Creeturs

A few weeks ago I was leading a class discussion of Susan Griffin's disquieting masterpiece A CHORUS OF STONES and noting how many of its historical monsters-- Heinrich Himmler, Wernher Von Braun, Hugh Trenchard, the father of strategic bombing-- had in various ways also been victims.

The corollary is that many of Griffin's victims had also been monsters or, more kindly, snitches, bullies, rats, grovelers at the seats of power. A little girl curries favor with a cruel friend by pouncing on a weaker one. A Jewish woman tries to escape deportation to Auschwitz by turning in other Jews. The tortured look up to their torturers.

Sometimes they become torturers themselves.

"What you've got to understand," I told my kids-- few of them were older than 20--"Is that people are horrible."



They looked shocked. Somebody giggled.

Given all the other ways I might have put it, I thought I was being mild, but we shouldn't underestimate the degree to which Americans want to believe that they are good people. We have been told we are since childhood.

But the truth is that people are terrible. Americans are no worse than anybody else, just more cosseted and deluded.

The great project facing all human beings is the project of transcending their essential awfulness.




There are various means of achieving this:

.Human beings can create works of art that are better than they are. Some works are so dazzling that they blind us to the flaws of their creators. The productions of Shakespeare


and Bach, to name just two, seem to issue from someplace beyond personality.

Other artworks somehow incorporate their makers' flaws into their design. In the novels of Dostoevsky, you can see all his hysteria, his Jew-hatred and drunken religiosity.

Frida Kahlo's paintings pulse with narcissism. Narcissism gives them their peacock brightness.

Kurt Cobain's songs might emerge from some dedicated organ of self-loathing. They're still great, and some of that greatness comes from their nakedness-- or, say, the blatancy of the suffering from which they are distilled.



.Human beings can escape their native selfishness long enough to do something truly unselfish. Most of us can only do that for a moment or two before our moral gravity reasserts itself. A very small number succeed in being selfless for the greater part of a lifetime. When someone does this it's as if a dancer were to leap into the air and remain floating there long after the other members of the company have landed and taken their bows, and all the lights have gone up, and the audience ceased clapping and filed out of the theater, into the cold and dark. While inside, in the darkened house, one dancer still hovers, so absorbed in the leap that she doesn't realize that it has yet to end.

.Human beings can strive to raise children who will be happier than they are. Not richer or more successful. Just happier. This is what Sophocles has in mind when he has Oedipus
enjoin his daughters, "Pray that . . . your life be happier than your father's." To appreciate how humble this hope is, consider that one of those daughters will be put to death for daring to give her slain brothers a proper burial. Still, Oedipus gets his wish. In the end, Antigone is happier than he was. She gets to suffer for something she believes in.

.Teaching combines some elements of the last two enterprises. It offers selfish people the opportunity to act unselfishly and aging ones a chance to pass on the little they know to younger ones. Most students won't recognize that anything is being passed down to them at all, but some will. Some will even value it.


Traditionally people think of art and children as ways of achieving immortality. But immortality is impossible. Rather, it's unverifiable. Who can know what part of him will survive his life?

An alternative is to think of immortality as release from the other part of our condition, which is not death but brokenness. Some parts of us die before others, and we carry those dead parts with us and inflict them on our fellows.

"'Are you a weak creetur," Dickens's Mr. Bumble asks Mrs. Corney, this being his idea of a come-on. "'We are all weak creeturs,' says Mrs. Corney. And Dickens adds that she is "laying down a general principle."

Who's the boss?

There was a Website called Foetry that devoted itself, in the words of its founder, to "chisel[ing] a small crack in the facade of the academic poetry industry." Mostly this meant savaging the reputations of various poets, some distinguished, some barely known outside the industry's branch-offices. Foetry had little to say about its targets’ work but spoke at length about their personal failings, their self-dealings and adulteries, their back-scratching and log-rolling .

Well, as Bill Wilson

once said in another context “We are not saints.”

For all their bile, these attacks barely registered outside the academy. In this way, they were like poems themselves. They were anti-poems, for a poem is something made from nothing, or almost nothing, and the attacks in Foetry were something reduced to nothing. More accurately, they were nothing heaped on something in an attempt to obliterate it.

The striking thing about Foetry, which shut down in May, 2007, is the disproportion between its bile and its subjects’ status in the larger world. Check out the Amazon ratings of books by Marie Ponsot , Paul Muldoon , or Philip Levine .
Take a walk outside and ask the first 10 people you meet who Jorie Graham is.

No fair if “outside” is the hall of a creative writing department.

The same phenomenon was apparent when I was an arts administrator in the 1970s. Nothing equaled the savagery with which our clients snapped and ravened for $200 grants and $50 reading fees. The scarcer the resources, the more savagely people will fight for them, and to read through the character assassinations in the Foetry archives is to envision two skeletal wretches in a freezing room in Leningrad during the Siege clawing each others’ eyes out for possession of a filthy heel of bread made from a few grams of rye flour bulked out with floor sweepings and rat dung.




But I wonder whether this savagery might also be a measure of something else. Almost 300 years ago,Shelley wrote that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Maybe this is still true. Between Shelley’s time and our own, the acknowledged legislation of the world has passed from kings to presidents to bankers and hedge-fund managers, with occasional interceptions by popes, ayatollahs, and chairmen. (At the moment we are witnessing a renewed struggle between representatives of the political and economic spheres, with the same bankers who rifled the world’s pockets holding a gun to its head and threatening to pull the trigger.)

But what if, in some secret dimension folded to infinitesimal thin-ness inside our own, the poets are still in power? I’m not sure what this power consists of. It may be the power to invest words with a meaning that in all other quarters has been stripped from them. The power to shape the dreams of people who still have dreams, or maybe just enter them, appearing as a cigarette glowing in an unlit doorway, the silver bark of a crepe myrtle, a cat perched magisterially on a fence, gazing at the dreamer with its topaz gaze.



The bankers and hedge-fund managers claimed they could make something from nothing, that is, from debt. In the end, they turned something into nothing, pouring trillions of other people’s dollars down a drain whose terminal point is still unknown to us, though maybe not to them.

The poets live up to their promise, though most of them promise very little. They still make something from nothing. That's why some people hate them.

Did Barack Obama Win by Memoir?

This just in from Katherine Russell Rich, a terrific writer and author of the forthcoming Dreaming in Hindi


The election sent readers running to the bookstore to buy Barack Obama's memoirs, the AP reported yesterday--it was the end of a great run for the president-elect's two books.

In a post-James Frey world, it's hard to imagine voting for a presidential candidate based on a memoir. Nevertheless, David Henry Sterry endorsed Obama at the Huffington Post, using the President-elect's memoir as his guide. His highly literary conclusion:

"I have no clue how the economic plans of either candidate will dig us out of this gaping gasping chasm. But memoir wise, Obama feels the real deal, while McCain feels a fake ... Obama, with his thoughtful, elegant prose, comes across like a man who'd rather talk than fight. A man true to his memoir.

Say It Soft and It's Almost Like Praying

I don’t want to write about Sarah Palin any more, I don’t even want to talk about her, but I can’t stop. Palin may be a small-town Mean Girl plucked into a position of incongruous power – and now feverishly trying to vamp and bully her way into one of even greater power—but she turns the rest of us into Mean Girls, too,
or Mean Guys.
And if you’re a nice person, a good person, or just like to think you’re not the sneering little shit you were in high school, you don’t want to go there. But I can’t help myself. Who can resist imitating her chirping hate speech, the cheerful hiccups with which she sets up her talking points? Who can keep from snickering as she bumps down the hallway, thrusting her assets in front of her?



(Who could resist snickering at the way her decrepit running mate kept ogling her at the Republican Convention, like a dirty-minded high school principal eyeing the slutty valedictorian?)


The six colleges, the beauty pageant, the imported witch doctor, the $150,000 wardrobe bought for her by her new bee-yotches in the Republican party?
I'm sorry, not me.

Last week I was talking about Palin with my wife, who’s been writing a campaign journal for the French newspaper Liberation. An obstacle to this is the fact that she’s been in Europe since the middle of September. In the accelerated time-scheme of this election season, that makes her a long-time expat trying to keep up with trends back home.
“Is it Buchanan who called her a cancer on the Republican party or is it Brooks? And why are those assholes waving toilet plungers?”


It gives me opportunities to update her. “You want to know who Sarah Palin is?” I said. We were Skyping. “She’s the False Maria in Metropolis! That’s who she is.”

My wife hadn’t seen the movie, so I had to explain. Metropolis was made by Fritz Lang in 1926 and is set 100 years in the future, in a city of colossal Art Deco ziggurats


rearing above an underworld of insatiable, smoking machines. The upper city is the domain of serene technocrats; the lower city is a lightless proletarian hive.

In my summary of the plot, a saintly beauty named Maria moves among the workers, urging them to rise up against their masters. Alarmed, the chief technocrat has her replaced by a robot Maria built by a mad scientist. The false Maria is a debased, sexualized version of the real one, and she, or it, beguiles the masses back into their trance, a trance of ceaseless, unthinking motion.



But, as my wife later pointed out, I had the plot wrong. The good Maria doesn’t preach revolution. She tells the workers they have to wait for a “Mediator” who will be a conduit between them, the “hands” of the city, and the masters who are its “head.” It’s the false Maria who whips them into a destructive fury in which they tear apart the machines they serve. This precipitates a flood that nearly drowns the workers’ children.

Of course Metropolis’s vision of the future—which seems too close to be called the future any more—is misapprehended. Part of the charm of old science fiction is the way it gets the future wrong. We’re not ruled by technocrats; we’re ruled by oil-men and hedge-fund managers, and the machines are all in China. Our underworld is more of an outerworld of big box stores where underpaid clerks pass merchandise through beeping scanners and hand it to customers who earn as little as they do. And, actually, that future is already racing into the past, to be replaced by a present in which the stores are closing.

I hold by my argument that Sarah Palin is the false Maria. The salient question is whether she’s tranquilizing her audience or goading them to rise. In the latter case, the workers won’t be rising against their masters, but against the infuriating pipsqueaks that they and Palin insist on calling the elite.
(It hardly needs to be noted that Palin is an evangelical Christian, and that Lang’s “Mediator” suggests nothing so much as a post-Marxist Jesus—though some of the more besotted pipsqueaks might identify him with Barack Obama.)
Some of the answer depends on what suits the masters’ plans. Some of it has to do with what suits Palin’s. More and more, she seems to be going rogue.

What remains true is that in the scene in which the evil Rotwang activates the false Maria, the svelte robot turns into a woman. She slinks up to the chief technocrat and listens impassively as he orders her down into the underworld to undo what her human original has started. Then slowly, deliberately, obscenely . . . she winks.

Faces and Masks

The following was written by my wife, Mary Gaitskill, and will appear in the French newspaper Liberation .

In his essay on Nikolai Gogol’s

“The Overcoat,” Vladimir Nabokov



describes the short story as “a grotesque and grim nightmare making black holes in the dim pattern of life,” a beautiful, flexible and fantastically broad phrase. “The Overcoat” is about a poor half-crazy little clerk in pre-Revolutionary Russia who, when his thin coat rots off his back one freezing winter, spends his entire savings on having a new coat made for him.
The new coat is magnificent, and it transforms his life. For the first time he is invited to a party where he drinks too much; on the way home he is robbed of his coat; the robbery breaks his heart; he sickens and dies. The story is typically read as an allegory of “the little guy” in a socially unjust world, but Nabokov sees something more terrible, a story of “whirling masks,” through which the tortured human protagonist must wander in desperate confusion, and in which the true plot, as opposed to the literal one, comes from “that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships.”


How garish are these masks that talk to us non-stop everyday, how huge they loom out of television and cyberspace!


What secret depths do they come from, what primitive forces are finding expression through them? John McCain, having unleashed insane Pandora, is now trying to stuff her back in the box probably because human beings are horrified at seeing his rallies turn into pre-lynch mobs. But when one of his supporters denounces Obama as “an Arab,” and McCain responds like a person (“He’s a decent family man”), he’s booed by his own. While one of his masks makes nice, the others keep putting out the misinformation. Through it all wanders the human voter—who, if he’s Republican, bought the overcoat years ago and, though it’s been stolen from him, still worships it on his knees.

The Higher-Priced Spread

To listen to the gloating condescension with which John McCain kept invoking Joe the Plumber (aka the splendidly named Samuel Wurzelbacher
during Wednesday's presidential debate was to understand the Republican party's attitude toward blue-collar Americans: superficially affectionate, at times even idolatrous, but fundamentally patronizing and contemptuous. As a working stiff who aspired to clamber into the ranks of the proprietor class, Joe the Plumber was a perfect Republican prop. He was the human equivalent of the hardhat the candidate might have worn on a visit to a factory, assuming he could find a factory that was still operating.


McCain and his spokesmen couldn't say the name enough, even after it emerged that Joe or Sam didn't have a plumber's license and had a tax lien standing against him. In this Joe is also representative of the Republican party: an unqualified person impersonating a competent professional. He belongs to the same category as a flack for a horse-breeders' association who impersonates an expert at disaster-management

and a draft-dodging oilman turned sports entrepreneur who impersonates a war president.

Except that even without a license Joe the Plumber is probably better at his job than Mike the FEMA director or George the POTUS were at theirs.


Along with just saying Joe the Plumber's name, McCain likes repeating his objection to Barack Obama's tax plans, and especially to Obama's desire to "share" or "spread" the wealth. "Barack Obama wants you to 'share the wealth'", he tells cheering rallies. "I want to create wealth!" It's the candidate as slot machine.

Of course, in Republican ideology, the true creator of wealth is not government: It's business. Still, the salient idea is of wealth as something created, as if from nothing, through the alchemical marriage of executives and shareholders.
The business's workers have been PhotoShopped out of the picture. The idea of work, of effort, has been PhotoShopped out. But of course workers can't be dispensed with entirely-- even the wealth created by Bear Sterns and Wachovia, by Lehman Brothers and AIG, wealth that dissolved like dry ice, required some kind of workers.

And so Joe the Plumber is brought forth as a place-holder for the ones who have been PhotoShopped out of the picture. He's a worker who dreams of becoming one of the owners, and that makes him a convenient mascot to a party that historically has viewed workers, and particularly workers' rights, more or less the same way the States Rights Party viewed African-Americans.
If Joe had just wanted a higher wage, or a health plan, it would have been a different story. Then he could have been a Democratic mascot.

Going back to spreading the wealth. The idea, if not the precise phrase, was a standard part of liberal small-D democratic governance for more than 40 years, embraced by both big-D Democratic and Republican administrations. It's the idea that the wealth of the nation belongs in some measure to all its citizens, and that part of government's job is to move it around. It's the idea behind public works projects and public schools and hospitals and the armed forces, things that all of us pay for and that are supposed to serve all of us.

Of course nobody likes to feel beholden. Ronald Reagan came into office by vigorously denying the notion that there was such a thing as national wealth. All wealth belonged to individuals (though many of those individuals were actually corporations), and any attempt by government to redistribute it was tantamount to theft. The claim satisfied the universal desire to hold onto one's money. It satisfied the peculiarly American desire to feel that one is the sole author of one's fortune.
Under Reagan and Bush 1 and, yes, Clinton, and finally the current president, the idea metastasized, giving us an energy policy dictated by oil companies, an EPA run for the benefit of polluters, a great city abandoned to storm and flood, disintegrating bridges, and at last the mass looting of millions of mortgage holders and small investors, by lenders and investment banks that had once been subject to government supervision until people like McCain and Phil Gramm succeeded in freeing them to create more wealth.

One of the reasons why so many American institutions are now in ruins is because government abandoned the job of distributing wealth. Actually, many of its actions during the past 30 years helped concentrate wealth.
That's why the inequality between the richest one percent and the poorest 20 percent is greater than at any time since the 1920s.

And if we really reject the idea of spreading the wealth, we may as well stop building highways when they get to the poor parts of town and let our enemies know that if they just drop their bombs on Detroit and Akron, we won't lay a finger on them.

What Would It Take

What would it take to charge the bankers, investors, and legislative facilitators (yoo hoo, Phil Gramm!) responsible for the bleeding wound in the American economy under the RICO act?

The advantage would be that the government could do them what it did to John Gotti and seize all their assets-- ALL OF THEM, the private planes and 30,000-square-foot houses in the Hamptons, the $10,000 suits and the $25,000 dresses for the wives and the $150,000 necklaces for the mistresses (sorry to be sexist here, but when it comes to Wall Street it's still a man's, man's world).

Scoop 'em up and sell 'em off to the highest bidder.

Who will probably be a Russian oiligarch or a Chinese dairy magnate. But that's their problem.