Sunday, February 16, 2020

A Tacitean Pastiche

The President’s man, service notwithstanding, faces punishment to serve the people’s, if not his own, tastes.  His power demanded leniency.  Despite protests, he seeks to shrink the price of his ally’s crime. Stone’s offense against some vulgar sense of propriety or simple taste matters not to a President who knows well on which side his bead was buttered: he could be loyal, especially to spite his enemies.

Now the Attorney General intervenes, claiming that the President’s taste plays no part. The press complains; ordinary people fail to notice or care. The President’s will is a fait accompli.  He had he found in William Barr a man uniquely suited, if not by nature, at least by ambition, to fulfill his wishes.

Barr, whose motives were hidden from none but himself, sought nothing if not to increase the President’s powers, no matter the President. For him, office mattered, not the man.  But, however inscrutable because unpredictable, the President in that moment, at least, had the better of him: Barr might try to please his master, but the President could always pardon Stone. Therefore, President kept Barr’s impotent subordination, while holding in reserve an ultimate capacity to decide. Nor was the Republican majority of the Senate willing to do more than preserve office at the price of subordination. If anything were certain, it was the threat of retaliation, while loyalty increased the opportunity for obscurity. Ultimately, senators preferred the President’s patronage to mere votes.


Media asked Barr to call for the President's restraint. The latter’s reserve matched Barr’s foresight.  If the President refrained from compliance, at least, one could see the trajectory. Barr, however, seemed ignorant of the foundation he set for the future: while he imagined security might come, he never considered the cost. Thus did a President, obscure for all the clarity of his signs, coopt an officer devoted to an arguably higher cause and lay the base of his family’s ultimate and foreseeable demise. 

Saturday, December 7, 2019

Canasta at Phil's

Thursday was Canasta at Phil’s. Thursday was the normal day, but this particular Thursday was special because Leni said that she’d come.  In the old days, say, fifteen or twenty years ago, someone, somewhere would have made a big deal about Thorstag, uttering some Teutonic blather to stir the ignorant faithful, and to give everyone a mystic sense that they were all rowing in the same direction.  But that was when everyone was green in the salad days of innocent youth; now Phil lived a humbler life, merely a Baltimore cabby, entertaining with slender means the few who, like him, had managed to reinvent themselves following the great curtain call.  Well, what could be said?  The Reich was a bit of a venture, a gamble, a throw of the dice, but it had failed, and so, like any failed entrepreneur, Phil, his luck out, had moved on to greener pastures.

He had been in the states for two years; the journey hadn’t been easy.  There were the two months in Bolivia with the insufferable Eichmann – a man who never really knew his place and always spoke in meaningless clichés.   “Winged words”!  Did he really talk like that?  Phil had never even heard of Homer till Joe introduced him.  But it was enough to clue him in to Eichmann’s banalities when they did appear.  And there was the irritating fact that Eichmann seemed nearly incapable of accommodating a vegetarian’s most simple needs. He was actually surprised, indeed, nearly offended, to learn, for example, that fish were not virtually the same thing as plants in the vegetarian scheme of things.  Demonstrating that incontrovertible fact by itself was a tedious two-day discussion that, frankly, never would have occurred at Berchtesgaden.  The man was also utterly humorless, and, despite having been an officer, had never learned how to use his silverware properly, insisting that the spoon was the fork’s superior in every way.  Phil could hardly suffer the two months in Bolivia under such intolerable conditions, his easy-going nature notwithstanding.

Before Bolivia, there was a brief interlude in Hungary where Phil had to pass himself off as a local courtesan of high rank.  Actually, he viewed this whole charade as a kind of chef d’oeuvre, as it really had given him scope for the artistic, one might say, bohemian, inclinations that were native to his personality.  Indeed, it goes without saying, towards the end, after weeks in the Berlin Bunker, he’d have said “yes” to just about anything.  Eva had gone off and killed her self, which gave a rather gloomy cast to an otherwise promising Springtime.  Granted she did this at his suggestion, but still she’d gone and left him in what he later reinterpreted as one in a series of betrayals.  Then Blondi, the dog, suddenly, though not inexplicably, died, and so Phil found himself decidedly at a loose end.  And, when the Russians finally closed in, his closest advisors, the remaining flower of his Reich’s intelligentsia and its assorted parasites, came up with an idea for how he might just survive; well, survive he did.

It was ingenious.  An SS Feldmarshal proposed that he escape as a Hungarian working girl, and the ridiculousness of that suggestion so tickled Phil that he felt it had to work, truth always being stranger than fiction.  So he submitted to a crack disguise artist, who’d honed his talents serving as Ernst Roehm’s faithful handyman, but decisively and irrevocably drew the line at his trademark, the prized moustache, which he swore to surrender under no circumstance whatsoever.  A well-placed mole was proposed by a voluptuary, who, as a senior officer and hero of the submarine fleet, was a confirmed expert in such matters.   Vigorous debate did ensue among the gathered experts, but the proposal was ultimately rejected in the face of convincing logistical arguments.  Traudl offered a brooch, and Magda was kind enough to provide shoes and a dress that she figured she wouldn’t need anyway: her taste was legendary, so Phil jumped at that opportunity.  A spontaneous fashion show ensued, in which Phil put the whole scheme to the test; “delicious” escaped the mouths of not a few on-lookers, confirming that the whole apparatus was a smashing success.  And so, having secreted on his person a few key mementos to keep the Teutonic flame alive, he slipped into Budapest, posing, more or less, as a mustachioed whore.  Oddly enough, no questions were asked, practically no propositions made, which suited Phil just fine.  In point of fact, it had been another of Eva’s failures that she’d not thoroughly skilled Phil in the necessary arts.  Fate does sometimes smile upon the fallen.

At any rate, the border-crossings might have been the trickiest, if not for the collective ingenuity gathered in that fabled bunker.  After all, he couldn’t have a passport imprinted with the name Adolph Hitler; that much he knew and declared before his expert staff even raised the matter.  Therefore, the Reich’s great surviving brains, the heirs to Hans Delbrück, carefully deliberated on the matter.  Some suggested Adolfo Sanchez.  Others, Hans Hitler.  Phil himself, intuiting that something far subtler was required, hit upon Phil.   If he were to travel West, he argued, Phil Hitler would be the most unremarkable and versatile of names, while the alternative, Adolfo Sanchez, posed a variety of profound challenges, not the least of which being the fact that he could scarcely pronounce the name with any confidence, let alone conviction, so much did it imply an innate swarthiness; Phil seemed reassuringly bland by a long ways.  As for Hans, he knew instinctively that proclaiming his German heritage would pose problems in his future home, wherever that might be.  Well, that was his considered opinion based on a familiarity with the greater world that actually didn’t embrace much beyond Germany or bit of France and maybe Rome.  But for years he’d managed to convince himself, and those around him, that such provinciality was a mark of purity, a gateway to cultural integrity unappreciated by Junker eggheads.  He was unsullied, he felt, by their “decadence”, a word imparted to him by his cultural lodestars, Joe and Al, that would, like an infection, inexorably come from contact with more cosmopolitan climes and places.

The escape itself wasn’t easy.  There’d been the few weeks in Budapest where, despite being a committed vegetarian, he was forced to eat goulash to keep up appearances and avoid penetrating questions.  Although the truth of his disguise had not been fully tested there, he did have to fend off the drunken proposition of an obscure count, who haled from the Banat.  And, it must be admitted, there was a blinking moment of uncertainty during baccarat, when Phil actually weighed the possibility of life in Hungary as well as the question of how he might keep his true state from this ardent suitor, who seemed to judge the cherished mustache as an exciting promise of hirsute wonders to behold after the wedding, but sober minds prevailed, diverting the count from further pursuit of the matter: he was pitched headlong off the Chain Bridge by a couple of loyalists who’d accompanied Phil from Berlin, posing, one, as chauffer cum bodyguard, the other as a desperately devoted and obsessively protective fraternal twin.  Actually, once time and space allowed Phil a moment of quiet reflection, he concluded on his own that throwing his lot in with the count never could have worked, as he deeply resented it whenever the provincial aristocrat affectionately tweaked the mustache: no amount of flattery, which Phil did indeed find persuasive, could have overcome that irritation in the long run.  His two companions had done him a favor, he later felt.  At any rate, after Berlin, after Budapest, after La Paz, after Havana, and after a dozen even more abhorrent and darkened places in between, he finally landed in Baltimore.

Phil’s decision to emigrate to the United States after the war, while not immediately approved by all who had been invited to offer an opinion, turned out in hindsight to have been a stroke of true genius.  The Americans, after all, were at the time laundering former Nazis with abandon, Herr Dr. Werner being only the best known.  Obviously, Phil never planned to announce himself at the border as a former Nazi, but, at least, it could be said that a season of renewal, occasioned by a new political calculus, was at hand.  Well, in the end, the communists had done some good, an irony Phil would occasionally recall with a chuckle when among good friends.  So seeing off his two traveling companions with the understanding that, although, perhaps, they’d meet again in the U.S., each going his own way might be safest, he boarded the S.S. Tasmania, a Cuban tramp steamer bound for Baltimore, and looked towards the happy end of his peregrinations.  That was maybe two years ago. 

Life in Baltimore, or rather his new manner of living, required adjustment.  Weak in English, particularly when German could shed no light on the matter, he quite naturally was drawn to the Germanic communities already occupying various pockets around town.   Having cast off Magda’s dress and reasserted his native masculinity, Phil had to admit mixed feelings of perplexity and gratitude at never having been recognized for who he actually was.  Of course, he partly attributed that to the genius of his disguise, but the changes in his appearance and habit, necessitated by his wanderings, did have their cost.  For example, though once so prominent a vegetarian and lover of animals that he’d appeared in the now defunct periodical, Das Freitier, he’d since become, as the price of his own freedom, an ostentatious omnivore wherever he traveled; indeed, once in Baltimore, he always made a point of asking specifically for scrapple, or Skrapfel, as he pronounced it.  What’s more, while previously he’d avoided alcohol, now he drank his National Bohemian, or “Nazi Bau,” as he couldn’t help but pronounce it, with real brio, the name itself fostering within him a welcome sense of nostalgia.  As to his appearance, wearing an old pair of woolen trousers, some beat up GI-issue Army boots, and one or two shirts picked up at a second-hand store, was enough to keep him nondescript.  Thus, changed, repackaged, and equipped with an endearingly forceful pidgin fashioned from German and English – people often wondered if a slight “l” was heard whenever he said “Hi” – he managed, after a brief stint rolling cigars in a little atelier near the B & O roundhouse, to land a job as a cabbie. He lived near the synagogue in a flat on Eutaw Street, carved out of one of those grand buildings that had been fractionated into an endless series of apartments during the war.  And he gathered around himself a few fragments of the past, admiring irredentists who remained true to the old project despite more recent setbacks.  There was Franz Liebkind, an ex-sergeant who, somehow slipping through the cracks of officialdom, basically moved straight to Butcher’s Hill from a prisoner-of-war camp in rural Virginia, where he’d become an accomplished darner of socks.  He actually fancied himself a writer, but reality in Baltimore compelled him to earn his bread polishing buttons for a Slovakian tailor and tending his landlord’s pigeons.  There was a friend from the old days: Hesse.  Phil had always thought him a bit of a kook, especially once he crashed an airplane into the Scottish countryside.  But that was water under the bridge.  It was nice to have a familiar face on hand, or, at least, someone who claimed to be.  And Hesse, who was making his way in a Frisian bakery located on the city’s fringe, could usually be counted on to arrive for canasta with a nice tort or strudel.  There, of course, were others.  Mostly survivors from the Reich’s demimonde: a cashiered postal worker, a retired sewerman, a provincial baggage handler from outside Vienna who had started out laying crossties during the surge in demand before working his way up the ranks of railway workers.  At any rate, whatever they lacked in formal status, they made up for in spirit and rarity, and Phil more or less appreciated their company whenever they turned up: after all, they all knew the Horst Wessel Lied.  Nevertheless, there were sometimes those darker moments, when he would ruefully confess that the new life offered comparatively little scope for his natural talents.  Plain drudgery crowded him.

He was always fighting with neighbors.  Often, he would return from a late evening spent prowling the city for fares.  His mustard-stained undershirt locked in a struggle with his paunch, he would sink into the ratty, overstuffed chair that dominated the flat’s living room, clutching a Nazi Bau, and let the crank phonograph play the one or two Wagner 78s still in his possession, only to be interrupted, at the very cusp of reverie by furious pounding and shouting from the neighbor, demanding that he turn off that music at such an hour.  The back and forth would ensue, the neighbors complaining about his selfish neglect of their peace and quiet, Phil, in his pidgin, saying something about Lebensraum.  Exhaustion usually helped settle matters, but tension had been part of the building’s culture ever since Phil’s arrival. It was difficult to adjust: to go from an old time and place where he could do as he wished, to a new time and place that called for give and take from a man who just couldn’t give, was a heavy burden.  Phil managed humble only as a kind of triumph of the will.  He had to be, or strive to be, an ascetic in this new world.  There was one ray of light.  In truth, it was actually his new calling as cab driver that gave him scope for his commanding ways.

In the cab, Phil was master of his domain.  It is true that a fare-paying passenger would name the destination, but the route was Phil’s. He could even refuse a fare.  What pleasure that was.  Once he pulled up on Charles Street to pick up some poor women who was burdened with groceries.  She opened the door; he took an immediate dislike to her vaguely Slavic accent and sped off, satisfied that he was, in some sense, still at it.  The Führerprinzip was not completely gone!  There were times when his shaky English would overcome his desire to pick up a passenger.  Taking someone to a place like the Shot Tower never posed a problem, of course, even if he thought it was Schattentur.  But there was, for example, the passenger he’d picked up at Penn Station who wanted to go to “Fader’s”, the cigar store on Calvert.  “Vetters?” asked Phil, a little puzzled, as he thought he’d heard what sounded like the German for cousin.  The man emptily confirmed “Fader’s” with an almost disdainful flick of the head.  “Who is dis nobody to demand I know where lif dis cousin,” Phil thought to himself.   In an instant, he saw the slight, clearly.  That was enough; he flashed his ruby anger, transformed like a roused octopus, hair disheveled.  There was a contentious, but brief exchange.  Phil cast the would-be migrant from the car with an authoritative and weighty gesture and sped off in a grey cloud of asphalt, exhaust, rubber.  Although his daily existence was now humble and distastefully contingent on others, he had managed to retain, in this sense, a satisfying mastery over this one domain.  The only other echo of his fabulous past, when the world nearly floated upon his fingertips before bouncing from his grasp, was supplied by those regular, mirthful nights playing canasta, when the few husks of Nazi empire who’d landed in America gathered round for cards, conversation, and camaraderie.

When those Thursdays came round, he would buy pretzels and beer for the guests.  He would select one of the better bottles of bad schnapps that he had come to favor by dint of circumstance.  The card table would be set up and some creaking chairs and an uncertain stepstool drawn from the kitchen’s stock would be placed round, along with his dilapidated, overstuffed chair, which in addition to fitting him well, emphasized his superior status.  A lamp would be brought from the bedroom to complement the bulb dangling from the ceiling.  Sometimes he might offer some cabbage too, or, if he’d been tipped well, a few sausages.  Thus had he built himself into quite the host.  Everyone usually came in clothing that was slightly above what they’d wear to work: fewer patches.  Newish shoe laces.  The former sewerman would smoke cheroots, which Phil tolerated as the price of memory.  And so they would meet regularly to eat, drink, and be merry.  For this particular Thursday, however, in light of the honored guest, Phil went all out.  Leni was a great artist, like him and maybe Speer.  She would bring glamor and class to their otherwise dour Kaffeeklatsch.  He could hardly wait, and he’d ordered everyone to dress appropriately, although he granted that the weather was too inclement for Lederhosen; Homburgs were permitted to any who could afford one.

Phil had cut his day short to prepare, even driving past an obviously well-heeled man in Charles Village as he vainly attempted to hale his cab.  But Phil had no time.  Everything had to be just right.  The pretzels, a bottle of the best second-rate schnapps he could find, the cabbage, some liverwurst, a wedge of cheese.  And he had to pick up his best pair of shoes from the cobbler who did what he could with the materials at hand to resuscitate leather that had given up the ghost years ago.  All the driving around took time, and then he had to prepare the flat.  He dusted and scrubbed and smoothed what was beyond smoothing.  And then, as the time for the arrival of the regular guests drew near, he entered the inner sanctum of his bedroom, in which he’d hidden, inside a tatty Bostonian shoebox rescued from a Roland Park trashcan and pressed into service as a kind of reliquary of the Reich, the few Nazi ostraka that had survived the journey with him to Baltimore.  There was a party membership card, sadly, not his own.  A scratched Swastika lapel pin, the very one he customarily wore for sits with his photographer.  A cake of guest soap from the Wolf’s Lair.  An SS sock in mint condition.  An uneaten candy. And an IOU from that deadbeat, Himmler, who’d borrowed 50 Reichsmarks for lunch in Wannsee during the summer of 1940.  All these precious objects bore about them the spirit of what had been, and normally they were produced only on special occasions, such as Phil’s birthday, or when he felt particularly low.  Their trivial nature was transubstantiated by a holy nimbus of fond and expectant memory surrounding them.  The box positively glowed from its contents, and Phil reverently withdrew each one, carefully recalling his day in the sun, now eclipsed by history.  Leni’s arrival called for a display of the holy bits.  Like a mystagogue, Phil would reveal them to the initiates at an appropriate moment, for their shock, wonder, and awe.

The sacred remains carefully placed upon the fireplace mantel opposite the card table, Phil turned his attention to final preparations.  The careful arrangement of the furniture.  The cards, from Argentina, of course, neatly placed on the table.  The glasses, beer and liquor, and food laid out on a sideboard made of two sawhorses and a plank, but covered in a linen made of old shirts shorn of their buttons and roughly stitched together by an accomplished taxidermist who’d inhabited the flat before Phil.  He brushed his teeth with baking soda and an old, matted boar-bristle brush, and carefully studied himself in the mirror as he precisely trimmed that moustache and carefully shaped with a small dab of lard his glistening, black hair.  If only the opportunity came, he thought, he’d be up to the task: he was ready for a return, some day, when the timing was right.  He’d been big; everything around him had somehow gotten small, he felt.  And he just slipped by.  And then he looked away, exhaling deeply, and proceeded to get dressed in a brown suit that was very stylish 20 years ago.  For a moment, though, he couldn’t locate his red armband.  Where had it gone?  He hadn’t worn it for two years, but he always returned it to the dresser.  And now at this moment he couldn’t find it.  That rage, born of profound frustration and disappointment, surged within, and, as he tore the sheets from his bed and thrust aside the small rug and shifted the bedroom furniture, he felt himself submerge in rising tides of anger.  The doorbell. Feigned composure.

Franz stood at the door, wearing his old helmet.  To his left, the sewerman emeritus, holding a pink box of pastries splotched here and there with oil stains.  To his right, Hesse, sheepishly rubbing his ear as he extended a well-handled bag of strudel.  The postman and the baggage handler had both begged off to attend a Tom Mix film festival across the Bay. That decision was not unnoticed.  Curtly and with authority, Phil invited everyone in, and then he thrust his face through the doorway to cast a glance down the hall and see if those neighbors might be spying on him and his guests.  He didn’t offer anyone anything.  They were to serve themselves, but under no circumstance were they to approach the würst.  Phil knew to make a point of this for Hesse’s benefit.  For now, only pretzels and drinks were fair game.  The rest was held in reserve to honor the anticipated guest.  Phil glanced at the little wristwatch he’d purchased at Wempe all those years ago: it was a little before seven.

“Well, Leni will be hier soon, don’t overdo the pretzels,” he admonished the guests.

“Nein, mein Führer,” Hesse answered, habituated beyond repair.

Phil, finding himself at a loose end because the party really couldn’t start without Leni, yet guests already had gathered, offered: “Perhaps, we von’t play de Kanasta with Leni.  A fift player doesn’t werk.”

“Nein, mein Führer,” Hesse answered, habituated beyond repair.

“Mein Führer, we shall simply talk of happier days,” Franz suggested.

“Ja, and, perhaps, of my return. But where?  Where could I return?”

Hesse had a thought: “Yes.  That will take some werk.”

“What?! The return? Where? What?!,” shouted Phil, moderately roused by the vacuous nature of Hesse’s comment, as if he were merely an empty vessel awaiting contents.

Hesse admitted that he hadn’t thought it through and couldn’t decide if he was responding to the problem of the return itself or where the happy event might take place, although he was certain that wherever it did happen, the ordinary people would welcome their imminent salvation. If that’s what Phil wanted, he added.

“Idiot!!” shouted Phil.  “I always knew your were an idiot.  Oh sure, you don’t mind jotting down vat I say, ‘my struggle’, as I aptly put it, but you always were a hopeless numbskull.”  He swatted Hesse, who shrugged and turned to his pretzel: Phil had a point, and yet in serving Phil, Hesse had found a kind of calling for himself, as he was solely a man with nothing more than the potential for loyalty, once the object of loyalty could be found.

The sewerman, disobeying orders, closed in and sniffed at the sausage, audibly, then grabbed a can of Nazi Bau and cracked it open with an effortless flick of the wrist.  Franz sat himself uneasily on the protesting step stool, clutching “ein pils”, as he’d often say, in one hand, a pretzel in the other.  As he bit it, the thing loudly exploded into a cloud of dust and crumbs, scattering white fragments all over his dark shirt.  He munched contentedly, washing down the dry contents of his mouth with a baritone gulp of beer.  He wondered out loud why the postman and the baggage handler had chosen the Tom Mix gala over an opportunity to meet Leni Riefenstahl.  It made no sense: here was a woman who made the German with blond hair and a tan into an Aryan, even when he was pledging fealty with a shovel; here was a woman who proved with art, by art, and through art, that Aryan Olympians were not to be trifled with, even if the American, Jürgen Owens, had actually won the footrace.  And what was Tom Mix?  Merely a cowboy, a romantic image from our days of youth.  Franz seemed to feel a bit let down by the absence of some of the regulars.

“A hass-been kowboy from the days of da yoot!”

Phil sympathetically patted Franz on the hand, acknowledging his words of support, uttering softly, “I’m so tired.”  And adding, “it’s gut.”  Phil could be understanding; he often found himself obliged to prop up the faithful; that was especially the case in the Bunker.  But it took a lot of work.  And, in some ways too, he had his fill of this kind of love; he was sick and tired of this kind of love in which he played tree to their lichen.  He reflected and, like a latter-day Luther, as, perhaps, he saw himself, declared to the faithful:

“Hier I stand: I set men on fire; I have this power, but I am tired.” 

The shine of this happy occasion had dimmed somewhat.  Something about the setting had given him a touch of melancholy.

“Maybe I’m uninspired.” 

Franz, the sewerman, and Hesse all chorused: “nein, Führer, nein.”  It was strange, but it almost seemed that they needed the idea of Phil more than Phil did.  He sat into his overstuffed chair, which gasped out a bit of lint as he sank into it.  It was a little past seven now.  They could sing the Horst Wessel Lied, but “vat’s the point,” he thought.  These were dark moments, when he felt terribly alone, as though everything he’d worked for was pointless.  He did feel tired and uninspired with all the coming and going.  In some ways, he felt that he was tired of playing the game; that somehow, it was all just a crying shame, he was so tired.  Tired of being admired: the whole effort was, he nearly sensed, somehow kaput.  It wasn’t like him to complain, though; he normally put a brave face on everything, like a little corporal that could.  So he told himself.  Leni’s anticipated arrival only cemented that view in his own mind.

Franz loudly redusted himself in a burst of pretzel crumbs.  For a moment, Phil gazed at where he had placed the sacred artifacts on the mantle, if only to refresh his inspiration.  He sipped some beer.  The sewerman excused himself and went off to the toilet. 

Suddenly, the dour pall that had settled upon the room was cast aside as the klaxon-like noise of the doorbell loudly sounded, pressed by an obviously heavy finger that held the button down as though trying get the attention of everyone in the building.  Hesse rose instinctively and went to the door.  Phil made no effort to rise from his chair.  A candygram for Phil was Hesse’s first thought, and he recalled that Phil liked candy.  When he opened the door, he found a man clad in black, parallel buttons shining in rows up the front, wearing a Western Union cap. 

“Ja?” said Hesse, a little brought down at the sight of the deliveryboy.

“Telegram for P. Hitler, sir.”

Phil heard this and rose.  As he scanned the delivery boy, his mind shot back to other days, and he briefly, mistakenly looked for an Iron Cross or some other decoration before his eyes settled on the words, Western Union.  The boy confirmed Phil’s identity and, after the few awkward moments it took him to realize that no tip would ever emanate from the flat’s inmates, departed.  By this time, the sewerman had returned, and he sat there fumbling with his zipper, fixing his attention, as did Franz and Hesse, on Hitler as he tore open the yellow message.

MBOTE PHIL STOP

MET FRIENDS IN ALEXANDRIA STOP CHARTERED FLIGHT TO KONGO STOP FILM OPPORTUNITY STOP AS THEY SAY IN LEOPOLDVILLE STOP WHEN YOU HAVE A TOOTH CRACK A NUT STOP LET THE BAND PLAY ON WITHOUT ME STOP

KISSES, LENI STOP

It was the calm within the eye of a hurricane.  Hitler’s hands fell to his side, one of them twitching pronouncedly as he put it behind his back and paced over to the sideboard, not fully comprehending the contents of the message.  He sniffed the würst, tore off a piece, ate it.  All eyes remained eagerly, receptively fixed upon him.

“I deal?” offered Hesse, unsure of proper etiquette in a delicate situation such as this.

And, then, the eye had passed; Hitler’s rage boiled into view.  His earlier fatigue yielded before surging blasts of restored energy: his purpose was clear.

“All of you get out!” he thundered. 

The guests were a little stunned; Franz was grateful to be sitting.  Hitler picked up the crumpled bag that Hesse had brought, thrust it at him, and ordered him out of the flat.  And Franz and the sewerman.  Everyone get out.  There was confused stumbling as people put down beers, or grabbed a final handful of pretzels, or worked the zipper, and then they were all gone.  Hitler went to the mantle, where lay the relics.  He unwrapped the sacred candy; he ate it.  It was stale and hard.  A tooth cracked, and he fell back into his wheezing chair, defeated.


Monday, November 11, 2019

Fear of Law and Fear of God


(NB: These remarks were delivered before the Lessons from Rome and Greece panel on Friday, Nov. 8, 2019, at the Northeast Political Science Association Conference.)

Rule of Law and Fear of God
“…social order must flow up from the people themselves – freely obeying the dictates of inwardly-possessed and commonly-shared moral values. And to control willful human beings, with an infinite capacity to rationalize, those moral values must rest on authority independent of men’s will – they must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being.

“In short, in the Framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people – a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and man-made law and who had the discipline to control themselves according to those enduring principles.”

The US Attorney General uttered those words when he gave a talk a few weeks ago (Oct 11) at Notre Dame.  Of course, they come in the context of a growing discontent in some circles with liberalism, classic or otherwise, but this concern is not new: Plato. for example, explored how institutions, law, and culture feed into a just state.  Today I want to draw your attention to Polybius.  What he suggests is simple enough: no matter the laws, democratic masses require fear of god.  This thesis is of greater interest if we reflect on the purpose of his histories: Polybius is kind enough to tell is from the very outset that he writes for aspiring or active politicians. (1.1-2) According to him, knowledge of historical facts and causes provides a reliable basis for politicians to engage in ‘affairs’ (pragmata). So, what are we to make of this lesson from Rome, this argument that fear of god makes up for what law alone cannot supply?  Polybius does not seem to write for the law-giver, the would-be Lycurgus: he writes for the practical student.  Alas, what this really means, I shall leave to the experts here gathered, but not without a few of my own reflections.  For my part, I intend to discuss what he says, provide some intellectual background, and, pose some questions, all the while reminding us that he is not merely a narrator of history: rather, he was an experienced politician in his own right who saw his histories as resources for current and future politicians.  In short, I propose to take Polybius the political theorist seriously and on his own terms.
Many still read Polybius primarily as a historian.[1]  Even interest in Book 6, where he presents a theory of constitutions and an exposition of Rome designed to explain to the attentive reader its rapid and unprecedented success, has tended to engage modern readers primarily in terms of what Polybius got right or wrong regarding 2nd century Rome.  As I say, he is primarily, it seems to me, judged as a historian in a very narrow sense.  Perhaps this is partly due to the imposing bulk of his work; partly, no doubt, to his excellent judgment and recording of events of great interest.  But let’s take Polybius on his own terms, as a political thinker in his own right.  Polybius wants us to read him with care: as he says over and over, he wants aspiring and practicing politicians to read his work and learn from history.  With Book 6, itself is a self-conscious interruption to his narrative, the goal is to help the reader understand the institutional and political basis of Rome’s success.  This exposition is delivered, however, in the context of his political theory.[2]  A proper understanding of all that will, he claims, allow the attentive reader to judge the developmental stage of any given state as well as what lies in its future.  That’s the claim.
 While incomplete, Book 6 still preserves plenty of material.  We find a theory of regimes: how they arise, flourish, and decay – the famed anacyclosis. Polybius describes Rome’s mixed constitution and military techniques; he analyzes other, actual constitutions, such as those of Sparta and Carthage.  For Polybius, it is axiomatic that a state’s worth depends on its laws (nomoi) and customs (ethe), a pairing that echoes a concern with public and private life. (6.47.1-2) Thus, one can judge the worth of a political system by its laws and customs.  When it comes to the Roman system (politeuma – Aristotle says this is synonymous with politeia), one feature stands out, rendering it superior others: deisidaimonia or superstition. (6.56.6) Note: however good Rome’s other institutional features, superstition is essential and deserves special mention.  He knows that this word, deisdaimonia, is normally pejorative, but insists that in the Roman republic it serves a valuable purpose, having been introduced specifically to render the ordinary people (to plethos) orderly, a condition which provides for the regime’s coherence.  As he explains, if a state could have been made of wise men, there would have been no need for this.  However, ‘every multitude [being] fickle, full of lawless desires, unreasoned passion (orge), and violent anger (thumos),’ needs to be kept in check by ‘invisible fears’ (adelois phobois) and ‘this sort of drama’ (tei toiautei tragoidiai). (hendiadys?) (6.56.11) In other words, the common people, absent deisidaimonia, would run amok and prove untrustworthy: superstition produces order among the lower orders, which produces order within the state (sunekhein used twice). (6.56.7, 11)   I don’t think there’s much question as to which between superstition and laws is the junior partner.  For, according to Polybius, without deisidaimonia, the irrational mob would run riot. (An assertion made by Isocrates in the Areopagiticus 7.39)  In Book 6, he says very little of law, whatever its benefits.  Remember: we are to judge a political system by its customs and laws, by the public and the private, which together produce order, yet in his Book devoted to political theory, he never discusses Roman law as an element of social control or a source of order.  He illustrates his point about superstition in the following way.  First, he says that with Greeks, if you entrust money to some official, despite everything being recorded in triplicate – even they had red tape! – you could never be sure that it wouldn’t be skimmed: despite the record-keeping, the rules, the audits. (6.56.13-5)  In short, positive law, which should order public action, cannot prevent an official from skimming: perhaps it cannot even render its citizens honorable. (Virtue is the product of habit, not law, says Isocrates. Areo. 7.48) Yet the situation in Rome is different.  Its magistrates can, he says, be trusted with money.[3]  We find, if this illustration is to be relevant, that Rome’s officials are more trustworthy. thanks to superstition!  Some aspects of this example puzzle me.  On the one hand, Polybius says that Roman superstition was instituted to control the plebs.  On the other hand, the example refers to officials, viz. people who would not be drawn from the mob or from the staff of slaves that served the state.  Something else is strange.
Polybius concludes Book 6 by reasserting the inevitable decay that must attend all regimes and by reminding the reader that what he has just propounded will enable the reader to ‘foretell the future’ (proeipein huper tou mellontos). (6.57.1-4; cf. 6.3.2) Next, he narrows his focus and recalls for us the conditions that turn democracy into mob-rule. (6.57.9) and connects this to the Roman republic itself.  Is he no longer classing it a mixed regime?  Is he now thinking of its democratic aspect particularly?  I’m not sure.  It is at this point that, to demonstrate the republic’s acme, he highlights an event from the 2nd Punic War which took place some 50 years before the period of composition. (6.58.1ff) In 216, after the Battle of Cannae, he reports, Hannibal sent ten captured Romans back to the city, proposing to exchange all his prisoners for ransom.  The ten had sworn an oath to return to Hannibal.  One, however, contrived to fulfill the oath in its technical aspects, but thwart its intent.  To make a long story short, the Roman senate rejects Hannibal’s offer and sends the captured soldiers back, including, bound in chains, the one who had tried to worm his way out of the oath.  Polybius cites this case because the Senate’s decision demonstrates Roman megalopsukhia (6.58.13) – at that time; but, if the Senators have dignity, the ordinary soldiers were ‘bound by their oath.’ (6.58.12) We must note, however, that one soldier tried to escape his sworn obligations: obviously, customs can’t cure all miscreants. It is, perhaps, strange that after presenting a glowing portrait of Rome, he includes an example of violating an oath.  Human beings remain capable of overcoming fear of god or law.  As a matter of history, the Romans had standing extortion courts and Polybius himself reports the death penalty for bribery (6.56.4), for which there’d be no need if there were no bribery.  Both of these are introduced after the 2nd Punic War, but during the author’s lifetime.  At any rate, real life is complicated, and Polybius was always concerned with the practical.  Ultimately, he is making a point about the relationship between positive law and fear of god, to wit: where both exist, that community is better, and its lower classes are more orderly.  (Can we upscale virtue?)
I mentioned earlier that Polybius devotes a sizeable portion of Book 6 to describing Roman military practices, including the making and breaking of camp. (6.19.1-42.6) (He describes how the Romans levy legions, how they conduct night watches, how they layout camps, and so forth.)  Apart from the practical purpose of this – he believes that the Romans can teach the Greeks a thing or two about military campaigns, and clearly thinks that their military practice has been an factor in their success, I think there’s another way in which this part of Book 6 relates to his overall thesis about the source of Rome’s political coherence and its control of the lower classes.  Fear is repeatedly identified as a factor in controlling the Roman legionary.  Beatings are inflicted for a variety of crimes (6.37.9-12), and, he argues, the severity, swiftness, and certainty of the punishments lead to scrupulousness among the men. (6.37.6) Roman soldiers live in dread (dediotes) of punishment. (6.37.13) Moreover, the regularity of their encampments, unlike the ad hoc nature of Greek practice, ensures that everyone always knows his place and what to do. (6.42.1ff) We find here a combination of fear and habit.  To my mind, this seems the very stuff of superstition, as advanced by Polybius, with the added factor that, at least, in the case of the Roman legionary, punishment is swift and assured. (cf. 6.37.6, punishment for failing nightwatch)  (Obviously, the divine is not necessarily up to this standard!)  Fear seems an important factor in keeping otherwise potentially unruly troops at bay, just as fear of the divine keeps the ordinary folk in good order.  Moreover, the habits of camp life, with their regularity, echo, perhaps, the habits that law or superstition provide for public life at Rome.  In any case, apart from the purely military interest of Roman practice, the camp offers an analogue to political life within the city. (Isocrates: virtue comes from habit. Areo. 7.40)  Polybius compares the camp to a town and stresses the soldier’s familiarity with where he lives in a camp as to someone knowing his ‘native city.’ (6.31.10; 6.41.10) (‘It never varies and is familiar to all.’ 6.42.5)
Now, returning to superstition, let me add a few more observations.  First, the language Polybius uses to describe the implementation of the deisidaimonia deserves notice.  On several occasions, Polybius uses words derived from ‘tragedy’ to describe the stories that give deisidaimonia its oomph.  Let’s consider an instance.  As a preliminary, I want to point out how the commonly used translations fail to convey the right sense.  In the Loeb, for example, we find ‘these matters are clothed in such pomp;’ in the Penguin ‘solemnity,’ in the Oxford ‘elaborate,’ and the Budé has ‘dramatisé.’ These are efforts to render the verb ektragodein: to make a theatrical production of it.[4]   English probably can’t capture that.  What we find in Polybius are the notions of fear and drama or theatricality.  Next, although Polybius argues that the Roman constitution arose naturally, unlike that of ‘god-like’ Lycurgus, which arose by design, he claims that superstition was introduced long ago (oi palaioi) and for a reason. (6.56.12)  We aren’t given a reason for this claim; maybe Polybius believes that superstition, as he means it, is man-made. At this juncture, I’d like to relate these comments about deisidaimonia to the anacyclosis or cycle of regimes, introduced earlier in Book 6.  There we learn that monarchy works on the basis of strength, aristocracy, on the basis of a council of wise men. Democracy Polybius defines thus: “when in a community where it is traditional and customary (patrion esti) to reverence the gods, to honor our parents, to respect our elders, and to obey the laws, the will of the greater number prevails, this (these kinds of systems/para tois toioutois sustemasin) is to be called a democracy.” (6.4.5-6) Polybius here identifies several features that are key to a genuine democracy, foremost of which is reverence for the gods. Indeed, this reverence is first among various factors that naturally fall into the category of customs, and the customs, we find, are balanced by the laws.   Thus, we find here our pair, customs and laws, that seems key to Polybius, and we know from the definition offered here and his later discussion the importance of superstition.  Moreover, Polybius highlights this pair as a critical component of democracy alone, not of other regimes.  For doubtless it is in a democracy where ordinary people have access to decision-making that restraint is most needed.  This connection between superstition and democracy has not received sufficient notice as an element within the political thought of Polybius, but I do think it is significant: the mob may enter the halls of power, but it must be polite!  Furthermore, Polybius does not explain religion’s origin, although he might have addressed it in some lost passage; rather, we find that reverence is integral to true democracy, and that the Romans wisely instituted superstition to regulate the mob.
Someone might object: religion and superstition are not the same thing.  I think that Polybius is saying that for the ignorant masses, the distinction doesn’t really matter.  We learn that democracy calls for reverence.  We find in Rome, which he ultimately suggests is democratic, that superstition is the outstanding component providing good order.  I think he means us to see that reverence in part amounts to this, practically speaking.  At any rate, I’d like to explore two things. First, the concept, deisidaimonia.  Second, the notion that religion was created as a means of social control.  This background will enhance our appreciation of our author’s meaning. The etymology of deisidaimonia is straightforward.   It means ‘god-fearing.’ In its negative valence, the word carries a connotation of excess and irrationality.  In other words, while being deisidaimon in the sense of showing proper reverence to the gods could be a fine thing, as Aristotle advises the tyrant (Pol. 5.11, 1315a1) or as Xenophon describes Agesilaus (11.8); excess coupled with ignorance poses a problem. Indeed, excess is probably never a good thing in the Lyceum! This is what is said of deisidaimonia in the Characteres, written by Aristotle’s successor, Theophrastus.  The work is a catalogue of types, drawn up, as an elderly Theophrastus explains in the prologue, to help his children improve themselves by choosing the right kinds of companions. (I want to point out in passing this practical aspect of the Characteres.)  Theophrastus defines superstition as cowardice towards the divine (deilia pros to daimonion). The superstitious man uses any means at his disposal to appease the numinous, known or unknown. (16.1-2) For example, if he sees that a mouse has eaten some barley in the house, he races to consult an expert. (16.6) A dream sends him to an interpreter to identify which god requires prayer.  He spits in his shirt, if he catches sight of a madman or epileptic. (16.6) The emphasis is on automaticity and ritual, motivated, it seems, by unreasoning fear.  There is no ‘theology’ nor is there any reasoning: all is driven by dread of what may happen if a ritual is not performed. We often collapse centuries in the Greek world, as though Polybius and Theophrastus could have been neighbors, so I accept that there are complexities of language lost to us. Nevertheless, Polybius clearly wants to argue in Book 6 that, however foolish it might seem, superstition is a social good.  Up-scaling virtue, after all, is tough; up-scaling fear, not so much. The irrational aspect of superstition highlighted by Theophrastus find its ideal host in the irrational mob.  Fortunately, ‘the ancients’ had the good sense to introduce it, good sense because it orders the mob, hence the city.  Maybe Xenophon hints at its power when he describes the soldiers of Cyrus charging at the cry of the paean: ‘for in such a situation particularly the god-fearing (deisidaimones) are less fearful of men.’ (C. 3.3.58)  Fear of god outweighs fear of the enemy charging at with you a spear: perhaps, Polybius might add, it also does more than law or boot camp! In any case, whatever superstition says of an individual, Polybius is arguing for its collective benefit: maybe we are to be surprised because he uses the word counter-intuitively.  Thus, he stresses his point.
So, how are we to connect superstition with reverence or religion?  We know the following: reverence for the gods is leading requisite of democracy; superstition is the outstanding feature of the Roman system; the Romans introduced certain dramatized notions (ennoias) about the gods and about Hades to the lower orders.  The image to draw from this is that deisidaimonia was doing the heavy religious lifting at Rome.  Now the idea that religion made up to control people was not an invention of Polybius.  In a passage from his play, Sisyphus, Critias declared religion a man-made imposture.  This literary fragment is interesting because it points out that positive law governs public actions and fear of gods (theon deos) restrains private wrong-doing. (Sex. Emp. Phys. 1.54)  The phrase, ‘fear of god,’ strikes me as evocative of deisidaimonia.  Similarly, Isocrates writes in the Busiris that the Egyptian lawgiver established religion to habituate people to obedience.  Here the fear of gods tames mankind, and oaths are thereby made more reliable.  Polybius echoes this in his discussion of the Roman military.  And, if we believe Lucretius, Epicurus likewise argued that religion was an imposture designed to aid the powerful.  You will also recall that Plato considers in several works how stories about the divine can benefit the community.  All the more so, as implied in the Gorgias, when the circumstances for proper education cannot obtain and the elengkhos fails.  So, in this regard, the idea that religion or beliefs about the gods might be used to temper the unruly is not especially novel.  And none of this is meant to answer the question whether Polybius believed in gods.  Nor do I have any interest in reconstructing our author’s bibliography.  Rather, this offers some context for appraising what Polybius was doing when he highlighted the role of superstition in Rome’s success.  It apparently is a contrivance both beneficial and necessary to the success of a system where the ordinary people would otherwise be unruly.  Not to maintain power, but to preserve order.  He is explicit about the benefit of dread, and he sees this not in the service of one group over another, but the community as a whole.  As I said earlier, if you cannot elicit virtue on a grand scale, perhaps, you can wring order from people through the introduction of fear of punishment, not from the magistrate, but from the divine.
Now another puzzle: the audience and what they are to make of all this.  Polybius writes for practical readers.  He is interested in facts and causes, which will allow, in the case of regimes, an attentive reader to assess where in the stages of development a given system is.  One cannot use this information to determine precisely when a regime will start to decay, but one can, he says, determine where in its life-cycle a regime is.  As Polybius states on several occasions, he writes for those who would engage in politics.  He is giving lessons for the real world.  His comments on superstition, then, are not merely about Rome.  How can they be?   Rome is a case study.  And, in discussing it, he draws our attention to factors, military and civil, that have made Rome an unprecedented success.  The problem for even a mixed constitution, one may suppose, is how to keep the masses in order, notwithstanding his description of checks and balances.  It does not appear to be a problem for monarchies or oligarchies until it’s too late!  Law is not enough, and superstition has worked wonders!  Now, as attentive readers, what are we to do with these insights?  If we have the means now to judge the worth of a system (i.e., its customs and laws) and where it is in the course of its life, what next?  If we see that crime and lawlessness have increased in lockstep with disbelief and cynicism, what does Polybius propose we do?  Move to Costa Rica? Seize power? Brace ourselves for the impact of the coming storm? Alas, I do not know.  Superstition was artificially constructed by some hazy ‘palaioi’ for the Romans; how and under what conditions he doesn’t say, or, if he did, those bits don’t survive.  But, surely, superstition could not be readily created and introduced among cynics, such as those who he says laugh at superstition.  His lessons would appear to end up as an aporia except in one respect.  Machiavelli before Machiavelli.  Polybius invites us to brace ourselves and wait for the opportunities as they arise.  One must sometimes yield to circumstances, sometimes exploit them.  At least when you know what condition your state is in, you can wait for your moment.






[1] Eckstein is an exception.
[2] He certainly deserves his own volume in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series.
[3] Apart from the historical fact of extortion courts or the case of Cato the Elder and Rhodes, Polybius gives his own sense of realism at 18.35
[4] Earliest attestation seems to be this passage.  LSJ has ‘to exaggerate, to deck out in tragic dress.’