The Art of War

You can’t just go about your business when you’re on the interstate.  You have to drive defensively. Sometimes the best defense is an offense—something which particularly applies when a Trump caravan surrounds you and tries to run you off the highway since they don’t like the sticker on your fender. It’s apparent that Trump is not sitting idly by in Mar-a-Lago. Now that the impeachment trial is over and he's free to misbehave again, he'll start to engineer his  comeback when he appears at CPAC on Sunday. After that will come the MAGA rallies aimed at Republicans like Adam Kitzinger and Liz Cheney, who went against him. Maybe inflammed hordes will pillage and destroy  the residences of people like Ben Sasse, Nicky Haley, Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney. Intimidation is one of the principles of the totalitarian state. You have to show the opposition that a severe price will be paid for those who stand up. Hitler used the Gestapo; Stalin created his notorious Gulag. Trump uses the naked violence of mob (sometimes lynch mob) rule. Will Biden’s coalition politics be enough to withstand constant attack? Will the message of conciliation and inclusivity fall on deaf ears amidst the drumbeats of Trump’s war song? It’s hard to fight fire with fire when your message is peace. How would a master manipulator and strong arm liberal like Lyndon Johnson have snuffed Trump’s flame?

Read Francis Levy's "Died Young," The Brooklyn Rail

What's an Emordnilap?

Emordnilap is palindrome spelled backwards. It describes a kind of word. While a palindrome is the same word spelled backwards or forwards, an emordnilap refers to any word which creates another word when spelled either forward or backwards. For instance, “dog,”  “god," “live” and “evil.” Whether there’s a relationship between “dog” and “god” or “live” and “evil” is a question for purveyors of the occult. “Tattarrattat” is a palindrome created by Joyce in Ulysses. “Radar,” “kayak” and “madam” are some common palindromes. “Avid” and “diva,” “mood” and “doom” are emordnilaps. As you can see there’s a paranormal relation between all of them. “Divas” tend to be unhesitatingly “avid.” “Doom” is a “mood.” With the exception of “palindrome”and “emordnilpap” themselves, the foot almost uncannily fits the shoe, but don't put it in your mouth. “Adobe” and “abode” are anagrams or different words formed from the same letters. But what are “AAA,” American Automobile Association and “AA,” Alcoholics Anonymous? Logorrhea or diarrhea of the mouth is not treated with Imodium.

Read "Why Big German Words Like Vergangenbangenheit Carry Weight" by Francis Levy, Huff Post

Pornosophy: Wheel of Fire

"Lear and Cordelia" by Ford Madox Brown (1848-9)

The unexpected cosmopolitan use of language in situations where such locutions are not expected can be both humanizing and liberating. Recently a porn actress demonstrating her talents with a particularly well-endowed partner commented, “this is going to be comical.” Such turns of phrase are not the expected badinage in couplings predicated on dominance and submission. Generally, the script for such productions can be summarized by two words “oh yeah,” repeated ad nauseam from beginning to end. Could the actress have been browsing at volumes like Octave Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban or Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in her local Barnes & Noble before the shooting? Consciousness raising can occur in the most unlikely situations—which is also one definition of revolution. Is it safe to assume Louis the XVI had no idea the sans-culottes would storm the Bastille? Generally pornography is predicated on hyperbole, but here is an example of an exchange in which an organ that bore some resemblance to the trunk of an elephant was presented to an average-sized mouth out of which emanated the kind of speech that might be encountered at a diplomatic reception in place of the usual inanities constituting the soundtrack of a so-called loop. “This is going to be comical,” doesn’t compare to Lear’s “But I am bound upon a wheel of fire that mine own tears do scald of molten lead.” However it does leave hope that flights of eloquence may occur almost anywhere. Remember the famous Groucho Marx quip, "I wouldn't want to belong to a club that would have me as a member?" Membership is the operant word.

Read "The Findings" by Francis Levy, The Evergreen Review

Babylon Palm Beach

Behind every popular uprising is an old guard or would be old guard eager to perpetuate its own power. Autocracy produces strange bedfellows. When you look at the MAGA crowds composed of the same dispossessed lumpenproletariat (unemployed and untrained workers and former ex-military) you wonder why they don’t realize they're being used. The fact that Trump’s tax cuts benefited the rich and that he never made good on his promise of a healthcare plan (at one press conference Kayleigh McInerny handed out a thick loose-leaf binder as proof of a health plan that was essentially the Emperor’s New Clothes). If you watched Babylon Berlin, the Netflicks series about Weimar Germany and the years leading up to the rise of Hitler, you noted a demographic tantamount to what is occurring in America today. Old-line conservative oligarchs, vestiges of the Prussian military find themselves in a fatal alliance with mobs of proto-fascists. It’s a dance of death much like that which exists between Trump’s base and the Republican party. Many Republicans have made a Faustian bargain with a nest of angry vipers. The sole purpose of these G.O.P. stalwarts lies in the perpetuation of their power—which they inadvertently relinquish each time they dilute the very values which they stood for in the first place. Actually, the conservative Republicans who would tolerate a Trump monarchy if it could satisfy their ends and their ragtag band of insurrectionists are like oil and water. It’s a delusional alliance that would be sad, were the results not so disconcertingly deadly. Don’t they realize their leader has nothing but contempt for his hordes of followers and that the gates of Mar-a-Lago itself will not open to MAGA?

Read "MAGA and the Coronavirus by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Livestock

photo of livestock by Daniel Schwen

They say your whole life passes before you at the moment of your death. Actually, it starts before...depending. During a pandemic like the one the world has been enduring, with both confinement and the lack of external stimulation, the conscious mind is prone to wander. At times it can almost be like a dream where all kinds unconscious  associations are mysteriously made due to the disinhibition that occurs when the cognitive faculties lay down arms. In fact, in times of great isolation waking up from sleep may jettison the mentality into worlds where it doesn't usually roam. For instance, if you were a hellion, during the 60s or later disco era in which you spent whole eras of your life bombed, you may be forced to take stock of your life. You may eventually be presented with a bill for your behavior. In other words, years later you may find yourself paying for your excesses. You, of course, don't need to be quarantined to find yourself, drifting into the past. In Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, an aging professor relives the lost opportunities of his youth. Distance makes the heart grow stronger; the further away you are from certain memories the more potent, they become. You’re more prone to relive something that happened 20 years ago than yesterday. You’re more likely to relive it when you're forty than when you’re twenty and can’t remember anything at all about what happened when you were 0

Read "Limbo" by Francis Levy, The Evergreen Review

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First Amendment, Right?

Arguing that the Proud Boys have a right to express themselves or that Parler is a site that should be sanctioned and carried by Amazon is like saying that Al Capone had the right to perpetrate the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Which brings up the question of the Second Amendment. Does having the right to bear arms include semi-automatic weapons? Within the context of the Insurrection of the capital, there's the question of the time between Trump’s inflammatory utterances and the attack of what had essentially become a lynch mob (who’d actually come equipped with a gallows). But let’s look at some other examples of free speech. What about Clarence Thomas talking about “Long Dong Silver” to Anita Hill? In theory you could say that’s not different than what Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt did in their magazines. However, the difference was that neither of these pornographers had a captive audience who they were able to coerce by virtue of seniority. Back when they were being published, you went to the newsstand and bought your Hustler or Playboy and you might even have hidden it in a brown paper bag. For many years the publication of Mein Kampf was forbidden by the state of Bavaria, which was the copyright holder. Free expression was an issue in the Charlottesville riots. Why didn’t Virginians have the right to display Confederate monuments? Well, let’s say you were a Holocaust survivor, what would you think about a bust of Hitler being displayed outside your synagogue? Gets complicated. Remember the ACLU's defense of neo-Nazis parading through Skokie? Does freedom of speech include threatening to execute a political opponent, as Marjorie Taylor Greene has done? Were the Mob’s rights violated when they were silenced by The Untouchables?

Read "White Meat, Breasts" by Francis Levy, The Evergreen Review

It's a Wonderful Life

If you watched the CNN sponsored town hall with Joe Biden in Milwaukee, you might have been reminded of Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. Particularly the Walpurgisnacht sequence when before Stewart is about to jump to his death, where the angel Clarence Odbody demonstrates what the world would have been like without him. Well, we saw what the world was like only 4 weeks ago. And it’s the difference between day and some unending night where people like Steve Bannon run around quoting Milton's, “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” and act like the devil. Will Biden ever steal Trump’s thunder? Certainly, he walks softly and authoritatively. He told a mother who was unsuccessful in finding a vaccine for her son who suffered from a high-risk medical condition to stick around afterwards. He’d try to help. He also assured the eight year old child of one of his interlocutors that there was nothing to worry about since most little kids don’t get Covid. Actually Biden bears more comparison to the angel than to Jimmy Stewart since he seems so good and pure and lacking in literally any of the self-regard of his predecessor.  During the town hall, he apologized more than once for talking too much. Such humility is refreshing. “For four years, all that’s been in the news is Trump,” Biden said. “For the next four years, I wanna make sure the news is the American people.”  As they say you had to be there, but if you were you would have believed  it.

Read "Trumpty Dumpty's Great Fall" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star