The Fiction of the Fiction of Anti-Semitism: A Letter on The Prague Cemetery
David,
Given your basically correct view of fiction as the master key to ethical development — it hammers the self into the ground as a marker, against which the chasm of intersubjectivity will get measured and bridged — I’m a little confounded by your review of Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery in COMMENTARY (January 2012).
There you conclude that the novel, which is an exploration of how the psychoses of anti-Semitism get codified as works of language and transmitted as categories of thought, would have been “more successful” as a non-fiction “literary history of anti-Semitism.” For myself, I’m willing to have that textbook remain unwritten in exchange for The Prague Cemetery.
First the requisite throat-clearing. There’s no doubt that a literary history of anti-Semitism written by Umberto Eco would become canonical. One can imagine essays that would blend his scholarship on medieval history, semiotics, and aesthetically-mediated judgment. Some tropes have inertia and tenacity while others are much thinner, requiring careful preservation and insulation to survive. Accusations of Jewish dual loyalty, always intertwined with insinuations about Jewish wealth, are ubiquitous. They thrive even in societies where there are few or no Jews to accuse of disloyalty. But the link between Freemasonry, Darwin, and Jews — unpacked with clarity by Hamas Deputy Minister of Religious Endowment Saleh Riqab on Al-Aqsa TV a few years ago — remains to be dug up. Somebody had to put that insanity in a book.
But are we really that deprived of non-fiction on the Protocols? Google Scholar returns over 6,000 results on the topic. Restricting by “literary history” still gets over 150 hits. Sure Eco would have added something. But would it really have been that much?
Anyway, our more pointed difference isn’t so much about costs as benefits. You don’t seem to see much value in having The Prague Cemetery be fiction. Beyond the “literary history” opportunity cost, you just don’t think it’s a very good novel. I want to push on the reasons you give, because I think they’re question-begging in the most precise way. More on that at the very bottom.
The value of Eco’s fiction is that he gets to dazzle with form/content games that are beyond almost any other author. In Foucault’s Pendulum the characters develop a grand conspiracy, explaining to the reader what makes a grand conspiracy work, as a plot unfolds that may or may not be a real grand conspiracy but that tracks in its features the fake one (I can’t find the exact quote right now but the key is something like “it explains everything or it explains nothing,” a cheeky inverse of the si omnia, nulla maxim that ate up a decade of theorizing in my field of rhetoric). In The Prague Cemetery the reader gets a fictionalized account of . . . a fiction. Dark, fanciful, and deliberately surreal plot points are woven into the writing of a dark, fanciful, and surreal plot. The slightly unreal pathos of the novel tracks with the pathos of the Protocols.
Eco’s ability to play those games is just as singular as his ability to pen interesting literary histories, so the opportunity cost is analogous. The question is whether those aesthetic gymnastics have any value. A good semiotician, Eco knows that literary works can and should index all kinds of social conditions. There’s value in gesturing toward what might be called — forgive me — our vaguely reflexive postmodern condition. Explanations have lost their innocence. We are constantly bouncing back and forth, on the level of daily politics and certainly on the level of daily political journalism, between the substance of arguments and how they’re produced. Between journalism and journalist, biased reporting and bias, policy and politics, and so on.
One of my favorite examples on this point actually comes from an interview with Eco. He was asked about Dan Brown’s disgrace of a novel. The naïve answer is to say that The Da Vinci Code is the pop version of Foucault’s Pendulum, and that Dan Brown is a poor man’s Umberto Eco. It’s hardly original, but good enough for cocktail parties. But Eco’s response was on a different level. I can’t shake the feeling that his answer is quietly and very straightforwardly brilliant:
My answer is that Dan Brown is one of the characters in my novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, which is about people who start believing in occult stuff. . . . [I]n Foucault’s Pendulum I wrote the grotesque representation of these kind of people. So Dan Brown is one of my creatures.
All of which brings us back to why I think it’s question-begging (and symptomatic!) that you find the novel underwhelming. You take issue with how none of the characters “faces any decisions that could have gone the other way.” That’s the result of them writing themselves into a structure that exists in a different fiction. The Protocols exists “outside” the novel, and inasmuch as it has its own material history, theirs is of necessity predetermined.
More explicitly you insist the novel finally breaks apart when “the form of the novel uncomfortably begins to mirror the Protocols: a cycle of set speeches with noisy narrative machinery to get from one to another.” I would suggest that’s the point.
Sincerely,
Omri
The Fiction of the Fiction of Anti-Semitism: A Letter on The Prague Cemetery
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Paul Manafort Wasn’t the Problem
Paul Manafort is out. The Trump campaign’s now former chairman had become a liability and, following a series of press investigations, had been implicated in illegal activity on behalf of foreign governments with interests opposed to those of the United States. Don’t dare call it a pivot from Trump, though. It is nothing more than damage control, and only after all the damage had already been done. What’s more, the team that is still manning the store is as or more problematic than Manafort ever was. The problem with the Trump campaign isn’t the team in charge; it’s the campaign’s principal.
The political press was still gushing over Donald Trump’s confession last night in a prepared speech that he regrets the fact that his rhetorical efforts to stoke racial tension and xenophobia were successful when the news of Manafort’s resignation broke. It is hard to begrudge the press for indulging in some fatuous reflection on this remarkable tone shift from a candidate who has repeatedly told interviewers he has no regrets about anything. The Trump campaign chairman’s resignation is less remarkable, however, when one considers the circumstances. Manafort had become a distraction.
In the September issue of COMMENTARY, James Kirchick details Manafort’s extensive history of working with pro-Putin entities abroad, and how he became a conduit through which the Russia manipulated the Trump campaign. This week, investigations revealed that Manafort’s name was on hand-written “black ledger” in Ukraine in which the ousted pro-Russian Yanukovych government of Ukraine had promised him many millions of dollars for his work with its campaign team. The Associated Press this week revealed that Manafort had funneled $2.2 million from pro-Russian governmental sources abroad to influential Washington lobbying firms without disclosing his relationship to foreign governments—a felony if prosecuted. A Politico investigation revealed that Manafort’s Kiev protégé, Konstantin Kilimnik, had and may maintain ties to Russian intelligence.
Manafort was an extraordinary problem for the Trump campaign. He had to go. But it wasn’t Manafort who led Trump by the nose into serving as a stooge for Vladimir Putin. Trump offered himself up for that role.
Well before Manafort boarded the Trump train, the future Republican presidential nominee was displaying a conspicuously conciliatory attitude toward Moscow. For a candidate that had shown little interest in the complexities of foreign affairs, Donald Trump was curiously interested in pursuing rapprochement with Russia on Russia’s terms. He had apologized for Vladimir Putin’s persecution of journalists and even dismissed the murder of opposition figures in Moscow as the basic stuff of statecraft. “I think our country does plenty of killing,” the Republican candidate said in Putin’s defense. “He, frankly, wants to fight ISIS, and I think that’s a wonderful thing,” Trump insisted, in support of Russia’s destabilizing intervention in the Syrian civil war in September of 2015. That intervention opened with a Russian airstrike on a CIA-provided weapons depot in Syria, exposing to the world a black program that no one in the United States government had previously acknowledged.
Manafort’s ascension to the top of the Trump pyramid was, in part, an effort to bring on an experienced hand to manage his campaign’s delegate operation. It was also, though, the culmination of Trump’s overtures of appeasement toward the Kremlin.
The Trump campaign might have cleansed itself of one liability, but it has only replaced it with another. The ascension of Breitbart News chief Steve Bannon to his new role as Trump campaign CEO has created a new series of headaches for the GOP nominee that are only just beginning to throb.
Former Breitbart News employee Kurt Bardella told ABC News on Thursday that his former boss’s “nationalism and hatred for immigrants” was apparent in their organization’s coverage of political events. He insisted that at least one staff-wide call he was on sounded to him like “a white supremacist rally.”
On Friday, one of the blog’s most popular personalities, who has also made it a personal mission to popularize and normalize the proudly “white nationalist” movement that has dubbed itself the “alt-right,” Milo Yiannopoulos, found himself in hot water. A Daily Beast investigation revealed that a charity Yiannopoulos established to benefit whites with college scholarships raised between $100,000 and $25,000, but none of that money found its way into deserving pockets. “No scholarships have been awarded and the charity’s website shows there isn’t even a way for prospective students to apply for them,” the report revealed.
By hiring Bannon to lead the team, Trump campaign and Donald Trump himself owns all of this.
Manafort was not a cause but a symptom of the Trump campaign’s troubles. Donald Trump’s regrets are likely to continue to mount in the coming weeks.
What the Left Will Owe to the Populist Right
Could 2017 be the year the Republican base gets its wish and ObamaCare is replaced with a new health care scheme? That’s increasingly looking like a real possibility, but the outcome won’t be what the Tea Party had in mind. If the backlash against Donald Trump not only destroys his presidential hopes but takes down the Republican majorities in both Houses of Congress, it’s more than likely that next January will mark the beginning of a new debate about health care in which the Democrats will be decided just how far they will go toward the left’s single-payer dream.
The irony here is twofold. On the one hand, the next stage in the health care debate will be made necessary by the widely acknowledged failure of the misnamed Affordable Care Act. The other reason is that it may be that it was precisely the right’s anger about the failure of the Republicans to roll back President Obama’s liberal agenda that set the stage for the rise of Trump. The resulting likely Democratic landslide could put in place a Democratic president and Congress, who will replace it with a new scheme that will include a vast expansion of government power.
The law is failing. The news this week about Aetna’s decision to pull out of the plan’s marketplaces illustrates once again that not even the vast power of the federal government is enough to reverse basic laws of economics. There simply aren’t enough healthy young people buying insurance in the ObamaCare marketplaces to balance out the older and sicker people who are compelled to use it and whose expenses render the entire enterprise a financial disaster.
As our Noah Rothman noted on Tuesday, the crisis puts the onus on Republicans running in competitive races to speak about the need for a fix and for the public to understand that without a GOP Congress the mess will get a lot worse. But the joke here may be on conservatives, not the liberals clamoring for another crack at imposing a single-payer system .
In the past few years, Democrats have mocked the Republican-controlled Congress for their numerous and obviously futile attempts to repeal ObamaCare. Grassroots Republicans were just as dismissive of these symbolic votes since they saw it as proof that the GOP majorities they helped elect were failing to keep what they saw as promises to roll back President Obama’s entire agenda and not just the signature health care legislation named after him. Indeed, far from appeasing the anger of the conservative base, these gestures were interpreted as evidence of a betrayal of the base by the establishment and government elites who wouldn’t really fight big government.
The frustration over what many in the grass roots perceived as a weak establishment-led GOP majority drove the equally futile attempts by Senator Ted Cruz and the House Freedom Caucus to shut down the government over ObamaCare and to threaten to do the same on budget issues. House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were perceived by the administration as tough opponents whose maneuverings frustrated most of their attempts to implement a liberal agenda—but to the right they were traitors.
We all know what the anger on the right brought about. Ted Cruz thought he would ride a populist wave of resentment to the GOP nomination, but instead it proved to be Trump, a man who had actually supported single payer systems and a host of other liberal positions far to the left of anything espoused by the much-despised Congressional leadership. But that didn’t seem to bother Tea Party voters,
Now the backlash against Trump has made it possible for Democrats to dream of taking back both houses of Congress in November, something they didn’t think was imaginable only a few months ago. If Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are running Capitol Hill and Hillary Clinton is in the White House, and a new era of liberal big government legislation is the result, the very same Tea Party conservatives whose blind anger at the establishment set the GOP on a course with disaster will have no one to blame but themselves.
Trump Being Trump May Sink the GOP
Earlier this week, pressed in an interview with the editorial board of the Miami Herald, Marco Rubio insisted that he still supported the Republican presidential nominee—and stuck by his description of Trump as a “con man.” His own role in the Senate upon reelection will be to “confront bad ideas from the White House,” no matter who wins the presidency, Rubio said. Think it was hard for Rubio to thread that needle? Let’s see how he does in a month.
The shakeup at the Trump campaign has largely been discussed in terms of its impact on the GOP nominee’s dwindling chances of victory. But what must also be considered is what the impact of the change will be on downticket Republican candidates will be. Trump is no fool and can surely see that an Electoral College victory is rapidly becoming unreachable. If he’s going to lose, he’d rather do so as himself. So even if the pollster Kellyanne Conway, who has been promoted to campaign manager, tries to steer him away from the rocks, campaign CEO and Breitbart.com propietor Steve Bannon will surely urge him on to help transform the GOP into the living embodiment of that website’s ethos of chaos.
Politicians like Rubio, Pat Toomey, Kelly Ayotte and House Speaker Paul Ryan gave their grudging endorsements to Trump based on the assumption that his hunger to win the presidency would cause him to be less of an embarrassment in the general election campaign. That was clearly a miscalculation. If Trump spends the next 82 days behaving as he has since the Republican convention, only more so, his reluctant allies will need to go a lot further to create distance from the presidential nominee than even Rubio did in that uncomfortable Miami Herald interview.
More fiascos like the spat with the Khan family or an accusation that Obama founded ISIS won’t just hurt Trump in the polls and give the TV talking heads something to chew over. If the spillover to downticket races becomes unquestionable, Trump’s behavior will finally create the schism within the Republican Party that has been in the cards since he clinched the nomination.
Turkey and the Shameful Media
Turkey was already among the worst places in the world for journalists before the July 15 coup attempt provided Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan with “a gift from God” to enable him to try to crush all enemies. Back in 2012, Reporters Without Frontiers called Turkey “the world’s biggest prison for journalists,” long before the latest seizures of media companies, closures of newspapers, and arrests of editors and journalists.
Traditionally, Western democracies not only valued the importance of free speech, but were also on the frontlines of advocacy for it. And, within those democracies, the most protective defenders of free speech were journalists and the newspapers or media companies for which they worked.
No longer. Robert Ellis, a long-time commentator on Turkey whose writing frequently appeared in London’s Independent, found an article of his that had been published eight days after the coup attempt yanked because Independent editors reportedly thought that his criticism of Erdoğan’s crackdown on journalists and others might offend the prickly Turkish leader and endanger another roving correspondent who wished to visit Turkey. (The article was subsequently republished here).
As the United Kingdom’s Press Gazette reports:
A former advisor to the European Parliament’s Turkey Assessment Group, Ellis said the paper knew he was critical of the Turkish government’s actions as he had taken an “openly critical stance” in previous articles. He added: “I think somebody on the Turkish side has said: ‘Let’s make a determined effort to stop this guy and shut him up’. For the Independent to go along with it is utterly reprehensible. “The Turkish authorities have been able to get to what I had considered to be a reputable publication. I’m flabbergasted really. I never expected this to happen.”
The Independent sought to explain its actions:
In an email to Ellis from Voices editor Hannah Fearn, seen by Press Gazette, he is told: “One of our foreign correspondents is travelling in Turkey now and has received threats as a result. However, I intend to republish as soon as he has crossed the border.” A spokesperson for the Independent said: “We have a duty to put the safety of our journalists first and that was the context of our decision to remove the item in question. “There was categorically never any request, nor pressure, from the Turkish authorities to remove the piece. It was an editorial decision taken with due consideration.”
The Independent’s explanation beggars belief: If there was “never any request, nor pressure” from the Turkish government, then the removal of Ellis’ critical article was pure self-censorship. However, given how open Turks can be with threats, it also does not seem credible that Turks—officially or unofficially—made no mention of their disapproval of what had appeared in the Independent’s opinion section.
Two days after Saddam Hussein’s government fell in 2003, CNN executive Eason Jordan published a New York Times op-ed describing the how CNN traded self-censorship for access. The scandal there was not simply the twisting of reality with regard to Iraq, but the fact that the same trade-offs occurred throughout the Middle East—with regard to the Gaza Strip, Iran, and the Polisario Front—among others.
If the Independent is fearful that the contempt with which Erdoğan and his fellow-travelers hold journalists and free opinion might complicate the desire of journalists to travel in Turkey, the answer is not to appease the censors. After all, that will not only encourage further threats and censorship but also lead to journalism which affirms a regime’s propaganda rather the illuminates reality or speaks truth to power.
The Forgotten Flood
“America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can’t-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.” That was liberal economist Paul Krugman’s assessment in 2005, just two days after the levies and floodwalls protecting Greater New Orleans from the water that looms over it failed. The preventable toll of human suffering in New Orleans—the property damage, the dead, and the traumatized—was a travesty. A flooding disaster is unfolding again in Louisiana today, this time in Baton Rouge, but it has yet to stimulate the ire of the nation’s liberal opinion makers. Why?
The Red Cross has called the flooding “the worst natural disaster to strike the United States since Superstorm Sandy.” It has caused incredible suffering. Thirteen are dead, with a toll that is likely to rise as the worst of the flooding has not yet abated. 8,400 are hunkering down in shelters and emergency services have rescued 30,000 from their homes. An astonishing 40,000 homes have been damaged, many of which will be beyond repair. More rain and associated flash flooding is forecast for today.
President Obama signed a disaster declaration and has received a briefing from FEMA head Craig Fugate on Wednesday, but has not issued a statement. The president has so far declined to interrupt his Martha’s Vineyard vacation to address the crisis in the Pelican State, despite calls from local papers to do precisely that. Barack Obama has, however, “emerged from his golf and fine dining-filled vacation on Monday” to raise campaign donations for Hillary Clinton. He quickly returned to his golf game. “Hillary Clinton has mentioned the floods only in a single tweet, and Donald Trump has said nothing about them at all,” The Atlantic reported.
Where is the apoplexy that followed George W. Bush’s failure to respond to a natural disaster with the alacrity his critics deemed appropriate? The press has not devoted its front pages to the disaster; the nightly newscasts have declined to open the broadcast with an update of events or to park correspondents outside Obama’s island dacha.
It is only too obvious why. It’s an election year, and there are far too many Democrats caught up in this thing to make waves.
Barack Obama is a Democrat. Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards is a Democrat. Baton Rouge Mayor-President Kip Holden is a Democrat. There is no truly competitive statewide race in Louisiana on Election Day, as the “jungle primary” race to replace retiring Senator David Vitter in November is almost certain to head to a runoff in December. There are plenty of political disincentives for center-left partisans in the commentariat to indict the Democratic establishment in Louisiana and Washington D.C. The result of this conflict on the part of America’s liberal opinion-makers has been conspicuous silence.
Rest assured, the nation’s unsung emergency workers and charities are not ignoring the tragedy. The National Guard is on site. Over 1,000 volunteers from all 50 states are working with the Red Cross to mount a $30 million relief and rescue operation. For now, the toll in terms of lives lost is nowhere near as grave as the cost associated with Hurricanes Katrina or Sandy, but tell that to the tens of thousands who lost their homes and possessions or those grieving the loss of a loved one.
It took political pressure to get George W. Bush on the ground in New Orleans. He later acknowledged that it was a “huge mistake” to allow himself to be photographed aboard Air Force One overlooking the devastation from 10,000 feet. Barack Obama did not repeat Bush’s mistake with Sandy in 2012. Two days after the storm made landfall, the president was on the ground in New Jersey touring the damage alongside its popular Republican governor. Obama was surely moved to quick action not merely by the precedent set by Bush in New Orleans that he sought to avoid, but also due to the convenient fact that his New Jersey sojourn was scheduled just seven days out from a presidential election. Pity the poor citizens of Baton Rouge; there is no political incentive for anyone to focus on their suffering.