Previous - 70. A new book
Preparing to vote
I spent a large portion of Sunday working through my Voter Information Pamphlet & Sample Ballot. At least I have an easy choice at the top of the ballot, but the rest is a total mess. I like my candidate for U.S. Senate and State Assembly. I have to vote for Pelosi, my U.S. Representative. I refuse to vote for my City Supervisor but can't really vote for the person running against him either. In the other races I have to choose the lesser evil -- as at the top -- or follow endorsements for the minor offices with candidates I've never heard of. Such is democracy. And that's the easy part.
Next we come to the State and City Propositions. There are 17 State Propositions but I've only voted (yes or no) for 13 of them -- the others I either can't make sense of or I could go either way on. Then there 25 City and BART or School District propositions where I've voted for 22.
I'm proud to say that in a number of these cases I've voted against my inclination because the Proposition would set a bad example or cause problems in addition to what it's intended to fix. In some cases it's really hard to know if voting yes or no would reflect my true opinion or achieve what was possibly intended. And of course they throw all these Propositions at us because our elected officials can't do their jobs and settle this themselves. In some cases I'm hoping I'm sending a message about what I really want or don't want, but in other cases I'm not sure what message, if any, I'm sending.
And if Tuesday goes as I expect, no one will be paying much attention to these local issues anyway.
A Century of Wisdom
I'm up to Chapter three and now Alice and her young son are in a camp -- though a very nice one where she continues to perform on the piano.Back in Prague she was raised in a quintessentially bourgeois-Jewish family with Franz Kafka as a close family friend. Most of her immediate family escaped to Palestine on the last train out of Czechoslovakia. She, and her husband and child, remained behind with her mother for what seemed like good reasons before Munich.
What do I mean by "quintessentially bourgeois-Jewish family?" They were well educated, very musical, well connected, involved in trade. Her mother was raised Orthodox, her father was a merchant. A year or two ago I would have thought nothing of this, but now I can't help viewing them -- along with Primo Levi's family in Turin and Oliver Sacks' family in London -- through the eyes of Dostoevsky and Ford. Thus I have to ask, To what extent were the Jews hated for being ur-bourgeois as opposed to being religious. (Sorry for the German prefix to a French adjective.)
I know this sounds far-fetched, but stick with me a moment. I've never paid much attention to what anti-semites were saying, going all the way back to that Austrian red-neck Morton covers in A Nervous Splendor. So what do I know? First, there's Fernand Braudel's argument that the origin of European capitalism is intertwined with the history of the Jews displaced from Iberia after 1492. Then there's an account I read a long time ago of anti-Jewish riots in the south of Germany back in some earlier century. (Sorry I can't be more specific.) There was a pattern to the violence against the Jews back then: The wandering Jews would settle in a community and offer credit. Things would be fine for a time but then the economy would go south, and when the local Christians could no longer keep up with their payments, it would be discovered that some Jew or other had tricked a Christian into smuggling a wafer (the body of Christ) out of a church and giving it to the Jew who then proceeded to torture it. The Jews implicated were attacked and the rest of the Jewish community fled.
Now this sounds completely nonsensical, of course, but what I read into it is that religion was just a tool the locals used to attack people they had a grudge against for economic reasons. Dostoevsky and Ford are not blatantly antisemitic, but it is clear in both The Brothers Karamazov and Parade's End that Jews are a part of -- and possibly a symbol of -- the bourgeois values they see as undermining the natural, Tory order. And, with Braudel in mind again, this is not wrong. (Mann is less interested in this line of reasoning -- Naphtha not withstanding -- because he was raised in an equally bourgeois, though, gentile, family.)
I really don't want to do the research -- read antisemitic writings of the time, and Nazi dogma -- but I'm curious about how much the Nazis were opposed to other aspects of bourgeois life like science and technology and the importance of merit vs birth.
A Faustian history of WW2
It would be impossible to pick the strangest section of Part 2 of Faust, but the battle section right after Faust returns to Germany from Greece would have to be in the running. If we accept that Faust (with Mephisto's assistance) represents the bourgeois spirit, then you can almost see this passage as an allegory for the Allied victory in both theaters in WW2. Wait, stay with me for just a minute...
The Allied victory was based largely on technological/scientific magic: The Bomb is the most obvious example of this, but there's also crytoanalysis, radar (by the end of the war radar sets small enough to fit in artillery shells), and the by then routine magic of modern industry with the exploitation of coal, oil, and everything else that can be mined from the Earth.
And it's worth remembering that deception played an important role in both Faust's battle plans and in the Allied battle plans (the British at the 2nd Battle of El Alamein and the American crossing of the Rhine being two good examples.)
Faust - Part 2 - Act IV Scenes I-III (Headland:Battle)
FaustNow, powerfully, streams pour on streams,10725
Sweeping from gorges with redoubled gleams,
A river now throws up an arching veil:
Pours over the rocky level in a tide,
Runs foaming down, on every side,
And, stepwise, hurls itself into the dale.10730
What use their fine, heroic resistance?
The vast wave roars, and fills the distance.
I shudder myself at this wild waterfall.
MephistophelesI can see nothing of these watery lies,
They only serve for fooling human eyes,10735
I delight instead in wonders that befall.
In companies, their men plunge down,
The fools imagine that they’ll drown,
While free to breathe, on solid ground,
With swimming strokes, they run around.10740
It’s bewildering them all.
(The Ravens return.)
I’ll praise you to the noble Master: but see,
If you’d like to display your own mastery,
Hurry to the glowing smithy,
Where the dwarf folk never weary,10745
Hammering sparks from steel and stone.
Ask for, once you’ve chattered first,
A fire to shine: sparkle, and burst,
The finest that man’s ever known.
It’s true that far off lightning flashes,10750
And stars that fall in sudden dashes,
Can happen any summer’s night:
But lightning in the tangled bushes,
And stars that fizzle in the rushes,
They’re not such a common sight.10755
Don’t trouble about my command,
Ask first, then afterwards demand.
(The Ravens fly off. All takes place as ordered.)
Darkness cloaks the enemy!
Their footsteps meet uncertainty!
Everywhere are wandering flares,10760
And those sudden blinding glares!
It’s all beautiful indeed,
Now some noise is what we need.
No comments:
Post a Comment