The Poison of Hope

By sheer coincidence, or happy accident, I was listening to a James Taylor album, Walking Man, while everyone at the DNC was waiting to hear Hillary Clinton give what they were touting was going to be the "most important speech of her life", accepting the nomination of her party as the first woman candidate for president in American history. I admit that, even though I am a proud Leftist, I saw and heard about as little of the DNC as I had of the RNC. I find such spectacles to be unbearably effusive. As one of the converted, why do so many if the homilies of the Democrats sound so fulsome and sometimes hollow? So, rather than wait for any of the speakers who preceded Hillary's historic speech to "play the other side" and say something original, something I haven't heard a hundred times, I pushed the "mute" button on my TV remote control and put on some music.

James Taylor's album Walking Man starts off with the title track, which has always been one of my favorite songs: "Well the leaves have come to turnin'/And the goose has gone to fly/And bridges are for burnin'/So don't you let that yearnin' pass you by . . ." But the first track is the only song on the album that became a hit, even making it to Taylor's Greatest Hits album.

But after that, what caught my ear was track #3, the song called "Let It All Fall Down." Taylor wrote it in response to Richard Nixon and Watergate, which was one of the lowest points in U.S. history. Nixon's crimes, his cocksure confidence that he was above the law, and the necessity of forcing him to resign, which saved the country further upheaval, made many Americans (like Taylor) doubtful that politics was fair or that it could bring about positive change.

The song starts, sarcastically, with the opening bars of "Hail to the Chief" and then launches into some of Taylor's most biting lyrics:

Sing a song for the wrong and the wicked and the strong and the sick, as thick as thieves.
For the faceless fear that was never so near, too clear to misbelieve.
Well the sea is jumping salty and the porpoise has the blues,
my recollection's faulty and I cannot find my shoes.
And my wiring is misfiring due to cigarettes and booze,
I'm behind in my dues, I just now got the news.
He seems to tell us lies and still we will believe him,
then together he will lead us into darkness, my friends.

Let it fall down, let it fall down, let it all fall down.
Let it fall down, let it fall down, let it all fall down.

The man says stand to one side, son, we got to keep this big ball rolling.
It's just a question of controlling for whom the bell is tolling.
Let it fall down, let it fall down, let it all fall down.
Let it fall down, let it fall down, let it all fall down.

There'll be suffering and starvation in the streets, young man.
Just where have you been, old man? Just look out of your window, man.
Let it fall down, let it fall down, let it all fall down.
Let it fall down, let it fall down, let it all fall down.

Well, it ain't nobody's fault but our own,
still, at least we might could show the good sense
To know when we've been wrong, and it's already taken too long.
So we bring it to a stop then we take it from the top,
we let it settle on down softly like your gently falling snow
or let it tumble down and topple like the temple long ago.

Let it fall down, let it fall down, let it all fall down.
Let it fall down, let it fall down, let it all fall down.

Gerald Ford, Nixon's successor, finally brought an end to the Vietnam conflict in 1975 by simply pulling the plug. Our clear defeat in Vietnam, despite the degree of destruction we wrought on the tiny country and neighboring countries, and the cost in both American lives and American dollars, was a double failure because we so swiftly turned our backs on it and neglected to try and learn something from it. Even the rash of Vietnam War movies, good and bad, that ensued failed to teach Americans anything about American power and its catatrophic misuses.

This coming November 8, American voters will be faced with what is easily the worst choice of candidates ever. Donald Trump is far too ridiculous to take seriously. His attitudes toward people - everyone who isn't in his tax bracket (whatever it may be) - are loathsome and detestable. He is clearly in it for the power that the office of president will bestow on him, not being satisfied with ruining other people with his rapacious acquisition of money, by any means necessary. Despite the amount and degree of personal attacks that his candidacy has provoked, he is obviously all-in.

On the other hand, Hillary Clinton is the other half of the biggest power couple in modern history. They seem to have arrived at a secret pact that keeps them together no matter what scandals, past, present and future, come down the pike. Whatever progressive ideals she may ascribe to, it seems to me that the White House has been her ultimate goal for at least the last fifteen years - since she had to move out of the White House in 2001. She was certainly one of the most active - and strident - First Ladies in history, even if her activities seemed to be a distraction - for her at least - from the incessant scandals that swirled around her husband. The result is that separating herself from him and from the bad smell he left in the room (regardless of what he accomplished as the president) was surprisingly effortless.

I had an image of Hillary in 2008, gliding calmly down a long red carpet toward the Democratic nomination, her eyes fixed ahead of her, when suddenly she was overtaken by Barack Obama and watched, transfixed, as he snatched the prize away from her. Despite her support for Obama throughout his two terms, and even her promises to continue some of his reforms, nobody has been mistaken about her intention to replace him. Her procession down the red carpet this time, despite the surprising noise of Old Bernie Sanders coming up behind her, was uneventful. She is now the first woman to be nominated by a major political party to run for president.

I couldn't bring myself to listen to Hillary's historic acceptance speech on Thursday night (Friday morning where I write this). Whatever she had to say about the great cracks appearing in the "glass ceiling," she seems to be exploiting the history of the moment. And why shouldn't she? I just don't think she would've got this far, or nearly as far as this, if her name wasn't Clinton.

Both sides in this presidential race are telling their supporters to vote for their candidate because victory for the other candidate will be a disaster for our country. The two parties are asking us to overcome whatever misgivings we may have against their candidate because, no matter how grave those misgivings may be, allowing the other candidate to win will bring about the end of America as we know it. And not voting - or voting for a third-party candidate - will certainly precipitate the election of the more loathsome candidate. The Devil or the Deep Blue Sea.

Searching online for material about Saul Bellow's Herzog, I came upon several pages in PDF format of what appear to be Bellow's typewritten notes to the novel. One note stood out:

"p.4 He now sat down, Not that long disease my life, but that long convalescence, my life. The liberal-bourgeois revision, the illusion of improvement, the poison of hope."

To this, all I can say is,

Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavory guide!
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark!*


*Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Scene 3.

Window Washing

One of the most boring ceremonies ever invented by the U.S. Navy is the Change of Command, in which one unit commander, the incoming one, is "piped aboard" by a boatswain's mate and the outgoing commander is "piped ashore," and in between the assembled sailors belonging to the unit stand in ranks at attention or at "parade rest" for the duration - which can be hours.

My last unit was stationed not aboard a ship but ashore on the Japanese island of Okinawa - a small admiral's staff consisting of about fifty officers and enlisted. Despite the fact that we had no dining facility, there were three Mess Specialists (cooks) assigned to the unit to serve the admiral and chief of staff on the rare occasions when we embarked on a ship.

For the change of command ceremony, held inside of an empty warehouse set aside for the occasion, these Mess Specialists, a Senior Chief Petty Officer and two seamen, were employed setting up tables and, because there was a formal dinner afterwards for the officers, arranging all the place settings. Since it was a Saturday and there were only three of them, they were at work late into the afternoon. At one point, probably resentful that he was obliged to work on a Saturday (yes, we had weekends off ashore in the Navy), one of the seamen began to complain.

"I ain't nothin' but a slave," he said. The Senior Chief, who was a Filipino, told him to "stop using that word."

"What word, Senior Chief?" the seaman (who was black) asked. "You mean 'slave'?"

"Yes," the Senior Chief replied. "Stop using that word."

"Don't you tell me I can't use that word," the seaman argued. "That's my word! I'll say it as many times as I want. Slave slave slave slave slave!"

I was reminded of this anecdote when I read in The Atlantic about Corey Menafee, a dishwasher at Yale Uniersity's Calhoun College dining hall. Last June 13, having worked at Calhoun for nine years, Menafee quietly climbed a ladder and shattered a stained-glass window that had been staring down at him all the time the 38-year-old had been working there. The scene that the offending stained glass window depicted included the figures of two slaves, a man and a woman, who were balancing bales of cotton on their heads. The college was named for John C. Calhoun, who is lately remembered as an outspoken proponent of slavery.

In April 2015, Yale president Peter Salovey answered requests from student activists to remove some of Calhoun College's more politically questionable monuments to a museum, not to obscure the facts of the College's history but to restore the monuments to their historical context, i.e., the distant past.

Menafee told the New Haven Independent that he found the particular image of black slaves "racist, very degrading." Asked if he knew about John C. Calhoun, Menafee said, "When I walked into this job, I wasn't aware of none of that. And then, you know, being there, you start hearing different things. I took a broomstick, and it was kind of high, and I climbed up and reached up and broke it. It's 2016, I shouldn't have to come to work and see things like that."

Menafee performed his act of "civil disobedience" (his words) not after hours when no one was watching, but in front of a room full of dining students. He then went to a rest room and shaved, making himself presentable for when "the authorities" arrived. He was taken away by police in handcuffs.

Menafee later apologized and "resigned" from his job. On July 14, Yale announced that it was not pursuing charges against Menafee and were not seeking any financial restitution.

The trouble with this story - as reported - is that it doesn't really add up. Clearly, there must have been something that set Menafee off, something unusual. If not, why did it take him nine years to make up his mind to carry out his act of destruction? (It doesn't really qualify as civil disobedience, unless Menafee had been a window washer, dutifully cleaning and clarifying an offensive image.) Having worked as a dishwasher once, for only a few weeks, I have nothing but respect for someone who could do it for nine years. There was no mention of how much Yale University pays a dishwasher, but it was enough to keep Mr. Menafee gainfully employed for nine years and enough to make him want to come back, if the university trusts him around windows.

The Atlantic article concluded with the folowing subtly-worded paragraph:

"For the past year, student activists at Yale have campaigned for the university to change the name of Calhoun College because of its links to slavery. But in April, Yale said it would keep the name. The former vice president and former student of Yale once said of slavery: 'I hold, then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.'"

Even at the height of its democracy, Ancient Greece had a sizeable population of slaves. How could the same men who invented democracy and philosphy, who gave us Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, have found a way to justify slavery? Certainly it wasn't enough for them to argue that every other preceding and contemporary civilization had slaves, so why can't we? They practiced self-rule, the principle of one man, one vote, and not some form of autocratic tyranny practiced by their neighbors. In one of his essays collected in The Dyer's Hand, W. H. Auden reasoned that “In accepting and defending the social institution of slavery, the Greeks were harder-hearted than we but clearer-headed; they knew that labor as such is slavery, and that no man can feel a personal pride in being a laborer. A man can be proud of being a worker – someone, that is, who fabricates enduring objects, but in our society, the process of fabrication has been so rationalized in the interests of speed, economy and quantity that the part played by the individual factory employee has become too small for it to be meaningful to him as work, and practically all workers have been reduced to laborers."

In the quotation cited by The Atlantic, John C. Calhoun was correct, even if his use of human history to justify an inhuman injustice was opportunistic. While history has certainly judged him for his defense of slavery, it has proved his thesis. Call it slavery or call it gainful employment, every society values some forms of labor over others. Even if you were to inform the average American that the starting pay for a garbage collector in many American cities is higher than that of a teacher, he might try to argue that garbage collection is more important than teaching. And that admission alone would tell you everything you need to know about what's wrong with America.

George Orwell said of dishwashing that "Like sweeping, scrubbing and dusting, it is of its nature an uncreative and life-wasting job."(2) It is one of those tasks that should be - and eventually will be - done by robots. We can then justify our enslavement of machines however we wish, as long as we never forget our enslavement of one another.


(1) "A Shattering Act of Civil Disobedience," by J. Weston Phippen, The Atlantic, July 14, 2016.
(2) "As I Please," Tribune, 9 February 1945.

Confessions of a Sepulturero

Twenty-six days after arriving in the Philippines, I met the woman who has been my constant companion, my asawa, ever since - a Filipina who was born in the province of Leyte, an island an hour's flight from Manila by plane, but more than a day by bus or by ferry. I was introduced to her family - to her mother, her brothers and sisters, and her four children. Over the years since then I have met uncles and aunts, cousins, nephews and neices, and - so far - her one grandchild.

One morning in our second house there was a knock on the door. Marcelina, my asawa's mother, was standing on my terrace, having just finished a walk along the highway. Something was wrong. There was a puddle of urine at her feet and a puzzled look on her face. I called out to my asawa to come quickly. Together we helped her mother down the terrace steps and a short distance to her brother's house, where she laid down. By evening, she couldn't speak coherently and could no longer control her bowels. She was taken to the provincial hospital. They told my asawa that she was probably having a stroke, but that they hadn't the proper equipment to make a diagnosis, and recommended she be carried by ambulance to Tacloban, the nearest big city. The cost of transporting her, of the catscan, and further treatment, however, far exceeded everyone's resources, even if we were to ask everyone, far and wide, to chip in. So a decision was made to simply take Marcelina home to her village, for everyone to provide whatever they could for her upkeep, and to keep her as comfortable as possible. The old woman finally died six months later. My asawa screamed when she got the call. I think of Marcelina whenever I hear of how much Americans spend every year for veterinary care of their pets, including surgical procedures and the very catscan that might have prolonged Marcelina's life, if only for another few years.

Jaime, my asawa's older brother (he was a year older than I), was a feared and respected titan of a man. I had already heard stories about some of his violent exploits when I heard another knock on my door one evening and went onto my terrace to meet him. He had a presence that was almost palpable, standing in a corner against the concrete railing. He smiled at me and shook my hand. His grip was beefy and rough. I could tell that he liked foreigners, and I suppose that I had my asawa to thank for whatever she had told him about me to inspire such friendliness. He had come to our island province to escape from some trouble he had gotten into up north. He was with his wife and he lived for awhile very close to my house, until after Marcelina's stroke, when he moved to an adjacent barangay, into a bamboo house on the ocean shore. He soon began to have problems with his weight, since he had changed from a very active to an almost totally sedentary life. There was nothing to do in the province, and rumors began to circulate about he and another woman in the barangay. Over the following years, I saw him on the rare occasions when I would go with my asawa to his house, a festival here and a festival there, an open-air disco.

Jaime had a daughter who was married to a German man, and an adopted son who lived with them in Germany. This young man came to visit him every so many years, and bought him a motorcycle and sent money every month for his parents' support. Jaime started to exercise with his wife, got himself back in shape and applied for a job as a bodyguard for the provincial governor. He gave up being a "babaero" (playboy) and went to church for what was probably the first time in decades. And only a week later, having eaten his dinner, he confessed to his wife that he wasn't feeling well. He laid down to wait for it to pass, but got up feeling worse. On the way to the hospital he lost consciousness. He was pronounced DOA. He had a massive heart attack.

His nephew delivered the news to us, coming in the door in tears in the late afternoon. My asawa screamed. That was at the end of last February. On Friday morning, July 1st, her youngest son came in the door to tell her that her daughter Jenelyn was dead.

I first met Jenelyn Dalde Adriano, aka Jenelyn Mirabete, when her mother brought her around to my hotel room in a Philippine resort town just before Christmas 2007. She was 17, and delightfully pretty. And I could tell how proud her mother was of her, who told me how many people loved her and would watch out for her through the years as she was growing up.

Here is what I know about her. She was born in Barangay Ul-Ug, in the town of Calubian, Leyte Province, on April 15, 1990. Her father, named Mirabete, was an engineer. When he learned that she was pregnant, he took Jenelyn's mother back to Calubian to be with her family. He made some promises, said goodbye, and was never seen again.

Two years later, Jenelyn's mother was with another man named Mendoza, with whom she had four more children over the following twelve years, one of whom died in early childhood. When she was 8, Jenelyn was already vivacious, always laughing, the darling of everyone who knew her. The fact that she wasn't his child must have been all the excuse that her step-father needed to rape her.

When her uncle Jaime heard about it, he started beating Mendoza to death. The police stopped him, arrested Mendoza and put him behind bars. A few weeks later, Jenelyn's two brothers, ages 6 and 4, who couldn't have known what their father had done to their sister, went to their mother in tears and begged her to get Mendoza out of jail. Without a bread winner, there was no other way she could support her three children, so she dropped the charges against Mendoza.

A year or so ago, Jenelyn started using her father's last name and expressed some interest in finding him. She called me "daddy" every time we spoke or texted each other, which gave me a strange thrill. I was looking forward to her coming to live with us next month, for her mother's and her little sister's sakes, but also for perfectly selfish reasons. Her coffin was carried to the cemetery today. I couldn't be there. I was left behind here in the province to look after her little sister, who is in school.

Above it all - the rumors, the bother about money, the time needed to travel there (which is something around thirty hours) - there she laid in the cooler until the undertaker (sepulturero) was given permission to remove her and prepare her for her coffin. And there was the inescapable thought, no matter how unnaturally perfect the undertaker made her look under the glass lid, of the final moments of her life, that were spent in terror and pain. And the knowing this, that no matter how many people loved her along her twenty-six years of life, and everything she had seen and known, there was that terror and pain, the last things she felt or knew before the light went out of her eyes. How could anyone face the vigil, the hours of the nights staying awake, talking, playing cards, sitting out the long wait to ensure that the dead were really dead and that her soul had a little company before it escaped her body. I remember my older sister at our father's funeral in 1988. She knelt beside our mother with her head in her lap, silently grieving. She would be dead, too, in less than a year.

Since the day we met in December 2007, my asawa has buried her mother Marcelina, her brother Jaime, and now her daughter Jenelyn. It is only natural that a country that has so much life in it should have as much death. In my country death is hidden away from us. I was given just enough time, in 1988 and 1998, to see the bodies of my dead father and mother before they were spirited away. In the Philippines, coffins are carried into people's homes and the dead are displayed for everyone to come and see. For days, everyone gathers in the evenings to eat, drink, and reminisce about the person who died. Then the funeral procession to the cemetery takes place, where an above-ground sepulchre waits to be filled. Forty days after the person's death, a pig is killed and barbequed and the family feasts one last time. Some people fear the end of the world, but worlds are going out of existence all around us, every day.

What now? As Paul wrote to the Hebrews, "Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us."

Taking It All In

[Time to remind myself of my exceptional Americanness on American Independence Day.]

I spent my last three years in the Navy stationed in Okinawa, Japan. I had loved Japanese culture, its literature and especially its splendid films, since I was in my teens. Since my unit was the command of amphibious forces for the Seventh Fleet, and since the vast majority of the Fleet's marines were on the island of Okinawa, my unit's headquarters was situated on a remote promontory of the west coast of the island called White Beach, from which we embarked on ships or on aircraft to locations throughout east Asia. In three years I visited South Korea three times, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Guam twice, and the main islands of Japan.

It's no wonder, then, that I look back on it as the time of my life. I was so taken with the experience that, when my tour of duty was over and I was released to civilian life, I couldn't bring myself to go back to the States. Instead, I went directly to the Philippines on my first, albeit abortive, attempt to live there. But that, as they say, is another story.

The last supervisor, or LPO (Lead Petty Officer), with whom I worked in Okinawa was one of those characters I sometimes encountered in the military who was, both physically and intellectually, a genuinely self-made man. He had been stocky all his life, but he managed to transform himself from a tubby young man into a impressive, if somewhat muscle-bound physical specimen. He was fanatical about avoiding fatty foods, and introduced me to a sandwich made with nothing more than a flour tortilla, sliced turkey or ham, and a slice of cheese, rolled up and heated in a microwave oven. Cover it with salsa when it's done, and it's a cheap, neat alternative to a cold bread sandwich.

His ideas were just as lean. He had come to an understanding with the world, based on his ten-year exploration of it in the Navy, and whatever reading he could squeeze in between port calls. He had arrived at the conclusion that the United States was not only exceptional as a nation, but that its values were the best that could be found anywhere in the world, superior to all others. America was a standard against which he measured the whole world - and found it wanting. He was uncurious about Japanese culture, and of every other Eastern culture, and lived comfortably inside his certainties.  

In Okinawa there was a fantastic English-language bookstore on the main thoroughfare outside Kadena Air Force Base where I found irreplaceable copies of books by my two favorite authors, Orwell and Camus. And I found a paperback copy of a book first published in 1926 by Aldous Huxley called Jesting Pilate. By then, Huxley had already become famous with the publication of the novels Crome Yellow and Those Barren Leaves. With his wife, he set out in 1925 on what was then called a World Tour, an around-the-world journey. Jesting Pilate is his account of that journey. At the end of the book, Huxley arrived at some tentative conclusions about travel.


LONDON

So the journey is over and I am back again where - I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many exploded convictions, many perished certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Of knowledge and experience the fruit is generally doubt. It is a doubt that grows profounder as knowledge more deeply burrows into the underlying mystery, that spreads in exact proportion as experience is widened and the perceptions of the experiencing individual are refined. A fish's convictions, we may be sure, are unshakeable. A dog is as full of certainty as the Veteran Liberal who has held the same opinions for forty years. You might implore a cat, as Cromwell by the bowels of Christ once implored a parliament, to bethink it that it might be mistaken; the beast would never doubt but that it was right.

I set out on my travels knowing, or thinking that I knew, how men should live, how be governed, how educated, what they should believe. I knew which was the best form of social organisation and to what end societies had been created. I had my views on every activity of human life. Now, on my return, I find myself without any of these pleasing certainties. Before I started, you could have asked me almost any question about the human species and I should glibly have returned an answer. Ask a profoundly ignorant man how the electric light works; he finds the question absurdly simple. "You just press the button," he explains. The working electrician would give you a rather more technical account of the matter in terms of currents, resistances, conductivity. But the philosophical physicist would modestly confess his ignorance. Electrical phenomena, he would say, can be described and classified. But as for saying what electricity maybe ... And he would throw up his hands. The better you understand the significance of any question, the more difficult it becomes to answer it. Those who like to feel that they are always right and who attach a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is travelling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced.

My own losses, as I have said, were numerous. But in compensation for what I lost, I acquired two important new convictions: that it takes all sorts to make a world and that the established spiritual values are fundamentally correct and should be maintained. I call these opinions "new," though both are at least as old as civilisation and though I was fully convinced of their truth before I started. But truths the most ancient, the most habitually believed, maybe endowed for us as the result of new experience with an appearance of apocalyptic novelty. There is all the difference in the world between believing academically, with the intellect, and believing personally, intimately, with the whole living self. A deaf man who had read a book about music might be convinced, theoretically, that Mozart was a good composer. But cure his deafness, take him to listen to the G minor Symphony; his conviction of Mozart's greatness would become something altogether new.

Of the fact that it takes all sorts to make a world I have been aware ever since I could read. But proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them. The newly arrested thief knows that honesty is the best policy with an intensity of conviction which the rest of us can never experience. And to realise that it takes all sorts to make a world one must have seen a certain number of the sorts with one's own eyes. Having seen them and having in this way acquired an intimate realisation of the truth of the proverb, one finds it hard to go on complacently believing that one's own opinions, one's own way of life are alone rational and right. This conviction of man's diversity must find its moral expression in the practice of the completest possible tolerance.

But if travel brings a conviction of human diversity, it brings an equally strong conviction of human unity. It inculcates tolerance, but it also shows what are the limits of possible toleration. Religions and moral codes, forms of government and of society are almost endlessly varied, and each has a right to its separate existence. But a oneness underlies this diversity. All men, whatever their beliefs, their habits, their way of life, have a sense of values. And the values are everywhere and in all kinds of society broadly the same. Goodness, beauty, wisdom and knowledge, with the human possessors of these qualities, the human creators of things and thoughts endowed with them, have always and everywhere been honoured.

Our sense of values is intuitive. There is no proving the real existence of values in any way that will satisfy the logical intellect. Our standards can be demolished by argumentation; but we are nonetheless right to cling to them. Not blindly, of course, not uncritically. Convinced by practical experience of man's diversity, the traveller will not be tempted to cling to his own inherited national standard, as though it were necessarily the only true and unperverted one. He will compare standards; he will search for what is common to all; he will observe the ways in which each standard is perverted, he will try to create a standard of his own that shall be as far as possible free from distortion. In one country, he will perceive the true, fundamental standard is distorted by an excessive emphasising of hierarchic and aristocratic principles; in another by an excess of democracy. Here, too much is made of work and energy for their own sakes; there, too much of mere being. In certain parts of the world he will find spirituality run wild; in others a stupid materialism that would deny the very existence of values. The traveller will observe these various distortions and will create for himself a standard that shall be, as far as possible, free from them — a standard of values that shall be as timeless, as uncontingent on circumstances, as nearly absolute as he can make them. Understanding diversity and allowing for it, he will tolerate, but not without limit. He will distinguish between harmless perversions and those which tend actually to deny or stultify the fundamental values. Towards the first he will be tolerant. There can be no compromise with the second.


In Okinawa, I respectfully presented Huxley's conclusions to my supervisor. I hoped, perhaps a little naively, that it might change his mind about the world, and that he might perhaps exploit it in order to gain something from the irreplaceable experience that the Navy was granting him. In his own defense, he denied that he was closed-minded about other cultures, but that everything he had learned from his experience, which he knew was impossible to refute, had confirmed what he suspected from the beginning - that he was supremely lucky to have been born an American, and that it was cause for celebration, not skepticism.

I had to agree with him that being born in America was an extreme stroke of luck, given the alternative of being born in so many of the places in which we disembarked. But such luck has not prevented me from becoming an expatriate, a transplanted American. My Americanness is something that I cherish, and that is impossible for me to hide, even if I could be mistaken for an Aussie, a German, a Swede, or any of the other expats who call the Philippines their home away from home. When we encounter one another in the street, all that is necessary for us to acknowledge our shared enthusiasms is a nod or a smile, in which volumes of astonishment are encapsulated.

The Isles of Unwisdom

According to the Cambridge Dictionaries Online, a "hick" is a "disapproving" noun defined as follows:

American English: "a person from a rural area who has little knowledge of culture and city life".
British English: "a person from the countryside who is considered to be stupid and without experience".

I live on a tiny island - one if the 7,107 islands that make up the Philippines. You cannot get very much more remote from what is commonly called civilization unless you were in an Amazonian backwater, sub-Saharan Africa, or Antarctica. The Bounty mutineers chose an island called Pitcairn as their ultimate hideout because it had a latitude on the maritime navigational charts of the time (probably those made by Captain Cook), but no accurate longitude. To find it, they had to reach the north-south line and sail east until they finally reached it in 1790. Knowing there was nowhere else to go without being discovered and certainly hanged, they burned the ship. In 1808, an American sealer called the "Topaz" found the sole survivor of the mutineers, John Adams, living amongst a small population of Anglo-Tahitians, the most that the tiny wild island could support.

I didn't burn my ship when I reached my island, but I might just as well have. Census takers have visited my house a few times over the years, making sure not to count me among its inhabitants because I was a "porriner" and proud of it. The islanders among whom I live are, strictly speaking, hicks. They were born here, raised here, and, even if they are lucky enough to find a job somewhere else, they will most likely die here, since Filipinos traditionally seek out their place of birth when they feel the approach of death.

These islanders are somewhat less isolated than they were before the bridge connecting their island to a much bigger one to the south was constructed, and they have certainly become interconnected by the insidious proliferation of cellphone communications. But they retain their status as hicks, in my opinion, because they remain "probincianos" - provincials in a physical as well as a psychological sense. All they know or care to know is the extent of their tiny island, its volcanoes and surrounding waters, and the limited view of the world that their horizon presents to them.

These people live in a kind of darkness that I have written of before. Instead of hearing a rumor about an impending tropical storm and checking the internet, which is available here (how else am I writing this to you, dear reader?), or perhaps checking a weather channel on cable TV (which I regard as a necessity), they will join everyone else they know and hurry into the nearest town to stock up on provisions like rice and canned goods. The source of the rumors along what we porriners call the "bamboo telegraph" is never divulged.

So these islanders cannot be blamed if their view of the rest of the wide world beyond their horizon is a little distorted or downright false. Their very isolation from the outside world exonerates them from the responsibility of making sense of it. For example, most of my neighbors call all expats, whether they are European, American, or Australian, "Canos" (short for Americanos) and believe that Berlin and Toronto and Sydney are all cities in America.

I have been writing film criticism since my first year of college, when I submitted examples of my critical acumen, such as it was at the age of eighteen, for extra credit in my English 101 class. The kinds of films that I chose to write about (exclusively at the time) exposed me to the charge of reverse-provincialism - a term Stanley Kauffmann coined in reference to writers like Graham Greene, who deliberately sought out the most exotic locations for their stories to attract readers in humdrum places like Des Moines. I wrote about what were once known, somewhat contemptuously, as "foreign films," but now fall under the equally contemptuous moniker "art films."

The reason why I wrote about films from places other than Hollywood was because of the resentment that was aroused in me, and that I still feel somewhat, when I discovered Federico Fellini's La Strada at the age of thirteen and learned something that no American film I had seen by then had taught me: that film was an art, that it could be a medium as profound and as rich and as deeply moving as a Hardy novel or a Mahler symphony. In the years following this discovery, I found many other films of equal value - a whole world of films that I had not known existed. And it was these films that inspired me to write criticism.

I suppose that I am guilty of the late Mr. Kauffmann's accusation of reverse provincialism. He was guilty of a provincialism of his own - a New Yorker who looked out of the world, and on the rest of America, with a sense of superiority, whether or not it was earned. But I am rather happy that this attitude has also affected my politics. My understanding of both Liberalism and Conservatism - Progressives and Reactionaries - is broader and more complex than the attenuated versions practiced in America. This is both an advantage for Americans and a disadvantage. While Americans have never faced the extremes of the Left and the Right - Communism and Fascism - they are ignorant of politics any more extreme than Walter Mondale or Ronald Reagan.

This election year, however, Americans have been treated to greater political extremes - a bonafide Socialist who has come in second for the Democratic nomination and a anti-immigration, isolationist neo-fascist who has won, or so it seems, the Republican nomination. If this means that the average American voter is better educated than he once was, it has done nothing to quiet the nerves of many observers (including myself) who fear a victory in November for the presumptive Republican who is prepared to do what America has never done in its history - pull back from its international commitments, put the brakes on legal immigration, deport millions of undocumented immigrants, and build a BIG wall all along the border with Mexico. All these things are indications of a serious withdrawal from the world back inside well-demarcated and well-enforced borders - the borders of an insular and isolationist America. It looks to many Americans like the party of Abraham Lincoln is about to hand over its nomination to a man who would bring back slavery if he could.

Yesterday, the citizens of the United Kingdom voted by a small majority in a referendum for exiting from the European Union for alot of the same reasons why the American presumptive Republican nominee is running for president. A new provincialism, resistance to immigration, a reversal of globalization (which many voters, mostly working class, feel has betrayed their interests) is driving this political trend. In a real sense, they are right to feel betrayed because their governments have failed to push forward fiscal reforms that can counterbalance the loss of jobs. As politicians have let go of their control of their economies, they somehow believe that, by relegating their authority, they can also relegate their responsibility. None of this is a reason for abandoning or dismantling the process of globalization, if using the money and power of developed nations to help lift backward countries (like the Philippines) onto their feet is what it is really about. But the motive behind globalization may not be entirely noble. I don't believe for a second that it's altruism that wants to lift people out of abject poverty. It may be nothing more than an attempt to create markets where they didn't exist before. But ending poverty, for whatever reason, is a positive good from which every one of us on the planet can benefit.

The people I live among on my island are genuine provincials. Their view of the world is severely limited. But they have an excuse for living in the dark. No one who lives in Europe or the U.S. - not even residents of the remotest Romania or in backwardest Mississippi has such an excuse. The people who voted for Brexit and who support Donald Trump are too sophisticated to pretend that they're as stupid as they seem. Something else motivates them. A hatred of politics, of the responsibilities of citizenship, of people who don't look like them or think like them. They feel extreme nostalgia for simpler times, when it was acceptable to be uninformed and excusable to be wrong. Most of them, we're told, have never voted before. But if they care so little for being right, for doing what they know in their guts is the right thing, then the right to vote and every other right of citizenship in an advanced, successful nation is wasted on them. They should be exiled, as ancient Rome once did, to an island such as mine, far from the pleasures and advantages of their culture.

The Isles of Unwisdom (stupidly retitled The Islands of Unwisdom for those Americans who maybe weren't aware that an "isle" is an "island") is an historical novel by Robert Graves, published in 1949 - a highly fictionalized account of an ill-fated Spanish expedition that sailed from Peru in 1595 bound for the Solomon Islands and the diamond fields rumored to be there, ripe for the stealing. After sundry misadventures, the expedition, sans its captain and most of its conquistadors, makes it only as far as the Philippines, not far from where I write this.

Run, Walk or Crawl

A friend I have not seen in the flesh in perhaps twenty-five years, but with whom, nevertheless, I am a Facebook "friend," posted something this past week to the effect, "If you comment on the events in Orlando with your agenda on either side of the gun debate, you're kind of an asshole." I "liked" his post. But what I wanted to reply was "Spoken like a true American!" So, at the risk of being an asshole, let me dredge up my agenda.

Over the past few days, people have been quietly observing the first anniversary of the mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, in which a young man, his head filled with white supremacist hate, went on a shooting rampage inside a historic black church in the middle of a prayer meeting. Federal prosecutors recently announced that they are seeking the death penalty in the shooter's trial.

The Charleston anniversary was completely overshadowed by yet another mass shooting, this time in Orlando, Florida the weekend prior, in which an apparently conflicted gay Muslim man took out his own self-hate on a crowd of revelers inside a gay nightclub, killing forty-nine of them. Since he chose not to surrender to police and was shot to death by them, at least there won't be a trial or a prosecutor seeking the death penalty.

American progressives (like me, dear reader) always have to pinch themselves just to be reminded that they're living in the 21st century. When it comes to certain aspects of American life, the intransigence of some of its citizens makes the idea of progress seem like an illusion.

Two issues that have clung tenaciously to life in 21st century American life, issues that were settled in the 20th century by every other nation in the West, are capital punishment and a citizen's right to bear arms. Evidence that the first issue is gradually going away is piling up in state after state. The extremism and apparent paranoia, like a species of "siege mentality," of proponents of the Seconnd Amendment is an indication that they, too, are losing their nerve.

Because the issue has sometimes seemed unsolveable, some gun control advocates have begun to look for ways of "owning" that Americans are an especially violent people and that guns, which now number more than three hundred million in America, are never going to go away. But I think the debate now runs deeper among Americans.

As I recognized in a post on this blog some months ago, Americans are now grappling with the proposition that the right of gun ownership is more important than human life. I hope that this statement sounds outrageous to most people, but it makes perfect sense to others. If there were multiple mass killings every day, if the death toll were multiplied exponentially - which it is likely to do before something is at last done about it - there would still be this tacit agreement that a citizen's right to bear arms is more important than the thousands who have been slaughtered in its name.

Such an outrageous proposition is not at all unprecedented in America - and everywhere else in the world for that matter. Almost a hundred years ago modern civilization arrived at a similar agreement when automobile accidents started to take their toll on drivers, passengers and pedestrians. Speed was the culprit. Human errors behind the wheel could only be controlled when an automobile's speed could be controlled. But nobody really wanted automobiles to be made slower. So a conscious choice between speed and human life had to be made, and life lost. Every year, the staggering numbers of automobile fatalities are published, along with civic leaders demanding that something should be done about it. And every year nothing is done, and the argument is shelved. Perhaps driverless cars will be the solution?

Maybe I am kind of an asshole, but I believe in progress. It may always be a struggle of two steps up and one back, with reactionary forces always trying to pull us in the opposite direction. "It is quite possible," George Orwell, playing the devil's advocate, wrote, "that man's major problems will never be solved. But it is also unthinkable! Who is there who dares to look at the world of today and say to himself, 'It will always be like this: even in a million years it cannot get appreciably better?' So you get the quasi-mystical belief that for the present there is no remedy, all political action is useless, but that somehow, somewhere in space and time, human life will cease to be the miserable brutish thing it now is. . . There is nothing for it except to be a 'short-term pessimist,' ie. to keep out of politics, make a sort of oasis within which you and your friends can remain sane, and hope that somehow things will be better in a hundred years."

I cannot believe that it will take that long for the gun lovers to come around and see that the right that they celebrate has become oppressive to everyone else who does not want to own a gun. Is it constitutional for the majority of Americans who don't have any use for a gun to continue being threatened into submission by the minority that do? It may take another generation for our gun culture to see it this way, but I must believe it will happen. I believe it because, by now, progress is built into our social system. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote "If you cannot fly, run. If you cannot run, walk. If you cannot walk, crawl. But you must keep moving forward." It's forward, not backward.

The Art of Witnessing

While researching material for my last post on the Alain Resnais film La Guerre est Finie, I read the Paris Interview of the Spanish writer Jorge Semprún (1) and came across a controversy involving Semprún and the French documentary filmmaker Claude Lanzmann. I touched on Lanzmann's criticism in my last post. He sharply criticized Semprún's treatment of the Nazi concentration camps in his "novels," Le Grand Voyage (1963) and Literature or Life.

In her introduction to the interview, Lila Azam Zanganeh wrote:

"Semprún published the book [Literature or Life] as a memoir, but in it he declares that 'the essential truth of the concentration camp experience is not transmissible.' His literary solution is to introduce fictional scenes and details whenever his own memory is too faint, too incoherent, or when it simply fails to evoke what he feels to be the truth of his experience.

"Semprún's decision to meld fiction with memory in recounting his concentration camp experience sparked heated debate in France, where critics accused him of calling all memory and eyewitness accounts into question. Semprún's fiercest critic was Claude Lanzmann, the director of the epic documentary film Shoah, who argues that his own approach to recording the experience of survivors - through direct testimony - is the only legitimate method, and that art and imagination can have no part in such an endeavor.

"Semprún allows that testimony is vital to historians, but he notes that testimony, too, is not always precisely reliable, and that historians, alas, are never quite effective as novelists at conveying the essence of experience. 'Horror is so repetitive,' he says, 'and without literary elaboration one simply cannot be heard or understood.' Hence he argues, 'The only way to make horror palpable is to construct a fictional body of work.'"

Coming from someone who was not a survivor of the camps, Lanzmann's criticism sounds almost puritanical in its insistence on scrupulous factuality rather than a more elastic or imaginative recounting of events. In the body of the interview, Semprún went further in the defense of his own work and even mentioned something that at first sounds nonsensical:

Interviewer: "The book you're working on now, 'Exercise de survie,' is made up of memoir as well as reflections on memory. Is this a response to your critics who objected to your adding fiction to your memoirs of the camps? Claude Lanzmann went so far as to argue that the use of fictional detail renders the narrative of the deported entirely counterfeit."

Semprún: "I think it is very difficult to enter into a discussion with Claude Lanzmann. Once he said, All Semprun does is literature! Shoah is indeed a remarkable film, but he would like us to believe that it is not a film composed partly of fiction? The disturbing truth, the great paradox of the gas chambers, is that it left no surviving witnesses. And that changes everything. All the other massacres of history have left a few survivors who could serve as witnesses. But no one survived the gas chambers. We have never been inside the gas chamber because had we been there, we would be dead. There are a few cases where someone was pulled out at the last minute, but then that person did not experience the gas chamber, just the entrance into the chamber. We only have the testimony of those who ran the gas chambers and dragged out the bodies of the dead. So in a sense, Lanzmann's film is also fictional. It takes place years later, and people are telling their stories with the measure of artifice it necessarily entails. I find this approximation both artistic and fascinating, but it is a strict reconstruction of the truth."

In an essay I posted on this blog in February called "In Shoah's Shadow," I asked what I thought was a valid question: "If [in a fiction film] the representation of a man being shot to death is somehow acceptable realism - even if everyone accepts that no such act actually occurred - why would an attempt to represent the moment, inside one of Auschwitz's gas chambers, when the Zyklon cyanide pellets are dropped into the air vent and the naked people inside are shown perishing be unacceptable?"

There appears to be an unwritten agreement among filmmakers to avoid staging scenes inside the gas chambers. The American film The Grey Zone, which is a fictionalized account of the Sonderkommandos - Auschwitz prisoners enlisted to haul the bodies of the dead out of the gas chambers and transport them to the crematoria, takes us all the way up to the doors of the gas chamber, through which Jews are shown entering, the doors closed, the German soldiers on the roof opening the can of cyanide pellets (which vaporized when coming in contact with the air), pouring the contents into an air vent, and even letting us hear the screams coming from within. Despite the somewhat unsettling presence of a number of familiar American faces in the film (John Cusack, Steve Buscemi, and Harvey Keitel), the film refrained from taking us inside the gas chamber doors.  

To hear Lanzmann describe his films, you would think they are nothing but the raw testimony of Holocaust survivors. But they are, of course, so much more than that. Lanzmann was, first of all, a filmmaker. And he set for himself a quite difficult precondition: he completely ruled out the use of preexisting newsreel film. But how could he record several hours of eyewitness testimony without his film being unbearably static? He was, after all, interested in making his film watchable. Presented with the simple technical problem of finding a solution to the "talking heads" - the monotony of people in front of the camera looking at someone just off camera and telling them what they witnessed - Lanzmann found various creative solutions that make his film not only watchable but sometimes impossible to look away from. As anyone who has seen the film knows, it is often difficult to take one's eyes off the screen. Shoah has become an artifact of the Holocaust in itself.

Unlike a film documentarist, writers like Semprún and Imre Kertesz, Auschwitz survivor and author of the novel Fatelessness, are artists, novelists. As Kertesz stated in his own Paris Interview: "I am somebody who survived all of it, somebody who saw the Gorgon's head and still retained enough strength to finish a work that reaches out to people in a language that is humane. The purpose of literature is for people to become educated, to be entertained, so we can't ask them to deal with such gruesome visions. I created a work representing the Holocaust as such, but without this being an ugly literature of horrors."(2)

In 2005, Kertesz's novel was adapted to film by the Hungarian director Lajos Koltai. Kertesz approved of the film, which was a dramatic re-creation of a semi-autobiographical novel about a boy's experience of the death camps. The possible permutations of the Holocaust are only as limited, it seems, as the creative vision of the artist.


(1) "The Art of Fiction No. 192," The Paris Review No. 180, Spring 2007, Lila Azam Zanganeh, interviewer; translated from the French by Sara Sugihara.
(2) "The Art of Fiction No. 220," The Paris Review No. 205, Summer 2013, Luisa Zielinski, interviewer.