Really good. This-- "The souring of America, as I called it last year, in which nothing gave us any satisfaction." is astute. Your house catches fire. The firefighters put it out. There's flame, water, and smoke damage. But it's out! Aren't you happy again?
The Dems and our candidates are ushering us toward a new house which is just like our old one, before the fire. Welcome home again.
Loved this. I was thinking the other day about how during the Clinton and Bush eras, there was very much a sense of a national psyche/national oversoul that we all participated in, however we felt about things. This was most salient during 9/11 its long aftermath—it felt for so many people like a personal violation or brush with disaster, a national-scale home invasion, and whether you liked Bush or hated him (and I very much hated him), there was still a sense of all being part of something at a visceral level. The Iraq war in this context felt like the response of a traumatized person to lash out blindly at perceived danger (or fall into substance abuse), and even opposing the war from the start, I felt a sense of participatory guilt in it… and then, over the course of Obama’s presidency that feeling slowly disintegrated, perhaps into national scale catatonic schizophrenia, the oversoul was gone, all atomized and alone.
What I realized reading your piece was that, at least for the community of left leaning people who care about institutions (of which I’m one), the participatory sense remained, and the past eight years were a collective and ongoing trauma for it. I liked Biden, and still do, but the sense of “finally, _someone_ is waking up and fucking fighting this nightmare” with Harris has been such a deep and visceral relief it’s hard to put into words. I think you’ve done the best job at it, in a roundabout way, of anything I’ve read so far.
there's a lot to process here. it seems very insightful, and will help to put the whole ugliness of 2015-the present day in better perspective.
that said, I'd like to revisit the concept of fear of Trump. I felt many different emotions during his term, his post-term, and in fact the many years before 2015, during some of which I lived in the Bronx. none of them would be classified by me as fear. there was certainly disgust, in large measure, complacence because MYC real estate in general, revulsion especially at the Central Park five shenanigans, mirth as the sheer absurdity of his antics, and eventually a strong loathing as his 4 years as CinC transpired.
not there is a big illiberal dose of vengeance and retribution swirling in my psyche, which certainly is detracting from the unalloyed joy I should be feeling at the turn of fortune for both parties. detracting almost solely because of its illiberality, which taints my otherwise old hippie peace love and understanding values. but whose better nature hasn't been tested and found a tad wanting during the last 8 years?
Thanks! I guess I'm not thinking fear of Trump personally, but of the movement, of Bannon and Miller and Vought and Project 2025, and not just the fact that it's fear, but that it's been a crippling fear that's prevented us from acting boldly, as we've finally started doing with Harris.
Along those lines, and again returning to the psychology angle, I think some of the most insightful political analysis of trump’s entire presidency was Josh Marshall’s repeated analogy to living on a home with domestic violence. Harris and Walz deftly balancing “yes, these guys are scary” with “but they’re also sad little creeps we should laugh at” really breaks free of that in a way Biden’s appeals to common decency and seriousness never quite did.
Well said! For me the crux of politics since 2016 (really since 2009) is how cruel and small and uncomprehending of the country's principles so many fellow citizens revealed themselves to be. Willing stooges the head bully in charge. The Biden years did not get us out of the house, and felt like a constant spinning red light in my head because his "Look, we are a decent people, so let's act like it" just wasn't getting the bums thrown out. Too many political opponents waded deep into the Hunter Cocaine Laptop Impeachment or whatever other slime they could invent, and too many political supporters were telling me they just didn't see Biden having the vigor to prosecute all the desperate tasks of restoration.
Well -- I had been thinking restoration was the word, but after reading the column above, I am thinking rejuvenation comes closer to what the nation needed. Biden could not deliver the lightning bolt to do that.
Now Harris & Walz are making it happen, and the urgency with which people are swept up in it feels great and makes me realize how desperate we all have been for it to happen. Most Americans really are decent and really do love the country and the future, after all!
this wave of boldness has been nothing short of invigorating! I felt this to a degree in 2008, and even, though I was a mere lad of 10, in 1960. why, he;;, I'm sleeping better, there's a new spring in my step (as much new spring as a 74-year-old is capable),
you're right about the general nature of the fear, though I have long thought that most of the bluster on the right is just that, and I never lose sight of the fact that these random acts of violence occur no matter what the circumstances, the political status, the economic well-being of the perpetrators. there are millions of strongly warped people among us, but only a small fraction have the wherewithal to convert that to overt action.
of course I speak from the relative comfort of white maleness in America, a fact which does not blind me to its inherent advantages, and therefore have been largely insulated from many of the situations that would rightfully promote a feeling of fear in me.
I've watched the fascists roll along, and said my piece about it plenty times over the last 4 decades. I've watched the re-enstatement of the Confederacy, the defiling of public education via 'vouchers' and tax $$ funding religious schools. I've listened to the lying liars, and their pathetic, eager acolytes. I've read the reports about the billionaires and their national suicide hobbies. I marveled at the plain, open re-emergence of the nazis and all their monstrous history celebrated. Then I moved to DC.
Here I endeavored to see these people in person on the grand scale. I attended the ritual debasements of language, refinement, judgement, truth and humanity that are the nazi rallies. I heard the insider accounts of federal agencies being ground under a jackboot for eternity.
I witnessed Jan 6 on the Mall and at the Capitol firsthand and am certain that it will never be properly avenged. This alone would be enough trauma, without all the rest of the viscera-ripping we are going thru.
Now many are pretending that it will all be better. Sorry, no. Not for me. Our long national nightmare is nowhere near over. We this nation have proved ourselves incapable of doing even the most basic act a nation MUST do to survive: put good people in control the levers of power, and defend them. The upcoming election will not change that enough. Not with the money and courts and the voting impediments (not to mention the many places where it ain't the votes but who COUNTS the votes).
I have not recovered and I am too old to start now. I fully expect the darkness will linger til long after I am gone. This place ain't the same, and it won't mend. This nation is too stupid to survive. It's baked in.
And, as you all may have guessed, I blame the parents for not giving their spawn a proper fetchins up.
Recovering from having been abused doesn't take the abuse away or change the fact that it happened, or restore the life we had before; that can't be done.
Thanks. On reflection I think that writing all that ^^^ was some self-therapificationizing. Sorry for venting all over the couch.
I despair not so much for me, but for all of us who thought we had a good thing going. The darkness is everywhere, and for a person predisposed toward light, it's disheartening and infuriating.
I agree with scholars who say that Schoenberg was wrong about the historical significance of 12-tone serial atonality. I find it innovative, not progressive (if such a thing is even possible). Here, it is deployed in perfect service to a goal. The fusion of text and setting makes a powerful case.
"Absolute" music that carries no extramusical meaning is at a disadvantage. What is it doing, and why? People seem to have no trouble when a film score uses radical techniques to complement horror, for example; but presented with an abstract work on its own they are alienated. Or so it seems to me.
Another piece that comes to mind is Penderecki's "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima." It has a title, so the YouTube comments say things like "you can hear screaming in the strings." Indeed you can, and you might well hear screams in the absence of a programmatic title. In any case, we know the composer's intent -- knowledge without which it might sound like another piece of harrowing formalism.
I've said nothing new ... What struck me on listening was the moment (6:10--) when the choir started singing the Shema Yisrael. Is the choir singing tonal music wrapped in chromatic anguish? I can't tell. Maybe their parts are glimpses of diatonicism that collapse into the horror. Schoenberg and his disciples were past masters at a sleight of hand that could find no better utility than this.
On the choir, I think that's partly a practical necessity; atonality is hard enough for one voice, too hard for a group. But that's certainly what happens. It's even better in Berg, right? in the violin concerto and the operas, where there's always tonality in the emotional atmosphere. To me Stravinsky's 12-tone music is more successfully "absolute", because it's got the dance feeling. You might like to check out the comments for this post at my original blogsite https://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2024/08/joe-did-what-post-trumpatic-stress.html#more, where Frank Wilhoit showed up, and there was a lot more talk about the music thanks to him, as well as a link to his blog, where he has been doing a series of brief posts on Schoenberg.
One last note: according to the notes I linked on Survivor From Warsaw, the chorus in Shema Yisrael is actually singing *the* row of the piece. I don't think that invalidates my point, but it just feels mind-blowing. At the same time I wonder if you can learn to hear it, the way you can hear the row in the Berg violin concerto.
Hmm ... the choir doesn't have to sing dissonant counterpoint among themselves, at least ... Now I'm biased to hear the row in the voices, not to experience tonal pareidolia.
I looked up the Berg violin concerto to confirm my remembrance. It's the one with a row mostly in thirds. (I remembered it as all thirds, but no.) I dimly remember an analysis like Wikipedia's about the "strong tonal undercurrent." I'll admit I haven't listened to it in years.
There are always moments in Schoenberg and Berg that sound to me like tonal music modulating so quickly and obliquely that a key never takes hold. Whether they intend me to hear like that is another matter. I hear the rows only at their most obvious.
(I've got no real schooling. I've just spent time listening unevenly and reading. Working at universities like UCLA brought me into contact with serious books.
I've read and forgotten a few reams about bibliography. Not music bibliography, though.)
Really fascinating frame, explains a lot of apparantly disconnected things very cleanly. Bravo. I am hoping against hope that This Time It's Different, that we're seeing a fundamental pivot like 1960 and 1980 and (in its own ugly way) 2000. We're overdue, so fingers crossed.
You had me at Nachträglichkeit! But seriously: I am usually adverse, or at least somewhat skeptical, of applications of psychoanalytic idea to groups but this really rings true for me. Beautifully done.
I've been thinking a lot why January 2020 didn't feel like a sea change in the way that the Harris-Walz moment seems to be. Of course that is connected to the pandemic and Jan 6 and all the other crises of the period. And to borrow from your formulation, there was and is certainly a post-traumatic effect at work here. And one could add that Biden, despite his successes in office, failed to be a leader who could inspire hope. But I also think other historical factors are at work here: the Trump act, perfected in 2015-16, seems very old now because it is, and he is. But also, as Rick Perlstein pointed out in his piece in American Prospect today, Harris is a different kind of Democrat. The party suddenly seems free (or at least freer) of the shackles that have prevented other candidates (Kerry, Gore, Dukakis, etc.) from addressing issues head on. I attribute this to Bernie and others like AOC who aren't afraid to address inequality or articulate progressive positions on the national stage.
Biden did inspire me, of course, with the post-neoliberal policy vision that he couldn't express but did implement, but I wasn't able to communicate it myself, or not very far, and it's probably not good campaign material. But he also chose Harris, a move a lot of people thought at the time was crass or pandering and now looks really brilliant.
Right? Watching the last month, and thinking of the hundreds and hundreds of articles about how Harris is awkward, hapless, uninspiring, etc, I think one of two things must be true. Either political insider journalism is mostly bullshit, or there’s a hundred pages of Latin on vellum somewhere with Kamala Devi Harris signed in blood at the end. And since I don’t think it’s that easy to sell your soul, I’m going with the former.
Really good. This-- "The souring of America, as I called it last year, in which nothing gave us any satisfaction." is astute. Your house catches fire. The firefighters put it out. There's flame, water, and smoke damage. But it's out! Aren't you happy again?
The Dems and our candidates are ushering us toward a new house which is just like our old one, before the fire. Welcome home again.
Loved this. I was thinking the other day about how during the Clinton and Bush eras, there was very much a sense of a national psyche/national oversoul that we all participated in, however we felt about things. This was most salient during 9/11 its long aftermath—it felt for so many people like a personal violation or brush with disaster, a national-scale home invasion, and whether you liked Bush or hated him (and I very much hated him), there was still a sense of all being part of something at a visceral level. The Iraq war in this context felt like the response of a traumatized person to lash out blindly at perceived danger (or fall into substance abuse), and even opposing the war from the start, I felt a sense of participatory guilt in it… and then, over the course of Obama’s presidency that feeling slowly disintegrated, perhaps into national scale catatonic schizophrenia, the oversoul was gone, all atomized and alone.
What I realized reading your piece was that, at least for the community of left leaning people who care about institutions (of which I’m one), the participatory sense remained, and the past eight years were a collective and ongoing trauma for it. I liked Biden, and still do, but the sense of “finally, _someone_ is waking up and fucking fighting this nightmare” with Harris has been such a deep and visceral relief it’s hard to put into words. I think you’ve done the best job at it, in a roundabout way, of anything I’ve read so far.
Just brilliant. Thank you.
there's a lot to process here. it seems very insightful, and will help to put the whole ugliness of 2015-the present day in better perspective.
that said, I'd like to revisit the concept of fear of Trump. I felt many different emotions during his term, his post-term, and in fact the many years before 2015, during some of which I lived in the Bronx. none of them would be classified by me as fear. there was certainly disgust, in large measure, complacence because MYC real estate in general, revulsion especially at the Central Park five shenanigans, mirth as the sheer absurdity of his antics, and eventually a strong loathing as his 4 years as CinC transpired.
not there is a big illiberal dose of vengeance and retribution swirling in my psyche, which certainly is detracting from the unalloyed joy I should be feeling at the turn of fortune for both parties. detracting almost solely because of its illiberality, which taints my otherwise old hippie peace love and understanding values. but whose better nature hasn't been tested and found a tad wanting during the last 8 years?
Thanks! I guess I'm not thinking fear of Trump personally, but of the movement, of Bannon and Miller and Vought and Project 2025, and not just the fact that it's fear, but that it's been a crippling fear that's prevented us from acting boldly, as we've finally started doing with Harris.
Along those lines, and again returning to the psychology angle, I think some of the most insightful political analysis of trump’s entire presidency was Josh Marshall’s repeated analogy to living on a home with domestic violence. Harris and Walz deftly balancing “yes, these guys are scary” with “but they’re also sad little creeps we should laugh at” really breaks free of that in a way Biden’s appeals to common decency and seriousness never quite did.
Well said! For me the crux of politics since 2016 (really since 2009) is how cruel and small and uncomprehending of the country's principles so many fellow citizens revealed themselves to be. Willing stooges the head bully in charge. The Biden years did not get us out of the house, and felt like a constant spinning red light in my head because his "Look, we are a decent people, so let's act like it" just wasn't getting the bums thrown out. Too many political opponents waded deep into the Hunter Cocaine Laptop Impeachment or whatever other slime they could invent, and too many political supporters were telling me they just didn't see Biden having the vigor to prosecute all the desperate tasks of restoration.
Well -- I had been thinking restoration was the word, but after reading the column above, I am thinking rejuvenation comes closer to what the nation needed. Biden could not deliver the lightning bolt to do that.
Now Harris & Walz are making it happen, and the urgency with which people are swept up in it feels great and makes me realize how desperate we all have been for it to happen. Most Americans really are decent and really do love the country and the future, after all!
That 'most' is doing one big ol' lift.
this wave of boldness has been nothing short of invigorating! I felt this to a degree in 2008, and even, though I was a mere lad of 10, in 1960. why, he;;, I'm sleeping better, there's a new spring in my step (as much new spring as a 74-year-old is capable),
you're right about the general nature of the fear, though I have long thought that most of the bluster on the right is just that, and I never lose sight of the fact that these random acts of violence occur no matter what the circumstances, the political status, the economic well-being of the perpetrators. there are millions of strongly warped people among us, but only a small fraction have the wherewithal to convert that to overt action.
of course I speak from the relative comfort of white maleness in America, a fact which does not blind me to its inherent advantages, and therefore have been largely insulated from many of the situations that would rightfully promote a feeling of fear in me.
I really appreciate this post.
But sorry, outlier, I.
I've watched the fascists roll along, and said my piece about it plenty times over the last 4 decades. I've watched the re-enstatement of the Confederacy, the defiling of public education via 'vouchers' and tax $$ funding religious schools. I've listened to the lying liars, and their pathetic, eager acolytes. I've read the reports about the billionaires and their national suicide hobbies. I marveled at the plain, open re-emergence of the nazis and all their monstrous history celebrated. Then I moved to DC.
Here I endeavored to see these people in person on the grand scale. I attended the ritual debasements of language, refinement, judgement, truth and humanity that are the nazi rallies. I heard the insider accounts of federal agencies being ground under a jackboot for eternity.
I witnessed Jan 6 on the Mall and at the Capitol firsthand and am certain that it will never be properly avenged. This alone would be enough trauma, without all the rest of the viscera-ripping we are going thru.
Now many are pretending that it will all be better. Sorry, no. Not for me. Our long national nightmare is nowhere near over. We this nation have proved ourselves incapable of doing even the most basic act a nation MUST do to survive: put good people in control the levers of power, and defend them. The upcoming election will not change that enough. Not with the money and courts and the voting impediments (not to mention the many places where it ain't the votes but who COUNTS the votes).
I have not recovered and I am too old to start now. I fully expect the darkness will linger til long after I am gone. This place ain't the same, and it won't mend. This nation is too stupid to survive. It's baked in.
And, as you all may have guessed, I blame the parents for not giving their spawn a proper fetchins up.
Recovering from having been abused doesn't take the abuse away or change the fact that it happened, or restore the life we had before; that can't be done.
Thanks. On reflection I think that writing all that ^^^ was some self-therapificationizing. Sorry for venting all over the couch.
I despair not so much for me, but for all of us who thought we had a good thing going. The darkness is everywhere, and for a person predisposed toward light, it's disheartening and infuriating.
Not the worst thing you can do with a couch if you know what I mean
Yeah. I winced after I typed 'couch', then decided I am nothing if not up to date. Which reminds me – time to reclaim the divan (it's in recovery).
I agree with scholars who say that Schoenberg was wrong about the historical significance of 12-tone serial atonality. I find it innovative, not progressive (if such a thing is even possible). Here, it is deployed in perfect service to a goal. The fusion of text and setting makes a powerful case.
"Absolute" music that carries no extramusical meaning is at a disadvantage. What is it doing, and why? People seem to have no trouble when a film score uses radical techniques to complement horror, for example; but presented with an abstract work on its own they are alienated. Or so it seems to me.
Another piece that comes to mind is Penderecki's "Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima." It has a title, so the YouTube comments say things like "you can hear screaming in the strings." Indeed you can, and you might well hear screams in the absence of a programmatic title. In any case, we know the composer's intent -- knowledge without which it might sound like another piece of harrowing formalism.
I've said nothing new ... What struck me on listening was the moment (6:10--) when the choir started singing the Shema Yisrael. Is the choir singing tonal music wrapped in chromatic anguish? I can't tell. Maybe their parts are glimpses of diatonicism that collapse into the horror. Schoenberg and his disciples were past masters at a sleight of hand that could find no better utility than this.
On the choir, I think that's partly a practical necessity; atonality is hard enough for one voice, too hard for a group. But that's certainly what happens. It's even better in Berg, right? in the violin concerto and the operas, where there's always tonality in the emotional atmosphere. To me Stravinsky's 12-tone music is more successfully "absolute", because it's got the dance feeling. You might like to check out the comments for this post at my original blogsite https://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2024/08/joe-did-what-post-trumpatic-stress.html#more, where Frank Wilhoit showed up, and there was a lot more talk about the music thanks to him, as well as a link to his blog, where he has been doing a series of brief posts on Schoenberg.
Several great points here. Thanks for the reply, and the recommendation.
One last note: according to the notes I linked on Survivor From Warsaw, the chorus in Shema Yisrael is actually singing *the* row of the piece. I don't think that invalidates my point, but it just feels mind-blowing. At the same time I wonder if you can learn to hear it, the way you can hear the row in the Berg violin concerto.
Hmm ... the choir doesn't have to sing dissonant counterpoint among themselves, at least ... Now I'm biased to hear the row in the voices, not to experience tonal pareidolia.
I looked up the Berg violin concerto to confirm my remembrance. It's the one with a row mostly in thirds. (I remembered it as all thirds, but no.) I dimly remember an analysis like Wikipedia's about the "strong tonal undercurrent." I'll admit I haven't listened to it in years.
There are always moments in Schoenberg and Berg that sound to me like tonal music modulating so quickly and obliquely that a key never takes hold. Whether they intend me to hear like that is another matter. I hear the rows only at their most obvious.
(I've got no real schooling. I've just spent time listening unevenly and reading. Working at universities like UCLA brought me into contact with serious books.
I've read and forgotten a few reams about bibliography. Not music bibliography, though.)
Really fascinating frame, explains a lot of apparantly disconnected things very cleanly. Bravo. I am hoping against hope that This Time It's Different, that we're seeing a fundamental pivot like 1960 and 1980 and (in its own ugly way) 2000. We're overdue, so fingers crossed.
You had me at Nachträglichkeit! But seriously: I am usually adverse, or at least somewhat skeptical, of applications of psychoanalytic idea to groups but this really rings true for me. Beautifully done.
Right, it's weird for me as well. That's why I dug up the Schoenberg thing--I needed to remember why on earth I started thinking about this?
I've been thinking a lot why January 2020 didn't feel like a sea change in the way that the Harris-Walz moment seems to be. Of course that is connected to the pandemic and Jan 6 and all the other crises of the period. And to borrow from your formulation, there was and is certainly a post-traumatic effect at work here. And one could add that Biden, despite his successes in office, failed to be a leader who could inspire hope. But I also think other historical factors are at work here: the Trump act, perfected in 2015-16, seems very old now because it is, and he is. But also, as Rick Perlstein pointed out in his piece in American Prospect today, Harris is a different kind of Democrat. The party suddenly seems free (or at least freer) of the shackles that have prevented other candidates (Kerry, Gore, Dukakis, etc.) from addressing issues head on. I attribute this to Bernie and others like AOC who aren't afraid to address inequality or articulate progressive positions on the national stage.
Biden did inspire me, of course, with the post-neoliberal policy vision that he couldn't express but did implement, but I wasn't able to communicate it myself, or not very far, and it's probably not good campaign material. But he also chose Harris, a move a lot of people thought at the time was crass or pandering and now looks really brilliant.
Yes, brilliant! Who would have thought that after the relentless media coverage of her “flopping” as VP
Right? Watching the last month, and thinking of the hundreds and hundreds of articles about how Harris is awkward, hapless, uninspiring, etc, I think one of two things must be true. Either political insider journalism is mostly bullshit, or there’s a hundred pages of Latin on vellum somewhere with Kamala Devi Harris signed in blood at the end. And since I don’t think it’s that easy to sell your soul, I’m going with the former.