Cindy Sherman at the MoMA

After finishing a series of photographs, Jed Martin feels like he never wants to take another shot. So does Cindy Sherman.

There are other similarities between the fictional photographer Jed Martin—whose pictures are described in Michel Houellebecq’s novel The Map and The Territory—and the real photographer Cindy Sherman, whose photographs are currently on display at MoMA.

Both are successful, their images selling for millions on the market, and both seem to have an exhaustive approach to art. Early in his career, Jed Martin started a photographic catalogue of all industrially produced things—a conceivable but impossible endeavor. Cindy Sherman appears to be making a catalogue of the human types contemporary American society produces—inconceivable because we are not types but people.

Unlike Jed Martin’s creator Michel Houellebecq, Sherman knows that. She uses the mechanical eye to capture humanity; Jed’s eye seems to be made not of tissue but of metal, a cell only capable of seeing stereotypes. He shows, she reveals. Reading him you snigger imperiously; seeing her you question each thread you are wearing and your very skin.

She is an artist and he is a critic. If properly handled, the two endeavors need not be mutually exclusive. Baudelaire did both very well—poems on the one hand, reviews on the other, or poems so beautifully biting that you can’t see the seams between the beauty and the bite.

“The question of beauty is secondary in painting,” writes Houellebecq in one of the many didactic disquisitions that interrupt his narration, “the great painters of the past were considered so when they had developed a vision of the world at once coherent and innovative.”

Houellebecq sees things clearly and he sketches with a sharp point, but his vision is dated; it is the same old adulterated Christianity rotted into romanticism that in France has passed for reality since Flaubert’s time. It is real enough to be funny but not real enough to be true. When applied to people it is deleterious, but it is effective when applied to art, ideas, and society.

“William Morris’s essential principle,” Houellebecq writes in another disquisition, “is that conception and execution must never be separated.”

As photographer and model, as well as make-up artist, director, casting agent, commissioner, sitter, and executioner, Cindy Sherman embodies that concept; and like William Morris she has found a way to make it commercially viable.

She’s cornered the market with her vertically integrated, high-margin production and distribution of portraits. The lady has a monopoly, so why isn’t anyone invoking the Sherman Antitrust Act? Because she succeeds in making us trust her. We can clearly see that though she attacks, she always shoots herself first.

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Houellebecq usually appears in his books through his detached and disillusioned heroes. In The Map and The Territory he is there in person—Michel Houellebecq, author—reading Tocqueville in Ireland before being brutally murdered in a France that has become a theme-park version of itself.

As his own character, Houellebecq focuses on his flaws. As her own model, Sherman treats her beauty as an accessory without making the beginner’s mistake of falling into an ugliness as easy as prettiness can be. Her constant self-portraits are less self-indulgent than his self-flagellation; where she manages to take pictures without making clichés, he seems incapable of producing anything else.

A scene with Jed looking at faded papers concludes with “things and beings have a life span,” and a Christmas dinner between Jed and his father ends on “human relations, after all, are a very small thing.”

In The Map and The Territory, we are given such stock figures as the lonely artist driven by an imperative above himself, the ambitious but passionate Russian, and the bitter, mal baisé PR woman.

“What he is really interested in, is not sex, but the organization of production,” says Houellebecq of the 19th-century French philosopher Charles Fourier. Replacing “sex” with “human relations,” we can say the same of Houellebecq.

“Yes, it’s true,” his eponymous fictional character almost admits, “even if my real subject had been the industrial process, without characters I couldn’t do anything.”

So he pulls a few types out of a sociology handbook as an ambitious and misguided misanthrope picks people like pebbles to strew along his path. He cobbles together a story as a package.

“I think I’ve more or less finished with the world as narration,” says the fictional Michel Houellebecq, “the world of novels and films, the world of music as well. I’m now only interested in the world as juxtaposition—that of poetry and painting.”

Unlike Houellebecq, Sherman has an endless supply of characters, since she is creating them stroke by stroke rather than picking them ready-made off the rack; and since she didn’t feel compelled to go through the motions of a story, she made stills that she shows untitled.

Jed Martin titled his first solo show The map is more important than the territory. If life is the territory, then the novel is its map. Houellebecq’s books are novels just like a dot on a map is Paris.

Untitled (The Cow Jumps Over the Moon), 1937–38 by Willem de Kooning

The de Kooning show just closed at MoMA, and I just finished reading The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Yergin.

We are as obsessed with oil as de Kooning was with oil paints. Trying to follow US energy policy is as pendulous as following de Kooning’s swings from abstract to representational and as grotesque as some of his figures.

From Pennsylvania to the Strait of Hormuz, The Quest has great locations, is packed with breathless story lines, and we meet lots of fascinating people: Edison, Ford, Einstein, and Haagen-Smit, the “father of smog.”

But everything is a battle for Yergin. “The world abruptly changed….The seemingly immutable structure of global confrontation had suddenly buckled,” he writes, referring first to the 1973 oil embargo, then to the opening of new countries to foreign investment in the 1990s.

Good thing it isn’t the Earth itself that’s so wildly oscillating, only “the Modern World,”  i.e., the energy industry. Because that’s what the book is about—an industry trying to find markets for its products and succeeding beyond its wildest dreams.

De Kooning said flesh was the reason oil paints were invented, but he used them to power everything: cloth, muscle, teacups, tables, faces, and even space. With oil paint, you can go through things without consuming them and touch things without polluting them.

As for petroleum, it was first used for illumination. Just when it was about to lose that market to electricity the automobile came along, and then an even bigger motor to fuel: The Global Economy.

In 1906 grain prices were low and farmers unhappy, so Teddy Roosevelt lifted the alcohol tax and ethanol developed as a fuel. Later it was banned along with other alcohols during Prohibition. In 1971 Nixon established price controls; in 1981 Reagan repealed them. In 1979 Carter had solar panels installed on the White House roof; in 1986 they were dismantled—along with the R&D programs they symbolized.

“There are many parts to the quest, but fundamental to it, and underpinning everything else, is the search for knowledge, which advances technology and promotes innovation,” writes Yergin, making Texas oil men, Kazak dictators, and Omani sheiks the equivalent of mystics or Enlightenment thinkers.

In his painting Excavation, de Kooning draws on the rich deposit of art history and through applied thought and studied technique gives each line, black as pitch or bright as the sun, its own motive force.

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Yergin writes:

There is one key energy source that most people do not think of as an energy source. Sometimes it is called conservation; sometimes efficiency. It is hard to conceptualize and hard to mobilize yet it can make the biggest contribution of all to the energy balance in the years immediately ahead.

But savings are not a source, just like a revenue shortfall is not a loss. A loss is something that existed then disappeared, like fossil fuels or forests when they are burned; a revenue shortfall is something that could have happened but didn’t. Fond as he is of the conditional, Yergin should know the difference.

It might not have happened had Saddam not gone to war.…The result is something that would have been unimaginable without the circumstances created by the price crash.

Yergin uses the conditional to talk of economic history but never questions the conditions. The idea that energy is something that must be bought and will come to you through a grid is a given. De Kooning takes conditions and bends them to his will. Under his brush’s mechanical movements the grid becomes a web, shapes are made boundless, surges are stilled, and energy can be stored forever in a simple canvas.

The financial markets and the rising tide of investor money were having increasing impact on the oil price. This is often described as speculation. But speculation is only part of the picture, for oil was no longer only a physical commodity; it was also becoming a financial instrument, a financial asset. Some called this process the “financialization” of oil. Whatever the name, it was a process that had been building up over time.

Speculation or financialization, loss or shortfall, abstract or non-representational, potato or potahto! But the terms are important; it matters whether you call things by their name or use a euphemism.

When they say “energy security” what they really mean is unimpeded access to cheap energy sources, presented as part of a seemingly immutable world order.

But “being anti-traditional,” de Kooning reminds us, “is just as corny as being traditional.”

In the US, ethanol—a non-traditional and renewable energy source—is made mostly from corn. It is not proven however that it pollutes less, and if we consider its entire production process, it may in fact increase both food prices and pollution.

Besides, it’s still the same old reaction, combustion, the first one we happened to get a handle on, but there are others, chemical or mechanical. In combustion, something will be consumed and something released. But for what? Rather than the source, let us look at the term.

Things aren’t looking too good these days, says Slavoj Zizek in his latest book, Living in the End Times.

The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its “four riders of the apocalypse” are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself…and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.

What the devil could he mean by “apocalyptic zero point”—a revelation, a revolution, a shift, an exhaustion, an implosion, an explosion?

[W]e are bombarded from all sides with injunctions to recycle personal waste, placing bottles, newspapers, etc., in the appropriate bins. In this way, guilt and responsibility are personalized—it is not the entire organization of the economy which is to blame, but our subjective attitude which needs to change.

He calls it an “ideological trick,” and it’s one of the oldest in the book. As personalized guilt was a hallmark of Christianity, diffused responsibility is one of democracy’s trademarks.

Badiou was right to claim that today the name of the ultimate enemy is not capitalism, empire, exploitation, or anything similar, but democracy itself. It is the “democratic illusion,” the acceptance of democratic mechanisms as providing the only framework for all possible change, which prevents any radical transformation of capitalist relations.

How radical were some of these so-called transformations? Were they revolutions blowing the whole thing to smithereens, seminal events setting new patterns, or merely vents allowing the system to blow some steam and keep going?

Zizek walks us through the last half-century’s successive insurrections. May ’68 failed politically but won socially with its loosening of mores. The anti-communism revolts of 1989 won politically as communism collapsed, but they lost socially. He says “the new post communist society with its combination of wild capitalism and nationalism is not what the dissidents were fighting for.” He dubs this year’s London riots as “pure irrational revolt without any program.”

Like the steam engines that launched it and that it launched, the system—call it industrial, capitalist, or democratic—is well supplied with safety valves (or in psychoanalytical terms, defense mechanisms).

After taking a line from quantum physics, Zizek compares our current situation with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—which he uses as chapter headings for his book.

Who died, though? A particular idea of what constitutes revolution? And is it such a sad thing that the hedge of piques and bayonets has turned to pointed fingers? They’re pointing rather lamely—not being as sharp, they’re not as fatal.

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Will we lament that we are no longer the teeming masses? Individuals are harder to make a team of, but they are therefore harder to yoke. And their numbers are growing exponentially.

The limitation of our freedom that becomes palpable with global warming is the paradoxical outcome of the very exponential growth of our freedom and power, that is, of our growing ability to transform nature around us, up to and including destabilizing the very framework for life.

A rather limited view of freedom. If we’re looking for a culprit it must be the one who is getting fatter, not the one who is getting stronger.

Marshes are trod upon and bees are dying en masse, but one behemoth is still thriving. It is so evolved that it can breathe the most pestilential air, so resilient it can absorb any criticism. Though it is difficult to fight against, it is not too disagreeable to live in the belly of that beast.

Perhaps therein lies the fundamental “contradiction” of contemporary “postmodern” capitalism: while its logic is de-regulatory, “anti-statal,” nomadic and deterritorializing, etc., its key tendency…signals a strengthening of the State…and its legal and other apparatuses. What one can discern on the horizon is thus a society in which personal libertarianism and hedonism co-exist with (and are sustained by) a complex web of regulatory State mechanisms.

Zizek is in the thick of it, looking for signs of the future in the entrails of Islamic terrorists, Austrian pedophiles, and B movies; diagnosing with the terms of psychoanalysis and quantum physics, which states by the way “that it is impossible to simultaneously measure the present position while also determining the future motion of a particle.”

We can’t escape the forces of physics; what about the illusions of power?

[T]he lesson of the 20th century is that victory ends either in restoration (return to the state-power logic) or an infernal cycle of self-destructive purification. This is why Badiou proposes replacing purification with subtraction: instead of “winning” (taking power) one maintains a distance towards state power, one creates spaces subtracted from State.

Which brings us to literature. Julian Barnes just won the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sense of An Ending. Like Living in the End Times, it also deals with time, history, and power. It talks of time without hubris and history of the personal sort. It also speaks of power—not so much as a paradox or a contradiction, but as a mystery because it emanates from a woman. At the end, there’s even a revelation.

Art Basel Miami 2011

In Miami Beach on Monday morning, the convention center was strewn with cardboard, Scotch Tape, Styrofoam peanuts, and other packing litter. The hotel bars were littered with hung-over Europeans loitering over their Scotch and peanuts, the aftermath of Art Basel Miami Beach.

For ten years now Basel has exported a very successful contemporary art fair, the summit for art dealers worldwide. And for a little over two decades it has exported banking rules, voluntary directives agreed upon by a summit of central bankers from around the world.

Basel I was adopted in 1988, principally to establish credit-risk ratings, ranging from zero for home-country sovereign debt to one hundred for corporate debt. In 2004 came Basel II, trying to set guidelines on how much capital a bank should maintain; and in 2008 came Basel III in response to the crisis.

It is not surprising that both Art Basel and the Basel Accords came to us from the same alpine city. Art and finance have always been linked, and before drifting across the Alps to Switzerland, both came from Italy.

I recently received several things from Italy: two cans of homemade olive oil from San Miniato, an exhibition catalogue from Florence (Money and Beauty. Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities—at the Palazzo Strozzi, a fascinating show if anyone is in the area), and from Siena the news that Monte dei Paschi, the world’s oldest bank, was at risk of going under.

From Florence to Florida and from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first, what has changed?

There are many bankers at Art Basel Miami Beach. In the fifteenth century bankers went to fairs, too—not to sip champagne but in the province of Champagne. Behind their bench with their abacus and scales they counted florins. When one of them went bust, his bench was cut in two to symbolize his demise—banca rotta, broken bench, bankruptcy.

Florence was a major banking center in those days and was very rich; it also suffered from spiritual unrest. Under friar Savonarola’s leadership, gli Arrabiati, the Angry Ones (also known as i Piagnoni, the Whiners)—were calling for more stringent moral standards. Displaying a keen sense of showmanship, they collected fancy clothes, paintings, books, and other symbols of luxurious decadence and burned them on the town square.

Higher moral standards are also what they are asking for in Zuccotti Park, yes? Except they seem to have abandoned the introspective and confessional aspects. On top of finger-pointing, Savonarola and his followers also practiced self-flagellation.

After the whole bonfire-of-the-vanities thing, Florence banned usury. Bankers came up with convoluted new stratagems to turn what on the surface was a letter of credit—a simple money transfer from one place to another—into an interest-bearing loan.

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After the mid-1980s in America, liberalization led to financial innovations, and bankers came up with convoluted new stratagems to turn credit into derivatives, subprimes, and SIVs. These innovations delved below the surface, offshore, and into the shadows.

Florence in the fifteenth century was split between its vocation as a beacon of light and purity (a City of God, a New Jerusalem) and its position as a center for international finance and the consumption of luxury goods (silk from China, Egyptian cotton, leather, perfume, and jewels).

Bankers in fifteenth-century Florence were so wealthy that even rulers envied them. When Galeazzo Sforza, the son of the Duke of Milan, visited the Palazzo Medici in April of 1459, he was amazed at all he saw. “All this cannot come from mere money,” he exclaimed, gaping at the Fra Angelico paintings and the Donatello sculptures.

Money could buy it all in Florence in those days—a prayer as well as a prostitute, the first costing less than the second, which offended the devout.

Cosimo the Elder, founder of the Medici dynasty, once asked Pope Eugene IV what he could do to guarantee that God would “grant him mercy and the preservation of his earthly goods.” It would seem they were conflicting demands, but Eugene said both could be achieved by giving 10,000 florins to restore the convent of San Marco.

What else has changed? In fifteenth-century Tuscany, they had the Mount of Piety, a lending institution set up by the Church to replace usury with charity and Jewish moneylenders with Christian pawn shops.

Nowadays we have the IMF, set up by victorious nations after World War II to replace colonization with debt bondage.

Things are changing, though. The IMF used to lend to Latin America; now it is trying to borrow from them. Christine Lagarde was on tour last week, doing a “historic about-turn” and soliciting South American funds to help solve Europe’s debt crisis.

In a dramatic reversal, Cosimo, at the height of his power, was sentenced to prison and exiled in 1433. His crime, according to Machiavelli, was farsi grande—acting bigger than his boots.

“The Bible dictates that man should earn a living by the sweat of his brow, work was God’s plan for man, and usury is not work. On the other hand, it is access to credit that makes it possible to rise from one’s rank and subvert the status quo,” explains one of the essays in the exhibition catalogue.

Another talks of sumptuary rules that dictated how much gold a woman could wear and how many yards of fabric she could drape from her dress. (The ladies quickly found ways to get around the rules.)

These days you’d have to pay a girl to wear more than two, three yards. What else has changed? Men used to wear tights, and only noblemen were allowed to wear red ones. Now tights are for women, and hosiery is no longer underwear but often the main article of clothing—a fashion development that has handsomely profited my friend Francesco, who makes tights in the Tuscan hills. With the profits from the tights, Francesco bought himself a farm where he produces olive oil for his pleasure and his friends. I received two cans of it last month: liquid, transparent, golden, it is just as we want our banks to be!

The threads for making the tights come from all over the world: Italian wool, cotton from Turkey, cashmere and silk from the Orient, nylon and Lycra from, say, DuPont in Texas—made of crude oil, but that’s another story. They spin and dye the thread in San Miniato, sew two tubes together to make a pair of tights, and ship them to Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman. Art-world beauties buy them; sheathed in them, they will then sell art at the Miami Beach Convention Center. It is all tied together by a thread!

And therefore hanging by a thread? The Basel Accords aim to reduce risk by improving bank’s Liquidity Coverage Ratios and giving investors a better picture of the risks each institution runs; but opponents warn their implementation “will decrease annual GDP growth by 0.05 to 0.15 percentage points.”

About to be burned, Savonarola warned from the pyre: “O merchants, abandon your usury, return the ill acquired and the goods of others, otherwise you will lose everything.”

In the fifteenth century, friars predicted the future; now it’s done by numbers. Men wore the tights; now women do. Bankers used to commission art; now they invest in it.

What else has changed? In those days, bankruptcy was just a broken bench.

1956 Cadillac Eldorado

I just drove to Kansas and back, 2600 miles listening to the radio and pondering American industry, the heartland, affairs of the heart, and other organs.

On either side of the road were billboards advertising psychological release—deferred (up in heaven) or immediate (down at the Adult Superstore). This partly explains the problem: intense belief in the deferred and intense practice in the immediate.

The intense belief in competition coupled with the intense practice of monoculture led to the Dust Bowl. The fervent belief in monogamy wed to the fervent practice of adultery leads to a whole lot of D-I-V-O-R-C-E, as Tammy Wynette sings.

“It’s hard to conjure a more purely competitive entity than the human spermatozoa,” write Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá in their book Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray and What It Means for Modern Relationships.

Well, there’s American industry. That’s a purely competitive entity. Or at least it used to be.

What happened? Bob Lutz, former executive at Chrysler, Ford, and GM, offers an explanation in his new book Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business.

According to Lutz, American industry’s demise can be blamed on acronyms—“the MBA bean counters” and the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) regulations Congress passed after the 1973 oil crisis mandating automakers to reengineer for higher fuel efficiency.

In Lutzian mythology, before the fall came the Golden Age when car designers such as Harley Earl and Bill Mitchell let their imaginations and their flamboyance run wild, before management started meddling with design and government started meddling with engineering. Before the Japanese penetrated the market.

In Sex at Dawn, the Golden Age was the time of the hunter-gatherers, when roots and grains grew wild, before humans started meddling with the soil and men started meddling with women’s wombs. Before outside influences penetrated our natural drives.

Agriculture brought private property, which brought monogamy: “Because of private property, for the first time in the history of our species, paternity became a crucial concern.” Vegetable seeds in specific furrows led to human seeds in particular burrows.

Religion enforced the fall from sexual innocence, but Ryan and Jethá’s thesis is that science only reinforced the same old story. The research universities preached the same faith as the cathedrals. The numerals concurred with the cardinals and the lab rats with the church mice:

Writing in the prestigious journal Science, anthropologist Owen Lovejoy suggested, “The nuclear family and human sexual behavior may have their origin long before the dawn of the Pleistocene [1.8 million years ago]. Well-known anthropologist Helen Fisher concurs, writing, “Is monogamy natural?” She gives a one-word answer: “Yes.” She then continues, “Among human beings…monogamy is the rule.”

From black robes to white coats—different garb, same theory. Matrimony is the way to go because it is sacred. Monogamy is the way to go because it is natural—which is the new sacred.

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And the most natural thing of all—the driving force behind everything we do—is competition, which is also sacrosanct.

Donald Symons describes the competition between men and women in his seminal The Evolution of Human Sexuality:

Men and women differ in their sexual natures because…the sexual desires and dispositions that were adaptive for either sex were for the other tickets to reproductive oblivion.

Bob Lutz describes the competition between GM and Toyota:

GM’s relationship with Toyota was unusual. It appeared to be a case of mutual admiration. Toyota admired GM’s huge size and global reach, while GM, finally aware of the competitive threat, wanted to glean the secret of Toyota’s enviable quality record and manufacturing prowess.

Men and GM may be big and strong, but women and Toyota have the manufacturing prowess, and it is this competitive friction that produces babies and satisfied consumers.

Competition, says Lutz, is what made the tailfins grow longer. Competition, say Jethá and Ryan, is what made men’s testes grow heavier. This gives us testy men and gas-guzzlers. Competition may give us what we want, but does it really give us what we need?

“[T]he only real vehicular ‘need’ that most customers have,” observes Lutz, deriding the bean counter’s obsession with market research, “is easily fulfilled by a two-year-old used car…everything else is psychology and ‘wants’…‘consumer turn-ons’ that research alone won’t find.”

As for Ryan and Jethá, they whip out the research-heavy artillery—anthropology, neurology, behavioral psychology, paleo-archeology, primatology—to pinpoint our turn-ons and prove that monogamy is unnatural.

Monogamy goes against some of our instincts. We needn’t drag in bonobos to prove it. Tammy Wynette knew it already—though it is certainly worth repeating: “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman/Giving all your love to just one man.”

But isn’t the beauty of this particular group-living primate that it can transcend nature, adapt to any condition, and take another’s fur if it gets too cold?

“In the early years of the new century, GM was cash-poor and wanted out of the then moribund Fiat. The latter played its card well: it cost GM $2 billion for the divorce,” writes Lutz.

“Is abandonment of one’s family,” ask Ryan and Jethá, “the ‘adult’ option for dealing with the inherent conflict between socially sanctioned romantic ideals and the inconvenient truth of human passion?”

If we’re going to talk of “the inconvenient truth of human passion,” we’d better turn to literature.

In Missouri motels at night, I read Sacher-Masoch. For him, the Golden Age was in ancient Greece when naked nymphs roamed free, “desire followed the glance, and pleasure followed desire.”

In our chilly northern climes, Venus must wear sable to survive and wield a whip to get what she wants. “Is there any greater cruelty for the lover than the beloved woman’s infidelity?” the dilettante Severin asks her in Venus in Furs.

Yes, there is. But that brings us to the question of power. We all need and want masters; but, sanctioned or not by those with master’s degrees, let us not be the slaves to received ideas.

Emporia, KS is home to the biggest producer of windshield ice-scrapers in the United States, which does not mean that it is home to the world’s biggest windshield ice-scraper factories. Those are in China and Ciudad Juarez.

But does America’s decrease in industrial output necessarily mean her loss of power?

A woman’s power is her ability to attract. America still does that, doesn’t she? She’s still pretty and still pretty powerful. She’s merely fickle, as beautiful women can be, shifting her favors from one industry to another. She used to bank on industrial horsepower; now she spurs on the banks.

When a wanton lady shifts her favors, only egos get bruised. When Congress does, it can lead to crisis.

In sex we want the crisis. It leaves us spent, but for most that’s where the greatest pleasure lies. In finance the crisis can come from over-spending. Though no one claims to want it, for a few that’s where the greatest profit lies.

David Grossman. To the End of the Land. Vintage (reprint edition), 2011. 672pp.

Dave Grossman. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Back Bay Books (revised edition), 2009. 416pp.

This is a story of two writers named Grossman—one David, the other Dave. Both of them write about killing—one via fiction, the other using real-life research.

David Grossman is an Israeli writer whose novel To the End of the Land tells of a woman named Ora fleeing the news of her son’s possible killing in the Army.

Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman is a professor of military science at Arkansas State University and the founder of the science of killology.

“When we examine the responses of creatures confronted with aggression from their own species,” says Lt. Col. Dave Grossman in his recently reissued study On Killing, “when the fight option is utilized, it is almost never to the death. Submission is a surprisingly common response….Our first step in the study of killing is to understand the existence, extent, and nature of the average human being’s resistance to killing his fellow human.”

Men have to be taught not only how to load and shoot, but to actually be able to load and shoot at someone.

Language is an important tool in this type of conditioning, like running in step with your fellow recruits behind the drill sergeant and repeating, “I want to kill, rape, and eat dead babies.”

Hannah Arendt wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem:

None of the various “language rules,” carefully contrived to deceive and to camouflage, had a more decisive effect on the mentality of the killers than this first war decree of Hitler, in which the word for “murder” was replaced by the phrase “to grant a mercy death.”

In American military training it is called engaging a target. In war, the enemy is a target to be engaged.

World War I veteran and military historian S. L. Marshall observed that “most soldiers seem to have an inner resistance to firing their weapon in combat,” and he set about correcting that. Marshall suggested that, like Henry Ford in his factories, the US Army should apply scientific methods to produce soldiers who would actually shoot their guns in battle. Only about 15% to 20% of them did in World War II, which rose to 55% in Korea and 90% to 95% in Vietnam—which according to this particular metric would be our most successful engagement. Marshall improved shooting exercises by changing the target to a man, a life-sized and moving dummy, more realistic than concentric circles of black and white.

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“One of the things that amazed me,” says a Vietnam medic in Lt. Col. Grossman’s book, “is how many bullets can be fired during a firefight without anyone getting hurt.”

Killing is rather like fecundating: millions of bullets, only one hit. And like sex for the Victorians, Grossman says it is partly because we repress frank discussion of violence that it has become such a problem. We are never exposed anymore to the slaughtering of a pig or to a grandfather dying in the room upstairs and laid out in the parlor. Actual death is hidden away while visions of virtual death are widespread, which Grossman says is like applying military-conditioning techniques to the youth at large: realistic video games toning the reflexes, blood and gore on the cinema screen associated with the pleasurable responses of candy in the boy’s mouth and his date in the next seat.

In David Grossman’s novel a character called Avram is tortured to within an inch of his life. “It would have been better if they’d gone that extra distance” is all he has to say upon liberation. But there are worse things one can do to a man than to torture and kill him, says Lt. Col. Dave Grossman—for example, making him kill:

In WWI 504,000 men were lost to the fighting effort because of psychiatric collapse and at one point psychiatric casualties were discharged faster than new recruits were being drafted in. In the 1982 incursion onto Lebanon, Israeli psychological casualties were twice as high as the number of dead.

The symptoms of these collapses are not found in civilian populations exposed to the same risks as soldiers. Killing, not fear of being killed, is what murders sanity.

Wolves actually don’t kill each other that much, but men do. Animals are nicer than us, Lt. Col. Grossman seems to say—“Aggression yes. Competitiveness yes. But a very tiny level of actual violence.” To their credit, the ancients were more like animals. As Professor Arthur Nock of Harvard was fond of saying, wars between the Greek city-states were “only slightly more dangerous than American football.” Beasts and Greeks are more peaceful than us.

Though Mexico has only a little over a third the population of the USA, there were nearly as many murders here last year. Here in the capital, men on the subway read El Grafico, whose front page is indeed very graphic and equally divided between Ares and Aphrodite: one half for dead bodies under an overpass, the other for a girl’s naked backside.

Up north, when experts look for causes of violence they drag in lead paint and unwed mothers, overlooking power structures and laws—those made in Congress and the courthouses and those of the market. Down here there is quite clearly a war going on. Shots fired in Juarez, Mexico, have been known to land on the walls of City Hall in El Paso, Texas.

On the Day of the Dead, the price of flowers goes up at the cemetery. I arrived too late to see the families picnicking on the tombs of their loved ones, but I read about it in the paper.

We never learn if Ora’s son dies or not, but in the early morning of August 12th, 2006, novelist David Grossman received the real-life visit from which his fictional character had been fleeing: His son had been killed in Lebanon.

At the end of his book, Grossman—the killologist, not the novelist—brings up the point that if our helicopter Medevacs, 911 operators, paramedics, and trauma centers weren’t so advanced, our murder rate would be much higher—three or four times higher, according to the Harvard and University of Massachusetts study he quotes.

There were 4.8 murders per 100,000 people in the United States last year. Multiplied by four if the attempts had not been foiled by medical technology, that’s 19.2—just above the 18.4 per hundred thousand recorded in Mexico.

On Lake Geneva I float, looking at France across the water, where the grass is not greener but the prices are much lower.

I don’t know how it works exactly, but I gather it has something to do with floating exchange rates: Things being unstable everywhere else, traders rush to buy some steady old Swiss francs and the price of bread goes up at the Migros supermarket.

Looking across, one can’t help but compare, just as looking up one tends to envy and looking down to pity—a nicer feeling, though not to be confused with rectitude.

Across is France where life is cheaper, below the murky depths, and above the Alps, where a young Hegel went walking over two hundred years ago.

As he noted in his diary, he had a nice holiday though his feet were blistered and the mountains underwhelmed him:

The sight of these eternally dead masses provokes nothing in me but the uniform and at length boring idea: it is.

Having read Rousseau, he’d expected so much more. Rousseau exulted about the Alps:

Meditations here take on a certain grand and sublime character, proportionate to the objects that strike us, a certain tranquil voluptuousness that has nothing acrid or sensual. It seems that in elevating oneself above the sojourn of men, we leave behind all low and earthly sentiments, and that in measure as we approach the ethereal regions, the soul catches some of their inalterable purity.

Rousseau peopled this exhilarating air—in which it was impossible to sin—with peasants so honest and innocent that they didn’t even put a price on their bread and cheese, enjoining the traveler to name his own.

Hegel discovered they didn’t put a price on things because they thought they could get more from the tourists that way. If you gave them less than market price they complained; if you gave them just the right amount, they left without a “thank you” or “farewell.” Only if you overpaid did they smile with sweet peasant innocence.

No pure primitives for Hegel then, just calculating Oberlanders. No inspiring nature, just brute matter and cold necessity: It is, nothing more to be said.

In one trip he killed two birds: nature and the noble savage. To make up for it, he invented history.

Just as Rousseau had taken these valleys—which until then had been considered hideous, almost evil, an obstacle to be traversed on the way to Italy—and filled them with his rich fancy, inventing the Alps.

If men have invented such grand things as the Alps and history, think of what else they could come up with!

I left the lake, its surface wavily reflecting the mountains like a Hodler painting, and a lyric of Hölderlin’s echoing in my water-filled ears:

…man knows
Much that is good; but astonished as the animals
He looks toward heaven….

Toward heaven I headed, in the Montreux-Berner Oberland train.

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Hoping to elevate my thoughts I read the paper, though it made me feel rather like Hegel felt when faced with a glacier:

We have seen the glaciers today at a half-hour’s distance and their vision presents no interest. We can call it a new way of seeing that however offers no new activity of the spirit.

I’d rather read Hegel’s Bernese diary. His descriptions are quite beautiful, like this one of a waterfall:

A thin trickle of water surges from a narrow cleft in the rock then falls back vertically in more substantial streams; streams that continually draw the spectator’s eye, but that he can never fix or follow, for their image dissolves itself at every instant; each stream is at every second chased by another, and in this cascade, the spectator eternally sees the same image, and at the same time he sees that it is never the same. At some distance we see some smoke billowing from a cleft and we understand that it is the spume produced by the fall.

That reminds me of the news, too: a stream of information, a few facts repeated endlessly from paper to paper, from country to country, with the appearance of difference but a deadening unity of message, the same noise, white like the spume, and a little smoke billowing out in a constant emergency. A dizzying effect.

They’ve come up with a certain lense, the journalists, that they call objective, and through which everything is in the same flat focus. The next-door neighbor or the ends of the Earth all become relevant in the same way. It fills the spectator with a dizzying and debilitating mix of envy and pity. Is that on purpose?

One can choose to step away—a little to the left or a little to the right—it doesn’t matter as long as you’re out from under the cascade’s full downfall.

Hegel reminds us:

Looking up is dizzying only when one is at the foot of a vertical wall: if one is, for example, below a church spire and raises one’s eyes to the summit, but not when the eye can measure the height and is at a certain distance.

The train paused in a valley; not the end of the line, but my stop. How crisp and clear the air through which the mountains beamed down at me! How could one be disappointed by this?

But at first glimpse, Wordsworth, too, had been disappointed:

...That day we first
Beheld the summit of Mont Blanc, and griev’d
To have a soulless image on the eye
Which had usurp’d upon a living thought
That never more could be….

But further progress through the gorges and passes did:

make rich amends,
And reconcil’d us to realities.

Some realities need not be reconciled. It is a reality that the prices in the Migros are a direct result of financial-market manipulation; a reality but not a necessity. It is but doesn’t have to be.

Silvio Berlusconi

On the blue Mediterranean I float, reading:

It’s only now that we realize that the gleaming wealth of the past years was shored up by a perverse conjunction of bank loans, dizzying rounds of postdated, overdrawn checks, [and] the extreme illusionism of an acrobatic Mandrake.

It refers to a family, not a country, and it is fiction, not fact—from a novel called With the Worst Intentions by Alessandro Piperno, a book which is well-intended but not very good since it is as filled with stock characters as the newspapers are filled with stock prices. So I might as well read the papers.

From Greek drama to Italian commedia dell’arte, they are very theatrical this summer. The conclusions are often foreordained, but surprise is not necessary to a good spectacle: In classical tragedy we already know that the protagonists will die at the end, in Hollywood movies that the lovers will kiss, and in the American Congress that the ceiling will be raised. In fact, there is no ceiling—it’s the sky.

And in Italy? With the man in charge being both puppet (with a face like a plastic mask) and puppet-master (pulling the strings), the show is sure to be extra-exciting.

“Done!” exulted Berlusconi on August 29th. “It was hard but we managed to keep our hands out of Italians’ coat pockets.”

La Repubblica sets the scene in a style closer to political thrillers than newspaper reporting:

When the procession of blue cars left Villa San Martino after seven hours of something closer to a union negotiation than a summit, Berlusconi remained alone in his house with Alfano and Ghedini, and that’s when he breathed a sigh of relief. He felt like uncorking the champagne he had put on ice to celebrate this watershed event that, he says, “will smooth the road till 2013.”

But reprieve is short-lived in commedia dell’arte, a lively genre full of plot twists and comical misunderstandings:

What [Berlusconi] cannot know is that at the very same instant, far from here, the experts at the Ministry of Finance are already running the numbers on the maneuver just accomplished, turning it inside-out like a sock to discover that at least 4.2 billion euros were missing of the 45 [billion] they had been decreed to recover.

Until Berlusconi finds out, champagne! Though “a lot will depend on the reaction in Brussels and in the markets, today and in the coming days.”

If Italians want to be more appealing to stockbrokers and ratings agencies, The Economist has a few suggestions for them:

One way of improving matters would be to privatize some of the public universities…another option would be to get public universities to compete more vigorously.

Italy is not appealing because her growth rate is closer to that of St. Kitts or Botswana than to other developed nations, and if she doesn’t grow fast enough, it’s because her universities are public, her businesses family-run, her trades corporatized, and a large part of her economy informal.

Back in the 1990s it seemed to some that Italy was on the threshold of institutional transformation, [and that] the “clean hands” corruption trials would allow Italy to become a more normal democracy in which power alternates between two main parties providing strong government.

By “normal,” they mean more like America: privatized, competitive, and kept busy with the restless alternation between two parties. For an Italian, however, it is more normal to strut on the piazza in the evening to see who has the nicest sunglasses than to compete on the international stage and spend time changing for dinner rather than changing the system.

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Not quite the perfect Homo economicus. Though where that elusive animal is meant to have his habitat, I have no idea. I’ve read about him in magazines and second-rate novels, but I’ve never actually spotted one.

I did come across some lovely species of local fauna at the café, though. Like Ingenua adorabilis, who was spawned by Bologna’s public university. She is thirty years old, has no career, and lives with her parents; but she speaks four languages with the most delightful accent, can converse in them intelligently on art or politics, and looks as beautiful in a bathing suit as in an evening dress.

Or Sarda selvatica. Another fine specimen, Sarda selvatica runs a shop with her mother—a family business open only in the summer, during which she can still be seen for about four hours each day at the beach, her tangled hair turning blonder, her bronzed body browner, and her bottom line staying pretty much the same year after year.

Why expand if there is always enough money for a ristretto or an aperitivo at the café? Or if there’s always a friend to pay for it, who in the informal system here will never ask for it back or hold it above her head in any way? Though they may ask her if she has a job for their nephew in her shop—the insidious system of raccomandazioni, unimaginable in a great meritocracy such as America. Get rid of it, says The Economist, and be more like us. Would that include the power to print money recognized the world over that can then be loaned or given to others to ensure compliance, or is that a specific raccomandazione we’d rather keep for ourselves?

Italy is like a café, deplores The Economist, one that is family-run, hasn’t been renovated for years, and doesn’t even serve frappuccinos.

Here in Sardinia we spend many hours a day in such a café, chatting about the weather and who kissed whom the night before, and lazily passing around the papers.

“The liberation of Libya and the acquittal of DSK are the two big stories of the summer,” says a Frenchman at the next table. “What a dog,” he added with a salacious grin. “In Paris we’ve known about his shenanigans for years.”

“Oh, and what about the financial crisis, isn’t that a big story, too?” asked Ingenua adorabilis in her charming accent. “And by DSK’s shenanigans, do you mean the predatory lending imposed on weaker nations by his bloated institution or the forceful fondling imposed on the weaker sex by his swollen body?”

“The financial crisis? That’s not a story,” said the Frenchman, turning livid, “it’s a catastrophe.”

Is it, though?

The International Herald Tribune announces on its front page that “the much-anticipated meeting between President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany produced little that would provide quick relief to the anxieties of bond traders.” But is it really the role of the government to “provide quick relief to the anxieties of bond traders”?

Are we really that intertwined that the plight of speculators is a tragedy for all? We are all bonded, sure, but we are not all bond traders.

And isn’t anxiety part of their job since lending is a risky business? However much we try to control or calculate or regulate it, isn’t it like love—inherently risky?

When the Frenchman at the next table passed from current affairs to love affairs and started bemoaning his budding romance—the longing, the not knowing, the distance—we all told him to shut up.

“But what if it doesn’t work out, after all I’ve invested in it?” he whined.

Deal with it.

On the blue Aegean I float, reading:

Greek cities were at least for a while taken over by populist strongmen swept into power partly by the demand for radical debt relief.

This is not in the latest newspaper, but in a new book by anthropologist David Graeber called Debt: The First 5000 Years. It doesn’t refer to the last few months, but to turmoil in the city-states 2,500 years ago.

It was a time when “the poor,” as Aristotle wrote in his Constitution of the Athenians, “together with their wives and children, were enslaved to the rich.”

Which I suppose is any time after private property came to be, and cash money—which Aristotle views as a symbol. Graeber tells us it emerged in three places simultaneously: northern China’s great plains, the Ganges Valley, and right here in the lands surrounding the blue Aegean, on which I float.

We are just now in the islands around Patmos on a motorboat driven by Iannis—whose profile is as fine as his belly is full—and accompanied by Babbis, former gun-runner and cicerone to our motley crew of Swiss rock star, Roman dottore, Greek-American cyclist, Jewish Princess, and me.

Between the islands we progress, as Graeber progresses through the historical incarnations of debt and the bondage that follows it: from money used by nobody to money used only for ritual or social purposes, donations in temples, marriages, vergeld—paying two martin pelts if you cut off someone’s ear in a fight—to money used by everybody for everything, like a porne [prostitute] in the agora; people bought and sold, slavery, debt peonage, wage slavery.

Variations on the themes of money, might, the military, and the moral—our notions of which come straight from finance, says Graeber, with words such as reckoning, redemption, guilt, forgiveness, and sin all coined by bankers before the priests took them over. The Lord’s Prayer, in the original, encourages us to forgive not our trespasses but our debts, “as we forgive our debtors.”

So Graeber asks:

What precisely does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of the business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts?

It turns “morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic,” he says, “and by doing so [justifies] things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene.”

Sure, sophistry can do that, but so can hypocrisy. So can any tool that allows one to shirk responsibility.

As Hephaestus shirked, when after professing in words his love for Prometheus, he proceeded in deeds to chain him to the rock. Nothing personal. He was only doing his job.

“High-contriving son of Themis of Straight Counsel,” Aeschylus has him say, “this is not of your will nor of mine: yet I shall nail you in bonds of indissoluble bronze on this crag far from men.”

Let Hephaestus be the banks, just doing their job, objectively lending and expecting a return. Let Prometheus be everyone else—chained. Let Zeus be the laws of economics that ordain the shackling. Who, then, is to blame? Hephaestus for forging the chain? Zeus for ordering him to? Prometheus, who knew quite well what he was getting into when he defied Zeus?

Better find a scapegoat. Thankfully, there are quite a few of these fleet four-hoofed beasts here in the Greek hills.

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“The bottle blondes are to blame,” says my friend the Greek-American cyclist, “all the money left the country for peroxide”—and indeed, blondes are even more plentiful here than goats, their hair of a greenish tinge that makes their olive skin seem sickly yellow.

Others claim the euro is to blame for the current malaise. But would there have been less drama if there were still the drachma? It seems to me that you can call the little symbolons by any name you please and invest them any way you want, but you still cannot invest them with the magical power of inevitable, foolproof increase. They are cents, not seeds, and even seeds, when manipulated by American corporations, can end up not sprouting.

Bound to his sterile rock, Prometheus moans:

I groan, questioning when there shall come a time when He shall ordain a limit to my sufferings. What am I saying? I have known all before, all that shall be, and clearly known; to me nothing that hurts shall come with a new face.

It makes the tragic masks of surprise and indignation worn by officials rather comical—as if it were all out of the blue!

I put my book down and jumped into the water, scattered thoughts of the floating of the dollar floating through my buoyant body.

What is money, I pondered? A pile of gold under the World Trade Center? Or a huge IOU, as the primordial debt theorists say? In 1694 when a consortium of English bankers loaned William of Orange 1,200,000 pounds and in return received the right to print and circulate bank notes, the second modern national bank was born.

Or is money like language—a system of symbols? A dollar bill standing in for a pound of butter like a word does; and coins like words, always striving toward an equivalence they can never attain. Perfect equality of the thing said and the thing seen, of the thing sold and the amount it is sold for, the sum lent and the sum returned.

Which brings us to interest. Adding interest made usury and threw off balance the only exchange that truly was equivalent: Borrow an amount, return the same.

Language and money are both very flexible. We can twist them to suit our needs. In nautical terms “bailing out” is the ejection of water. In financial terms, it is the massive injection of liquidity. In martial terms, taking something from a rival that will not be given back is called “tribute.” In modern international relations, it is called “foreign debt.”

And if they actually were to ask for it all back? Chaos, fire, and brimstone raining down death and destruction. The apocalypse of John the Revelator’s visions.

This island of Patmos is the very spot where he received his revelation, and the cave where it occurred is open to visitors. Down the sun-warmed steps, past the monk in black with his long hair coiled, to the penumbra and candelabra, is the corner where St. John had the visions. A hole in the rock where he is said to have laid his hand to pull himself up is now lined with silver.

If you line a whole with silver, it is still a hole. If you throw more gold in it, it is still a hole. If you renamed it “slate,” however, you could wipe it clean! As the Sumerians did each time a new ruler came to the throne, as the ancient Jews did every seven years: Jubilee, forgive, forget, wipe it clean and start anew!

It wouldn’t be the end of the world, only the end of the world as we know it: a lifting of veils, a shedding of light, a revelation, which is what “apocalypse” actually means. When will that happen? Soon, said St. John two thousand years ago.

Like the society that sent him scurrying to his cave, we may not be very virtuous, but we are very virtual, our treasure transformed to ones and zeros on a computer screen. They have no substance, but they can still make a great din if they come crashing down. Crash go the symbolon like cymbals, crash goes the Dow, tumbling into the sea in widening circles ’til the ripples disappear on the blue Aegean.

The water dripping from my limbs, I climbed back up the ladder to the boat. Iannis served us ouzo.

“Better times ahead,” said Babbis, raising his glass. Turning to our Roman friend he added, “Now it’s your turn to get a slap from the Golden Boys.”

Next stop: Italy.

In his new book On China, Henry Kissinger looks at what makes China what it is. In his new book The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama attempts to explain why China is not Europe.

The first book is written by a diplomat. It is in large part a firsthand account and takes a micro view: Sino-American diplomacy in the second half of the twentieth century. The second book is written by a pedagogue. It is full of historical data and takes a macro approach: mankind, the last two million years. And while Fukuyama seems so appalled by Oriental despotism that he has no eye for Oriental wisdom, Kissinger is fascinated by both.

Kissinger is fascinated by Chinese diplomacy and its “meticulous analysis of long-term trends, careful study of tactical options, and detached exploration of operational decisions”—surely a refreshing change from American strategy, with its shallow analysis of short-term trends, careful study of public opinion, and impassioned exploration of dysfunctional decisions after they’ve been made in order to determine how they can be blamed on others.

Kissinger is fascinated by the Chinese people: “this paradoxical mass—at once obedient and independent, submissive and self-reliant, imposing limits less by direct challenges than by hesitance in executing orders they considered incompatible with the future of their family.” He is fascinated by their likewise paradoxical leaders: Mao Zedong reaching “far back into the classical Chinese tradition he was otherwise in the process of dismantling”; Zhou Enlai, the enabler and moderator of the endless purges; and Deng Xiaoping, demolishing at age eighty the system he’d ruthlessly fought for as a young man.

“Deng abandoned Mao’s continuous revolution,” writes Kissinger.

Did he really, though? If revolution is radical reappraisal—one generation burning the deeds of the previous—can’t we say that China is still engaged in this violent cycle? From the Cultural Revolution to “socialism with Chinese characteristics” to “one of the greatest per-capita GDP increases in human history,” it’s been changing while staying the same. And what about us; are we stagnating while insisting on constant change? As they say in Thailand, “same same but different.”

On China is a good book, a diplomat sharing some of the same qualities as a good novelist, such as the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes and convince indirectly. It is also an illuminating comparison of two civilizations. Kissinger talks of Confucius and confusion and Nixon and Reagan, and of Mao receiving Khrushchev in a swimming pool so that the Russian who couldn’t swim had to wear blow-up fins for their meeting. He talks of chess and weiqi, and in so doing he draws a picture of China and America and their differing views of war, mastery, and time.

At the end, Kissinger wonders about our future interactions. Since we have such different notions of victory, it might be tricky to know who’s winning or even when the game has ended. Lord Macartney, the first British ambassador to the Qing court, considered he’d won—though all his demands were rejected—because he knelt before the emperor instead of kowtowing.

In their records the Chinese made him kowtow anyway.

China was the first modern state, with a bureaucracy and taxes and an army by the third century BC: “eighteen hundred years before Europeans,” kowtows Francis Fukuyama, who proceeds to explain why they “failed to develop” a market economy like the capitalist one, “didn’t manage” to establish a strong supra-national Church like the Catholic one, or a common law like the British one.

He goes around the world, tracking such “failures”: China is great but too authoritarian, India wonderful but so unequal, Melanesia is minor and mired in kin relations. Returning from his grand tour with a sigh of relief, Fukuyama is satisfied that there is no place like home, where the showers are hot, the air-conditioning cold, and the democracy liberal.

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If Darwin’s full title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Fukuyama’s could be On the Origin of Political Order by Means of A Variety of Causes, or the Preservation of Favoured Nations in the Struggle for Liberal Democracy. That is what all flags point to for him: “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”—which he had already prophesied in The End of History.

So he is consistent with himself, as well as with European thought’s great inconsistent current, that paradoxical mix of faith and reason, faith in reason, actuated by some mysterious force—divine providence or the market’s invisible hand—but always pushing forward, progressing to some definite end. Thomas Moore had the good sense to place it in Utopia, and Marx saw it in the future and communism. For Fukuyama, it is conveniently located right here in America.

Sure, we’re progressing. In history, we’ve progressed from the “great men” paradigm to the scientific one.

Here is the “great men” approach, as parodied by Tolstoy at the end of War and Peace:

Louis XIV was a very proud and self-confident man. He had such and such mistress, and such and such ministers, and he governed France badly….By the end of the eighteenth century there gathered in Paris two dozen or so persons who started saying that all men were free and equal. Because of this in the whole of France people began to slaughter and drown each other. At this time there was a man of genius in France—Napoleon. He conquered everyone everywhere, i.e., killed a great many people because he was a great genius.

And here is the scientific approach, as practiced by Francis Fukuyama: “When a monkey or a human being succeeds in achieving high status, levels of serotonin, a critical neurotransmitter, are elevated.” Or: “The failure to balance [France’s] budget led to bankruptcy and the delegitimization of the state itself, a course that finally terminated in the French Revolution”—that is the economic, or pseudoscientific variant, also a European favorite.

“Since at least the time of David Hume,” says Fukuyama, “we have understood that it is not possible to verify causality through empirical data alone. With the rise of modern natural science however, we have theories of causation that can at least be falsified, through either controlled experiments or statistical analysis.”

Hume wanted us to know “how soon nature throws a bar to all our enquiries concerning causes, and reduces us to an acknowledgment of our ignorance” and that there are “no ideas, which occur in metaphysics, more obscure and uncertain, than those of power, force, energy or necessary connection.”

Drawn by the very obscurity perhaps, we keep exploring these dark recesses. Why not? We’re good at it, searching and sailing, shining theory’s tainted light into the folds of cliffs and brains.

In the thirteenth century, both authors tell us, China possessed a navy finer than any in Europe. They could have explored and conquered, but they didn’t.

Why? asks Fukuyama.

How can we use that information? schemes Kissinger.

Jonathan Franzen

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen came out last year, but since it has been called the novel of the century, I suppose it is still relevant.

Freedom is what is now called a “literary novel”; even an “ambitious literary novel,” as the author himself would describe it. Certainly its author is ambitious, and it is filled with ambitious characters.

Julien Sorel, the hero of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, was an ambitious character, which led him to ask himself how one should live. Joey Berglund, one of Freedom’s characters, is ambitious too, which leads him to ask himself how he can make a living, and fast.

So he buys spare parts that he sells to the Army, though he knows they are not the ones they need, and the Army buys them without checking anything but their bulk. Do they fit the Jeeps they are meant to fix? Who cares? They have the right weight.

Is Freedom an important novel? It sure weighs like one.

Let us leave it aside and turn to its author, for Franzen may be a better character than any he’s put on paper. His interviews are highly entertaining, sprinkled with gems such as: “Strong Motion was a novel written by a person to whom things were happening as he wrote it.”

He talks of “finding an audience” with the fervor that Christian mystics reserve for the Holy Grail. And like a pretty girl confessing with a shy smile that she loves flowers and teddy bears as though she were revealing a startling idiosyncrasy, he modestly discloses that what really drives him is “the story” and that he’s just “serving the characters.”

“If the novelist is free,” asked professor René Girard, “how can his characters be?...What is impossible to God cannot be possible to the novelist. Either the novelist is free and his characters aren’t, or the characters are free, and the novelist, like God, does not exist.” The conceit of free-willed characters is irrelevant, but the existence of free-willed novelists is essential.

When people say that America is the land of the free, I think they mostly mean that we are free to compete. The possibility of winning exists in theory for all; or as Franzen’s buddy David Foster Wallace would say, there are situational modalities of obtaining success.

Side by side on the bookstore table, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, lay next to Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will by David Foster Wallace. One writer was incensed by all; the other self-immolated.

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Since David Foster Wallace is dead, they published his student thesis in philosophy, a refutation of a short Richard Taylor essay on fatalism.

“The fatalist contends, quite radically, that human actions and decisions have no influence on the future. Your behavior today no more shapes events tomorrow than it shapes events yesterday.” Richard Taylor does not support the claim but proves it semantically, and Foster Wallace “bends over backward” to “[prove] that you couldn’t, in fact, deprive the universe of possibility with just a bit of logical and linguistic finesse.”

His whole essay is a fight against a certain understanding of logic, which he could just as well have refused to use. David Foster Wallace—like countless men before and after him, clever ones, too—bombards the a priori with heavy artillery when he could have just puffed at that house of cards or walked around it.

But Fate, Time, and Language was only a student thesis. Then he moved on to literature.

In Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Wallace displays, in a few of the best pages, a grasp of psychology much finer than any contained in Freedom’s five hundred. He understood the mess and describes it from the inside, which may be why Franzen chose to attack him on his most obvious flaw: his excessive reliance on cleverness.

“Dave’s level of purely linguistic achievement was a turf that I knew better than to try to compete on,” said Franzen, slashing the ties between style and substance and leaving a void into which he could only fall.

What both writers shared was the heavy use of aww-shucks regular-guy Americanisms, perhaps a necessary protection for Wallace and a pose that comes naturally to Franzen.

In a recent commencement speech reprinted in The New York Times, Franzen explains to children the difference between liking something on Facebook and the messiness of real love—real because it is messy. The speech opens with a description of his new BlackBerry. It is ironic and he regrets having to do it, but still, it is what the people want, so he gives it to them, and besides, he is the people and therefore wants it, too.

So he talks about his love for his BlackBerry, but with a wink. He seems to do that a lot: winking as he acquiesces. From an interview in The Paris Review: “I hate the word creative, but it’s not a bad description of my personality type.” Jonathan does what must be done with the tools at hand, freely competing in the free market.

And what bound Wallace? His precocity? His talent? The drama of the gifted child?

“I think I had a kind of midlife crisis at twenty, which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity,” Wallace predicted.

Instead of continuing to climb, he killed himself arguing about whether it was even possible to climb. What a pity. Franzen kept right on walking, straight to the top. For such a competitive man, in terms of status only the summit will do; but in terms of thought, the middle is just fine.

Alexander McQueen

I usually go to art shows to look at fashion, but last week I went to a fashion show to look at art.

The actress Chloë Sevigny held her first runway show for Opening Ceremony in a SoHo church rec hall, and she brought in pieces by the artist Charlie Wing.

It was his first show, too, and he set the stage with thick sod on which a nun in orange camouflage held a crossbow next to choirboys shearing a lamb whose horns were lit with LED. Though the figures, rather than chiseled marble, are plastic mannequins dressed in nylon, they have a baroque Pietà’s calm mystery–a sense of eternity replaced by a whiff of the absurd. The composition is strong. There is movement in the static and beauty in the horror. It is a sculpture. It doesn’t merely take up room, it makes space.

The next day, I went to the museum to see some fashion.

The Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a beautiful and very popular show. It’s a pity that the curators felt the need to justify it with an abundance of wall text stressing the dresses’ “ideational and ideological aspect.” They tell us the collections “offer a commentary on the politics of appearance” and their unveilings were not mere runway shows but “presentations suggestive of avant-garde installation and performance art.”

So it is: Performance wants to be art, art wants to be performance, fashion wants to be fiction, or sculpture or architecture, and everyone wants to be philosophy–who only wants to be popular, so she squeezes herself into the constraining corset of catchphrases.

Out of these petty jealousies beauty sometimes emerges: Painting aspired to be like music, totally abstract but still stirring, and it got there. At least Rothko did. When objects aspire to the status of literature, however, the results are less convincing. Narrative is by necessity imposed on images and everything must “tell a story.” But stories are bound to time and must unfold, while objects are borne in space and can be apprehended instantly.

It seems rather perverse to put yourself under the whip of time when you were free from its lashings. Like McQueen’s accessories, it shows our tendency toward the masochistic—a tendency that has become a style. Fifteen years later it is still prettily trickling down the runway, simplified for mass production and streetwear in the Chloë Sevigny show’s torturing shoes and laser-cut leather.

Actually, it’s more like a hundred and fifty years later—McQueen certainly didn’t start the flow. Baudelaire and Poe may have, with their carrion and their prostitutes and their nevermore and their n’importe où hors du monde (“anywhere outside the world”).

To be happy you have to be somewhere or someone else; that was romanticism’s great breakthrough. And according to The New York Times, to be good you have to be something else. That’s the greatest compliment they could find for McQueen—that his clothes are “poised on a line where fashion turns into something else.”

It’s all right for a dress to be romantic, but critics by now should know better. The n’importe ou loin d’ici is really too old-fashioned, and even in the nineteenth century it wasn’t a philosophy so much as a pathology.  The dresses are not good because they are something other than dresses or something more than dresses. They are neither more powerful nor more political than Balenciaga or Yves Saint Laurent. And the show is neither more nor less “avant-garde” for being shown in cramped galleries with distressed walls than the Balenciaga exhibit was last fall in a Park Avenue building with wall-to-wall carpet and regular old glass cases.

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McQueen “expanded the understanding of fashion beyond utility to a conceptual expression of culture, politics, and identity,” The New York Times continues, displaying a rather limited understanding of both art and utility.

They tell us McQueen was an artist because he was making things that were not immediately useful—and he was an artist, the walls insist, because he was expressing himself.

Juicers and oil wells are expressive. Children and mediocre memoir writers are self-expressive. Artists, however, do not squeeze out some raw substance that exists fully formed on the inside; they spend their time making things, bringing things into existence through the act. What issues is not an idea, but an object—only an object and nothing more. Amid the profusion of wall text is this quote by McQueen: “Everything I do is based on tailoring.” The organizers should have left it at that. He had a strong imagination and his clothes were extremely well-tailored. The dresses are not stories or sculptures; they are dresses, beautiful dresses.

In the next gallery however, at the Richard Serra show, transubstantiation is achieved and drawings become sculptures.

The halls were empty, and the white walls almost bare, too, save for expanses of Belgian linen covered in black paint stick—flat and untailored and stuck to the wall, but somehow three-dimensional. They are monochromatic but somehow not monotonous.

Being rather primitively suspicious of the mono—from mononucleosis to monotheism and monogamy—I’d never given much thought to monochrome’s potential, but I felt it there for the first time. The effect comes from friction: It is actually not monochromatic since the wall is part of the piece and the wall is white. It’s the contrast that strikes.

A man whose path crossed mine several times in the gallery kept muttering, “I could have done that.” Then, trying to get me to agree,  “We could have done that.”

“I don’t think so,” I answered. We didn’t do it. So we can’t have. But it has been done, and I shudder with the pleasure of it.

Serra’s drawings seem easy to fabricate so we don’t think about their creation. McQueen’s skill was in tailoring, so rather than unwrap those complex patterns, we obsess over the simple stories behind them and stuff them to the seams full of concept. Are we really still stuck at knocking matter in favor of spirit and spitting on spirit for not being crafty enough? That is so last season.

Mostly all these little notions get along just fine, rubbing against each other to thrilling effect in the body—as in bodies of work.

Charlie Wing has his plastic mannequins and taxidermied sheep; Alexander McQueen—RIP—used leather, balsa, feathers, shells, or silk; and Richard Serra’s art, for me, culminates in his use of white linen and black charcoal. With the many or the minimal, with fabric or plastic or plaster, mass-produced or made to measure, matter in the right hands is made to matter.

According to reviewers, Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit From the Goon Squad is “virtuosic,” “shape shifting,” “startlingly new,” and it “turns the novel on its head.” According to me, it is “not bad,” “readable”; it tells stories and provokes emotions; it is, as they say, “well-crafted.” I will only pick on it because it drew attention to itself by climbing up the best-seller list and winning the Pulitzer Prize.

What really seemed to get the critics ooh-ing and aah-ing was “the nonlinear thing,” the “formal experimentation.” The book jumps around in time and uses different styles and points of view. That approach was novel when James Joyce did it. A hundred years later, it’s a bit of a novelty act.

A Visit From the Goon Squad contains sections in the first person, sections in the third, a section that is a pastiche of a celebrity profile, and one that is a PowerPoint presentation. You can call them brilliantly interlocked short stories and rave at the clever construction, or you can call them chapters and look at what they contain.

What they contain is the usual faddish blend of alienation, celebrity culture, a pinch of the old ultra-violence, and a sprinkling of semantic theory. (A chapter titled “Pure Language” contains such sentences as, “All we’ve got are metaphors, and they’re never exactly right. You can’t ever just Say. The. Thing.”) Then it’s all topped off with a touch of dystopia, and in lieu of ethics, a few spoonfuls of shame.

In Philip Roth’s latest novel Nemesis, shame still appears under its previous incarnation—guilt, which went out of style sometime after the 1940s, when the novel takes place. To know guilt you need to have some concept of good and bad; to know shame, only a high awareness of yourself and what others might be thinking of you.

The main character in Nemesis is Bucky Cantor, a high-school Phys Ed teacher. It is the summer of ’44, and while every other able-bodied man is off at war, Bucky, exempted for poor eyesight, is guarding a playground in Newark. When a polio epidemic breaks out, the playground becomes a war zone, and his character is tested.

Roth’s Bucky Cantor feels guilt and it paralyzes him for life. Jennifer Egan’s character Bennie Salazar is successful in life but full of shame—shame for having mispronounced a word at an awards ceremony, shame in front of a hairdresser for the lice in his son’s hair. He even makes a list of his most embarrassing moments and reads it over to feel the burn again and so assure himself that he is alive. In search of that same reassurance, his assistant Sasha steals random objects that she does not need, and kids in a punk club ponder the importance of scenester gossip:

Knowing all this makes us one step closer to being real, but not completely. When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it’s happened?

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A generation waiting to be told that they’re really living because their hairstyle is real—now that’s a lost generation.

Egan explained in an interview that many of A Visit From The Goon Squad’s characters are in the music industry because “in a certain way…music cuts through time like almost nothing else. You know, it makes us feel like we’re back in an earlier moment.” Yes, we do know. And music can indeed be used to good effect in literature; Roth wrote a beautiful love scene in Nemesis with “I’ll Be Seeing You” drifting across a Poconos lake, and in Proust, there is Vinteuil and his petite phrase.

Dragging in Marcel P. to talk of Jennifer E. can only beg an unfavorable comparison, but she brought it on herself. To let us know, right off the bat, that she was tackling the subject of time, she opened with two quotations from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

According to Jennifer Egan, time is a “goon squad” coming ’round to beat us up. Are we gonna let it? What she has to say about time is that being a teenager is fun and it’s all downhill from there. She also puts a sort of Hollywood spin on the Proustian epiphany, making it not only a realization but an instant transformation. Like the deep voice in the movie previews says, “Nothing will ever be the same again.”

Proust attempted no such thing as a description of time, especially not capturing it in the bright bubble of an aphorism. What he did was make descriptions of people in time, sculpting with slow chisel strokes. Egan manufactures lifelike beings by piling on the quirky details. Bennie Salazar sprinkles gold dust in his coffee as an aphrodisiac and sprays pesticide in his armpits—truth is stranger than fiction, you can’t make that kind of stuff up, how very real.

And the way she knows how to deal with the relations between these quirky characters—or “human interconnectedness” as the Guardian calls it—is by highlighting the sort of casual link that makes people exclaim, “What a small world!” with ever-renewed amazement, as if the fact that a cousin of a friend went to the same school as their doctor’s daughter somehow proved God’s existence.

An African warrior dancing somewhere in the middle of the book gives rise to a fast-forward one-paragraph account of his descendants so that at the end, when his grandson appears in New York holding another character’s daughter’s hand, “closure is achieved.”

Hurray for Closure, Queen of Psychobabble! Award-winning authors need closure too, not just teenagers like the ones a professor in another Roth novel is forced to teach:

They open their mouths and they send me up the wall. Their whole language is a summation of the stupidity of the last forty years. Closure! There’s one!...[E]very experience, no matter how ambiguous, no matter how knotty or mysterious, must lend itself to normalizing, conventionalizing, anchorman cliché. Any kid who says ‘closure’ I flunk. They want closure, that’s their closure.

“I hope she found a good life,” Bennie says of his kleptomaniac assistant Sasha, “she deserves it.” In Egan’s world, girls who “deserve” a good life get it by being reunited with their first love. What “deserving” might mean is not put in question. For that, we’d better read Roth.

She lives on credit and lusts after entertainment, whether emotional or commercial. She derives her pleasure solely from seeing her reflection in the gleam of a man’s eye or in the sheen of a new silk dress. Like a L’Oréal target customer, she is “worth it.” Whatever luxury the world contains should be hers because she is beautiful and of superior sentimentality.

I am not talking about a modern American woman, but about Emma Bovary, born 1857, with no end in sight to her reign of senseless craving and mediocrity.

Why even bother to write about that common hussy? Because here she is loose again in bookstores, made up like a flapper on a sickening pink cover. A new translation is out, and critics are raving. (How many of them speak French, I shudder to ask.)

Madame Bovary: A New Translation by Lydia Davis sounds exactly like what it is—a book written in 21st-century America. Hollywood period movies can be dated by the hairstyles; here the turn of phrase is a dead giveaway. There is “give me a hug” in place of “embrace me,” “deep in her soul” instead of “at the bottom of her soul,” and “waiting for something to happen” rather than “waiting for an event.” Little things, little things, though some would say that even a comma is big when it comes to translation and that a translator should be a slave to the original as the Slav Nabokov was to Pushkin, as the poet Baudelaire was to Poe—“servilely attached to the letter” at the risk of producing baroque and even painful results.

There is no pain for the reader in Madame Bovary: A New Translation by Lydia Davis—just smooth, easy, up-to-date, democratic Americanness. It’s a choice, but it’s a shame, because it doesn’t do justice to Flaubert’s style, and however one may dislike what he chose to write about, Flaubert knew how to write.

Emma Bovary the woman is morally quite ugly, but Madame Bovary the book is technically rather beautiful: the deft machinery of the action’s development, the shifting points of view, the treatment of time and space; masterful, swift, seamless. And extremely visual. If Flaubert can be said to have invented anything, it is the cinema. His scenes read like detailed shot lists, progressing from Wide Shot to Medium Close Up to Close Up and punctuated by jump cuts and well-chosen cutaways.

The book is peopled more by caricatures than by characters, but artistically and formally, yes, it is an achievement. But Madame Bovary—“masterpiece of realism,” by Gustave Flaubert, the “inventor of objectivity” as Lydia Davis and so many before her present it—not quite.

Flaubert’s plan was to hide, but his fat form is visible behind every sentence, dripping contempt over the whole of humanity: townspeople and country folk, aristocrats and bourgeoisie, priests and atheists, those with ambition and those without it. One size fits all, and when contempt doesn’t quite cut it, irony will do nicely. If common sense says dans le doute abstiens toi (when in doubt, don’t), Flaubert says dans le doute ironise (when in doubt, use irony).

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Each sentence seems to declare that life, which is everything outside of love and art, is wholly inadequate to a sensitive soul’s needs. Sounds like romanticism to me.

“Flaubert is holding up a mirror to the middle- and lower-middle-class world of his day,” Davis informs us in the introduction. Sure, but when the mirror is as dirty as the thing it reflects, what can you possibly see? Dirty and tear-stained, for there must be pathos! Flaubert wanted them to cry. He wanted to write about contemptible people and wanted the public to be moved by it. Did he not notice that people tend to see their own tears as holy water, sanctifying the object for which they were shed? He wanted to take a common subject and make it poetic. Why? Just to show that it can be done? In his elevation of style above all else, Flaubert underestimated art’s power. For it may be that fiction doesn’t so much foreshadow as influence what is to come, that Madame Bovary as the prototypical 21st-century consumer is not “strikingly prescient” but unfortunately influential. Emma Bovary is a common hussy, yes, but she is also a heroine. Placed on a novel’s pedestal, people will look up to see her.

Returning from an escapade with her lover, Emma is confronted by creditors. Frantic for money, she runs to the notary (who disgusts her) and the tax collector (who refuses her). Then she remembers her first lover Rodolphe and turns on the waterworks. She gets him to profess his eternal love before springing on him that she needs three thousand francs. He refuses. She crams arsenic in her mouth. And all through this we hear how beautiful she is when distraught—even more beautiful than before because she’s more passionate! Lust for money and the frantic thrashings of a trapped animal. Beautiful.

A shortsighted pleasure-seeker slowly heading to her own destruction; a silly, shallow liar wreaking havoc around her, for if she’s going down, she’s taking everyone with her. Beautiful, beautiful. Such an alluring example that it is now emulated not only by bored housewives but by entire nations.

We are asked to spend hours in Emma Bovary’s stultifying company on the subway, in bed, turning the pages to get to the end. She is pretty, so we do it. And everyone is in love with her…Charles and Rodolphe and Leon…Mario Vargas Llosa, Vladimir Nabokov, Julian Barnes, and Philippe Sollers. When they write about her, the page is still moist from their drool. She’s vulgar, they admit, but so vivacious. The shallowness is part of her appeal, right along with the senseless craving and the promise of violence. It combines to give a good imitation of a richer life, of greater sensitivity. But Emma doesn’t feel more, she just wants more, though whatever you give her will never be enough and you will always get blamed for her petty dissatisfaction.

Bref, she’s the bottomless hole, the typical bitch. So why do men like her so much? Beats me!