worthy of exegesis since it contains a number of assumptions: 1) that a head of state in France has an official family (the current Francois in power in France confutes that assumption, of course 2) “inevitable retinue of mistresses.” Is it written in French law that a head of state must have a “retinue” in order not to face impeachment? Certainly the other Francois seems to have met this qualification handily having thrown over the journalist Valerie Treirweiler for the actress, Julie Gayet, (footnote: his 30 year relationship with Segolene Royal had come to an end one month after Royal’s defeat in the 2007 election) 3) while it seems that the name Francois can be attached to positions of power in French government, we know the name is not a requirement. It was not, for example, Francois de Gaulle. There have been many summit talks in which American presidents have met with their European counterparts. But there has unfortunately never been a sexuality summit in which major leaders could compare notes. Imagine a circle jerk with Francois Mitterand, Francois Hollande, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton for starters. But reading about the exploits of the two Francoises, it's hard not to ask, were these two leaders of France sex addicts and what differentiates them from DSK, a renowned swordsmen, who also occupied a prominent quasi governmental position as managing director of the IMF?

Machiavelli Needed in The White House

Niccolo Machiavelli by Santi di Tito

As we approach the 500^th anniversary of Machiavelli’s death (in June of 2027), we can rest assured that his influence is alive and well and that he’s remembered not simply for being the root of a well worn adjective. And his insights certainly live on in the advocates of realpolitik like Robert D. Kaplan, the noted political analyst, commentator and author of Balkan Ghosts, who wrote an essay entitled, “What Machiavelli Can Teach Us Today."  Is for instance "The Trolley Problem," originally proposed by Phillipa Foot, in l967 and something which is usually associated with philosophy, really an insight that finds its root in Machiavelli? Making the decision to murder one person to spare the lives of others is an insight Machiavelli would undoubtedly have endorsed. In an article in the New Criterion (“Machiavelli’s Enterprise," October 2013) Harvey Mansfield, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard, for instance, remarks on one of Machiavelli’s “own excuses, such as that the murder of your inconvenient brother may be for the common good.” In summarizing Machiavelli’s achievement Mansfield goes on to underscore his modernity thusly: “To create the modern world Machiavelli initiated a two-fold transformation of politics and philosophy that would bring them together: politics with the elevation of philosophy and philosophy brought down to earth. These two motions come together in the prince, now understood not merely as a ruler, but also as a thinker devoted to improving the prospect of princes and incidentally, or not incidentally, their peoples—so that princes become knowers of ‘the world.’” Roosevelt, Johnson and Clinton were all great Machiavellians, statesmen who brought philosophy “down to earth.”  President Obama is a visionary leader, but with all the problems he's had with congress and the Republicans, perhaps he needs to re-read The Prince. In a recent Times Op-Ed piece (“Why Machiavelli Still Matters,” NYT, 12/9/13), John Scott and Robert Zaretsky argue just that when they remark, “What would Machiavelli have thought when President Obama apologized for the fiasco of his health care rollout? Far from earning respect, he would say, all he received was contempt.”