by Katalin Balog

I. Trump

In the last 30 years, I have witnessed, criss-crossing the Atlantic, first, my native Hungary's transition from communism to democracy and capitalism, and, for the past 6, its about-face: the sudden dismantling of the institutional system of liberal democracy, as well as the rapid spread of crony capitalism, the establishment of a “mafia state“. In 2014, its prime minister, Viktor Orbán, proudly called Hungary an “illiberal state“. The institutions of liberal democracy proved to be too fragile, the careful checks and balances too foreign to take root in Hungary, in a climate of growing corruption, mass unemployment, and rising inequality. So my state of mind has been, more than anything else, a shock of recognition at Donald Trump's precipitous rise and the rapid transformation of the culture of political discourse in the Republican party and beyond. This is how democracy has been lost in Hungary; it started with a profound transformation of political discourse. Trump's debasement of the public sphere, the normalizing of taboo-breaking racist, sexist, xenophobic speech, the defiant, hateful rejection of “political correctness” has strong echoes in the post-socialist political-cultural scene in Hungary. I have already been there.

Whatever you think of American foreign policy, or the Democratic establishment, or the breaking up of the big banks, and even if you think capitalism itself is unacceptable, you better realize that something fundamental is at stake that you ought to take a stand on: you ought not pretend that this is politics as usual.

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by Katrin Trüstedt

As people are moving, spaces are transforming. In the context of the European refugee crisis, schools, former airports, and hotels are turned into camps; south European islands that have developed an infrastructure for northern European tourists have now become border regions and immigration areas for non-European refugees. Artistic acts of transforming spaces can bring the transformations themselves into focus. The contribution of the Icelandic Pavilion to the last Venice Biennale consisted of turning the deconsecrated Church of Santa Maria della Misericordia into a mosque. While the function of this transformation was officially explained by the aim “to provide a platform for dialogue about and communication between different cultural positions”, it actually posed the question: what kind of a space did this transformation create? A place of worship? A place of art? Inside the mosque, a small sign that could easily be overlooked warned against “worldly talk and gossip in the Masjid [place of worship]”: “There will come a time upon people when they will talk about worldly affairs in the Masjid […] Allah Ta'ala does not need such people.” The mosque that cautioned against them was full of exactly such people: the international art scene crowd, discussing the Biennale and what they had or were going to see. The sign itself, being part of the mosque that was the Icelandic Pavilion in the Venice Biennale, was in fact part of the very art that prompted, contrary to the sign's request, much “talk about worldly affairs”. The artist Christoph Büchel, who created this piece, has formerly also transformed a museum into a swinger club. Is that the same kind of transformation? The same kind of art? Apart from being part of the series of Biennale Pavilions, “The Mosque” is also part of Büchel's transformation installations series.

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by Elise Hempel

When I was twelve, the year some kids started “making out” and sneaking cigarettes, I walked to the drugstore alone and made a secret purchase, nervously doling to the cashier the money I'd saved up, then racing home with my heart pounding, clutching the brown paper bag as I bounded up the stairs to my bedroom, making sure the door was locked before I crinkled open the now-sweaty bag and pulled out … my new toy telephone.

I don't know what I was thinking, except that I'd never had one before, and … my family must never find out. My new phone was plastic, of course, thin and cheap, a lemony, too-yellow yellow no real phone would ever come in. The receiver, attached by a fake curly cord like a pig's tail, was hollow, both ends dotted with phony “holes,” and under the clear dial that jingled flimsily as it spun (an anemic tricycle bell), the numbers were only stickers. No way to plug it in, smooth and solid in the back, my phone was an imposter, connected to nothing but itself.

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by Chris Bacas

During a blaze across Florida, our leader hosted a band party; his way of saying thanks.

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by Maniza Naqvi

Wearing white, Hillary Clinton made her speech as the presumptive Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party after the California Primary as the one who would save us from Trump. But she is the one who has been saved by Trump. Wealthy warriors, Trump and she, members of the one percent, diverting America's attention from this fact and uniting America through fear, presenting fear as their net worth and credentials to the ninety-nine percent.

The same fear, that the specter of extremism would take over, had Americans marching on into war now has them marching towards Hillary who voted for the wars. Hillary Clinton didn't stand much of a chance (given her record on supporting war and her accumulation of wealth) in today's context of a deafening roar of protest about the rising poverty and the growing gap between the rich and the middle class the 99% versus the 1%. But then miraculously that context was trumped by Trump by his rhetoric of fascism. Trump has provided the theater needed to make Hillary viable and credible. The more preposterous he gets, the lighter and more bearable becomes, her very real baggage regarding trust and bad decisions. Hillary's trump card is Trump, in the game against Bernie Sanders.

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by Max Sirak

I spent my 20s working in bars and bookstores. Really, what this means is – I read a lot and I drank a lot. And, over the course of all this reading and drinking, I even managed to learn a thing or two. So, today we're going to talk about making a good drink and living a good life.

One of my favorite reads in my 20s was Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd's, The Time Paradox. One of my favorite drinks in my 20s was a well-crafted margarita. Now – I know what you're thinking, “A margarita? How pedestrian…” and “The Time Paradox? I've never heard of it…”

The book is all about how “attitudes toward time have a profound impact on your life and your world, yet you seldom recognize it.” (The Time Paradox) The drink, when done right, is about the most delicious thing you can put in your mouth on a summer's day. And – as luck would have it – the recipes for how to best think about time and how to best make a margarita are pretty damn similar.

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by Thomas R. Wells

“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” John Kerry challenged Congress about the Vietnam war in 1971. There in a nutshell is the standard test by which democratic republics assess their military adventures: Is this cause worth dying for?

The idea of such a test is a good one. War is a question of politics, indeed the oldest question of political power: ‘Who's in charge here?' Specifically, governments contest each other's sovereignty – their ability to get their own way – by employing or threatening the means of extraordinary violence. Since war is defined by its terrible means, it can only be justified by some extraordinary purpose. Ordinary political goals will not do. Hence the need to find some measure that will be immune from the merely personal or factional interests of politicians or their hubris.

Nevertheless, Kerry's test is not quite right. The most ethically significant thing about war is not that our soldiers are ordered to risk their lives to further the interests of our state – or perhaps just our politicians – but that they are ordered to kill for it. The real ethical test of a war is whether our cause is worth killing for. If that is not satisfied then our soldiers are mere murderers and we are the ones who made them so.

This test turns out to be much harder to meet.

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At The Milken Conference: “Attendees want to know about … politics
and global military campaigns only insofar as (they) produce new
opportunities to make money. A panel called “Value in Turmoil” was
packed (and) ‘Opportunities in distress’ was a recurring theme.”
…………………………………………. —David Dayen in The Intercept

Das Kapital

In a conference of elites
the distress of others is an
investment opportunity,
said the gator to the croc,
croaked hen vulture to her cock,
shot Kalashnikov to Glock,
coughed Phillip Morris to a doc.
.

by Jim Culleny
5/7/16

by Holly A. Case

Ares, god of war

When Joseph Brodsky taught poetry at Mount Holyoke College, his method of choice was memorization. At the beginning of every class, students took out a blank sheet of paper and wrote out the poem for discussion that day from memory. Every comma, every line break, every word: they all had to be in the proper place. More than three errors of any kind would earn a zero.

I audited Brodsky's course on the poetry of W. H. Auden as a sophomore. Though I rarely adhered to his strict regimen, I did with Auden's “September 1, 1939.”

After the ritual of the blank sheet came the discussion. Holding a plastic espresso cup, and often—in defiance of every code—a cigarette, Brodsky walked among us, repeating lines from the poem with Russian-accented rhythmic intonation:

Blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse: …

(He pronounced the noun and verb forms of “excuse” identically, always like the verb.)

Then came a question: Why “blind skyscrapers”? A hand or two went up. Possible answers were proffered and gently dismissed. Finally, he offered an image of clouds reflected in the glass; everything deflected, nothing allowed in. As I listened, the adjective “blind” opened wide, swallowing a hissing tangle of nouns: “ignorance,” “hubris,” “superficiality,” “soullessness,” “emptiness,” “selfishness,” whereupon—already grotesquely distended with meaning—it proceeded to engulf the hundreds of pages of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, as well. Brodsky was passing from behind on my right as he spoke, the light on the desks was diffuse and without shadow, and a boy in a tutu from Hampshire College was sitting to my left: nothing happened, everything changed.

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by Carl Pierer

German foreign policy often talks about a particular historical German responsibility, some special status that Germans have inherited after World War II[i]. Even left commentators, usually internationalist in outlook, seem to accept such a notion uncritically[ii]. But what role does the concept of ‘nation' play in this context?

Ernest Renan writes in « Qu'est-ce que une nation ? »:

Or, l'essence d'une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup des choses en commun et aussi que tous aient oublié bien des choses. (…) Tout citoyen français doit avoir oublié la Saint-Barthélemy, les massacres du Midi au XIIIe siècle.[iii]

At first, a seemingly straight-forward cynical remark. But in the revised edition of his hugely influential “Imagined Communities”[iv], Benedict Anderson realises that Renan takes ‘la Saint-Barthélemy' and ‘les massacres du Midi' as being understood, without the need for further explication. Anderson rightly asks: “Yet, who but ‘Frenchmen', (…) would have at once understood that ‘la Saint-Barthélemy' referred to the ferocious anti-Huguenot pogrom launched on 24 August 1572 by the Valois dynast Charles IX and his Florentine mother (…)”[v]? Secondly, as Anderson points out, there is something paradoxical to the demand that every French citizen must already have forgotten these atrocities, which immediately afterwards are supposed to be known.

Anderson's ingenious insight is that this particular way of talking about historical events supports the idea of an ancient community, which was always there and finds only now its political manifestation in the ‘nation'. In this way, it is not that these atrocities were inflicted by one community against another, but are to be understood as ‘fratricidal' episodes of a common family history: “Having to ‘have already forgotten' tragedies of which one needs unceasingly to be ‘reminded' turns out to be a characteristic device in the later construction of national genealogies.”[vi] Of course, as Anderson does not fail to point out, this idea is fittingly illustrated by the US-American ‘civil war': presented as a war between ‘brothers' always to be re-united into the sovereign nation that is the USA, and not as a war between two sovereign states, it seems only fair to suppose that this narrative would be wholly different had the South not lost the war[vii].

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by Libby Bishop

“Descending tetrachord?” Neither one of us had a clue. The descending tetrachord is one of many musical mysteries my husband and I have faced as we have listened and watched Professor Craig Wright's course, Listening to Classical Music, on YouTube from Yale University. Professor Wright is a self-described old white guy, talking about dead (mostly) white guys, to (mostly) rich kids, about a (supposedly) dead musical genre. It should be as exciting as watching gravy congeal. But instead, it is intelligent, instructive, entertaining, funny, and moving.

Much of the success of the course can be attributed to Professor Wright, an exceptional teacher, with knowledge that is broad and deep, yet with no perceptible arrogance from that knowledge, and a passion for his subject and the pleasure of sharing it with others. But equally important is his approach to studying music. From the first lecture, he challenges the dualism of knowing and feeling in which knowing more means feeling less. We can learn about music – its history, forms, structure, and composition—without diminishing our emotional response to it. In fact, understanding may enhance feeling, and vice versa.

Like too much of the rest of my education, my knowledge of music is uneven: the best parts were excellent, but far too many gaps remain. As a child, I learned from my mother and sister, both good pianists, guitar players and vocalists. After attempts at violin and piano, I settled on flute, which I played for several years, barely reaching middling mediocrity. But I do recall the great satisfaction I felt the moment I blew my first full, true note.

Learning music and learning about music is to learn two languages. First, obviously—or rather aurally—is the language of sound. It demands refining one's hearing to distinguish separate voices or instruments. It is like trying to separate the words when listening to rapidly spoken French. I can make out the individual words if they are spoken slowly, but in normal conversation, the words blur into indistinguishable phrases. I can “hear” it, but I cannot differentiate the words to get their meaning. Similarly with music, I can hear, but far too often, I cannot differentiate: bass from melody, oboe from clarinet.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Alienation has an aesthetic. While it reeks of coldness, sharp edges, and an inch-thick coating preventing any form of attachment, it nevertheless also produces the joy of detachment, and irresponsible freedom. While we all know the dangers of too much alienation, a dose every now and then is a welcome elixir to help stave this world that presses down so hard.

Every now and then, in search of an easily available alienation, I find myself craving the luxuries of a hotel room. I imagine the details of the transaction — the presentation of a credit card, the perfunctory smiles, the reading of rules and regulations, the due verification of self as self — in return for the insides of a cavern with an attached bathroom. I imagine that someone else will have taken charge of providing for me the pleasures of a gigantic bed, white sheets, and a spotless bathroom. I do not, and will not ever own white sheets, or white pillowcases, or turn up the air conditioning so high, that I need the services of a white duvet. But countless movie tableaux have impressed upon me the vision I will make, wrapped up in all of the above. I imagine the softness of the bathrobe that every hotel cautions the guest against stealing. I speculate at the brands of mini shampoo, conditioner, and moisturizer that this hotel will stock. I think of the hours I will lie in bed, watching television, protected from the world, safe in the knowledge of room service. I dream of towel warmers.

In my love for hotel rooms, I find myself beholden to the seductive beauties of capitalism, even as I know so very well, how soon these attractions wane. The first hotel room that I remember inhabiting was at my first job, when I was housed, courtesy client money, at a tastefully decorated, swanky five-star enterprise, with mirrors on all walls, and a shiny bathtub. I was sure that all my life had been building up to that moment. I remember walking around testing light switches, taps, and soap dispensers, wondering if they would do what they promised to do. My remembrance of the light in that room is resplendent to this day. Everything appeared softer, richer, and more meaningful. Even my reflection.

Since then, I have lived in countless hotel rooms, of all denominations, and never recovered that one joyous moment. The law of diminishing marginal utility governs all things in my life.

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— 'You may call it “nonsense” if you like … but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!'

—The Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass

by Richard King

When Seymour Hersh published his 10,000-word essay ‘The Killing of Osama bin Laden' last May he entered a strange and murky realm of information and counter-information in which nothing and no one is quite the real deal – a through-the-looking-glass world (to use one of his own tropes) in which black is white and up is down and four is not always divisible by two. No, not the shadowy world of ‘intelligence' in which his sources and their opposite numbers move, though the dissimulation and disinformation that characterise that milieu had their parts to play; I mean the brave new world of online media and instantaneous ‘analysis', of truth subordinated to tribe and identity, of epistemic closure and flat-out confusion. An intervention in, and challenge to, the official version of the war on terror, ‘The Killing of Osama bin Laden' became a (small) battle in the reality wars.

I am certainly not the first to notice how the reaction to Hersh's article – which was published in the London Review of Books and alleged, inter alia, that the CIA had lied about the provenance of the information that led the Navy SEALs to Abbottabad; that Pakistan's military leaders had secretly agreed to the murder/execution of Osama bin Laden; that a frail and unarmed bin Laden was killed, not at the end of a chaotic shoot-out, but at close range and with high-calibre rifles; and that his mangled body was thrown, bit by bit, from a helicopter over the Hindu Kush – displayed a lack of journalistic rigour. A few days after the story broke, Trevor Timm published an essay in the Columbia Journalism Review anatomising the media's response to the piece. Noting that the online magazine Slate had run no less than five hit-jobs on Hersh's story in the space of just thirty-six hours, and noting as well the collective deaf ear turned to the many documented falsehoods offered by the CIA to the US government and by the US government to the US citizenry, Timm described that reaction as ‘disgraceful'. This was the kind of press, he implied, of which most governments can only dream. No wonder the White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest looked so relaxed when he fronted the media in order to rebut Hersh's version of events.

The principal allegation levelled against Hersh (who has recently published the essay in book form) is that his story is ‘a conspiracy theory' – a fantasy concocted on the back of sources too scarce and too anonymous to be trusted. This is a charge to which Hersh's record of breaking big stories is apparently no impediment, though anyone making it feels called upon to pay the grizzled old muckraker his due, noting in particular his sterling work on the My Lai massacre (for which he won a Pulitzer) and his key role in breaking the Abu Ghraib story.

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by Dave Maier

If you ever meet a guy who tells you that he is a skeptic, most likely he means that he doesn’t believe in angels or fairies or anything “metaphysical”. Maybe he is a member of CSICOP (the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, publishers of Skeptical Inquirer magazine). We should, he will tell you, examine the evidence carefully before committing to anything, and be neither gullible nor dogmatic. But of course he himself believes plenty of things, and one person’s skeptic is another’s denialist. What, after all, is “intelligent design” if not skepticism about the biological theory of evolution, and climate change “denialism” if not skepticism about climate science? In all such cases the objector accuses his opponents of epistemological dirty pool and demands that the matter be instead illuminated by the sweet light of reason, as manifested (naturally) in his own views and the ironclad evidence for same.

Such battles about which particular things to believe do not concern the philosopher, who has bigger, more theoretical fish to fry. But these fish can smell pretty fishy to those primarily concerned to beat back the dark forces of dogma and superstition (or “metaphysics”). Perhaps they should be left out for the cat.

Not long ago, for example, Bill Nye the Science Guy opined on the value of philosophy. He was not impressed. One of his gripes was that philosophers spill lots of ink on pointless questions such as whether there’s really a real world out there, or whether instead we might all be in the Matrix, maaaan [*bong hit*]. There is much indefensible stupidity and ignorance packed into Nye’s short remarks, and it is not our task today is to air it out, but I did want to say a few things about the very idea of philosophical skepticism.

As it is presented in popular works and (sometimes) in Phil 101, the skeptical question is indeed given in just this form: how do we know anything at all about what’s “out there”? Most of the time we think we know all kinds of things, but here comes the skeptic to burst our bubble, and put everything we thought we knew into question. Maybe we all (or just you) are simply dreaming! Maybe we don’t know anything at all! And yet of course we do, for that way madness lies; so the whole thing looks like a perverse, logic-chopping sideshow. Why should we care about such nonsense?

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by Michael Liss

Film still from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

It is time for navel-gazing here in the US.

We are about to have an election in which the two likely nominees have managed to alienate the electorate to an unprecedented degree. It has led to a surreal atmosphere. Hillary Clinton slogs on with a message that brings to mind the appeal of an appointment with a dental hygienist—it won’t be the highlight of your day, but it’s the healthy choice. Donald Trump has managed to do something quite brilliant—he has identified his target audience, taken disgust with dysfunction, mixed it with a shot of anger, and distilled it into one easily digestible slogan: “Make America Great Again.”

It is a genius-level move by a master salesman. With those few words, Trump seizes for himself and his supporters a core identity as the true heirs of a legacy of American preeminence. Like a classic old building, American greatness is still here—it’s just covered under layers of accumulated grime. With the right man in charge, someone of vigor and boldness, we can sandblast it all away and have a palace—even a cathedral—that celebrates. As we once were, so shall we be again.

But who were we? To what are we returning? That’s a fascinating question, because to own something, you need to be able to define it. And history lacks the clarity of a mathematical proof or a replicable scientific experiment. To paraphrase an interesting point Mary Beard makes in SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, the historian engages in a work of reconstruction which, by definition, is self-limiting. When the written word is absent or suspect, you learn about things by piecing together inference and fact, as if you were reassembling a broken amphora. You can scientifically analyze the contents, you can date the time it was fired, you can make assumptions about the economic and social standing of the owner and the community he lived in, but, in the end, what you have in front of you is likely the remains of an attractive, once useful, pot. A pot—not an unimpeachable set of facts about the nature of the people who used it.

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