413

Well, Waferinos, let me wish you all a Happy New Year. We will flush out Trumpi, but don't despair: Trumpism lives on. Can 74 million voters be wrong? Grover Cleveland made a comeback after 4 yrs of being out of the presidency, and it's an even bet that Trumpalumpi will do the same. But with or without the World's Greatest Douche Bag (WGDB), a Jackass Like No Other (JLNO), America will continue its downward spiral. Years ago, I predicted that this wd be the crucial decade, and it is now upon us. Stupidity, of course, is a significant factor in all this; and when I see the progs in ecstasy over Biden's wonderful diverse appointments, unable to recognize that in substantive terms this changes nothing, I have a warm, fuzzy feeling. Maybe you do as well.

Meanwhile, this blog soldiers on. By now all of you are aware of the problems I'm having, accessing it from Internet cafes. I will do my best to figure out a solution, as being able to run it only 12 days a month wd be a terrible defeat. After all, where else, in the English language, at least, can one go to discuss what is really going on in America, as opposed to the Disney fantasies offered by other media and outlets?

So stay safe and healthy in 2021, and together we can watch the America follies play out.

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412

Well, Wafers, I'm still working on Part II, but it's a struggle. E.g., I fall into Kim's anus like Alice down the rabbit hole; during my descent, I pass by Tulsi, Ging (Newtrich), Dan Quayle, and other illuminati, including a cluster of Karens; and at last have lunch with Meghan Markle, who is wearing a very chic hat, but who bores me to death. I dunno; I think I may be losing my creative edge.

Anyway, we've had some good discussion up to now, watching Trumpi embarrass himself, the bubbas strutting around (impotently), and the vaccine finally making an appearance as thousands of Americans continue to die. I think this virus is going to be a life-changer; it may never be over, and it could well mutate into more virulent forms. Everyone in a mask: it looks like a scene in a dystopian sci-fi movie. And then literally millions of Americans living in an alternative reality, guaranteeing that the country has no real future. Older Wafers scratch their heads, wondering what happened to the US of their childhood, while savvy younger Wafers are clued to staying outside of the Matrix. Fun times, eh?

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Crossing the Rectal Divide (Part I)

It's a recurring dream, and it refuses to go away. I have it every three or four weeks. In the dream, I'm dining alone in some fancy restaurant, and suddenly begin to beat on a plate with a soup spoon, while chanting, "Americans are degraded and debased!" As I get louder and louder, the waiter, who happens to be Indian, comes over to me.

"I'm sorry, sir, but you are disturbing the other customers. I actually agree with you: Americans are a sorry lot. But I have to ask you to keep it down, and not use a spoon." To which I reply: "The dregs of humanity!" This comes out as a shriek. "Can I offer you a bowl of cheddies?" he asks me.

"Why do you Indians always say 'cheddies'? It's cherries, for heaven's sake."

"Yes sir, I know," he replies. "We can't help it; it just comes out that way. Even Gandhi said 'cheddies'. 'Life is not a bowl of cheddies', he always used to say. Anyway, I think you'll find them veddy soothing."

Meanwhile, the owner of the place calls the local mental institution; the medics arrive in a white van, put me in a straight jacket, and cart me off to the Happy Valley Lunatic Asylum. I continue screaming; they put me in a rubber-lined room, so I can't hurt myself. The door opens, and the resident psychiatrist, Dr. Ludwig von Schmaltzkopf, comes in and sits down. I'm lying on the floor, exhausted.

"Mr. Lokshen Kugel," he says; "I agree with you: the country consists of 330 million putzes. 'Dolts' is too mild a word for them. But you cannot go around yelling this in upscale restaurants. The putzes will get annoyed. Do you understand me?"

"But who will tell them?" I counter.

"Not you, Mr. Kugel. Try writing a letter to the Times instead, OK?"

"But the Times consists of putzes," I reply. At this point I wake up, sweating and breathing heavily. My wife stirs in her sleep.

"Lokshen, honey," she says; "did you have your America dream again?" I nod.

"Lokshen, you can't go on being a one-man anti-asshole crusade. Time you went to see a shrink."

"They'll just give me pills," I tell her. "That won't solve anything."

"It might stop you from having this ridiculous dream," she suggests. "Why don't you just confine yourself to writing your study of Kim Kardashian's buttocks, Crossing the Rectal Divide?"

"I've hit a brick wall with that. I can't cross the divide, so to speak, until I actually examine Kim's anus, see what's going on in there. I wrote her, explaining the project, and asking if we could set up an appointment, but she never wrote back. Meanwhile, my dream is the only thing keeping me going, the only inspiration I have left."

"It's also making you ill," says Sophie. "Why not just fly to LA, and pay Kim a visit. Who knows? Maybe she'll drop her pants. Then you might solve the problem of Americans being assholes by examining an actual American asshole."

My eyebrows go up. "Who's crazy now?" I ask her.

"I'm just trying to get you to lighten up. It's either that or the loony bin, for real." She sighs. "You could also drop in on Meghan Markle, ask her why she thinks Americans are preoccupied with her and her stupid hats. I mean, beyond the fact that they are morons. Americans, I mean, not the hats," she adds.

"A hat can't be a moron," I tell her.

"No, but it can be moronic, which means that Meghan hat-worshippers are morons."

"Why would people worship a hat?" I ask.

"Oh, they think that if they wear a Meghan hat, the hat energy will rub off on them, and they'll be like British royalty. By the same token, if you publish your book and include photos of Kim's anus, you'll sell millions of copies. We'll be rich, and we can relocate to the French Riviera."

"But what if people start to fetishize me, chase me down the street hoping to tear off my T-shirt, or even my pants?"

"Lokshen, I think we may be getting a bit ahead of ourselves. For now, concentrate on your book, and have Dr. Flanksteak give you a pill." Always so helpful, my Sophie.

I booked a flight to LA, also bought a speculum, a flashlight, and a large tube of KY jelly. I'm going to get to the bottom of this, I told myself.

I knocked on the door of Kim's mansion. Kanye West opened it. "Hey dude, wassup?"

"I just want to say how sorry I am that you weren't elected president," I tell him, squelching the desire to add that he looked like a complete buffoon. This is an American idol? I thought to myself. No wonder the country is going down the drain.

"No sweat, amigo; el Señor Trump just made me his homie."

"Wow, that's great!" I reply. "Exactly what does that entail?"

"Oh, I just hafta tell everyone that Biden stole the election. No big deal. But why are you carrying a speculum, a flashlight, and a tube of KY?"

"I'm here to inspect your wife's anus," I tell him, smiling rather dementedly.

"Far out! Hey Kimmie, get that big booty of yours over here. There's some white boy here, wants to have a look at the Royal Asshole." She comes to the door.

"Kanye," she says, "once and for all: you're the Royal Asshole. Unless maybe it's Meghan Markle."

"Ms. Kardashian," I interject, "I'm honored. Could we repair to your bedroom?"

"'Repair'?" she exclaims. "Jesus, you white boys sure talk funny."

"True," I reply, "but then we voted for Trump, and Kanye is now his homie. So let me play that funky music."

"All right," she says; "let me drop my pants so we can get this over with. What are you looking for, anyway?"

"America," I tell her.

"Well, Kugel-face, you've definitely come to the right place. You won't hafta dig very deep, either."

(To be continued)

410

Wafers-

Well, that last thread had a lot of good discussion in it. Now, we can continue our analysis of the theater of the absurd, i.e. American politics. The nation is broken in two, and each part refuses to recognize the presidency of the other part. More than 70 million people, apparently, regarded Obama as illegitimate--the whole "birther" business fomented by Trumpaloni. So when the latter squeaked through on razor-edge margins in 2016, he was never given a chance by the other 70+ million Americans. Granted, he is an awful human being--perhaps one of the most awful in the history of humanity--but he was legitimately elected, and from Day 1 the Dems went to work to discredit that election: impeachment, plus daily attacks in the press (items normally reserved for the editorial page were now on the front page--opinion as "news"). Of course, Trumpi did himself in with his botching of the covid crisis, and his callousness toward George Floyd and black people in general; but nevertheless, the Dems took their gloves off and went for the jugular. In that sense, although his claims of voter fraud this election are completely farcical, I can sympathize with the poor douche bag: of course he wants to instil in the public mind, his base in particular, that this election got stolen. Joe Biden's call for unity sounds heartwarming, but the reality is that again, 70 million Americans will regard his presidency as illegitimate. Sure, it would be great if he can get a handle on the virus, on climate change, and on racism; but the bottom line is that the country is a broken political entity, like Humpty Dumpty, and I can't see the king's horses or men being able to put it together again.

Of course, from a declinist point of view, it's just as well. I've suggested before that the American empire can collapse via a number of different scenarios, and fascism was certainly one route. If we have now averted that, there is a more likely scenario on deck: we just tear ourselves apart, and continue to do so until secession becomes the obvious solution. Whether that will generate a better world than the one we have now is anyone's guess, but what I do predict is that the world will regard America with pity--as politically irrelevant. I think it was David Susskind who once remarked (rather unkindly) that Canada was "a large, snow-covered land limping toward anonymity." Leaving the snow aside, that might be more our fate than Canada's.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to this new thread.

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Of Size and Scale

Wafers-

While we're waiting for Schmiden to win and Trumpi's absurd lawsuits to crash and burn, I thought I might provide a bit of intellectual diversion. As follows:

Beyond right and wrong there is a field; I'll meet you there. --Yalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

A short while ago, someone sent a message to this blog, in which he voiced his concern that communism was threatening to take over America and the West. For me, it was like listening to Rip Van Winkle, who had fallen asleep for 30+ years and woke up thinking that Ronald Reagan was president. But it got me reflecting on the danger--not of communism or capitalism per se--but of size. It could be that the real problem with the Russian empire, or the American one, was the word "empire." In other words, it was not about ideology as much as the scale of the enterprise. After all, if we are talking about modern industrial societies, the most successful ones on the planet would appear to be the Scandanavian countries, which keep both socialism and capitalism in check by means of a mixed economy.

Another way of saying this was posed many years ago by the American anthropologist Richard Schweder, who suggested that most ideologies were functional or viable within limits. There is, however (he went on to say), a perverse tendency to always go overboard; to go to extremes. One thinks, for example, of the political correctness movement, which has become intolerant of any dissenting opinions to the point that it has acquired some of the characteristics of the fascist groups it opposes. Or as I wrote in the wake of 8 November 2016 (see Essay #15 of Are We There Yet?), how its extremism finally provoked the backlash that put Donald Trump into office.

As far as socialism goes, it does, as noted above, seem to work in controlled contexts, such as the Scandanavian countries. Modified socialism, as it were. But apply it on a vast scale, as in the case of the former Soviet Union, and you wind up with totalitarianism--Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. (Of course, Russia has been autocratic for something like a thousand years, long before the Bolshevik revolution; but that's a whole other discussion.) As for capitalism, a similar argument was made by Richard Powers in his brilliant novel Gain, which is a condemnation of the scope of hustling, not of hustling per se (we all have to make a living). In the novel, in the late eighteenth century, two brothers open a soap-and-candle shop on the Boston docks. It proves to be very successful, so much so that 200 years later it has evolved into a huge pharmaceutical conglomerate, poisoning rivers and giving the folks who live near them cancer. The point is obvious.

It's also about religion, in the broad sense of the term. Whether Left or Right, it is easy for people to get caught up in abstractions, and lay waste to everything around them as a result. We see this clearly in that remarkable TV series, The Americans, in which two Soviet agents living in the United States (played by Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell) so blindly follow orders from Moscow that they murder one "enemy" after another (most of them innocent) for the sake of The Cause, until at the end, with Gorbachev emerging as a challenge to the Kremlin's old guard, they have to confront the fact that their lives have been meaningless, a gigantic illusion. On the capitalist side, we have millions slavishly pursuing the supposedly endless expansion of the American Dream, which, after a certain point, also issues out in meaninglessness. (I recall David Brooks, a few years back, writing about how, despite having a $4-million apartment in Manhattan and celebrity status as a New York Times columnist, he was depressed. Gee, what a surprise!)

The sad fact is that the number of political writers who realized the crucial importance of not getting seduced by an ideology--not going "whole hog," as it were--is pitifully small: Koestler, Camus, Orwell, Eric Hoffer (The True Believer), and the American monk Thomas Merton, among others. Koestler's word for this fanaticism or fundamentalism was "devotion," a word with obvious religious overtones; and toward the end of his life he suggested that the only hope for the human race was that scientists develop a pill to combat it. Which does raise the question of the psychological dimensions of the phenomenon. (More on this in a moment)

The Scandanavian example does point to an important post-imperial possibility (although China has certainly failed to get the message): decentralization. Alternative politics can emerge with the breakup of empires, although the post-Soviet collapse led to a great deal of regional brutality. America, too, will (I believe) have its own secessionist breakup, probably within two or three decades, or even less; yet it is not likely that these new independent states will be able to shed the narcissism and competitive individualism that seems to be woven into the American DNA. E.F. Schumacher notwithstanding, small is not in and of itself necessarily beautiful.

I go beyond the issue of decentralization in the second story of my recent short story collection, The Heart of the Matter, which is also called by the same name. Whom might we look to for sensible political alternatives? In that story, I suggest John Ruskin, William Morris, Gandhi, Lewis Mumford, and Ernest Callenbach as guides to a reasonable future, although, as we might expect, they have to date been dismissed as "quaint" or utopian. All of these writers were in favor of decentralization, but they saw something equally important, in addition: the necessity of inner peace, of balance, of a human consciousnss that was not endlessly self-aggrandizing. "The spirit of our days," wrote William Morris, "has to be delight in the life of the world." Hard to disagree.

This brings us to the psychological aspect of the problem. There is, in fact, a sixth writer we need to consider, namly the much-maligned Italian thinker, Niccolò Machiavelli. As I argue in Genio: The Sources of Italian Genius, Machiavelli has been badly misunderstood. Beneath the level of political opportunism--which he certainly did advocate for princes--there is a deeper level that transcends Left and Right, and that is the opposition of ego vs. decency. I do believe that if we are to have any future at all, as a human race, it is going to have to be green, sustainable, and decentralized, containing elements of both capitalism and socialism, and free of the ideology of "growth." But these are necessary conditions, not sufficient ones. For enlisted in the service of ego, these things can also turn into "religions." (If you've ever met a Green fundamentalist, you know what I'm talking about.) Machiavelli understood that in the real world--the world of rulers and their subjects--it was ego that prevailed; but what kind of world was that, finally? The man was no buddhist, but he did see that in order to evolve toward decency, the ego had to become aware of what it was doing, and why; to acquire self-transparency, in a word. As James Joyce famously put it, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Waking up: this is the long road ahead.

(c)Morris Berman, 2020

Down to the Wire

Waferinos-

The election is one week away. The battle of the 'titans': a sociopathic buffoon vs. a lame goofball. Democracy in action. 8 swing states still up in the air. Wafers, of course, understand that the real choice is between rapid collapse of the US vs. a slightly slower one. Viva Zapata!

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Sitcom Nation

Some time ago, on this blog, I mentioned the fact that a second screening of the popular sitcom Friendsrevealed to me something I had not noticed the first time around: a good bit of the humor is derived from the characters ridiculing or poking fun at one another. The “Chandler” character (played by Matthew Perry), for example, delivers a running stream of banter along these lines; he in turn is the butt of endless gay or homophobic jokes. A similar pattern can be seen in Seinfeld, and I have to admit that, notwithstanding all this, I enjoyed both of these sitcoms very much. Indeed, on first take the two of them struck me as being hysterically funny. Second time around, I realized that both of them had an “undertow” or shadow, and that it was actually rather ugly.

Possibly the worst example of this underlies the enormously popular series,The Big Bang Theory, about a group of nerdy physicists and their convoluted relations with the gorgeous blond who lives across the hall (played by Kaley Cuoco), as well as with two other women. This too is a hilarious portrayal of the ups and downs of their lives together, but once again, the shadow is pretty dark. In this case, the ridicule often amounts to brutal verbal attacks on each other, to the point of cruel humiliation. “Howard Wolowitz” (played by Simon Helberg) is a frequent target here, singled out for his height (short), his overattachment to his mother, the fact that he lost his virginity to his (second) cousin, and the fact that he never obtained a Ph.D., but is “only” an engineer from MIT. All of this is very wounding to him; the other boys find it amusing. Howard, for his part, spends a lot of time making fun of the Indian member of the group, “Raj” (Kunal Nayyar). And this pattern is operative with all of the characters, as the episodes progress. As I watched the show the second time around, I was filled with pain and anger on behalf of the victims, and I finally realized why: this was my experience of elementary school, high school, and even university and beyond.

What chance did I have, in an American context, really? At age 7 I was playing chess and reading poetry. As a teenager, I thought the concerns of my peer group—e.g., cars and their “groovy” tail fins—were pretty stupid, light years from anything I regarded as meaningful or worthwhile. As for university, Cornell was once characterized by an icon of a shoe stepping on someone’s face, with the prevailing ethos identified as “one-upsmanship.” In all 3 contexts, nasty put-downs were the order of the day. Nor am I proud of the fact that on occasion, I was the aggressor, being caught up in the soup of sadism we all floated in. Things were not much different when it came to the various jobs I held over the years, both academic and non. (I recall, when I was an Assistant Professor at Rutgers, one of the graduate students remarking, “Around here, they go for the jugular.” Where don’t they? one might reply.)

What my own experience—and probably yours as well—demonstrates, along with these 3 sitcoms, is the deep pathology of daily American life, which Americans barely notice and take for granted. It’s part of the air we breathe. This vicious treatment of other people is pretty much the norm in America, some version of Lord of the Flies. You can read the ultimate outcome of our early child, teen, and young adult cultural indoctrination in the daily papers: we hate each other, and we kill each other, often over nothing at all. Massacres occur now practically on a daily basis. One article I referred to in the last post tells of policemen beating porcupines to death with their night sticks, and finding it hilarious. Why would they do such a depraved, awful thing? Because such behavior is practically in our DNA; it’s how we relate to each other, the world (the torture of innocents, for example, or dropping atomic bombs on civilian populations), and even the animal kingdom. Time to stop blaming the top 1% for our problems, I would think, let alone China or Russia or Islam or god knows who else (as Jimmy Carter declared in his 1979 Annapolis speech, to which Americans turned a deaf ear). The truth is that the entire culture is sick beyond description, and really, beyond redemption. There is a deep poison in the American soul, and no conceivable way to remove it. Think of the many countries that will be happy (openly or in secret) when the nation finally self-destructs. Which event, given who we are, would seem to be inevitable.

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406

Well, Wafers: Trumpi has the virus, and is revealed to all and sundry to be a colossal shmuck. Except for his base: they'll find a way to spin this in his favor. And then that absurd "debate," which revealed to the world the complete dysfunction of the American empire (if other countries didn't know this already). Gore Vidal once remarked: "Stupidity excites me." Jesus, I dunno when I've been more excited. And now the election is a month away, which Trumpi may or may not win. Either way, Alexander Pope's words capture our situation now:

"Thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored/Light dies before thy uncreating word/Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall/And universal darkness buries all.”

We have no future, amigos. How many times can we say it?

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405

Well, as many of your posts suggest, we continue to go to hell in a basket. The election is only a few weeks away; either way, it will change nothing. Except that Trump will make things even worse, should he be reelected. The bubbas are armed; the progs have their heads rammed deeply in their buttocks, and roll around like donuts. You do the math.

Interview with Guy McPherson (Nature Bats Last)

Wafers-

Here's a bit o' fun:

https://youtu.be/hhKLrm8QWrU

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The Larger Perspective

Wafers-

I thought this might interest you all: a documentary, now about 10 years old, called "Surviving Progress." It gives a larger perspective to our current American political dilemmas--la longue duree (the long view), as the French would say. There are some silly interviews toward the end, regarding how technology can supposedly save us--which actually fall into the category of what Ronald Wright calls the "progress trap"--but these are countered by a few folks who know better. On a planetary scale, the doc suggests that we have two options: colonize Mars, and fuck that planet up like we did the earth; or become a very different type of human being, right here at home. Switching from limbic system to prefrontal cortex is I guess what the latter option would entail. I can't imagine it, myself: this is the path of those thinkers of a window of about 1,000 years--Christ, Buddha, Socrates, and Confucius--who discovered "second-order thinking," i.e. the type of reflexivity that occurs in meditation, for example. Before you act, you step back and assess what you are doing.

So imagine that you come across a Karen in the midst of a vicious tirade, and you say to her: "This is not helpful behavior, going postal just because a store asked you to put on a mask." Or you say to Shaneka Torres, just as she's about to shell a McDonald's with her machine gun because they forgot to put bacon on her cheeseburger: "Better not, my dear; you'll just wind up in jail for a very long time." What are the odds, really?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGyU6MEstjU

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402

Wafers-

Poor America. Stuff like this seems to be happening almost every day now: the murder of innocent children:

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/13/us/north-carolina-boy-killed/index.html

The killer was arrested; nothing is known of the motive so far. A life snuffed out, and for what? We do need to think about what may lie beyond the national collapse, but clearly, the transition is going to involve a lot of tragedy.

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Trump (and America) Revealed

Hola Wafers-

Well, that Trump interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios has to be the most damning interview in the history of the world. The man-child was revealed as a callous buffoon, a clown living in an alternative reality regarding the pandemic and the stats of suffering (medical and financial) of the American people. A real horror show, that was, and with the exception of his base, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the president of the US was a moron and a jackass. Which, from a declinist point of view, is a good thing. The late Roman Empire had similar emperors at the helm, who did much to bring the civilization down. I'm personally not happy about the suffering of millions of people, but this is how empires typically end. As Hegel famously remarked, History is a slaughter bench. Or to put it another way, you don't get History for free.

Of course, it's a safe bet that his base--something like 40% of the voting population--will see the interview in a positive light: "I guess he showed them!"--that kind of thing. As Trumpaloni once said, he could shoot someone in Times Square and his base would still vote for him.

The real issue, however, is not Trumpo per se. The man is merely an icon for the rest of the country. Whether progs or bubbas or Karens, 99+% of the nation believes in the American Dream, and the American Way of Life. Like Trump, they just want to get back to hustling. They just want to make America great again, or save it. Only a few declinists and Native Americans understand that the place was a mistake from the get-go. "Possessions are a disease with them," said Sitting Bull. How many Americans agree with that? Left-wing 'heroes' certainly don't, any more than does Trumpalump. The Lump is ridiculous, but he is hardly the cause of the mess we are in. Look to the people, said H.L. Mencken, George Carlin, Gore Vidal. That's where you'll find the core of our failure as a nation.

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400

Wafers-

This blog began 14 years and 3 months ago, and we are now up to the 400th post. Monthly hits now number about 90,000; the total for those 14 years is nearly 5 million. Clearly, we are poised to take over the world. Can you imagine a Waferworld, where decency and integrity prevail? It's an inspiring thought.

Modesty aside, this is clearly the greatest blog in the universe. We soldier on, through thick and thin, pursuing the truth no matter where it leads. Occasionally I hear of people going to other blogs, and I just shake my head. Why in the world would anyone do such a thing, when this blog has it all? I remain completely baffled.

I predicted the demise of America in the Twilight book, 20 years ago, and now it is upon us. The country will look radically different by 2030, and it's not going to be pretty. Of course, Americans are not very bright, so many of them believe the situation can be turned around. Which I have likened to trying to turn around an aircraft carrier in a bathtub. It just ain't gonna happen, as all of you know. The US was founded on faulty premises (hustling), and now the chickens are coming home to roost. The man in the White House is the consummate hustler, fully representative of Americans' deepest aspirations. The spiritual goal of the Middle Ages--salvation--has been replaced by secular salvation, i.e. money: to live in a big house, drive a Mercedes, own a private plane, and drink $20,000-bottles of wine. An empty life, a stupid life, and what almost all Americans think life is about. Pretty thin fare, when you think about it.

O lente, lente currite noctis equi! Tick tock, time is running out. Meanwhile, let all 172 of us celebrate the GBOE--Greatest Blog on Earth. America will go down the drain, but what we stand for will endure forever. It always has.

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399

Wafers-

Following up on the podcast with Bret Weinstein, from the last thread: I think most of us here would say that the BLM and anti-racist protests are an attempt (emotional though it may be) to redress a situation of systemic oppression of black people, rendering them second-class citizens for a very long time now, as well as the targets of white police. Bret, and I'm guessing many others, see all this in a different light: an attempt on the part of these protest groups to grab power for themselves, and via political correctness, to shut down all discourse. My own view is that these two takes on the situation are not mutually exclusive, and that both factors could be operating at the same time. Bret also believes that the bubbas are reacting rationally. I.e., if they correctly(?) see the protests as an attempted power grab, they understand that if the 'left' does seize power, it will be at their expense. Hence the anti-demonstrations, show of guns, and so on. What thus may be operating now in America is the conflict between two types of incipient fascism, which is ripping the country apart. (Where the Karens fit into this cosmic struggle is, I'm guessing, unclear. O dem Karens!)

I keep thinking of that line from Talleyrand, in the wake of the Terror (1793-94): "Above all, no zeal." No chance of that in the US today, unfortunately; though again, from a declinist point of view, it may be a good thing.

O&D, chicos-

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398

Waferinos-

Great dialogue! Let's continue the discussion. References to delis in NY and LA would not be amiss.

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397

Wafers-

Well, I don't have much to add today, beyond the obvious observation that the US is going to hell in a handbasket. Things are unraveling much faster than I expected. Like most of us, I never imagined Covid or George Floyd, which have picked up the pace of our chaotic collapse-in-progress. And then, much of the country has rejected Covid, so the EU has rejected us (a remarkable development)--part of the Suez Disintegration, I'm guessing. As for BLM and associated protests, the cops show no signs of changing, and the movement has devolved into an intense preoccupation with political correctness, which will leave the structures of power intact. The Civil Rights movement, for all its importance, didn't threaten those structures; indeed, economically speaking, black people are in the same position today that they were in 1950 (amazingly enough).

Anyway, I had picked this decade as the End Time for America, based on the increasing dysfunction of capitalism--which is still true, I believe, but now the whole thing seems to be on steroids. Having Trumpi in the White House, and the country moving toward civil war, is no small contribution to the process. Just as an aside, though, I have lately been wondering if some hospital or lab could run MRI's on a bubba brain and a prog brain, and then compare the results. I can't help thinking they might actually be identical.

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396

Well, with each post we see more racist attacks, more police brutality, and higher rates of the corona virus. As well as a president unhinged from reality, though he still could squeak through in November. Meanwhile, the bubbas march toward the boogaloo, while the progs think they can save America by tearing down statues and enforcing political correctness. One wonders if, Wafers aside, there is a single American out there who doesn't have his/her head rammed up his/her ass. Be sure to check out Flabster's post at the end of the last thread, which seems to sum up our situation. And also the word 'ecpyrosis' on Google, which puts a lot of this in perspective.

Onward, onward toward the Abyss!

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Bupkis

This is what we can all expect in terms of changes in race relations, police procedures, socioeconomic conditions, and relations of power. Many Americans believe we have turned a corner, and that all of these things are henceforth going to be very different. The problem with Americans is that they have poop in their heads, and think that outrage is the same as ideology, or astute political organizing. One thing we can be sure of is that there will be no wakeup moment for any of them. They will live in bupkis, and die in bupkis. R.I.P., bupkis.

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394

Well, Wafers, it's been quite a ride. The country seems to be careening toward destruction now, although how current events will play out is anyone's guess. We are marching, we are dying, and we are unemployed. Everything I predicted in the Twilight book (now 20 years old), and more, is coming to pass. Martial law hovers in the wings; the bubbas whisper about boogaloo. Churchill famously said that in the end, the United States always did the right thing. Not this time around, I fear.



The Heart of the Matter

Wafers-

At long last, here it is. Enjoy, enjoy!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1635619319/ref=sr_1_14?dchild=1&keywords=morris+berman&qid=1590884779&s=books&sprefix=morri%2Cstripbooks&sr=1-14

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What a Shit Pile

Wafers-

I mean, what else is there to say? We've got the police bumping off innocent black men like it was a turkey shoot; a president who is clearly a lunatic; virus deaths now over 100,000; a near-broken economy; and an unemployment rate worse than the Great Depression. All good, of course, from a declinist point of view. But I'm impressed at the virulence of our disintegration, and the impotence of our responses. Some 'leaders' we've got, eh? And of course, some citizens. We need to rename the country Doofus World.

Let me repeat my plans for my epitaph:

I KEPT TELLING THEM, BUT DID THEY LISTEN? NO!

Well, anyway, laissez les bon temps rouler and all that.

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The Chicken Farmer

Wafers-

It’s been a long slog, but the editing process for my new collection of short stories, The Heart of the Matter, is finally finished. The book should be listed for sale on Amazon by the end of the month. I’ll notify you as soon as it is online. I like this book a lot; it is a fusion of heart and mind. I hope you will enjoy it.

I do, of course, understand your impatience. One Wafer wrote me: “If this book doesn’t appear by May 31 I intend to get a .357 Magnum and blow my brains out. There’s only so much waiting I can endure.” In my defense, let me point out that you guys have already read three of these stories, which I posted over the past few months: “The Wire Cage Experiment,” “Sweet Honey in the Rock,” and “Circus Days.” But I suppose that’s not enough. So while you’re waiting for the book to appear, I thought I would post another one, for your reading pleasure during the lockdown fog, and so that no one will be into purchasing large guns. As follows:

It was in the late 1970s that I was living with my then girlfriend in San Francisco, in a two-bedroom apartment near Russian Hill that had a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Looking back on it now, the rent was absurd: $275 a month. I'm guessing it now goes for $5,000 or $6,000, minimum. In any case, my girlfriend and I finally split up, after four years. She didn't want the apartment, and left for parts unknown. I had to place an ad for a roommate. The folks who came through: I tell you, it was like Zoo Parade. One person was stranger than the next. In one case, the potential renter rejected the place because he said he couldn't live without hardwood floors. I could have written a short story about it all, really.

Finally, a "normal" guy came by, a stockbroker in his early twenties, very good looking, and with a sense of humor. I didn't know, at the time, that Clive was an alcoholic, and I was fairly ignorant of what alcoholic behavior entailed. But all that came later. I told him he could move in.

There was one aspect of his life that I was a bit jealous of; it was certainly foreign to my own experience. Clive worked in the financial district, and he told me that from Monday to Thursday, all the brokers slaved away at their computers, putting in very long hours. But at about 3 p.m. on Friday, it was like a switch was turned on (or off). All of the young people in the firm would troop down, en masse, to the bar across the street, with the express purpose of getting drunk and laid. I guess it was the reward for a hard, nerve-wracking week. First, everyone got so blottoed that they could barely see the wall. Then, the women would file into the men's bathroom, pull up (or remove) their skirts, drop their panties, and get fucked—either standing up or bent over. Apparently, they had little interest in who was pounding them. Clive certainly didn't care: a typical afternoon, he told me, involved four girls in a row, all of whom he barely knew. Of course, this could have been nothing more than macho bragging, but as he told it, it seemed real enough. Saturday morning he would wake up in our apartment with a ferocious hangover, having only a vague memory that he had gotten laid a lot the day before. It's really a pity that the penis doesn't have a memory.

You'd think a stud like that would be happy with his sex life, but he wasn't. It was the oddest thing: once in a while I would start dating someone, which occasionally led to her sleeping over. This drove Clive into a fit of jealousy. I just didn't get it. The guy was drowning in pussy, but got upset if I got a bit once in a while. He would then act out, usually a few days later, by bringing home some girl and fucking her on the living room floor, so that I could hear her screams. It was puzzling: I was not in any sexual competition with him, but there he was, trying to prove that he could nail the gals as well as I could. I never asked him what the deal was; it was obviously a sore subject with him.

Over time, I managed to figure it out. The Friday afternoon orgies notwithstanding, Clive was a romantic. His jealousy of me was not sexual; it was that he could see that in the case of my (very occasional) girlfriends, I was more or less involved with them, and he wanted that for himself. The likelihood of finding that in the bathroom of a bar with drunk, anonymous coworkers was vanishingly small, and it grated on him. It was also, I realized, even larger than that. Clive was drifting; he was searching for meaning, and he wasn't finding it. His Catholic faith was not delivering the goods, and he was smart enough to realize that the stockbrokering life, with its mindless and endless pursuit of money, was pretty shallow. Where, then, to turn?

I was in my mid-thirties, and I guess Clive saw me as older and wiser (terrible mistake), because he began to pour his heart out about his religious doubts, his sexual misadventures, and above all—his work. It turned out that at an earlier point in his life, he had apprenticed to be a carpenter, and had worked solo on some fairly complicated projects, like constructing a bar and rec room for some rich guy in his home town. He showed me pictures of his work; it looked pretty impressive.

"I dunno," he said; "I guess I got sidetracked. Carpentry is very exacting work, and the pay is OK, but nothing to write home about. Then a friend of mine was getting into the brokering business, and pulled me in along with him. I never really hit the big bucks down in the District—a number of guys were making millions—but it was way ahead of a carpenter's income. Two years later, I'm sort of floating along. I don't really know why I'm doing anything."

I should say something about my own life at the time. I survived by doing glorified secretarial work—for private individuals and, for a while, at the University of California Medical School (UCSF). I was deep into Buddhism, meditating every day at the San Francisco Zen Center, and writing a book about Buddhism for the modern age. From Clive's point of view, I was a total oddball, and he often wanted to talk about what I was doing, or what I was thinking. So I talked to him about maya—illusion—and how, according to Buddhism, most people were sleepwalking through their lives. They never figured out who they were, and in a sense were little more than vegetables. Clive was fascinated by all of this; he may have wondered if he too was a vegetable.

The whole thing came to a head when very suddenly, out of the blue, Clive quit his job, went over to the bar across the street (it was not a Friday), got roaring drunk, and took the bus back to Russian Hill. He sat at the back of the bus, screaming at the top of his lungs, "You're all vegetables! You are sleepwalking through your lives! Your lives amount to nothing! You're vegetables!" Why the bus driver didn't eject him from the bus I never understood, but I'm guessing Clive's accusation hit home with a number of people. Maybe with most of them, if Buddhism is right about human beings. In any case, his life became more erratic after that. There were several more women loudly getting laid on our living room floor; Clive also took to coming home drunk at 3 a.m., singing opera at the top of his lungs. After about a month or so of this, I had had it, and asked him to leave.

I got a new roommate; I never saw Clive again. He called me once, asking me how to register to vote, but that was the only contact we had after he left.

Years went by. I was living in a different city, and one day I cruised by a newsstand, and began leafing through a popular American journal. Looking down the table of contents, I saw an article called "Motorcyclists: A Photographic Essay." It was a series of pictures, sort of like Playboy centerfolds, of various men striking poses with their Harleys or whatever. Except for the very first photo: there, staring out at me from the page, was Clive. The look in his eyes was not proud or aggressive; it had a faint air of being puzzled. He didn't look particularly happy. He was standing next to his cycle, surrounded by chickens, and the caption read, "Clive Jenkins is a chicken farmer in Nebraska."

"Oh no," I said, almost aloud. "Oh no. Did I do this?" As I said, I hadn't known much about alcoholism way back then; I didn't even know there was an organization called Alcoholics Anonymous, to which I could have steered him. So what happened in the interim? I had become a minor author on the "spiritual" lecture circuit, talking about Buddhism; Clive had become a somewhat doubtful chicken farmer. Apparently I had, with my interest in Buddhism, given him a bridge to nowhere. For it's not enough to realize that you're a vegetable; you also have to figure out how to undo that, and not be a vegetable. I knew (or thought I knew) how to do this for myself, but that was where my knowledge ended. As the Buddhists say, you can't live out someone else's karma for them; that's their responsibility.

Nevertheless, I felt guilty. My Buddhism suddenly seemed only theoretical. But perhaps I was being unfair. Who's to say if writing books and lecturing is more meaningful, or worthwhile, than raising chickens? Most of us enjoy egg dishes and chicken salad, after all, and surely the world contains its fair share of happy chicken farmers. But the ambiguous look in Clive's eyes told me he believed that in terms of his own life, he had missed the boat. Shit. I did this, I thought. I "infected" the guy, couldn't really help him deal with the whole phenomenon of self-transparency, and apparently, ruined his life.

I thought of contacting Clive, but I realized I didn't know what to say. Should we talk about motorcycles, or chickenfeed? I had no idea. But somewhere out there in the great American Midwest is a guy on a motorcycle, raising chickens, and wondering what the hell happened.

I ask myself the same thing.

©Morris Berman, 2020

Americans Are Classy

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/05/us/dollar-tree-wiping-face-trnd/index.html

Mrs. Fletcher

Wafers-

I wouldn’t ordinarily recommend a bad book, but it’s possible that there is something of a hidden “metatheme” here, one relevant to the Waferian perception of America:

https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Fletcher-Novel-Tom-Perrotta-ebook/dp/B01NAKX8WI/ref=sr_1_1?crid=39B3RKVX5T64E&dchild=1&keywords=mrs.+fletcher&qid=1587726193&s=books&sprefix=mrs.+flet%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C275&sr=1-1

The story (not much of a plot, really) takes place in middle-class suburbia, focusing on the lives of a woman and her teenage son, both of whom are basically boring. Almost all the characters are pretty shallow, like cardboard cutouts; their lives, their preoccupations, are banal. The only thing that seems to interest them is sex, which shows up in some fairly weird expressions. Plus gender issues, and a good dose of pornography. As one Amazon reviewer wrote, the book goes nowhere, ultimately says nothing. Admitted, it is something of a page-turner; but when you finish it, you wonder why you even bothered to read it. (In my case, I’m a fan of Tom Perrotta.)

Unless the point of the whole thing is the shallowness of American life; that this is the “metatheme” Perrotta was trying to convey. In other words, that this was intentional on the author’s part, to show how empty and clueless Americans are; how most of them are on autopilot, living lives that can only be called stupid and meaningless. Now wouldn’t that be a curve ball!

I’m only guessing, of course. In the case of my own fiction, I don’t sit down with a specific intention, or “syllabus,” in mind. Rather, I literally go into a trance; the stories or novels are “channeled,” as it were, and the ending is organic, i.e. emerges from the text itself. The writing just pours out; I have no idea what I’m going to say until I’ve said it. It feels like my hand is writing the text, not my brain. I just lay down one sentence after another. Hence, the unconscious factor is pretty large.

So what was going on with Perrotta when he was writing Mrs. Fletcher? Did he explicitly, deliberately, want to paint a portrait of the emptiness of American life, or did that fall out unconsciously, in a trance? One might argue that it doesn’t matter, but if the answer is the latter, then the book strikes me as a very powerful statement. It means that the author was not trying to prove anything; rather, his unconscious “imbibed” the social context of American life, as a result of living in it, and then spat out an X-ray of who we are: nothings, sad and pathetic beings, narcissistic beyond all imagining. If that is the case, this rather tedious book might be regarded as a classic of declinist literature.

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It's All Over but the Shouting

Wafers-

A few months ago, David Masciotra, a free-lance writer and author of Against Traffic, among other works, approached The American Conservative with a proposal for an article, which would be a review of my American Empire trilogy. He subsequently submitted the article, and never heard back. Since I'm neither a conservative nor a progressive, but only a writer interested in Reality, it's possible that TAC got spooked by David's essay. (To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, "Americans can't bear too much reality.") However, it's also possible that by that time the coronavirus was starting to make itself visible, and that TAC was thrown by that rather than anything ideological. I guess we can give them the benefit of the doubt. In any case, David and I agreed that I should just post his essay on my blog, and accept the fact that no American publication was likely to run it (for whatever reason). Hence, here it is.

It’s All Over but the Shouting: Morris Berman’s Work on American Decline

“Stick a fork in their ass, and turn them over. They’re done,” Lou Reed dryly announces on his 1989 song about the American Empire, “The Last Great American Whale.” The rock and roll poet’s grim diagnosis of a culture gone awry makes for a fine lyric. If Reed were to have expanded his morbid one-liner into a 1,000-page trilogy of books, full of assiduous research, brilliant anecdotes, and despite the sad subject matter, immensely enjoyable, and often amusing, prose, he would have something resembling the series of books on American decline from cultural critic, historian, novelist, and poet, Morris Berman.

Berman, while a visiting professor in the belly of the beast at the Catholic University in Washington, DC, began writing the first installment in the late 1990s, The Twilight of American Culture, after observing the coalescence of several pathologies that are now beyond dispute as inflicting pain on American life: staggering rates of inequality, governmental dysfunction, an ever-expanding militarism, the fracturing of communal and civic life, and the dominance of anti-intellectualism, visible in everything from an increasingly shallow pop culture to misspelled words on public signs. There was also an aura of threat in the air, of the kind predicted by Don DeLillo in his 1985 novel, White Noise. Like the thick presence of humidity on a summer afternoon, Americans couldn’t see that their neighbors were becoming selfish, and often cruel, but they could feel it.

Having studied the downfall of other empires, Berman saw the window for American reform closing. He warned that if America did not drastically transform its public policies, ideology, and working conception of citizenship, its troubles would only intensify and calcify, bringing a once-promising civilization past the point of no return. In the two books that followed—Dark Ages America and Why America Failed—Berman meticulously demonstrated that America’s myopic focus on profit, at the expense of everything else, its zest for war – at home and abroad – and its lack of self-awareness and insight had escalated, making recovery virtually impossible.

Simultaneous with the development of Berman’s argument, the United States suffered the worst attack on its soil on September 11, 2001, and responded by launching not one, but two disastrous wars. Its housing market and financial system crashed, liquidating much of middle class wealth, and it reacted with giving away boondoggles to the very parties of greed that caused the crisis. Then, in 2016, as the citizenry began to stratify in ways more violent and intractable, Donald Trump became President-Elect. Berman, whom the New York Times and other mainstream outlets dismissed as cynical, cranky, and “anti-American,” looks more and more sterling.

The left and right argue about nearly everything, making extreme accusations about each other. Maybe one camp is right on other issues, and the other is correct on some, but the larger possibility to consider is, what if they are all wrong on the main issue?

As Berman put it during a recent email exchange that I had with him:

Conservatives and progressives alike are patriots; like Trump, they seek to save America, or make it great again. What they are ignoring is the rhythm and record of history. All civilizations rise and fall; there are no exceptions to this rule, and America is not going to escape its fate. The great Southern historian, C. Vann Woodward, first suggested the inevitable decline of the nation in 1953. Andrew Hacker stated it clearly in The End of the American Era, 1970. Between that year and today, there have been a host of books—my trilogy on the American empire included—that have pointed out that civilizations come and go, and that now is our time. Yet on both the right and left, there is no recognition of this bedrock reality. If you do recognize the larger picture, you can't possibly care about impeachment, for example, or who wins these silly Democratic debates. All of that is theater, not reality.

The reality is ascertainable from the daily deluge of grim headlines—lead poisoning in the water causing irreversible brain damage in children, the rise of the “working poor,” near-daily mass shootings, America spending hundreds of billions on weapons of war while ignoring its crumbling infrastructure. Pundits and politicians have a tendency to treat all of these signs of pathology and dysfunction as isolated, but an unobstructed historical vantage point, which Berman’s work provides, suggests that all of America’s problems—from high rates of functional illiteracy to political corruption—are trees growing out of the same rotten roots.

Berman’s project becomes more excavation than analysis, demonstrating an affinity for radicalism, in the original sense of the term, which is identifying and criticizing an issue’s origin, rather than obtusely obsessing over its consequences. America, from its inception, was dedicated to commercial conquest, and equated “the pursuit of happiness” with the acquisition of wealth and property. The third book in Berman’s trilogy, Why America Failed, relies on assiduous research and sharp analysis to prove the case over its 400 pages. Meanwhile, the consistent papering over the more accurate story he tells, with red, white and blue advertisements, robs even many of the country’s leading dissidents of a holistic perspective. In his deployment of cultural criticism, Berman shows how, although his politics tend slightly toward the left, he is most in mourning over America’s destruction of tradition and refusal to balance its desires for commercial dominance with small scale, communal concerns:

Dating back 400 years—the continent was filled with individuals whose idea of the good life was goods, i.e. money and property. There were dissenting voices, such as Capt. John Smith and the Puritan divines, but these were increasingly pushed aside. The title of Richard Bushman's book, and the book itself, are good summaries of the process: From Puritan to Yankee. America was effectively born bourgeois; it had no feudal period. And while feudalism had its obvious drawbacks, it also had some serious advantages: community, craftsmanship, ties of friendship, meaningful work, noblesse oblige, and spiritual purpose, among other things. The American experiment was based, from the first, on hustling, opportunism; this is what the "pursuit of happiness" really meant in the eighteenth century—go out and get yours (which the Founding Fathers certainly did). "Virtue" originally meant putting the needs of society above one's own personal interests. By the late seventeenth century, the meaning had been inverted: it now meant personal success in an opportunistic environment. Blaming the corporate elite has its limits, because what virtually all Americans want is to join the upper 1 percent. Thus American spirituality, such as it is, can be summarized in a single word: More. More, more, I want more. Our leaders reflect our values, which is how America's consummate hustler, Donald Trump, wound up in the White House. In that sense, we have a genuine democracy.

In his seminal essay, “Democratic Vistas,” Walt Whitman worried that “genuine belief” had left American life. In the mad race for money and status, Americans were forgetting or neglecting the sociopolitical principles that could construct a spiritually strong society. For “genuine belief” to thrive, the believers must, in spite of their partisan or ideological disputes, maintain some adherence to tradition – a set of ideas, rites, and practices that form the foundation of their politics, behavior, and vision for the development of their culture.

Berman attempts to achieve a balance in his cultural and historical analysis by spotlighting societies where edifying traditions are steadfast, helping to anchor their respective cultures, and help inhabitants connect to each other with a shared sense of purpose. In Neurotic Beauty, Berman writes about Japan’s traditions of craft, family, and advantageous use of empty space in art and identity, and how those traditions are under siege by Japan’s own move to large scale, corporate capitalism. In Genio: The Story of Italian Genius, Berman examines the Italian gift of injecting space, movement, into static situations – the result of which is, arguably, the most significant creative legacy in the Western world.

It is not only through travel and study that Berman is able to contrast cultures that maintain some loyalty to their best traditions with the American fixation on commercial, technological, and militaristic “progress,” but also through his own experience. He asserts that the “best decision” of his life was moving to Mexico, and one of his worst decisions was waiting so long to do it. When I asked him about the “traditional society” of his Mexican home, as juxtaposed with his previous home in Washington, DC, he began with the caveat that “Mexico has been heavily Americanized, and traditional values—community, friendship, craftsmanship, spirituality—have accordingly been eroded in favor of hustling, individualism, alienation, and meaninglessness.”

Nevertheless, his move to Mexico was a “bet” on the lasting elements of tradition and communal life in Mexico, and it is one that has proven itself wise. Berman offers an anecdote to illustrate the camaraderie and generosity that often characterize his relationships and interactions in Mexico:

Something like this happens to me at least once a week, and it always wakes me up to the fact that I am not living in the US anymore. I live in an apartment building in Mexico City, one floor up. One day I was coming home from the supermarket, going up the stairs, carrying plastic bags full of groceries, and one of the bags broke. Contents spilled out all over the stairs and onto the ground: oranges, Diet Coke, whatever. At that point, at the top of the stairs, the door to the apartment there opened, and a 5-year-old girl peered out. Without saying a word, she came down the stairs and helped me put the spilled groceries back in the bags. When it was done, she went back upstairs and closed the door. Berman would not argue that acts of kindness never take place in the United States, or that every single Mexican behaves according to an ethic of solidarity, but the rarity of friendly relations in America, and the breakdown of community, as documented at length by Robert Putnam, Sherry Turkle, and many other scholars, is not accidental.

“For one thing, girls are taught to fear men, in America (possibly with good reason),” Berman said, and added, “The sexes pretty much hate each other, or are at least wary of each other. But equally significant, Americans of all ages are taught to not help other people (we even arrest people who attempt to feed the homeless). Their problems are their problems, not yours. You are not your brother's keeper, and in general other people are rivals or enemies.”

America has failed to enact the social welfare policies of its democratic peers in Western Europe, but what Berman indicts goes to deeper to core of America’s character. America has also neglected to preserve its “bonds of voluntary association” that Alexis de Tocqueville believed were crucial to the health of the society. In that sense, Americans interested in conservatism might consider that their country is the least conservative in the world. It invests almost no effort in conserving anything, from the beauty of its natural environment to the social ties that are essential for a durable civilization.

The improvements of American life for blacks, women, gays, and workers were possible through the courageous social movements of the 20th century, and these are improvements that Berman admires. He cautions, however, that none of them address the central problem of American culture:

Those were certainly great successes, and they made a great difference for the people involved in those movements. Personally, I applaud them. The problem, however, is that all of them were bids to have a greater share in the American pie—bids to enter the dominant culture. None of them envisioned, a la Lewis Mumford, Henry David Thoreau, or Ernest Callenbach, a different type of society. They merely wanted a greater role in the society as is. The only group that stood for a completely different way of life was the Native Americans, and look what we did to them. The savagery of that genocide, of a people who dared to disagree with the American definition of "progress," is unbelievable.

When Martin Luther King turned more radical, expressing opposition to the “spiritual sickness” of America, rather than only its racist laws, the country turned on him. Similarly, Berman describes in his trilogy how most of the public mocked and ridiculed President Jimmy Carter for his televised "Spiritual Malaise" address, given in Annapolis in 1979—a speech that now appears prescient in its condemnation of uncontrolled consumerism, unabashed selfishness, and the stunning inability of the nation to observe its own behavior.

The candidates in the 2020 race for the presidency, including the president himself, routinely repeat the bromide that the election will determine the “direction” of the country. The "soul" of the nation is somehow always at stake, and yet regardless of who gets elected, things continue to spiral out of control. Morris Berman’s sobering assessment doubles as a “Dead End” sign, warning that the winner might influence the speed and comfort of travel, but that ultimately, we're headed for collapse.



Fourteenth Anniversary

Wafers!

As we head into April, it is my pleasure to tell you that next month marks 14 years of this incredible blog, a blog like no other in the known universe. Some of you know that 14 years ago, I was not into it, but was dragged kicking and screaming by my then-editor at Norton, and my then-agent in San Fran, to set this thing up. Why would I want to spend lots of time online? was my thinking on the subject. But I caved to their pressure, and now I'm glad I did. What we Wafers have established is an oasis of sanity in the context of a country steeped in violence, stupidity, and sheer lunacy. And the data: since that time, more than 4.5 million hits. Last month alone saw more than 82,000 of them. I figure we must be doing something right.

I've been doing public lectures since 1971, and publishing books and articles since 1978, and the one thing I'm truly proud of is a repeated refrain from my reading or listening audience: "Until I read ____ [some book of mine], I thought I was crazy. Thanks to your work, I now realize I'm one of the few sane people around." Everything I've written is against the grain, because the grain is destructive of everything human. "Look! Open your eyes! Join me!"--is all I've been able to say, in my work and on this blog. And lo and behold, out of 329 million zombies, I managed to change the lives of a few thousand. Not bad for a lifetime's work, depending on your value system.

As for the haters, the trollfoons, they have pretty much been crushed, tho they do surface from time to time. It's not hard to crush them: we aren't talking about any kind of brain trust here. So they will inevitably flare up, to which I say: "Haters gonna hate," and "The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on." And this caravan is moving on, amigos, as all of you well know.

O&D!

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Is There Life Beyond Paradigm?

Wafers-

A few weeks ago I was asked by an anthropology institute connected with UNAM, the national university in Mexico City, to give a seminar on an anthropology topic of my choosing. Two faculty members and I had breakfast together to discuss it, and decided on May as the best time for the event. Nice guys. Then, of course, I never heard back from them, as the coronavirus descended and public gatherings were to be avoided. (The school may currently be in shutdown mode, for all I know.) In the meantime, I had written my little 'conferencita' as an introduction to the proposed seminar.

I'm posting it here, as a break from the virus, the collapse of America, the disintegration of capitalism, and all of our usual discussion material. What could be more unrelated to these topics than witchcraft? I'm guessing my colleagues won't mind, since (1)Who knows when UNAM will be back in action, and whether the seminar will still be on? (2)I was, of course, going to give this talk in Spanish; the text below is the original English version, and (3)This blog, although the greatest in the universe, remains completely off the radar screen, so very few people are going to see this post. I do hope that absolves me of 'leaking' the lecture in advance. Meanwhile, Wafers get a sneak preview. Here goes:

Most people like stories, so I thought that today I would tell you one. This story has the added advantage of being true. Many years ago, a British sociologist by the name of Max Marwick moved to Northern Rhodesia, or what we now call Zambia, whose tribal people, the Cewa, practiced a form of witchcraft. In keeping with academic criteria, Marwick didn't believe that these magical beliefs had any basis in objective physical reality. These criteria dictated that the anthropologist's job was to study these beliefs from the outside, as it were; to learn what the major beliefs or practices were and try to figure out why these tribespeople believed them. And so he rented or purchased--I can't recall exactly how it was arranged--a grass hut in the village, and settled in for a year of research, i.e., observation.

There was, however, just one particular problem with this arrangement: Marwick wasn't able to sleep. When he subsequently wrote this story up, he called it "The Case of the Dancing Owls." Every night a flock of owls would gather on the ceiling of his hut and hoot and jump around. In England, one would simply call an exterminator to remove the owls. But this was not England, and the Cewa certainly didn't have any exterminators. In addition, Marwick wanted to try a native solution, not a Western one, so he paid a visit to the local sorcerer. The suggested remedy was hardly one he expected. The sorcerer asked him if, prior to leaving England, there had been any disturbance in his family relations. It turned out that there was: Marwick had had a rather acrimonious argument with one of his uncles, which left him feeling depressed and guilty. The sorcerer recommended some medicines, to rub into his skin, and added that he should write his uncle and mend that relationship. "Then," he said, "the owls will leave you in peace." As you might imagine, Marwick did neither.

And here we come to the issue of conflicting epistemologies. Marwick regarded this advice as absurd. What possible relationship could there be, he thought, between his conflict with his uncle and the owls "dancing" on the ceiling? Rather than try the sorcerer's remedies, he chose to spend his entire time in the village living with noisy owls that wouldn't let him sleep. But if we switch out of a Western scientific epistemology, to that of African sorcery, a different picture emerges. African systems of causality place great emphasis on social relations, and the Cewa attribute negative events to disturbances in those relations. As with cats in 17th-century New England, owls are regarded as witches' "familiars"--animals with supernatural powers that do the work of sorcerers or malevolent agents. The sorcerer whom Marwick consulted believed that his uncle sent the owls to disturb his sleep, in retaliation for the bitter argument they had. Hence the logical remedy to the situation was to heal that relationship, after which the owls would depart. What was obvious to the Cewa was essentially crazy to the Western-trained sociologist.

So that's the end of the story, although it does raise some interesting questions:

1. Leaving the issue of the sorcerer's medicines aside, did Marwick not write his uncle because this suggested causal connection was ridiculous, in his view, or because it might actually work?

2. What would have happened if Marwick had written his uncle, repaired the relationship, and the owls disappeared?

3. Marwick saw himself as a social scientist, and the heart of science is empirical testing. But his reaction--a priori rejection of the theory--was hardly a demonstration of scientific experimentation. After all, he could have tested the theory, but instead he refused to do it. Not the best example of scientific procedure, or curiosity, it seems to me.

4. Note that Marwick was willing to cast an anthropological eye on the Cewa, but apparently had no interest in casting such an eye on his own culture. We Westerners have the truth, is the idea, so we observe and record the "strange" behavior of "primitive" cultures. It never occurs to us that, say, Australian aborigines probably regard white Anglo culture as weird, if not actually insane. (In fact, the deliberate ignoring of social relations might properly be regarded as toxic. Let me add that this is why I left the United States 13 years ago.) As one enlightened sociologist once quipped, "There is more sociology in a department of sociology than there is in the rest of the world."

Let me suggest that Western science, although it obviously contains much that is objectively true, also has holes in it. No paradigm is a perfect description of reality; that's just not possible. And once you insist that your own paradigm is perfect, you have entered the world of religion, i.e. of unquestioning belief. Science can be made into a religion like any other paradigm, and it was Marwick's. I suspect that if he had written his uncle and the owls then went away, he would have had a nervous breakdown. His world would no longer have made sense to him, and as a result he would have no way to orient himself in the world--and no way of knowing who he was, anymore. Mystery and miracles were just not part of his world view.

Personally, I don't find the uncle-owl connection all that mysterious, if we are willing to credit what we call "pre-science"--magic, witchcraft, alchemy, astrology, numerology, and so on--with some degree of validity. The medieval and Renaissance magical tradition was based on what was known as the Theory of Correspondences, which said that the world was interconnected: that everything was related to everything else. In fact, this theory has been resurrected in the field of holistic medicine and certain branches of environmental science, and it is also the ethical basis of Buddhism. Birds, for example, start to twitch, to behave differently just before an earthquake hits. This is well known, especially in rural communities. Similarly, they can probably detect disturbances in human beings. Marwick was emotionally miserable; he was walking around with a load of guilt because of his break with his uncle, and the owls picked up on this "vibration," this disturbed energy. I have no doubt that had he written his uncle and eased his soul, the owls would have flown away.

The Theory of Correspondences has another name: action-at-a-distance, and it is actually not that far removed from modern science. Isaac Newton's deepest intellectual attachment was to alchemy, and he wrote thousands of unpublished pages on the subject. The British economist John Maynard Keynes, who discovered these pages, declared that Sir Isaac was "the last of the magicians"; and it was alchemy that gave Newton the notion of action-at-a-distance, which became the basis of his Law of Universal Gravitation. Without alchemy, we could never have put a man on the moon. The Theory of Correspondences, like the Law of Universal Gravitation, is based on the notion of invisible influence, and this is why the sorcerer told Marwick to write his uncle. But Marwick couldn't do it, because a positive result would have blown his mental categories. Had he regarded modern science as one possible view of reality, this would not have happened. But for him, science was IT--was religion--and thus he was trapped. Better noisy owls and insomnia than a reasonable belief in invisible forces. To quote the British poet W.H. Auden, "We would rather be ruined than changed." Depressing thought.

Two points I'd like to make in conclusion, and to open the floor to a general discussion:

1. I don't know if it's true, but someone told me that the most often quoted phrase on the Internet is from my book Coming to Our Senses: "An idea is something you have; an ideology is something that has you." Is it not possible to cultivate some distance--say, 2 millimeters--between who we are and what we believe? This could be the beginning of world peace, when you think about it.

2. The reason that we turn ideas into ideologies, which is to say into mythologies and religions, is that we are afraid of the outside world. And there is, of course, much to be afraid of. So we latch on to various belief-systems, whether sacred or secular, to give ourselves the illusion of security. But as all paradigms--including modern science--are necessarily incomplete, this ultimately will not work. There is, however, a way out: to accept insecurity and incompleteness as inescapable; as central to the human condition.

Easier said than done.

(c)Morris Berman, 2020

Schmiden

Wafers-

The election--which doesn't amount to shit, really--is 8 months away, yet all of America is agog over this absurd nonevent. And the progs are all excited about the supposed anti-Trump, who is a senile, sclerotic goofball, a turkey of the 1st order who can't even identify the Declaration of Independence. But this is true democracy: Schmiden is comatose, and the entire nation is as well. Schmernie has been surgically removed, Tulsi is a joke, and we are left with a buffoon to tilt against Trumpola. The twilight of America, as I predicted in 2000.

Onward, into the abyss!

-mb

Schmernie

Well, folks, everything is up for grabs. What if Trumpola, or Schmernie, get the coronavirus? Or if 1/3 of the American population does? What if Schmernie gets elected, and there is a military coup, restoring Trumpi to power? What if Tulsi makes a killing in exercise tapes, and becomes a combo president/fitness guru? So many possibilities!

But in these uncertain times, Wafers know one thing for sure: at some unspecified point in time, perhaps 2040, the US will be no more. Inside the US there will be weeping and wailing. Outside, rejoicing and celebration. For some odd reason, we are not the most beloved nation on earth.

Meanwhile, on the short story front, things are progressing swiftly. Altho for the sake of sales, I'm thinking of changing the name of the book to LeBron James Confronts Harvey Weinstein. Can't lose w/that, n'est-ce pas?

As the country heads down the drain, your typical Wafer will sit next to the fireplace, new Berman book in hand, and (to quote T.S. Eliot) laugh like an irresponsible fetus. (See "Mr. Apollinax")

Exciting times, amigos-

mb

Circus Days

Wafers-

Gd news: my new collection of short stories was just accepted for publication. I'm now working with my technical staff, and hopefully the thing will be listed on Amazon in June or July. In the meantime, I wanted to provide you guys with a few samples, as I have been doing. Here's one of my favorites:

There was an annual fair that came to our town, which included circus acts, magic demonstrations, and all kinds of other shows. One year, when I was seven, my parents took me to it, and bought me a large cone of cotton candy. It was pink, and tasted of sugar. I ate the whole thing, then threw up in a nearby garbage can. When I finished, I looked around, but my parents were nowhere to be seen. You'd think that I would be afraid, start crying or whatever, but instead I had a heady sense of freedom. Ours was not a happy home; my parents were always fighting. I often dreamed of running away, and now, suddenly, the opportunity had presented itself, like a prison break.

I began making my way among all the tents and displays. In one, there was a fat lady with a moustache; in another, a man riding around on a bicycle with only one wheel. Finally, I stopped at the magician's booth. The magician was tall and handsome, wearing a tuxedo and a top hat, and sporting an elegant moustache. His assistant was a very pretty lady in a bathing suit. He did things like pull a rabbit out of a hat, or "saw" his assistant in two—which she miraculously survived. I had by now pushed myself up to the front row of the crowd. Mr. Miraculo, as he was called, was holding a balloon in one hand and a long, thick needle in the other. He announced that he was going to pierce the balloon, but that the balloon wouldn't pop. He leaned over to me and asked me to touch the point of the needle with my finger.

"Is it sharp, sonny?" he asked me. I nodded. "Tell everyone here," he said. I turned to the crowd behind me. "It's sharp!" I declared. Then his assistant, who was called Miss Yvette, held the balloon in her hands, while Mr. Miraculo pushed the needle into it. The balloon didn't explode; instead, the needle went through it like butter and came out the other side. Mr. Miraculo took a bow, and the audience applauded.

I was dumbfounded. How in the world could a sharp needle not pop a balloon? Mr. Miraculo and Miss Yvette did a few more tricks with cards and coins and handkerchiefs, but I wasn't interested. All I cared about was learning the secret of the balloon trick.

It was late afternoon by now; all the stands were packing up, including Mr. Miraculo's. I approached the stage, looked up at him. "How did you do that?" I asked him. "Do what, sonny?" "Put a needle through a balloon," I answered. "Oh, that's a trade secret," he said; "a magician never gives away his secrets. But maybe someday you'll become a magician, and then you'll know all the secrets." He smiled broadly. "Why not right now?" I asked him. "You could teach me." "Shouldn't you be getting on home?" he suggested. "It's getting late." "I have no home," I told him. "My parents disappeared the other day, and I've been sleeping on the street." I faked crying. I guess that was my magic trick. "There, there, sonny." He bent down, put his arms around me. "We should probably go to the police." "No police!" I shouted; "no police! Let me live with you!" He and Yvette lived in a large covered wagon. "Let me stay in your wagon. Look how big it is."

Mr. Miraculo looked over at Yvette; she just shrugged. "Why not?" she said; "we might even be able to use him in one of our acts. Come on up here, sonny; we can fix a bed for you right below ours." And so began my apprenticeship with Mr. Miraculo—and Yvette.

The three of us toured the countryside, performing tricks in various towns. Mr. M. showed me the secret of the balloon: you coated it with oil. Then, when the needle pricked it, the oil moved in to seal the spot before any air could escape. Oil was also poured into the inside, so that the same thing happened when the needle emerged from the balloon. I was really excited by this, and Mr. M. let me practice with it until I got it right.

He and Yvette were really kind to me; I never figured out why. Mr. M. used me to "test" the needle for the audience, and gave me pocket money for this. They shared their food with me, took care of me. I was finally free from my parents, and I was in heaven. This was my idea of a real family.

As we tended to get up very early, we all usually went to sleep around 9 p.m. Every night, for some reason, he and Yvette would wrestle on their bed, and she would moan and groan. Should I say anything? I worried that he was hurting her. But the next day, she always emerged with a big smile on her face. She apparently enjoyed these wrestling matches, so I decided it was OK.

I began to pester Mr. M. to teach me some magic tricks. And slowly, he did. I learned the rabbit-in-the-hat trick, and the saw-Yvette-in-half trick. Meanwhile, Yvette introduced me to the Tarot. "These cards," she said, "tell the person for whom you are reading what is happening in his life, or her life. Sometimes, they can foretell the future. But you have to know how to read them correctly. I'll teach you, and then we'll set you up with a table next to the stage. You'll read for people, and charge them fifty cents. You get twenty-five, and Mr. M. and I get twenty-five. OK?" I nodded happily.

"People want to know that their lives are on track, that things are going well. Or if not, they want some idea as to how to fix things. Women always want to hear that they are going to meet a tall dark stranger. Men want to hear that they will soon be rich. You understand what I am saying?" Again, I nodded.

"Now take this card, for example. Death. It's part of what we call the Major Arcana. It could, of course, represent death, but it could also stand for a major change in a person's life—which could be a good thing. So when you're doing a reading, instead of telling your customer that he or she is about to die, tell them that some big change is going to occur in their life, and that they should be ready for it. Get the idea?" I said yes.

"Why do you and Mr. M. wrestle every night, when we go to bed?" I asked her. Her face turned as pink as that cone of cotton candy I had eaten long ago.

"To keep fit!" she said. "It's really good exercise."

"I was afraid he was hurting you," I said.

"Oh, no, not at all; it feels really good."

"Could I try it?" I asked her. Her eyes widened. "What, with me?" she exclaimed. I nodded.

"No, sonny. In order to wrestle properly, you need a girl your own age. You'll do it when you get older, you'll see." I was deeply disapointed, but I didn't say anything. Meanwhile, I started running "Oscar's Tarot Table" next to the stage, charging fifty cents per customer. It got easier as I got more practice with the cards. Yvette was absolutely correct: the women wanted to meet a man and fall in love, and the men wanted to make lots of money. So I tried, when I could, to steer the readings in these directions. But what my customers wanted, above all, was that things come out "all right" for them, whatever that meant. I discovered that all of them were worried about their lives; often, very worried. What they most wanted from the readings was reassurance, and I did my best to provide it. This often led to generous tips.

One evening, instead of the usual wrestling match, Mr. M. and Yvette had a big fight. I was sitting outside the wagon at the time. I wasn't sure what the fight was about, but I heard her cry, "Look at all the years I've put in! Look at all the loving I gave you! Don't you think it's about time?" She jumped out of the wagon, ran into me, put her arms around me, and cried like a baby.

"Yvette," I said; "what's wrong? Tell me."

"He won't marry me," she said, angrily. "After all these years of being together, all these years of being his faithful assistant, he says he doesn't want to get married. Jesus, what else does a girl want, anyway? I have half a mind to leave him."

"Why doesn't he want to marry you?" I asked her.

"Oh, the usual male nonsense about wanting to be free, needing space, and so on. I think he might be interested in another girl."

"No one could replace you, Yvette; no one," I told her.

"Thank you, honey; you're such a doll. Can I sleep in your bed tonight? I don't want to sleep with Guido right now."

It was kind of a strange arrangement, that night. I curled up in Yvette's arms, and smelled the fragrance of her body. She was still wearing her bathing suit, and I pressed against her. "You're such a great kid," she kept saying. "I wish I could have a kid just like you."

The fight with Guido blew over for a while. Yvette was still angry, but she wasn't ready to go off on her own. After all, what could she do? Read Tarot, probably, but that was all. She was an assistant, not a magician.

Then a dark cloud suddenly appeared. The next town we got to, there were posters with my face on them, stuck on walls and telephone poles. MISSING they said; REWARD OFFERED. "OK, Oscar, no Tarot this time around," said Guido. "You need to stay in the wagon, out of sight." At one point a cop even came by, carrying a poster. "You haven't seen this kid by any chance?" he said to Guido and Yvette. "Apparently he ran away from home."

"Sorry, officer," said Guido; "haven't seen any sign of him." The policeman laughed. "Kid probably ran off to join the circus," he said jokingly.

That night Yvette, Guido, and I had a "family meeting." "Listen, kid, we're in a bit of a bind here," Yvette explained. "If you get caught, we could go to jail for kidnapping, even though we didn't kidnap you. Do you want to go back home?"

"This is my home," I told her. Yvette shot a look at Guido. "What do you think?" she asked him. He shrugged. "Let's take the chance and keep him," he said. "He just hasta stay outta sight in those towns where the posters are up. Meanwhile, he can keep earning money from Tarot readings, and I'm going to continue to train him in the magical arts. That way, when he gets older, he'll have a craft." Talk about kindness.

So I stayed. The sleeping arrangements continued to be kind of weird. Two or three nights a week Yvette would wrestle with Guido; the other nights she slept in my bed, hugging me tightly. Guido didn't seem to mind. As for me, I loved her body, loved the smell of it, the sensation of it. "You're going to make some girl very happy some day," she told me. I was now eight years old; I had been with her and Guido for over a year, and was not to learn the joys of "wrestling" for another seven. (More on that in a moment.)

In any case, we finally got caught. Someone had identified me from a poster, and turned me in to get the reward. Guido and Yvette were arrested. At their trial, I testified that coercion had never been involved; that I was never kidnapped, and had in fact imposed myself on them. The judge accepted this, but jailed the two of them for a year for harboring a minor and failing to report it to the police. I went back to my parents, who were still fighting all the time, and pretty much suffered in silence. I was not allowed to visit Guido and Yvette in jail, but I wrote her two or three times a week (she saved all my letters). When she was released, I met her outside the jail, and we hugged and cried. I also got together with Guido, and thanked him for teaching me to do magic, which I practice to this day.

I go by the name of Mr. Fabuloso, and have a lovely assistant named Peggy. As for Yvette, she finally left Guido and married a prosperous wheat farmer. She and I kept in touch, and she also acted as my "wrestling" coach, told me what to do and how to do it. Let's just say that her instructions were very precise; clinical, really. For this, Peggy has always been her biggest fan, and we wrestle quite often.

Yvette also joined a dance troupe, and Peggy and I would go to see her when she was in town. "How is the farmer at wrestling?" I got bold enough to ask her, one time. She pinched my cheek. "Like a tractor, kid."

* * * * *

Sweet Honey in the Rock

Waferinos-

Update on short story situation: I now have 17 of them, or 175 pages, so hopefully it won't be too long b4 I can pitch it as a bk to publishers. Meanwhile, thought I'd entertain u guys with a rather short one; as follows:

Good evening, my friends. I hope I am not intruding. I promise to take only a minute of your time. My name is Jean-François Champollion. I died in Paris in 1832, at the age of forty-one, from a stroke. I am writing to you from beyond the grave. To you, who might want to listen.

Do you know me? I am the decipherer of the Rosetta Stone. Yes, the one that has been sitting in the British Museum for more than 200 years now; that one. I cracked the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics. I made the Egyptian language, and Egyptian civilization, accessible to the West. Me, le jeune, as my friends used to call me, in contrast to my older brother, Jacques-Joseph.

But this was not some exercise in “Orientalism”—not at all. First, because I regarded Egypt as a great civilization. Not, as the British believed, some boring slave civilization centered around a death cult. Now that was Orientalism. No, I saw Egyptian civilization as a vibrant, complex, and long-lasting culture, with values and purposes different from our own, but no less superior for that.

And second, because my real goal was to demonstrate the opposite of Orientalism, which is empathic understanding. It is not difficult to see that the great curse of mankind is a failure of empathy. Everything has to be viewed through the lens of our Self; the Other is merely an (inferior) other. We can never seem to grasp that the Other is a Self all its own. We do not seek to understand or explore that other Self—not at all. All we want to do is paste labels on it. Why? I wish I knew.

So know that I am an Orientalist in the positive sense: my goal was to understand Egypt from the inside, as well as to demonstrate the principle, and the benefits, of empathy. I hope I succeeded.

There is one thing, however, that I am not proud of; it haunts me to this day. In terms of the Stone, and cracking the hieroglyphic code, I wanted all the credit—la gloire—for myself. And so rather than talking about “standing on the shoulders of giants,” I deliberately played down or ignored the contributions of those who preceded me, in particular the British doctor and physicist Thomas Young. Looking back now, I realize that this is just another form of denying the Other; which means that it too is a form of oppression. I just said that I didn’t know why we typically seek to denigrate the Other, or impose the Self on it, but maybe the phenomenon of plagiarism makes it clear: if I am insecure about my Self, then it is very tempting to try to obliterate the Other; and grabbing all the credit for one’s Self is one way to do this. Human insecurity, in short, is ultimately at the root of violence.

I confess, that really depresses me.

The content of the Stone itself is not very important. It’s just a pharaonic administrative decree, fairly banal. So the translation of this text is not my legacy. My legacy was to make translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics possible in general, which then allowed scholars to find out what Egyptian civilization was actually about. Equipped with the key in the lock, which I had provided them, they translated one carving, one papyrus, and one wall inscription after another. Thus we learned about Egyptian history, mythology, burial customs, and belief systems. We discovered that these people had a sophisticated knowledge of astronomy, mathematics, and architecture. All of this would have been a closed book if not for me. And for me, this was the “honey in the rock,” so to speak, what Nicholas of Cusa called “the sweetness of truth.”

Shall I go on, my friends? Shall I tell you how I did it? As with Young’s formulation of the wave theory of light—mon dieu, what a genius that man was—these “aha!” experiences are a combination of sweat and spark, of deep background information plus some inexplicable click in the brain, when everything falls into place. Roughly twenty years after I died, my fellow countryman Louis Pasteur declared, “chance favors the prepared mind.”Et voilà, mesdames et messieurs! There you go.
The Stone was discovered when I was nine years old, in the course of Napoleon’s expedition into Egypt. The expedition, as is well known, touched off an “Egyptomania” among the educated classes in France, and I got caught up in it. When I was sixteen, I wrote to my parents: “Of all the peoples that I love the most, I will confess that no one equals the Egyptians in my heart.”Zut alors! You have to be an adolescent to say things like that. In fact, I didn’t get to Egypt until 1828.

My great breakthrough occurred in 1822. For starters: What, exactly, does the Rosetta Stone contain? For those of you who haven’t been to the British Museum, let me spell it out. It consists of three texts, all of which say the same thing. The upper part is written in hieroglyphics, and the bottom part in Greek. The middle text is written in what is called the demotic script of the Egyptian language, and is related to Coptic, a modern language—one which I had studied extensively (it’s the latest stage of the Egyptian language, and written in the Greek alphabet). So the trick became to match the bottom two texts against the top one, eventually yielding a translation of the latter.

My friends, I don’t wish to bore you with the technical details, but let me just summarize by saying that the point I discovered that ran through all three languages was the verb “to give birth.” This broke open the hieroglyphic text. In my own imitation of Archimedes (albeit fully clothed), I ran down the street to my brother’s office at the Institut de France, and yelled “Je tiens l’affaire!”—I’ve got it! Subsequently, I was able to establish an alphabet that applied to all epochs, and I deciphered grammatical words along with the names of kings and private persons. This opened the door to Egyptian civilization. This was my legacy. Ten years later, due to poor health, and probably the stress of unrelenting work, I was dead.

What did I do in the interim? I worked on other hieroglyphic texts, and published several books on my discoveries. I traveled to Italy, visiting collections and monuments there. I met the pope, who helped me to obtain funds for an expedition to Egypt. In 1826, the king appointed me curator of the Egyptian collections of the Louvre; in 1831 I was made chair of Egyptian history and archaeology at the Collège de France. The next year, I was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery, a kind of national hero. I am, to this day, regarded as a major figure in modern French history, the “Father of Egyptology.” Recently I learned that a lunar crater on the far side of the moon was named after me. It all seems like a dream.

I don’t know why the Fates chose me for this purpose, this opening up of the richness of Egyptian civilization to the West. I don’t know why they gave me the gift of languages, and I don’t know why they took me from the earth at so young an age. I was married, and had a beautiful daughter, Zoraïde, whom I loved dearly. That I had to leave her prematurely was the hardest part of dying. You’d think there would be a code book somewhere, something like the Rosetta Stone, that could be deciphered to explain all of this; that could explain the workings of the human heart. But there isn’t.

Reflecting on my life now, I have to ask myself why Egypt in particular was my “laboratory” for exploring otherness. Part of it was the national “Egyptomania” already referred to. But it went deeper than that. If Egypt was the oldest human civilization (or one of them), then it promised to tell us the most basic things about human beings; or so I believed. The other factor was the sheer unfamiliarity, the opaqueness, of the script. It made Egypt the most Other of Others. What I was really exploring, I can see now, was myself. Egypt is my mirror; is me.

It has been said that we can never truly know another person, but some psychologists have added that we can never truly know ourselves, as well. I tell myself that in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter. That I don’t count for anything, despite all of the national tributes. What counts is a rock sitting on display in the British Museum. And yet, what is it all for, if not for human beings? What is a rock, compared to a beating heart—mybeating heart? On cold winter nights, here in the spirit world, I think about these things, and wonder.

©Morris Berman, 2019