Contagion

Contagion, the new Steven Soderbergh film, is about an epidemic. Stephen King devoted one of his most famous magnum opuses to a similar subject in The Stand. If you look at medieval woodcuts, you can see the earliest attempts to depict the devastations of the bubonic plague. Novels and films on similar subjects cross a wide variety of genres, from horror films like George Romero’s famed Night of the Living Dead to Nevil Chute’s On the Beach. And depictions of persecution and brain washing run the gamut from the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter and of course The Manchurian Candidate, whose cast of right-wing conspirators (including Angela Lansbury) and leftist brain washers palls next to the reality of the tea baggers, luddite unibombers, ideology driven serial murderers and underground wannabees who populate both the imagination and early 21st century reality. Columbine and Oklahoma City have turned out to be as viral as any plague when you look at the Virginia Tech and Fort Hood massacres. Contagion has been praised for its realism, but can any degree of realism do justice to the AIDS epidemic—a nightmare come to life? Geneologies are created in an attempt to divine the source of the infection, epidemiologists search for ARV's (anti retroviral drugs) and retro-thinkers see the virus as a sign of coming Armageddon. May 21 was supposed to be Judgment Day. Meanwhile, Tom Perotta deals with the imaginative consequences of “The Rapture” in his recently published novel The Leftovers.

Velocirapturists

If capitalism is part of the dialectical process that leads to communism and the eventually withering away of the state, why were Lenin and Marx so intent on destroying it? If the antichrist as manifested by the advent of the secular nation-state is the process by which the world is destroyed and the Rapture and Second Coming occur, why try to impede its progress? These are the contradictions raised by Mathew Avery Sutton, a professor of history at Washington State University, in a recent Times Op-Ed piece (“Why the Antichrist Matters in Politics,” NYT, 9/26/11). “Like orthodox Marxists who challenge capitalism even though they say they believe it represents an inevitable step on the road to the socialist paradise,” Professor Sutton remarks, “conservative Christians never let their conviction that the future is already written lead them to passivity.” Both Marxists and Rapturists (or, as I like to call them, Velocirapturists) are species of fundamentalists who have an attraction-repulsion relationship with dialectics. In other words, though both these troglodyte specimens would be great candidates for a reality show called “The Best of Hegel,” both are dialectically challenged. The good news is that this learning disorder is imminently treatable through the use of antipsychotics and experience-based cognitive therapy. Last May 21 came and went with not even a chance to refund our misery, and one only need take one of the battered cruise ships that the North Korean government is running out of Pyongyang as a means of attracting foreign currency to see the pathetic residue of Utopia at work.

Not All Republicans are Bad

Not all Republicans are bad. Remember the liberal wing of the party, led in New York State by a man named Jacob Javits? Some of their primitive attempts at thoughtful behavior should be encouraged, even when they are wrongheaded and insensitive. Such is the case with the “Diversity Bake Sale” thrown by Cal Berkeley’s youthful Republicans. Yesterday’s Times reported the event thusly: “Last Week, the Berkeley College Republicans announced its ‘Increase Diversity Bake Sale,’ scheduled for Tuesday. On Facebook, the group listed the price for a pastry at $2 for white students, $1.50 for Asian students, $1 for Latinos, 75 cents for African-Americans and 25 cents for Native Americans. Women of all races were promised a 25-cent discount” (“A ‘Diversity Bake Sale’ Backfires on Campus,” NYT, 9/27/11). The Times quoted Shawn Lewis, a political science major and president of the Republican organization as saying, “We expected people to be upset. Treating people differently based on the color of their skin is wrong, and we wanted people to be upset about that.” Nice try Shawn. Satire is a tough game and if you don’t offend somebody then you aren’t doing your job. You might want to switch your major from political science to English so you get to read the great satirists like Swift. The fully annotated hardback editions of Gulliver’s Travels are something that every young Republican will be able to afford, as long we continue to provide tax breaks for the wealthiest sector of the population. But Swift also wrote A ModestProposal, in which he proposed solving Ireland’s hunger problem by eating the babies. Now don’t jump your guns and get the idea that Swift’s screed should be employed to deal with the growing homelessness, malnutrition and starvation in America. Still, it’s a piece you should take a look at, since it employs two techniques that were missing from your nice little attempt at humor—those being hyperbole and irony. If you have a point to make about inequity, it’s only going to be strengthened by the humanizing force of art.

We Shall Bury You!

Fucked-up people of the world unite! Let’s take over. Let’s have rallies where we tell all the little intimate secrets about our most intimate habits. Let’s leave no stone unturned. Then let’s find an object of blame. Let’s call ourselves the have-nots and call the blameworthy ones the haves. Preferably it will be a country with people of easily identifiable ethnicity. Let’s call these people Turds. The Turds had a cultural this and a cultural that and in addition they encouraged their children to triumph at the expense of our kids, who were taught to be honest about their apprehensions and failings. OK, it’s a plan. We start off with small rallies in beer halls. These are the garden plots in which the seeds of discontent are sown. We will build up to a big demonstration in a venue like Yankee Stadium. There will be a veneer of democracy and understanding. Secretly however we will no longer be democratic or understanding. All of our members will now have brown uniforms with leather straps running diagonally across the chests, and while we were all once l00-pound weaklings, we will be pumped with Muay Thai and Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. We will all be trained in tactical nuclear warfare. We’ll get back at those urbane sophisticates in a way that will make Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge look like high school guidance counselors. We will cleanse the world of the confidence men, i.e., those who give off plastic confidence. Yes, the impotent, the constipated, the losers in board games will finally rule. We will begin by conquering the Turds and then we will march through the Sudeturdland and we will raise our flag with its universally recognizable cardboard toilet-paper-roll tube. We shall bury you! 

War of the Words

“Walter O’Malley once said I was so good at it, they should just let me make the whole damn thing up and forget about playing the game.” That’s Nat Allbright talking to the Washington Post in 1982, as quoted in his recent Times obit. Walter O’Malley was the famous Dodgers owner, and Allbright had been conscripted to broadcast re-creations of the goings-on at Ebbet’s Field for radio listeners, using telegraph messages as the raw material for his scripts. Allbright provided details and sound effects like “snapping his tongue against the roof of his mouth that sounded like a bat striking ball” and “tapes of the tide-like murmur of the crowd.” When technology made him obsolete, Allbright created personalized broadcasts for those who wanted them. “A 240-pound would-be jockey rode Secretariat to victory in the Kentucky Derby,” the Times recounted. “Another customer fought Sugar Ray Leonard, saying realism demanded that the customer himself be knocked out.” He also “created games even when the seasons were suspended because of labor strife.” Many gamers still play fantasy football today, but Allbright came from a world where radio produced magic. Listeners really believed what they heard but couldn’t see. That’s why Orson Welles was able to suspend his listeners’ disbelief and create mass panic with “War of the Worlds,” his infamous broadcast of an alien invasion that never occurred.

Diasopric Dining XXVI: The Chelsea Royal Diner

Photo by Hallie Cohen

The Chelsea Royal Diner in West Brattleboro, Vermont, is now a vacation destination. It’s rare that a restaurant, still less a diner, would be chosen is the raison d’etre for a visit to Vermont or anywhere else. Usually travelers go to Vermont in the fall for the leaves, in winter to ski, in the spring to break a leg in the metaphorical sense of the word and in the summer for hiking in the mountains. But why bother with these things when you can attend this dynamic restaurant in the shape of a railroad car, with an old-fashioned jukebox in the front? Make a weekend of it. You can stay down the road at the Holiday Inn Express. This not one of those ersatz affairs like say Manhattan’s Brooklyn Diner, with its theme-park Las Vegas feel. It’s the real McCoy and serves both a standard menu and home-cooked daily specials that are listed on a black board. You can get the sirloin tips or fried haddock, soup or salad and dessert or coffee, all for $7.99 on the early-bird special. On weekends Mexican food is served, and the Chelsea Royal boasts an award for best Mexican in Brattleboro in 2007. The lamb shank, at $l0.99, was one of the specials on a recent night, and the diner is renowned for its buffalo wings. If eating creates a state of mind, it’s not an exaggeration to say that well-being is the dish served at the Chelsea Royal. Back in the ’60s people went to Esalen and Big Sur to get high. The Chelsea Royal creates its own high through a feeling of instantaneous intimacy that’s not something to scoff at. It’s the direct opposite of the feeling you get when you walk into a four-star Michelin restaurant and feel you’re doing something wrong before you’ve even ordered.

A Message from the Emperor

The Emperor is dying and calls a messenger to his deathbed. The message is sent “to you, the one apart, the wretched subject, the tiny shadow that fled far, far from the imperial sun….” So begins Kafka’s A Message from the Emperor, which appears in a new translation by Mark Harman in The New York Review of Books (9/29/11). Harman writes in a brief introduction that the composer Martin Bresnick had asked him to produce a new translation “that could…evoke the at-first unimpeded progress of the emperor’s messenger and then the obstacles that begin to clog his path.” A Message from the Emperor is the kind of parable that presents a series of paradigms. In its most basic form, the message is Sisyphean, since the messenger never gets to where he is going, meaning that the wisdom contained in the message never arrives. Like the shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave, ideal forms always elude the perception of human consciousness. In psychological terms, the unrevealed message is the unconscious: that which, by definition, we are not conscious of. In religious terms, the emperor is the ultimate authority figure, the divine Father. The parable sets the stage for the Judeo-Christian concept of faith, since it closes out the possibility of actual connection, replacing it with the notion of the leap. The divine Word will never be successfully passed from God to man. Such is the predicament of both God and man.