Guests at my semi-regular literary salon often ask me: “how old are you?” Depending on the questioner, I may laugh, crying mock offense, or coyly purr, “old enough,” or just simply smile, silent, sipping from a jar of my home-brewed sweet schnapps. The fact is, age is no hurdle for enlightenment. At two months or twenty-five years, humanity has remained my mien; its history, my bailiwick.
“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” wrote James Joyce one sleepless night, and as I peruse my clippings from the past week in my satellite study, I feel all too sharply the sting of the past’s claim. As I admire George W. Bush’s proficiency in form and space, the works of El Greco and Brueghel flood forth from the memory banks. When President Obama undercuts his own party’s attempts to raise the minimum wage, I see not the tawdry politicking of modern times, but the craftsmanship of a Stradivarius, burning the midnight oil in his violin depot. And when I see that a flock of cardinals have chirped in unanimity for a new pope, I see Julius Caesar, wreathed in laurels, as alive as you or me.
Yes, today is the Ides of March, a portentous day for leaders, and I wonder whether, as Cardinal Bergoglio became Pope Francis, the Argentine saw any assassins in the conclave. A cold snap of Argentinean history swept across all media as a world totally unfamiliar with this unknown quantity tried to pretend otherwise. Had this peace-loving Jesuit been a collaborator with General Videla’s military junta, obscuring the regime’s crimes and dispatching priests to be “disappeared”? Was this economically populist man-of-the-people a political scallywag, cozying up to tyrants and undermining elected leaders ?
Good questions, to be answered by our dogged free press, in all its iterations. And they scotched it – it took a day or so before the claim that the Pope ran a gulag could be rejected. Not a fine example our press set, groping at basic information about God’s earthly arbiter, but then, as in Caesar’s day, when we Americans get our hands on a “tribune of the people,” we tend to also kill him. Just ask now-admitted whistleblower Bradley Manning. Besides whatever demented torture his mouth-breathing jailers come up with, Manning must withstand the smears of the Old Grey Lady himself, neocon BFF Bill Keller. Keller, whose thought experiements in the run-up to the Iraq War consisted of scrawling his byline in wavering crayon above Ahmed Chalabi’s latest howler, has the temerity to mock Manning’s inability to get in touch with a NYT reporter, and crow that Manning would’ve been “on his own” even had the Times heard him out.
With fearless defenders of press freedom like Bill Keller in your corner, who needs assassins? The Fourth Estate again distinguished itself this week, comforting that most afflicted of underdogs: the Fourth Estate. Satanic fluffer and intern fucker Michael Wolff wrote an awful lot of words complaining about how difficult it is for Very Important People like him to have their heads chopped off by a gang of scruffy Jacobins get good tables at expensive restaurants. With any luck, this pike fish of a person will book a dinner date very soon with Patrick Bateman – who is, after all, only marginally less cartoonish than Wolff. Washington’s own Frog Prince, Ezra Klein, extolled the praises of high-flying, often anonymous journalistic sources – sources who’d certainly never manipulate a shrewd operator like Ezra into printing puffery and lies. And, ahead of Obama’s upcoming visit to Israel, sober, “thought-provoking” glossies, like New Republic and The Economist – the kind of magazines poseurs read to feel smart – proved their intellectual bona fides by descending into sub-South African levels of ethnic chauvinism and unblinking racism.
No matter, it’ll still be their world – no matter how far afield the fuckers gallivant. Chicago’s unionbuster-in-chief and destroyer of public schools, hotel heiress Penny Pritzker, moves to a new ministry in Washington. Obama heads to Israel, to laud a U.S.-funded missile defense system that does not work, and to pretend he is not hated there. Short-selling market fraudster John Paulson mulls a move to Puerto Rico, like any good patriotic American dodging capital gains taxes . Life contracts, thinned out by a thousand cuts, while the rest of us get a little hungrier and confused.
On second thought, maybe Brutus had the right idea. Think that over as you fall asleep this Ides of March.
