I’m a Liberal, But...
An interview with Bernard-Henri Lévy
The celebrity polemicist on the resurgence of anti-Semitism, an Arab brand of fascism, and how the election of Obama could reconstitute the grand alliance of Jews and African Americans.
BHL1.jpgBernard-Henri Lévy’s Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism appeared in September, and—as with his previous book, American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville—the nastiest reviews tend to come from Lévy’s fellow leftists. Not quite a memoir and not quite a manifesto, Left in Dark Times maps out in broad swaths the territory that Lévy insists the left in both America and France should take up together. The brothers in democracy, along with others particularly in Europe, must avoid the gaping pitfalls that lie before them: anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and anti-interventionism. Particularly where fascism appears among Islamists or elsewhere, it must be denounced and attacked. If fascism, or for that matter brutality of any sort, appears in the developing world, anti-imperialism must not interfere with the denunciations or immediate calls to intervene, as Lévy believes has happened in Darfur.
Left in Dark Times, then, is a meditation on the soul of the left, bursting at its margins with nostalgia for a left that never lived up to its ideals. One particularly notable section is Lévy’s deconstruction of anti-Semitism, which the New York Times Book Review’s Sam Tanenhaus called a most elegant summary. What makes anti-Semitism so insidious and persistent, Lévy writes, is that it always piggy-backs on some other tendency, one that is socially admired, such as anti-imperialism. It is also supported by the notion that when two groups are suffering, one must get the greater share of sympathy—e.g. Palestinians over Israelis. Lévy calls this “competition between victims.”
A particularly contemptible example of this to Lévy, as we discuss below, was when Jimmy Carter published his tome, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, and met with senior Hamas leaders on the thirty-year anniversary of his hailed Camp David Accords. Lévy denounced the visit in the Wall Street Journal as Jimmy Carter’s “sad end.” “The problem,” Lévy wrote, was not that Carter met with Hamas, but “the spectacular and useless embrace he exchanged with the senior Hamas dignitary, Nasser Shaer, in Ramallah.” As he notes below, when it comes to meeting with contentious groups like Hamas, “there are ways, and there are ways.”
Denunciations like these are where Lévy differs most starkly with the American left, which sees military campaigns by powerful states like Israel as critical to understanding the causes of conflict, tyranny, and terrorism, and supports fewer exceptions to international law from democracies, whether to stem the spread of communism or terrorism. Here’s Scott McLemee discussing Left in Dark Times in The Nation: “We witness a historical re-enactment of the New Philosophical argument that Pol Pot’s regime was the logical culmination of the Marxist revolutionary vision at its purest. Here, the benighted American leftist reader may want to interrupt—to ask if, say, the destabilization of Cambodia by years of carpet bombing during the Vietnam War might be just as germane to understanding the Khmer Rouge’s rise to power as even the most nuanced appreciation of Louis Althusser’s structuralism.”
The question of when and how to meet with the “enemy” of your ally is one not isolated to the work of Lévy; it has been an area of contention in the U.S. presidential election as well. Likewise the question of when and how to use military power. It is precisely his proximity to power that may explain the stark differences between his view and the greater left’s, which is much more habitually suspicious of power, particularly hard power. Left in Dark Times even begins with Lévy taking a call from candidate Nicolas Sarkozy seeking Lévy’s endorsement, with him trying to understand his “reflex” to continue to vote with a left that seems, at times, to revile him. The left, says Lévy, is still his family. Thus, he is still a liberal, but...
When we sat down to speak this summer at the Carlyle, Lévy was wearing one of his expensive white shirts open to the belly button. I began with his family, about which he rarely speaks. He was very reticent, almost whispering his answers. On his childhood? “I never talk about it. I have very few memories of that period.” Why? “It does not interest me. It is repressed. Not repressed... remote. I never think about it. I don’t cultivate it. I was born in a place I did not know till [I was] forty-five years old.” Where? “Algeria. I have a strange memory. And it’s ok. I think the peculiarity of a writer is that he’s born twice or maybe three times. I was born once—which was my [actual] birth, which is not so important. And I was born a second time when I began to write [at twenty-four]. And I will be born a third time when I die, when my books continue on.”
Was his childhood difficult? “No, no. Easy. Gifted. Blessed. With nearly all that you can desire in life.” When did his consciousness of politics arise? “Vietnam War.” His father? “When he was seventeen, he involved himself in the Republican camp of the Spanish [Civil] War. Then, when he was eighteen, he volunteered for the French Army at the beginning of the anti-Nazi war. Then he came, after the defeat of the Free French (Forces Françaises Libres)... and all this time, he was close to the Communist Parties in Algeria and France. In Spain, all these young guys who went to Barcelona were close to the Communists. My father as well.” On whether he regrets this: “No. Number one, it is his business, not mine. Number two, he did not remain so close. He withdrew just after the war. Maybe when I was born, ’48, ’49. But he kept a liberal-leftist sensibility all his life; even when he became a wealthy man, he kept this philosophy.”
That wealth came from a lumber business called Becob; when his father died, Lévy managed the business for a brief period. When it sold in 1997, it earned a reported 750 million francs. Enormous wealth, open shirts, his marriage to the actress Arielle Dombasle, his keenness to challenge the left—what he calls a reflex—often in ways that happen to sound slightly right-wing to his leftist comrades, all add up to a stature that goes beyond writer, past polemicist, past celebrity.
—Joel Whitney for Guernica
Guernica: One of the darknesses you look at in Left in Dark Times is anti-Semitism. What is the state of anti-Semitism today? Is it coming? Going away? Doing both at the same time?
Bernard-Henri Lévy: It’s doing both at the same time. Going away in its old shape. And coming back in its new shape. As always. Anti-Semitism has no fixed pattern; it does not present itself always in the same form. It’s like a virus which changes. What are the workings of its changes, what is its logic is tied, simply, to what is acceptable. It is as if anti-Semitism—without giving it an intelligence, which it doesn’t have—is searching for the precise words or intellectual schemes for allowing itself to be heard, to be supported by the most people. It is as if it were searching for the words which might help it advance, not under the flag of pure evil, but under the flag of an evil aiming sort of in a good direction.
When the Christians were anti-Semitic, they did not just say, We hate Jews. They said, We hate Jews because, unfortunately, they committed the great crime, which was to kill Christ. When Voltaire was anti-Semitic, he did not say, I hate Jews because there is something in their essence which deserves hate; he said, I hate them because they invented Christ.
And this is the sort of tricky way of assembling a big number of people around the speech of hatred. Barring that, you would have very few anti-Semites. So today, all the old processes of legitimacy are dying, are more or less dead. Not so many Christians really think that I killed Christ. Not so many followers of Voltaire really think I am guilty of having invented Christianity. Fewer and fewer believe in the racist identity of the Jews, of which people like me would be the bearers.
But we are facing the installment of a new scheme, with new arguments, new reasons, new logic, trying to make anti-Semitism again acceptable, relatively, according to the general mood of the times. In the chapter you allude to, I try to identify the words with which anti-Semitism must express itself in order to gather under its flag a reasonable number of people, which is a real danger, of course.
Guernica: What are some of those ways?
Bernard-Henri Lévy: There are three: which are denial of the Holocaust, the competition of victimhood, and the demonization of Israel. If you put the three together, you have the portrait of a people, a community, who are guilty of three crimes. Which is the crime of being crooks, moral crooks, inventing or exaggerating their own martyrdom, doing that in order to overshadow others’ martyrdom, and the whole thing in the interest of an illegitimate and deeply guilty state, which is Israel. If you can put it into the brain of some people that Jews are people who exaggerate their martyrdom, who therefore [minimize] the martyrdom of other people, all this with the sole selfish aim of saving Israel, you give to some people some new motives, arguments, reasons for feeding the old hatred.
Guernica: We’ve certainly seen at least one leader in the Middle East, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, attempting to deny or voice doubts about the Holocaust. Are you finding denials of the Holocaust in the United States and in Europe?
Bernard-Henri Lévy: Of course.
Guernica: In relatively mainstream places?
Bernard-Henri Lévy: Mainstream, no. Fortunately, it’s not mainstream. But you have either denial or minimization or banalization. You have some pseudo-scientific historical studies in California, Paris, and London, which say that the gas chambers didn’t exist. And so, yes, you have that in America. The godfathers of this delirium were French, but the focus of the generalization is probably California today, the biggest source of that.
Guernica: The state of California today is the biggest source of...
Bernard-Henri Lévy: Not the [whole] state—you have some little sects, little groups, in California, in Los Angeles; I name them in the book—who are the most efficient sources of popularization of this stupid idea.
Guernica: Is this what Ahmadinejad drew on for his Holocaust deniers conference last year?
Bernard-Henri Lévy: Ahmadinejad relied on some of these people. So you have this in America. Competition of victimhood: we are fed up with the Holocaust; please, there are other things to think [about]. This idea exists in Europe. Of course, it is what Palestinians say. What a lot of people in the Arab world say. And you have that in America and in France. If you listen to some of the radical groups, the African-American groups like that of Farrakhan, it is more or less what they say. Competition of victimhood. You have to choose, Jews or Blacks. You cannot support both. You have to choose your victims. You have to choose your cause.
Guernica: Let me read one quote from your manuscript for Left in Dark Times (page 188). You were writing that Jews had nowhere to go during the Holocaust since Nazis wanted to wipe the very trace of them from the earth. You go on to write, on the other hand, that “a Cambodian could, theoretically at least, flee Cambodia; a Tutsi could flee Rwanda, and outside Rwanda, at least ideally, would be out of the range of the machetes; the Armenians who managed to escape the forces of the Young Turk government were only rarely chased all the way to Paris, Budapest, Rome, Warsaw.” Does that not verge on competition of victimhood?
Competition of victimhood means there is limited space in your brain or mine available for sorrow, and therefore if you use it for the Palestinians, there is nothing left for the Jews, if you use it for the Tutsis, there is nothing left for the Cambodians, and so on.
Bernard-Henri Lévy: No. Of course not. It verges simply on trying to understand the specificity of historical events. What is the peculiarity of one event, the singularity of another one, what allows the comparison, what is out of the comparison. It’s the task of the intellectual, of the historian. I hate competition of victimhood. But I also hate the idea of a big, huge, and empty concept of suffering, one in which you would put an accident, the Holocaust, the genocide of the Tutsis, a murder across the street, an accident on the road, all in the same bag.
Guernica: So at some point, we do have to compare degrees of the victims?
Bernard-Henri Lévy: You have to compare different things. So the Cambodian genocide is different from the Tutsi genocide, which is different from the Armenian, which is different from the Holocaust.
Guernica: But in terms of limited government resources, limited NATO resources, limited UN resources, in a way we do have to spend some time thinking about where the crisis is worst in the world?
Bernard-Henri Lévy: Yes.
Guernica: And that sometimes involves just counting the dead?
Bernard-Henri Lévy: Oui. That’s true.
Guernica: How is that different from competition of victimhood?
Bernard-Henri Lévy: It’s true that in terms of military resources, it is true that the democrats cannot intervene, cannot help all the victims of all the atrocities of the world. This is a truism. It is not competition of victims; it is realism. You cannot—America, France, Germany, Spain, the few democracies in the world—cannot help at the same time the Burmese, the Chinese, Darfuris, and so on. It’s policy. Policy is the art of the possible, what is doable, and so on. Nothing to do with competition of victims.
Competition of victims says something else. Competition of victims relies on the idea that what is scarce is not a scarcity of resources but is the scarcity of the ability of mankind to cry, to sympathize, and to have sorrow. The theory of the competition of victimhood means there is limited space in your brain or mine available for sorrow, and therefore if you use it for the Palestinians, there is nothing left for the Jews, if you use it for the Tutsis, there is nothing left for the Cambodians, and so on.
And this is completely untrue; it is the contrary. The military resource, that—of course—you are probably right. But the capacity for sorrow, the pity capital, these work in a different way. The more you feel sorrow for the Tutsis, the more you will be able to feel for the Jews. The more for this, the more for that. The proof of that is that it is always the same; those who mobilize themselves for Darfur, those who get immediately what is happening in Rwanda, those who see the red light in Burundi, they are always—no exception—those who know exactly what happened with the Holocaust.
I see it in myself. I would probably not have become aware so quickly of what was happening in Bosnia if I didn’t have the memory—and more than the memory: the concern—of what happened in the Holocaust. It’s true. I know that it would have taken me much more time to catch what was going on in Darfur if I’d never had Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Jewish experience in mind. So it is not this or that. It is that because of this. This is why this argument of competition of victims is just untrue and stupid.
This theory of competition of victimhood is running slowly through America, too. And one of the reasons I am so much in favor of [Senator Barack] Obama is that his election might be, will be—because I think he will be elected—a real end to this tide of competition of victimhood, and especially on the specific ground of the two communities, Jews and African Americans, who were so close in the 1960s. And some parts of them have felt the need to separate. The Obama election would reconstitute the grand alliance. And this is the duty of our generation.
Guernica: Do you suppose this is partly why some right wingers have tried to smear Obama’s record on Israel?
Bernard-Henri Levy: Probably. You have some strong forces in America in favor of the rupture of the grand alliance, of blacks and Jews and other minorities. You have some forces with an interest in the war of communities, in the war of memories, in the conflict of victimhood—you have some forces. They go from Osama bin Laden to some anti-black racists, to some anti-Semites, and those want McCain. Those try to do what you said: [smear] Obama’s commitment to Israel.
Guernica: Which you looked into when you were traveling in Chicago for American Vertigo?
Bernard-Henri Lévy: I’m not a cop. I didn’t make any investigation, but it’s obvious.
Guernica: You told me in January that you asked around in Chicago about Obama, as you did about all the candidates and players in the 2004 election, when you were traveling for that book.
Bernard-Henri Lévy: Absolutely. Of course. Chicago is one of the cities where I feel very comfortable in America. I go there from time to time. I have some friends in the Jewish circles in Chicago. They have no doubt; they know Obama well. They have no doubt about his commitment, his record. And myself, I just do what you have to do as far as a politician is concerned. I listen. I read what he says. I cannot find a single sentence where he goes against Israel. And the more recent declarations should fill us with joy when he says he is a supporter of Israel.
Guernica: To go from the present (and perhaps future) of the Democratic party to its past: Jimmy Carter is a different story for you. You’ve strongly condemned his recent trips to the Middle East.
Bernard-Henri Lévy: Jimmy Carter is precisely this type of person who believes that if you have sorrow for one, you can’t have sorrow for the other...
Guernica: Are you saying he meets with Palestinians, but not with Israelis?
Bernard-Henri Lévy: No, but he belongs to this category of people who believe that you have a capital of sorrow, and to have sorrow for the Palestinians means there is nothing left for Israel. He is guilty of—there is no other name for it—fascism when he says that Hamas…
(His wife comes; she is leaving for the airport. He introduces her, walks her out, and returns shortly.)
Bernard-Henri Lévy: Where were we?
Guernica: Jimmy Carter.
Democracy—which has some vibrant elements in the Muslim world, among women, intellectuals, the young generations—needs this work of mourning, this work of sorrow, this work of truth, about the past.
Bernard-Henri Lévy: For forty years, I’ve been in favor of the Palestinian state. A sovereign one. I wrote that for the first time in 1969, forty years ago. But, I am able to recognize, and one should be able to see differences among Palestinians (as among any people) between the democrats and the fascists. The problem with Jimmy Carter is that he is unable to do that. When he treats Hamas as responsible people, Hezbollah as respectable people—both as regular interlocutors—he is just blinding himself and trying to blind us to this main difference, without which we are in dark times. Hamas is a fascist party. They rely on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, they believe in it, they have it in their chart, they have a cult of martyrdom, they have a religion of the blood, a conception of the race and anti-Semitism, by the way, which are the components of a new form of fascism, a new version, which just by its being Arab does not make it innocent. You can have a French fascism and an American fascism; you can have an Arab fascism.
Guernica: I suspect there are still many American liberals who aren’t aware that certain Arab nationalist groups (like the Baath Party) and Muslim groups (like the Muslim Brotherhood) are fascist movements with ties to European fascism. Paul Berman, of course, writes about this here in the U.S. You have written about it, too.
Bernard-Henri Lévy: We Frenchmen know that such a tradition can be vibrant as long as it is not acknowledged, criticized, or mourned. As long as we did not acknowledge the depth of our fascist temptation, it was living in our unconsciousness. It’s a long process. It’s painful. It’s difficult. A people, a nation has to do it. You are criticized when you do it. I was shot down, morally speaking, when I wrote The French Ideology, the thesis of which was that France’s problem was not that it was occupied by a foreign army, but that it held homemade fascism, which was our specialty. We did that. You in America, it took you one century to acknowledge that you have in the depths of your history a very dark side. Segregation. Racism. The Ku Klux Klan. You had to engage in a quasi-revolution in language to get rid of all that. It’s a huge task. Every nation has to do that.
It’s the same for the Arab world. They have the same task. They have to look in their memory. They have to look in their past. They have to mourn their dark temptation. To tell them fairy tales, to help them blind themselves is the worst we can do for them. Democracy—which has some vibrant elements in the Muslim world, among women, intellectuals, the young generations—needs this work of mourning, this work of sorrow, this work of truth, about the past. By which territorial, by which providential privilege would the Arab world be immune to or out of reach of fascism? No way. You had fascism in Japan. You had fascism in Europe. You had fascism in people like Lindberg in America. You had fascism in Latin America and in the Arab world.
Guernica: The problem may be that some Americans hear “Islamo-fascism” for the first time from partisans with a very right-wing agenda. What your book does, what Paul Berman does, and what others have done is to point out that this is a very concrete tie.
Bernard-Henri Lévy: It is not a slogan. It’s a concept.
Guernica: It’s a fact, according to your book, according to Berman.
Bernard-Henri Lévy: It’s a fact. I gave all the historical evidence on one side, ideological evidence on the other, of this tie. It is not a fatal tie. I don’t believe in eminent guiltiness. I don’t believe that there are blessed people or damned people. No angels and no beasts. You have in Islam, like in France, like in Europe, a battle, a very fierce fight, between those who want equality for women, anti-racism, the triumph of human rights, and those who want the values which have been built and popularized by the fascists. It’s a battle.
When I was a very young man, I was told, You should not criticize the Soviet Union because the French Right does it, too. So what. I’m going to bless the killings of millions of people in concentration camps on the frivolous motive that I have some stupid right-wing Frenchman who agrees with me? He will be forgotten. Bush is the same. Bush is nothing. I take rendezvous with you in two years, and nobody will care about Bush. I take rendezvous, and Bush will be opening his library. You will see, it will be a non-event. So I’m not going to sacrifice, I’m not going to let die, I’m not going to betray all these heroic women, courageous young men who fight for democracy because Bush seems to want to help them also. Maybe he does, by the way. I don’t care. Bush is nothing. He was something. He is nothing now.
Guernica: Here’s what Carter said, “If you sponsor an election or promote democracy and freedom around the world, then when people make their own decision about their leaders, I think that all the governments should recognize that administration and let them form their government.” He said later that, to show their good faith, no terrorist acts have been claimed by, committed by, or attributed to Hamas since August 2004. He also said careful engagement could help them become peaceful. But, even if you disagree, how do you fix the long-standing problem in the area without engaging Palestine’s elected leaders?
Bernard-Henri Lévy: Number one: not committed terrorists acts? What about shelling Sderot? I visited Sderot, which is a city near Gaza, a ghost city, [and it was] shelled and bombed all day long by Hamas. Shells and rockets thrown by Hamas-controlled patrols every day. Number one.
Number two: To be elected is a proof of what? It is not a reason to treat them as reasonable people.
And number three, there are ways, and there are ways, to deal with people like Hamas. Ways which weaken them, or ways which reinforce them. You have ways to legitimize them, ways to de-legitimize them. As far as I know, the visit of Carter to the area did not make peace advance one foot. Hamas did not make one step in favor of recognition of Israel first.
Guernica: President Carter said on Charlie Rose that some high-level officials told him that Hamas would recognize Israel within the 1967 borders.
Bernard-Henri Lévy: The fact that Carter said it is not very interesting. I would like Mr. Meshaal, the chief of Hamas, to say that. And which borders? The return to the 1967 borders? Nearly everybody agrees with that. It is more or less the position of Israel.
Guernica: Carter was not alone in noting how the security wall, which goes outside those borders, outside Israeli borders into Palestine, means that it is not, in fact, the current position of Israel.
Obama said he will speak with enemies of the United States. That’s not a problem. Since war is such a horrible thing, it has to be the very last resort—so, of course, he should speak.
Bernard-Henri Lévy: No, no, the wall includes 6, 7, maybe 8%, maximum, of the Palestinian territory. It’s not so far. It’s a negotiation, as far as I know. Israel did not conquer the occupied territories—this is admitted by all historians. Israel was attacked and in the process of defending [themselves], they advanced and occupied the territories. Okay. They said they are ready to give back, let’s say, 90%. It’s a lot, as a basis of negotiation—with people who want your annihilation. It’s a lot. When Germany had Alsace-Lorraine—they said 0% [was what they would] give back. It had to be decided by force. Today, you are a state which was attacked, which—in the process of defending itself occupied a few kilometers… and which is already ready to give back most of it, frankly before negotiating—92, 93, let’s say 90%. Then the negotiation begins. The 92 may become 95%. There can be some exchange of territories, and so on and so on.
Guernica: One of the things that Obama has been criticized for by his opponents is for his statements that he would sit down with the United States’s “enemies” and do exactly what you warn against above—Carter with Hamas—and perhaps legitimize leaders now considered our enemies. Is this problematic for you?
Bernard-Henri Lévy: It’s not quite clear what Obama said on this topic, which is Iran, number one. Number two, going to Tehran, greeting Ahmadinejad, telling him he’s a great man, encouraging him to continue, [this] would be one thing. Going to Tehran, telling Ahmadinejad that he will be out of the [group of] civilized nations if he enriches his uranium, addressing oneself to the civil society of the Persian nation in order to separate them from the regime, [this] would be another thing. I don’t know what Obama will do. Obama said he will speak with enemies of the United States. That’s not a problem. Since war is such a horrible thing, it has to be the very last resort—so, of course, he should speak. But to say what? My feeling is that Obama is not the sort of man who would treat Ahmadinejad as a democrat. I may be wrong. I don’t think so.
Top | Home / Mailing List / Contact / Site Design / Build by I Am Still Alive
All materials, text, images © 2003-2006 Guernica Magazine. All rights reserved.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Obama Win Sparks Push to End Racism in France
ABC News
Obama Win Sparks Push to End Racism in France
Give us 'egalite': Inspired by Obama, leading French figures brandish anti-racist manifesto
By ANGELA CHARLTON
The Associated Press
PARIS
Inspired by Barack Obama, the French first lady and other leading figures say it's high time for France to stamp out racism and shake up a white political and social elite that smacks of colonial times.
A manifesto published Sunday — subtitled "Oui, nous pouvons!", the French translation of Obama's campaign slogan "Yes, we can!" — urges affirmative action-like policies and other steps to turn French ideals of equality into reality for millions of blacks, Arabs and other alienated minorities.
"Our prejudices are insidious," Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, a singer and wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy, said in an interview with the Journal du Dimanche newspaper, which published the manifesto. She said she hoped the "Obama effect" would reshape French society.
Nations across Europe rejoiced over Obama's victory, seeing it as a triumph for American democracy and a world weary of President George W. Bush. But Obama's election also illustrated an uncomfortable truth: how far European countries with big minority populations have to go getting nonwhites into positions of power.
Grass-roots groups in France and Britain are trying to turn Obama's election into electoral gains for minorities at home. Sunday's manifesto suggests France's elites are taking notice, too.
"The election of Barack Obama highlights via a cruel contrast the shortcomings of the French Republic, and the distance that separates us from a country whose citizens knew how to go beyond the racial question and elect a man who happens to be black as president," the appeal said.
"What a lesson!" it went on. "We French ... should listen to it well."
The manifesto was written by Yazid Sabeg, a French self-made millionaire whose parents were Algerian immigrants, and signed by politicians from the left and right and other public figures.
Obama is extremely popular in France, yet blacks and other minorities are nearly invisible in national or local politics here. The lower house of parliament has 555 members from the French mainland; just one is black.
"We shouldn't be surprised that Obama's popularity is so high here: It testifies to the aspirations of all the children of France who are experiencing by proxy a recognition that France does not give them," the manifesto reads. "It also betrays the bad faith of those who welcome the victory of modernity outside our borders, in order to tolerate the status quo here."
The manifesto calls for affirmative action policies like those the United States used years ago to encourage greater minority representation in the workplace and in universities.
Sarkozy has suggested affirmative action for France, but later backed away from the idea since it goes against France's ideals of egalitarianism, which dictate that the country not classify its citizens according to race. This idea that everyone is just "French" means there are no census or other national figures calculating how big the country's minority groups are.
The manifesto urges term limits to make way for more minority candidates, and presses the government to improve schools in working-class neighborhoods.
That appears to be a reference to housing projects heavily populated by nonwhite immigrants and their families, areas that erupted in riots in 2005 by disenfranchised youth, many of them Arab and black children of immigrants.
Critics say the tough-talking Sarkozy fanned discrimination ahead of the riots. Manifesto author Sabeg slammed efforts under Sarkozy to help minority neighborhoods as "an empty shell."
Bruni-Sarkozy said she couldn't sign the appeal because of her status as first lady but that she fully supported it. She is quoted in the Journal du Dimanche as calling Obama's election "an immense joy."
The Italian-born first lady exhibited optimism in her adopted land, saying Sarkozy's ethnically mixed background is a sign that France is open to change.
"My husband is not Obama. But the French voted for the son of a Hungarian immigrant, whose father has an accent, whose mother is of Jewish origin. (Sarkozy) has always considered himself as a bit of a Frenchman from elsewhere," Bruni-Sarkozy is quoted as saying.
She also took a dig at the prime minister of her native Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, for saying last week that Obama is "tanned." The often impolitic and suntanned Berlusconi defended it as a compliment, but Bruni-Sarkozy saw the situation differently.
"I'm very glad to have become French," she said.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures
Obama Win Sparks Push to End Racism in France
Give us 'egalite': Inspired by Obama, leading French figures brandish anti-racist manifesto
By ANGELA CHARLTON
The Associated Press
PARIS
Inspired by Barack Obama, the French first lady and other leading figures say it's high time for France to stamp out racism and shake up a white political and social elite that smacks of colonial times.
A manifesto published Sunday — subtitled "Oui, nous pouvons!", the French translation of Obama's campaign slogan "Yes, we can!" — urges affirmative action-like policies and other steps to turn French ideals of equality into reality for millions of blacks, Arabs and other alienated minorities.
"Our prejudices are insidious," Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, a singer and wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy, said in an interview with the Journal du Dimanche newspaper, which published the manifesto. She said she hoped the "Obama effect" would reshape French society.
Nations across Europe rejoiced over Obama's victory, seeing it as a triumph for American democracy and a world weary of President George W. Bush. But Obama's election also illustrated an uncomfortable truth: how far European countries with big minority populations have to go getting nonwhites into positions of power.
Grass-roots groups in France and Britain are trying to turn Obama's election into electoral gains for minorities at home. Sunday's manifesto suggests France's elites are taking notice, too.
"The election of Barack Obama highlights via a cruel contrast the shortcomings of the French Republic, and the distance that separates us from a country whose citizens knew how to go beyond the racial question and elect a man who happens to be black as president," the appeal said.
"What a lesson!" it went on. "We French ... should listen to it well."
The manifesto was written by Yazid Sabeg, a French self-made millionaire whose parents were Algerian immigrants, and signed by politicians from the left and right and other public figures.
Obama is extremely popular in France, yet blacks and other minorities are nearly invisible in national or local politics here. The lower house of parliament has 555 members from the French mainland; just one is black.
"We shouldn't be surprised that Obama's popularity is so high here: It testifies to the aspirations of all the children of France who are experiencing by proxy a recognition that France does not give them," the manifesto reads. "It also betrays the bad faith of those who welcome the victory of modernity outside our borders, in order to tolerate the status quo here."
The manifesto calls for affirmative action policies like those the United States used years ago to encourage greater minority representation in the workplace and in universities.
Sarkozy has suggested affirmative action for France, but later backed away from the idea since it goes against France's ideals of egalitarianism, which dictate that the country not classify its citizens according to race. This idea that everyone is just "French" means there are no census or other national figures calculating how big the country's minority groups are.
The manifesto urges term limits to make way for more minority candidates, and presses the government to improve schools in working-class neighborhoods.
That appears to be a reference to housing projects heavily populated by nonwhite immigrants and their families, areas that erupted in riots in 2005 by disenfranchised youth, many of them Arab and black children of immigrants.
Critics say the tough-talking Sarkozy fanned discrimination ahead of the riots. Manifesto author Sabeg slammed efforts under Sarkozy to help minority neighborhoods as "an empty shell."
Bruni-Sarkozy said she couldn't sign the appeal because of her status as first lady but that she fully supported it. She is quoted in the Journal du Dimanche as calling Obama's election "an immense joy."
The Italian-born first lady exhibited optimism in her adopted land, saying Sarkozy's ethnically mixed background is a sign that France is open to change.
"My husband is not Obama. But the French voted for the son of a Hungarian immigrant, whose father has an accent, whose mother is of Jewish origin. (Sarkozy) has always considered himself as a bit of a Frenchman from elsewhere," Bruni-Sarkozy is quoted as saying.
She also took a dig at the prime minister of her native Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, for saying last week that Obama is "tanned." The often impolitic and suntanned Berlusconi defended it as a compliment, but Bruni-Sarkozy saw the situation differently.
"I'm very glad to have become French," she said.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures
Philip Bobbitt: The flag-waving is over. This is how the president can change the world
Philip Bobbitt: The flag-waving is over. This is how the president can change the world
Barack Obama's priority must be the economy, says former Washington strategist
Sunday, 9 November 2008
Related Articles
Americans have always been a little flag-crazy, and I am no exception. Shortly after 9/11, I happened to arrive at JFK - the same airport runway from which I had watched the Trade Towers explode - and saw through the airplane porthole an airport worker waving the plane to its berth.
He was guiding the pilot with the usual gestures, except that in each hand he held a small American flag. I remembered on Tuesday night how moved I had been by this simple expression of solidarity. That evening the crowds in Harlem were exuberant, and amid all the car honking, and the music from every quarter, there were hundreds of persons, black and white but mostly black, waving American flags. Just writing those words brings back that same spontaneous ache, only an involuntary smile comes too.
The first phase of the wars on terror is over. The US has conquered its fear of the unknown - for a time, as there will surely be new and justified fears to face down. By electing a figure largely unknown a year ago, an African-American who has had to live by his wits, whose middle name is Hussein and whose father was a Muslim, the US has decisively rejected offshore penal colonies, deceptive rationalizations for warfare, secret torture chambers, and contempt for the constitutional and international law that would forbid such activities. Indeed by selecting a former law professor, the country has thoroughly dismissed the notion that law is an obstacle rather than a guide to achieving security.
We know what security policies Obama is against. What are some of the international programs he should be for?
His first priority must be economic. It can be argued that the principal contribution of the US to global security in the last 50 years has been the maintenance of a relatively free trading system and a relatively stable currency. Recent events in the financial markets put both these achievements at risk. Next weekend President Bush convenes a meeting of 20 world leaders to discuss the global financial crisis. It would be well if President-elect Obama made an appearance at this meeting to emphasize - as only he can - that a global, multilateral approach to the crisis of credit that is enveloping the world’s economies will be the centerpiece of his first months in office.
Addressing this crisis from a national point of view will lead to ruin globally. The Japanese want to talk down the yen; we should help them because of the unusual investment advantages brought by the yen carry trade, not simply to sell more Toyotas. The British want international cooperation around an EU plan for stabilizing global markets; we should follow their lead because London and New York are the centers of both the crisis and its remedies. Just as a national approach will be fatal internationally, nationalizing failing businesses will be equally disastrous domestically. Instead of more State-owned-enterprises, we shall need more Sovereign wealth funds, investing in the best run companies rather than managing the affairs of the worst.
His most urgent security problems arise in Pakistan. The increasingly frantic efforts of the US administration to capture bin Laden, are only further roiling troubled waters in that impoverished but nuclear armed state. Obama will want to be careful not to be forced into any desperate moves initiated by the outgoing administration, just as Eisenhower’s plan to remove Castro ensnared Kennedy at the Bay of Pigs.
Obama is not identified with the failure of the US to support the rule of law in Pakistan, owing to our understandable concern to fight terrorists in Afghanistan. He has pledged to increase US forces in Afghanistan. Our efforts there will only succeed if he can win Pakistani support, in part perhaps, by negotiating with some elements in the Taleban for a share of power.
His trickiest challenge will come from the Democratic Congress and many of his own supporters over the issue of international trade. To some extent these problems are the consequence of the political campaign just finished. This is scarcely unique to Obama: Eisenhower’s campaign pledge to “roll back” Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, Kennedy’s promise to reverse a “missile gap” that turned out to be illusory, Nixon’s “secret plan’ to end the war in Vietnam, Clinton’s commitment to accept open gays in the military, George W. Bush’s repeated rejection of “nation building” are all examples of campaign-created hangovers for the incoming administration.
Any effort to renegotiate NAFTA (which barely achieved ratification the first go round), or worse, to try to insulate US workers from the coming increases in unemployment by protectionist trade practices would bring a world-wide recession. The chief economist for the AFL-CIO was quoted the other day as saying, “China is the issue that should be part of Obama’s trade policy right away,” and we can be sure that she was not urging freer trade.
His easiest problem - though by no means insignificant - may well be the conflict in Iraq. Here his occasionally improvident campaign pledges to withdraw US combat forces will actually win credibility for US efforts from Shia politicians who do not trust the current US administration and have therefore refused to sign a Status of Forces Agreement.
The success of the surge did not help John McCain, who supported it, but rather has bought time for the Iraqi government to strengthen its own forces and make a US withdrawal less perilous. Obama is already committed, wisely in my view, to increasing the size of the American army and marine corps and has called for training in foreign languages and the recruitment of foreign language speaking men and women. He appreciates that our trouble in Iraq wasn’t just having too small a force, but having the wrong force.
The problems that will require the most adroit diplomacy lie in the architecture of international institutions. The UN Security Council, the IMF and the World Bank, Bretton Woods, NATO - all are artifacts of World War II and the Long War of which it was a part. Victory in that war has, ironically, made the institutions that assured Western preeminence inadequate. New states must be brought into the leadership of the global organizations and the regional ones - like NATO - must be supplemented with something like a league of democracies that is global. Russia should be brought into the WTO; China should be offered something like the status Russia enjoys with respect to the G7.
The unknown problem for which the new president must plan is the next phase in the wars on terror. The US should join the International Criminal Court in order to create a forum for trying terrorists. The Geneva Conventions should be updated to cope with the change in warfare we are experiencing. Precautions like providing for the replacement of congressmen killed or disabled in an attack, and the replenishment of the Supreme Court following an atrocity should be given a green light. Closing Guantanamo is a necessary gesture, but no more than that; we must still develop the protocols of due process that will enable us to detain the truly dangerous without wholly relying on the ordinary criminal law.
The long term problem which the new administration must address is denuclearization. Drastically cutting US arsenals, joining the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, offering security guarantees to Middle Eastern states in preparation for the day Iran gets nuclear weapons, putting greater resources in the security of the Russian, Indian and Pakistani stockpiles, and a nuclear fuel bank are all measures that can help. But until there is a long term strategy to denuclearize regions, the threat of a catastrophe will persist.
Tackling climate change is at once the simplest and the most complex of the problems Obama will face. The simple truth is that the US can demonstrate leadership by encouraging energy conservation, reducing its oil consumption through more efficient technologies, increasing the share of American electricity from renewable sources, and developing low-carbon forms of energy. The complex fact is that it will be very difficult to persuade other states to make costly changes in their drive for development because we fear the long term consequences of the lifestyles we already enjoy and they covet.
In a famous passage F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “ France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter - It was a willingness of the heart.” On Tuesday, the American people demonstrated just that trait. Wish us well.
Philip Bobbitt is professor of jurisprudence at Columbia University and a former senior adviser at the White House. He is author of 'Terror and Consent: The Wars for the 21st Century'
copyright: The Independendent.co.uk
Barack Obama's priority must be the economy, says former Washington strategist
Sunday, 9 November 2008
Related Articles
Americans have always been a little flag-crazy, and I am no exception. Shortly after 9/11, I happened to arrive at JFK - the same airport runway from which I had watched the Trade Towers explode - and saw through the airplane porthole an airport worker waving the plane to its berth.
He was guiding the pilot with the usual gestures, except that in each hand he held a small American flag. I remembered on Tuesday night how moved I had been by this simple expression of solidarity. That evening the crowds in Harlem were exuberant, and amid all the car honking, and the music from every quarter, there were hundreds of persons, black and white but mostly black, waving American flags. Just writing those words brings back that same spontaneous ache, only an involuntary smile comes too.
The first phase of the wars on terror is over. The US has conquered its fear of the unknown - for a time, as there will surely be new and justified fears to face down. By electing a figure largely unknown a year ago, an African-American who has had to live by his wits, whose middle name is Hussein and whose father was a Muslim, the US has decisively rejected offshore penal colonies, deceptive rationalizations for warfare, secret torture chambers, and contempt for the constitutional and international law that would forbid such activities. Indeed by selecting a former law professor, the country has thoroughly dismissed the notion that law is an obstacle rather than a guide to achieving security.
We know what security policies Obama is against. What are some of the international programs he should be for?
His first priority must be economic. It can be argued that the principal contribution of the US to global security in the last 50 years has been the maintenance of a relatively free trading system and a relatively stable currency. Recent events in the financial markets put both these achievements at risk. Next weekend President Bush convenes a meeting of 20 world leaders to discuss the global financial crisis. It would be well if President-elect Obama made an appearance at this meeting to emphasize - as only he can - that a global, multilateral approach to the crisis of credit that is enveloping the world’s economies will be the centerpiece of his first months in office.
Addressing this crisis from a national point of view will lead to ruin globally. The Japanese want to talk down the yen; we should help them because of the unusual investment advantages brought by the yen carry trade, not simply to sell more Toyotas. The British want international cooperation around an EU plan for stabilizing global markets; we should follow their lead because London and New York are the centers of both the crisis and its remedies. Just as a national approach will be fatal internationally, nationalizing failing businesses will be equally disastrous domestically. Instead of more State-owned-enterprises, we shall need more Sovereign wealth funds, investing in the best run companies rather than managing the affairs of the worst.
His most urgent security problems arise in Pakistan. The increasingly frantic efforts of the US administration to capture bin Laden, are only further roiling troubled waters in that impoverished but nuclear armed state. Obama will want to be careful not to be forced into any desperate moves initiated by the outgoing administration, just as Eisenhower’s plan to remove Castro ensnared Kennedy at the Bay of Pigs.
Obama is not identified with the failure of the US to support the rule of law in Pakistan, owing to our understandable concern to fight terrorists in Afghanistan. He has pledged to increase US forces in Afghanistan. Our efforts there will only succeed if he can win Pakistani support, in part perhaps, by negotiating with some elements in the Taleban for a share of power.
His trickiest challenge will come from the Democratic Congress and many of his own supporters over the issue of international trade. To some extent these problems are the consequence of the political campaign just finished. This is scarcely unique to Obama: Eisenhower’s campaign pledge to “roll back” Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, Kennedy’s promise to reverse a “missile gap” that turned out to be illusory, Nixon’s “secret plan’ to end the war in Vietnam, Clinton’s commitment to accept open gays in the military, George W. Bush’s repeated rejection of “nation building” are all examples of campaign-created hangovers for the incoming administration.
Any effort to renegotiate NAFTA (which barely achieved ratification the first go round), or worse, to try to insulate US workers from the coming increases in unemployment by protectionist trade practices would bring a world-wide recession. The chief economist for the AFL-CIO was quoted the other day as saying, “China is the issue that should be part of Obama’s trade policy right away,” and we can be sure that she was not urging freer trade.
His easiest problem - though by no means insignificant - may well be the conflict in Iraq. Here his occasionally improvident campaign pledges to withdraw US combat forces will actually win credibility for US efforts from Shia politicians who do not trust the current US administration and have therefore refused to sign a Status of Forces Agreement.
The success of the surge did not help John McCain, who supported it, but rather has bought time for the Iraqi government to strengthen its own forces and make a US withdrawal less perilous. Obama is already committed, wisely in my view, to increasing the size of the American army and marine corps and has called for training in foreign languages and the recruitment of foreign language speaking men and women. He appreciates that our trouble in Iraq wasn’t just having too small a force, but having the wrong force.
The problems that will require the most adroit diplomacy lie in the architecture of international institutions. The UN Security Council, the IMF and the World Bank, Bretton Woods, NATO - all are artifacts of World War II and the Long War of which it was a part. Victory in that war has, ironically, made the institutions that assured Western preeminence inadequate. New states must be brought into the leadership of the global organizations and the regional ones - like NATO - must be supplemented with something like a league of democracies that is global. Russia should be brought into the WTO; China should be offered something like the status Russia enjoys with respect to the G7.
The unknown problem for which the new president must plan is the next phase in the wars on terror. The US should join the International Criminal Court in order to create a forum for trying terrorists. The Geneva Conventions should be updated to cope with the change in warfare we are experiencing. Precautions like providing for the replacement of congressmen killed or disabled in an attack, and the replenishment of the Supreme Court following an atrocity should be given a green light. Closing Guantanamo is a necessary gesture, but no more than that; we must still develop the protocols of due process that will enable us to detain the truly dangerous without wholly relying on the ordinary criminal law.
The long term problem which the new administration must address is denuclearization. Drastically cutting US arsenals, joining the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, offering security guarantees to Middle Eastern states in preparation for the day Iran gets nuclear weapons, putting greater resources in the security of the Russian, Indian and Pakistani stockpiles, and a nuclear fuel bank are all measures that can help. But until there is a long term strategy to denuclearize regions, the threat of a catastrophe will persist.
Tackling climate change is at once the simplest and the most complex of the problems Obama will face. The simple truth is that the US can demonstrate leadership by encouraging energy conservation, reducing its oil consumption through more efficient technologies, increasing the share of American electricity from renewable sources, and developing low-carbon forms of energy. The complex fact is that it will be very difficult to persuade other states to make costly changes in their drive for development because we fear the long term consequences of the lifestyles we already enjoy and they covet.
In a famous passage F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “ France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter - It was a willingness of the heart.” On Tuesday, the American people demonstrated just that trait. Wish us well.
Philip Bobbitt is professor of jurisprudence at Columbia University and a former senior adviser at the White House. He is author of 'Terror and Consent: The Wars for the 21st Century'
copyright: The Independendent.co.uk
Obama puts 'hundreds' of Bush rulings under review
Obama puts 'hundreds' of Bush rulings under review
By Leonard Doyle in Washington
Monday, 10 November 2008
Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, leaving Spiaggia, in Chicago, on Saturday night
AP
Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, leaving Spiaggia, in Chicago, on Saturday night. The Italian restaurant has a strong following among the Windy City's foodies. 'There is no better Italian restaurant in America than Spiaggia,' raves John Mariani, the food critic at Esquire magazine. Its menu includes 'wood-roasted rabbit loin wrapped in pancetta' and 'orange blossom honey-lacquered duck breast with duck sausage, rapini and creamy yellow polenta
* Photos enlarge
Search Search Go
Independent.co.uk Web
Bookmark & Share
Beset by war on two fronts, a rapidly emptying national Treasury and the worst economic crisis in decades, Barack Obama and George Bush are trying to ensure that the transfer of power between them goes as smoothly as possible.
The President-elect and Mr Bush will begin substantive discussions on the handover today when the Obamas visit the White House. While Laura Bush takes Michelle Obama on a tour of the first floor residential areas of her new home, Mr Bush will host his successor for talks in the Oval office.
Co-operation between the outgoing administration and the Obama team on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, looming threats of terror attacks and economic mayhem are being described by aides as "unprecedented". Mr Bush said at the weekend that a seamless transition is "a top priority for the rest of my time in office".
Though far from a backslapping relationship, both President Bush and Mr Obama are said to share a common desire for a smooth transition and for the new administration to hit the ground running before further problems pile up. There are widespread expectations that the new President will be quickly tested abroad, either by acts of terrorism or direct challenges to United States interests by countries such as Iran or Russia.
The political talk shows on television yesterday morning provided evidence of the desire for co-operation, with Mr Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, urging Congress to adopt an economic stimulus package asked for by the Bush administration to ease the pain of recession. But he made clear that the President-elect would not back away from tax cuts for 95 per cent of working families and would proceed with a tax hike for the wealthiest Americans, those earning more than $250,000 (£160,000) a year, despite of the economic slowdown.
It is also obvious that the mood of co-operation may well snap before the 20 January inauguration as Mr Obama presses for access to confidential documents and lays out plans to reverse Mr Bush's controversial legacy.
Public expectations for change are sky high, but the Obama team is trying to decide which of the expansive campaign promises it made over the past 21 months should take priority in the administration's first 100 days. The "big-bang" approach – pressing ahead on multiple fronts – seems to have been put on hold by his transition advisers. John Podesta, the leader of the transition team, pointed yesterday to a more pragmatic "step-by-step", or "hybrid", start to the presidency.
In a radio address over the weekend Mr Obama he said his first priority is an economic recovery programme. Now the debate is whether to tackle health care, climate change and energy independence all at once or to stagger them. But his team is discouraging talk of a fast-paced 100-day agenda.
Mr Obama has made clear for months, however, that he wants to scrap as many as 200 of the most controversial decisions of Mr Bush's eight years in office. A team of 48 advisers is already drawing up a list of measures they intend to undo, relating to torture, federal funding for stem cell research, reproductive rights and climate change.
As soon as he takes over Mr Obama is expected to issue an executive order declaring that CO2 emissions from factories are a danger to human welfare, a big leap forward in the battle to reverse the effects of climate change. He will also reverse a decision to prevent California from regulating CO2 emissions from cars. At the stroke of a pen Mr Obama is expected to wipe out many Bush-era policies that have caused angst abroad, including the global ban on US aid for family planning groups abroad that provide any advice on abortion.
Mr Obama and Mr Bush have met in the White House before. On a visit with a group of newly elected senators in 2004, Mr Obama relates in his memoir, The Audacity of Hope, the President called out "Obama!" before taking him to one side and offering him the following, now rather prophetic-sounding, advice: "You've got a bright future. Very bright. But I've been in this town a while and let me tell you, it can be tough ... Everybody will be waiting for ya to slip. So watch yourself."
Breaking down walls: Black history at the White House
*When Barack and Michelle Obama walk through the White House today, they will be carrying with them the mixed emotions of generations of African-Americans.
There will be reminders of the length of time it has taken for black Americans to feel at home in a mansion built by slave labour and where for decades the only blacks welcome were servants.
It was not until 1973, under Richard Nixon's presidency, that Sammy Davis Jr and his wife became the first black guests to sleep over.
After Booker T. Washington dined there with Theodore Roosevelt in 1901 a newspaper called it "the most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen".
Before the election Mr Obama referred to the powerful symbolism of his children, Malia and Sasha, scampering about the White House.
In 1801 Thomas Jefferson brought slaves with him to the White House, and for nearly fifty years they helped run it.
Amidst the struggles over slavery, the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass was the most prominent black visitor. When Barack Obama's hero Abraham Lincoln was president, he visited three times.
* Click here for copyright permissions
Copyright 2008 Independent News and Media Limited
By Leonard Doyle in Washington
Monday, 10 November 2008
Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, leaving Spiaggia, in Chicago, on Saturday night
AP
Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, leaving Spiaggia, in Chicago, on Saturday night. The Italian restaurant has a strong following among the Windy City's foodies. 'There is no better Italian restaurant in America than Spiaggia,' raves John Mariani, the food critic at Esquire magazine. Its menu includes 'wood-roasted rabbit loin wrapped in pancetta' and 'orange blossom honey-lacquered duck breast with duck sausage, rapini and creamy yellow polenta
* Photos enlarge
Search Search Go
Independent.co.uk Web
Bookmark & Share
Beset by war on two fronts, a rapidly emptying national Treasury and the worst economic crisis in decades, Barack Obama and George Bush are trying to ensure that the transfer of power between them goes as smoothly as possible.
The President-elect and Mr Bush will begin substantive discussions on the handover today when the Obamas visit the White House. While Laura Bush takes Michelle Obama on a tour of the first floor residential areas of her new home, Mr Bush will host his successor for talks in the Oval office.
Co-operation between the outgoing administration and the Obama team on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, looming threats of terror attacks and economic mayhem are being described by aides as "unprecedented". Mr Bush said at the weekend that a seamless transition is "a top priority for the rest of my time in office".
Though far from a backslapping relationship, both President Bush and Mr Obama are said to share a common desire for a smooth transition and for the new administration to hit the ground running before further problems pile up. There are widespread expectations that the new President will be quickly tested abroad, either by acts of terrorism or direct challenges to United States interests by countries such as Iran or Russia.
The political talk shows on television yesterday morning provided evidence of the desire for co-operation, with Mr Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, urging Congress to adopt an economic stimulus package asked for by the Bush administration to ease the pain of recession. But he made clear that the President-elect would not back away from tax cuts for 95 per cent of working families and would proceed with a tax hike for the wealthiest Americans, those earning more than $250,000 (£160,000) a year, despite of the economic slowdown.
It is also obvious that the mood of co-operation may well snap before the 20 January inauguration as Mr Obama presses for access to confidential documents and lays out plans to reverse Mr Bush's controversial legacy.
Public expectations for change are sky high, but the Obama team is trying to decide which of the expansive campaign promises it made over the past 21 months should take priority in the administration's first 100 days. The "big-bang" approach – pressing ahead on multiple fronts – seems to have been put on hold by his transition advisers. John Podesta, the leader of the transition team, pointed yesterday to a more pragmatic "step-by-step", or "hybrid", start to the presidency.
In a radio address over the weekend Mr Obama he said his first priority is an economic recovery programme. Now the debate is whether to tackle health care, climate change and energy independence all at once or to stagger them. But his team is discouraging talk of a fast-paced 100-day agenda.
Mr Obama has made clear for months, however, that he wants to scrap as many as 200 of the most controversial decisions of Mr Bush's eight years in office. A team of 48 advisers is already drawing up a list of measures they intend to undo, relating to torture, federal funding for stem cell research, reproductive rights and climate change.
As soon as he takes over Mr Obama is expected to issue an executive order declaring that CO2 emissions from factories are a danger to human welfare, a big leap forward in the battle to reverse the effects of climate change. He will also reverse a decision to prevent California from regulating CO2 emissions from cars. At the stroke of a pen Mr Obama is expected to wipe out many Bush-era policies that have caused angst abroad, including the global ban on US aid for family planning groups abroad that provide any advice on abortion.
Mr Obama and Mr Bush have met in the White House before. On a visit with a group of newly elected senators in 2004, Mr Obama relates in his memoir, The Audacity of Hope, the President called out "Obama!" before taking him to one side and offering him the following, now rather prophetic-sounding, advice: "You've got a bright future. Very bright. But I've been in this town a while and let me tell you, it can be tough ... Everybody will be waiting for ya to slip. So watch yourself."
Breaking down walls: Black history at the White House
*When Barack and Michelle Obama walk through the White House today, they will be carrying with them the mixed emotions of generations of African-Americans.
There will be reminders of the length of time it has taken for black Americans to feel at home in a mansion built by slave labour and where for decades the only blacks welcome were servants.
It was not until 1973, under Richard Nixon's presidency, that Sammy Davis Jr and his wife became the first black guests to sleep over.
After Booker T. Washington dined there with Theodore Roosevelt in 1901 a newspaper called it "the most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen".
Before the election Mr Obama referred to the powerful symbolism of his children, Malia and Sasha, scampering about the White House.
In 1801 Thomas Jefferson brought slaves with him to the White House, and for nearly fifty years they helped run it.
Amidst the struggles over slavery, the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass was the most prominent black visitor. When Barack Obama's hero Abraham Lincoln was president, he visited three times.
* Click here for copyright permissions
Copyright 2008 Independent News and Media Limited
Obama to Use Executive Orders for Immediate Impact
ABC News
Obama to Use Executive Orders for Immediate Impact
Transition chief: Barack Obama to use executive orders to make immediate stamp on presidency
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON
President-elect Obama plans to use his executive powers to make an immediate impact when he takes office, perhaps reversing Bush administration policies on stem cell research and domestic drilling for oil and natural gas.
John Podesta, Obama's transition chief, said Sunday Obama is reviewing President Bush's executive orders on those issues and others as he works to undo policies enacted during eight years of Republican rule. He said the president can use such orders to move quickly on his own.
"There's a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we'll see the president do that," Podesta said. "I think that he feels like he has a real mandate for change. We need to get off the course that the Bush administration has set."
Podesta also said Obama is working to build a diverse Cabinet. That includes reaching out to Republicans and independents — part of the broad coalition that supported Obama during the race against Republican John McCain. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been mentioned as a possible holdover.
"He's not even a Republican," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said. "Why wouldn't we want to keep him? He's never been a registered Republican."
Obama was elected on a promise of change, but the nature of the job makes it difficult for presidents to do much that has an immediate impact on the lives of average people. Congress plans to take up a second economic aid plan before year's end — an effort Obama supports. But it could be months or longer before taxpayers see the effect.
Obama could use his executive powers to at least signal that Washington is changing.
"Obama's advantage of course is he'll have the House and the Senate working with him, and that makes it easier," said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. "But even then, having an immediate impact is very difficult to do because the machinery of government doesn't move that quickly."
Presidents long have used executive orders to impose policy and set priorities. One of Bush's first acts was to reinstate full abortion restrictions on U.S. overseas aid. The restrictions were first ordered by President Reagan and the first President Bush followed suit. President Clinton lifted them soon after he occupied the Oval Office and it wouldn't be surprising if Obama did the same.
Executive orders "have the power of law and they can cover just about anything," Tobias said in a telephone interview.
Bush used his executive power to limit federal spending on embryonic stem cell research, a position championed by opponents of abortion rights who argue that destroying embryos is akin to killing a fetus. Obama has supported the research in an effort to find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's. Many moderate Republicans also support the research, giving it the stamp of bipartisanship.
On drilling, the federal Bureau of Land Management is opening about 360,000 acres of public land in Utah to oil and gas drilling. Bush administration officials argue that the drilling will not harm sensitive areas; environmentalists oppose it.
"They want to have oil and gas drilling in some of the most sensitive, fragile lands in Utah," Podesta said. "I think that's a mistake."
Two top House Republicans said there is a willingness to try to work with Obama to get things done. But they said to expect Republicans to serve as a check against the power held by Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress.
"It's going to be a cheerful opposition," said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind. "We're going to carry those timeless principles of limited government, a strong defense, traditional values, to the American people."
Pence, of Indiana, is expected to take over the No. 3 leadership post among House Republicans.
In other transition matters, Obama's new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, would not say whether Obama would return to the Senate for votes during the postelection session this month. Obama's presence would be extraordinary, given his position as president-elect, especially if Congress takes up a much-anticipated economic stimulus plan.
"I think that the basic approach has been he's going to be here in Chicago, setting up his economic, not only his economic team, but the policies he wants to outline for the country as soon as he gets sworn in, so we hit the ground running," Emanuel said.
Also, Emanuel would not commit to a Democratic proposal to help the auto industry with some of the $700 billion approved by Congress to for the financial bailout.
Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a letter Saturday to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that the administration should consider expanding the bailout to include car companies.
Podesta appeared on "Fox News Sunday," as did Pence, and CNN's "Late Edition," where Reid also was interviewed. Emanuel spoke on ABC's "This Week" and CBS' "Face the Nation."
———
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures
Obama to Use Executive Orders for Immediate Impact
Transition chief: Barack Obama to use executive orders to make immediate stamp on presidency
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON
President-elect Obama plans to use his executive powers to make an immediate impact when he takes office, perhaps reversing Bush administration policies on stem cell research and domestic drilling for oil and natural gas.
John Podesta, Obama's transition chief, said Sunday Obama is reviewing President Bush's executive orders on those issues and others as he works to undo policies enacted during eight years of Republican rule. He said the president can use such orders to move quickly on his own.
"There's a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we'll see the president do that," Podesta said. "I think that he feels like he has a real mandate for change. We need to get off the course that the Bush administration has set."
Podesta also said Obama is working to build a diverse Cabinet. That includes reaching out to Republicans and independents — part of the broad coalition that supported Obama during the race against Republican John McCain. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been mentioned as a possible holdover.
"He's not even a Republican," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said. "Why wouldn't we want to keep him? He's never been a registered Republican."
Obama was elected on a promise of change, but the nature of the job makes it difficult for presidents to do much that has an immediate impact on the lives of average people. Congress plans to take up a second economic aid plan before year's end — an effort Obama supports. But it could be months or longer before taxpayers see the effect.
Obama could use his executive powers to at least signal that Washington is changing.
"Obama's advantage of course is he'll have the House and the Senate working with him, and that makes it easier," said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. "But even then, having an immediate impact is very difficult to do because the machinery of government doesn't move that quickly."
Presidents long have used executive orders to impose policy and set priorities. One of Bush's first acts was to reinstate full abortion restrictions on U.S. overseas aid. The restrictions were first ordered by President Reagan and the first President Bush followed suit. President Clinton lifted them soon after he occupied the Oval Office and it wouldn't be surprising if Obama did the same.
Executive orders "have the power of law and they can cover just about anything," Tobias said in a telephone interview.
Bush used his executive power to limit federal spending on embryonic stem cell research, a position championed by opponents of abortion rights who argue that destroying embryos is akin to killing a fetus. Obama has supported the research in an effort to find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's. Many moderate Republicans also support the research, giving it the stamp of bipartisanship.
On drilling, the federal Bureau of Land Management is opening about 360,000 acres of public land in Utah to oil and gas drilling. Bush administration officials argue that the drilling will not harm sensitive areas; environmentalists oppose it.
"They want to have oil and gas drilling in some of the most sensitive, fragile lands in Utah," Podesta said. "I think that's a mistake."
Two top House Republicans said there is a willingness to try to work with Obama to get things done. But they said to expect Republicans to serve as a check against the power held by Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress.
"It's going to be a cheerful opposition," said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind. "We're going to carry those timeless principles of limited government, a strong defense, traditional values, to the American people."
Pence, of Indiana, is expected to take over the No. 3 leadership post among House Republicans.
In other transition matters, Obama's new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, would not say whether Obama would return to the Senate for votes during the postelection session this month. Obama's presence would be extraordinary, given his position as president-elect, especially if Congress takes up a much-anticipated economic stimulus plan.
"I think that the basic approach has been he's going to be here in Chicago, setting up his economic, not only his economic team, but the policies he wants to outline for the country as soon as he gets sworn in, so we hit the ground running," Emanuel said.
Also, Emanuel would not commit to a Democratic proposal to help the auto industry with some of the $700 billion approved by Congress to for the financial bailout.
Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a letter Saturday to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson that the administration should consider expanding the bailout to include car companies.
Podesta appeared on "Fox News Sunday," as did Pence, and CNN's "Late Edition," where Reid also was interviewed. Emanuel spoke on ABC's "This Week" and CBS' "Face the Nation."
———
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures
Gore urges US to try for 100% renewable energy within a decade
Gore urges US to try for 100% renewable energy within a decade
* Bobbie Johnson in San Francisco
* guardian.co.uk, Monday November 10 2008 00.01 GMT
* The Guardian, Monday November 10 2008
* Article history
Barack Obama should set drastic targets to force the US to switch to renewable energy in an effort to slow down climate change, according to the former vice president Al Gore. Gore said that one of Obama's first acts as US president should be to demand a move to 100% renewable energy within 10 years.
"We can do that," he said during the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last Friday. "The declaration from President [John F] Kennedy that we would land a man on the moon and bring him back safely was thought by many to be impossible."
During his presidential campaign, Obama promised to invest $150bn (£96bn) in renewables over 10 years as part of the plan to increase US energy security amid fear of oil shortages, while also cutting carbon emissions. Many hope to see those policies enacted with a far-reaching climate-change bill that would bring the US back into the global environment fold.
Gore's call for action, made at the summit, one of the hi-tech industry's leading events, included his view that the internet had a vital role to play in the mission for energy; but he stressed that people needed to start using the web for social good.
Gore has got close links to the industry through his work as a board member at Apple, as an adviser to Google, and as a prominent investor in a number of hi-tech companies.
Making an analogy between the march of the internet and the early development of electricity, Gore suggested the web should find a real purpose beyond making money and sharing information.
He said: "The early uses of electricity were aimed at specialised applications and gimmicks." But the web's real purpose, he suggested, was "to bring about a higher level of consciousness about our planet and the imminent danger ... we face because of the radical transformation in the relationship between human beings and the earth".
Gore's perspective and the similar views of his allies formed the biggest call at the summit for hi-tech development, saying technology should be used to tackle the problem of climate change.
At the summit, delegates heard about how a range of developments, in green technology, hi-tech monitoring systems and alternative energy sources, was now attracting growing interest from investors.
* Bobbie Johnson in San Francisco
* guardian.co.uk, Monday November 10 2008 00.01 GMT
* The Guardian, Monday November 10 2008
* Article history
Barack Obama should set drastic targets to force the US to switch to renewable energy in an effort to slow down climate change, according to the former vice president Al Gore. Gore said that one of Obama's first acts as US president should be to demand a move to 100% renewable energy within 10 years.
"We can do that," he said during the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last Friday. "The declaration from President [John F] Kennedy that we would land a man on the moon and bring him back safely was thought by many to be impossible."
During his presidential campaign, Obama promised to invest $150bn (£96bn) in renewables over 10 years as part of the plan to increase US energy security amid fear of oil shortages, while also cutting carbon emissions. Many hope to see those policies enacted with a far-reaching climate-change bill that would bring the US back into the global environment fold.
Gore's call for action, made at the summit, one of the hi-tech industry's leading events, included his view that the internet had a vital role to play in the mission for energy; but he stressed that people needed to start using the web for social good.
Gore has got close links to the industry through his work as a board member at Apple, as an adviser to Google, and as a prominent investor in a number of hi-tech companies.
Making an analogy between the march of the internet and the early development of electricity, Gore suggested the web should find a real purpose beyond making money and sharing information.
He said: "The early uses of electricity were aimed at specialised applications and gimmicks." But the web's real purpose, he suggested, was "to bring about a higher level of consciousness about our planet and the imminent danger ... we face because of the radical transformation in the relationship between human beings and the earth".
Gore's perspective and the similar views of his allies formed the biggest call at the summit for hi-tech development, saying technology should be used to tackle the problem of climate change.
At the summit, delegates heard about how a range of developments, in green technology, hi-tech monitoring systems and alternative energy sources, was now attracting growing interest from investors.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Barack Obama, John McCain and the Language of Race
September 22, 2008
Editorial Observer
Barack Obama, John McCain and the Language of Race
By BRENT STAPLES
It was not that long ago that black people in the Deep South could be beaten or killed for seeking the right to vote, talking back to the wrong white man or failing to give way on the sidewalk. People of color who violated these and other proscriptions could be designated “uppity niggers” and subjected to acts of violence and intimidation that were meant to dissuade others from following their examples.
The term “uppity” was applied to affluent black people, who sometimes paid a horrific price for owning nicer homes, cars or more successful businesses than whites. Race-based wealth envy was a common trigger for burnings, lynchings and cataclysmic episodes of violence like the Tulsa race riot of 1921, in which a white mob nearly eradicated the prosperous black community of Greenwood.
Forms of eloquence and assertiveness that were viewed as laudable among whites were seen as positively mutinous when practiced by people of color. As such, black men and women who looked white people squarely in the eye — and argued with them about things that mattered — were declared a threat to the racial order and persecuted whenever possible.
This obsession with black subservience was based in nostalgia for slavery. No sane person would openly express such a sentiment today. But the discomfort with certain forms of black assertiveness is too deeply rooted in the national psyche — and the national language — to just disappear. It has been a persistent theme in the public discourse since Barack Obama became a plausible candidate for the presidency.
A blatant example surfaced earlier this month, when a Georgia Republican, Representative Lynn Westmoreland, described the Obamas as “uppity” in response to a reporter’s question. Mr. Westmoreland, who actually stood by the term when given a chance to retreat, later tried to excuse himself by saying that the dictionary definition carried no racial meaning. That seems implausible. Mr. Westmoreland is from the South, where the vernacular meaning of the word has always been clear.
The Jim Crow South institutionalized racial paternalism in its newspapers, which typically denied black adults the courtesy titles of Mr. and Mrs. — and reduced them to children by calling them by first names only. Representative Geoff Davis, Republican of Kentucky, succumbed to the old language earlier this year when describing what he viewed as Mr. Obama’s lack of preparedness to handle nuclear policy. “That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button,” he said.
In the Old South, black men and women who were competent, confident speakers on matters of importance were termed “disrespectful,” the implication being that all good Negroes bowed, scraped, grinned and deferred to their white betters.
In what is probably a harbinger of things to come, the McCain campaign has already run a commercial that carries a similar intimation, accusing Mr. Obama of being “disrespectful” to Sarah Palin. The argument is muted, but its racial antecedents are very clear.
The throwback references that have surfaced in the campaign suggest that Republicans are fighting on racial grounds, even when express references to race are not evident. In a replay of elections past, the G.O.P. will try to leverage racial ghosts and fears without getting its hands visibly dirty. The Democrats try to parry in customary ways.
Mr. Obama seems to understand that he is always an utterance away from a statement — or a phrase — that could transform him in a campaign ad from the affable, rational and racially ambiguous candidate into the archetypical angry black man who scares off the white vote. His caution is evident from the way he sifts and searches the language as he speaks, stepping around words that might push him into the danger zone.
These maneuvers are often painful to watch. The troubling part is that they are necessary.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Editorial Observer
Barack Obama, John McCain and the Language of Race
By BRENT STAPLES
It was not that long ago that black people in the Deep South could be beaten or killed for seeking the right to vote, talking back to the wrong white man or failing to give way on the sidewalk. People of color who violated these and other proscriptions could be designated “uppity niggers” and subjected to acts of violence and intimidation that were meant to dissuade others from following their examples.
The term “uppity” was applied to affluent black people, who sometimes paid a horrific price for owning nicer homes, cars or more successful businesses than whites. Race-based wealth envy was a common trigger for burnings, lynchings and cataclysmic episodes of violence like the Tulsa race riot of 1921, in which a white mob nearly eradicated the prosperous black community of Greenwood.
Forms of eloquence and assertiveness that were viewed as laudable among whites were seen as positively mutinous when practiced by people of color. As such, black men and women who looked white people squarely in the eye — and argued with them about things that mattered — were declared a threat to the racial order and persecuted whenever possible.
This obsession with black subservience was based in nostalgia for slavery. No sane person would openly express such a sentiment today. But the discomfort with certain forms of black assertiveness is too deeply rooted in the national psyche — and the national language — to just disappear. It has been a persistent theme in the public discourse since Barack Obama became a plausible candidate for the presidency.
A blatant example surfaced earlier this month, when a Georgia Republican, Representative Lynn Westmoreland, described the Obamas as “uppity” in response to a reporter’s question. Mr. Westmoreland, who actually stood by the term when given a chance to retreat, later tried to excuse himself by saying that the dictionary definition carried no racial meaning. That seems implausible. Mr. Westmoreland is from the South, where the vernacular meaning of the word has always been clear.
The Jim Crow South institutionalized racial paternalism in its newspapers, which typically denied black adults the courtesy titles of Mr. and Mrs. — and reduced them to children by calling them by first names only. Representative Geoff Davis, Republican of Kentucky, succumbed to the old language earlier this year when describing what he viewed as Mr. Obama’s lack of preparedness to handle nuclear policy. “That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button,” he said.
In the Old South, black men and women who were competent, confident speakers on matters of importance were termed “disrespectful,” the implication being that all good Negroes bowed, scraped, grinned and deferred to their white betters.
In what is probably a harbinger of things to come, the McCain campaign has already run a commercial that carries a similar intimation, accusing Mr. Obama of being “disrespectful” to Sarah Palin. The argument is muted, but its racial antecedents are very clear.
The throwback references that have surfaced in the campaign suggest that Republicans are fighting on racial grounds, even when express references to race are not evident. In a replay of elections past, the G.O.P. will try to leverage racial ghosts and fears without getting its hands visibly dirty. The Democrats try to parry in customary ways.
Mr. Obama seems to understand that he is always an utterance away from a statement — or a phrase — that could transform him in a campaign ad from the affable, rational and racially ambiguous candidate into the archetypical angry black man who scares off the white vote. His caution is evident from the way he sifts and searches the language as he speaks, stepping around words that might push him into the danger zone.
These maneuvers are often painful to watch. The troubling part is that they are necessary.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
Sunday, September 21, 2008
WALTER BENJAMIN 1940 SURVEY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Completed in Paris six months before his death, Walter Benjamin’s final report to Max Horkheimer on the literary situation in France is published here for the first time in English. It was the third ‘literature letter’ that Benjamin had drafted for the Institute for Social Research in New York; the earlier two (3 November 1937, 24 January 1939) can be found in the Gesammelte Briefe. Almost twice as long as these, the Survey of 23 March 1940—Hitler’s troops would take Holland six weeks later—was composed during the same months as ‘On the Concept of History’. Benjamin’s personal situation was precarious: his health had not recovered from his internment as an enemy alien in Autumn 1939; back in his tiny Paris apartment, he worked in bed because of the cold.
Benjamin’s ‘apologies’ to Horkheimer for the difference between this text and his last may refer to the political and intellectual vistas of war-torn Europe it provides, which open out far beyond the pages under review. It contains perhaps his most direct reflections—via Spengler—on the Hitlerite mentality. If the tone recalls the ‘almost Chinese’ courtesy that Adorno remarked in Benjamin’s correspondence, his sensitivity to the Institute’s reactions was well grounded. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproductibility’ and his great essay on Fuchs had been published in its journal shorn of their Marxian passages; Benjamin had only learnt while in the internment camp that his ‘Baudelaire’ would finally appear, after the virtual rejection of its first version by Adorno the year before. To comply with Horkheimer’s request for a further report, he set aside a planned comparison of Rousseau’s Confessions with Gide’s Journals (‘a historical account of sincerity’), and his Baudelaire: ‘closest to my heart, it would be most damaged if I had to stop after starting it again’.
It is not clear why the Institute never sought to publish the 1940 Survey. It was not included in Scholem and Adorno’s 1966 collection of Benjamin’s Correspondence, nor in the five-volume Selected Writings published in English by Harvard University Press. It first appeared—in its original French—only in 2000, in Volume VI of the Gesammelte Briefe. Yet the text stands as a striking valedictory statement on the themes central to Benjamin’s mature work: Paris, now ‘fragile’ under the threat of war, its clochards signalling the vaster tribe of Europe’s dispossesed; the twilight of Surrealism; and the vocation of cultural theory as material social critique.
WALTER BENJAMIN
1940 SURVEY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Paris, 23 March 1940
Dear Monsieur Horkheimer,
It is over a year since I sent you my last résumé of French literature. Unfortunately it is not in literary novelties that the past season has proved most fertile. The noxious seed that has sprouted here obscures the blossoming plant of belles-lettres with a sinister foliage. But I shall attempt in any case to make you a florilegium of it. And since the presentation that I offered you before did not displease, I would like to apologize in advance for the ways in which the form of the following remarks may differ.
I shall start with Paris by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz—the last portrait of the city to appear before the War. [1] This is far from being a success. But the reader will find here certain interesting features, in that they reveal the distance that the portraitist takes from his subject: the city. A distance on three counts. Firstly, Ramuz has hitherto concentrated on tales of peasant life (of which Derborence is the most memorable). In addition he is not French but Vaudois, so not just rural but foreign. Finally, his book was written when the threat of war had begun to loom over the city, seeming to lend it a sort of fragility that would prompt a retreat on the part of the portraitist. The book came to prominence through its serialization in the Nouvelle Revue Française. The author still holds the stage, as he seems to be becoming the nrf’s accredited chronicler of the War. The March issue opens with his ‘Pages from a Neutral’, presented as the start of a long series of reflections.
Ramuz’s language bears traces of the hold that Péguy must have exercised over him. It offers the same cascade of repetitions, the same series of minimal variations on a given phrase. But what in Péguy recalls the movement of a man driving in a nail by successive hammer strokes, rather suggests, with Ramuz, the gait of an individual interminably repeating his steps—like those neurotics who, when they leave the house, are obsessed by the idea of having left a tap running or forgotten to turn off the gas. A recent critic has rightly emphasized the tenacious anxiety of Ramuz. In other words, one will not be expecting certainty, trenchancy or established conviction from this author. The drawbacks of such an approach are obvious; but it is not without certain advantages. Ramuz is a relatively unbiased spirit. He proved this five years ago with his book What is Man, an interesting attempt to get to the heart of the famous Russian experience, which displays the same hesitations that are so striking in ‘Pages from a Neutral’ and in Paris: Notes by a Vaudois.
As to the latter: the first chapters, which tell how the ‘little Vaudois’ established himself in Paris around the beginning of the century, may be simply signalled in passing. Ramuz describes with great acuity the developing consciousness of the young provincial whose Parisian isolation makes him aware of his essential solitude and difference. Moving on to the theoretical notes in the second part of the book, a few samplings will suffice to bring out the characteristics noted above. Ramuz writes:
This is in sharp distinction to the denunciations of the great city as a centre of disorder and disruption, sheltering that ‘nomadic, floating and overflowing mass . . . corrupting by its idleness in the public arena, blown by the winds of factions, by the voice of whoever shouts loudest.’ This was Lamartine, but the same alarm bells ring all through the century—in Haussmann, and later Spengler. It is no less surprising to encounter Ramuz’s account of the alleged eclipse of the prestige of Paris—the great city par excellence:
You will understand, from this little internal debate, how greatly Ramuz seems designed by vocation for the role of Neutral. At all events, his gifts as observer and writer bring us some remarkable pages:
The reader can expand on such reflections in painful reverie: this wandering flock that Ramuz evokes has been enlarged by the war that has raged in Guernica, in Vyborg, in Warsaw.
Michel Leiris’s book, Manhood, is also based on the biography of the author. [2] But what a different biography this is! Before going further, I would like to draw out what it has in common with other recent Surrealist publications. Particularly notable is a decline in the power of bluff: a power that was one of the glories of Surrealist actions from the beginning. This drop is accompanied by a weakening of internal structure and an unwonted textual transparency. This is due, in part, to the grip that Freudianism exerts over these authors.
Leiris is in his mid-thirties. He was a member of the Collège de Sociologie, which I wrote to you about at the time of its foundation. In civilian life he is an ethnologist with the Musée de l’Homme, at the Trocadéro. As for the personal impression he makes, you met him yourself in 1934 or 35, at a soirée at Landsberg’s. [3] It would be no exaggeration to claim that his book would have been the greatest success of the literary season if the War had not intervened. I think certain pages of his autobiography might interest you and will take the liberty of sending you the volume.
You will not suspect me of an excessive tenderness, either for the milieu from which this production emerges, or for the literary genre (‘true confessions’) to which it belongs. In fact the book rather reminded me of Chaplin’s well-known gag where, playing the part of a pawnshop employee dealing with a customer who wants to pawn an alarm clock, he examines the object with distrust, then, to make sure, carefully takes the mechanism to pieces, finally putting all the parts in the customer’s hat and explaining that he cannot see his way to granting a loan on such an object. I have been told that, when Polgar saw this film, he exclaimed: ‘That’s psychoanalysis, the spitting image!’ [4] Leiris’s book, which the author explains was written after psychoanalytic treatment, may well trigger the same remark. It seems unlikely that a man who has been brought to list his mental assets so scrupulously can hope to produce future works. Leiris explains this clearly enough: ‘It is as though the fallacious constructions on which my life was based had been undermined at their foundations, without my being given anything that could replace them. The result is that I certainly act more sagaciously; but the emptiness in which I dwell is all the more acute’ (p. 167).
It is not surprising, after this, that the author should show little gratitude towards psychoanalysis: ‘Though the modern explorers of the unconscious speak of Oedipus, castration, guilt, narcissism, I do not believe this is any great advance in terms of the essentials of the matter (which remains, as I see it, related to the problem of death, the apprehension of nothingness, and is thus a question for metaphysics)’ (p.125). This passage delimits the intellectual horizon of Leiris and his milieu. His judgement of the revolutionary impulses that he experienced at one point is thus only to be expected: ‘I could not completely admit at that time that what triggered my anger . . . was not the condition that the laws of society have placed us in, but simply death’ (p. 553).
These positions, though they situate the book, would not in themselves have led me to bring it to your attention. The reason is rather that, for all our reservations, it must be admitted that the complexes recorded here are described with a remarkable vigour. If you will excuse a personal reference, I would say that the two dominant complexes, Lucretia and Judith, forcefully remind me of those colour plates that are to be found in certain books of the mid-nineteenth century. These were novels for petites gens, shop assistants or servants, and the illustrations were the work of anonymous artists. Plates with garish colours were covered with a coat of varnish that gave them an ambiguous glow. These illustrations (to which I consecrated my collector’s passion for many years) belong to what can be called the folklore of the great cities. In Leiris’s work this same folklore flows from places such as public swimming pools, brothels and racecourses. It is inspired by an eroticism that rejects socially acceptable forms and turns resolutely towards exoticism and crime. The author’s depictions of the fortune-telling prostitute (p. 33), of Judith (p. 116), of the museum as a site of debauchery (p. 40) are gripping. I was not surprised to find, in two interlinked sentences, the same interweaving of purity and corruption that gives this popular imagery I mentioned above its terrifying charm. Leiris actually writes: ‘I have always loved purity, folklore, all that is childish, primitive, innocent.’—And, immediately after: ‘I aspire to evil because a certain evil is necessary to entertain me’ (p. 110). Finally, I would like to signal to you two passages of philosophical interest: a theory of orgasm (pp. 65–6), and an erotic theory of suicide (p. 114).
Leiris’s book shows how little the Surrealists are beholden to workaday Freudian orthodoxy. It goes without saying that it is the positivist rudiments of the doctrine that trigger their protests; but since any serious critical effort is foreign to them, they end up reintroducing metaphysical concepts into Freudian doctrine. This brings them closer to Jung. It is Jung to whom Bachelard appeals in his most recent book, devoted to the forefather of Surrealism, Lautréamont. [5] This book is instructive for many reasons. Before outlining the three main aspects, I will conjure up the figure of the psychoanalytic sniper, as embodied in Adrien Turel. I do not know if you are familiar with the famous explanation of the Divine Comedy, or more specifically of the Inferno, whose nine circles, according to Turel, represent the nine months that the embryo spends in the mother’s womb. [6] That will give you a basic idea of the atmosphere of Bachelard’s studies. For all that, the argument from which the book begins is solidly established.
Bachelard points to the preponderant role played by animals in Lautréamont’s imagination. He draws up an inventory of the animal forms that proliferate in Maldoror. It is not, however, the bodily shape of these beasts that obsesses the poet, but rather their aggressive desire. Here again, Bachelard’s exposition seems unassailable. He explains how disturbed Lautréamont is by various forms of animal aggressivity. He shows how these different manifestations are constantly transforming into each other. They present the elements of an interminable metamorphosis. This must be emphasized, in Bachelard’s view, while taking into account the primacy of claw and muzzle as symbols of aggression. Among the living creatures of the earth, the ones that Lautréamont particularly identifies with, according to Bachelard, are those that swim and those that fly. (In fact the attempt is made to establish a kind of mystic identity between the two.)
It goes without saying that no elucidation of Lautréamont’s poetry can succeed outside of a historical analysis. Bachelard’s accommodation of a metaphysical concept of ‘spirit’ stands in total opposition to this. It is this concept—through which he reunites with Jung—that deprives him of any critical penetration, and which is finally responsible for a terminology both slovenly and pedantic. References to an ‘essentially dynamic phenomenology’ (p. 42), a ‘psychism that is not only kinetic, but truly potential’ (p. 174), sustained by a grandiloquent jargon—‘the animal is a monovalent psychism’ (p. 173), etc.—stud the text. Theorists such as Caillois, or ‘the eager young philosopher Armand Petit-jean’ (pp. 180 and 187) are appealed to as authorities. Nor is Klossowski’s study on Time and Aggression forgotten. The book’s methodological procedure, in other words, is far from promising. But before tackling the heart of his study, I would like to mention what is truly amusing about it—comic, even. And I am far from claiming that this comic aspect was not felt and intended by the author himself.
For Bachelard, Lautréamont’s death at the age of twenty-four—as well as certain passages in his oeuvre—justifies placing great importance on the experience of the poet as a schoolboy. The pages where he brings out the deep-seated nature of the poet’s cruelty—identified both with the severity of the teachers, and with the tortures inflicted by the older boys on those new to the class—are very welcome. Nor is Bachelard afraid to write that Lautréamont’s drama is one ‘born in the Rhetoric class’ (p. 99). In a conclusion, he connects Lautréamont’s famous ‘Hymn to Mathematics’ (model for Aragon’s ‘Hymn to Philately’) to the very essence of this cruelty:
I confess that I find highly seductive the idea that this book, full of outrageous assertions, emerged from a classroom, like Athena from the head of Zeus. It is also backed up by quotations that show what a raging need for revenge his school years aroused in the poet: ‘The classroom is hell, and hell is a classroom’ (p. 101).
The third aspect that Bachelard’s book offers is far and away the most interesting; it is also one that has completely escaped the author himself. To stay within the circle of psychoanalytic experience, his book might be compared with drawings that certain analysands provide to help explain their dreams. Psychoanalysts treat the drawings as puzzles (Vexierbilder) and manage to find in them images that correspond to the subject’s latent preoccupations. Bachelard’s book likewise has a latent content, of which he allows himself to be the dreamer, I would say.
Lautréamont’s fundamental impulse, as Bachelard describes it—his ‘Platonic violence’ (p. 168)—suggests all-too-familiar features to the contemporary reader. But Bachelard is so unaware of the image these features compose that he is quite prepared to salute this new ‘Platonism’ as a philosophy of the future. His description of Maldoror’s aggression can be summarized in four tropes. ‘It is in the dream of action that the truly human joys of action reside. To act without acting, to leave . . . the heavy continuous time of practice for the shimmering momentary time of projects’ (p. 197)—here is the first distinctive feature of his conception. From this it follows that violence demands a ‘suspended time’, to which Lautréamont ‘knew how to give the temporal essence of menace, of deferred aggression.’ ‘Whilst animal aggression is expressed without delay, and is candid in its crime . . . Lautréamont integrates the lie into his violence. The lie is the human sign par excellence’ (p. 90). Here we encounter the third element of this unprecedented Platonism:
Finally, in the same order of ideas, this violence is essentially vindictive. ‘What is striking in . . . Lautréamont’s revenges is that these are almost never struggles against an equal. They attack the weakest or the strongest . . . they smother or they scratch. They smother the weak. They scratch the strong’ (p. 80).
Bringing together these indications—scattered throughout Bachelard’s analysis—the physiognomy of Hitlerite domination emerges with all the sharpness one could wish, like the figure hidden in the puzzle. Thus it should not be too much of an effort for Bachelard to grasp the insanity of his assertion that ‘It is necessary to graft intellectual values onto Lautréamontism’ (p. 199).
Reading these reflections, you will surely not accuse me of forcing the interpretation or seeing problems where there are none. And yet, to better explain the course that my thoughts have followed in such readings, I would like to interject a few words on a subject that has nothing directly to do with the present survey. I refer to Spengler’s Decline of the West. Without dwelling on the circumstances that led me to consult this book, I simply want to let you know the devastating impression it makes on anyone who opens it for the first time in these months. I have had the opportunity to do so, as well as that of finding not the German text but only the French translation, which, by sacrificing its nuances, shows all the more sharply the book’s key ideas. You are familiar with the work; I shall not repeat them here. The most I will say is that I found in Spengler a development of the idea of peace that is a perfect complement to Bachelard’s analysis of violence: ‘Universal peace is always a unilateral decision. The Pax Romana had one and only one meaning for the later military emperors and the German kings: to make a formless population of hundreds of millions into the object of the will to power of a few small bands of warriors’ (p. 266).
I do not flatter myself with making any new discovery when I say that a number of elements of the Hitlerite doctrine are ready to hand in this book. For example: ‘It is from an entirely metaphysical disharmony of “feeling” that a racial hatred is born which is no less strong between French and Germans than between Germans and Jews’ (p. 235). All this is too well known; the only thing that could perhaps detain us is that, when this second volume appeared in 1922, any decisive reaction on the part of the German Left seems to have been absent. The intellectuals, as always, were the first to acclaim the builder of their own scaffold.
Apart from all this, there is one element of the book whose meaning seems only to have surfaced at the present time. This concerns the very procedure of Spengler’s thought, which seems to prefigure that of Hitlerite strategy. Spengler, without any deep knowledge of the subjects on which he prognosticates, refers to the most distant epochs with the sole purpose of integrating them into a performance—Schau—which constitutes, quite precisely, a speculative model for the Reich. This Schau is, in fact, expressly defined as a ‘decree of blood’ (p. 69). Any historical epoch can form part of its metaphysical ‘living space’, just as any territory can form part of the Reich’s Lebensraum. The démarche in the physical world was thus preceded by a similar metaphysical procedure. Few books give a better sense of what is hideous and hateful in the claim of German profundity.
The poverty of the German intellectual milieux mentioned above is not without its counterpart in France. At the moment when the Hitler–Stalin entente has knocked away the whole scaffolding of the Popular Front, a book has appeared that provides evidence of the latter’s intrinsic weaknesses. To be sure, one does not approach Eugène Dabit’s Intimate Diary in any spirit of severity. [7] The author tells his story without pretensions of any kind—neither literary: ‘I speak here only of certain of my states of mind. And not always very clearly or deeply’ (p. 342)—nor moral: no search for a position of advantage, or even an interesting attitude. There is, besides, the question of his fate: the author was cut down, not yet forty, by an illness contracted during his journey to Russia. All this makes for a rather favourable disposition towards the book he left behind; but this inevitably evaporates in the course of reading. It is oppressive, and for reasons that, for the most part, necessarily escaped its author.
One cannot discount the fact that Dabit was a champion of the Popular Front, and one in whom the literary hopes of the movement were vested. Yet the first striking fact is the lacklustre colouring of his political memoirs. Interviews with men like Gide or Malraux; descriptions of meetings, such as the French writers’ protest in support of those persecuted in Germany; allusions to the various cultural congresses—all lack precision, and above all any vibrant communicative power. As for the European upheavals that took place during the eight years that his Diary covers (1928–36), their repercussion here is almost nonexistent. The advent of Hitler, the Abyssinian war, the beginnings of the civil war in Spain, serve simply as backdrop to the stage occupied by the author’s states of mind.
There is something typical in all this. The latest book by Guéhenno (Diary of a ‘Revolution’) is further proof: a commentary on the Popular Front government, and far more resolutely oriented to political actuality, it is no less vague and adopts no decisive stance. André Thérive, the best-informed of French critics, judiciously wrote (Le Temps, 22 June 1939): ‘M. Guéhenno sustains his confidence by his very defeats.’ In Dabit’s case, it is less a matter of confidence than of apprehension, derived from a tenacious fear of ‘missing out on life’. It is true that he confesses this fear without any affectation. But could a more sophisticated presentation lend worth to such reflections as these?
Complaints of this kind set the tone. Obsession with women recurs repeatedly, plaintive for the most part. Yet this is a man of thirty-seven. Most disconcerting of all is the insistence on the agony of war, which crops up like an idée fixe, no matter what the context. This obsession seems to have the function of draining any definite content from the political circumstances that fuel it. There is something sad in discovering that a man whom one had imagined sturdy and determined to change the course of events, in reality latches on to the first philanthropist to come along.
Closing this long parenthesis, let us return to Surrealism with the last-but-one book by Jules Romains, Volume 17 of his Men of Good Will: Vorge against Quinette. Its subject is quite curious. In the second volume of his story, Romains had introduced Landru as one of his characters (under the name of Quinette). [8] In Volume 17, he brings Quinette to the fore, while dissociating him quite unexpectedly from his original model. Quinette, in fact, is supposed to follow the Landru trial in the papers, and to find one of his own victims in the list of crimes imputed to Landru. It is around this time that a young Surrealist, Vorge, comes across Quinette, whom he alone sees in his true light, i.e. as the author of a series of murders, through a series of links that Romains cleverly constructs. It is only a short step from this to promote Quinette as the grand master of Surrealism, which Vorge cheerfully does.
The novel is a pleasant read. If I mention it here in particular it is because it provides grounds for thinking more about its author. (Another reason, of which I assume you are aware, is that Romains has been very active in support of the intellectuals in the detention camps. He was intervening on my behalf when I was released.) Two questions may be asked about Romains: why does he have such a great influence on the public? And what is his political ‘line of force’? The two questions are connected. As for the second, I would refer to my letter of 24 January last year. Here it is appropriate to signal the broad political developments in the volume under discussion, which appeared towards the end of last year, in other words just after the declaration of war. This confers a very particular interest on its final chapter ‘The Festival of Victory’. It makes a gripping read. One of the principal passages loses scarcely anything in being taken out of context:
One might say this is simply reportage. But it is reportage impregnated not just with the atmosphere of past events, but also with the actual situations of the many readers of this account. This leads me to the first of the two questions. One of Romains’s achievements lies in the fact that his work, starting from the post-War era, is entirely devoted to a recent past, yet combines this portrayal of the past with a constant concern for actuality. This makes his work full of passages that, like double exposures, project information of immediate interest onto a background of the recent past. Romains’s speciality within contemporary French literature is the richness of information on the play of the social machine, the routines of government, church, parliamentary, commercial and military action. On this point his books are comparable to the novels of Dumas père, with their inexhaustible detailing of Parisian life. At all events, Romains possesses an extraordinary faculty for putting a range of psychological and social experiences within public reach that it would be hard to access through reasoning or moral feeling. The way in which Surrealism is presented in Vorge against Quinette is further proof of this.
I have waited until the end of this survey to discuss a rather slim volume presented as a series of essays—Georges Salles, Le Regard. This is an enchanting work. I bring it to your attention not so much for some of the theoretical passages, which I shall note, but rather for its beauty, which strike the reader more or less throughout in its happy formulations. Salles is curator of Oriental Antiquities at the Louvre, and writes only incidentally. His book is all the richer from the experiences accumulated in the course of his work. Nothing reveals this better than when the author laments:
In defining such a vision, the author uses terms close to Proust’s. I was particularly struck to find a description of the aura similar to the one I used in my Baudelaire. Salles sees art objects as
Salles considers the connoisseur’s contribution as essential to the life of museums. He fears the day when the state becomes the sole collector. In the meantime, he ascribes to the museum the task of educating the public’s sensibility, over and above that of instruction.
The author rails against a misplaced modernization, and expresses reservations about some of the initiatives at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, with particular allusion to the Van Gogh exhibition where the canvases were surrounded with documentation, as much photographic as written. The public was overwhelmed with far more material than it could take in. (One of the principal contributors to this exhibition was John Rewald. Along with the novelist Noth, he is almost the only German émigré to have made a name for himself in France. He is a hard worker, very well-informed on certain subjects, a young man in command of his world—yet a mind without real scope.) Salles’s critique of this false scientific complacency is also an attack on excessive material comfort. He denounces the danger ‘of pandering too much to the ease of the visitor or the comfort of the art-object’, and thus neglecting ‘the timely inconvenience that provokes their encounter and initiates debate’ (pp. 90–1).
Salles’s concern for clarity, and for the riches of sensuous reception, are combined with a perfect understanding of the workings of theory. He understands its necessarily indirect and roundabout character, and grasps its aim. ‘An art’, in effect, ‘differs from what has gone before, and comes into being precisely because it expresses a completely different reality, not merely a material modification: it reflects a different man . . . The moment to grasp is that at which an expressive fullness responds to the birth of a social character’ (pp. 118–20). Salles seems to understand very clearly what the theoretical penetration of the art object, provided this is sufficiently far-reaching, can teach us about ‘the birth of a social character’. ‘To study the fundamentals of an art, we must, in the end, shatter our frameworks and steep ourselves in those hallucinations of which this art yields us only a clotted sediment; we must journey through the depths of social species now extinct. A hazardous task, with much to tempt a sociologist aware of his mission’ (pp. 123–4).
There is no need to force the text to see that in these lines the author pursues an identical goal to that envisaged in the third part of my essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’. I hope these few notes will suffice to persuade you to read this book, which has such an essentially Parisian atmosphere: the gentle and powerful light of knowledge, filtered through the unstable, cloudy layer of the passions.
In my letter of 3 November 1937, I informed you about Merinos by Henri Calet. I can now recommend Fever of the Polders, by the same author, published after an interval of three years. The quite remarkable quality of this novel explains why Calet cannot conform to the normal rhythm of production for novelists, of one or two books per year.
As a matter of conscience I will note a novel by Victor Serge, Midnight in the Century. The author is of the same party as Souvarine—as you no doubt know. His book has no literary value, and holds the attention only for its picturesque descriptions of Stalinist terror. It is far below the triptych of the Soviet regime that Panait Istrati painted ten years ago. [9]
Caillois has published a ‘Theory of the Festival’ in the nrf, rather pretentious reflections that contain nothing really new. The same author—he is now in Argentina, where he has just got married—has launched a manifesto there against Hitlerism. It is a series of points that simply repeats what honest people have been saying unceasingly for seven years.
By way of information: a History of Art Criticism by Lionello Venturi. The author, son of the famous historian of Italian Renaissance painting, left for America at the start of the War. His book is only a compilation, complete but hurried. A young normalien, Georges Blin, has just published a book on Baudelaire (with nrf). I shall tell you about it next time.
A few days ago, I heard from Mme Adorno that M. Kraft wrote to you from Jerusalem to claim priority for ‘Jochmann’. She said that you would be forwarding me his letter. This has still not reached me. But in any case I want to tell you right away that M. Kraft’s letter relates to a conflict following which I broke off relations with him. This was early in 1937, and my ‘Jochmann’ text was at the root of it. M. Kraft was familiar with Jochmann before I was; but I came across him independently from Kraft, in the course of my studies at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Seeing M. Kraft issue the claim to reserve this author for himself, I did not hide the fact that I deemed this inadmissible, and will consider it totally unacceptable. I await his letter to send you a detailed exposé of the facts.
Death has reaped an ample harvest in recent times, even in ‘peaceful’ quarters. You will naturally have been informed of the deaths of Fuchs and Bouglé. The great critic Charles Du Bos shortly preceded them. A few days ago, Paul Desjardins died; I described him to you last year during my visit to Pontigny. And personally, I have just lost a very young friend, a graphic artist of exquisite talent, who took his own life together with his wife. [10]
One of these days I shall tackle the rest of Baudelaire.
Since neither my health nor the blackout makes me want to go out, I live a very reclusive existence. Perhaps that can excuse the unwarranted length of this letter.
I end with my most cordial greetings to you and your friends.
Walter Benjamin
Translated by David Fernbach. Reprinted from Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vi, pp. 403–21, with permission of Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.
[1] C. F. Ramuz (1878–1947): Swiss writer. [Footnotes by nlr]
[2] Michel Leiris (1910–90): ethnographer, Surrealist.
[3] Paul Ludwig Landsberg (1901–44): German philosopher.
[4] Alfred Polgar (1873–1955): Austrian essayist; the remark also appears in Polgar, Ja und Nein, Hamburg 1956.
[5] Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962): Lautréamont, Paris 1939.
[6] Adrien Turel (1890–1957): Swiss philosopher and psychoanalyst; see ‘Dantes “Inferno” als Gegenwart und Wirklichkeit’ in Die Literarische Welt 3, 1927.
[7] Eugène Dabit (1898–1936): author of Hôtel du Nord.
[8] Henri Landru (1869–1922): conman convicted of 11 murders in 1919, the year in which the action of Vorge against Quinette unfolds.
[9] Panait Istrati (1884–1935): Romanian novelist, collaborator of Serge and Boris Souvarine. Istrati in fact only wrote the first volume of the 1929 trilogy to which Benjamin refers—Towards the Other Flame; Serge wrote the second, Souvarine the third, but by agreement all three appeared under Istrati’s name.
[10] Eduard Fuchs (1870–1940): collector; Célestin Bouglé (1870–1940): sociologist; Charles Du Bos (1882–1939): literary critic; Paul Desjardins (1859–1940): organizer of the annual gatherings of writers and intellectuals at the Décades de Pontigny, 1910–39. The graphic artist and his wife are probably Augustus Hamburger and Carola Muschler.
By the same author:
Goethe: The Reluctant Bourgeois
A Radio Talk on Brecht
Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia
Conversations with Brecht
The Author as Producer
Paris, Capital of the 19th Century
copyright: The New Left Review
Benjamin’s ‘apologies’ to Horkheimer for the difference between this text and his last may refer to the political and intellectual vistas of war-torn Europe it provides, which open out far beyond the pages under review. It contains perhaps his most direct reflections—via Spengler—on the Hitlerite mentality. If the tone recalls the ‘almost Chinese’ courtesy that Adorno remarked in Benjamin’s correspondence, his sensitivity to the Institute’s reactions was well grounded. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproductibility’ and his great essay on Fuchs had been published in its journal shorn of their Marxian passages; Benjamin had only learnt while in the internment camp that his ‘Baudelaire’ would finally appear, after the virtual rejection of its first version by Adorno the year before. To comply with Horkheimer’s request for a further report, he set aside a planned comparison of Rousseau’s Confessions with Gide’s Journals (‘a historical account of sincerity’), and his Baudelaire: ‘closest to my heart, it would be most damaged if I had to stop after starting it again’.
It is not clear why the Institute never sought to publish the 1940 Survey. It was not included in Scholem and Adorno’s 1966 collection of Benjamin’s Correspondence, nor in the five-volume Selected Writings published in English by Harvard University Press. It first appeared—in its original French—only in 2000, in Volume VI of the Gesammelte Briefe. Yet the text stands as a striking valedictory statement on the themes central to Benjamin’s mature work: Paris, now ‘fragile’ under the threat of war, its clochards signalling the vaster tribe of Europe’s dispossesed; the twilight of Surrealism; and the vocation of cultural theory as material social critique.
WALTER BENJAMIN
1940 SURVEY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Paris, 23 March 1940
Dear Monsieur Horkheimer,
It is over a year since I sent you my last résumé of French literature. Unfortunately it is not in literary novelties that the past season has proved most fertile. The noxious seed that has sprouted here obscures the blossoming plant of belles-lettres with a sinister foliage. But I shall attempt in any case to make you a florilegium of it. And since the presentation that I offered you before did not displease, I would like to apologize in advance for the ways in which the form of the following remarks may differ.
I shall start with Paris by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz—the last portrait of the city to appear before the War. [1] This is far from being a success. But the reader will find here certain interesting features, in that they reveal the distance that the portraitist takes from his subject: the city. A distance on three counts. Firstly, Ramuz has hitherto concentrated on tales of peasant life (of which Derborence is the most memorable). In addition he is not French but Vaudois, so not just rural but foreign. Finally, his book was written when the threat of war had begun to loom over the city, seeming to lend it a sort of fragility that would prompt a retreat on the part of the portraitist. The book came to prominence through its serialization in the Nouvelle Revue Française. The author still holds the stage, as he seems to be becoming the nrf’s accredited chronicler of the War. The March issue opens with his ‘Pages from a Neutral’, presented as the start of a long series of reflections.
Ramuz’s language bears traces of the hold that Péguy must have exercised over him. It offers the same cascade of repetitions, the same series of minimal variations on a given phrase. But what in Péguy recalls the movement of a man driving in a nail by successive hammer strokes, rather suggests, with Ramuz, the gait of an individual interminably repeating his steps—like those neurotics who, when they leave the house, are obsessed by the idea of having left a tap running or forgotten to turn off the gas. A recent critic has rightly emphasized the tenacious anxiety of Ramuz. In other words, one will not be expecting certainty, trenchancy or established conviction from this author. The drawbacks of such an approach are obvious; but it is not without certain advantages. Ramuz is a relatively unbiased spirit. He proved this five years ago with his book What is Man, an interesting attempt to get to the heart of the famous Russian experience, which displays the same hesitations that are so striking in ‘Pages from a Neutral’ and in Paris: Notes by a Vaudois.
As to the latter: the first chapters, which tell how the ‘little Vaudois’ established himself in Paris around the beginning of the century, may be simply signalled in passing. Ramuz describes with great acuity the developing consciousness of the young provincial whose Parisian isolation makes him aware of his essential solitude and difference. Moving on to the theoretical notes in the second part of the book, a few samplings will suffice to bring out the characteristics noted above. Ramuz writes:
This is in sharp distinction to the denunciations of the great city as a centre of disorder and disruption, sheltering that ‘nomadic, floating and overflowing mass . . . corrupting by its idleness in the public arena, blown by the winds of factions, by the voice of whoever shouts loudest.’ This was Lamartine, but the same alarm bells ring all through the century—in Haussmann, and later Spengler. It is no less surprising to encounter Ramuz’s account of the alleged eclipse of the prestige of Paris—the great city par excellence:
You will understand, from this little internal debate, how greatly Ramuz seems designed by vocation for the role of Neutral. At all events, his gifts as observer and writer bring us some remarkable pages:
The reader can expand on such reflections in painful reverie: this wandering flock that Ramuz evokes has been enlarged by the war that has raged in Guernica, in Vyborg, in Warsaw.
Michel Leiris’s book, Manhood, is also based on the biography of the author. [2] But what a different biography this is! Before going further, I would like to draw out what it has in common with other recent Surrealist publications. Particularly notable is a decline in the power of bluff: a power that was one of the glories of Surrealist actions from the beginning. This drop is accompanied by a weakening of internal structure and an unwonted textual transparency. This is due, in part, to the grip that Freudianism exerts over these authors.
Leiris is in his mid-thirties. He was a member of the Collège de Sociologie, which I wrote to you about at the time of its foundation. In civilian life he is an ethnologist with the Musée de l’Homme, at the Trocadéro. As for the personal impression he makes, you met him yourself in 1934 or 35, at a soirée at Landsberg’s. [3] It would be no exaggeration to claim that his book would have been the greatest success of the literary season if the War had not intervened. I think certain pages of his autobiography might interest you and will take the liberty of sending you the volume.
You will not suspect me of an excessive tenderness, either for the milieu from which this production emerges, or for the literary genre (‘true confessions’) to which it belongs. In fact the book rather reminded me of Chaplin’s well-known gag where, playing the part of a pawnshop employee dealing with a customer who wants to pawn an alarm clock, he examines the object with distrust, then, to make sure, carefully takes the mechanism to pieces, finally putting all the parts in the customer’s hat and explaining that he cannot see his way to granting a loan on such an object. I have been told that, when Polgar saw this film, he exclaimed: ‘That’s psychoanalysis, the spitting image!’ [4] Leiris’s book, which the author explains was written after psychoanalytic treatment, may well trigger the same remark. It seems unlikely that a man who has been brought to list his mental assets so scrupulously can hope to produce future works. Leiris explains this clearly enough: ‘It is as though the fallacious constructions on which my life was based had been undermined at their foundations, without my being given anything that could replace them. The result is that I certainly act more sagaciously; but the emptiness in which I dwell is all the more acute’ (p. 167).
It is not surprising, after this, that the author should show little gratitude towards psychoanalysis: ‘Though the modern explorers of the unconscious speak of Oedipus, castration, guilt, narcissism, I do not believe this is any great advance in terms of the essentials of the matter (which remains, as I see it, related to the problem of death, the apprehension of nothingness, and is thus a question for metaphysics)’ (p.125). This passage delimits the intellectual horizon of Leiris and his milieu. His judgement of the revolutionary impulses that he experienced at one point is thus only to be expected: ‘I could not completely admit at that time that what triggered my anger . . . was not the condition that the laws of society have placed us in, but simply death’ (p. 553).
These positions, though they situate the book, would not in themselves have led me to bring it to your attention. The reason is rather that, for all our reservations, it must be admitted that the complexes recorded here are described with a remarkable vigour. If you will excuse a personal reference, I would say that the two dominant complexes, Lucretia and Judith, forcefully remind me of those colour plates that are to be found in certain books of the mid-nineteenth century. These were novels for petites gens, shop assistants or servants, and the illustrations were the work of anonymous artists. Plates with garish colours were covered with a coat of varnish that gave them an ambiguous glow. These illustrations (to which I consecrated my collector’s passion for many years) belong to what can be called the folklore of the great cities. In Leiris’s work this same folklore flows from places such as public swimming pools, brothels and racecourses. It is inspired by an eroticism that rejects socially acceptable forms and turns resolutely towards exoticism and crime. The author’s depictions of the fortune-telling prostitute (p. 33), of Judith (p. 116), of the museum as a site of debauchery (p. 40) are gripping. I was not surprised to find, in two interlinked sentences, the same interweaving of purity and corruption that gives this popular imagery I mentioned above its terrifying charm. Leiris actually writes: ‘I have always loved purity, folklore, all that is childish, primitive, innocent.’—And, immediately after: ‘I aspire to evil because a certain evil is necessary to entertain me’ (p. 110). Finally, I would like to signal to you two passages of philosophical interest: a theory of orgasm (pp. 65–6), and an erotic theory of suicide (p. 114).
Leiris’s book shows how little the Surrealists are beholden to workaday Freudian orthodoxy. It goes without saying that it is the positivist rudiments of the doctrine that trigger their protests; but since any serious critical effort is foreign to them, they end up reintroducing metaphysical concepts into Freudian doctrine. This brings them closer to Jung. It is Jung to whom Bachelard appeals in his most recent book, devoted to the forefather of Surrealism, Lautréamont. [5] This book is instructive for many reasons. Before outlining the three main aspects, I will conjure up the figure of the psychoanalytic sniper, as embodied in Adrien Turel. I do not know if you are familiar with the famous explanation of the Divine Comedy, or more specifically of the Inferno, whose nine circles, according to Turel, represent the nine months that the embryo spends in the mother’s womb. [6] That will give you a basic idea of the atmosphere of Bachelard’s studies. For all that, the argument from which the book begins is solidly established.
Bachelard points to the preponderant role played by animals in Lautréamont’s imagination. He draws up an inventory of the animal forms that proliferate in Maldoror. It is not, however, the bodily shape of these beasts that obsesses the poet, but rather their aggressive desire. Here again, Bachelard’s exposition seems unassailable. He explains how disturbed Lautréamont is by various forms of animal aggressivity. He shows how these different manifestations are constantly transforming into each other. They present the elements of an interminable metamorphosis. This must be emphasized, in Bachelard’s view, while taking into account the primacy of claw and muzzle as symbols of aggression. Among the living creatures of the earth, the ones that Lautréamont particularly identifies with, according to Bachelard, are those that swim and those that fly. (In fact the attempt is made to establish a kind of mystic identity between the two.)
It goes without saying that no elucidation of Lautréamont’s poetry can succeed outside of a historical analysis. Bachelard’s accommodation of a metaphysical concept of ‘spirit’ stands in total opposition to this. It is this concept—through which he reunites with Jung—that deprives him of any critical penetration, and which is finally responsible for a terminology both slovenly and pedantic. References to an ‘essentially dynamic phenomenology’ (p. 42), a ‘psychism that is not only kinetic, but truly potential’ (p. 174), sustained by a grandiloquent jargon—‘the animal is a monovalent psychism’ (p. 173), etc.—stud the text. Theorists such as Caillois, or ‘the eager young philosopher Armand Petit-jean’ (pp. 180 and 187) are appealed to as authorities. Nor is Klossowski’s study on Time and Aggression forgotten. The book’s methodological procedure, in other words, is far from promising. But before tackling the heart of his study, I would like to mention what is truly amusing about it—comic, even. And I am far from claiming that this comic aspect was not felt and intended by the author himself.
For Bachelard, Lautréamont’s death at the age of twenty-four—as well as certain passages in his oeuvre—justifies placing great importance on the experience of the poet as a schoolboy. The pages where he brings out the deep-seated nature of the poet’s cruelty—identified both with the severity of the teachers, and with the tortures inflicted by the older boys on those new to the class—are very welcome. Nor is Bachelard afraid to write that Lautréamont’s drama is one ‘born in the Rhetoric class’ (p. 99). In a conclusion, he connects Lautréamont’s famous ‘Hymn to Mathematics’ (model for Aragon’s ‘Hymn to Philately’) to the very essence of this cruelty:
I confess that I find highly seductive the idea that this book, full of outrageous assertions, emerged from a classroom, like Athena from the head of Zeus. It is also backed up by quotations that show what a raging need for revenge his school years aroused in the poet: ‘The classroom is hell, and hell is a classroom’ (p. 101).
The third aspect that Bachelard’s book offers is far and away the most interesting; it is also one that has completely escaped the author himself. To stay within the circle of psychoanalytic experience, his book might be compared with drawings that certain analysands provide to help explain their dreams. Psychoanalysts treat the drawings as puzzles (Vexierbilder) and manage to find in them images that correspond to the subject’s latent preoccupations. Bachelard’s book likewise has a latent content, of which he allows himself to be the dreamer, I would say.
Lautréamont’s fundamental impulse, as Bachelard describes it—his ‘Platonic violence’ (p. 168)—suggests all-too-familiar features to the contemporary reader. But Bachelard is so unaware of the image these features compose that he is quite prepared to salute this new ‘Platonism’ as a philosophy of the future. His description of Maldoror’s aggression can be summarized in four tropes. ‘It is in the dream of action that the truly human joys of action reside. To act without acting, to leave . . . the heavy continuous time of practice for the shimmering momentary time of projects’ (p. 197)—here is the first distinctive feature of his conception. From this it follows that violence demands a ‘suspended time’, to which Lautréamont ‘knew how to give the temporal essence of menace, of deferred aggression.’ ‘Whilst animal aggression is expressed without delay, and is candid in its crime . . . Lautréamont integrates the lie into his violence. The lie is the human sign par excellence’ (p. 90). Here we encounter the third element of this unprecedented Platonism:
Finally, in the same order of ideas, this violence is essentially vindictive. ‘What is striking in . . . Lautréamont’s revenges is that these are almost never struggles against an equal. They attack the weakest or the strongest . . . they smother or they scratch. They smother the weak. They scratch the strong’ (p. 80).
Bringing together these indications—scattered throughout Bachelard’s analysis—the physiognomy of Hitlerite domination emerges with all the sharpness one could wish, like the figure hidden in the puzzle. Thus it should not be too much of an effort for Bachelard to grasp the insanity of his assertion that ‘It is necessary to graft intellectual values onto Lautréamontism’ (p. 199).
Reading these reflections, you will surely not accuse me of forcing the interpretation or seeing problems where there are none. And yet, to better explain the course that my thoughts have followed in such readings, I would like to interject a few words on a subject that has nothing directly to do with the present survey. I refer to Spengler’s Decline of the West. Without dwelling on the circumstances that led me to consult this book, I simply want to let you know the devastating impression it makes on anyone who opens it for the first time in these months. I have had the opportunity to do so, as well as that of finding not the German text but only the French translation, which, by sacrificing its nuances, shows all the more sharply the book’s key ideas. You are familiar with the work; I shall not repeat them here. The most I will say is that I found in Spengler a development of the idea of peace that is a perfect complement to Bachelard’s analysis of violence: ‘Universal peace is always a unilateral decision. The Pax Romana had one and only one meaning for the later military emperors and the German kings: to make a formless population of hundreds of millions into the object of the will to power of a few small bands of warriors’ (p. 266).
I do not flatter myself with making any new discovery when I say that a number of elements of the Hitlerite doctrine are ready to hand in this book. For example: ‘It is from an entirely metaphysical disharmony of “feeling” that a racial hatred is born which is no less strong between French and Germans than between Germans and Jews’ (p. 235). All this is too well known; the only thing that could perhaps detain us is that, when this second volume appeared in 1922, any decisive reaction on the part of the German Left seems to have been absent. The intellectuals, as always, were the first to acclaim the builder of their own scaffold.
Apart from all this, there is one element of the book whose meaning seems only to have surfaced at the present time. This concerns the very procedure of Spengler’s thought, which seems to prefigure that of Hitlerite strategy. Spengler, without any deep knowledge of the subjects on which he prognosticates, refers to the most distant epochs with the sole purpose of integrating them into a performance—Schau—which constitutes, quite precisely, a speculative model for the Reich. This Schau is, in fact, expressly defined as a ‘decree of blood’ (p. 69). Any historical epoch can form part of its metaphysical ‘living space’, just as any territory can form part of the Reich’s Lebensraum. The démarche in the physical world was thus preceded by a similar metaphysical procedure. Few books give a better sense of what is hideous and hateful in the claim of German profundity.
The poverty of the German intellectual milieux mentioned above is not without its counterpart in France. At the moment when the Hitler–Stalin entente has knocked away the whole scaffolding of the Popular Front, a book has appeared that provides evidence of the latter’s intrinsic weaknesses. To be sure, one does not approach Eugène Dabit’s Intimate Diary in any spirit of severity. [7] The author tells his story without pretensions of any kind—neither literary: ‘I speak here only of certain of my states of mind. And not always very clearly or deeply’ (p. 342)—nor moral: no search for a position of advantage, or even an interesting attitude. There is, besides, the question of his fate: the author was cut down, not yet forty, by an illness contracted during his journey to Russia. All this makes for a rather favourable disposition towards the book he left behind; but this inevitably evaporates in the course of reading. It is oppressive, and for reasons that, for the most part, necessarily escaped its author.
One cannot discount the fact that Dabit was a champion of the Popular Front, and one in whom the literary hopes of the movement were vested. Yet the first striking fact is the lacklustre colouring of his political memoirs. Interviews with men like Gide or Malraux; descriptions of meetings, such as the French writers’ protest in support of those persecuted in Germany; allusions to the various cultural congresses—all lack precision, and above all any vibrant communicative power. As for the European upheavals that took place during the eight years that his Diary covers (1928–36), their repercussion here is almost nonexistent. The advent of Hitler, the Abyssinian war, the beginnings of the civil war in Spain, serve simply as backdrop to the stage occupied by the author’s states of mind.
There is something typical in all this. The latest book by Guéhenno (Diary of a ‘Revolution’) is further proof: a commentary on the Popular Front government, and far more resolutely oriented to political actuality, it is no less vague and adopts no decisive stance. André Thérive, the best-informed of French critics, judiciously wrote (Le Temps, 22 June 1939): ‘M. Guéhenno sustains his confidence by his very defeats.’ In Dabit’s case, it is less a matter of confidence than of apprehension, derived from a tenacious fear of ‘missing out on life’. It is true that he confesses this fear without any affectation. But could a more sophisticated presentation lend worth to such reflections as these?
Complaints of this kind set the tone. Obsession with women recurs repeatedly, plaintive for the most part. Yet this is a man of thirty-seven. Most disconcerting of all is the insistence on the agony of war, which crops up like an idée fixe, no matter what the context. This obsession seems to have the function of draining any definite content from the political circumstances that fuel it. There is something sad in discovering that a man whom one had imagined sturdy and determined to change the course of events, in reality latches on to the first philanthropist to come along.
Closing this long parenthesis, let us return to Surrealism with the last-but-one book by Jules Romains, Volume 17 of his Men of Good Will: Vorge against Quinette. Its subject is quite curious. In the second volume of his story, Romains had introduced Landru as one of his characters (under the name of Quinette). [8] In Volume 17, he brings Quinette to the fore, while dissociating him quite unexpectedly from his original model. Quinette, in fact, is supposed to follow the Landru trial in the papers, and to find one of his own victims in the list of crimes imputed to Landru. It is around this time that a young Surrealist, Vorge, comes across Quinette, whom he alone sees in his true light, i.e. as the author of a series of murders, through a series of links that Romains cleverly constructs. It is only a short step from this to promote Quinette as the grand master of Surrealism, which Vorge cheerfully does.
The novel is a pleasant read. If I mention it here in particular it is because it provides grounds for thinking more about its author. (Another reason, of which I assume you are aware, is that Romains has been very active in support of the intellectuals in the detention camps. He was intervening on my behalf when I was released.) Two questions may be asked about Romains: why does he have such a great influence on the public? And what is his political ‘line of force’? The two questions are connected. As for the second, I would refer to my letter of 24 January last year. Here it is appropriate to signal the broad political developments in the volume under discussion, which appeared towards the end of last year, in other words just after the declaration of war. This confers a very particular interest on its final chapter ‘The Festival of Victory’. It makes a gripping read. One of the principal passages loses scarcely anything in being taken out of context:
One might say this is simply reportage. But it is reportage impregnated not just with the atmosphere of past events, but also with the actual situations of the many readers of this account. This leads me to the first of the two questions. One of Romains’s achievements lies in the fact that his work, starting from the post-War era, is entirely devoted to a recent past, yet combines this portrayal of the past with a constant concern for actuality. This makes his work full of passages that, like double exposures, project information of immediate interest onto a background of the recent past. Romains’s speciality within contemporary French literature is the richness of information on the play of the social machine, the routines of government, church, parliamentary, commercial and military action. On this point his books are comparable to the novels of Dumas père, with their inexhaustible detailing of Parisian life. At all events, Romains possesses an extraordinary faculty for putting a range of psychological and social experiences within public reach that it would be hard to access through reasoning or moral feeling. The way in which Surrealism is presented in Vorge against Quinette is further proof of this.
I have waited until the end of this survey to discuss a rather slim volume presented as a series of essays—Georges Salles, Le Regard. This is an enchanting work. I bring it to your attention not so much for some of the theoretical passages, which I shall note, but rather for its beauty, which strike the reader more or less throughout in its happy formulations. Salles is curator of Oriental Antiquities at the Louvre, and writes only incidentally. His book is all the richer from the experiences accumulated in the course of his work. Nothing reveals this better than when the author laments:
In defining such a vision, the author uses terms close to Proust’s. I was particularly struck to find a description of the aura similar to the one I used in my Baudelaire. Salles sees art objects as
Salles considers the connoisseur’s contribution as essential to the life of museums. He fears the day when the state becomes the sole collector. In the meantime, he ascribes to the museum the task of educating the public’s sensibility, over and above that of instruction.
The author rails against a misplaced modernization, and expresses reservations about some of the initiatives at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, with particular allusion to the Van Gogh exhibition where the canvases were surrounded with documentation, as much photographic as written. The public was overwhelmed with far more material than it could take in. (One of the principal contributors to this exhibition was John Rewald. Along with the novelist Noth, he is almost the only German émigré to have made a name for himself in France. He is a hard worker, very well-informed on certain subjects, a young man in command of his world—yet a mind without real scope.) Salles’s critique of this false scientific complacency is also an attack on excessive material comfort. He denounces the danger ‘of pandering too much to the ease of the visitor or the comfort of the art-object’, and thus neglecting ‘the timely inconvenience that provokes their encounter and initiates debate’ (pp. 90–1).
Salles’s concern for clarity, and for the riches of sensuous reception, are combined with a perfect understanding of the workings of theory. He understands its necessarily indirect and roundabout character, and grasps its aim. ‘An art’, in effect, ‘differs from what has gone before, and comes into being precisely because it expresses a completely different reality, not merely a material modification: it reflects a different man . . . The moment to grasp is that at which an expressive fullness responds to the birth of a social character’ (pp. 118–20). Salles seems to understand very clearly what the theoretical penetration of the art object, provided this is sufficiently far-reaching, can teach us about ‘the birth of a social character’. ‘To study the fundamentals of an art, we must, in the end, shatter our frameworks and steep ourselves in those hallucinations of which this art yields us only a clotted sediment; we must journey through the depths of social species now extinct. A hazardous task, with much to tempt a sociologist aware of his mission’ (pp. 123–4).
There is no need to force the text to see that in these lines the author pursues an identical goal to that envisaged in the third part of my essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’. I hope these few notes will suffice to persuade you to read this book, which has such an essentially Parisian atmosphere: the gentle and powerful light of knowledge, filtered through the unstable, cloudy layer of the passions.
In my letter of 3 November 1937, I informed you about Merinos by Henri Calet. I can now recommend Fever of the Polders, by the same author, published after an interval of three years. The quite remarkable quality of this novel explains why Calet cannot conform to the normal rhythm of production for novelists, of one or two books per year.
As a matter of conscience I will note a novel by Victor Serge, Midnight in the Century. The author is of the same party as Souvarine—as you no doubt know. His book has no literary value, and holds the attention only for its picturesque descriptions of Stalinist terror. It is far below the triptych of the Soviet regime that Panait Istrati painted ten years ago. [9]
Caillois has published a ‘Theory of the Festival’ in the nrf, rather pretentious reflections that contain nothing really new. The same author—he is now in Argentina, where he has just got married—has launched a manifesto there against Hitlerism. It is a series of points that simply repeats what honest people have been saying unceasingly for seven years.
By way of information: a History of Art Criticism by Lionello Venturi. The author, son of the famous historian of Italian Renaissance painting, left for America at the start of the War. His book is only a compilation, complete but hurried. A young normalien, Georges Blin, has just published a book on Baudelaire (with nrf). I shall tell you about it next time.
A few days ago, I heard from Mme Adorno that M. Kraft wrote to you from Jerusalem to claim priority for ‘Jochmann’. She said that you would be forwarding me his letter. This has still not reached me. But in any case I want to tell you right away that M. Kraft’s letter relates to a conflict following which I broke off relations with him. This was early in 1937, and my ‘Jochmann’ text was at the root of it. M. Kraft was familiar with Jochmann before I was; but I came across him independently from Kraft, in the course of my studies at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Seeing M. Kraft issue the claim to reserve this author for himself, I did not hide the fact that I deemed this inadmissible, and will consider it totally unacceptable. I await his letter to send you a detailed exposé of the facts.
Death has reaped an ample harvest in recent times, even in ‘peaceful’ quarters. You will naturally have been informed of the deaths of Fuchs and Bouglé. The great critic Charles Du Bos shortly preceded them. A few days ago, Paul Desjardins died; I described him to you last year during my visit to Pontigny. And personally, I have just lost a very young friend, a graphic artist of exquisite talent, who took his own life together with his wife. [10]
One of these days I shall tackle the rest of Baudelaire.
Since neither my health nor the blackout makes me want to go out, I live a very reclusive existence. Perhaps that can excuse the unwarranted length of this letter.
I end with my most cordial greetings to you and your friends.
Walter Benjamin
Translated by David Fernbach. Reprinted from Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vi, pp. 403–21, with permission of Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.
[1] C. F. Ramuz (1878–1947): Swiss writer. [Footnotes by nlr]
[2] Michel Leiris (1910–90): ethnographer, Surrealist.
[3] Paul Ludwig Landsberg (1901–44): German philosopher.
[4] Alfred Polgar (1873–1955): Austrian essayist; the remark also appears in Polgar, Ja und Nein, Hamburg 1956.
[5] Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962): Lautréamont, Paris 1939.
[6] Adrien Turel (1890–1957): Swiss philosopher and psychoanalyst; see ‘Dantes “Inferno” als Gegenwart und Wirklichkeit’ in Die Literarische Welt 3, 1927.
[7] Eugène Dabit (1898–1936): author of Hôtel du Nord.
[8] Henri Landru (1869–1922): conman convicted of 11 murders in 1919, the year in which the action of Vorge against Quinette unfolds.
[9] Panait Istrati (1884–1935): Romanian novelist, collaborator of Serge and Boris Souvarine. Istrati in fact only wrote the first volume of the 1929 trilogy to which Benjamin refers—Towards the Other Flame; Serge wrote the second, Souvarine the third, but by agreement all three appeared under Istrati’s name.
[10] Eduard Fuchs (1870–1940): collector; Célestin Bouglé (1870–1940): sociologist; Charles Du Bos (1882–1939): literary critic; Paul Desjardins (1859–1940): organizer of the annual gatherings of writers and intellectuals at the Décades de Pontigny, 1910–39. The graphic artist and his wife are probably Augustus Hamburger and Carola Muschler.
By the same author:
Goethe: The Reluctant Bourgeois
A Radio Talk on Brecht
Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia
Conversations with Brecht
The Author as Producer
Paris, Capital of the 19th Century
copyright: The New Left Review
Wall St woes help Obama overtake McCain express
Wall St woes help Obama overtake McCain express
With Palin mania ebbing away, the Republican campaign looks suddenly vulnerable after a string of serious gaffes. A tumultuous week on the financial front and a drift of women voters back to Obama have eroded McCain's gains and made the election once more too close to call. The Democrats are now fighting on a ground of their own choosing - the economy
Paul Harris in Iowa
The Observer,
Sunday September 21 2008
Article history
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Photograph: Bob Brown/AP
The opening was superbly choreographed. To the sound of thundering rock music blaring from speakers, several thousand people watched as John McCain's campaign plane swooped out of the sparkling blue Iowa skies.
The plane taxied to a halt only 100 metres away from the crowd gathered at an airport outside the city of Cedar Rapids. They cheered wildly as McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, descended from the aircraft and trooped through the throng, smiling and shaking hands.
Then things started to go wrong. 'Thank you so much, Iowa. It's great to be here in Grand Rapids,' Palin said as she took the stage, naming a completely different city in the far-off state of Michigan. 'CEDAR Rapids!' came shouts from the crowd. Palin ignored her gaffe and ploughed on with a speech that was quickly interrupted by anti-war protesters. For several minutes the hangar was filled with shouts and chants, drowning out the Alaska governor's words. Then McCain took the stage, and the same thing happened to him, forcing him off his script to address an unruly scrimmage as security hauled out the shouting demonstrators. 'The one thing Americans want us to do is stop yelling at each other,' McCain said in exasperation.
Suddenly, after hauling his campaign back into contention for the White House, the wheels are starting to come off McCain's fabled Straight Talk Express. The gaffe-ridden rally in Cedar Rapids was only one indication. In a week of almost unprecedented economic crisis, when Wall Street seemed on the brink of meltdown, McCain's presidential bid was hit by mistake after mistake, varying from the serious to the surreal.
As stocks dropped off a precipice, McCain said the economic fundamentals were strong. Then a senior aide seemed to suggest McCain had invented the BlackBerry. His top economic adviser, Carly Fiorina, confessed she thought neither McCain nor Palin was capable of running a large company. Then, in the middle of the worst financial collapse since the 1930s, McCain got the public endorsement of Donald Trump, a celebrity tycoon who symbolises raw capitalism. For a candidate trying to strike a populist tone, the backing of 'the Donald' was poorly timed. 'It's like a Saturday Night Live routine,' quipped rival Barack Obama on a campaign stop in Nevada.
At the same time the remarkable surge of support inspired by Palin seems to be ebbing. Polls show women voters drifting back to Obama, who has established a slim lead again. Palin is increasingly mired in the 'Troopergate' scandal related to allegations that she fired a senior official out of a personal grudge against her sister's former partner. Palin's star, which shone so brightly for two weeks and reinvigorated the Republican base, is showing every sign of dimming. But the real problem is the biggest one: the stunning economic rollercoaster of last week. Americans in their tens of millions have been glued to their TV screens watching banks collapse, stocks slide and their own government pump billions of dollars into the system to bail out troubled banks and insurers. It has turned the election right back to the core issue that Democrats have wanted to talk about all along: the economy and its terrible woes. McCain, with the first presidential debate looming this week, is now fighting the election on his opponent's strongest turf. In an America shaken and scared by the spectre of a second Great Depression, no one is talking about pigs, lipstick or moose-hunting any more.
But McCain is nothing if not a fighter. In Cedar Rapids he came out blazing against Wall Street, reckless investors and the regulators who let them place such risky bets. His speech was full of fiery language as he vowed to sack government officials, defend US workers and clean up Washington DC. 'Right now you are hurting and it is not your fault,' he told the crowd of several thousand packed into an aircraft hangar. 'It started at the top. It started in Washington. It started on Wall Street and we are going to fix it.'
The crowd dutifully cheered its support, swinging behind this new image of McCain as a man of the people. The applause lines just kept on coming. 'They turned our markets into a casino,' McCain added, to more cheers. 'The regulators were asleep at the switch. They were asleep, my friends. They were not working for you,' he said. It seemed to work, too, though only with an all-Republican crowd that had long bought into his message. 'I am very excited about this. McCain right now is the best thing for this country,' said Harry Meek, owner of a local Iowa pest management company, who had driven more than 100 miles to get to the rally.
Outside the confines of a friendly Republican crowd, McCain's message is likely to meet greater resistance. For many years, McCain has been an outspoken advocate of easing restrictions on Wall Street, not tightening regulations. His campaign is closely linked to lobbyists and the financial industry is a huge donator to his cause. That has allowed Obama's speechwriters to hurl some sharply worded barbs. 'The old boys' network? In the McCain campaign, that's called a staff meeting,' is one of Obama's most popular lines in his current stump speech.
At the same time McCain is facing an American electorate likely to blame eight years living under a Republican White House for the current mess. The words that McCain never mentions on the campaign trail are 'President George W Bush'. In effect, McCain has to run against what his own Republican party has done for the last two presidential terms, almost turning his campaign into a third party. But the Bush legacy is still likely to cast a deep shadow over his efforts. 'It is hard for his message to ring true: "If you elect me I will finally clean up Washington, having been there for 30 years",' said Professor Seth Masket, a political scientist at Denver University. 'It is a really hard needle to thread.'
The economy is not the ground on which McCain wanted to fight the election. His line last week that 'the fundamentals of our economy are strong' was the latest in a long list of verbal mistakes he has made over economic issues. The subject has been a weak one for Republicans ever since the Bush administration turned a surplus into a massive deficit and jobless figures started creeping up.
A recent Washington Post poll found that people preferred Obama on the economy by 51 per cent to 39 per cent. Almost three-quarters of people said Obama understood their economic problems, compared with only 53 per cent who thought McCain felt that way. Certainly McCain's recent successes in the polls have not been built on his economic image. Instead they were boosted by a tough, disciplined message machine that had successfully torn into Obama's image and accused him of being elitist, liberal and sexist. But now that apparatus of attack is starting to splutter too. Reporters on McCain's campaign plane recently staged a protest against a decision to cut off access to McCain. They chanted 'Bring Mac back!' as they sat in their plane seats. The demonstration had little impact but showed how broken relations have become with the press corps that once fawned upon the candidate.
At the same time, the hard-edged anti-Obama attacks have become so extreme that many commentators have accused the campaign of outright lies. Even the conservative Fox News channel joined the debate when one of its anchors publicly ripped into a senior McCain spokesman on air for misrepresenting Obama's tax plans.
Finally, to add to the misery, there has been a slew of negative news about Palin. After first promising to co-operate in the Troopergate investigation in Alaska, she has now refused to testify. So has her husband, Todd. The McCain campaign is taking the whole issue so seriously that it has dispatched a rapid response team to Alaska to rebut the regular new revelations emerging from the state. The effort is being directed by lawyer Edward O'Callaghan, a McCain aide who was previously a terrorist expert. Polls have shown that the story has damaged Palin, and a carefully planned media rollout, via a series of TV interviews, has done little to blunt it. After massive swings in her direction after her stunning debut at the Republican convention, the pendulum of popularity has started to reverse course. Last week one poll showed Palin registering an 11-point drop in support among women. Another showed white women voters going back to Obama by a margin of 21 points. Not that anyone could tell that from Palin's performance in Iowa. When not shouting over the noise of protesters, she doggedly delivered her trademark speech, complete with introduction of her husband as 'First Dude' and touting her experience as a 'mom'. She exuded confidence and kept up the barrage of attacks on Obama. 'He likes to point the finger of blame,' she said of the Democratic candidate 'But has he ever really lifted a finger to help?'
The message is aimed at people like Ron Eversman and small towns like Newton, Iowa. Eversman, a baker, was sitting last week in the neat square at the heart of Newton, a town surrounded by cornfields and reeling from the closure of a factory and the loss of hundreds of jobs. It is a story repeated all over America and uppermost in voters' minds. Eversman had watched the events on Wall Street unfolding with a mixture of fear and grim fascination. 'It sure isn't good, is it? I have a little investment and it has taken a beating,' he said.
Eversman had good news for Obama. He plans to vote for him. 'McCain is too much like Bush. He's better than Bush, of course. But I want something different.' But it would be a mistake to think the Democrats have the support of Eversman - and millions of worried voters like him - sewn up. Eversman admitted that he could change his mind by November. 'I don't think Obama is any kind of saviour or anything,' he said with a shrug.
The economic crisis holds many pitfalls for Obama too. His style and rhetoric have been based on lofty idealism and inspiration. That created an astonishing political movement, based on young voters, black people and the well educated. But, as Hillary Clinton showed in the final weeks of her nomination run, Obama is vulnerable to a candidate who can tap into the deep concerns of working-class white America. His choice of Joe Biden as a running mate was meant to solve the issue, but so far the Delaware senator has had little impact, apart from developing a long line of mistakes, including opining that Clinton might have been a better choice. Obama himself might have trouble striking a populist tone, too. As the first black candidate of a major party, his staff is aware that he cannot afford to be portrayed as the 'angry black' candidate. His appeal is based on unity, good governance and an attempt to be 'post-racial'.
Like McCain, he has been hit by some unfortunate events in the past week. Both campaigns seem to be expert at attacking each other and less good at their own performance. First, Biden called for rich people to pay more taxes as their patriotic duty. That comment was co-opted into McCain's speech literally within hours. 'Raising taxes in a tough economy is not patriotic. It is not a badge of honour. It is just plain dumb,' McCain said in Cedar Rapids, getting the biggest cheer of the rally.
Then Obama was hit by the fund-raising needs of his campaign. As the economic crisis sloshed over the country, he held a celebrity-studded event in California, at which Barbra Streisand sang. The cost for a ticket was a staggering $28,500(£15,500). Obama was ruthlessly mocked on the late-night talk shows. 'All the big Hollywood stars were there... I believe the topic was how John McCain is out of touch with the common people,' quipped TV host Jay Leno.
But there is little doubt that the Democrats are now much happier to be fighting this election on economic issues. The past few weeks of 'Palin mania' threw them off balance. Now it has put their campaign where it always wanted to be: attacking McCain directly and making it about serious issues. The airwaves are full of Obama ads portraying McCain as out of touch and Obama as in tune with the needs of ordinary people. They even include a two-minute advert in which Obama outlines his economic agenda. 'That's a pretty amazing ad to be running. It shows how serious people are taking this,' said Masket. On the stump last week Obama launched salvo after salvo in McCain's direction. 'What we've seen the last few days is nothing less than the final verdict on an economic philosophy that has completely failed,' he said at a Colorado rally. The Democrats are sensing their chance again. The polls bear them out. They are back in the game. Obama has re-established a small but solid lead in recent surveys. The RCP average of polls has him two points ahead of McCain. In the key battleground states things are tight again.
A week ago all the buzz was about McCain closing the gap in Democratic strongholds like New York and New Jersey. Now the stress is on Obama's growing strength in red states like Virginia, Colorado and North Carolina. With seven weeks to go, the election is swinging to and fro but is still too close to call.
Yet as the economic crisis has swept all before it and dominated the headlines, a few people are beginning to question what it is that the next occupant of the White House is going to inherit. 'Whoever it is, Obama or McCain, I really don't envy the next President,' said Masket.
Locking horns
'I could walk [100 miles] from here to Lansing and I wouldn't run into a single person who thought our economy was doing well, unless I ran into John McCain.'
Joe Biden, Monday
'The fundamentals of our economy are strong. But these are very, very difficult times.'
John McCain, Monday
'Yesterday, John McCain actually said that if he's President he'll take on, and I quote, "the old boys' network in Washington" ... The old boys' network? In the McCain campaign that's called a staff meeting.'
Barack Obama, Wednesday
With Palin mania ebbing away, the Republican campaign looks suddenly vulnerable after a string of serious gaffes. A tumultuous week on the financial front and a drift of women voters back to Obama have eroded McCain's gains and made the election once more too close to call. The Democrats are now fighting on a ground of their own choosing - the economy
Paul Harris in Iowa
The Observer,
Sunday September 21 2008
Article history
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Photograph: Bob Brown/AP
The opening was superbly choreographed. To the sound of thundering rock music blaring from speakers, several thousand people watched as John McCain's campaign plane swooped out of the sparkling blue Iowa skies.
The plane taxied to a halt only 100 metres away from the crowd gathered at an airport outside the city of Cedar Rapids. They cheered wildly as McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, descended from the aircraft and trooped through the throng, smiling and shaking hands.
Then things started to go wrong. 'Thank you so much, Iowa. It's great to be here in Grand Rapids,' Palin said as she took the stage, naming a completely different city in the far-off state of Michigan. 'CEDAR Rapids!' came shouts from the crowd. Palin ignored her gaffe and ploughed on with a speech that was quickly interrupted by anti-war protesters. For several minutes the hangar was filled with shouts and chants, drowning out the Alaska governor's words. Then McCain took the stage, and the same thing happened to him, forcing him off his script to address an unruly scrimmage as security hauled out the shouting demonstrators. 'The one thing Americans want us to do is stop yelling at each other,' McCain said in exasperation.
Suddenly, after hauling his campaign back into contention for the White House, the wheels are starting to come off McCain's fabled Straight Talk Express. The gaffe-ridden rally in Cedar Rapids was only one indication. In a week of almost unprecedented economic crisis, when Wall Street seemed on the brink of meltdown, McCain's presidential bid was hit by mistake after mistake, varying from the serious to the surreal.
As stocks dropped off a precipice, McCain said the economic fundamentals were strong. Then a senior aide seemed to suggest McCain had invented the BlackBerry. His top economic adviser, Carly Fiorina, confessed she thought neither McCain nor Palin was capable of running a large company. Then, in the middle of the worst financial collapse since the 1930s, McCain got the public endorsement of Donald Trump, a celebrity tycoon who symbolises raw capitalism. For a candidate trying to strike a populist tone, the backing of 'the Donald' was poorly timed. 'It's like a Saturday Night Live routine,' quipped rival Barack Obama on a campaign stop in Nevada.
At the same time the remarkable surge of support inspired by Palin seems to be ebbing. Polls show women voters drifting back to Obama, who has established a slim lead again. Palin is increasingly mired in the 'Troopergate' scandal related to allegations that she fired a senior official out of a personal grudge against her sister's former partner. Palin's star, which shone so brightly for two weeks and reinvigorated the Republican base, is showing every sign of dimming. But the real problem is the biggest one: the stunning economic rollercoaster of last week. Americans in their tens of millions have been glued to their TV screens watching banks collapse, stocks slide and their own government pump billions of dollars into the system to bail out troubled banks and insurers. It has turned the election right back to the core issue that Democrats have wanted to talk about all along: the economy and its terrible woes. McCain, with the first presidential debate looming this week, is now fighting the election on his opponent's strongest turf. In an America shaken and scared by the spectre of a second Great Depression, no one is talking about pigs, lipstick or moose-hunting any more.
But McCain is nothing if not a fighter. In Cedar Rapids he came out blazing against Wall Street, reckless investors and the regulators who let them place such risky bets. His speech was full of fiery language as he vowed to sack government officials, defend US workers and clean up Washington DC. 'Right now you are hurting and it is not your fault,' he told the crowd of several thousand packed into an aircraft hangar. 'It started at the top. It started in Washington. It started on Wall Street and we are going to fix it.'
The crowd dutifully cheered its support, swinging behind this new image of McCain as a man of the people. The applause lines just kept on coming. 'They turned our markets into a casino,' McCain added, to more cheers. 'The regulators were asleep at the switch. They were asleep, my friends. They were not working for you,' he said. It seemed to work, too, though only with an all-Republican crowd that had long bought into his message. 'I am very excited about this. McCain right now is the best thing for this country,' said Harry Meek, owner of a local Iowa pest management company, who had driven more than 100 miles to get to the rally.
Outside the confines of a friendly Republican crowd, McCain's message is likely to meet greater resistance. For many years, McCain has been an outspoken advocate of easing restrictions on Wall Street, not tightening regulations. His campaign is closely linked to lobbyists and the financial industry is a huge donator to his cause. That has allowed Obama's speechwriters to hurl some sharply worded barbs. 'The old boys' network? In the McCain campaign, that's called a staff meeting,' is one of Obama's most popular lines in his current stump speech.
At the same time McCain is facing an American electorate likely to blame eight years living under a Republican White House for the current mess. The words that McCain never mentions on the campaign trail are 'President George W Bush'. In effect, McCain has to run against what his own Republican party has done for the last two presidential terms, almost turning his campaign into a third party. But the Bush legacy is still likely to cast a deep shadow over his efforts. 'It is hard for his message to ring true: "If you elect me I will finally clean up Washington, having been there for 30 years",' said Professor Seth Masket, a political scientist at Denver University. 'It is a really hard needle to thread.'
The economy is not the ground on which McCain wanted to fight the election. His line last week that 'the fundamentals of our economy are strong' was the latest in a long list of verbal mistakes he has made over economic issues. The subject has been a weak one for Republicans ever since the Bush administration turned a surplus into a massive deficit and jobless figures started creeping up.
A recent Washington Post poll found that people preferred Obama on the economy by 51 per cent to 39 per cent. Almost three-quarters of people said Obama understood their economic problems, compared with only 53 per cent who thought McCain felt that way. Certainly McCain's recent successes in the polls have not been built on his economic image. Instead they were boosted by a tough, disciplined message machine that had successfully torn into Obama's image and accused him of being elitist, liberal and sexist. But now that apparatus of attack is starting to splutter too. Reporters on McCain's campaign plane recently staged a protest against a decision to cut off access to McCain. They chanted 'Bring Mac back!' as they sat in their plane seats. The demonstration had little impact but showed how broken relations have become with the press corps that once fawned upon the candidate.
At the same time, the hard-edged anti-Obama attacks have become so extreme that many commentators have accused the campaign of outright lies. Even the conservative Fox News channel joined the debate when one of its anchors publicly ripped into a senior McCain spokesman on air for misrepresenting Obama's tax plans.
Finally, to add to the misery, there has been a slew of negative news about Palin. After first promising to co-operate in the Troopergate investigation in Alaska, she has now refused to testify. So has her husband, Todd. The McCain campaign is taking the whole issue so seriously that it has dispatched a rapid response team to Alaska to rebut the regular new revelations emerging from the state. The effort is being directed by lawyer Edward O'Callaghan, a McCain aide who was previously a terrorist expert. Polls have shown that the story has damaged Palin, and a carefully planned media rollout, via a series of TV interviews, has done little to blunt it. After massive swings in her direction after her stunning debut at the Republican convention, the pendulum of popularity has started to reverse course. Last week one poll showed Palin registering an 11-point drop in support among women. Another showed white women voters going back to Obama by a margin of 21 points. Not that anyone could tell that from Palin's performance in Iowa. When not shouting over the noise of protesters, she doggedly delivered her trademark speech, complete with introduction of her husband as 'First Dude' and touting her experience as a 'mom'. She exuded confidence and kept up the barrage of attacks on Obama. 'He likes to point the finger of blame,' she said of the Democratic candidate 'But has he ever really lifted a finger to help?'
The message is aimed at people like Ron Eversman and small towns like Newton, Iowa. Eversman, a baker, was sitting last week in the neat square at the heart of Newton, a town surrounded by cornfields and reeling from the closure of a factory and the loss of hundreds of jobs. It is a story repeated all over America and uppermost in voters' minds. Eversman had watched the events on Wall Street unfolding with a mixture of fear and grim fascination. 'It sure isn't good, is it? I have a little investment and it has taken a beating,' he said.
Eversman had good news for Obama. He plans to vote for him. 'McCain is too much like Bush. He's better than Bush, of course. But I want something different.' But it would be a mistake to think the Democrats have the support of Eversman - and millions of worried voters like him - sewn up. Eversman admitted that he could change his mind by November. 'I don't think Obama is any kind of saviour or anything,' he said with a shrug.
The economic crisis holds many pitfalls for Obama too. His style and rhetoric have been based on lofty idealism and inspiration. That created an astonishing political movement, based on young voters, black people and the well educated. But, as Hillary Clinton showed in the final weeks of her nomination run, Obama is vulnerable to a candidate who can tap into the deep concerns of working-class white America. His choice of Joe Biden as a running mate was meant to solve the issue, but so far the Delaware senator has had little impact, apart from developing a long line of mistakes, including opining that Clinton might have been a better choice. Obama himself might have trouble striking a populist tone, too. As the first black candidate of a major party, his staff is aware that he cannot afford to be portrayed as the 'angry black' candidate. His appeal is based on unity, good governance and an attempt to be 'post-racial'.
Like McCain, he has been hit by some unfortunate events in the past week. Both campaigns seem to be expert at attacking each other and less good at their own performance. First, Biden called for rich people to pay more taxes as their patriotic duty. That comment was co-opted into McCain's speech literally within hours. 'Raising taxes in a tough economy is not patriotic. It is not a badge of honour. It is just plain dumb,' McCain said in Cedar Rapids, getting the biggest cheer of the rally.
Then Obama was hit by the fund-raising needs of his campaign. As the economic crisis sloshed over the country, he held a celebrity-studded event in California, at which Barbra Streisand sang. The cost for a ticket was a staggering $28,500(£15,500). Obama was ruthlessly mocked on the late-night talk shows. 'All the big Hollywood stars were there... I believe the topic was how John McCain is out of touch with the common people,' quipped TV host Jay Leno.
But there is little doubt that the Democrats are now much happier to be fighting this election on economic issues. The past few weeks of 'Palin mania' threw them off balance. Now it has put their campaign where it always wanted to be: attacking McCain directly and making it about serious issues. The airwaves are full of Obama ads portraying McCain as out of touch and Obama as in tune with the needs of ordinary people. They even include a two-minute advert in which Obama outlines his economic agenda. 'That's a pretty amazing ad to be running. It shows how serious people are taking this,' said Masket. On the stump last week Obama launched salvo after salvo in McCain's direction. 'What we've seen the last few days is nothing less than the final verdict on an economic philosophy that has completely failed,' he said at a Colorado rally. The Democrats are sensing their chance again. The polls bear them out. They are back in the game. Obama has re-established a small but solid lead in recent surveys. The RCP average of polls has him two points ahead of McCain. In the key battleground states things are tight again.
A week ago all the buzz was about McCain closing the gap in Democratic strongholds like New York and New Jersey. Now the stress is on Obama's growing strength in red states like Virginia, Colorado and North Carolina. With seven weeks to go, the election is swinging to and fro but is still too close to call.
Yet as the economic crisis has swept all before it and dominated the headlines, a few people are beginning to question what it is that the next occupant of the White House is going to inherit. 'Whoever it is, Obama or McCain, I really don't envy the next President,' said Masket.
Locking horns
'I could walk [100 miles] from here to Lansing and I wouldn't run into a single person who thought our economy was doing well, unless I ran into John McCain.'
Joe Biden, Monday
'The fundamentals of our economy are strong. But these are very, very difficult times.'
John McCain, Monday
'Yesterday, John McCain actually said that if he's President he'll take on, and I quote, "the old boys' network in Washington" ... The old boys' network? In the McCain campaign that's called a staff meeting.'
Barack Obama, Wednesday
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
