Melania

The title of this post will have raised some eyebrows. Did he watch the documentary? Is he going to review it? And so I must immediately temper expectations. No, I didn’t watch it. Perhaps I shall, some day. I’m in no hurry.

I just want to note what strikes me as an extraordinary response by the public and the critics.

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Melania has an aggregate rating of 1.3 from 10 at the IMDb. Some 49 thousand votes have been submitted.

Surely it isn’t that bad? Even Caligula (1979) manages a rating of 5.3.

Ah, here we go. “Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title,” the website disclaims.

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“Trump Film is a Gilded Trash Remake of
The Zone of Interest”

… The Guardian opines. Quite a good dig, that.

(The Zone of Interest, if you didn’t know, depicts the opulence of an Auschwitz commandant’s household.)

Again, the vitriol is excessive. Or not? Time will tell.

No, it really is excessive, no matter how things turn out. Melania evidently is no Triumph of the Will. It doesn’t show a nation’s diabolic fervor. It’s just a vanity project. This sort of thing has been done before and will be done again. Sometimes, a despot commisions it (cf. Turkmenistan); sometimes, it’s just the excrescence of some rich dude, as when Charles Foster Kane pays for his wife to be an opera lead. I expect Melania is in between.

Here’s a more sympathetic Guardian review.

Inflation; remembering the Holocaust; I am a V.I.P.

Karin went to the grocery store. A man in the bread aisle turned to her.

Man: “It’s all so damn expensive!”

Karin: “It’s pretty bad.”

“This is my first time shopping in ten years!”

“It must be bad.”

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As I type, I am listening to a long phone message from the local superindentent of schools urging us all to think about the Holocaust. Appropriately, my mother-in-law just returned my copy of Maus. I’d lent it to her to read to her current foster son, a highschooler whose plan of care includes being read to. He’d been objecting, reasonably enough, to the children’s books my mother-in-law had been reading to him. I suggested Maus. He liked it at first but later refused to sit next to my mother-in-law to look at the pictures. “And it’s pointless to read a graphic novel to someone who won’t look at the pictures,” my mother-in-law explained.

Some future Holocaust reading (for me):

Our Nazi (reviewed here).

Diaries of Victor Klemperer (hat tip: my cousin-in-law Peter and his Facebook friends).

Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (this has been scheduled by my reading group).

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Samuel chose me to accompany him to today’s “V.I.P. breakfast” at his school. The scholars ate fruit and cheese. The grownups had coffee and donuts. They sat at cafeteria tables with their children. I stood while Samuel ran laps around me. “Take me to your friends,” I told him. He’d guide me within five feet of this or that child. Then he’d laugh and run away. I couldn’t always tell whether the child was his classmate.

A few parents introduced themselves. “My child often talks about Sammy,” they’d say. Most parents just looked at us as if we were deranged.

One child (not acquainted with Samuel, apparently) had smuggled Lego bricks into the cafeteria. Samuel kept trying to run away to play with those toys. The mother covered the Lego bricks with a jacket. Samuel lifted the jacket to get to the Lego bricks. I dragged him to the picture-taking area. We posed with an inflatable donut. Samuel took me to his classroom. His teacher put him right to work, and I went home.

Behold him watching football, earlier this week, with his abuelos and his Grandaunt Linda (a rabid Chiefs fan).

Weil on the Iliad; Nazis everywhere; the scholar, pt. 4; a dialog of trucks

I discussed, with fellow readers, Simone Weil’s essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” which we all were impressed with.

(Weil gets some details about the Iliad wrong, per the introduction in this edition.)

We also learned about this new book: Our Nazi.

Nazis, Nazis everywhere is the virtual life-refrain of one of our venerable reading-group members.

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Rough school day for Samuel, who heard some unsettling noises. He doesn’t want to go back.

Karin bought him some Hot Wheels, out of pity.

Later, she heard him playing with other toy cars – a pickup truck and a food truck.

“Hey, man, give me some sliders.”

“Sure, man. Where do you want them?”

“Just toss ’em in the back of my truck.”

Mitfords, pt. 5

Another monstrosity: Pigeon Pie, a war novel.

At first, it seems a subdued, almost contrite work: an about-face from the fervid, jolly cynicism of Wigs on the Green.

It doesn’t stay that way. By the end, it outdoes its predecessor.

It was written in 1939. Nancy’s sister, Unity, the Hitler enthusiast, had just tried to commit suicide. The war had just begun. Heady days.

Dunkirk … the Battle of Britain … the Blitz … all were forthcoming.

The novel mocks Germans, Lord Haw-Haw, aristocratic volunteerism, the Cabinet, the House of Lords, parachutists, and real and pretending spies. The titular pigeons are messenger pigeons. None is actually baked in a pie. Some, bearing intelligence to the Nazis, are shot down over the Channel.

A surprising number of Germans drown underneath London, in the drains.

The heroine is an utter nitwit.

I confess I am very glad to have read this book.

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Daniel went to the physician again today (his own doctor, not the WIC doctor) and got shots. Karin had promised him a treat. She bought him some McDonald’s. They wouldn’t sell her a chicken McGriddle (the best kind). Maybe they don’t sell chicken at breakfast-time anymore. A bore, as the characters say in Mitford. I stayed home with Samuel, who played enthusiastically and in peace.

Since last week, we have had 60-degree (F) temperatures, then snow, then 60-degree temperatures (likely to climb to 70); snow is expected two days from now.

Mitfords, pt. 4

Well, I finished reading the third Mitford book, Wigs on the Green. I kept wondering how it would earn that title.

Chapter 12 hinted that the village festival would be graced by inmates from the local madhouse for peers. (The asylum, in the deepest, darkest, most bucolic Cotswolds, is a replica of Westminster … an inspired touch.)

I thought these doddering ex-members of the House of Lords would initiate the fracas; instead, it’s contested by the village’s rival youth factions: Social Unionists (“Union Jackshirts”) and Pacifists.

One roots for the Union Jackshirts.

The fight scene is a jovial and rousing climax. Alas, the book is mean-spirited on the whole; indeed, distressingly personal.

Who writes a novel mocking one’s little sister? (Even if she is gaga for Hitler.)

A cloistered aristocrat, that’s who.

Still, the book’s scorn isn’t directed against the young fascist heroine – or even her reactionary ancestors – so much as against her cynical hangers-on.

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This is Daniel’s last week before his “terrible twos.”

He’s into planets. He plays for hours with softballs, stress balls, and clementines.

Jupiter Planet.

Saturn Planet.

Mars.

Tune (Neptune).

Key (Mercury).

He loves to remove his pants and diaper and streak through the house. We’ve gone back to dressing him in bodysuits, which he can’t take off by himself. We’ve had to buy larger bodysuits to cover his growing frame. He’s less than a head shorter than Samuel.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 60: Un héros très discret (A self-made hero)

Albert grows up thinking his father died fighting for France in World War I. Probably not; probably, his mother lied to him. During the next war, the Nazis capture their village. The village officials welcome the Nazis. Albert’s mother discreetly collaborates with the Nazis so that she can receive the pension for war widows. Then the Nazis are driven out and the village officials welcome the liberators. The Nazis’ French collaborators are rounded up and dealt with. Albert’s mother is spared the worst treatment, however: Albert’s father-in-law has been sheltering Allied parachutists in his barn, and the whole family is protected by, indeed profits from, this clandestine heroism. Albert is humiliated that neither his father-in-law nor his wife saw fit to inform him that good deeds were being done. He hops on a train to Paris. There he falls in with a con artist and an unscrupulous businessman. He learns to inflate his credentials, rehearse catchphrases, and recall names. By dropping the right words into conversation, he insinuates himself into the postwar in-crowd. Its celebrities are the former Resistance fighters. Albert attends their gatherings and pretends to have been a Resistance fighter. He fits right in. The Resistance fighters also name-drop, and he can do it better than they can. He studies English phrases and street names and pretends to have been exiled in London. When he pretends to have been sired by a Polish Jew, his star rises especially high. Eventually, he impresses the right people and is given a prestigious army job.

He works hard at being an impostor. All the while, he is racked with guilt.

The story is sordid and tragic and brightly and cheerfully told.

This impostor’s tale is designed to make every honest viewer worry whether, or to what degree, he or she also is an impostor. It also develops a subtler theme. Is society responsible for incentivizing the deception that Albert practices? Yes, and for turning a blind eye to it. Consider Albert’s wife, and his mistress. Both suspect that something about him is screwy. Neither is especially bothered. They see potential in his talent for self-presentation. Consider the virtuous father-in-law, the one who heroically hides the parachutists in his barn. Deep down, he must not trust Albert; but he trains him in his salesman’s craft. By turning Albert into a disciplined performer, he helps him down the road to impostorship. Consider the soldiers and Resistance fighters. Some are clearly fooled by Albert. Others clearly are not. Most leave it ambiguous whether or not they are fooled. The prevailing attitude seems to be: Let’s see how far this guy will travel; let’s see how useful he can be to us. Hardly surprising, in a society that exalts Nazis or Resistance fighters according to who it is who happens to have the upper hand.

Throughout the movie, various men engage in homosexual flirtations toward Albert. I don’t believe that Albert is a closeted or latent homosexual. The sexual flirtation is a metaphor for a different kind of flirtation: I know what you’re really up to, but I’m going to let you get away with it because I can capitalize on it. The dance of sex is a dance of social advancement, or, in some cases, of social rebellion. Put your wedding dress back on, Albert tells his bride after they have consummated their marriage. Albert, the fraud, wants to recover the idea of purity, of transparency. His bride, who really is pure, is attracted to his deceptiveness. She won’t be the last to regard him in this way. Albert is a self-made “hero,” and a discreet one; and it is a discreet society that quietly calculates whether such a fraud as Albert can be allowed to pass for a hero.

Another good result

… in World Cup qualification, against Bolivia. The match transpired as I expected it would, with defensive errors, wasted shots, and Ecuador’s eventual victory. The final score was 3 to 2. We briefly leaped into second place among South Americans. It was mathematically impossible for us to remain there, however, and Argentina overtook us by drawing against Paraguay, in lackluster fashion.

Tomorrow, Colombia or Uruguay can knock us down into fourth place, but not if they also draw. The Colombians will play against us on Tuesday.

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November’s novel by C.P. Snow is The New Men, in which scientists jockey for the privilege of building the atomic bomb. They all consider that it’d be better for the world if the bomb weren’t built – but as long as Nazi and U.S. scientists are trying to build it, British scientists may as well try, too. And thus is lit the fuse of personal ambition.

The old Penguin covers are interesting.

Straight-up Communist

As always, to magnify an image, click on it.

What I’m sharing is a screenshot of one of my friends’ Facebook posts. According to my friend, not only are many of the recent quarantining measures “in direct opposition to our constitution,” they’re “straight up Communist.”

By embracing these measures, U.S. citizens “have changed their views on ‘freedom’.”

Instead, they should be holding leaders “accountable.”

Well, I want to know:

Which measures are the unconstitutional ones?

What about them is unconstitutional?

What about them is “straight-up Communist?”

What kind of holding accountable is being urged? Are leaders to be voted out? Are they to be impeached? Are their laws to be disobeyed?

My friend doesn’t say.

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This is hardly the most inflammatory post I’ve seen about the quarantining measures.

Yesterday, another friend, a sweet woman from my church, shared a photo of a Nazi putting a noose around a teenaged resistance fighter.

Socialism! was her accusation.

We need to pay attention to history!

But the history is that courts in the USA have given the federal government and, especially, the state governments extensive leeway to quarantine.

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Reading the two posts between their lines, I think that what’s being advocated is civil disobedience. (It’s a member of the resistance who’s being portrayed as a hero.)

This is a grave position for my friends to take, and not only because civil disobedience, by its nature, tends to weaken the rule of law. It’s especially grave in this context because disobeying the law is likely to result in many more deaths.

Interestingly, my first friend grants this point, saying, “Our opinions about whether or not the current measures are necessary are ultimately irrelevant.”

This position implies that certain freedoms (of commerce? of movement?) are more important than the preservation of many lives.

I wonder if my friend has thought this through.

He has six children. If he considered the measures necessary for preserving lives, would he grant his children the freedom to flout them?

I doubt it.

If his children were adults, would he want them to have the freedom to act so as to disregard the preservation of lives?

If he says he would, he’s more radical than the people who oppose seatbelt laws. The brunt of the harm that results from the choice not to wear a seatbelt is borne by the person who makes that choice. This is much less likely to be true of the person who chooses not to take precautions against COVID-19.

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As it happens, my friend doesn’t believe that the measures are necessary for preserving lives. He doesn’t believe that COVID-19 is especially dangerous. In other posts, he says that COVID-19 probably is much more widespread than the official story claims. He even believes that his whole family had COVID-19 in December, in South Carolina. (I think this is ludicrous.)

But if his disbelief in the measures’ necessity is what’s influencing him to reject the measures, then either (a) he’s confused – that is, he misspeaks when he says that whether the measures are necessary is irrelevant – or (b) he’s arguing in bad faith: he says that the question is irrelevant though he knows that it’s relevant to him.

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Relatedly, I wonder: when my friend says that the measures are “straight-up Communist,” is he confused, or is he arguing (or asserting) in bad faith, using an inflammatory label just for its rhetorical effect?

And if he’s confused, is his shoddy understanding of Communism indicative of willful neglect? Does it suggest that his general argumentative tendencies are characterized by bad faith?

On prefaces in history books

The most irritating part of a history book, I find, is its preface, in which the historian tries to justify his enlarging of the literature. Not that it isn’t fitting that he should give a justification – or, at least, an apology. On “big” topics, the literature is vast enough already; on “little” ones, it’s questionable why there should even be a literature (I mean, one financed by something other than the market. The authors whose books are bought for pleasure tend not to apologize in the way that I am about to describe). Again, typically, a justification or apology is in order. What’s irritating is how formulaic it usually is. “This book fills an important gap left by predecessors X, Y, and Z.” Then follow perfunctory, yet overblown, praises for X, Y, and Z, coupled with decrials of the inadequacy of X, Y, and Z. The most skillful writers make these decrials seem not terribly shrill. Yet this does not redeem the practice. If only one or two authors had ever followed this pattern, it might not have become so awful, but the fact that it is done consistently casts doubt on all who do it. It’s like crying wolf. So many plainly unnecessary decrials exist that I’ve stopped taking each new one seriously, no matter how urgently some gap might need to be filled, no matter if a wolf is present or not. The worst decrials are slander and false advertising; the best decrials are indistinguishable from the untrue ones.

Such are the feelings stirred up in me by pp. xv–xxxiv of Richard J. Evans’s The Coming of the Third Reich, the first installment in his gigantic trilogy about the Nazis. (Yes, I know that William Shirer’s lively classic has its shortcomings. That’s why I’m reading your book, Prof. Evans – that reason, and your book’s bright orange Penguin spine, and your reputation as an authority on why the discipline of history is worthwhile.)

Here, then, are two other prefaces that memorably fit the fatal pattern – in my opinion, more ingeniously than Evans’s does.

I do not apologize for producing a life of a king – and a life cast in traditional form – at a time when academic historians are rightly much concerned with exploiting the techniques of socio-economic analysis and the like. [That’s precious: And the like.] Biographies of monarchs still have their place, as well as their limitations. Nor do I apologize for producing a biography of seemingly so well-known a figure as Henry VIII. It is now sixty-five years since A.F. Pollard’s celebrated life of the king appeared; and none of the surprisingly few subsequent biographies has gone significantly beyond the limits of that pioneer work. In the meantime, a great deal has been written about the reign, not least by Pollard himself, which throws new light on the king.
[J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII]

This book began as my attempt to update The Indiana Way, a book I published in 1986. But simply updating that book proved unwise. Only remnants of it appear here. This is a new book, with a new title, because Indiana has changed. So has the knowledge of our past. New scholarship in the last three decades has given us a better understanding.
[James H. Madison, Hoosiers: A New History of Indiana]

It is clever to seemingly give an apology without in fact apologizing; it is perhaps cleverer to seemingly withhold an apology while apologizing, as Scarisbrick does. And Madison apologizes only for bettering himself.

Fraktur

I thought I’d return to the theme of Nazism. This is from Alexander Lawson, Anatomy of a Typeface:

The classifiers of type place all informal gothics under the French heading lettre bâtarde. … A. F. Johnson, the English expert on early types, prefers simply to use the term bastard, although the Latinized bastarda is more generally employed by historians. … 

By 1490 bâtardes were in wide use in Germany, where the name applied to them, apparently arbitrarily, was Schwabacher (there is no evident reason why the Bavarian town Schwabach was thus memorialized, as there was no typefounding or even printing at that location). 

Until the middle of the sixteenth century the Schwabacher style was what was most used for German-language printing; it was saliently used at Basel in Switzerland, then a center of scholarly printing. The next important bâtarde to be developed in Germany was the Fraktur design, which for the following four centuries served as the German national type. 

Fraktur is a more condensed letter than the Schwabacher, and varies from the earlier type in being more pointed, with sharply tapered ascenders; printers naturally had a fondness for this narrower form, which made the type more economical in book work. The design of Fraktur is credited to the Nuremberg calligrapher Johann Neudörferr, and at the request of Emperor Maximilian it was cut in metal for type in 1513. Within the next decade a number of other Frakturs were produced, and by the 1540s it was beginning to replace Schwabacher as the preferred letter for German printing. … 

In the long run it was the classical influence of the Renaissance that spelled the end of the prevalence that the gothic hands had maintained in northern Europe since the twelfth century. Only in Germany did it remain a convention, where it survived as a text type even into the twentieth century. Elsewhere, by the close of the eighteenth century black letter was being used primarily for headings and for specialized liturgical printing. In every other instance the roman letter forms had taken over the world of printing. 

Even in Germany, where Fraktur was the national type, the black letter has had a curious history. During the middle years of the nineteenth century, a great period of European nationalism, the use of Fraktur was inevitably strengthened — sufficiently, in fact, to offset the modernizing influence of the Industrial Revolution, particularly through the dominance of German technical and scientific literature. With the growth of international advertising in the early years of the present century, the use of roman type in Germany increased, but even as late as 1930 almost sixty percent of the new books being published were still composed in the German black letter (also called Deutsche Schriften), and almost every newspaper stayed with the Fraktur. 

When Adolf Hitler came to power, his National Socialist Party decreed that the Fraktur be considered the only appropriate form for the German language. This resulted in a wider use of Fraktur in the twentieth century than in earlier times. In 1940, however, it was officially determined that Fraktur interfered with the German plan of world domination, since outside Germany the roman forms prevailed. Thus, the Nazis then issued a proclamation that roman would henceforth be the German standard type, the explanation given being that Fraktur was a ‘Schwabacher-Jewish type.’ 

In postwar Germany roman has become the standard type, although with some difficulty, as the schoolbooks through which all adults had learned their alphabet were composed in black letter. But there is little likelihood that Fraktur will ever again be the national type; now less than one percent of German books appear in that hand. As a display letter, however, the face has been revived.

Anglophilia

By now you should be tired of reading, every fall and spring, how the misty weather makes me anglophilic — how, suddenly, I want to think about punting on rivers, eating suet, having séances in gloomy houses. (I want to think about these things, not do them.) … Dystopias even seem agreeable. Right now I’m reading The Children of Men and envying the protagonists. Yes: hoodlums roam the countryside; but it’s jolly to be reminded of A Clockwork Orange. Yes: the government is ruthless; and so conspirators must plot in beautiful old churches, or in gardens, or museums. … What the survivalists hoard is wine. Where they live is Oxford. … Had C.S. Lewis remained in Ulster, would we have liked him just as well? Would we have been as interested in his life and writings? … What accounts for the forcefulness of anglophilia? … Even the Nazis, deep down, harbored affection for the English. Which was why they lost.