Groundhog Day

Modernity is ubiquitous. There's little way of escaping it, unless you're convicted of something and become an uncooperative prisoner. Then you will be put in solitary confinement, still a widely used form of punishment, which has little to commend it beyond the fact that it so steadfastly avoids the notion of progress. The New Yorker ran a story this past fall about a young man who ended up in solitary confinement for months after initially being apprehended for a petty robbery he didn’t commit (“Before the Law,” The New Yorker, 10/6/14). Confined to a small cell with none of the amenities of modern life, you will, if nothing else, have found a respite from the virus of apps and appliances which make one place so much like the rest. The truly great wall of China is not the one we read about in travel books, but the firewall the Chinese have put up to keep control the internet (“China Further Tightens Grip on the Internet,” NYT, 1/29/15).  So this is one solution. Another one is fundamentalism which sharply controls a citizen’s ability to avail himself of many of the pleasures of modern life. No one wants to be Suge Knight, who could face a stiff sentence, for his recent hit and run in Compton (“Suge Knight Arrested on Suspicion of Murder in Compton Hit-and-Run,” ABC Eyewitness News, 1/30/15). But you could look at hardened criminals, Chinese ideologues and religious fanatics as being fugitives from modernity. One doesn’t want to have to commit a crime against society in order to be freed from the nightmare that has made reality into an out take from the Bill Murray comedy, Groundhog Day. But can one really revel in the notion of being free, when most human beings are living in a predicament where they're basically chasing their tails and where all roads lead not to Mecca, but Dunkin’ Donuts?

Will Caitlyn Jenner Become a Not so Little Old Lady?

“Jenner reveals new name Caitlyn, breaks Twitter record,” (Reuters, 6/1/15) was one of the many news items propelled by this month's Vanity Fair cover—a mixture between a coming out of the closet celebration and a debutante presentation. What’s disappointing is that Jenner has chosen to adopt a classic image of feminity that verges on parody. She’s almost like one of the beautiful pre-op transsexuals you used to find in70’s after hours clubs whose exaggerated glamour was like a cartoon, a kind of female version of Popeye in which silicone pumped up breasts the way spinach exaggerated the comic book character’s infamous biceps. Not surprisingly, Annie Leibovitz who has shot so many cultural icons, photographed the Vanity Fair spread. As The Daily Beast reported besides her storied athletic career, the newly minted woman was setting other records too (“Caitlyn Jenner, 65, is the Oldest Woman to Appear on the Cover of Vanity Fair” 6/2/15). And what does the future hold for Caitlyn Jenner? What kind of an older woman will she be? Will she be one of those Upper East Side dowagers like Brooke Astor who spend their later years attending charity balls? Will she attempt to make up for lost time with the help of botox? Will she even attempt to enjoy the pleasures of being a kept woman or will she just turn out to be another aging overweight starlet like say the late Elizabeth Taylor? Jenner is a Christian and could easily end up being one of those white haired church going types who run bingo games on Monday night. Jenner was married to Kris Kardashian the former wife of the late Robert Kardashian, the lawyer and father to Kim, but it’s unlikely that all the hormone replacement therapy and even gender reassignment surgery in the world will ever give her the kind of fundament that her step daughter recently paraded on the cover of another glossy (“No Filter: An Afternoon with Kim Kardashian," Paper Magazine, 11/12/14).

The Stranger

Baby boomers will recall the desert beige colored Leo Lionni cover of the Vintage edition of Camus’ The Stranger which became an iconic representation of a French import called existentialism in the later 50’s and early 60’s--and which Steve Heller recently wrote about on his design blog, The Daily Heller. Other books like Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha and Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet would achieve a similar cultish status--verging on being a mass market phenomenon if such a thing can be said about items whose basic appeal is to intellectuals. But Siddhartha and The Prophet, along with Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate and Sartre’s  Nausea are now literary footnotes, while The Stranger seems to maintain its philosophic and commercial credibility which is to say that people continue to read and admire The Stranger in such a way, as to make one suspect that it might achieve the status of immortal works which remain pertinent while also being read differently by future generations. Hamlet is the major example of such a phenomenon. Only recently Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, a novel based on the brother of one of the main characters of The Stranger (the murdered Arab) garnered France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman. But what makes L’Etranger live on? Dusty streets, a random act of violence that recalls in some way another set piece of proto-existentialism, Raskolnikov’s murder of the old woman in Crime and Punishment are the palette from which Camus worked. Existence precedes essence is what you learn about existentialism in philosophy 101. Humans are defined by the actions and choices they make. However, what makes the novel perennially relevant is not a philosophical aphorism but the conjunction of an idea and a world. Camus was born in the North African culture which he describes and it’s as if the philosophical novel he created seamlessly evolved from a milieu, he knew--essentially a colonialist society, in which the punishment for being a lower order of the food chain was objectification. The Stranger is the other. Martin Buber talked of I and Thou (Ich und Du), I and It. The other is the It, the person who has been denied his humanity. Perhaps the novel has maintained its hold on our imaginations because it’s fundamentally about empathy or the loss thereof—a phenomenon that allows for what Clausewitz termed “the continuation of politics by other means,” a state we know only too well, as war.

Was Stalin Bulimic?

                                       U.S Signal Corps

Was Stalin bulimic? Does that explain his purges? Out of the frying pan and into the fire is the expression, but it may seem like a long road from the toilet to the gulag. But who is to say how the functioning of the GI tract and the varying sphincters of the body affect the creation of personality. Back in 2005 Paul Starobin wrote an essay in The Atlantic called “The Accidental Autocrat” about another Russian leader, Vladimir Putin. Starobin attributed some of the games Putin plays on the stage of history to morphological singularities. Starobin cites Brenda L Connors “a certified ' 'movement analyst’" at the Naval War college to show that “he seems to lack what is called contra-lateral movement and instead tends to move in a head-to-tail patern, like a fish or reptile." Starobin quotes Connors to the effect that reptiles “patrol their borders, and if an alien enters, lunge reflexively.” Like reptiles Putin is particularly border conscious. Starobin is more skeptical about Connors’ irredentist hypothesis that Putin’s “instinct to make himself whole is mirrored in his imperative to keep Russian from breaking up.” However, it would be interesting to look at whether Stalin suffered from some grave eating disorder which became the only tool available for him to deal with his paranoia. It’s easy to test the DNA from the remains of a dying person and famously Einstein’s brain was preserved in formaldehyde, but it’s impossible to get a stool sample from a corpse and even if Stalin had ever seen a GI guy for any of his complaints, it would take a pretty wily researcher to attain those records. But it’s not hard to imagine Stalin gorging himself on Chicken Kiev at some state dinner and stealthily going off to the bathroom, sticking his finger down his throat and later ordering the elimination of a good portion of the attendees.