Kent State: May 1970

short documentary film about the Kent State Massacre

directed by Joseph E. Clement

(1970)

 

On Company Business

documentary film about the CIA

directed by Alan Frankovich

(1980)

 

Book Review

The Piano Teacher

by Elfriede Jelinek

     “Erika, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” As a reader you may often feel tempted to yell this question at Erika Kohut, the protagonist of The Piano Teacher by Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek. As the title informs you, Erika is a music teacher, caught between two people representing different desires in her life. Her mother dominates her existence while the student, Walter Klemmer, is who she turns to for liberation from the trap of her home life. Erika’s behavior is violent, self-debasing, and masochistic; her desires and the things she does to herself are irrational on the surface, but when looked at carefully in the web of her life and personal psychology, a method to her madness is revealed.

Erika’s mother has dominated her for her entire life. The mother recognized her talent for music at an early age and, believing in the prodigality of her daughter, she restricted her social, psychological, and intellectual development so that she could grow in no other way except for her musical skills. But Erika’s musical talents make her less than ideal for being the genius concert pianist her mother believed she was destined to be, so she earns her living by teaching piano to young students at a musical academy in Vienna. At the age of 36, Erika still lives with her mother who controls most aspects of the daughter’s life. But the feeble old lady’s motherly love is not so innocent. Her primary interest in her daughter is motivated by capitalist exploitation; she depends on Erika for money and she hoards as much of the income as she can so they will eventually be able to move into a higher-class apartment. The two of them fight, sometimes physically, and there is one passage that suggests Erika has incestuous sexual desires for her own mother.

The other main character in Erika’s life is Walter Klemmer, a piano student a decade younger than her. Klemmer begins to take notice of Erika in a romantically suggestive way. His intentions are not so pure either. With his mind steeped in literary fantasies of masculine strength, lifted from the pages of Norman Mailer and Friedrich Nietzche, Klemmer spends his free time climbing mountains and whitewater rafting. In his naive mind, he sees himself as being a conqueror of nature as well as a conqueror of women. While Erika sees him as a potential lover, he sees her as an aging woman with few prospects for finding a husband before hitting menopause. He thinks of her as easy prey, an easily seduced plaything he can use and then abandon before moving on to more exciting triumphs.

Of course, in the middle of this is Erika. Her life is dedicated to the lofty melodies of classical music but she contains a contradiction in that her sexuality is base and sometimes filthy. Jelinek establishes early in the novel that Erika is emotionally stunted and one way in which she never develops into maturity regards her sexuality. Erika’s desires and indulgences are displaced. One way she displaces her sexuality is through self-harm. In one passage, she lifts her dress and sits in front of a mirror so she can see her vagina while she proceeds to cut herself with a razor. The language describing this act likens the blade, as it penetrates her flesh, to a phallus sexually penetrating a woman. The description of her bleeding also relates to both the flow of menstrual blood and the ejaculation of a penis.

The other way her sexuality is displaced is through voyeurism. Erika spends time visiting peep shows, porn theaters, and watching a prostitute having sex in a public park. Interestingly, the sequence of these events starts in enclosed spaces and ends in open spaces as if this progression signifies a movement of her sexuality from repression to fuller expression. Erika begins by watching peep shows in the privacy of an enclosed booth. From there she goes on to watch X-rated films as a member of an audience in a porn theater and from there spies on a naked couple getting it on behind some bushes outside an amusement park. In the first two instances, she does not feel any pleasure during her acts of voyeurism but in the last case, her orgasmic release is sublimated into the act of urination. The same thing happens in a later passage when an unfulfilled sexual encounter with Klemmer also results in her urinating in place of any other kind of sexual gratification. The displacement of her sexuality shows that while Erika can express herself sufficiently through music, she can not express herself in any other healthy way.

Things heat up when, figuratively speaking, Erika and Klemmer begin circling each other like a pair of ballet dancers. In a passage reminiscent of Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Erika, just like Severin, writes a letter to her lover with detailed explanations of what she wants him to do to her. The reference to Sacher-Masoch is significant, not only because she expresses her wish for a sado-masochistic relationship with her partner, but also because both The Piano Teacher and Venus in Furs are explorations of power dynamics. Both novels turn concepts of domination and submission on their heads, making it difficult to say exactly who is ultimately in the position of power. Erika’s letter is loaded with fantastical descriptions of bondage, physical assault, humiliation, degradation, and rape. The language is lofty and liberating in the same way that Erika uses language to describe the ecstasies of music. As horrific as her letter is, her expressed desire to be urinated on and kicked in the stomach is strangely beautiful as if she poured every ounce of passionate desire she had into expressing these scenarios. But the letter is not just a BDSM dream, it is also a love letter in which she waxes rapturously about her willingness to be vulnerable and devoted. It is a plea for acceptance and the wish to be desired is at the heart of all that Erika says. In reality, the sado-masochism of her love letter is not the point of it all. She is saying what she thinks will entice Klemmer the most. She wants love, not abuse, but we need to remember that she never matured sexually because of her upbringing and Erika learned about eroticism entirely from pornography. Her inability to separate the performative act of contrived sexuality from the realism of authentic erotic expression is a fault line in her life.

But then again, Erika Kohut may not be as naive as she seems. Walter Klemmer is disgusted by the letter when he reads it and when she offers to perform oral sex on him in a restroom, the memories of her letter flood his mind and he is unable to get aroused. Her reaction is to be emotionally supportive; she tells him they have all the time they need to get comfortable with each other. Instead of making herself vulnerable through BDSM games, she makes herself vulnerable through a willingness to communicate. Her reaction to Klemmer’s impotence is one of maturity. Klemmer, on the other hand, reacts by becoming dangerous. He feels humiliated for his inability to get an erection and his anger begins to smolder. Instead of blaming himself for not feeling entirely comfortable in that situation, he blames Erika and her pornographic fantasies for his failure. Klemmer later shows up at Erika’s apartment. While any intelligent person would agree that it is sick to say that a rape victim asked for it, in Erika’s case, it literally is true when taking into consideration the contents of her letter. She literally did ask to be raped. How she feels about this at the end of the novel is ambiguous; remember that self-harm is one of the ways she relieves her sexual tensions.

In the end, the big question is, “What is Erika’s problem?” You have to wonder if she is mentally ill as long as you look only the surface appearance of her behavior. She certainly is eccentric but eccentricity is not necessarily synonymous with insanity. We see how her mother controls her life but on closer insepction it appears that Erika is complicit in her submission. Erika is physically strong enough to overpower her mother so she could easily escape the apartment. Erika is probably stable enough to survive on her own, albeit with a few quriks here and there. She is certainly financially well-off enough to live independently. If anything, it is her mother that is dependent on her. So why does she put up with her mother’s totalitarian control? This is why Klemmer is such an important character. He reveals how Erika feels about relationships. She has come to believe that submission to another person’s control is the way to gain their love and acceptance. As long as she submits to her mother, her mother’s love is guaranteed. By offering herself up in submission to Klemmer, she hopes to transfer this acceptance to him in the form of a sado-masochistic romantic relationship. But it can’t work because neither of them understand each other. People familiar with BDSM know that this lifestyle and its relationships require a high degree of trust, understanding, and communication and this is the element that is missing from Erika and Klemmer’s failed tryst. Furthermore, Erika intends to use sado-masochism as a lure and a trap to keep Klemmer close to her as a companion in her life. With that being the case, isn’t she the one who is attempting to exert her power over him? Does that also imply that by submitting to her mother’s control, Erika is actually the dominant one if their household?

So is Erika Kohut insane? Her mother certainly is and while Walter Klemmer may not be crazy, he is a dangerous criminal who will probably end up in prison. In contrast, most of Erika’s bizarre behavior is well-directed towards serving functional purposes. There is a method to her madness so I might be inclined to say “no”, she is not insane, or maybe I should revise that and say “maybe”; after all there is that passage where she puts broken glass in a girl’s coat pocket. I might even further say “maybe” because offering a clinical diagnosis for her craziness takes all the grotesque and horrific beauty out of this unique novel. One thing is for sure though, Erika Kohut is the most memorable literary character I have encountered in a long, long time.

Jelinek, Elfriede. The Piano Teacher, translated by Joachim Neugroschel. Serpent's Tail, New York: 1992.
 

Can a Book Kill You?

 

literary discussion by Plagued by Visions

Visit Plagued by Visions' homepage

Operation Hummingbird: When the Nazis Killed the Nazis

     About a century and a half ago, a sick-minded little boy was born in Austria. He was inbred, his parents were cousins, and his family name was Schiklgruber. His first name, Adolf. Had his father never changed his last name to Hitler then this ridiculous little ass may never have grown to the awful stature that he did. “Heil Shicklgruber” just doesn’t have the catchy ring that “Heil Hitler” does, so future parents might want to be cautious about the names they choose.

In any case, this stupid little imp named Adolf was an average student who never finished high school. He had ambitions of being a famous artist and took off for Vienna where he planned to attend an architectural institute. He tried making a living by painting but he ran into one major problem: he had no talent. He thought of himself as too superior to do manual labor so he lived on handouts and charity, nearly starving to death, and reading voraciously while living in flophouses.

Hitler fought in World War I and even earned a medal or two. After the surrender, Hitler moved to Munich where he attended meetings held by the German Worker’s Party. This small political gang were leftist and socialist but also had a preoccupation with antisemitism. Members included occultists, conspiracy theorists, economic ranks, and a gay pedophile name Ernst Roehm. They were impressed by Hitler’s oratorical skills and quickly admitted him to their inner circle. For a time, Roehm would prove to be Hitler’s greatest ally until he became Hitler’s greatest enemy.

During the 1920s, Germany’s Weimar Republic was swinging. Democracy was flourishing, the economy was growing, art schools were thriving, and cabarets were packed on a nightly basis. In the middle of this progressive, freewheeling time of cultural experimentation, politics also began to change. The Communist Party and the more moderate Social Democrats started winning elections. But then the booming economy went bust; thousands of blue-collar workers lost their jobs and poverty gripped the nation by the throat. These rough factory workers began to flock to the German Worker’s Party which had already been renamed the National Socialist Worker’s Party of Germany, also called the NSDAP, colloquially the Nazis. They were attracted by a young new demagogue street preacher named Adolf Hitler who blamed the Jews for their misery. He promised them an end to unemployment, free food and rent, and the destruction of the aristocratic class. Of course, this promise was never fulfilled because the label of National Socialism was only a ruse for a new kind of politics called fascism. But the NSDAP had authentic socialists supporting it, one of which was Ernst Roehm.

Most of these young unemployed men were organized into ranks and given uniforms by Roehm. They became officially known as the SA. In the streets, people called them “stormtroopers” or “brownshirts” because of the color of their uniforms. The SA were a continuation of the German Freikorps, paramilitary vigilante organizations that were called up ad hoc to help the army and police commit acts of violence. Originally, Roehm summoned the SA to act as security guards at Nazi meetings and rallies. Then they began invading and attacking crowds at events held by rival political groups. Being frequent customers at beer halls, they roamed the streets when drunk, intimidating and attacking random people passing by. At their most organized, they engaging in rioting, looting, vandalism, rape, and street fights with Communists. At least 100 people were known to have been murdered during these melees. As the brownshirts got more rowdy and unpredictable, they became a liability to Hitler and the Nazi party which was rising in the hierarchy of the German government.

By 1930, the NSDAP had gained a handful of seats in the German Reichstag. The Communists and Social Democrats were also making inroads into this legislative body. But Hitler’s ambition for political power was not coming fast enough. He began soliciting meetings with government officials and after associating for a while with the right people, he eventually earned an audience with the German President Paul von Hindenburg. As the aging leader grew closer to death, he appointed Hitler Chancellor. The first act of the supreme leader of the Nazi Party, and the second most powerful man in the government, banned all political parties in Germany with the exception of the NSDAP. The Nazi Party and the state were joined together as one and the same thing. Another bold move by Hitler was making extra-judiciary imprisonment, punishment, and execution entirely legal. The practice of granting a fair trial was no longer a reality in Germany and the Nazis could kill anybody they wanted, for any reason they chose, and it would be entirely legal. The third move Hitler made in his ascent to power was to dissolve the Reichstag, thereby making him the sole lawmaker of the German nation. The only two things separating Hitler from absolute control in his nation were the army, a state organ that acted independently of the Chancellor, and the ailing president Hindenburg. Deutschland, no longer a nation of laws had degenerated into a nation of men and the lone man who led the way had a delusional mind, saturated in paranoia and hate, a lunatic leading his nation directly into the deepest pits of hell.

Werner von Blomberg’s position was Minister of Defense, meaning he held the commanding position over the Reichswehr, the German army. Blomberg was on friendly terms with Adolf Hitler but he was not a member of the Nazi Party. To the ambitious Ernst Roehm, this was not acceptable. Hitler stood between the two men, not just ideologically but in terms of power politics too. Blomberg and his officers had all come from the Prussian aristocracy while Roehm and his SA thugs came directly from the working class. Blomberg looked down on the SA as the rabble, an undisciplined mob, and the riffraff of the German nation. He did, however, see as them as potentially useful for bulking up the Reichswehr ranks. Roehm, on the other hand, saw Blomberg as an effete snob, a weakling from the upper class who bought his position rather than earning it. Roehm’s reasoning for supporting National Socialism was entirely socialist. He wanted to lead a proletarian uprising to eliminate the aristocracy and establish populist rule by the laboring masses. The two authorities were fundamentally incompatible, exemplifying a schizophrenic fault line in the character of the Nazi Party.

Roehm petitioned Hitler to execute Blomberg and appoint him in his place as Minister of Defense. The high and mighty Hitler had the means at his disposal to do this but the potential for a military coup was great. Due to the humiliating Versailles treaty, the heavily armed Reichswehr was limited to having only 100 troops while SA membership had expanded into the millions. Hitler stood in the middle of a potential civil war. In 1934, Roehm made a proposal to Blomberg; he wished to bind the army and the SA into one entity with the army acting as an auxiliary unit to the stormtroopers. Blomberg also liked the idea of joining the two forces into one division but decided to take the case to Hitler to make the pivotal decision. Hitler agreed to make the Reichswehr and the SA one but instead decided that it would be the SA that acted as an auxiliary unit to the army. The fuehrer had frustrated Roehm’s greedy power grab and the SA leader was furious. The first crack in the connection between Hitler and Roehm had shown.

At this point, The Nazis’ public image was not entirely favorable. A large part of this had to do with the SA. Not only were the brownshirts feared for their joy in busting skulls, but Ernst Roehm had become a liability as well. He openly flaunted his homosexuality and stories of his lavish orgies in gay bathhouses, some involving children, were whispered by citizens afraid to speak too loudly out of fear of violence perpetrated against them by the secret police. Roehm notoriously offered promotion in the ranks of the SA in exchange for sexual favors from the boys he found attractive and those that refused his offers were sometimes beaten and raped. Some of them were even murdered after being sexually assaulted. To the conservative Nazis, Roehm was an embarrassment. Members of the fuehrer’s inner circle like Josef Goebbels, Hermann Goering, and Heinrich Himmler began discussing ways to pressure Hitler into slicing the SA leader’s throat. Other politicians were unimpressed with the brownshirts’ antics too. Vice Chancellor von Papen threatened to resign if the SA were not reigned in and Hindenburg, the President himself, threatened to declare martial law if the SA were not subjugated and brought under control. Hitler had no use for von Papen but the Vice Chancellor’s resignation would be a blow to his image as an infallible leader and the declaration of martial law would be a loss of face he would never be able to recover from.

Meanwhile, when Hitler embarked on a trip to Rome for a meeting with his accomplice Benito Mussolini, a Nazi official with cordial ties to the Italian fascist dictator made a secret phone call and asked Mussolini to pressure Hitler to eliminate Roehm. Mussolini told the fuehrer that the SA were ruining Germany’s international reputation. Considering Hitler’s stated long range goals to dominate the world by acts of evil, this was an odd line of reasoning. But in the minds of many sharp-dressing Mediterranean people, public appearances can count for a lot.

While Ernst Roehm’s unsavory reputation got worse and worse, Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler upped the ante by writing an intelligence briefing in which they claimed the Gestapo had intercepted messages proving that the French government were willing to pay Roehm a huge sum of money if he were to oust Hitler and take over the country. Logistics of this secretive operation were said to be forthcoming. This information was entirely fabricated by Goering and Himmler since the two of them both had vested interests in the removal of Roehm. Goering saw this as an opportunity to take over as leader of the Reichswehr. Himmler saw this operation as a chance to break the SS, Hitler’s elite squad of bodyguards, free from the SA’s control. The deluded mind of Hitler was well-primed by his consiglioris for violence and slaughter. While Hitler’s hate-filled brain churned over his options, high ranking members of the NSDAP drew up hit lists and held meetings to discuss which people they wanted to eliminate, forever, from their presence on terrestrial soil.

On the morning of June 30, 1934, Nazi commander Hermann Goering waited for a phone call from Josef Goebbels. Earlier, at 4:00 am, Hitler and an entourage had flown off to Munich. The city was tattered after a drunken night of brownshirt rioting. Shattered glass and pools of blood could be seen on several streets. The group drove to the local headquarters of the Nazi Party and summoned the chief of police and the leaders of the local SA. Hitler furiously shrieked at them for their brutality and browbeat the police chief for failing to control the mob. He tore the epaulets off the chief’s shirt before his henchmen took him outside and shot him in the alley. The SA leaders were arrested.

Hitler rounded up a group of SS officers and police. They drove off to Bad Wiessee, the location of the Hanselbauer Hotel where Ernst Roehm and his lieutenants were sleeping soundly in the early morning hours. As the sun began to rise, Hitler barged into Roehm’s suite and personally arrested his longtime friend and one of the first men to declare his loyalty to the fuehrer in his rise to power. Hitler’s posse gathered together all the other commanders of the SA and arrested them as well. One of them, Edmund Heines was found naked in bed with a teenage boy. The SS troopers took them outside and shot them dead, leaving their bodies to rot in a ditch.

At 10:00 that morning, Goebbels made a call from an office in the Munich Nazi headquarters. At the other end, Goering picked up the receiver and heard the German word “kolibri” which means “hummingbird” in English. It was a word randomly chosen and had no symbolic meaning. But it was a code word and it certainly meant something to Goering. It meant the Roehm Purge was meant to begin immediately. While Hitler made a speech to the crowd assembled outside the Munich offices, SS soldiers, police, and Gestapo agents around the country went into action arresting hordes of SA members and taking them off to a prison camp.

Dachau would later become notorious as the extermination camp where hundreds of thousands of victims were executed for no good reason whatsoever. On this day, the fascists initially opened the gates to the inferno when they transported thousands and thousands of SA members to its prison cells. Later that night, each one of them were brought before a kangaroo court, given a one minute trial in which they were inevitably found guilty, and then marched off to the outside of the building. They were stood up against a blood-covered wall, their feet standing in a pile of brains and gore since the Nazis never bothered to clean up the mess between executions. Many of them, believing themselves to be victims of a treacherous SS conspiracy to overthrow Hitler, raised their arms in the Nazi salute and barked “Heil Hitler” before having their bodies ripped apart by bullets from the guns of the executioners. When their bodies collapsed, a wheelbarrow was brought to haul them away. They were dumped together in a mass grave, never able to fully understand why they died as martyrs for an insane cause, killed by the same nationalist political party they so wholeheartedly supported. One might be inclined to feel sadness for the slaughter of these people, but, then again, these dumkopfs were Nazis so there is no need to waste tears in memoriam for their deaths.

While this mass murder was in progress, Ernst Roehm was sitting in his cell. A team of guards came in with a loaded pistol and left it on a chair. “You have ten minutes to commit suicide,” they told him. He replied, “If I am to be executed then Hitler must do it himself.” When the guards returned he was still alive and standing with his shirt off, his chest puffed out in defiance. Roehm shouted, “Heil Hitler, mein fuehrer”, and made the stiff armed salute while the guards shot him point blank. Had Roehm instead shouted “Heil Schicklgruber” this horrific scene would have been comic.

Brownshirts were not the only victims of this purge. Journalists, professors, and leaders of rival political parties were shot in the streets and dumped into the sewers. Elders in the Catholic church who supported Hitler only halfheartedly were also killed. Vice Chancellor Papen was arrested because Hitler did not like the comments he made about the SA’s lack of discipline; his staff and family members were killed but Papen was later released from prison.

This two day murderous rampage has been dubbed by historians as “The Night Of the Long Knives”, a German idiom meaning a time when something hideous happens in the name of vengeance.

After the killings, Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda for the NSDAP had a lot of damage control to do. It was impossible to keep the purge secret due to the large number of deaths but he persuaded the media to portray this as being necessary to cleanse homosexuality and moral depravity from the SA, as well as being a strike against an internal enemy with plans for insurrection. President Hindenburg, on his deathbed, praised Hitler for having the courage to kill off the enemies. Likewise, Blomberg, head of the Reichswehr also praised Hitler and declared the army’s undying loyalty to the dictator. The German citizens also cheered for the purge but some were only putting on a show of approval for public display while those who disapproved remained silent; the Gestapo had turned Germany into a surveillance state with eyes and ears everywhere so those who did not like these events made themselves inconspicuous to prevent retaliation from the secret police.

After those two bloody days, Adolf Hitler had taken over command of the Reichswehr. He also eliminated the socialist faction of the NSDAP but retained the name of National Socialism. Fascism was never intended to be about honesty. The socialist side of the Nazis was nothing but a sham to trick the proletariat into acting as interchangeable pieces in Hitler’s totalitarian machine. Enlistment in the SA dwindled until the organization was officially disbanded in 1938. The NSDAP would go on to become a dictatorship of the aristocracy, a new breed of oligarchs to replace the senile and aging conservative upper class of old. Hitler completed his consolidation of power when Hindenburg died, leaving the Chancellor as supreme commander of all German-speaking peoples.

The Night Of the Long Knives would not be the last time Hitler attacked and killed his own supporters. After failing miserably to conquer the Soviet Union while England and America bombed Germany, destroying much of the country in air raids, Hitler turned his fury against the German people and commanded his own Luftwaffe to bomb German power plants and radio stations in retaliation for his people not fighting hard enough for victory. Hitler couldn’t win therefore no one could win and he proceeded to turn his own country into another Valhalla’s Wake. With his wife Eva Braun, who probably died a virgin considering Hitler had no sexual interest in women, he committed a cowardly suicide in his underground bunker by shooting himself in the head.

During the postwar Nuremberg Trials, Josef Goebbels admitted that Roehm’s plot to overthrow Hitler was entirely fabricated by Goering and Himmler.

 

Daisy's Ad (Peace Little Girl)

Lyndon B Johnson presidential campaign TV commercial

directed by Tony Schwartz

(1963)

 

Book Review

The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays

by Richard Hofstadter

     In the 1950s, American historian Richard Hofstadter noticed a distinct socio-political trend which he outlined in a landmark essay. As the titular piece, it is included in The Paranoid Style in American Politics. In this essay, and in the others that accompany it, he details a particular world view; for the most part, he was right on the mark because it is easy to see how this faulty political paradigm has survived up until our present day.

The first section of this book is titled “Studies In the American Right”. It opens with “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” and this theme is carried on throughout three other essays, two about “pseudoconservatism” and one about the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign. The paranoid style he describes is more of a tendency then a pathological mental illness. It involves moral panics and conspiracy theories, underlined by the belief that American has been taken over by a secret cabal that strives to enslave Americans. This tendency is traced back to the foundation of America and the usual suspects include the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Jews, the Catholics, and the Communists You can easily extend this belief up to our present day and the lunacy about the “Deep State” that the Trump administration claimed to be fighting. Hofstadter shows how this paranoid style is rooted in Puritanism and fundamentalist evangelical Christianity. This is a black and white view of the world, without any nuance, and politics are framed as a final battle between ultimate good and ultimate evil. Sound familiar?

The essays on pseudoconservatism identify a political class in America. Its members are primarily white, Protestant, middle-class, and uneducated. They are the least politically engaged members of society because their political views are largely based on conservative Christian morality which does not, in any logical way, translate easily into financial management poilicies or legislation. So they become outsiders to the political establishment. But these people are not really conservatives because “conservative” means to adhere to tradition, to submit to authority, and to maintain the status quo. They are pseudoconservatives because they believe in overthrowing the established order and dictating their unwanted minority views on the rest of us. Manifestations of this pseudoconservatism can be seen in the rise of the anti-Semite Father Coughlin and Joseph McCarthy as well as authoritarian organizations like the John Birch Society. All of these tendencies coalesced in the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign.

Although these four essays were written at separate times with the intention of addressing separate issues, it is easy to see how they all fit together. When read alongside each other, they serve as a warning because Hofstadter saw these trends as a rising force for the future. In fact, as he states, the real significance of the Goldwater campaign was not the landslide victory that Lyndon B. Johnson achieved at his opponent’s expense, but the way in which Goldwater brought this politically ignorant and ignored class of American citizens out of the woodworks as a presence in the American mainstream. These four essays are prophetic and if Hofstadter had been around to see the Republican party from the Reagan administration to the disastrous Trump years, he would probably say little more than “I told you so”.

IN the second section, “Some Problems Of the Modern Era”, other issues are addressed. One essay demonstrates how the religious and right wing belief in Manifest Destiny made American imperialist wars against Spain in Cuba and the Philippines a possibility. The second essay explains why the Antitrust movement of the early 20^th century died out with the rise of the big corporations and the political influence they began to exert over the American people. The third essay is about William Hope Harvey and the role his political tract played in the radical Populist Party and the Free Silver movement.

This second section of essays are a strange addition to this collection. Their connection to the first section is tenuous and arbitrary. The first two essays do have some connection to the paranoid style and pseudoconservatism because the expansionists and anti-monopolists they describe relate back to those themes but you need to do some second-order thinking to see these interconnections. The section on Harvey and the Populist Party is more directly related to the first half of the book because it puts the Free Silver movement into the context of conspiracy theories and outsider political movements. As far as essays go, it is not an easy read. That is not to say it is a bad essay. Hofstadter knew what he was talking about but it is full of technical jargon about economics and finance that are not so accessible to the layman. This whole second section of the book appears to be filler and could have been entirely left out. You may even want to skip it entirely.

Hofstadter starts out by identifying a political trend in his time. Now it is 2021 and we have seen the rise of the Religious Right, Newt Gingrich, right wing talk radio cranks, climate change deniers, paranoid anti-communists, a resurgence of nativism and white supremacist movements, the Trump administration and his coterie of paramilitary cults like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, a treasonous riot in the Capitol, and a whole lot of people who believe, without evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen. A lot of these people think America will collapse if the Democrats are allowed to govern. Some of them want America to collapse. A lot of Trump supporters are people who had never voted before and have minimal knowledge as to how legislation is accomplished. They are mostly white, uneducated, middle-class, anti-intellectual, Christian, paranoid, and extremely gullible. You might feel inclined to quibble with Hofstadter over some of his details, but one thing he got right was that there is a sector of American society that represents a clear danger to our democracy. After reading The Paranoid Style in American Politics, you can almost hear this mid-century Cassandra screaming at us from the grave, “I told you so. Goddamn it, I told you you so”.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays. Vintage Books/Random House Inc., New York: 2008. 

 

Music from Oil Drums

short documentary films about making handpans

by Toshi and Peter Seeger

(1956)

 

Happy 4th of July

America, you're a nation of assholes.

 

Donald H. Rumsfeld, Defense Secretary During Iraq War, Is Dead at 88

Mr. Rumsfeld, who served four presidents, oversaw a war that many said should never have been fought. But he said the removal of Saddam Hussein had “created a more stable and secure world.”

Read the full article on The New York Times