Farces All the Way Back

"I just had to laugh/I saw the photograph"

The always worth reading Greg Olear had a fine post up working critically through some of the classic definitions of fascism and coming to his own kind of diagnostic approach that can be applied to the ongoing emergency—which I might want to get back to at some point. But the thing that has me triggered at the moment is a minor quibble with a point that isn't even from Olear, but rather from a quotation he offers of Umberto Eco, the great semiotician, feuilletoniste, and novelist, in his own 1995 essay on "Ur-Fascism":

Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian fascism was the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing — far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be.

I would maintain that the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country was that of Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, the first president of the Second French Republic, who got himself elected following the decidedly leftist Revolution of 1848, having made something of a leftist name for himself (as the author of a treatise calling for the "extinction of poverty" and the instigator of a number of anti-royalist coup attempts against the "roi citoyen" Louis Philippe), under the political aegis of his dead but still revolutionary uncle Napoléon, Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1814 or 1815, depending how you count; but in his presidential campaign quickly aligned himself against liberals, socialists, and radicals with the rightmost faction, of Adophe Thiers ("who believed he could be the most easily controlled," sound familiar?) and Victor Hugo, not yet the heroically progressive author of Les Misérables; and after the election, ordered an expeditionary force sent by the National Assembly to Rome to support the republicans under Mazzini and Garibaldi, to support the Pope instead.

And then, in 1852, about to be term-limited out of office by the Second Republic constitution, staged his own auto-golpe, naming himself Emperor Napoléon III (on the silly claim that the first Napoléon's son, the Duc de Reichstadt, had in fact been the Emperor Napoléon II), prompting Hugo to flee into exile in the Channel Islands (first Jersey, then Guernsey), and to refer thereafter to the newly minted Emperor as Napoléon the Little, and the occasion for Karl Marx's famous maxim according to which history always repeats itself, first time as tragedy (with the first Napoléon) and second time ( with the third) as farce.

I had a dream about this once, I'm not kidding, which I've never figured out a way to use, though it's maybe the best dream I've ever had from a literary point of view: not a dramatic dream about things happening, but a narrative dream about telling a joke, which I was either telling or listening to, which I now remember something like this:

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It's actually 1989, as the Communist empire in Central Europe is falling to pieces, and God wakes up one morning and says to his faithful attendant Gabriel, "Hey, let's spend the afternoon in Hell! We'll have a beer with Professor Marx, and twit him over the collapse of his stupid theory!" Because in Heaven there is no beer, as you know, a huge variety of wines and spirits, almost anything you can imagine, but there's this one ridiculous rule. So they climb into the funicular, and disembark in the Città Dolente, and head over to the main research library reading room, where they find Karl Marx buried, as they expected, in a pile of forbidding-looking books, and scribbling notes.

"Hey, Marx!" says God, "How're they hanging? How do you feel? You following the news? How do you feel about all your theories getting blown up in Central Europe?" "Hmm," says Marx, "I don't know about that. And I still don't believe in you." But he willingly comes out with them to the pub.

"What are you trying to say?" says God, as the server lays out the drinks. "Communists don't even exist any more!" "Well," says Marx, "I really don't think I got that much wrong?"

"You can't be serious!" says God. "Well," says Marx, "I did get some things wrong, no doubt."

"You're confessing!" says God. "For example?"

"You know that aphorism of mine about history repeating itself?"

"Of course! First time as tragedy, second time as farce! Best thing you ever wrote! I love that quote!"

"I'm no longer so sure," says Marx. "I think it's infected with sentimentality. For instance, we think of Napoleon the Big as a tragedy, because of all the corpses, but when you look at it structurally, it was a farce, mistaken identities and ridiculous coincidences—the Man of Destiny, from the fact that he happened to be on hand as the only 'little corporal' available to manage the siege of royalist-held Toulon on the south coast in 1793 as the British Royal Navy watched from offshore for the chance that never came, to the hemorrhoids or dysuria that compromised his judgment at Waterloo, never really know what was going on. He's bumbling blind through his career like Mr. Magoo, even as he continues to believe he's the greatest genius in history. The Napoleonic Code is great, but he didn't write any of it. He just barked the orders and then gave himself the credit. It was basically a farce from start to finish. In fact, if my hypothesis is correct, it's farces all the way back."

No, the original dream wasn't packed that intensely, it's taken a lot of editorial work to get it where I wanted it to go.

I was reminded of it the other day, anyhow, with reference to the dumb short-term story (dumb though horrific) of the guy from Las Vegas who decided he was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy inflicted in high school (which may well be true, though we won't know until the autopsy results are out) but blamed the National Football League. He was able to walk unobstructed across a wide plaza, openly carrying his big semiautomatic rifle, into the building where NFL has its New York headquarters, at 345 Park Avenue, with the idea of killing somebody from there as a way of, I don't know, publicizing his plight, or a form of suicide terror, shot a bunch of people in the lobby, and took an elevator upstairs to shoot somemore, only got in the wrong elevator bank and ended up on the wrong floor, not in the NFL offices but those of Rudin Management, a Manhattan real estate management firm. So he shot one more innocent victim there, and then himself. Counting himself, he killed five people altogether, including a police officer, but none of them from NFL. Curiously, he did shoot one NFL employee, I think a woman who was in the lobby, but he couldn't have known that, and in any case she managed to take cover, and survived. Apparently there's video of him courteously letting another woman get out of the elevator before he gets into it for his last futile action.

That is, it's really terrible, but at the same time has a farcical structure; because his mission was a total failure. Nothing he did, except killing himself, was according to plan. He made a complete fool of himself. You feel guilty laughing, but it's laughable. That's what Marx meant about Napoleon, and that's basically how I feel about our trio of farcical presidents, Reagan, Bush II, and Trump. Even as they kill, they leave you laughing, because they're so bad at what they do, and yet do it with such sublime, if irritable, confidence—again, like Mr. Magoo. With Trump, it's inflated to the completely Ubu-sized monstrous, but it's still funny, perhaps all the funnier just for that.

Dr. Krugman had something important to say on this the other day, in his terrific post on the incompetence of Stephen Moore, the Heritage Foundation economist Trump called on to provide some lies on the state of the economy after the upsetting July jobs report and the firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for her failure, as he saw it, to make him look good:

I don’t mean that Moore is extremely right-wing, although of course he is. I don’t even mean that he’s a dishonest hack, although again of course he is. I mean that even among dishonest right-wing hacks Moore stands out for his pathological inability to get numbers and facts right.

(Read the piece for the receipts on this.)

Krugman proposes an explanation for the incompetence of Trump's hires drawn from Hannah Arendt's writing on totalitarianism—it's to do with loyalty:

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

And why is he even bothering to write about such a stupid thing?

The answer is that Trump/Moore was a symptom of a deep sickness in our body politic. And I have no idea when or how we’ll recover.

And that, as Cronkite used to say, is the way it is.