Category Archives: Nihilism

Irish Catholic readers should be able to wallow in a bit of nostalgia! On Wednesday of last week I happened upon The Dick Powell Theatre on satellite movie channel Talking Pictures TV (TPTV). It was an innovative TV drama show in its day (early 1960s) a TV series of one-off dramas.

This particular episode didnt date that well it was melodramatic, with awkward close-ups and music that unsubtly telegraphed meaning.

For its time it was probably edgy, with a storyline that featured adultery prominently but this was a moral universe, with none of todays relativism or even nihilism.

The main characters adultery had him seriously conflicted and was seen as demeaning and objectionable with several characters trying to persuade him to give it up. A journalist character was entirely upstanding and studiously professional.

By contrast the moral climate of new drama series Dublin Murders is more muddled. It started last week Monday and Tuesday on BBC1, Wednesday on RT1. I just cant warm to it with its bunch of characters that run the short gamut from unlikeable to obnoxious, along with the most gratuitous foul language Ive heard for years in a mainstream drama series the worst offender was a senior Garda character.

Theres a very dark plot about the murder of children (the camera lingers way too long on the corpse of a murdered child) and a peculiarly voluminous amount of cigarette smoking.

I found the script rather stilted and the acting often stiff, while my distaste was heightened by the dubious use of child actors in such unsavoury material, an all too common practice.

Religion didnt figure much in the first two episodes, though there were lots of statues and holy pictures in a home where child abuse is hinted at. Hmm

Back in the muddled real world, after the excesses of the extinction rebellion protests, last Thursdays Drivetime (RT Radio 1) reported that Dublin City Chief Executive Owen Keegan was annoyed that the climate protestors had been allowed to camp overnight in Merrion Square at the height of the protests. No one else is permitted to do this (though the homeless might have a more urgent claim on the facility) and it is against the relevant bye-laws.

I thought Keegan was being professional, supporting the rule of law and the neutrality of state bodies but Paul McAuliffe, Lord Mayor of Dublin, thought that climate change was such an important and unique issue that it was acceptable.

Ironically this is the same geographical area where other arms of Government and other lawmakers want to bring in exclusion zones and rule out lawful and peaceful pro-life protests at Holles Street. Inconveniently (for the Government) Garda Commissioner Drew Harris was reported recently on RT News as saying that such exclusion zones were not necessary and that existing powers were adequate.

Owen Keegans approach could well be copied by other officials and bodies funded by the State, and by journalists, but this kind of professionalism is unfortunately declining, e.g. as current affairs presenters show their political and ideological biases.

Lines are crossed in divisive ways, and my compliments for Commissioner Harris do not extend to Garda cars covered in rainbow colours and Garda stations raising rainbow flags as happened recently in Kerry raised higher than the national flag in contravention of respect-for-flag protocol.

Media-related examples abound one of the latest happened on Newstalks Breakfast show last Saturday when Susan Keogh was reporting on what Bishop Alphonsus Cullinane said about yoga in Catholic schools. Instead of just reporting it in her newspaper round-up, as she did with all the other stories, she editorialised with a few rather dismissive comments, among which: maybe we should let schools teach children what they want to teach children maybe we should let the medical profession decide how young people should be kept safe [no mention of parents] and maybe bishops and priests should do what they know what to do [sic] but maybe thats too much common sense.

Finally, lest I end on a complaint, I must say I enjoyed Andrea Corrs interview on The Late Late Show last Friday. She didnt get to talk about her religious faith (outlined in last weeks cover story) but did speak about her faith in humanity, how blessed she was with children despite several miscarriages and was particularly moving when speaking about when her parents passed away.

Live Pope Francis celebrates Mass to conclude the Synod of Bishops, which discussed the Amazons religious and ecological pathways.

Singers Jordan Mogey and Andy Calderwood explore the life-changing power of music and faith.

David Kerr talks with students from St Ninians High School near Glasgow about commitment to spreading the Gospel of Life.

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A throwback to times before relativism - The Irish Catholic

With their lank hair, in their dank sharehouses, wearing a bong-water scented flannel shirt, listening to woozy opening chords of some Nirvana song, there is an image of Gen X fossilised in amber.

But of course its not like that any more. Gen X, which includes former and current prime ministers Boris Johnson, David Cameron and Scott Morrison, have flown under the radar as millennials and boomers engage in decades of tedious generational warfare.

This invisibility has so far meant that blame for the climate emergency has not been directed at Xers. But that is changing. Gen X is in power and it is obvious that this cohort has squandered 30 years where they could have taken action at a structural and personal level.

The question is why?

Part of it is the underlying DNA of a generation that came of age in a time of high irony and profound nihilism, and partly it is because of good old-fashioned self-interest. Just like boomers, it turns out that Gen X also wants all the things.

Its not that Gen X didnt take the streets and protest its just that when they did, the protests were either cannibalised or cauterised.

Anti-globalisation protests raged throughout the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, bringing attention to global human rights issues and systems that needed structural reform. But these protests were interrupted by 9/11, the so-called war on terror, and never really got back on track.

And in more subtle ways, the protests and Gen X culture were cannibalised by the market. Brands started interacting with the counterculture sponsoring music festivals and working with street artists, Nike marketed environmentally friendly shoes and CK One with its low-key packaging and downbeat models was the choice of fragrance for the No Logo generation.

Then there was Iraq.

When millions took to the streets around the world, something curious and unsettling happened leaders discovered they could dismiss the protesters without any significant electoral blowback.

As hundreds of thousands of people gathered in central Sydney in 2003 to protest Australias involvement in the Iraq war, the Greens senator Bob Brown told the Sydney Morning Herald: This is going to send a message to our Prime Minister (John Howard) that he cannot ignore.

But he like governments around the world did ignore it, saying at the time: I dont know that you can measure public opinion just by the number of people that turn up at demonstrations.

He was re-elected for a fourth term in 2004.

It would be 16 years until the climate strikes led by Gen Z eclipsed the number of people marching against the Iraq war, an indicator that a generation that should have maintained their rage had lost its steam, or perhaps had just lost heart.

Published in 1996, the ultimate Gen X novel was Alex Garlands The Beach. There was something allegorical in the story, like a 1990s Lord of the Flies. In it, a British backpacker in south-east Asia tries to find somewhere unspoilt, not tainted by that ultimate boomer invention: The Lonely Planet Guide.

Of course what happens is when he does find a hidden tropical paradise, it is inevitably spoilt by selfish humans.

In a way, that is what Gen X did to the world taking pride in exploring and being an independent traveller rather than a tourist but in the end, wrecking what they loved.

The decade following the publication of The Beach would see an explosion of cheap travel that Gen Xers quickly took up without question.

Ryanairs profits over this time tell the story: rising from 231m in 1998 to 1.8bn in 2003 and to 3bn in 2010.

Gen Xers became and remained addicted to cheap travel even when we were made aware of the damage that emissions from flights did to the environment. Personal escapism remains more highly prized than collective responsibility. Alex Garland summed up the mindset in The Beach: Escape through travel works.

Travel around the outer edge of any city to the newer estates and youll see housing that is in a way representative of the mess we have found ourselves in.

These houses are built right up to the hilt of the block, with no trees, little green space or shade and sometimes overlapping gutters with their neighbours. They rely on air conditioning rather than smart design to keep cool. In the quest for ownership, personal space and comfort (all individual quests) Gen X have continued an ignoble boomer tradition of squandering an opportunity not only to make housing more equitable and affordable for all but to embrace building sustainability in a way that lessens the contribution to climate change and ameliorates some of its effects.

Rob Sindel, the managing director of construction materials provider CSR, told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2018 he estimates most of Australias 9m homes would have just an environmental one-star rating.

Gen X cant claim ignorance on environmental destruction we grew up worried about CFCs and the hole in the ozone layer. The climate emergency has been a long time coming, yet rather than act in our younger years to reform systems that cause the problems we have followed the baby boomers into an unsustainable way of life that prioritises personal comfort and personal wealth creation (often through the acquisition of private property) over the collective good and the health of the planet.

Gen X fell asleep at the wheel during the last decade or so when structural change could and should have happened, in part because of the surge in distraction. The internet became mainstream in the 1990s and smartphones and social media in the mid-2000s. Like everyone, Gen X lost their shit. After all this is the generation that still had a lived experience of using telephone boxes.

The focus and drive that is needed to fight for and implement major structural reforms to prevent a climate emergency were dulled through weapons of mass distraction and box sets followed by streaming culture.

But then again, Gen Xers martyred saint, Kurt Cobain, gloomily predicted this for our generation Here we are now entertain us.

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Boris Johnson, Scott Morrison: are the Generation X leaders stuffing this up? - The Guardian

Are you missing out on the hard hitting, nihilstic action of Attack On Titan? Are all your friends talking about the wildly popular anime franchise but you haven't caught up on the adventures of Eren Jaeger and the rest of the members of the Survey Corps? One Titan fan has you covered as they give an insanely well detailed synopsis of all the events that have taken place during the franchise, in both the past and the present, filling you in on the events that have happened before Attack On Titan takes its final bow before ending its run in both the manga and the anime.

Reddit User H-K_47 created an intricate Attack On Titan synopsis that breaks down the entire time line of the franchise, following the events of the story long before the arrival of Eren and the story beats that took place during the numerous installments of the series afterward:

Attack On Titan is ramping toward its conclusion in both the manga and the anime, with the latter taking place later next year with the fourth and final season of the series. In the manga, the war between Marley and Eldia rages on with Eren and his brother Zeke using their Titan abilities to travel into the past and actually make their presence known with the residents they come into contact with, including Eren's father Grisha and the first Titan, Ymir. If nothing else, the final installments of Attack On Titan will continue to hold the same level of horror and nihilism that has been seen throughout the series.

With Eren Jaeger taking a much darker path as the series continues, it will be very interesting to see if we get a happy ending for Attack On Titan or if the ending of the series will be just as dour as its entirety up to this point.

What has been your favorite moment in the Attack On Titan franchise? What are you hoping to see before the series finally calls it quits? Feel free to let us know in the comments or hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics, anime, and all things Titans!

Attack on Titan was originally created by Hajime Isayama for Kodansha's Bessatsu Shonen Magazine in 2009. It's set in a world where the last remnants of humanity live within a walled city in order to escape the danger of the Titans, a race of giants monsters that eats humans. The lead character, Eren Yeager, ends up joining the military with his two childhood friends Mikasa and Armin after the Titans break through the wall and attack his hometown. Now Eren, Mikasa, and Armin must survive in a world where they not only have the Titans to fear, but the very humans they are trying to save. You can currently find the series streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.

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Attack On Titan Fan Just Made the Series Simple with One Handy Summary - Comicbook.com

Whats the equivalent now of impending nuclear war? Whats creating the big cultural anxiety? For me, its the anxiety of a reckoning, Lindelof said in an interview with The New York Times. The identification of white supremacy as a bad guy in a superhero comic book that could not be defeatedthe Klan wears masks, but why are its members never the villains in a superhero story? Those ideas felt like natural fits for Watchmen. Moores opus was about the extent to which people place their trust in costumed avengers and asked the age-old question of who watches the watchmen. Lindelofs Watchmen takes the comics most potent symbolthe maskand shows how it can protect not only superheroes, but also the flawed institutions Americans rely on.

The show begins with a depiction of the Tulsa, Oklahoma, massacre of 1921, in which a white mob ransacked and destroyed the vibrant Black Wall Street neighborhood of Greenwood, dropping firebombs from planes and murdering hundreds. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about Tulsa in his Atlantic piece The Case for Reparations, which Lindelof said served as an inspiration for the show. As the horror of Tulsa rages on-screen, men in Klan outfits parade around shooting at peoplea chilling, if detached, vision of supervillainy.

In delving into Americas real history of racist violence, HBOs Watchmen initially seems a far cry from Moores original work. The latter is steeped in its alternative reality, which unfolds through the personal recollections of its core cast of superheroesRorschach, Doctor Manhattan, Nite Owl, Silk Spectre, Ozymandias, and the Comedian. But the first scenes of Watchmen do slyly mix historical fact with comic-book lore, as ScreenCrushs Matt Singer identified. In the Tulsa sequence, viewers see two black parents trying to save their child from danger, arranging to have him smuggled out of the city as it explodes around him. The scene is reminiscent of Supermans famous origin storyexcept the boy in Watchmen isnt eventually rescued by a kindly couple and must instead make it on his own.

Much like that sequence, Lindelofs show is a marriage of pulpy mythmaking and grim reality, telling a weighty story under the guise of mass-market entertainment. Thats long been Moores specialty: His Watchmen chronicled the seedy truths and vicious nihilism that often underlie superheroism, upending the cheerful idealism of old-fashioned comic books. The first issue features the creation of the Minutemen, a 1940s assemblage of costumed do-gooders formed as part of a publicity stunt. But their squeaky-clean, patriotic image is just a facade: After the group poses for press pictures, one of the members, the sardonic Comedian, attempts to rape another, the Silk Spectrea crime for which he goes unpunished.

Another attempt to create a team of heroes fails before it even begins: Years later, in 1966, the aged leader of the Minutemen, the polished Captain Metropolis, tries to start a new group called the Crimebusters. Metropolis, a throwback hero who wants to fight hippie-era social ills such as promiscuity, drugs, [and] campus subversion, makes a rah-rah pitch but is thwarted by the Comedian, who sets his presentation on fire. Whats going down in this world, you got no idea, the Comedian scoffs. It doesnt matter squat because inside 30 years the nukes are gonna be flying like maybugs. The crowd disperses, with a horrified Captain Metropolis shouting after them: Somebody has to do it, dont you see? Somebody has to save the world.

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The Brave New World of HBOs Watchmen - The Atlantic

PARIS The Foals keyboardist Edwin Congreave met Yannis Philippakis, his future frontman, at an ice cream shop in the English town of Oxford. Congreave had just been hired, while Philippakis was cheekily returning to a scene of a crime: Hed been fired a few weeks earlier for incinerating the shops mascot, a polystyrene toy cow, in a toaster oven, to impress a girl. Both also briefly matriculated at Oxford University. I dropped out because I was an idiot, Congreave said. But with Yannis, it was clear he was supposed to be a superstar of some sort.

Foals a brawny, dancey, heartfelt rock band came up in the late 2000s playing hometown house parties and South London squats built out of abandoned hostels. Chaos, said Philippakis, 33, gleaming-eyed when asked what he remembered from those days. And a kind of beautiful navet. And, like, I never felt tired. He smiled. There was one gig where a whole wall got demolished by fire extinguishers and everyone was on ketamine.

Philippakis recalled this, over many cigarettes and one sparkling water, on the roof of a Paris venue overlooking the Notre-Dame cathedral, a few hours before a recent Foals show. Last week, the band released the second half of a two-part album, Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost, that explores the apocalypse by way, abstractedly, of the climate crisis. The hedges are on fire in the country lanes, Philippakis broods over spare piano and synths on Im Done With the World (& Its Done With Me), and all I want to do is get out of the rain.

Its an earnest, audacious project. And its right on brand. In the decade-plus since they were playing druggie house parties, Foals have grown into a very specific modern-day anomaly. Theyre signed to Warner Bros. and Q Prime management, home to Metallica, Muse and Disturbed. Theyve also been nominated for Britains esteemed Mercury Prize three times. They are now one of a spare handful of contemporary, critically acclaimed and commercially viable rock acts.

They didnt always seem destined for wider audiences. For their 2008 debut, Antidotes, Philippakis said he wanted to make techno with guitars: I almost set out a manifesto. No chords, everything played staccato, really clean. The result was a wonderfully strange collection of stop-start bangers. Back then, he sang with the microphone facing stage right. Finally, a manager intervened: Youve got to start [expletive] facing the crowd.

But looking back now, the band always had ambitions. I was really worried that we were going to have a taste of it and it was going to be taken away, Philippakis said. Wed seen a lot of bands in the U.K. get pumped up by the NME and then implode.

By their second album two years later, Total Life Forever, theyd moved away from the obliqueness of their debut and smoothed out the staccato. Soon enough, Philippakis said, I felt like we couldnt be erased. Albums in 2013 and 2015 followed, before this years double release. Now theyre gunning for the top slot at the Glastonbury festival. (SkyBet has them as a 7/4 favorite, alongside Paul McCartney and Fleetwood Mac, to headline next year.)

Their live show is purposefully boozy and shambolic. Philippakis likes to clamber onto balconies and other high-rise structures, or to float his way to the bar and slug a shot. It needs to be almost shamanic, he said. The show is a chase: Were chasing that transcendent moment. Youre getting yourself to the edge of yourself and then, ideally, losing yourself.

The guitarist Jimmy Smith, 35, explained how they get there. Yannis drummed it into us from a really early stage: Play every show like its your last, he said.

There have been times, the 34-year-old drummer Jack Bevan said, that the show got so out of hand, he stopped playing altogether: I felt like, If I keep four to the floor, hes going to kill someone. Congreave, 35, said their frontman can even wander away from the song: Sometimes Yannis is doing a solo and hes kind of in another world. Hes playing cosmically. And hes playing the wrong notes.

In the last few years, Philippakiss climate-change anxiety has started to keep him up nights. Channeling that into the music, he explained, was about trying to engage beyond the immediate concerns of his romantic or filial relationships, the stuff that powered the previous albums.

Philippakis wrote the lyrics for these new albums in a furious month and a half, almost entirely in pubs. He wanted the lyrics to pour out of him. He hoped to archive, naturally, the insecurities and perils of what it feels like to be alive today.

Congreave, the bands in-house cynic, said hes glad Foals are talking about climate change but added, We should be running around screaming, not having conversations. Philippakis, though, said he tries to avoid nihilism and oh-dear-ism.: Im always looking to convert life into music. And its true; someone has to write the songs that people listen to while they feel bad that the world is falling apart.

Both the double album and the overtures to the climate crisis can also be seen another way: as a grander statement, a shot at a wider relevance. Peter Mensch, a co-founder of Q Prime, has worked with stadium rock bands since the 1970s, and is candid about the bands place in the firmament. Were standing on the SS Her Majestys Ship the Album and were bailing water as fast as we can! he shouted over the phone. And while he doesnt want Foals to change, he believes they can still access a bigger audience.

Theres a whole bunch of people who are obsessed by Foals, Mensch said, and theres a whole bunch of people who dont know who they are. He said hed love for Philippakis to write a hit. Chances are that it wont [happen], he added. But he wants the band to reach megastardom, And I will literally die trying.

The Paris show, an underplay to a 700-capacity room, was packed full of young people. Some were, consciously or otherwise, cosplaying as Philippakis, in loud, short-sleeved button-ups and thin gold chains. They shouted along with him and followed all his commands, including one to crouch down to the floor mid-breakdown on Inhaler, then pogo back up.

At the end of the set, Philippakis abandoned his guitar and waded into the crowd. With one hand he held his microphone; with the other he clasped hands with a fan. From between the crush of bodies it was hard to tell if it was for balance, or for that extra oomph of communion.

Link:

Foals Are Writing the Soundtrack to an Apocalypse - The New York Times

What does it mean to speak? To speak in a way that not only broaches the moral ambiguities of silence, but also probes the limits of speechs capacity to make sense of the world. William Kentridge, the Johannesburg artist and theatre director, addresses this question in a 2018 essay titled Let Us Try for Once. The text forms part of adispersed archive of writings (public lectures, essays, long-form interviews, feral notes) of equal import to his drawing, printmaking, sculpture, film and theatrical productions. Like many of his essays, this recent composition is digressive and fragmentary. Midway through, Kentridge pauses on two European cultural figures with dissimilar approaches to language: German dadaist Kurt Schwitters and Belarusian journalist and writer Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Since 2017, when he premiered the work at New Yorks Performa 17 biennial, Kentridge has been performing Schwitterss 1932 sound poem Ursonate: a sonata composed of grunts, pauses, gestures and sounds.1 Kentridge describes its incomprehensible locution Fmms b w t z Uu, for example as evidence of the activity of speaking.2 He contrasts this calibrated play with Alexievichs oral reportage in Zinky Boys (1991), a sensory collage of testimonies based on interviews with participants in the Soviet-Afghan war, a decade-long conflict shrouded by official silence. The young boy took a long time to die and, as he lay there, he said the words for everything his eyes came across, just like a child who is just learning to speak, Kentridge quotes. Sky. Mountain. Tree. Bird. Haversack.

Alexievichs book was published just as white-minority rule in South Africa was coming to an end violently in places but also, crucially, through dialogue and negotiation. (The country is still struggling to articulate apolitics of social reconciliation capable of replacing the racist language of apartheid.) Here we have language at its most basic, in extremis, trying to tie the word to the world, Kentridge observed of Alexievich.3 Somewhere between her unnamed soldier grasping at the radiance of things and Schwitterss meaningless sounds, he adds: We operate with how our language ties us to the world and enables us to make meaning both of the world and ourselves.4 For Kentridge, this is the enigmatic power of speech: its capacity to name phenomena and to ethically situate a speaker within a broader context. But speaking, for Kentridge, is not simply about exposition and articulacy; his vocalism also involves exploring the limits of speech and its ability to truly reveal, defuse or bear witness to history, particularly in South Africa. These limits mark the failure of reason as much as they do the breakdown oflanguage.

Fragmentation is central to Kentridges method. Let Us Try for Once borrows its scrappy form from Theodor Adornos classic Minima Moralia (1951), which Kentridge first encountered in the 1970s. The book provided a crucial insight: One can either take parts or already existing fragments or one can shatter what is there, what seems coherent, and rearrange them as Adorno does in that book, and see what they add up to, he told art historian Tamar Garb in a 2016 interview. This method, which Kentridge applies to his art as much as to his writing, is greatly at odds with his upbringing.

Born into a patrician family of Johannesburg lawyers in 1955, at school Kentridge was a member of the debate club. Rather than instil a sense of faith in his family legacy logical argument and rhetoric the experience seems to have inspired the opposite. Argument and logic became something on top of the world, hovering over its surface, rather than embedded in it, Kentridge explained during the first of his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 2012. I became an artist because Irealized I needed a field in which the construction of fictional authorities and imagined quotes would be a cause for celebration, rather than rustication and disgrace.

While studying politics and African studies at Wits University in the mid-1970s, Kentridge joined a Brechtian theatre group and became involved in trade-union politics. His early drawings, posters and theatre works are characterized by a youthful faith in didacticism and indictment; the productive possibilities in the breakdown of language only surface later. In 1986, Kentridge received a Young Artist Award from South Africas National Arts Festival, aprominent honour that included a request for a public lecture. The resulting essay, Art in a State of Grace, Art in a State of Hope, Art in a State of Siege, heralded the beginning of a prolific, if fragmented, writing practice.5

Kentridges ruminative writings provide insight into his cosmopolitan upbringing, Jewish heritage, early rendezvous with drawing, felicitous immersion in the cultural Marxism of 1970s Johannesburg, rejection of irony and urbanity and, not insignificantly, his status as a deserter of his class, to paraphrase Adorno. This corpus of prose, which looks out at the world as much as inwards at the artists own production, doesnt make Kentridges life entirely transparent, but it does thicken an appreciation of his high-modernist tendencies, his love for Russian constructivism and German expressionism, and his arts literary scaffold. That this writing has not received critical attention may owe partly to how Kentridge describes it: as words attaching themselves to his images like captions to photos, or as instruments to detect sonorities in his work.

It is always reflective, Kentridge told me during arecent visit to one of his studios. (He keeps two in the town of his birth.) It is kind of justifying the work after the event. When we met, he was in the process of orchestrating the layout of Why Should I Hesitate: Sculpture, the first museum exhibition devoted exclusively to his sculptural production. Curated by artist Karel Nel for Cape Towns Norval Foundation, the show coincides with Why Should I Hesitate: Putting Drawings to Work, a presentation of Kentridges drawings, prints and films across town at Zeitz MOCAA. Together, the two shows form the largest survey of his work to date.

The artist tells me that he maintains a clear division of labour between the me that writes in my notebook and the self that walks around the studio thinking: how can we continue? It is the latter action of circling in the studio, gathering energy and hovering at the edge of an idea that matters most to him, as he notes in his 2013 essay Thinking on Ones Feet. In his Norton lectures, Kentridge asserts his identity as an artist who believes in the primacy and the necessity for stupidity, particularly in the studio, adding that he is an imperfect critic, especially of his own work. But Kentridges writings are compelling precisely because they range beyond his own practice to offer acute indictments of colonial and apartheid injustice.

Art in a State of Grace was written during a period of intense civil strife and cultural isolation. Its elliptical style and cosmopolitan manners link Kentridge to South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer a close family friend whose husband, the art dealer Reinhold Cassirer, pushed the artist to return to drawing in the mid-1980s after aperiod of abandonment that included studying mime in Paris and working in commercial film. With its bathed and perfumed and depilated white ladies, Gordimers 1966 novella, The Late Bourgeois World, describes the social class and racial privilege that Kentridge relentlessly examined in his early drawings and animated films, such as Felix in Exile (1994), which chronicles the lives of capitalist Soho Eckstein and artist Felix Teitelbaum. Gauche in their critique and awkward in their embrace of colour, Kentridges neo-expressionist fables portray a societal structure that, as Gordimer writes in her searing 1983 essay Living in the Interregnum, is built to the specifications of white power and privilege.

Kentridges Art in a State of Grace vocalizes these themes, jumping with Gordimer-like ease and lyricism from refinement to revolution. He describes Vladimir Tatlins unrealized Monument to the Third International (191920) as one of the great images of hope under Bolshevik Communism, albeit one whose ideals were dashed by their betrayals under Stalinism. Betrayed idealism is a recurring theme throughout Kentridges work, most recently in The Head & the Load (2018), a musically ranging, visually layered and textually rich ensemble theatre piece that investigates colonial-era African aspiration against the backdrop of World War I. Some two million Africans served in the war, of whom 250,000 died of disease or were killed in action: a debt that is still under-acknowledged.6

Though Kentridge directly reckons with this violent history, his process-based work does not permit despair. Writing in Art in a State of Grace of Max Beckmanns painting Death (1938), Kentridge states that the work accepts the existence of a compromised society and yet does not rule out all meaning or value, nor pretend these compromises should be ignored. It marks the spot where optimism is kept in check and nihilism is kept at bay. Kentridge sees himself working in this narrow gap: the same breach that separates Alexievichs wartime nihilism from Schwitterss joyful incoherence.

As I sat in the studio with Kentridge, we re-read Art in a State of Grace together, and he marked key passages in red pencil. He was visibly struck, not just by the succinctness and lingering truisms of the lines, but also the articulate certainties of his younger self, which to him felt both proximate and strange. I thought I had to give a talk that was different from an ordinary lecture, Kentridge explained of the genesis of this essay. He used a slide projector to collage image and text: his ambition was to merge the competing elements; to create, in effect, articulate and experiential drawings.

This kind of sparring with and against the lectures form, its conventions and expectations, directly informed Kentridges Norton series. It also undergirds works like The Head & the Load as well as I am not me, the horse is not mine (2008), a lecture-performance in which he discussed research for his then-upcoming 2010 adaptation of Dmitri Shostakovichs 1930 opera, The Nose, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. All three works are built on a foundation of language and argument, which Kentridge disassembles and visualizes.

Early Soviet culture, with its contest between egalitarian optimism and totalitarianism, has long intrigued Kentridge. I am not me, the horse is not mine derives its title from a phrase Russian peasants used to deny guilt, which Kentridge unearthed from the testimony of Soviet writer Nikolai Bukharin, who was put on show trial in 1938. Bukharin exemplifies so many of the victims of Stalinism, and stands as a practical example of language and logic taking their belongings and going on their own journey showing that violence and the grotesquely comic are close bedfellows, said Kentridge in a 2011 interview with the Turkish newspaper Todays Zaman, indicating how Joseph Stalins purges robbed language of its reason.

Tragicomic absurdity runs through The Head & the Load, one of the artists most ambitious works, which premiered at Londons Tate Modern. It was a real test to see how incoherent something can be and still make meaning using language as a vehicle of incoherence, Kentridge told me of its collaged music, dance, spoken word, film projections, mechanized sculptures and shadow play. The performance commences with a recitation of various manifestos in English, French, Italian, Swati and Zulu and draws on sound recordings of World War I African prisoners made at the Half Moon Camp near Berlin, Tswana proverbs collected by author and political leader Sol Plaatje, as well as details from a suppressed 1914 letter by Baptist minister and anti-colonialist John Chilembwe, who questioned why Africans should shed [their] innocent blood in Europes war.

This vast polyphony is not always comprehensible, its indictments of the exploitation of black lives in the service of empire subsumed by the effects and exigencies of theatre. There are the words themselves, and their syntax and grammar and their relation to the outside world, Kentridge stated in his Norton lectures. But there is also the discipline of the medium, that which is in between the words the devices which one uses to either pin the words more closely to the world outside or to encourage the listener to make the connection, to convince. Rather than set out to narrow the gap between grammar, argument and its elocution, Kentridge allows for incoherence in his theatre work, leaving room for the audience (and himself) to doubt the authority of what is said.

I prefer to work from not knowing what I am doing from doubt, from indecision, from failure, Kentridge told me when I interviewed him back in 2005. The artists multi-media theatre work, Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997), a collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company, underscores the centrality of doubt and the failure of language in his work. The performance abstractly grappled with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: a legal body convened to reckon with the countrys violent past. In a lecture given in Antwerp in 1997 the year Ubu and the Truth Commission premiered Kentridge expressed his mistrust in the worth of Good Ideas, asserting instead the contingent, the inauthentic, the whim, the practical, as strategies for finding meaning. So, while Kentridge may try to tie the word to the world as he speaks, he fully accepts that meaning is conditional and prone to slipping away.

1 William Kentridge, Let Us Try for Once, lecture at Brooklyn Public Library on 9 December 2018, reprinted on Literary Hub <https://bit.ly/2MFCaKI>2 Ibid.3 Ibid.4 Ibid.5 Kentridge delivered the speech at the Standard Bank National Festival of the Arts Winter School in July 1986. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev first reprinted the talk in her book William Kentridge (1998).6 Estimates regarding African casualties during World War I vary widely, but probably around 250,000 African soldiers and porters diedduring the war, in addition to around 750,000 civilians.

Why Should I Hesitate: Putting Drawings to Work continues atZeitz MOCAA andWhy Should I Hesitate: Sculpture continues atNorval Foundation, both Cape Town, South Africa, through 23 March 2020.

Main image:William Kentridge, The Head & the Load, 2018, performance documentation. Courtesy: the artist and Goodman Gallery

This article first appeared in frieze issue 206 with the headline Tying the Word to the World.

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William Kentridge's Indictment of Colonial and Apartheid Injustice - frieze.com

Mark Duffy has written the Copyranter blog for 12 years and is a freelancing copywriter with 25-plus years of experience. His hockey wrist shot is better than yours.

Wherever hopelessness and meaninglessness exist, nihilism breeds. And these days, nearly nothing is as hopeless as the State of the Advertising Tagline. This generations tagline writers arent just writing meaningless taglines. Theyre writing worthless meaningless taglines.

Taglines used to give you real reasons to buy: The One Beer To Have When Youre Having More Than One; Nothing Sucks Like An Electrolux; Let Your Fingers Do The Walking; When It Absolutely Positively Has To Be There Overnight. These taglines didnt just increase sales, they launched and grew companies. They became part of pop culture.

Today? Nothing. And into this creative vacuum has crawled more meaninglessness: ad influencers, sponconners and branded Facebook puzzle posts a 1-year-old can solve.

Also, into this meaningless void comes the Nihilist Tagline Writer (NTW).

What does Be Legacy mean? Arent legacies talked about after someone dies? Therefore, Stellas slogan is, essentially, Be Dead. Pretty nihilistic already. Nietzsche believed to do is to be. But then, he went insane from staring too long into the abyss.

Again, this life insurance sellers motto is already pretty grim, considering the unspoken two words at the end of the line (to death). But the NTW believes the above paraphrasing of a Nietzsche quote makes for a more urgent call to action.

Perfection In Life? Via a ridiculously expensive instrument that pretends to measure time? The NTW posits that perfection in life is when nothing happens. No watch needed, then. (Nihilistic tagline stolen from Thomas Ligotti.)

Impossible is not nothing; it is everything. Athletics is nothing, workouts are nothing, sweat is nothing. You want to wear Adidas while achieving nothingness? Whatever floats your nothing-boat.

Its been said that there is only the self, and the self is always alone. You want to achieve harmony? Dont answer a hundred questions about your self. Just desire nothing, and be nothing.

Open Happiness. That is quite a something-ism. Imagine that: bottling happiness. HA HA HA! Is your name Genie? Maybe Coca-Cola put your name on some of its plastic bottles. But drinking from or rubbing the sugar water receptacle will not make your wishes come true. Unless, you wish for emptiness. (Nihilistic tagline inspired by Fuminori Nakamura.)

The NTW ends with one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in human history: the diamond engagement ring. What power the ring holds. And as every true nihilist knows, the love of power is the demon of mankind (Nietzsche). We also know that we come from darkness, and its where were heading.

Have a nice day.

NOTE: The NTWs sources include this video of 150 Nietzsche quotes and quotes tagged nihilism from Goodreads. The NTW used the font Propaganda for his taglines.

Go here to read the rest:

Enter the Nihilist Tagline Writer - Digiday

Sam Harris, the atheist philosopher and neuroscientist, has recently been using his popular Waking Up podcast to discuss Donald Trump, whom he abhors, with an ideologically diverse series of guests, all of whom believe that the president is a vile huckster.

This began to wear on some of his listeners. Wasnt Harris always warning against echo chambers? Didnt he believe in rigorous debate with a positions strongest proponents? At their urging, he extended an invitation to a person that many of those listeners regard as President Trumps most formidable defender: Scott Adams, the creator of the cartoon Dilbert, who believes that Trump is a master persuader.

Their conversation was posted online late last month. It is one of the most peculiar debates about a president I have ever encountered. And it left me marveling that parts of Trumps base think well of Adams when his views imply such negative things about them.

Those implications are most striking with respect to extreme views that Trump expressed during the campaign. Harris and Adams discussed two examples during the podcast: Trumps call to deport 12 million illegal immigrants from the United States, a position that would require vast, roving deportation forces, home raids, and the forced removal even of law-abiding, undocumented single mothers of American children; and Trumps call to murder the family members of al-Qaeda or ISIS terrorists.

Trump took those positions not because he believes them, Adams argued, but to mirror the emotional state of the voters he sought and to open negotiations on policy.

Harris expressed bafflement that such a strategy would work:

Harris: If I'm going to pretend to be so callous as to happily absorb those facts, like send them all back, they don't belong here, or in the ISIS case, we'll torture their kids, we'll kill their kids, it doesn't matter, whatever worksif that's my opening negotiation, I am advertising a level of callousness, and a level of unconcern for the reality of human suffering that will follow from my actions, should I get what I ostensibly want, that it's a nearly psychopathic ethics I am advertising as my strong suit.

So how this becomes attractive to people, how this resonates with their valuesI get what you said, people are worried about immigration and jihadism, I share those concerns. But when you cross the line into this opening overture that has these extreme consequences on its face, things that get pointed out in 30 seconds whenever he opens his mouth on a topic like this, I don't understand how that works for him with anyone.

Adams: Let me give you a little thought experiment here. We've got people who are on the far right. We've got people on the far left. In your perfect world, would it be better to move the people on the far right toward the middle or the people on the far left toward the middle? Which would be a preferred world for you?

Harris: Moving everyone toward the middle, certainly on most points, would be a very good thing.

Adams: So what you've observed with President Trump through his pacing and emotional compatibility with his base is that prior to Inauguration Day, there were a lot of people in this country who were saying, 'Yeah yeah, round them all up. Send all 12 million back tomorrow.'

When was the last time you heard anybody on the right complaining about that? Because what happened was, immigration went down 50 to 70 percent, whatever the number was, just based on the fact that we would get tough on immigration. And the right says, Oh, okay, we didn't get nearly what we asked for, but our leader, who we trust, who we love, has backed off of that, and we're going to kind of go with that, because he is doing some good things that we like. And we don't like the alternative either.

So this monster that we elected, this Hitler-dictator-crazy-guy, he managed to be the only guy who could have, and I would argue always intended, to move the far right toward the middle. You saw it, you know, we can observe it with our own eyes. We don't see the right saying, Oh no, I hate President Trump. He's got to round up those undocumented people like he said early in the campaign, or else I'm bailing on him. None of that happened. He paced them, and then he led them toward a reasonable situation, which I would say we're in.

I dont agree with parts of Adamss analysis. But as he tells it, Trump targeted voters whod be attracted rather than repelled by calls for policies that would inflict great suffering; he told those voters things that he didnt really mean to gain their emotional trust; and all along, he probably intended to go to Washington and do something else. That sounds a lot like the way that Trump voters describe the career politicians who they hate: emotionally manipulative liars who will say anything to get elected, get to Washington, and betray their base by moving left on immigration.

Now consider the most extraordinary exchange in the podcast, when Harris attempts to explain his confusion that not everyone regards Trump as a vile huckster:

Harris: Everything you need to know about Trump's ethics were revealed in the Trump University scandal. This is a guy who is having his employees pressure poor, elderly people to max out their credit cards in exchange for fake knowledge.

Adams: Well, hold on. You understood that to be a license deal, right?

Harris: Yeah, but I understand that to be the kind of thing that he would have to know enough about to know what he was doing. If he only found out about it after the fact, that's not the kind of thing you'd defend, it's the kind of thing you'd be mortified about. And you would apologize for and pay reparations for if you're this rich guy who has all the money you claim to have.

Adams: Unless you were a master persuader who knew that if you ever backed down from anything, people would expect you to back down in the future from other things.

Note that Adams hypothesizes that Trump would not back down even if he were in the wrong and innocents were hurt as a consequence, because it might hurt him personally. A person who wrongs innocents, then hides it because he puts a higher priority on preserving his public persona than justice, is not a person to be trusted with power!

Harris: But what you're describing is a totally unethical person. This is the problem for me. So let me just give you a couple more points here. People will say that all politicians are liars, or all politicians have something weird in their backstory. But there are very few politicians walking around with something that ugly in their backstory that they haven't repaired.

Adams: Let me just clarify. When I said that it was a license deal, as opposed to a business that he was actively runningin the Dilbert world, I do a lot of license deals. And have in the past. The nature of those is that you're giving your brand and your name and then you're not really paying attention to the management of the company. So there are two possibilities here. One is what you described, that he knew the details and he was okay with it, which would be problematic for me, and I'm positive it would be problematic for 100 percent of Trump's supporters if that was the case. Now, if it was a typical license deal where you don't really know exactly what people are doing and you're not paying attention because you've got, in this case, 400 companies with his name on them

Harris: His whole life is a license deal for the most parteven his real estate empire is a license deal.

Adams: So if it were the case that he were treating it like every other license deal there's a high likelihood that he didn't know about the details until it was too late. Now once he found out the details, how he handled it in court is yet another separate case.

Lets pause here. What Harris understandably didnt know off the top of his head is that Trump University was not a typical licensing deal. According to The Washington Post, court documents revealed that the Trump Organization owned 93 percent of Trump University. As well, beginning in 2005, New York State Education Department officials told the company to change its name because they deemed it misleading. And Trump appeared in ads for the enterprise, where he said, I can turn anyone into a successful real estate investor, including you. Obviously, Trump did not believe that anyone who saw the advertisement could be turned into a success in real estate, and the ad represented that Trump would be doing the turning.

Harris: But even granting you that, it's another separate case that says everything about the man's ethics.

Adams: It says everything about his ethics if he was aware of it at the time.

Harris: No, no, if you're aware of it in the aftermath. If I created some deal, you know, The Sam Harris Waking Up Podcast UniversityI mean, first of all, the fact that he would license it out to other conmen who were unscrupulous, and not do proper vetting but claim he had, I mean there's a whole commercial with him talking about how these are the geniuses who will be instructing you in this incredibly expensive but profitable enterprise.

If you did all that you're already a schmuck.

But imagine I had done that, and I'm so busy, I've got 400 different businesses, and I just didn't really understand, I got conned, and got lured into doing this with people I didn't totally vet. In the aftermath, I would be horrified! If I found out that someone had their life savings ripped from them by conmen who I had licensed, right, and I'm this billionaire, I would atone for that as much as could possibly be done. I mean, you have to do that!

Adams: Now Sam, when you say you would atone for it, let's talk about the financial part of that atonement. Would you then negotiate with the people who were complaining to figure out what was an appropriate payment?

Harris: It would be obviously indefensible, and I would immediately pay back everything that was lost, and probably more, because there's all the pain and suffering associated with it. You have to make people whole.

Adams: But would you give them whatever they asked for? Like hey, give me 10 million dollars

Harris: Well no, there has to be some rational consideration of what the cost is. But again, you know the spirit in which he defended this, right? He hasn't admitted that this was a sham. It's of a piece with everything else he has represented about himself. He's a genius whose done nothing but help the world and the world is ungrateful because they can't recognize it. And all the rest is fake news.

Adams: But let me ask you againand by the way, I want to be very clear that there's nothing about Trump University that I defend.

Harris: But that should mean something to you!

There were, in fact, things about Trump University that Adams was defending. In an effort to persuade, he was portraying himself as an expert on licensing deals, and suggesting that Trump may well have been innocent of any wrongdoing beyond not knowing what the folks who licensed his name were getting up to. Because Adams is not a master persuader, Harris was able to knock down that argument, even without knowing some of the facts that made it obviously wrong.

Thats when the conversation arrived at a place Adams often inhabits: claiming he doesnt defend vile or hucksterish behavior from Trump, but continuing to act as Trumps booster.

Adams: But I also think it needs to be put into its clearest context. And the clearest context is, there were people who used the legal system for his complaints, and Trump used the legal system the way it was used, to negotiate, and part of that negotiation is, 'Hey, I'm taking you to court.' 'Well, go ahead, I'll take you to court.' So that's how you negotiate in the legal context. When it was done he paid them back as the legal process probably was going to come out that way whether he was elected president or not.

Harris: It shouldn't have had to go to court. The fact that it had to go to court is a sign of his litigiousness, his defensiveness, his not owning the problem. And who knows how many other scandals like this are in his past where the people couldn't afford to go to court? We actually know a lot about the way he built buildings, insofar as he actually built themand he screwed hundreds if not thousands of people, and these are people who couldn't afford to take them to court. This guy's reputation is so well known.

At this point Adams repeats a persuasive tactic he had already usedon Trump University, he mentioned his own experience of licensing Dilbert, as if it gave his opinions special weight; in this next part, he casts himself as a construction expert. Factual context for the following part of the conversation can be found in this USA Today investigation.

Adams: Have you ever been involved in a big construction project? Because I've done a few. And what do you do when a subcontractor doesn't perform the way that you want them to perform?

Harris: That's one description of what has happened, but again, you're ignoring the fact that he has a unique reputation for screwing people. And this is something, journalism didn't do its job before the election to get this out

Adams: Well, I would agree he has a reputation. But what is the source of that reputation? It's the people that didn't get paid, right?

Harris: But again, the fact that Trump University exists, and the fact that he handled it the way he did, tells me everything I need to know about him. Everything. Literally everything Scott.

Adams: Did you just change the subject?

Harris: No. I can see his real estate career through the lens of Trump University. If you give me Trump University, I can tell you what kind of developer he's going to be. And how he's going to treat his subs.

Adams: Well, that's another analogy problem, that Trump University is an analogy

Harris: No, it's because people's ethics tend to cohere. If you think you can screw someone mercilessly when they're under your power in one context, you are the kind of person, I will predict, who will be screwing people under your power in other contexts, unless you've got some kind of multiple personality disorder.

Adams: Are there no stories you're aware of in which President Trump has done things which he was not required to do which were considered a kindness?

Harris: Well, I'll give you two other points which I think aren't entangled with these wrinkles, which kind of make the same point So take his career as a beauty pageant host and owner, and the stories well attested of him being the creep who keeps barging into the dressing room so he can look at the beauty pageant contestants, these 18-year-old girls who are essentially his employees, so he can catch them naked. So there's doing that over and over again.

And then add his career as a pseudo-philanthropist. So here's a great example. There's this ribbon-cutting ceremony for a children's school that was serving kids with AIDS. This was back in the 90s. And hes pretending to be one of the big donors, and just to get a photo op with the mayor of New York and I think the former mayor of New York, and the real donors to this charity, he jumps on stage, pretends that he belongs there at the ribbon cutting. He never gave a dime to this charity! No one knew he was coming, he literally crashed this party to pretend that he was this big-time philanthropist. Well you may say, this is brilliant PR, right?

It's completely immoral PR.

If I had done this you wouldn't be on this podcast. If you found out these things about me, Sam Harris pretends he gives to charity when he doesn't, he barges into the dressing rooms of his teenage employees so he can catch them naked, and he's got this thing called Harris University that he had to get sued to apologize for, in fact he never apologized for, those three things about me, you wouldn't be on this podcast, and for good reason. But yet you're saying you would elect me president of the United States.

Adams: Yeah I would go even further and say that if you even knew the secret life of any of our politicians we would impeach all of them.

Harris: That's not true.

Adams: The problem is that people tend to be fairly despicable when you drill down.

Harris: Do you think Obama is trailing things of this magnitude? Manifest character flaws of this magnitude?

Adams: Well, I won't name names, but I would say it would be more common than not common, for especially males to have sketchy behavior with the opposite sex.

Harris: Not this level of sketchy behavior. I mean, I'm not going to go to the Billy Bush groping tape which I think is

Adams: Keep in mind that President Trump's past is far more public than other people. So you're going to see the warts as well as the good stuff. But let me stop acting as if I disagree with the general claim that you're making, that he has done things that you and I might not do in the same situation, and would disapprove of. That is common and would be shared by Trump supporters as well.

Notice the pattern here.

Harris offers an indictment of Trump; Adams tries to undercut it; Adams fails; Adams asserts that he has been misleading us about his real views in the course of doing so; then Adams grants the original indictment, but insists there are mitigating factors:

Harris: But then you seem to give it no ethical weight.

Adams: Here's the proposition. He came in and he said in these very words, I'm no angel. But I'm going to do these things for you. Now he created a situation where for his self-interest, if you imagine he's the most selfish, narcissistic, egotistical human who ever lived, he only cares about himself, he put himself in the position where there was exactly one way for any of those things to go right for him, which is to do a really, really frickin' good job, and to imagine that he wants to do anything but the best job for the country now, now that he's in the position, and probably even when he was running, is beyond ludicrous.

It is fascinating that Adams counts the pronouncement, Im no angel, as a point in Trumps favor, as if unapologetically acknowledging moral depravity lessens its weight.

And that isnt even the most ludicrous part of his argument.

Upon being elected, it is in the interest of every president to do a really, really good job. As Harris put it, I will grant you that he cares about his reputation to some degree, and his reputation would be enhanced if at the end of four years or the end of eight years more likely, he was described as the greatest president we ever had. I think he would like that. If you could give him a magic wand and he could wave it in any direction, he would want to leave being spoken of as the next Lincoln or the next Jefferson. In that sense, his interests and the country's interests would be aligned.

So Trump shares that incentive with every president. And as Harris added, there are other ways in which Trumps interests depart from Americas interests far more than other presidents: the profits and overseas dealings of the Trump organization, for one thing, and Trumps murky relationship with Russian oligarchs, for another.

All that aside, even perfectly aligned incentives are worthless if a politician lacks the moral compass and practical skills to govern well. The strongest anti-Trump argument is that he is unfit, regardless of what he wants for Americansthat he is governing about as well as he managed the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, a property that he wanted to succeed but that ended in ruin.

Stripped of all the evasive rhetorical tactics, Adamss case for Trump amounts to this: Trump is a master persuader, as evidenced by his success manipulating voters with morally odious positions that he didnt believe and never intended to executebut Americans shouldnt be bothered by the vileness or the hucksterism, which Adams regards as mostly harmless, because its in Trumps personal interests to be successful, and as Adams later argued, Americans should want a guy who will succeed in the White House more than a guy who is moral or honest.

Now, personally, I dont believe that Trump is a master persuader. I think hes a guy who started out with unusual amounts of money, name recognition, and media coverage, three hugely important factors for a pol; ran against an unusually disliked opponent; and still managed to lose the popular vote by a margin of almost three million. But whether or not Trump is a master persuader is really beside my point here.

My point is that Harris had been using his podcast to discuss Trump with an ideologically diverse series of anti-Trump guests who believe the president is a vile hucksterand then, when he agreed to host the pro-Trump guest who his pro-Trump listeners flagged as Trumps most formidable defender, that guest essentially conceded that Trump has done all sorts of vile things and rose to power via lies, but that its all for the best because he has an incentive to do a really good job. To accept all that would be to cede any grounds for objecting to future politicians who behave immorally, inject cruel policy proposals into the national debate, and lie to get elected. If Adams truly is the most formidable defender of the Trump presidency, then the best defense of the president is grounded in corrosive moral nihilism.

More:

Scott Adams's Nihilistic Defense of Donald Trump - The Atlantic

You may have heard French novelist Thophile Gautiers phrase, The French lack the sense of the epic.

Unfortunately, the saying remains accurate nearly two centuries later.

Indeed, it applies beyond France, from one end to the other of a discouraged Europe overtaken by nihilism, where even the idea of envisioning or imagining something a little greater for mankind has become unintelligible and absurd.

Which is why I am always inclined to view with a favorable eye books that reveal an attachment to the old-fashioned virtues of heroism, greatness, and a will to go beyond what was thought possible, despite the generalized disenchantment and cynicism that are the hallmarks of our age.

One such book is La Nostalgie de lhonneur,to be released in France on September 6. In it, journalist and columnist Jean-Ren Van der Plaetsen looks back on his grandfather, General Jean Crpin, one of the brightest (but until now poorly documented) figures of the epic of Free France.

The story begins in Manoka, Cameroon, where, on the morning of August 20, 1940, an artillery captain in the French colonial army, gripped by one of those spur-of-the-moment decisions on which great destinies are sometimes built, decides to follow an unknown general, Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque.

It continues with the adventures of a handful of mystical bums who, like himself, bet their lives on the crazy dream of liberating Paris, of hoisting the French flag over Strasbourg cathedral, and of ridding Europe of Nazism.

That mission accomplished, the story follows the heroes into a complicated Indochina redolent of the novels of Graham Greene and French novelist Lucien Bodard.

And then into the quagmire of the Algerian war, where some of the band will lose their way, even while continuing to believe themselves faithful, literally, to the oath they took in the summer of 1940.

And finally into old age: Splendidly gray, proud of their military feats but strangely sad, recognizing one another, Van der Plaetsen tells us, by the fixed star they bear on their forehead like a seal visible only to those who have seen and done what they have seen and donethese are taciturn men with the overwhelming modesty that is the mark of the truly great; reticent men, hesitant to impart lessons of courage and nobility, which must be pulled out of them, as here, by stubborn grandchildren.

Some may find some aspects of this story overly martial.

Some may be startled to read that, in the eyes of the author, there is no calling more noble than that of the soldier.

And perhaps they may detect, here and there, an echo of the prodigious atmosphere of youthful friendship typical of nostalgic war writing in the mold of Philippe Barrss La Guerre vingt ans(War at Age 20) or Henry de Montherlants La Relve du matin(Morning Watch), both published at the beginning of the twentieth century.

But they would be wrong to leave their assessment there.

Because the essence of the book lies in its portrait of the generation of justly named Free French who make up the loftiest, most chivalrous, and most romantic of French orders of merit.

It lies in its description of that brotherhoods ties of suzerainty to General de Gaulle, who emerged suddenly from the ranks in an ascent that can be compared only to Napoleons rise over his own peers.

I admire the authors way of bringing alive the conversions of philosophy professor Andr Zirnheld, of mountain infantryman Tom Morel, and of an obscure Georgian prince, and othersall transformed, by the grace of their heroism, into the stuff of legends. Plaetsens feat reminds me of Roland Dorgelss observation in Wooden Crosses (1919) that, were it not for war, Joan of Arc would have died a shepherdess and 1789 hero Louis-Lazare Hoche a stable boy.

Because that is all true, and because it echoes a truly great novel of war from the 1920s, Jean Schlumbergers Camarade infidle(Unfaithful Comrade), I admire Van der Plaetsens conclusion that his characters tasted something so layered and so strong that everything against which they later had to measure themselves seemed either bland or bitter.

And I must say that these pages contain scenes of great beauty: the entrance of undaunted De Gaulle, accompanied by generals Koenig and Leclerc, into the nave of Notre Dame under fire from the last collaborationist militiamen; the funeral of Leclerc, two years later, with a tank carrying his coffin and with the hero of the book, by request of his peers, stock still at attention at the right of the tank, to offer last military honors to the departed hero; or, forty years later, the encounter between the junior general, now a very respectable bourgeois gentleman, with a column of union demonstrators who jostle and manhandle him until Crpin, pulling himself up to his former height, raising his voice slightly, and brandishing his cane as years ago he would have done a sword, holds his ground until the marchers back away and allow him to pass, dumbstruck by the unassailable, almost magical authority that he still exudes.

I, too, am a son of Free France.

Like the author, I was raised to respect the exceptional adventure that was early Gaullism.

And, like him, I have never been able to read without a shiver the commendation my father received on July 19, 1944, after the battle of Monte Cassino, from another of the books characters, General Diego Brosset: Andr Lvy, always willing day or night whatever the mission, performed evacuations under mortar fire with complete disregard for his personal safety, returning several times to the lines to recover the wounded under intense enemy fire ...

Which is to say that in paying tribute here to Van der Plaetsens Nostalgie de lhonneur,in saluting his noble act of devotion, reparation, and preservation of memory, I know what I am talking aboutand have weighed my words.

Translated from French by Steven B. Kennedy

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Honoring Honor: Jean-Ren Van der Plaetsen's Moving Account of the Epic Figures of Free France - HuffPost

SF Weekly

Outside Lands and the Nihilism of the Fake Counterculture SF Weekly Across the continent, Nazis bearing semiautomatic weapons and garden-supply-store tiki torches made a show of force at the University of Virginia. After protests and counter-protests, someone was killed. It feels redundant to condemn it, but in short ...

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Outside Lands and the Nihilism of the Fake Counterculture - SF Weekly