Friday, September 22, 2006

All rising to great place is by a winding star; and if there be factions, it is good to side a man's self, whilst he is in the rising, and to balance himself when he is placed. – Francis Bacon

LI’s dao is sarcasm. First comes the irony, then comes the insight. So, yesterday, we appended a ps to our post on Iran, recommending that the best way to influence policy at the moment is through insinuation and flattery at the Bush court. Thus, strategically, those who want to avoid bombing Iran in this country should try to find ways to make this seem like Bush’s own thought, the logical conclusion of his perfectly brilliant Middle Eastern policy. We meant this satirically – for there is nothing that still awakens the latent Puritan in the American character as flattery, and we have a Puritan in the woodpile as well as anybody else. But as soon as we had written it, a piece of the puzzle, as it were, dropped in place. For if – as we think is true – in shedding the Constitution (the torture debates being only one moment in the long process of creating a monarchical and hateful executive, for which all succeeding generations will, of course, view us, each and every one of us, as some of the vilest creatures who ever crawled upon the face of the earth), the Federal government has become more and more like a court society, then one should expect that the manners of a court society will emerge. And court societies are run far more than historians like to admit on flattery.

Since flattery is so inimical to republican virtue, or to a political culture that is, at least formally, constituted by vote, that it is only viewed from the angle of the moralist. That angle suggests that flattery is a character fault, or two character faults: servility, on the part of the flatterer, and gullibility or vanity, on the part of the flattered. This character analysis has loomed so large that there is not, properly, a functionalist account of flattery. Flattery doesn’t have a chapter in books on political science, or “theology.” However, I suspect that this severely underestimates flattery. As the U.S. becomes your usual bloated and debt ridden empire, with a Fortune 500 of billionaire knaves lording it over a mass of ignorant and credulous peasants with credit cards, Godfearing Snopeses who drink away their Sundays (while newspapers love to report on how 99 percent of Americans love God and Jesus Christ and believe the world was created 10,000 years ago, they report much less on the fact that only about a third of Americans attend church every Sunday), the republican virtue of “choosing” our representatives slowly transforms into something else – the democratization of flattery (to speak in the cant of Thomas Friedman). We are given the pleasant role of flattering those who are going to rule us anyway. As election time draws near, you can pretend to be your favorite tv pundit and “support” a candidate. It is like being near greatness!

There is an excellent text for exploring the way flattery works in court society: Francis Bacon’s letters. Bacon crawled on his stomach of his own free will so much that it was almost like he had snake genes. But he was, also, a genius. And occasionally sparks of that genius irked his betters. The man he dedicated the Essays to, Lord Buckingham, was a favorite of King James and of his son, Charles. And a more arrogant man never walked England’s green and pleasant land. Sometimes, Bacon would get caught between Buckingham and James on some issue that Bacon thought was relievingly foreign to their concerns – something where he could make his own judgment. Rather like some EPA peon thinking he could get away with actually enforcing a law against some heinous pollutant. “Surely,” the peon thinks, “Dick Cheney won’t come down on me if I send this letter to X company asking them, in the politest terms, to please, please refrain from pouring mercury into the drinking water of Los Angeles.” Or some such naïve, twittish gesture. Down comes the iron fist, and out goes our peon, to be re-educated on K street in the wiles of the D.C. court and to return, perhaps under a blessed Democrat, to advance further, by scrapping and corruption, up the ladder until someday he can retire into some businessy sinecure.

More on Bacon, Coke, and the business of gold and silver thread in a further post.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

LI, i'm quite taken by your suggestion of the seizure of absolute executive power, and the accompanying court society and flattery. i've never read the letters of Sir Francis, so look forward to your next post.

inspired by your previous posts on the subject, i did attempt to draft a letter to the Rebel and Chief and his minions. obviously, i started of by mentioning the considerable achievements - memorable for generations to come - in the middle east, tora bora, new orleans, kyoto, guantanomo, etc. sad to say, i couldn't quite wax poetic about the secret 'black' places of torture, since they somehow exist and don't exist at the same time. i was humble enough to say that these achievements really left me almost speechless, though not without the desire to find the appropriate words for them.
i further expressed gratitude over not having to ponder things like the starry heavens above and the moral law within, since the rebel in chief is well on his way to making the one and the other extinct.
i think i might have gotten carried away by a wave of euphoria, as i went on to suggest that they should forego The Stranger and Battle of Algiers and instead put La Rochefoucauld on their bedtime reading list and watch Roberto Rossellini's film, La Prise du Pouvoir par Louis XIV.
i was so taken by this, i thought they might even pull a few strings and i could have a TV show to rival Oprah, be telling everyone what to read and see. ah, this reaching for the stars!

RR's Louis was made for french TV, at a time when he was sick of the film-spectacle industry and wanted to explore the "pedagogical possibilities" of the "audio-visual medium". The last scene has Louis in his bedroom, slowly taking off his trappings of power and spectacle, and in his undies, picking up and reading a book by La Rochefoucauld, murmuring the phrase he had read as he looks into the distance - le soleil ni la mort se regarder fixement.

hmmm, maybe this wouldn't have been the best laudatory letter to send to the RIC. as it happens, the ink was barely drying on my letter when a squirrel jumped through my apartment window, grabbed the letter and scooted off down the fire escape. a savior squirrel!

Roger Gathmann said...

You're crackin' me up!
Another film to write down on the list in my neighborhood video store. Now, if only I could get them to pay more attention to my requests than the Rebel in Chief pays to those letters which reach him from outside the T-th-third awaaaakening!

Anonymous said...

messed up the quote. it should read,
le soleil ni la mort se peuvent regarder fixement.

Anonymous said...

good grief, maybe i need a pair of spectacles or something - managed to mangle the same line twice! there's a lil ol "ne" missing: le soleil ni la mort ne se peuvent regarder fixement.
many sorries.
look on the brighter side though - am humbled enough by my dyslexic traits to be mum over the quote from master H. as it is i probably meed to engage RWG services for my comments!

Lovecraft

“If Lovecraft was an odd child,” his biographer L. Sprague de Camp writes, “his mother showed signs of becoming even odder. In fact, she gav...