In Which We Strive To Be Outside The Thing That Thinks

The Culture Wars In Reverse

by DICK CHENEY

The 1960s and 1970s were a garbage time and place to be a part of. You had to choose a side in this war of bad color schemes, scarves worn in exactly the wrong places, and the all-encompassing scent of B.O. On one side stood an ungrateful bunch of wretches who had not really done any work, but listed the things they expected their country to provide for them. On the other side were a bunch of sexist racists who inhabited the power structure and were like, "What was really wrong with how things were when women and blacks were casualties of a quintessential maleless that was everpresent, like the wind?" 

Well, now that power structure has been dismantled. The most important person in our foreign policy has largely been a woman for seventy percent of the last two decades, and for eight years we have enjoyed the gentlemanly, paranoid camaraderie of an African-American policy wonk in the Oval Office. Nobody in their right mind would say that the last eight years were a nightmare; neither did they represent a renaissance. We stood pat. Unfortunately our hand was not all that great.

Now one maniac has a basic platform. Let's go back to how things were, let's make America gr8 again. The WGN series Outsiders concerns the white people who settled on a mountain in Kentucky more than a century ago, and a corporation which wants to remove them from their home. They know exactly what Mr. Trump is talking about.

All property is rightfully possessed by those with the will to defend it. None of the police officers in Blackburg, Kentucky want to go up to that mountain and lead an eviction of these primitive folks who call themselves the Farrells. This crazy inbred tribe brew moonshine; it is not entirely clear how they supply themselves with food. They are led by a man named Foster (David Morse) and his mother Ray (Phyllis Somerville), who looks like a granola bar.

At times Hillary Clinton lapses into a disturbing Southern accent. She cannot help being something of a fake, of being the sort of person who tells everyone she meets exactly what they want to hear, because this is the primary tact of her two main competitors in obtaining the presidency. Say what you want about Mr. Obama, but he always said what he thought he could get away with, and if you didn't like it, he did not really care.

That is two types of people. Whites are becoming a majority; white males even more so. America's population is becoming urbanized and weak, feeble like the sheriff in Blacksburg, an Oxycontin addict played by the marvelous New Zealand actor Thomas M. Wright. A man is not a man, now. Donald Trump is not even a man. Look at photographs of him when he was younger: he looks like Patrick Bateman crossed with William F. Buckley wearing a condom on his head.

Ronald Reagan was not exactly a man's man either. You have to go back a long way to find someone who was a man's man in the Oval Office. I used to think Donald Rumsfeld had balls, but then he focused his energies on making a card game app, and I started writing for This Recording because I wanted to seem cool and because I had a lot of jokes about Matthew Fox that I felt needed telling. When I looked down in the shower on Friday I couldn't see either a penis or balls. I was bare as a mannikin down there. 

Thomas Wright's police offer becomes the sheriff under unusual circumstances. The previous sheriff took him on the Farrells' mountain. His foot became caught in a bear trap, and he fell, where another trap snapped his head off. Outsiders showed this unlikely death, and since I am not a real man, I almost cried. 

Even the men on Outsiders, grizzled as they are, spend the vast majority of their time worried about what women think of their actions and behavior. It is less of a patriarchal society on Hick Mountain than you could expect. A ruling council is led and filled by women, though the men do not always obey. Outsiders is the best thing WGN has ever brought to air, but it may hit a bit too close to home.

I watched a movie the other day that I hoped would place some gristle in my private parts. It is called The Survivalist. It is about a man's man (Martin McCann) who lives on a little farm long after people have run out of oil and other fossil fuels which sustain our current way of life. He is doing fine by himself living in the cutest cabin until two women saunter into his garden. Naturally, the women are his complete undoing. The younger one (Mia Goth) has no eyebrows and offers to have sex with him for food. 

He accepts naturally, and he becomes incredibly soft. He only has eyes for Mia Goth. He is perhaps unaware of all the filthy things Shia LaBoeuf did to her in the context of what Shia calls a romantic relationship. Not even Shia LaBoeuf is a real man, for a real man only knows what a mirror is when he hears other people talking about it or when he uses the bathroom at the mall.

As you can see this essai has gotten away from me. When I began it, my goal was to prove that this was the culture wars in reverse: an aggrieved white minority wants to return to an idyllic past while a multicultural majority wants to suppress what they believe are disturbed values.

But as I was proving this by reviewing a TV show that airs on WGN and movie that went straight to OnDemand, I realized that in order for a culture war to exist, there actually has to be a culture. There is nothing Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton can actually do to change America in any discernible way. The only way they can alter the nation is by saying things that make people angry. Then perhaps those individuals will go and do things to alter the flow of events. 

The last important decision made by a president was made by a real man, Lyndon Johnson. It was the wrong decision, and we kept fighting the war in Vietnam. I say 'we', of course I had no desire to get anywhere near this shitshow. A president is not going to do anything, and anybody that tells you differently just doesn't understand the world. 

More importance is attached to that thing in our brain which thinks. That is what we are, and to make a culture, a bunch of people have to think a lot of different things. Someone asked me the other day who I thought the most important man in America was. It was a good question, possibly a query without a real answer. But then it came to me: there are no men left except for Robin Thicke, so I guess the answer is, him by default?

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

"Millionaire" - Thao Nguyen & the Get Down Stay Down (mp3)

In Which We Imitate Our Loves

Nearer Everything

by ALEX CARNEVALE

What the American male really wants is two things: he wants to be blown by a stranger while reading a newspaper, he wants to be fucked by his buddy when he's drunk. Everything else is society.

Wystan Hugh Auden arrived in New York City in January of 1939. His friends in New York shared the attitude of his friends in England: they were as unhappy to see him arrive as the English were to see him leave. "Just a note to ask you not to bring Auden and Isherwood to see me," wrote Louise Bogan to Edmund Wilson. "I can't say I want to spend an evening being examined by two visiting Englishmen as a queer specimen."

Impressions of Auden and his friends Christopher Isherwood did not noticeably improve by the spring. "He's pretty eccentric and does strange things like picking his nose and eating what he finds," observed Paul Bowles.

with his one time sexual partner and friend Isherwood

Auden was unsurprised at the vastness of American wealth. That he was used to. It was this country's waste that deeply bothered and disturbed him. "The great vice of Americans is not materialism," he wrote, "but a lack of respect for matter."

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In between trying to get New York's monied elite to give him and Isherwood money of their own volition, Auden reviewed only the books he liked. (He had no stomach for rendering negative notices.) Despite his relative poverty - he and Isherwood shared a shabby Yorkville apartment - he prioritized taking Benzedrine in the mornings and Seconal at night. The upper intiated his writing for the day, and the downer allowed him to sleep after all that had happened.

When he finally quit amphetamines twenty years later, his social charm - what was left of it - disappeared as well.

Wystan and Chester

At the beginning of April, Auden met Chester Kallman at a poetry reading he was giving in Brooklyn. A few weeks later he wrote his brother John

Just a line to tell you that it's really happened at last after all these years. Mr Right has come into my life. He is a Roumanian-Latvian-American Jew called Chester Kallman, eighteen, extremely intelligent and I think, about to become a good poet. His father who knows all and approves is a communist dentist who would be rich if he didn't have to pay two sets of alimony. This time, my dear, I really believe it's marriage.

After the two had sex for the first time, Auden gifted his new partner a volume of William Blake.

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Auden's focus on Kallman arose out of his own loneliness in his new country. The next year he would be able to summarize his plight better: "The person you really need will arrive at the proper moment to save you."

The couple was temporarily separated while Auden taught for a short time at St. Mark's School in Massachusetts. He disliked the buttoned-up place as soon as he arrived, finding the faculty and administration closed-minded and anti-Semitic. When he returned to Kallman, the two planned a bus trip to New Orleans. The entire way down Chester attempted to seduce every hot young thing he came across. Auden called it their honeymoon.

The book he came back to again and again during this time was Pascal's Pensées.

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The pair moved on. About 130 miles north of Albuquerque, Taos represented the home of D.H. Lawrence's widow Frieda. They did not care for these new surroundings either, with Auden quipping that "it's curious how beautiful scenery tends to attract the second rate." The diverse community of writers in the area only emphasized how much it would never be as engaging as New York.

Auden refused to shower during this period: he would only bathe himself in a proper bathtub. (As Stravinsky would put it, "He is the dirtiest man I have ever liked.") They were driven out of New Mexico, to the Grand Canyon. Auden concluded he could only stay for a moment or forever. With the kind of bizarre sincerity he became known for, he wrote that "the Boulder Dam gives one hope for the human race."

God returned to Auden's life around the time that Hitler entered it. In response, he began reading Kierkegard almost exclusively. Publicly he remained quiet about the war, admitted later that "All that could be said, had been said. There was no point in my saying it again, a little more hysterically." He registered for the draft, applied for U.S. citizenship and moved to Brooklyn.

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Chester Kallman could always bring out Wystan's jealous side. It was not a great look for the older man. The lack of sexual chemistry between the two became a sticking point; Kallman wanted to fuck and be fucked as intensely as possible, and Auden could not begin to service his needs. "I don't think," Auden once said, "Browning was very good in bed."

It was equally destructive that Kallman seemed to delight in the jealousy his behavior inspired. This drove them apart for a time. Whenever Kallman quoted Hart Crane, Auden reacted like he had been slapped in the face. Auden took a teaching position at a small college in Michigan and then in Ann Arbor.

from a course on romanticism he taught at Swarthmore

After a miserable time at the puritanical Swarthmore, Auden returned briefly to Europe for the first time in six years in spring of 1945. Upon setting foot on English soil, he said, "My dear, I'm the first major poet to fly the Atlantic." He visited Italy and Germany, finding them both inadequate in different ways. He now felt the only place he could learn to improve as an artist was New York City.

He returned there later that year, moving into a studio apartment in Greenwich Village. This constituted his first time ever living alone, and there was never a moment when the place was anything but an absolute mess. There he composed his new book.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about Jack Reacher.

"It Comes And Goes" - Dido (mp3)

"The Day Before The Day" - Dido (mp3)

 

In Which We Are Unjustly Imprisoned

with his students in Germany

American Vacation

by JACQUE DE VRIES

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wanted to go to India. But he could not afford it, so he went to America instead.

When he first stepped foot in lower Manhattan, he was cowed by the size of the buildings. The year was 1930, and the Empire State Building was only just being built. I do not myself believe in the existence of an all-knowing being, but sometimes I feel I understand those who do better than those who don't.

Most troubling to Bonhoeffer about this country was its lack of freedom. Instead of being prohibited from drinking large beverages in restaurants, Bonhoeffer could not consume alcohol while in this country. He wrote to his Jewish friend that "Unfortunately I cannot even drink your health in a glass of wine, which is forbidden by law. This prohibition which nobody believes is a dreadful absurdity." Back home, the Nazi party consolidated its election gains.

at the Union Theological Seminary

Many churches in New York desired his presence, but he expended the majority of his efforts in Harlem. He first surveyed the densely populated region from an airplane. He led groups of black women in Bible classes; his evenings were completely filled, and he never neglected his sight-seeing.

He did not want to stay in America, refusing a Harvard appointment at the age of 25, because of the legacy of slavery. He celebrated his birthday in the company of the New York Jews that housed him.

After he was arrested for trying to overthrow the Nazis, his first months in jail were full of hope that the plan would come to fruition. The letters he wrote and received in prison never despair. He was married shortly before his arrest, to this eighteen year old:

He was executed three weeks before Hitler's suicide effectively ended the war.

Bonhoeffer was surprised by the communal freedoms Americans took entirely for granted, what he called "social courage." In the academic life of his native Germany, it was verboten to each approach a professor outside of class if, for example, you saw him limping across campus. He was both envious and disdainful of his American peers in the Union Theological Seminary. He considered some of the students he met too jaded, others he found hopelessly innocent, and the qualities shifted even between individuals. He quantified it as a kind of naive pessimism.

The outreach programs of the churches he visited, and the social life that surrounded them seemed to replace the idea of a dedicated Christianity. The distinction, which Bonhoeffer eventually grasped, is completely misunderstood by many secular people. The foreign attitudes displayed in Bonhoeffer's appraisal of American literature were also confusing at first. The mixture of hard-won cynicism without a corresponding knowledge of the world baffled Bonhoeffer.

He had barely concerned himself with novels before now, and the ones he read, often autobiographical accounts by black writers, stoked a certain interest. He wrote his grandmother to say that the novel "always awakens in one the wish to get to know the man himself."

in prison

Before his execution, Bonhoeffer was moved to Buchenwald. On the truck the prisoners were enclosed in darkness. He shared his cigarettes with the other prisoners; he only liked to smoke every so often and had more than enough to satisfy that particular urge. He had been learning Russian in his last camp.

Even when I read de Tocqueville I feel first and foremost how easy it is to misunderstand America. With Bonhoeffer, there is nothing he says of this place that is not still true, and yet there are so many sins of omission it is difficult to decide where to start. It would take more than one lifetime, and he did not even have the one he was given.

in Kieckow, 1940

The day of his death he did not want to hold a service demanded by the guards. He feared offending the other prisoners, many of whom were Catholics or not Christians at all. He was forced to do so anyway. His parents were the last to know he had been murdered.

His last act in America was to drive south with his friend Jean Lasserre. They travelled to the Mexican border in a decrepit Oldsmobile and entered the country by train. They made it all the way to Mexico City and then had to talk their way past the border on the return trip. If he had never left America. If he had never left Mexico. If he had never left Germany. These are just three of the infinite number of ways he might still be alive.

Jacque de Vries is a contributor to This Recording. This is his first appearance in these pages. He is a writer living in Chicago. 

"I Love The Rights" - Silver Jews (mp3)

"The War In Apartment 1812" - Silver Jews (mp3)

intercession list, july 1939