Grand Hotel Abyss

Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an “event,” if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural—or structuralist—thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the term “event” anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this sense, this event will have the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling.

—Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”

For Sarkozy, “rupture” reflects both mundanely tactical and deeply personal choices. The 12 years of Jacques Chirac‘s presidency, together with France’s tradition of alternation in power, suggests a victory for the left. Positioning himself as the candidate who represents a sharp break with today’s unpopular politics is the only means to escape that fate.

This is reflected in Sarkozy’s openly pro-American stance – an act of political courage in a France where anti-Americanism is running high. Sarkozy’s message is that Chirac and Villepin were right in substance to oppose America’s military adventure in Iraq, but that their style was disastrously wrong. Thus, his deep admiration for “American values,” while sincere, implies no embrace of President George W. Bush. It also reassures the French business community, which was shocked by Dominique de Villepin’s flamboyant opposition to the United States when he was Chirac’s foreign minister.

—A French Presidential Primer

I wrote this essay yesterday and on a whim sent it off to Counterpunch, but evidently they didn’t want it. I reproduce it here, where some 2 million fewer readers will find it than would have had I made the big time!

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“This crazed, narcissistic worst mass murderer in American history.”

That was how NBC anchor Brian Williams described…not George W. Bush, but Cho Seung-Hui, the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech massacre, on Hardball with Chris Matthews. Williams read from the “manifesto” that Cho had sent to NBC: “Generation after generation, we martyrs, like Eric and Dylan.” The press will seize on Cho’s allusion to the Columbine killers, but more fascinating is the Nietzschean locution. “We knowers,” Nietzsche would write bitterly, or “we moderns.” Is it ironic or is it only predictable that the philosopher who wrote out of an aristocratic contempt for the moralizing mediocrity of bourgeois Europe just before its wreck in World War I should provide a literary style to a student whose fury at the wealthy might have been termed by Nietzsche a sickly resentment?

Cho reportedly wrote the name “Ishmael” on the return address of the package sent to NBC. Network president Steve Capus was unable to tell Chris Matthews the provenance of the name. It comes from Genesis, where Ishmael is the first son of Abraham, borne to his servant Hagar in defiance of God’s instructions. God prophesies that Ishmael’s “hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand will be against him” (Genesis 16:12) Tradition holds that Ishmael’s descendants were the Arabs—thus giving early credence for the Christian and Jewish prejudices that continue to animate the violent assault on Muslims that make up the so-called “War on Terror.” Closer to Nietzsche’s time, Melville adopted the name Ishmael for the alienated narrator of Moby-Dick, who took to sea because he felt “a damp, drizzly November in [his] soul.”

Cho’s allusions—including the Hamlet-like plot of his play Richard McBeef, reproduced on thesmokinggun.com—are to a tradition of alienation and despair in Western culture that has been present since Biblical times, but was first valorized and made central in the Romantic era. The isolated, lone, potentially violent young man stalking modern society is a figure not of contemporary films or video games, but of great nineteenth-century European novels like The Red and the Black, Pére Goriot, Crime and Punishment or The Secret Agent. He is an archetype of the individualism and desperation that mark much of the modern era, when the energy of intelligent, restless young men has nowhere to go in a society that values material wealth, business and sensationalism. The image of the “violent young man with nowhere to go” is our pop-psychological cliché about Middle Eastern societies, but wave after wave of school and workplace shootings that have plagued the U.S. for the last two decades prove that this random violence and alienation come directly out of the matrix of modernity. Cho, who was an English major (as the humanities-hostile media keeps reminding us ominously), merely does us the favor of providing footnotes to his appalling activity, even if the NBC president cannot understand them.

“Why weren’t we warned about Cho’s disturbing behavior?” is the question on everyone’s lips. “What are the warning signs?” Unfortunately, there is no fool-proof method consistent with a free society to prevent individuals from committing murder in every case, and creating a culture in which “loners” or “weird people” or “outcasts” are demonized and placed under surveillance will not help. Neither will banning violent video games, movies or music, which are themselves symptoms rather than causes of an unequal and brutal war culture. In any event, as we’ve seen, Cho seems to have been as influenced by classic literature and philosophy as by Tarantino or the Wachowski Brothers. This is not because culture induces violent behavior, but because culture, whether Tarantino or Stendhal, expresses the violence and pain of a society. Cho’s actions are not singular; they fit a pattern of mass murder going back decades, and his words recall an older tradition.

Many pious commentators have admonished us that it’s too soon to begin interpreting the massacre. This anti-intellectual attitude represents a cowardly surrender to the power of chaos and hate to arrest thought. It is an outrage to the human spirit, and perfectly encapsulates the nihilism not only of Cho’s crimes, but of the society in which such crimes are so appallingly frequent. “No one deserves a tragedy,” poet and Virginia Tech professor Nikki Giovanni declaimed to students at a convocation on Wednesday. No one deserves a tragedy, but tragedies are inflicted every day by young people just like Cho. Unlike Cho, those young people are not deemed psychotic by pundits: instead they are celebrated and supported as our brave men and women in uniform. Their official targets too are mostly young men like Cho, considered just as brave and worthy by the beleaguered populations that support them in the absence of viable alternatives. Global capitalism, sweeping all traditions, cultures and institutions before it, fragmenting societies and exacerbating inequality, has brought us to this abyss, and this abyss stares back in the ubiquitous image of a gun-wielding young murderer. The nightmare of the nineteenth century is not over. The nightmare of the twenty-first is just beginning.

Your thesis that these rage murders are effectively failed slave rebellions takes you back in your book to consider in some depth the circumstances of slave rebellions in the antebellum South. At what point did the parallels start to dawn on you?

I really started with the idea that in every age, there is some awful oppression that is not yet recognized and therefore doesn’t exist, but later seems horribly obvious. This became clear to me working in Moscow in the ’90s. No one in the “liberal” Western press corps, academia, world financial aid organizations or Clinton Administration had a shred of sympathy for the millions of Russians suffering from so-called “privatization” programs that we rammed down their throats. Literally millions of Russians went to their graves early in the ’90s, yet many respectable Westerners openly said that the old generation would “have to die off” before the proper mindset set in to allow full Westernization in Russia.

Those millions of deaths are still not seen as part of something larger and evil. Later I looked at the details of these American rage murders — they were all similar, mostly normal Middle Americans attacking seemingly “at random.” If they weren’t psychopaths, which they aren’t, then that meant their attacks were very deliberate, that they were attacking something as a response. That’s when I decided that it was the culture which was viewing the murders “at random,” the culture which refused to see the purpose.

I simply assumed, from experience in Russia, and from looking at modern rage rebellions, that early slave rebellions would be completely misunderstood in their day as random acts of crazed evil just as modern “rage rebellions” are, and from the evidence I uncovered, it seems they were.

How much blame do you place on Reaganomics for the changes in the workplace that you argue lead to rage attacks?

Put it this way: rage murders in the workplace never existed anywhere in history until Reagan came to power. Reagan made it respectable to be a mean, stupid bastard in this country. He is the patron saint of white suckers. He unleashed America’s Heart of Vileness — its penchant for hating people who didn’t get rich, and worshipping people who despise them, and this is the essence of Reaganomics.

—interview with Mark Ames

Mind now what the therapists and cops on television say now: keep your eye on your neighbor. If he’s acting funny, you’d better tell a teacher, parent, coach or cop. Always be ready to tell a cop. Keep your eyes open. Your neighbors are nuts. You need protection. You need a king, a priest and a corporation to keep the hordes off your doorstep. What’s that? You think we’d all be a lot less crazy if the king and the priest and the corporation just left us the fuck alone? Ah, but this is the first sign of pathology. Don’t you know? You’re all sick. You had better just keep your head down and work hard and try not to think about it. We will protect you. You are the barbarians mired in earth and we are the civilizers from Planet X. On your knees!

And now I ask: what else has bourgeois Europe done? It has undermined civilization, destroyed countries, ruined nationalities, extirpated “the root of diversity.” No more dikes, no more bulwarks. The hour of the barbarians is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, gregariousness, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.

—Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

“People in this country,” my immigrant grandmother once said, “so stupid, you can’t believe.”

One mark of the know-nothing American tradition is ignorance of history. The pleasure and power of understanding where our things and thoughts came from escapes so many of my fellow Americans. They wouldn’t understand the joy I’ve taken in reading Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman during the ritual slaughter of the appointed racist/sexist, Mr. Imus, and the discussion over whether or not blogs ought to be regulated, controlled, monitored, self-policed, etc.

The foundational text of Euro-American feminism seethes and squirms with Wollstonecraft’s loathing of those of her gender (she uses the word “sex,” but she means “gender” very much in its contemporary sense) who pant, faint, cry and generally go about like invalids to whom the sight of a mouse is more threatening than the prospects of sin or stupidity. Wollstonecraft founded a humanist Enlightenment feminism that probably died with Andrea Dworkin. I realize that the latter is not often associated with humanism or the Enlightenment, and maybe she would have refused the terms, but her insistence on concrete legal rights and redresses coupled with an understanding that the law would never be enough to protect women if the state were patriarchal put her in a very different philosophical tradition from the group-therapy model of feminism promoted by today’s media-military-industrial complex.

Under the new regime, facts and material conditions pall before our collective feelings—and how do we know how we collectively feel? Well, some corporate or government big-wig will tell us. Luckily, we’ve got enough big-wigs to go with every consumer preference. You want “a racist blowhard”? A “black prophet”? A “concerned mother”? An “artist who keeps it real”? Oh, we’ve got all of those in the political mall. But be sure you stay in the mall! You wouldn’t like it outside! Wollstonecraft saw through this trick in 1791, but we have yet to catch up with her.

Meanwhile, Alexander Cockburn quotes Snoop Dogg, keeping it real:

It’s a completely different scenario. [Rappers] are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We’re talking about ho’s that’s in the ‘hood that ain’t doing shit, that’s trying to get a nigga for his money. These are two separate things. First of all, we ain’t no old-ass white men that sit up on MSNBC going hard on black girls. We are rappers that have these songs coming from our minds and our souls that are relevant to what we feel. I will not let them muthafuckas say we in the same league as him. Kick him off the air forever. Ban him like they did ‘Pacman’ Jones. They kicked him out the [National Football] League for the whole season [for numerous violations of the NFL's personal-conduct policy, including multiple arrests], but this punk gets to get on the air and call black women ‘nappy-headed ho’s.’

So the problem is not that Don Imus, who of course has a trail of racist and sexist slime going back decades, called a group of African-American women by a degrading name, the problem is plainly that he called the wrong black women by a degrading name. There really are some wretched hos about the place, and rappers know who and where they are when they need to be dealt with, but it really does go over the line when some white interloper dares to use bad language about members of the middle class! My grandmother, who never made it to fourth grade, let alone Rutgers, would understand that one.

Oh, but “class” is such a naughty word, the ultimate one, really. It feels so much better to talk about race and gender—especially when the people doing all the talking, however black or female they may be, don’t have to wonder about their next paycheck or meal.

I would warn Snoop that if, blinded by the dollar-signs in his eyes, he accedes in the culture of group therapy, then artists like him will be out on their asses right after Imus. Because if we must feel good, then we must feel good! And nothing must disturb us, ever! Harsh language, harsh noises, harsh reminders of the people who aren’t going to school tomorrow or who got blown up by an American bomb yesterday—well, these things must be torn out, root and branch. The era of good feeling is upon us, and no one may say anything that savors of a quarrel.

Thus it is with a gale-force sigh that the right-wing media can couple their own ass-covering denunciations of Imus with the happy news of the exoneration of those poor Duke lacrosse dudes, who learned the hard way that you can’t trust the help these days. They should have vetted their strippers with Snoop, who seems to know a lyin’ ho when he sees one.

You see, the middle-managers will stoke our outrage at this or that offensive thing that Rush Limbaugh or Rosie O’Donnell has said while the swaggering white frat pigs who really run the show get on with their business, the business of which is business, remember, as the hos on Snoop’s street are never allowed to forget. And then maybe our blogs will be regulated and our airwaves overseen and naughty words will never come to our ears, even if we could hear them by then, what with the level of blood rising and rising.

Mary Wollstonecraft is spinning in her grave like a turbine. Or maybe the time and the calm of death have mellowed her, and she’s laughing. Whatever it is, she, who said that what we need is not charity but justice, well understood that a corrupt, unequal political and economic system will always produce hate, violence and stupidity. To attempt to arrest the hate, violence and stupidity at the point at which they’re disseminated is a fool’s errand when you leave untouched—and unacknowledged!—the point at which they’re produced.

So I hope we all enjoy our group therapy session while it lasts, because, no matter how good we feel, the bill is on its way.

[Edit: I did not know when I wrote the above that a gunman in Virginia had killed, so far as we know, 31 people. A radio host in Virginia just said to an MSNBC interviewer that those who have just endured the worst mass shooting in U.S. history are in “shock and awe.”

Not an innocent remark, by no means, and not unrelated to the comparatively trivial story just pushed from the headlines by this massacre. When a society and a culture are inherently unjust, that society and that culture produce death.

This is not natural, young gunmen roving around shooting people, though this is what we have seen in the U.S. in the last decade or so. It’s not natural: it’s a product of our society, as are hatred-spewing radio hosts. In our culture, people feel hopeless, restless, angry, alientated. Violence, verbal and physical, is the inevitable result.

No amount of censorship of music, TV or video games will prevent this. Music, TV and video games are ugly and violent because they too are products of our culture and its political and economic relations. We don’t therapy, we don’t need charity, we don’t need censorship. We need justice.]

The other day I was (enforcedly) reading an excerpt from Giorgio Agamben’s celebrated book Homo Sacer. Agamben’s thesis, if I may attempt to put it simply and clearly, goes like this: modern state sovereignty, founded as it is on the rights of man and citizen, predicates the political status of individuals and the consequent protections of states that they enjoy, not on man considered as a political animal but on man as animal, as mere life. The fact of being born grants one rights in the modern order. One is born a man and becomes immediately thereupon a citizen. To our innocent eyes, this would appear to be hard-won progress, a vast improvement over rule by arbitrary kings and their private courts. Not so, says Agamben. The old king may have struck your head from your body if you ran afoul of his dictates or his order, but until then you were left alone. Your political fate was predicated upon your political activity, however defined. Now we are political from the womb, or even in the womb if anti-abortion advocates are to be believed (and they are not!). We are citizens insofar as we are bodies.

In this political order, then, the state comprehends our bodies in its sovereignty. Moreover, if the state strips us of the rights of citizens, our rights of man vanish too, and the state enjoys the right to dispose of us as mere animal life. So we’re damned if we’re citizens and damned if we aren’t. As citizens, the state intrudes upon our privacy in every way: educating our children in public schools, ordering criminals into psychological treatment, mandating vaccinations for the young. On the other hand, if we are denied the rights of citizens, we may be expelled from the state, imprisoned, reduced to slavery or exterminated within its borders. Our bodies in any case are not our own property, and, one assumes, our property is not our own property either. Agamben isn’t much for distinguishing between fascist, liberal-democratic, social-democratic and communist states. In any of those, one’s property may be seized by the state, in the name of eminent domain, agricultural collectivization or whatever.

Perhaps because the professor for whom I was reading Agamben is a leftist, and moreover one who believes that the academic Theory-left is basically right-wing in effect if not in intent, I wondered if Agamben knew just how much he sounded like an old-fashioned American conservative—like Pat Buchanan, or, to take a more honorable example, Justin Raimondo. Now I am not entirely without these Old Right sympathies: the state is proving far too intrusive these days, mandating vile cultish twelve-step treatment for drug-law violatiors, mainting those drug laws themselves, tormenting so-called “sex offenders” to death and controlling school curricula down to the day-by-agenda in the name of leaving no child behind, among other impositions, not to speak of the PATRIOT Act.

In the main, however, I am your traditional big-government leftist. I hate some of the shit the government is now doing, but I would like to reserve the state’s right—the state, in a democracy, being us, after all—to intervene in society for the good of the commonweal.

One of the events of the French Revolution that most enraged Edmund Burke was the expropriation of the churches. Not so much because Burke was offended at this treatment of the Catholic Church—though perhaps he felt that way and didn’t want to broadcast it, given that he was accused of being a cypto-Catholic in anti-papist England. Rather, Burke couldn’t believe that this modern state would dare consider private property, whether of individuals or of corporations like the Church, as its own to dispose of. He complains:

The treasure of the nation, of all things, has been the least allowed to the prerogative of the king of France or to the prerogative of any king in Europe. To mortgage the public revenue implies the sovereign dominion, in the fullest sense, over the public purse. It goes far beyond the trust even of a temporary and occasional taxation. The acts, however, of that dangerous power (the distinctive mark of a boundless despotism) have been alone held sacred. Whence arose this preference given by a democratic assembly to a body of property deriving its title from the most critical and obnoxious of all the exertions of monarchical authority?

Even kings, he says, didn’t make claims on the property or wealth of the nation! Burke does answer his “whence?” question: it turns out that the monied interests and the men of letters conspired to destroy religion and the aristocracy, which is pretty much true. This is the kind of thing that Karl Marx saw as progress. If Agamben is any evidence, our new radical theorists tend to agree with Burke. Like I said above, I get what these Old Right types are getting at, and I am not entirely without sympathy for them. Still and all, preferring the Middle Ages to the French Revolution strikes me as rather too…well, medieval.

And when it comes to expropriating churches, I think that’s a wonderful idea. If I were elected president tomorrow, I would issue an executive order taxing the everliving fuck of all religious organizations, and I would consider engrossing into the state and de-consecrating their community service functions, from soup kitchens to grade schools. When I visited Paris, I found the metro a far more splendid achievement than Notre Dame. I hold to that opinion.

The other day Alexander Cockburn was on C-Span 2’s three-hour interview show In Depth. (Watch it here.) I have my complaints about Cockburn—it seems to me that Counterpunch has veered dangerously into the territory of anti-semitism over the last few years by publishing the writings of “anti-war” conservatives like Paul Craig Roberts, Ray McGovern, Bill and Kathleen Christison and other such people who believe not that capitalism is exploiting and oppressing the majority of people in the world, but that the United States is a fundamentally good country betrayed into evil by a minority of rootless-cosmo types who exercise their power through something called “the Jewish lobby.” It used to be understood on the left that anti-semitism was the socialism of fools, and too that the socialism of fools is usually fascism waiting to happen. I don’t see why Cockburn fails to understand this, especially at a time when the right-wing is so free with the usually spurious charge of anti-semitism, directed against anyone who dares to call apartheid and ethnic cleansing by their right names when those crimes are committed—as they are every day—by the Israeli government, and excused every day in the country sponsoring these atrocities.

But anyway, I like Cockburn very much as a writer and as a personality. Everybody should get themselves a copy of his great published journal, The Golden Age is in Us: Journeys and Encounters 1987-1994. Whether he’s inveighing against Gorbachev’s reforms, Clinton’s capitulations or Oliver Stone’s conspiracy theories, he’s always fun, and occasionally moving, as when he mourns the death of his mother and of the Soviet Union. A great book.

About an hour into the show, they showed Cockburn on his farm out in Petrolia, California, talking to his horses and his dog. He wore a large-brimmed black hat with a feather in it and gave the cameras a tour of the different buildings and cars on his property. In his office, he chattered to his dog. It was so strange and refreshing to see a real human being on television. A human being is in this case someone who is indifferent to how he might appear on television, unlike the “reality” human beings with which television is now chiefly concerned. It almost makes me feel churlish for pointing out Cockburn’s obvious flaws, as I have above. Such fault-mongering perhaps bespeaks that very desire for (a suitably ironic) purity of heart and intention that television provokes and gratifies.

After their little tour of Cockburn’s property, they listed his favorite writers. I scribbled down the list out of curiosity. Here it is:

Marcel Proust
Stendhal
Nikolai Gogol
Mikhail Bulgakov
Thomas Love Peacock
Gustave Flaubert
James Joyce
Flann O’Brien
Theodor Adorno
H.J. Massingham
Edward Abbey
Ezra Pound
Jean-Paul Sartre
P.G. Wodehouse

That’s a pretty good list, even if it is all white dudes. It’s got variety of mood, mode and affect, and balances a respect for the old canon with an endearing quirkiness (I had to look up Massingham) and even local color (O’Brien and Joyce representing Cockburn’s native Ireland, Adorno and Sartre representing the political left). It’s even got one of my particular favorites on it—Stendhal. You might think me insane for copying this down and commenting on it, but the truth is that I love lists like this—people’s favorite books, movies, albums, writers, etc. These cultural monuments have colors and tones about them, and to see one person’s individual list of cherished items is to see a composite of the colors and tones that make up that nebulous thing called a self. I also like lists in general—what can I say, I was born in postmodern conditions.

Some literary critic once said that the greatest list in all of literature was Miss Flite’s list of the names of her birds in Bleak House:

Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach.

Could be. I was reading something recently and found a list that gave that a run for its money, but now I can’t remember what the list was or what book it was in. Tristram Shandy perhaps, in which case I’ll probably never find it again.

Anyway, what the hell’s my point? I don’t know, something about variety, humor, complexity, a little self-implicating irony. Cormac McCarthy is now famous, having been plucked like an impoverished South African adolescent from obscurity and granted the imprimatur of Oprah, pope of the New Age Church of Global Corporate Stalinism. But I wax furious about the world and I meant only to complain about Mr. McCarthy, a writer of aggressive fatuities on the awful meaninglessness of it all. I base this, I grant, only a reading of one half of one of his books, the celebrated Blood Meridian. I did read that first half twice, though, in deference to McCarthy’s pre-fame adulation by the literary in-crowd (Harold Bloom, etc.), but I was twice repelled by a discomfort brought on by alternating spasms of laughter and drowsiness.

McCarthy writes like H. P. Lovecraft and on some of the same themes, but without Lovecraft’s redeeming schlock. Lovecraft, despite his haunted personal life and occasionally grotesque personal views, never stoops to somnolence. His excesses have always seemed salutary to me, a little jab in the ribs to say, “Hey, fellow white dude, we’re working through some unhealthy fantasies here, but don’t fall too deep into it.” McCarthy has fallen too deep into it, and it’s turned out to be all the pretty horseshit. Various bloggers have been commenting on the first paragraph of his Oprah-selected novel The Road. It goes like this:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

Now I won’t bitch about the commalessness, because I have no a priori objection to such a defamiliarizing device. James Joyce used it, Gertrude Stein used it. McCarthy might well have done us the favor to be as amusing as Joyce and Stein, but I grant him his right to chuck the commas. I draw the line at over-emotional adjectives though: “precious breaths”?—is this a poem by Jewel? And “dark beyond darkness,” well, those are just words. How about “the inward parts of some granitic beast”? Which parts? Can one be in outward parts? And what fable features pilgrims and rock-monsters? And is a rock-monster-swallowed pilgrim’s biggest problem that he or she is lost? Finally, bypassing the affectedly affected diction (“room where lay…a lake”), those “eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders” have taken us right out of the realm of serious consideration. We might indeed be in an old episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

I know that novels, being the privileged artform of the era of land enclosure, commons privatization and the creation of domestic space, are meant to be read silently, but I’ve always thought that a writer ought to try his lines aloud to make sure they’re presentable. One really must read McCarthy aloud! As Harrison Ford told George Lucas, “You can write this shit, but you can’t say it.” The fame of McCarthy will, I believe, go down in the annals of American credulity—not so funny when you consider that antiquarians will behold McCarthy issuing his tough-guy messages about the rottenness of human nature in an era of extraordinary political and social reaction.

So I will just have to take the part of unusual radicals who talk to dogs and admire a bewildering variety of literary possibilities. Oprah can keep her turgid chronicler of the wasteland that Africa and increasingly America are becoming under not some gothic primordial curse but under the very real reign of the wealthy that she represents. You have to laugh.