Joe Did What? Post-Trumpatic Stress Disorder

Listen to it twice, if possible—it's not long, and it's mostly in English. Here's a good text for following along, with the few German bits translated.

A little over a month ago, at my day job as a music bibliographer, I was processing an essay by the Italian musicologist Mariano Russo about the12-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg and his students, which argued that it was never as revolutionary as it sounded, and didn't last very long, if at all, as the norm for contemporary music; nevertheless (according to the abstract I wrote),

in the history of 20th-century music it continues to be felt as the decisive parting of the waters after which everything changed. Jacques Lacan's concept of the après-coup (after Freud's term Nachträglichkeit, "afterwardsness"), a "mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events", is drawn on to explain the phenomenon: the arrival of 12-tone music was recognized as a traumatic event only after the event had passed. An illustration is provided by the premiere of Schoenberg's A survivor from Warsaw under the conductor Kurt Frederick in Albuquerque in 1948. After the performance, the audience remained stunned and baffled, without applauding, for a full minute. Then Frederick repeated the whole of the 7- or 8-minute work, and the audience applauded thunderously--it was only in the "afterwardsness" of the re-hearing that they were able to process the traumatic character of the first impression.

Which took hours of research, I may say; I don't have any experience with the later 20th-century psychoanalytic material—somewhere in my library there's a chapter on Lacan in a book surveying the French structuralist movement, but I know I didn't read the chapter with much interest or understanding, and I can't find it at all at the moment. But the après-coup concept really stuck in my mind, where it got connected to something completely different: the political events of the last month and the last eight years, and in particular the strange sensation of "joy" Democrats have been experiencing especially last week over the Chicago festivities.

Not just the joy in itself, but what seems to me like its belated character, of a national celebration we really should have been enjoying four years ago, when we drove Trump out of office. We're out singing and dancing in the public square like the Munchkins after Dorothy's house falls on the witch—"Ding dong, the witch is dead!"—at the wrong time, when the witch has actually come back to life, and seriously threatens to retake power.

For the Record: Legitimate Political Discourse

 

Cool variant on Lévi-Strauss's famous analysis in which the stories of the Theban cycle are shown as simultaneously present in the myth, like the voices in a musical score. Via John Phillips, National University of Singapore.

Structuralism continues to be bon à penser!

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

That's after Claude Lévi-Strauss, the totem hero of structural anthropology, who said that mythology is "bon à penser", "good to think", in the same way as we say certain foods are "good to eat". In the same way, structural anthropology itself can be "good to think"  I've been working on an example that's interesting, I think, with reference to gloomy comparisons between the 1923 Nazi coup attempt in Munich and the 2021 Republican coup attempt in Washington—it's gloomy because it gets the relationship upside down.

Beer Hall Putsch has always been the best Jan 6 comparison

— Paul Lerner (@PFLerner) February 6, 2022

2016 immature movement seizes power constitutionally, with aid of moribund conservative establishment
2020 moribund movement attempts to retain power extraconstitutionally, with aid of (uncooperative) miltary

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

Trump was an old fool in 2016 who failed to learn that constitutionalism had led him to success and did everything worse on his second round.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 6, 2022

For the Record: The Era of Tubes

Got kind of snappish with a good Twitter friend, of which I'm not proud, but for the record, and because we maybe got somewhere:

A bit beyond the criticism of the media well deserved as it is what in the f*#k is Tom Perez doing?
After Iowa which was unforgivable now virtual rally failures?
You know that line "You had only one job"?

— Heim Yankel (@heim2yankel) May 10, 2020

People have a weird idea of what his one job is. DNC raises money and is doing it pretty well. https://t.co/cxwHJjInRn Much better than Republicans except in the dark money field. That's not the problem.

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 10, 2020

Republicans in Democrats' Clothing?

Henry A. Wallace. Photo by D.N. Townsend, 1940, via Wikipedia. 

Harry Truman: “Given a choice between a Republican & a Democrat who acts like a Republican; the voters will pick the Republican every time.”

Moderates are convinced that we have to compromise our progressive values to win.

They’re wrong.

We have to fight for our values to win.

— Ryan Knight 🌹 (@ProudResister) March 8, 2020

Like everybody else around here, I've heard that quote dozens of times and possibly used it myself, but this started me off wondering what Democrats Truman might have been talking about, and whether it was a genuine quote at all, a question Dr. Google doesn't seem to have heard recently, but it turned out to be not too hard to find the source, an address Truman gave at a dinner of the Americans for Democratic Action, 17 May 1952:

The Third Dimension

White mochi with macha filling, via Uncut Recipes.

So Jordan was wondering over in the comments how David Brooks might have reacted to the Clinton impeachment 20 years ago, and I found something kind of—unsurprising might be the right word, from David Nyhan writing for the Boston Globe in January 1999, who watched a Brooks appearance on PBS looking back at the failure of the Senate trial, and, spoiler, no, he didn't talk about how Gingrich's House ought to have been working on infrastructure bills instead:

"This is a Great Lost Cause," he enthused of the Republican drive to snuff out the Clinton presidency. "We fought for truth, for justice," he said. That notion was novel to me. This whole thing has looked like a down-and-dirty political ambush from the word go, to me and to most Americans. I could never buy the William Bennett Moral Crusade; I always suspected that was a book-tour con.

But Brooks found what he gamely phrased "a kernel of romance" for Republicans in this yearlong dive into the cesspool of semen-stained dresses, cigars in the wrong places, sneaky tapes of a ditzy young intern by a repulsive Republican operative (can anyone defend the taxpayers still paying $90,000 a year to Linda Tripp for her no-show Pentagon job?), and the greasy pawing-over of tapes, transcripts, appointment logs, Secret Service records, and other detritus of the 60,000-page House impeachment probe.

Brooks looked ahead to the Republican National Convention of 2000 and through the mist of the future, saw Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, being summoned to the podium to accept the plaudits of a grateful party, with the crowd roaring for Hyde and his fellow impeachers: "They stood for principles against the polls."

It strikes me that there's more to this than simple hypocrisy, a simple double standard for Republicans vs. Democrats; or maybe I should say it's a motivated double standard.

For the Record: Christianity and Stuff

Residents of Tecun Uman, Guatemala, and migrants from Central America cross the Suchiate River June 10, 2019, to enter Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico. (Photo/Jose Cabezas, Reuters). As long as Father Martin exists, you'll never get me to say Christianity is evil, though I do understand the temptation.

Anyway this person informing me that ex-governor Huckabee seemed not to be a good Christian didn't realize that she was going to trigger me:

The "old testament" or Tanakh as some of us call it is the basis for a deeply compassionate religion known as Judaism. Huckabee knows nothing of it.

— CandyflossOfOutrage (@Yastreblyansky) September 1, 2019

I guess you know fuck all about Judaism too. Go away before I report you.

— CandyflossOfOutrage (@Yastreblyansky) September 1, 2019

After that, it occurred to me that it might not be obvious to her why anybody might have a negative reaction to being told their Holy Book is evil (and she's probably somebody who thinks of herself as being "of the left"), and I started trying to explain, in an absolutely not hostile or oversensitive way:

The decay you decry

Photo by mks at dubstepforum.

Concerned David Brooks is concerned about marriage inequality! Not what you're thinking: it's that apparently all the best marriage is being hogged by a happy few while the majority have to make do with what remains, and the gap between the camps is growing:

marriage is polarizing: The best marriages today are better than the best marriages of generations ago; the worst marriages now are worse; over all, the average marriage is weaker than the average marriage in days of yore.

This is a not totally inaccurate summary of some research results reported in 2014 by the social psychologist Eli Finkel in a New York Times Valentine's Day piece, "The All-or-Nothing Marriage", and as a matter of fact it's probably the most interesting thing in the column, or would be if Brooks had been capable of understanding what he was reading when he read, or looked at, that article—I'll be getting back to it shortly, as Krugman would say at this point—but Brooks himself quickly loses interest in it and moves on to his own views on what modern thought, as represented by the self-help literature in airport bookshops, has to say on the subject of marriage, which is that we have three attitudes, of course, seeing it through three distinct "lenses", psychological, romantic, and moral...

Pay it retrociprocally

Restaurant Oliviera, Nice. Photo by Mong789.

In his Elementary Structures of Kinship (1948, English version 1969) Claude Lévi-Strauss described the then commonplace phenomenon of solitary diners in a Provençal lunch place sitting at adjacent tables, or sharing a table for two. Each has a little pichet of red wine and a glass at his place setting, but instead of pouring himself a glass ("himself" because it's hardly going to be a woman eating alone, in southern France in the 1940s), he pours one for the stranger, who pours one for him in turn. Because society, as Lévi-Strauss learned from his great teacher Marcel Mauss, is made up of acts of motivated and unmotivated exchange, this economically meaningless gesture creates a sociality on the spot that doesn't have to go anywhere, a moment of human community.

I was reminded of this famous moment in the history of structural anthropology by a tweet that showed up today: [jump]