MIGRATION

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 08:28:32 -0500

Encouraged by my publisher to have a FaceBook “presence”, and teased by various friends for NOT having one, I have decided to take the plunge, make a “profile” and a separate “page” for my books -- and it is to those more trafficked countries that Occasionalia is moving.

I promise to sweep the floors daily of any accumulating gossip, chit-chat, what-I’m-doings-at-this-moment, etc, and keep these pages for substantive discussion of this and that, literary, cultural and political.

If you’re not already FaceBooking, you’ll have to forgive the vocabulary of “friends” and “friending”, and becoming a “fan” -- which I still find annoying, and contra-factual. From Occasionalia’s point of view, “friends” get certain, more general writings, and “fans” receive more specifically book-related ones. Many essays go to both. I am also keeping a separate blog for those who are not FB members, but would like to keep reading my Occasionallia.

Here’s how you get there:

FaceBook profile (become a “friend”)
FaceBook page (become a “fan”)
Blog

Hope you’ll check into one of these and dialogue with me, one way or another, on some of this material.

Marc
mestrin@mac.com

GUILLOTINE PLAYLIST

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 11:02:48 -0400

Being a musician, I think in musical terms and often structure my work guided by musical forms. As a teenager, I was completely bowled over by Thomas Mann's chapter on Beethoven's last piano sonata, op. 111, early in his Doctor Faustus. "I'd love to be able to write something like that," I thought. Fifty years later, I gave it a try with my chapter on a fictive Charles Ives sonata in my debut novel, Insect Dreams.

Since then, my every novel has some composer or some piece of music as part of its story or structure. In various books, I have engaged Ives' Fourth Symphony, Handel's Messiah, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Zelenka's Lamentations of Jeremiah, Mahler's Second Symphony, Gilbert & Sullivan's Yeoman of the Guard, Scarlatti's piano sonatas, Messian's L'Ascencion, Prokofiev's First Violin Concerto, and Beethoven's Grosse Fugue. I have planned books to be in sonata form, in rondo form, and as themes and variations.

The Good Doctor Guillotin was structured and driven by the songs of the French Revolution: The main sections are Ça Ira -- a revolutionary song meaning it will happen, it will work out fine; Allons enfants de la patrie -- the beginning of the Marseillaise -- let's go!; and La jour de gloire est arrivé -- the glorious day has come. Unfortunately, the glory turned out to be the Terror.

Realizing that a young composer who lived and died during the Revolution's genesis and birth -- Mozart -- had to be part of the picture, one of the first scenes I conceived of was that of the good doctor Guillotin, progressive, humanist member of the National Assembly, playing a Mozart sonata with Tobias Schmidt, the German piano maker who built the early beheading machines. "Why are you crying?" Schmidt was to ask. "Why are you crying?" was to be the answer. While both characters were real, it was I who made them both musicians. The discussion that followed would concern not only the music, but the revolution occurring around them.

Not being a violinist, and not well-acquainted with the violin literature, I emailed my many musicians friends -- folks I play chamber music and in orchestras with. "If you were going to cry over a moment in a Mozart violin sonata, what would it be?" I received a variety of answers, but the one that came up most commonly was the E major trio in the minuet of the E minor sonata. I listened to all suggestions, and decided that not only was that most popular suggestion eminently cryable-to, but that it would give me the most thematic connection with the social complexities of the revolution. It is now the context of the chapter "Tempo di Menuetto".

So, anyway -- to my "playlist".

First, the French revolutionary songs:

The Marseillaise (http://www.marseillaise.org/english/audio.html) needs little explanation. The one intriguing fact is that it was written by C-J Rouget de Lisle on April 25, 1792, the very day our hero Nicholas Pelletier, the patient, the package, was executed. Claude-Joseph wrote it at his table in Strasbourg -- childhood home of the builder of the execution machine.

Ça ira is an enthusiastic, if bloodthirsty, tongue twister (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/caira.html) in which we find the aristocrats swinging from lamp posts and Marie Antoinette in hell. It was the most popular "people's song" during the Revolution.

La Carmagnole was a popular revolutionary song and dance again concerning Marie Antoinette who, by the way, was unpopular not only because of her "Let them eat cake" attitude toward the poor, but because her Austrian family was likely to attack France to preserve its own and Europe's monarchies. Listen at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmagnole. There is a wonderful Kathe Kollwitz drawing and set of sketches ("Carmagnole") of a revolutionary crowd dancing around a guillotine in Paris.

Next, Mozart:

Of primary use was the E minor sonata mentioned above. But equally important thematically is a piano piece played by beginners, a little set of variations on the French folk song, Ah, vous dirai-je Maman. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71f2fahFhDE)We know the tune as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star". In French, there are bawdy lyrics (probably more to Mozart's liking) about what a young daughter would like to, but can't tell her mother about her new lover, but the original may have been a simple children's song, which I find thematically more interesting:

Ah! Vous dirai-je Maman
Ce qui cause mon tourment ?
Papa veut que je raisonne
Comme une grande personne
Moi je dis que les bonbons
Valent mieux que la raison.

Mama, should I tell you what is tormenting me? Papa wants me to reason like an adult, but I think bonbons are worth more than reason.

There, in a nutshell, the fate of the Enlightenment Project, and our own predicament.

Musically, what is of musical/thematic interest here is that in the midst of the upbeat, tongue-in-cheek compositional facility of the twelve variations, plunked down in the middle, is one of the darkest moments in Mozart. Perhaps this crucified minute is no "worse" than some of the tortured moments in the late symphonies, but here, in the midst of a nursery rhyme tune, it is particularly devastating. The darkness concealed in the light. Both Guillotin and Schmidt would have noticed that. And they do.

Two other Mozart pieces make their appearance, both in the context of the contemporary fad for Mesmer, his healing clinic, and his animal magnetism. (Though he was run out of Paris by the good doctors of the Sorbonne, he was one of the earliest practitioners of the "energy medicine" now widely practiced in its eastern and western forms.) There was a lot of "new age, woo-woo" music played in his clinic during the healing sessions, and Ben Franklin's design for the "glass harmonica" was the Wurlitzer in the theater. Mozart wrote an Adagio and Rondo for Glass Harmonica, (http://www.pbs.org/benfranklin/l3_inquiring_glass.html) which was very likely part of the mix. Woo-woo.

The inveterate Wolfgang clown wrote a send-up of Mesmer himself in Così fan Tutte, where, at the end of Act One, fake Albanians are killed by fake poison, and are revived by a fake doctor, using a giant, all-healing magnet.

Bach

Hard to escape him. As Bach developed his keyboard works, it became obvious to many -- including the old man -- that the clavichord and harpsichord could no longer contain or express the range of emotion and intensity of passion he and his works had grown capable of. Music history was screaming for a pianoforte, and organ builders and harpsichord makers put their minds and tools to it. For purposes of the story, I made Schmidt one of them, a child so inspired by his own understanding of the Kantor's needs as to make a life project of piano building. Too bad that during the Revolution, aristocrats weren't buying pianos anymore, and of course the poor never could. Find a hole and fill it. Beheading machines. That's the ticket! Makes for a sardonic consciousness.

Schmidt was not the only character involved with Bach. Sanson, the executioner of Paris, was the historical figure with the most written about him. It turned out that he (like me) was a bad cellist, but bad enough -- that, mixed with his profession -- no one (I thought) would play with him. What do cellists do when they have to play alone? They play the Bach cello suites. Today, any cellist anywhere can go to the nearest music store and buy any of many editions. But then? Would Sanson have been able to get his hands on them? Yes, they were written by then. And there were musical manuscripts flowing, largely through Strasbourg, between Germany and France. And any suite would be easy enough to copy in the pre-xerox age. So -- it's possible that Sanson, a self-styled noble, and member of the court, might have been able to get hold of some of them. That's the best I could come up with from my musicological friends -- "It's possible". Time for my author's rights: I gave him a copy to nurse his cellistic wounds with. I imagine him loving the Saraband from the D minor suite.

My soulmind is so often filled with Bach that the moment I sat down to write the Acknowledgements, I translated "I acknowledge" into Confiteor -- which, in spite of the many settings of the latin Credo, first and formost means the enormous fugue/plainsong "Confiteor" movement of the B minor mass. So I wound up dividing my acknowledgements into Bach's components -- the marching continuo, the fugue and the chant -- and the form served me well to acknowledge the many aspects of the novel that needed acknowledging.

Minor characters

Bert Brecht and Kurt Weill's opera masterpiece, Mahagonny, was bound to show up in any work of mine about the Enlightenment. After all, it concerns a planned city -- planned by criminals, of course -- which, like the French Revolution -- was to be devoted to human happiness -- happiness in this case consisting of eating, drinking, whoring and boxing. It ends with the electric chair. Sound familiar? Early on, Jimmy Mahoney, like my Schmidt, senses the limitation of the project. He and his friends get together and sing a barbershop quartet (barbering, anyone?) about how wonderful, noble and beautiful their new world is. "But," Jimmy continues to observe, "Something is missing." The moment sang itself right into my text.

As did Richard Peaslee's "Fifteen Glorious Years" from Peter Brooks's astonishing Royal Shakespeare Company production of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade. Many of the elements of this remarkable play prompted moments and larger musings in my text. Peaslee's music has that kind of memorable rightness which will forever prevent me from thinking of any other settings -- much like Tenniel's drawings for Alice, or Cruikshank's for Dickens.

As did two epigraph references from The Mikado -- inevitable in a book about beheading as punishment. "Now though you'd have said that head was dead" speaks directly to the fierce eighteenth century debate about whether the guillotine was kinder than the gallows. We are currently in the midst of an equally barbarous debate concerning our procedures for lethal injection. And we, unlike other advanced democracies, are also still debating whether the punishment fitting the crime must necessarily involve state murder to convince the public that murder is a bad thing to do.

There is a piece of music which did not, and could not, get into The Good Doctor Guillotin, but which I would also recommend to the interested reader/listener: the final scene from Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites, in which a convent of Carmelite nuns, condemned for resisting the Revolution's disenfranchisement of the Church, are led serially to their deaths, singing a prayer to the Virgin while the mob screams and denounces, and the guillotine cuts, and cuts, and cuts through their serenity.

My wife and I stayed with an orchestral conductor in Paris one of whose proudest plumbing creations was his invention of how to do the guillotine sound.

PROPHETIC VISION

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 13:12:03 -0400

I write on Thursday, September 10th, the day before the Art Hop opens. No one (including myself) has yet seen the exhibit of photographs of Gaza at the FlynnDog. And yet, as part of its promotion of the weekend's events, there have been two BFP essays concerning "hate speech" and "anti-semitism", garnering by today 42 comments.

I've followed these comments with interest to try to understand what -- in the complete absence of any evidence of the exhibit -- people are doing with their hearts, their minds, and their invitation to public speech. Here are some patterns I've gleaned from the texts:

No one has seen the photos, so most of the "controversy" is necessarily abstract. In one of the two initial pieces, Mark Hage, one of the organizers of the exhibit remarks, "Art can liberate us from fear, ignorance". Which, quoted, called forth two comments: "It can also lie..." (elipsis by the commentator), and "So can an Acorn Squash," a comment quite mystical, but vaguely equating art-intelligence with that of a soulless fruit.

Concerning the first comment, though, the writer, in the context of a debate about the upcoming exhibit, implies the possibility that the photos of two photograhers on the scene of the recent Gaza events, may "lie". Viewer, remember that. The images you see -- like all art -- may be lying.

"Propaganda labeled as art is still propaganda," another not-yet-viewer writes, warning the art hoppers that what they will be looking at is (not "may be") propaganda. The writer would not close down the propaganda -- "I don't advocate silencing them but they certainly seem to be out to lunch." -- "out to lunch" implying, I gather, that the photographers, the host, and the organizers of the exhibit have gone off duty for the moment, no longer responsible this lunch hour, to the public which they are supposed to serve.

The writer goes on to explicate his critique of contemporary art in general: "Art by nature, always seems to have to be a view of a tradgedy (sic) or something that will disgust the viewer. Some people believe the crucifix with jesus peppered with dung is art? To me it seems that people use 'art' to make gross predjudice, ignorance and loose facts relevant." The not-yet-seen exhibit will likely, in his view, reflect the latter.

Name calling of the presenters aside ("PC", "moron liberals", "uneducated", "monster"), the comments I find most interesting are those dissociating themselves from the exhibit per se, but clearly offering themselves as a context in which any exhibit concerning Palestine must be viewed.

Floating over all is the threat of a second holocaust following "disparagement" of the Jewish people. "We Jews know the effect of such disparagement," one contributor writes, "the robbing our people of the legitimacy of our own existence." A slippery slope to an existential threat? The writer explains that "We know from harsh experience that verbal and visual expressions of hatred often lead to violence." Remember, this is in an essay about the upcoming South End Art Hop, an essay which calls for a "response to hate", such as happened with "the picketers from Kansas" or with Sweden's failure "to criticize an article in a major newspaper of Scandinavia that alleged that Jews killed Palestinians in Gaza to harvest their organs." (This is a rhetorical technique known as guilt by association.)

The writer is well aware of the over-application of the word "anti-semitic" by some in the Jewish community. "Clearly," he writes, "not all criticism of the State of Israel is anti-Semitic. I have spoken publicly about my experience in East Jerusalem, standing beside Palestinians as their home was demolished for no good reason; harvesting olives outside of Nablus with Palestinians threatened by Israeli settlers. But the assertion through words, photographs, cartoons, or artistic suggestion that Israelis are Nazi-like, genocidal murderers is hate speech."

While he admits that he cannot comment on this year's exhibit on Gaza because he hasn't seen it, his comment above clearly implies that photographers involved may be artistically suggesting that Israelis are Nazi-like, genocidal murderers, and that the potential viewer had best be prepared to reject such assaults, which he, with Swedish writer and political leader Per Ahlmark, compares to those "most dangerous anti-Semites [...] who wanted to make the world Judenrein, 'free of Jews.' Today, the most dangerous anti-Semites might be those who want to make the world Judenstaatrein, 'free of a Jewish state.'"

That's a lot of associative projection onto two photographers, both of whom were present during the Gaza events, and as many of us would, took photos of the most affecting scenes to present themselves.

As we take in the Art Hop this weekend, let us beware of seeing more than there is to see, and be open to what is actually there to be seen.

BOTH VICTIM AND EXECUTIONER

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 11:36:42 -0400

Vermont has no death penalty. Still, federal prosecutors demanded that Vermont hold a capital punishment trial in a recent federal murder case which crossed a state line. And a jury of twelve Vermonters delivered the first death sentence in 50 years -- another step backward toward barbarism as the feds contrived to teach liberal Vermont a lesson. Accompanying that verdict, there is now a citizen and legislative push to bring capital punishment back at the state level.

There are two entrances to the Federal Building in Burlington. One is near the corner of a busy street; it is wrapped around that corner -- for maximum visibility -- that we held our weekly vigils against bringing the death penalty to Vermont.
Yet the press massed itself daily at the other entrance, a smaller, mid-block one, half-hidden by luxuriant trees. Why? Because it was there that “the family” emerged for lunch or dinner. It was there they could be exhaustively interviewed and photographed for their every response to the courtroom events.
In the courtroom itself, one whole side of the public seating was marked off as “reserved”. For whom, the sign was tacit. But that was where the family and their friends sat, sparsely, compared to the larger public packed into an equal space on the other side. The empty seats around them were treated as sacred space, not for outsiders. It was a rare courtroom visitor who was clueless enough not to take the hint.
The family. Even the defense counsel in his summation, chose to praise the family, that very family whose insistence before the trial sought death for their client, and whose performance before the jury and in the media did much to condemn him. That family was extolled as a prime example of what their client never had -- a loving clan that could come together to support one another in hard times, and celebrate in good ones. A model family which had overcome its many hardships. A model family – something their client never had.
In a country where more than half of marriages end in divorce, where single-parent households are now in the majority, “Family” has taken on iconic, white-hat status. Elections are won on “family values”. All our holidays feature “family fun”. You want to be a bad guy? Target the family. Worse, turn them into victims.
The family played their media hand with skill. I am not suggesting that their pain over the murder was not authentic. I don’t know what many things they were really feeling, or who was advising them on their strategies. Perhaps they were even played by the media more than they played it. But the overall effect was such as to achieve their goal -- to get a death verdict from a Vermont jury for the first time in half a century. Perhaps they felt justice was served. Perhaps it was merely revenge. But what they said they wanted was “closure”.

We found much support as we stood Wednesdays at noon against the death penalty. Yet there were still many passers-by who felt otherwise. “An eye for an eye,” they would yell from their cars, or “They kill us—we kill them!”
While the rest of the western world has long put capital punishment behind it, the United States perversely bucks the trend. For years, Amnesty International has indicted the US for its killing of juveniles, killing the mentally ill, for the wide regional disparities in executions, for the arbitrariness of those selected for execution, the obvious role of race in those selections, the systematic exclusion of opponents of the death penalty from juries, the use of peremptory challenges to exclude blacks from sitting on capital trial juries, especially if the defendant is black, for the assignment of inexperienced, often incompetent counsel to indigent offenders, for a whole array of procedural bars to appeal, for the increasing unwillingness of federal courts to consider new constitutional questions, and for the very narrow view of the role of clemency taken by governors and pardon boards. All these, says Amnesty International, puts the US outside the norms of international behavior.
No technical or bureaucratic problems were present in the Fell trial. Fell’s guilt was admitted, and his legal representation was competent and strong. The judge was attentive, and scrupulously fair. The drama was focused on one question only -- would the jury unanimously ask for death? The answer was yes.

Whence the still strong American embrace of the death penalty? In addition to the merry brutalization of our culture discussed above, I suggest it also arises from two spurious needs, both of which have been normalized by a bizarre combination of collateral damage from our war-making and politically-correct “sensitivity”. The first is obvious; the second less-so.
One of the hallmarks of our contemporary culture is its curious competition for victim status. In addition, since 9/11, our administration has actively flown the banner of the victimized, crucified, vengeful Christ. Now that we as a nation have suffered so, we have a right to judge and punish. The city on a hill. And our punishment is far from unholy: we kill in order to redeem.
As we continue to victimize others around the globe, it is most convenient to proclaim our American selves as victims. And national claims trickle down to groups and individuals. Whites claim victimization by affirmative action, males by feminism, Republicans by “the liberal media”, the rich by “big government” – and so forth, a whole convenient upsidedownism whereby victimization is seen not only as a right, but as a claim on resources. The competition is fierce.
Think for a moment about the demands of the Victim’s Rights Movement.
First of all, it is now unquestioned that more people are victimized by a murder than simply the murder victim. All friends and family are understood as affected by the crime, expanding the test of victimhood to the suffering of those left behind, whose emotional performances seem so persuasive to juries. A new spotlight for “the family”.
For the most part these people insist on vengeance as the only possible “closure” for their distress, a word that has been recently taught them by the political culture and its media—as if the effects of a murder are ever “closed”. Protecting the community via life without parole will simply not serve. Though it would achieve immediate closure of the case -- no further appeals, no further media attention to open old wounds -- still “real” closure concerning a murdered loved one is sold to us as requiring the death of the murderer. That psychiatry does not support such dynamics is neither here nor there. Life imprisonment just isn’t satisfying.

Concerning the jurisprudence of sentencing, what the Victims’ Rights Movement has done is to substitute private for public justice, normalizing a sense of entitlement to the death penalty. Only a satisfying personal experience will do, and this now becomes the only adequate gesture for the rest of the community. The goal of the Victims’ Rights Movement is to repersonalize criminal justice so that the public -- and potential juries -- must declare an alliance with either the victim or the offender. Criminal sentencing thus becomes a test of loyalty to one’s community – a dangerous new path which predisposes toward the punishing needs of the emotionally involved. Rehabilitative strategies are overlooked, rejected as not sufficiently reparative to the new class of victims. Capital punishment becomes the ultimate assertion of righteous indignation, and the highest form of public victim-recognition.
No less a legal figure than former Attorney General Janet Reno has raised victim status to absurd heights:
“I draw most of my strength from victims,” she said, “for they represent America to me: people who will not be put down, people who will not be defeated, people who will rise again and stand again for what is right. You are my heroes and heroines. You are but little lower than the angels.”
Is victimhood, then, not a goal worth striving for?
The elevation of extended victims to sub-angelic status has two major consequences. First of all it normalizes and legitimates revenge in place of retribution, opening society to suffer an unending chain of reciprocal act of vengeance. We see this result playing out overtly in the Middle East, and covertly in the consciousness of people of color in this country, and around the world. By creating victims, we become the new victims, and victims are beatified.
And in this beatification, legitimate questions of restorative justice are passed over:
-- Just what are the real needs of those who have been harmed? What, on deeper questioning, is really important to them? On surveys and in interviews, victims have most often indicated that acknowledgement by the perpetrator of the damage he or she has done is crucial, and would go a long way to easing them. Quite often questions need answering which would otherwise gnaw: why?, how?, what were the details of the death? Imaginations haunt; facts set to rest.
-- And what about the defendant’s needs? Restorative justice belongs to all parties, before any situation can be in some measure “restored”. Again, as surveyed, perpetrators most often need to acknowledge what has happened, and in some way make amends. They don’t know how to do that, and the system does not help them. We are open to helping those soldiers psychologically wounded from killing Iraqi innocents, but not a civilian who has killed one of our own.
Aiding both victim and perpetrator would restore as best it could. Further killing restores very little.

A further social dimension of embracing the vengeful victim plays out in the political sphere: revenge killing by the state becomes part of a strategy of governance that makes us fearful and dependent on the illusion of state protection, that divides rather than unites, that promises simple solutions to complex problems. The number of men and women condemned to die grows each year, and we are treated to the spectacle of people running for public office on the basis of how many they are prepared to kill. Tough on crime, it’s called.
Caught up in the contemporary cultural preoccupation with identifying and paying homage to “real” victims, the idea that criminals can be victims too all but disappears, and deeper sociological, political and cultural issues are ignored as the white hats simply execute the black ones. Any mature engagement in responding to society’s most severe social problems is shouted down by victims’ claims for lethal “closure”. Constitutional guarantees of equal treatment under the law are overlooked. Our fragile democracy increasingly calls for strong symbols of public sovereignty, like expanding jails and capital punishment. The desire for victim status, and a fearful aversion to non-government violence lead to a apprehensive attitude toward others. Increasing fear and frustration mark the current American condition.
The focus on victims functions as a strategy of political legitimation. The centrality of crime to governing, especially in a democratic state, requires citizens who imagine themselves to be victims, potential victims or those responsible for the care of victims. As criminals are demonized, many ordinary citizens are enlisted as authorizing agents and appreciative, applauding audience for America’s own brand of lethal violence. To be for capital punishment is to be a defender of traditional morality against permissivism and of the rights of the innocent over the rights of the guilty. Down with protesters. Up with the fall from grace, with no prospect for redemption. In the land of the free and the home of the brave, we are all victims.

And can the land of the free ever evolve to crawl out of such embracing, larger, muck? Let’s examine the muck to determine its adhesiveness.
There is a concept in the Russian language known as poshlost. Speech or attitudes or states of soul that are poshlost-y embrace values that are almost, but not quite, kitsch, containing some level of authentic thought or emotion, but nevertheless, more -- or less -- subtly -- trumped-up, false or phony. A quintessential example of poshlost appeal is contained in the defense summation to the jury I described at the opening of this chapter. For diagnostic purposes, this allusion is worth quoting in full:

We see such devotion and love in [the victim’s] family, that [it] is overwhelming. They have been here every day in support of Terry, because that's all they have left. That's --that's what they, that's where they have committed as a family and have come together. And, you know, and that doesn't, that never even came close, close to existing to what the childhood that Donny had. And isn't it important? How -- and that's what -- that's what this mitigation is -- our mitigation case is all about.
Don't underestimate the power, the significance of, of a father figure, someone to care, someone to nurture, someone to provide. Don't underestimate the power and significance of a mother's love for her children. Look, look at what it's done, what it's done for the King family. They will never -- and it was poignant when Michael -- the grandson's letter was read, and he said -- and he compared it to 9/11, and it definitely -- their family will never be the same, and America will never be the same. But America is not destroyed, and when you see their faces and heard their testimony about their love for Mrs. King, their family's not destroyed. It can't be because they have too much of those protective, nurturing factors that exist, that are what we all -- that makes us who we are.

Surely, overwhelming love, devotion and commitment are worth rewarding. And yes, nurturing fathers are rare enough and nice. The comparison of a death in the family to the world-shaking 9/11 may have its metaphorical value. And while the assertion that “America is not destroyed” may be somewhat nearsighted, still the co-appeal of both prosecution and defense to the jury’s patriotism (if for opposite purposes) is probably a universally-endorsed tactic of the times. The summary, however, bodes ill. For it seems there cannot be “too much of those protective, nurturing factors...that are what we all -- that make(s) us what we are.”
The Oprah-appeal of this language, this thinking; the culture that feeds on it, that somehow seems to need and support it; the implied be-all, end-all prioritization of untutored emotion which we see amply demonstrated in every facet of contemporary American culture -- this is not a likely milieu to transcend the kind of selfish emotionalism with which victims demand harsh penalties “for closure”. That a defense lawyer in a capital case -- buoyed along by these normative phrases, and counting on the jury’s receptivity to them -- would lionize the very family asking for his client’s death is a self-defeating notion, lethal, as it turned out, to the defendant. What was the defense inhaling? Only air polluted by ubiquitous poshlost could create such confusion.
Not once in my hearing were the non-poshlost-y dimensions seriously presented to the jury as a challenge:
-- that, if they disapproved of murder, should they really be willing to coolly, and premeditatively, murder someone?
-- that there is no scientific psychological evidence for “closure” after demanding death. Indeed, that families and jury members often suffer after doing so.
-- that the US stands alone among western nations in exacting the death penalty, and that they must question the reasons for such exceptionalism.
-- that there were likely political reasons for retracting the government’s previously agreed upon plea bargain -- and did they want to cooperate with this?
Instead, the defense strategy focused entirely on the poshlost-y dimensions of Fell’s horrible childhood. Why? Because poshlost is the reigning language and currency of the land, the only dimension one can assume operative in a juror? Or in a voter? Or a consumer? Or a 17-year old wanting to “serve his country” and help “establish democracy and freedom across the world”?
As long as poshlost rules American culture and American hearts, and is offered up to juries, we may have a hard time joining the majority of the world in opposition to the death penalty. In this, we are truly victims.

THE OLD ENEMY WITHIN

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:31:10 -0400

Historical parallels are messy matches -- Venn diagrams overlapping in the center whose leaves flap independently in their own unique breezes. And parallels made via notions held in common are iffier still, language and context shifting to alter color, shape and meaning. Still, catchwords held in common resonate, sometimes ominously so: “The enemy within” is one of them.
At the end of his blog, “Prussia on the Mediterranean?” (http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/438863?rel=hp_picks) Roane Carey describes an Israel which “increasingly sees its Palestinian citizens as a menace, as the enemy within...” Political dissidents, they are, untermenschlich voters reproducing themselves at non-Jewish rates, genetically scheming to become a voting majority. Guns they may not have, or F-16s, but sedition lies in their hearts. Better, safer without them.
At least two historical parallels force themselves to mind, weaving their themes in and out of the current situation in the middle east. The first is Germany in the later thirties until the Wannsee meeting in ‘41, with its Final Solution. The second is the early French Revolution, from the overthrow of the Bastille in ‘89 to the beginning of the Terror four years later.

National Socialist Strategy

Step 1. Define the enemy. Jewishness was clearly and legally defined as part of a problem. Thus the Jews were made “other” to the rest of the population.
Step 2. Eliminate the enemy from the economy. Jews were not allowed to work in state-affiliated institutions. Jewish stores were boycotted and vandalized. “Otherness” was thereby increased, as the Jews were forced from the normal productive economy, and were now an ever-increasing problem -- and not just by definition.
Step 3. Ostracize by custom and law. Many other discriminatory laws were put into place.
Step 4. Remove from view. Ghettos were created to wall the problem off from the rest of the population. Jews thus became less visible. When they began to disappear, there was often little to notice. As intolerable conditions developed in the ghettos, inhuman measures were justified as humane. Jews were killed in “acts of mercy” -- in order to “spare them the agony of famine”. In deliberately intolerable conditions, the stage was set for even more radical steps.

Ostracism as a policy in Nazi Germany

In his hair-raising book, Nazi Justiz (Praeger 1995), Richard Miller describes the gradual, multifaceted ways in which Jews were turned from productive members of society into an kind of “living dead” who were permitted to wander through society, but forbidden to take part in it. The mass killings in the camps was only a late development, the logical “final” successor of many incremental “solutions” inflicted along the way on an increasingly desperate people.
Miller concentrates on Germany in the 30s, after the rise of Hitler, but before the war, when all changes affecting Jews were done “legally”, “democratically”, with support from the media and the German people. In this “time of peace”, a variety of local and national laws were passed, with due deliberation, in no way a result of military desperation. Across the country , jot by innovative jot, legal and social restrictions fell into place which sealed the victims’ fate.
The movement began with “unofficial” boycotting of Jewish businesses or professionals. Boycotts spread to those who patronized Jews in any way, thus taking goods and wages away from good German citizens. Such “unofficial” boycotts were peppered with equally “unofficial” violence, of which Kristallnacht was the most coordinated example. Naturally, there was no police protection.
Having recognized a “mandate” from the people, governments began to act against “the enemy within”. A pastiche of creatively sadistic local law and ever more inclusive national law took control of Jewish life, and eventually obviated the need for “unofficial” populist action. Place by place, Jews were not allowed in parks, theaters, libraries, museums, sports stadia, beaches, athletic and social clubs. They could not be guests in hotels, or get service at restaurants. One profession after another banned Jews from being licensed. Jews would no longer be granted permits to open retail stores, or be allowed into blue or white collar unions or the jobs they controlled. They couldn’t be patent agents or lawyers, tax consultants or swimming instructors, lifeguards, jockeys, actors, lottery salesmen, stock brokers, antique dealers, archivists. They couldn’t rent out park chairs, or distribute motion pictures, or deal in art or literary works. They were prevented from dealing in currency, engineering construction projects, selling guns. No Jew could be a detective, private guard, accountant, or work in a credit agency. No Jew could be a tourist guide, a pedlar, auctioneer, or real estate agent, or manage a factory, house, estate, or land. Needless to say, all the new business and newly opened job opportunities went to Aryans, vastly increasing the popularity of the Nazi regime.
In areas where Jews were not yet banned, other ways were found to shut them down. Before real estate licenses were outlawed for Jews, tax authorities refused to deal with Jewish agents, leaving few property owners interested in hiring them. Sugar was cut off to Jewish bakers and candy-makers, effectively destroying their businesses. Legal Jewish newsstands would be refused newspapers; Jewish textile managers could no longer get raw materials. Jewish businesses could not put ads in commercial directories, newspapers, on billboards or the radio. Eventually all employment was restricted except particularly loathsome tasks: cleaning public toilets and sewage plants, jobs at rag and bone works were considered possibly “suitable” for Jews. Outside of such work, Jews had to somehow fend for themselves.
How could even that be made more difficult? Travel bans and invalidation of passports were obvious. But how about no parking for Jews? Special license plates to identify Jewish cars for special harassment. Soon enough, prohibition of drivers licenses, and then restriction from public transportation. Impoverished Jews could not rent their homes, sublet, or sell. Retirement benefits and contracted pensions were cancelled, as were all insurance policies. Jewish students were not allowed to take finals, and so couldn’t complete their schooling. All student loans had to be repaid within 2 weeks, regardless of contractual payment schedules; those in default were subject to police action. Jewish streets were not cleaned, nor were other municipal services available. German police, when present at all, were an occupying army, and beatings and attacks were common. Many main sections of towns became off-limits to Jews, and any remnants of Jewish culture came under attack: Jewish art and music were censored as “decadent”, and even jazz was attacked as “a barbarian invasion supported by Jews.”
Because Jews were to be restricted from so many areas, they needed to be easily identified. Rush-hour passengers would not tolerate checking IDs of every boarding passenger, so eventually the yellow star was required, with strict punishment for any Jew who did not wear one in public. Germany had long been known as a land of “law and order”. But Jews could not use the justice system to thwart clearly illegal onslaughts. All courts were packed with government appointees to enforce, not judge, official policy. The object of the law was to protect the state, not the individual citizen. If Jews were a menace to the state, then all laws oppressing them, were both legal and just. Furthermore, laws were seen as implying “direction”, and were not confined to their original settings. For instance the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service spoke only of dismissing Jewish government employees. Martin Heidegger however, as rector of the University of Freiburg, ended fellowship payments to Jewish students under the guiding spirit of that decree.
Courts built rulings on Nazi party resolutions, and took their philosophical guidance from Hitler speeches. Naturally, Jewish defendants were at an extreme disadvantage. Jewish lawyers were barred from court; Aryan lawyers could not serve Jews. Consequently, Jews had to represent themselves against highly trained adversaries. Judges were instructed to view Jewish witnesses “with extreme caution”, and no verdict was to be passed when a sentence would have to be based entirely on Jewish testimony.
Just in case there were any legislative objection to these judicial proceedings, Hitler pushed through the “Enabling Act” which allowed his handpicked cabinet to make laws having the same validity as any passed by the Reichstag, even ones disregarding the Constitution. The circle was closed, complete and tight. The living dead would soon become the dead -- period.

The Enemy Within, variation 1. Variation 2: shorter, sharper, if not sweeter:

France’s Great Fear

La Grand Peur normally refers to a period in the French countryside shortly after the storming of the Bastille in Paris.
“They’re coming, they’re coming!” “Who’s coming?” “They!”
Out in the boonies, in the apprehensive weeks following the taking of the Bastille, “they” might have been anybody: British marines already landed; the Swedes gathered in the northeast led by Artois, or the thirty thousand Spanish troops gathered, perhaps, outside Bordeaux.
But the “they” most often feared were the enemy within -- putative gangs of frightening “brigands,” relishing rape, dismemberment, and the wholesale burning of houses, farms, and crops, starving peasant bands gathered to devour their own, financed by Artois and other aristocrats to take revenge on the French people for their theft of the National Assembly. “The brigands are coming!”
The tocsin is rung, village militias are gathered, armed with pitchforks and scythes. People are sent to warn the next village.
The children are hidden in haylofts and given bread, cheese, and milk for a multi day siege. The brigands, so they say, have already murdered all the men and boys two towns over. The mayhem never arrives. But the breathless band sent out to warn is seen itself as evidence of the approach of the brigands.
And then again: Nobles out to attack us? Let’s fire the castles. The nobles, the landlords, the judges—they’re always preying on us. Do they know what we’re thinking? Do they think us incapable of thought? Do they even know we’re here? We’ll show them.
All over France, estate owners were attacked, their cellars and larders looted, their legal documents—those mysterious orders written by lawyers and enforced by the police—destroyed, and their chateaux burnt.
In fear of retribution, they, too, were coming, the landlords and their armies. They’ve been meeting. Soldiers have been seen. Cottagers drove their cattle in from the fields, shuttered their windows, and barred their doors. Townspeople armed themselves, locked the gates, manned their walls. Rumor was cheap—but decisive. “La grande peur.”: the enemy within. As the illiterate and unpropertied majority rose up, paranoia reigned, and the countryside feared even itself in collective psychosis.
After a while, as reality failed to correspond with imagination, “the great fear” waned, and slept, until its grand, better-than-ever awakening.

The Terror

Historians call it The Terror, or The Reign of Terror, and generally date that period from the fall of 1793 to the late summer of the following year. But, for me, The Terror was yet another statement of La Grand Peur -- of the Enemy Within.
With the formation of the Committee on Public Safety on September 6th, ‘73, the stage was set for the elimination of the enemies of the revolution. Vernichtung. And that stage became the scaffold, the viewing platform of Dr. Guillotin’s humanitarian device for painless, instantaneous execution and intimidation of the enemy within -- the scheming nobility wanting the return of their privileges, the avaricious clergy wanting the return of their domain, and above all, the vast sea of unidentified people who might want to keep (as Peter Weiss so admirably describes) a painting, a mistress, a horse, a garden, an estate, their factories, their shipyards...their king.
Dissenting political parties were closed down, and their leaders arrested: the Revolutionary Tribunal became a Revolutionary dictatorship, and the guillotines were fully booked. Robespierre called the shots: “The Terror is nothing other than prompt, severe, inflexible justice.”
An arresting detail: back in December of 1792, Robespierre had given a long and passionate speech to the National Assembly against capital punishment as a policy for an enlightened new world. What happened to this “incorruptible” lawyer, who as a child rescued baby birds, and had dedicated his law practice to the poor?
What had happened was the Great Fear of the Enemy Within, an “existential fear” that the world-shaking project of revolutionary France would be suffocated in its cradle, pushed into the sea of human fallenness and greed. Robespierre and France turned from savior to mass murderer, as the new world sunk deep into old blood-threaded mud.

Prussia on the Mediterranean

Palestinians the problem. Ostracism. Ghettos. Walls. Removal from view. Work limitations. Economic strangulation. Travel restrictions. Legal justifications. Imprisonment of opposition lawmakers. Sadistic local regulations. Enabling acts. Mass arrests. Secret prisons. Torture.
Even given the looseness of historical parallels, that Israelis are so worried about “the enemy within” is a cause of great concern. We have already seen full-blown Israeli terror against innocent populations in Lebanon and Gaza. Who needs guillotines when one has F-16s, Merkavas, and white phosphorus? We continue to see Israeli terrorist behavior in the West Bank -- settler violence against people, land, crops, animals; bulldozer violence against homes; checkpoint violence day in and day out; IDF shooting at children and peaceful demonstrators. The Great Fear of the anger of Untermenschen grows along with that anger in a devil’s circle of violence and potential violence.
The world is witnessing a saber dance on very thin ice. If history provides at least a warning guide, Israel is dangerously close to falling into an cold Reign of Terror, even within its ‘67 borders.
A broken-jawed Robespierre ended up screaming in pain and horror under the falling blade he so embraced. Germans have still not recovered psychically from the Third Reich.
The Enemy Within was themselves.