Let us not Praise Famous Men

Let us not Praise Famous Men (a celibate celebrity?)

            The composer William Schuman, before his death, was asked in interview whether or not he would have preferred to be more famous than he was, given his munificent talent and accomplishments, known more fully only within cultured circles. His response remains instructive: ‘Given the many factors and their quality that go into the construction of fame in our time, I would not have preferred that.’ He later suggests that these factors distract from one’s work, appeal to the baser emotions, and exist as well as temptations to the artist to lend to his intent an outside influence which takes away from the work itself. This rejection of fame can be seen as a secularized version of that Augustinian, the first detailed statement we possess about both temptation and the perils of persona over against personhood. Sirach’s ecclesiastical text, from which the phrase, itself famous, originally comes, speaks to us through much of the Gospels, providing not merely a sense that some of Hebrew ethics are ported quite bodily into the nascent Christian outlook but as well, that, barring any overzealous sense of messianic property, prodigality, and perhaps yet propriety, from the period between c. 170 BCE and c. 80 CE, a quarter of a millennium which seems so telescoped from our vantage point as to be a single moment as well as a singular one, the popularity and use of Sirach was such that Jesus’ sensibilities could only be translated by way of these older and more established rhetorical remarks.

            However this may be, it is clear that the many moments, especially in Matthew, wherein Jesus is quoted as expressing almost exact advice and counsel as does Sirach, tells us of a consistency in the Hebrew outlook under Roman rule. It is the view of a people conquered and striving to make the best community possible in harsh times. Agee and Walker’s Roosevelt-era document bearing the same title tells indeed the same story; of the courage and even nobility of the most marginal persons in Depression America, working to make as generous a community as possible under severe hardship. In a word, such persons are to be celebrated not because of their fame, which none in life possess, but rather are to be recalled and exalted because of their lot and their response to it; Sirach can be thus seen as the original hagiographic accounting. It is an unfortunate coincidence that the Hitler Youth leader and sometimes poet had a similar name as the Hebrew ecclesiast, but for Balder von Schirach, fame was something with which one got drunk. He reminds us, also in interview, that ‘Hitler’s genius made him a man without measure’, but does add that this can cut both ways, as it were. Fame accrued during a life of missionizing – on the side of the marginal themselves, Jesus, on the side of the margin itself, Hitler – makes it more difficult to distinguish its ‘use and abuse’, if you will. For the ability to convince others of one’s mission is of the utmost to its continuation.

            Jesus was executed on a personal vendetta, Schirach served a full twenty-year sentence handed down at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity, of which he maintained until his death he had no knowledge. One wonders at the fate of the famous, but not at the destiny of fame itself. Our entire relationship to the former is disingenuous in the extreme. We vault this or that person into a persona and hope to see them topple from their aerie perch. Celebrity in our society is a function of ressentiment alone. We love the idea of fame whilst hating those who have it. As long as they do remain persona, we provide for them our modernist worship; adulation, fandom, wealth and other privileges of both exclusivity and even outright exclusion. But when their actual humanity shows them to be as we are, then the pressing question collapses the card-castle; why them and not us? ‘How is it that I am not rich and famous’?, is an extrapolation of the less outlandish but still resentment-fueled ‘what does she see in him?’ type of query. In it, there is a promotion not so much of self-doubt, that which our very existence can authentically challenge us and indeed needs do so, but rather a self-denigration, which can only add to our resentment. What transmutes mere resentment into malicious existential envy is just this conundrum; what is it about me that is of less merit than her?

            It thus very much matters how a culture defines merit. For the ancient Hebrews, insofar as we can judge through their writings, the meritorious is a combination of pious and ritualistic adherence to taboos and mores, and a willingness to speak of ideals otherwise in their face. For the Reich, ritual too is certainly present, but in this ‘new religion’ that Hitler, at a dinner with English aristocracy of all things, announced he would create, and more or less to himself seated at a long table overburdened with silver and glass, it is rather the expression of cultural will itself that is the most noble thing. It remains a stunning logistical and economic accomplishment that, in spite of the overwhelming demands made of Germany under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, in a scant few years the nation transmuted itself from the very margins to the very center. The Reich is, historically speaking, writ large the personal transfiguration of the converted Jew. This ‘new religion’, godless and yet just as mythical as any antique belief, in its extermination of European ‘Jewry’, found for itself the ultimate conversion experience. And its model had been present specifically in German Romanticism; the overcoming of the person, the death of the self by its self-transcendence through art.

            The Reich’s non-rational ideal was to create a society based solely upon art. Those whose livelihood was gained by attaching themselves, like parasites, to either art itself or the life of the artist – presumably, artists of Jewish descent were deliberate frauds, mocking the superior works with their doggerel dogma, hence the preponderance of their works displayed as ‘Entarteite Kunst’; though it is important to recall that a number of ‘Aryan’ artists’ works, notably those of Otto Dix for instance, were also included in these ‘showings’ – were to be removed, not only from the discourse but also from society as a whole. Such is fame, one might say at this juncture, for its fickle flame is fanned now here now there, by this one and then by that, one work adored and the next disdained – Richard Strauss, himself the Reich’s Arts Director for some years before he resigned due to his support for Jewish artists, knew these ups and downs of celebrity very well – that Schuman must be understood as being quite correct in his estimation thereof. And just as no God survives an absence of belief in Him, so no celebrity is left standing who, through her own shared humanity, exhibits in any way the mortal coils of an equally human life.

            The radical conception of a God on earth is the origin of celebrity. Jesus himself shunned it, which was presumably part of the whole point of working as the neighbor figure alone, even within the confines of ‘embodiment’, but since then we have bodily embraced it. Mass media is ever on the look-out for the next messiah, whether it be in politics, popular music, sport, or self-help, amongst others. Those whose mission stands the test, not of time, but rather of taste, endure as part of a pop-culture pantheon, to be repeated, with self-serving irony, in the afterlife. We regularly hear musicians and critics extoll ‘heaven’s band’, which by now would have to be the ultimate super-group. The unutterable nonsense of celebrity must needs extend itself into what has been ‘shown to us as a mystery’ only; even the apparent dotards of antiquity understood that much. That we continue to praise the persona framed round an otherwise human life and ignore the person within such frames only speaks to the loss of Godhead historically, and the corresponding loss of community socially. Coupled with the desperation exhibited in cursing an immortal conception with a merely human life, fame does a double disservice to both forms of being; it at once commits God to an ill-fitting grave while destining Humanity to resent its own existence.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, religion, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Beothuk Dodo

Beothuk Dodo (an excursus in extermination)

                                    Too big to fly, Dodo ugly, so dodo must die

                                    Dog go, with fear on its side

                                    Can’t change, can’t change the tide

                                    Dog baiter, agitator

                                    Asking questions, says he wants to know why

                                    Ain’t no reason that money can’t buy

                                    Mink, he pretty, so mink he must die…

  • Genesis, 1981

            It is well known that the Reich made the obvious connection between exterminating vermin such as insects and rats to doing the same with those they considered to be person-pests; ‘life unworthy of life’, as was said. The penchant for eugenics was married to the desperate desire for ‘racial purity’. The Jew, in spite of his eternally wandering status and his pariah personality, had somehow maintained his own racial homogeneity, refusing to entirely assimilate wherever he next washed up. The subito siren of the death of the other, beseeching us in both ways at once – if I must die let it be quick; nay, I shall rather slay you in the heat of your own desire – is remade in the grander scale of opera or yet epic. A Wagnerian death, fit only for the antique gods, when transposed to humanity, required millions to be murdered, and systematically so, for that is the most rapid way of capturing the drama of the moment. The Holocaust was more than an anthropological machine for ‘beautifying the world through violence’, it was also an architectonic aesthetic statement; that those closer to the old Gods in form and feel would take over the once-Valkyric duty to choose the slain before these lower forms reached up from the depths of ugliness and dragged the rest of us down with them.

            How many human deaths could equal that of one God’s? That is the question the Holocaust and like events pose to us. The old god of morals, long dead, was Himself an immoralist in the sense that He aided the ancient Hebrews in their quest for a homeland. Begrudgingly, given their lack of loyalty and inconsistent worship, Yahweh must have been thinking that, ‘Well, they do suck but all these other groups wouldn’t be any better. Besides, the children of Akhenaton invented me, so I suppose I owe them one’, and so on. This ‘religion of the father’, as Freud famously put it in his final volume, Moses and Monotheism, only gives way to that of the son through patent parricide. Now, how then to keep the potency of that ultimate death alive given that history rewrites and memory forgets? The death of the father = the life of the son; Jesus was thus not forsaken on the cross but rather because of the incarnation, the one to whom He called was Himself lost. The death of the under-race = the life of the over-race, and thence toward the so-called ‘super-race’ yet to come. In the ‘Dyskabolos’ speech, Hitler cautioned his art history buff audience that ‘we can only be said to have reached our goal when we have attained the form expressed by the Greek sculptors or even have gone beyond it’.

            This ‘form’ could not have been an idealized, stylized reference simply to an Olympic athlete, though we to this day, with continued Nazi verve, celebrate the ‘festival of both youth and beauty’ – the subtitle of Riefenstahl’s documentary film of the 1936 games – but for Sontag for instance, referenced the ‘fascist aesthetic’ which was wholly esthetic in its surface appearance. Riefenstahl herself calls out this analysis in the film The Power of the Image, and somewhat amusingly to boot. But the very use of the term ‘form’ is suggestive; it in turns calls to mind the Platonic ideals, the eternal form and not its passing content. Youth, for a few years and those extended by Olympian practice and exercise, maintain something close to the ideal bodily expression of the form. So, it is not so much that a race as a whole must reproduce itself unsullied by inferior elements, but rather more specifically the youth of that race. It is not a coincidence, nor is it merely an effort in pedagogy, that the Reich spent much effort upon cultivating its youth in both culture and sport. By 1940 or so, even complete nudity was made into part of the propaganda imagery, not so much due to the sense that mores had relaxed since Orff’s highly erotic Carmina Burana was first performed in 1937, becoming a Nazi favorite soon thereafter, but rather because the first generation of racially pure youth had now come of age, ready to strut their perfect stuff in a call to more than military arms.

            At the climax to the Olympic torch relay, also a Nazi invention, one needs recall, the BBC commentator remarks on how ‘perfect’ and ‘pure’ does the physique of the German runner look, and thus extolls it to the world. Just as was the Holocaust the result of applied aesthetics, so the Olympics are the obverse side of that self-same coin. Anyone who watches them is a crypto-Nazi at best. Far better to give into the baser desire to see youthful bodies as simply objects of lust and nothing more transhistorical; that is how low we can go without imagining extermination camps. For the beauty of youth, stained by the Internet, suppressed by the neo-conservative, was actually the one truer thing exalted by the Reich. It expresses an essential will to life, just as does mass murder – we imagine that life is precious not in its quality but rather in its quantity; if you must live, then I shall surely die, there’s simply not enough of it to go around – and the killing of the other in order to preserve my own ongoing existence remains a human ultimatum to its more ‘affective unhistorical subconsciousness’, if you will. We are possessed by a feeling, not merely of superiority, but of a kind of passing grace; I am alive and at the peak of my living performance. The Olympian expresses this will to life over against the unhealthy and infirm, the injured and ill, but also, more profoundly, against all those ugly and deformed. What used to be referred to as the ‘special Olympics’ is belatedly inserted not so much out of any doubt about what is beauty and thus truth, but rather for perspective, and rather out of the sense that Nazism can after all be democratized and alles can be included in the race for the perfect race.

            But few desire to watch the ugly try to be beautiful. They exist in their own media ghetto, its walls unforgiving and stretching as far past the eye of the now as does the death of God stretch back in historical time. In His stead, we are rightly outraged in the face of the ubiquitous abuse against athletes because coaches and trainers are themselves outside their sacred circle, violating it with their perverse lust, petty authority and picayune control. The gymnast is a living sculpture, her mobile museum the stadium. It was not merely a function of lack of more qualified personnel that the Olympic stadium in Berlin was defended by two-hundred Hitler Youth led by an art history professor. The Soviets quickly dismantled this effort with few casualties on either side, sending the kids home and the professor back to his campus office, perhaps missing the whole point of it. No, these defenders were the most qualified to serve and protect this meta-sacred space. Donning the uniform of Valkyric intent, obeying the higher orders of aesthetic authority, the young men and women imagined that theirs was the transcendental task of elevating life unto death. However many barbarians died was not and never at issue. The question was not even of what constituted the ‘good death’ – that is something for the therapist to ponder in the face of a smaller life perhaps replete with some regrets and disconnects – but rather what is the highest death? What is the life that is worthy of being chosen by the sisters of Brunnhilde? That is the death worth dying, and only that. And the highest of deaths must be ledgered by the lowest, those occasioned by the camps.

            So, the function of the death camp system was at least two-fold; in its baser of operations, it was a eugenics facility, but in its noble cast, imagined by its architects and likely specifically by Haydrich himself, given his own sense of art and accomplishment, it was a bellwether for the evaluation of the meaning of the higher death. If I am the final person standing, if I have vanquished all others, pretenders and even vermin that they were, then the Valkyric youth, the ideal woman who is both a goddess and a warrior, beautiful and lithesome, whose athleticism is no longer a theatrical display as in the Olympics but is absolutely real in its ‘event’, shall surely light on I and I alone.  It is no coincidence that the Olympics were born out of the skills associated with ancient warfare, the javelin, the pole-vault, the broad jump, steeplechase, and Pankration. The Valkyrie is the one with all those skills; she is the truer heptathlete. In my desire to die by her own hand, I shall exterminate the many distractions that might yet blind her to the presence of the higher form. So much is this a vaunted goal, that in our imagined post-Nazi days we seek to buy our way into her purview, abusing our actual youth but mass-manufacturing the pretense thereof for adults; sixty is the new thirty. Yet because thirty is also the new thirteen the sixty must maintain its deeper mark, masking the stinging stingy stigmata of agedness with the wistful wiseacre of fantastic ages. But the capitalist, like the communist before him, misses the point. Extermination is about ultimate life, not death. It is the only passion by which a mortal being can distinguish himself in the eyes of the dispassionate Gods.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, aesthetics, religion, education, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

In Memoriam: Ian Bairnson

In Memoriam: Ian Bairnson

                        How can you be so sure?

                        How do you know what the earth will endure?

                        How can you be so sure… that the wonders you’ve made

                        In your life will be seen, by the millions who follow

                        To gaze at the site of your dream?

                                                                         – Alan Parsons/Eric Woolfson (1978).

            Of such things none can be so confident, let alone certain. If anything, given the vicissitudes of history, rather the opposite is the case. The question of legacy animates most older persons, especially if one is diagnosed with a terminal illness and has committed, in health and as future-looking, an enduring gift to our collective cultural bastion, the only bulwark we possess over against our individually fleeting immortality. Ian Bairnson was one such bearer of cultural gifts. Arguably the most under-rated guitarist in popular music, he died after a five-year struggle with dementia, at age 69 just a few weeks ago. A list of his musical peers would have to include the likes of David Gilmour, Alex Lifeson, and Neal Schon. These names are much more recognizable due to their being band leaders or founders. But as guitarists, all are, in my opinion, severely under-rated as well. Bairnson had no flash about him. The precisely dedicated passions in his work instead bore all the hallmarks of perfection, and when I think of his playing, this is the very word that comes to mind, first and last.

            Think of the arcing solo in ‘What Goes Up…’ (1978) from which the above epigraph is taken. The seamless transition between moods, almost as if there in fact were two distinct players. This gift is revisited in the compare and contrast solo in ‘Somebody Out There’ (1984), where not merely the tone changes drastically, but also the very personality of the sound. The poignantly classical elegance throughout the ironic elegy of ‘Ammonia Avenue’ (1983). The elemental herald of the signature track ‘Sirius/Eye in the Sky’ (1982). Then there’s the soaring, wincingly beautiful bridge solo of ‘Closer to Heaven’ (1987), the impassioned fire of the flamenco-inspired guitar work in the instrumental ‘Paseo De Gracia’ (1987), the extended soloing throughout the epic suite ‘Turn of a Friendly Card’ (1980), the guttural defiance of the solo in ‘Turn it Up’ (1993), a song about resistance, even revolution. One feels more confident about staffing the barricades with Bairnson at one’s side. One feels quite clear in conscience about entering the gates of paradise with Bairnson ennobling a life with no mean soundtrack. One feels the ambiguity of one’s own selfhood, or the mystery of what has in fact ‘been lost’ to time, even though it too ‘must be found’. We do find it; in Bairnson’s music, for one.

            Though it is the case that the very best of studio musicians must master not only the diverse instrumentation of one’s featured instrument, but also a wide range of styles from classical to popular and everything in between, Bairnson must be thought of as someone who went well beyond this impressive technical competence, even mastery. In the ever-burgeoning guild of guitarists worldwide, Bairnson must be seen as someone who transported the standard of studio work not only into the theatre of live performance, where so many things can go awry and there are no retakes, but also of transcending the studio quality of such work. There is nothing calculated about Bairnson’s guitar, even though once heard in situ, no other solo, no other riff, no other comp, no other chord progression could be imagined that would suit the overall music as well. Sometimes a song requires simplicity without being simplistic, sometimes sophistication without sophistry, care bereft of pedantry, or transcendence without the pompous. Bairnson was a musician who could gift any and all of these and in force, as Alan Parsons, himself one of the most respected names in the recording industry, and arguably the most knowledgeable about its history and techniques, demanded a stunning array of emotions and characters even on a single album. And though the guitarists who have been lucky enough to follow in Bairnson’s footsteps with the band into the 21st century have walked in his shoes without ever coming close to filling them, it is perhaps testament to Bairnson’s enduring legacy that Parsons has continued to shift among very competent guitar players over the more recent years.

            I will remember Ian Bairnson (1953-2023), as an inspiring call to aesthetic conscience, a musician who came from the margins and arrived in a sense unknowing of the center whilst occupying it for a full quarter century. If dementia is itself a loosening of our ideally shared perception of the social world, if it is to be thought of as a loss of something which the rest of us must indeed find and continue to care for, the one who suffers from it remains a talisman for all of us who live on and bear the mark of the future upon us, uncertain because unknown. But it is not so much the works of the past that themselves cannot be lost to us, but rather the very essence of our resolute being that faces down that selfsame future and walks with intrepid grace towards it. These too are the calling cards of an Ian Bairnson guitar; each solo is possessed with a graceful resoluteness that is kindred with the deeper call to conscience with which a human life presents its vehicle. As such, his music attains the more profound aesthetic of being a serious commentary on the shared existence that alone, each of us is called upon to both endure and enact.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in aesthetics, ethics, education, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Higher Infidelity

                                                The Higher Infidelity

          Can’t you go to bed with a woman without loving her, and can’t you love her without going to bed with her?- de Sade

            Two areas of contemporary gender equality are of immediate interest in the history of sexuality; infidelity and voyeurism, the first measured in intimate disloyalty in both formalized and informal conjugal relations and the latter observed with regard to the consumption of erotica. These suggestive scenes point us in the direction of imagining that the politics of the body have been somehow separated from that of the State or corporation. This specific disconnect was certainly well-practiced by the church, but during this pre-modern period the schism between the dominant sexes was shot through the entirety of society. Now, and for the first time since mechanical social organization where all was apparently equal in its inequality, we see a diversity of equalities and inequalities. Why should this be, in our own time, the case?

            In ‘The Higher Immorality’, C. Wright Mills reminds us that while noble ideals can summon ignoble efforts in the hopes of achieving them, it is also true that these dubious means can themselves attain a more highly valued approximation to the ideals to which they supposedly would lead. This gentrified baseness is operative not only in the State and its functionaries, but also in individuals. Previously, the ‘martinet’, the one who aped the emperor in a style hyperbolic in order to assuage any misgivings others might have about his loyalty, was the sole vehicle for the sense that baseness could cover itself over in nobility. But it was well known both by the martinet – whose political ancestor might well have been the court jester; both are, to once again use Mills’ vocabulary, ‘inside dopesters’ – and by everyone else that this was only a masquerade become a charade. Today, however, there are true believers in this new livery; one need only recall Oliver North to mind.

            While sociology is not itself caught in a bind of its own creation, any observant human being may well imagine that she now is, precisely due to the problem of self-fulfilling prophecy, much analyzed by Robert Merton and others. For on the one side, we have actual people sincerely believing in the fascism of political  or State loyalty, and on the other we have Thomas’ proverbial sensibility that ‘if you believe something to be real, it is real in its consequences’. Therefore it is to political reality that such an analysis might at first cleave. Yet almost everyone remains aware that politics is at best, a performance containing ulterior motives, some of which may be publicly known, others of which may be discernable in policy statements, and yet others occluded in personal networks or even childhood friendships, each exerting its own brand of loyalty. But the reality of politics is too transparent, even so, to be a radical enough ground into which an analytic may place itself and thence become a fertile engine for social change.

            Instead, it can be taken as a sign of sexual politics and the more literally interpreted ‘body politic’ that women and men share both a patent disdain for one another as well as find that betraying one another on an equal basis makes them more equal. Is this too a delusion? Mills’, in his review of de Beauvoir’s great work, The Second Sex, summarizes a crucial point she makes about the institution of marriage and also its sabotage. As de Beauvoir writes, marriage as a ‘career’ for women must be prohibited. Instead, sex and love should be candidly separated and distinguished along the lines of a partnership and a liaison: “Sexual episodes do not prevent either partner from leading a joint life of amity with the other; adultery would lose its ugly character when based on liberty and sincerity rather than, as at present, on caution and hypocrisy.” (1963:342). Yes, young women in particular are yet portrayed as ‘darling little slaves’, but not always. 2021 is not 1961 in many ways, though it may be astonishing for some that much if not most of the world’s population vehemently prefer women to be only servants.

            What I recommend in such cases is not disloyalty to one another as human beings, but rather a higher infidelity directed at social institutions, including the formal idea of marriage, the State and in particular, its educational system – this is not to say that most current attempts to set up alternatives are based on some liberating consciousness; rather quite the opposite – as well as party politics and political machines, state sponsored media corporations and further, the sense that one is a ‘fan’ of anything too particular at all, including specific sports teams or entertainers. Fine to love soccer and metal, not so fine to zero in on singular people with the effect of aggrandizing them beyond their shared humanity. No, they must rather be levelled with those who show them interest. Many celebrities are uncomfortable with their status – one only need call to mind Prince Harry to this regard – and so we should also not attempt to blame those in the limelight simply because they find themselves to be so. Like the state of governments in democracies, it is we who are responsible for the hounded harried hurry of celebrity. It is certainly correct that the stereotypical genders should be eliminated, as Mills goes on to say later in his review, and not only that of the female. Men are just as oppressed by our system of gender relations as are women. Though it is unfashionable to admit to this, it is nevertheless the case. One only need to look at the rates of male suicide to raise the bar equal to the rates of female mental illness. Men simply don’t stick around to become or remain ill, and thus provide a grim recompense for public health care.

            This said, it remains a deeper understanding that infidelity directed at one’s own selfhood is by far the greatest danger. The sources of auto-disloyalty are many and various. Given that sexuality is in the process of being equalized, at first on a covert or semi-covert level, as we have seen from the examples of ‘cheating’ and pornography consumption, we should take a look at how these two scenes are first constructed. Both contain a servility and an attempt at an aesthetic. The base and noble mingle as if they were one thing. One can certainly fall in love with another and betray one’s spouse. This additional love may be as noble as that current, or it may supplant it. The base side of the dynamic is the subterfuge, not the emotion or even the sexual act. With the sex industry proper, sleaze and usury conjoin beauty and empowerment, once again, the base and the noble. In the coming of age short story ‘Strip!’, I seek to contrast these two elements. An out-take:

            “Yes, that is it. Now just slip that dress right off, okay sweetheart?”

            “Bryce, get the fuck out of here.” This from Mitts. But Bryce, who clearly ran the operation, stared stonily back at his camera-woman. “First day, Bryce. Come back tomorrow.” Now the middle-aged man moved off, nodding his acquiescence but not without a grin. Mitts groaned and stopped her production entirely until the uninvited third wheel rolled his half-flattened self back out the door.

                “Just take it right off then?” Virginia asked. Mitts had to strain to hear her.

                “Look, whenever you’re ready. Keep the heels on for now. But I do need to see you naked at some point, okay? For now, ease into it.” Okay, I knew it. I fucking just knew it. Fine. I’m not a child. I know I’m hot. Everything and everyone everyday tells me so. This is no different. No, it is different. It’s better. Better by far. I’m getting paid now. People want to look, then they pay. That’s the way it should be. My gods those volleyball shorts. Huh. Okay, I’m not a prude. Mom and dad, huh, after attending the first game I ever played, back in grade eight. Even then. They had to say it. I could tell in the car ride home they weren’t happy about something or other. Well, my team won, so what the fuck was it? No, it was our athletic gear that had geared them up. But Mom was nice. If I recall correctly she said something like, ‘So, honey, are you comfortable wearing your team uniform as it is?’ That was rich. Team ‘uniform’. Come off it mom. But at that juncture I simply said, ‘for sure’. Later, when I was older and bolder, I said, apropos of nothing after a game, something more like ‘this gear fits like a glove. Don’t even know I’m wearing anything. How about that, dad?’ I like to tease him, for obvious reasons. He can’t answer back. He can’t do anything at all.

                “Okay, yes, so I figured. Brilliant. Let’s go through the entire series of poses again, and I’ll call them off just like we’re doing a square dance call, hey?” Good, I’ve got this. I hate heels though. I want them off already. I could never ever be wait-staff. Almost every other girl on both the volleyball and basketball teams was a waitress. Hmm, they don’t even use that word any more. Okay, sure, keep it coming. I’ve got this. Fuck me it’s a fucking work-out, actually. Hah! “Beautiful.” Mitts concluded before coming up for air from behind her camera.

                That one word. That’s what I live for now. Maybe I’ll die for it too, but I’m eighteen now, an adult. I need to at least act like one even if I can’t immediately actually be one. How many times have my teachers and even mom and dad said the same words to me. The very same. Act your age, for goodness sakes. No threat of punishment of course. I love my folks for that alone. Nothing like that in our schools at least either. All good. But the way they still speak to you; adults, I mean. Surely these older people can’t quite be ‘adults’ either, in the same way that I’m not quite one. No, they’re not. They’re actually only like us, just bigger and sometimes smarter. And they use both of those advantages against us, at least, a lot of the time. Here, I’m in control. Okay, this is the moment, I can feel it. I’m ready though, for sure I’m ready to get these gosh-darn shoes off. Like they’re meant for a ballet practice!

                “Just go with that now. Not the whole thing quite yet. Let’s do some yoga. Anything you want. Anything. Okay, breathe. Hold it in. Release. Now: its just you, okay? You in thin denier tights. Everything about you is beautiful. The sun wants to know you, and the moon tells its secrets to you. The bedding braces itself for your embrace. The linen longs to robe you in its folded fearlessness. The hands of time desire to caress you, to take your youth and make Time itself stop. That’s what you’re doing right now, beautiful Ginny; I can no longer feel my heartbeat for it has flown on wings of joyful wisdom and arcs over your youthful breast.” Holy gods. I have never heard anyone speak like that to me. It fills me with desire. I’m actually getting seriously aroused doing all this. If that sleaze-ball Bryce walked in on me now I wouldn’t even notice him. I can’t hear the camera clicking and whirring. I can’t see Mitts. All I feel is a lightness, a denial of gravity, as if I had stayed in dance, which would have been past a joke.

                Now it’s gone. Huh. Wipe your eyes, you big baby. You’re such a pussy. Such a coward. Grow up, you. No wonder you’re so worried about graduation and what comes next. Moving out? Fat chance. You couldn’t survive a week on your own. College? Well, my grades are awesome so college can go fuck itself. No, its not the world that’s scary, it’s you who are scared. Just plain scared.

                “Hold that!” All the surf of sounds then washed over Virginia, as if she were nothing more than a grain of sand, but also nothing less than an entire beach. Back and forth, from large to small, from universe to bedroom, from game to shower, from object to subject, objecting to both and yet subjected to both. Subjecting herself to both? Is that what adults do then, in the world? Do they really choose their fates? Eighteen and a model. Still in school and a nude model. Now that’s fun to think about, that is. Okay, let’s think about that and that alone. …

            The traditional separation of sex and love, beauty and shill, subject and object, have been collapsed in the arenas of social life wherein the genders have sought to collapse themselves. This quest is itself noble, but our means for doing so are, thus far, not so much. Instead, within a dialectical dynamic there exists the freedom to bracket both these oppositions and transcend them. If we are disloyal to the other in our vainglorious and yet life-willing guerrilla attempts at liberations, if we are disloyal to ourselves in allowing others to prevaricate their own freedoms at our expense, then we can yet commend to ourselves the higher infidelity of a space which does not admit to either man or woman. Case in point, Marx’s ‘atheism’ has been misinterpreted as a disbelief in a god. No, for Marx, in communist society, the question of God cannot arise at all. Since we have been able to imagine such a freedom as this, one cast in the direction of metaphysics no less, surely it would be no such feat to imagine a social world where the questions of marriage, family, the State, subjection and objectification, exploitation and yet ‘beauty’, and even gender itself could never themselves arise.

            Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of forty-five books in ethics, education, aesthetics, health and social theory, and more recently, metaphysical adventure fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Gender: the Ever-Bending Story

                                    Gender: the Ever-Bending Story

                                                Beauty has little to do with desire.

                                                                                –               Marcel Proust

                A romantic notion of the performance of gender, attached to any age or aesthetic, would simply be to suggest that we are attempting, in our mortal and fragile manner, to approach the concept of Beauty. We are to be the beautiful embodied, and this is our sole and singular desire. From the mimicry of fashion, the downward percolation of haute-couture, the adulation of celebrity, the fitness regimes that claim that sixty is the new forty and so on – is thereby twenty the new twelve? Our delayed ethical maturity rates support this other claim at least – such a desire to become and if possible, remain, beautiful, animates much of even popular health discourse. Not an ounce of wasted fat. Sadly, perhaps, few of us attain these heady heights, especially as we age. We are another version of the 99% movement, more or less asexual, displaying genders of uncertain registry, possessing only tattered proof of ownership, gradually weaning ourselves away from glamour.

            Though this sensibility maintains a certain surface tension between ideals and realities, it is still a gloss on another, more elemental sense that the limits of mortality place upon us. Rather than simply a desire for the Beautiful, more deeply as well as more simply, we are driven by a basic will to life. We understand that health, in general, lends itself to longevity. That the figure is enhanced by the physique is of secondary import only. And yet, if the prime mover is an attempt not so much at Beauty per se, with neither Truth nor the Good necessarily following along from this, but rather at Godhead itself, it is also true to say that living better has it charms when juxtaposed with simply living longer.

            The bodies of the Greek pantheon, for example, are both cliché as well as inspiring what Sontag in our own time referred to as the ‘fascist aesthetic’. Riefenstahl was her particular target, and at the time, this latter duly replied ‘I cannot imagine how someone so smart can be so stupid’. On both counts, the rest of us are guilty. We ape the esthetic of eugenics whilst pretending unawareness of the fascist methods it takes to attain it. It is also a ‘look’ underpinned by health and hygiene, and neither erotism nor even sexuality qua sexuality. In a word, a hot body is a better reproductive machine. It is changing population dynamics, altered political franchises, and transitional personal identities that support the more realistic analytic of the study of gender taken into the social world rather than being left to the wider latitudes and sometimes deadpan platitudes of the world of literature.

            This said, if we compare the eugenics height-weight charts of the 1930s with the insurance driven charts of our own day, it is clear that we have lost some weight, as it were. This is a good thing in the sense that women should not be defined by their reproductive physiology and men should not be defined by their ability to carry around the gears of war. Let the latter play out this pre-nuclear destiny in video games, let the former simply adopt. Gender and sex have never been in a one-to-one correspondence with one another. They are regularly completely separate conceptions and thus give forth conflicting sensibilities. ‘Born a woman, born a man’ is someone’s paean to a dubious nostalgia. Who this ‘someone’ may be in today’s world is certainly of interest, but what students of this topic tell us is that it is more of a ‘what’ than a specifically definable ‘who’. Foucault’s conception of ‘bio-power’ is likely the most powerful analytic tool we have to lens these phenomena. Of its relationship to the ability to wage wars of both attrition and obliteration, he states: “But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.” (1978:137 [1976]). Any State which is losing population will have more repressive laws against both LGBTQ2 and abortion; Russia and Poland are obvious examples. If a State has too many people, such as India, laws are loosened to these regards, as we have also recently observed. Within the confines of national boundaries, the same argument covers the actions of waning subcultures or those dominant. Evangelical Protestants have maintained and even succeeded in growing their franchise by teaching against non-heterosexual identities and displaying a vigorous opposition to abortion, this in spite of the fact that it is working and middle class married white women who abort the vast majority of fetuses – simply due to personal constraints of finance and time as well as perhaps, an incipient sense that they are not vessels of mere reproduction after all – and in spite of the fact LGBTQ2 numbers represent an insignificant portion of sectarian franchises. The logic of desire alone argues that the subaltern should be commending post haste alternate sexual identities and practices for the dominant culture, their enemies, instead of making blanket statements that all of us should eschew the bending of gender and sexuality alike.

            This straying from rationality also overtakes a strictly biopower approach, for once again, if the goal is political dominance in a democracy, one’s enemies should be encouraged to abort, to be gay etc. and to generally practice a hedonism that will never lead to stable family and reproductive relationships. Given that this is manifestly not what we observe, it may be the case that subalterns already know that their enemies will not heed their advice, so they can rest in preaching to the choir, hoping that at least these latter will in fact do so. In lesser democracies, governments have more ability to impose restrictions and cast to the historical winds any opposition. Even so, there are ways to counter such Herodian measures. If one is expected to add to the population of one’s homeland in the effort to make it more powerful as a military figure, or to help insulate it against the otherwise necessary importation of immigrant labour pools – which in turns heralds a latent ethnicism; the proverbial ‘fear of a ‘black’ planet’ – one can simply practice safer sex. It is of interest that while this is an oft impotent cliché in the education of youth, we do not so much hear a peep of it regarding adults, especially those in conjugal relations. Speaking of the hygiene of eugenics, it was the Reich’s ideal to reproduce as rapidly as possible, hence the gaudy medals given out to the mothers who bore the most children per annum. One suspects Russia, for instance, of providing more vulgar trophies, this time for the men, given the paucity of laws against domestic and child abuse in that country. Zhivym boitsam pochot i chest’, don’t want to marry, settle down and have kids? Well, here, guys, do whatever you want to your women (and children) and the State will turn a blind eye to it. How’s that for a deal?

            While it is also sadly likely the case that many men in all nations would find such an offer attractive – why should there be opportunities for this kind of recreation as performance in the theaters of abuse that include aspects of the sex industry as well as the far more real abuses that yet take place in some schools in certain countries and in most homes around the world if this were not the case? – it is also plausible to suggest that the more public LGBTQ2 phenomena is suggestive of a transition away from not only the bourgeois family and its repressed esthetic of binary erotism but even more importantly, from the call of duty the homeland has customarily represented. Nuclear weapons have provided an ironic egress from both of these structured strictures. On the one hand, vast armies are no longer required to wage war. On the other, everyone is now a warrior, however passive, for in contemporary global war, all perish and not merely those who serve. It may raise eyebrows to declare a direct relation between weapons of mass destruction and the wider advent of the LGBTQ2, but this is, to me, quite clear.

            The key to using this aesthetic and ethical disconnect to the advantage of overcoming the cause and working more intimately with the effect is to ensure that no matter the local cultural source of youth, the new ideology of global interrelations and dialogue be taught as the commanding presence in educational processes. Yes, this too is an argument, but it rests in the service of life. For the first time in the history of gender-bending, those who on the face of it mean to become comfortable with their extant bodies through gender transition or other methods, also have this wider calling. Their example must teach the rest of us how to overcome the dual and allied forces of State and Family. I think that those who resist LGBTQ2 persons are aware of this very threat, even though their response is too steeped in Hexis to attain a specific rationality. The rhetoric that a god is displeased with alternate sexual identities cannot possibly resonate in a diverse world of many creeds and creditors. No, the best defense against non-binary gender is to simply have as many children as possible within the subculture in question and then teach them about man and woman as they were ‘meant’ to be. Ignore whatever else is going on and hope that the rest of us will simply die out for lack of reproductive potential, in another irony, kind of the like the Shakers. Now, will the women of Poland, of Russia, or for that matter, of Texas and Utah, comply?

            I would like to doubt it. There is an alliance between feminism and ‘genderism’, for lack of a better term. So the only other tactic that can be employed by a waning culture is to try to convince at least some of the rest of us to join in. Men, are you feeling a little ‘incel’ these days? Join us! We have young women aplenty eager to serve you, and we too will look the other way if you enjoy disciplining them (and their children) in some old-world fashion. A number of threads in VoyForums, for example, attest to this marketing and its grim results, which are celebrated as if domestic abuse were a common good. On the other side, the rest of us, however asexual and denuded of our own desires, must put our remaining energies into curtailing all such activities to their null point, while accessing the spirit of Antigone but transcending her choice, which in turn may mean simply destroying the sources which promote, and continue to promote, the inhumane ideals of family and state alike.

            Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of forty-five books in ethics, education, aesthetics, health and social theory, as well as more recently, metaphysical adventure fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.