Reuters news article, 09/25/22:
Italy’s Meloni calls for unity after election victory
Of course she does.
Of course she isn’t talking about camicie nere or castor oil, Giovinezza on loudspeakers in public squares or credere, obbedire, combattere posters on village walls. Per favore, this is 2022, not 1922.
Of course it is.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition….
1. Putin’s table being longer than Trump’s necktie.
2. Representative Boebert mistaking her Glock for a sex toy on national TV.
3. Sinema verité (Interviews with bamboozled Arizona Democrats)
4. Chickenhawk on the menu again.
5. Republican state governors offering official sanction to volunteer vigilantes and informers. The Nazi term for this was Gleichschaltung. Look it up.
The thing about people crazy the way Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are crazy is that their own exquisite craziness, as many-faceted as they imagine it to be, is never enough for them. They’re rapists by nature, not onanists.
I learned 56 years ago, sitting in my underwear on a bench in the Armed Forces Induction Center in Los Angeles, how to avoid being cast as a bit player in someone else’s psychodrama. I don’t believe that what I learned there is something that social media can teach you, but bullies certainly can.
The discrete charm of the bourgeoisie.
I‘m beginning to suspect that at the end of the day, murder/suicide will turn out to have been the quintessential American art form.
We‘ve got a ways to go yet before we find out for sure, but it’s hard to miss the fact that it’s getting the best reviews at the moment.
Today in the Guardian, a number of Bob Dylan’s fellow musicians contributed to a celebration of his 80th birthday by naming their favorite Dylan songs, and commenting on their choices.
In her comments, Gillian Welch said this:
I bought my first Dylan record – The Times They Are a-Changing [1964] – when I was 17, but to experience those early records in real time as he was releasing them must have been like being around when Shakespeare was creating new plays.
Yes. It was like that. Exactly like that. Unexpected. Miraculous.
Nur wer im Wolfstand lebt, lebt angenehm.
Years ago, when I first fell in love with a scratchy early recording of die Dreigroschenoper, I misheard the famous punchline from die Ballade vom angenehmen Leben (The Ballad of the Comfortable Life), which actually goes Nur wer im Wohlstand lebt, lebt angenehm.
The original line, which, translated into English means something like “Only he who is well-off can live a comfortable life,” came, in my misheard version, to mean something like “Only he who adopts the habits of a predator can live a comfortable life.”
When I discovered my mistake, my first take was, “God, how embarrassing,” and my second, which cheered me up a little, was “Hey, I just made my first pun in German.” (A friend of mine, who’d been partially deaf from birth, once confessed to me that he’d learned early on that when he misheard something in a social situation, being credited with a clever pun was much more to his advantage than being considered slow-witted. I now knew exactly what he’d meant.)
Brecht’s original line represented a very understandable attitude for anyone, let alone a Marxist, witnessing the horrors of the German 1920’s, but I have to wonder if he might not also have approved of my corrupted version had he been confronted with the viciousness of 21st century neoliberalism in the United States, or the schwarze Null fetishism of Wolfgang Schäuble and the CDU in the reunified Germany of today. With all due respect to the genius of the original, I’d like to think so….
*Apologies to any native German speakers who might be reading this, der Wolfstand not being a genuine German word, as far as I know, I have no idea what anyone born into the language would make of my accidental corruption of Brecht’s famous line. All I know is that it’s stuck with me all these years as somehow being even more Brechtian than the original. This is blasphemy, or at least lèse majesté, I admit, but I mean well….
Giammai di questo fondo
Non tornò vivo alcun
From these depths
No one living
Has ever returned
Dante, Inferno, XXVII, 64–65