Author: john mcgowan

The Third Thing

Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty (Norton, 2011) is consistently interesting, intermittently insightful, and frequently annoying.  I wanted to say “infuriating” in that last spot, but that is way too strong.

To get over the annoying bit first: Nelson is very fond of quoting some writer or other, and then saying “I mostly agree” before launching into her reasons for not fully agreeing.  Not only is this a tic, but it also often just comes across as the attempt to believe two contradictory things at once.  Which, in fact, is often just what she does want.  On the one hand, she tends toward a fairly stringent aestheticism.  Hardly surprising if your topic is cruelty in art.  It’s important to stress that cruelty in art is not cruelty in life.  Child abuse in life is morally reprehensible; no nuances there.  But child abuse in Lolita is something else again.  Yet (there is always that “yet” in Nelson), she also wants to say that art gives us some insight into non-aesthetic human behavior.  Cruelty in art is not totally separable from cruelty in life.

So what is the relation?  At this point she goes into waffling so deft it can seem illuminating.  Francis Bacon haunts this text.  It seems pretty clear that Nelson doesn’t “like” Bacon’s paintings—and she certainly doesn’t like Bacon as a person.  But she keeps returning to look at the paintings as if another look will get her to some settled account (one that satisfies her) about what those paintings do.  Bacon turns living flesh into “things,” stripping them of all subjectivity in order to render them as objects.  In this way, he replicates what Simone Weil (in her famous essay on the Iliad) says is the effect of “force”: it turns what it touches into a thing, brute material acted upon.

“Artists such as Plath and Bacon aimed to access ‘the brutality of fact’ without providing any narrative to house it, and yet also without courting abstraction.  This is an intriguing aim, albeit one bound to produce not only formal but also political difficulties” (239).  There you have it; art is not just about itself; it also has some relation to “the political.”

Specifically, the political difficulty is fatalism, which breeds a passive acquiescence in the “brute fact.”

“For many would argue [notice Nelson’s sly distancing of the thought she is about to utter] that art which aims to extinguish the story behind suffering and focus on the suffering itself partakes in a different, more insidious cruelty—that of depoliticization, of stripping cruelties from their contexts so that they seem pitiable, sensational, or inevitable, rather than contingent, avoidable, or explicable. . . . ‘The most politically indoctrinating thing you can do to a human being is to show him, every day, that there can be no change,’ says filmmaker Wim Wenders.  For the most part, I agree. [The Nelson hedge at play.] And if one suggests that the thing that cannot change is the very thing that is causing suffering, the indoctrination can be all the more toxic.  Such forms of expression can seemingly act as an accomplice, even if unwittingly, to this cynicism, which turns its back on the hard work of ferreting out the reasons why a particular cruelty has occurred, who is responsible for it, who gains from it, and who suffers” (239).

Nelson then narrates going to a Bacon retrospective and having the experience of “finding I wasn’t in the mood to look at Bacon’s paintings any longer” (240).  But the suggestion lingers that this mood might pass, and she will find herself able (even desiring?) to look at his paintings some other time in the future.

What’s annoying (OK, infuriating) in a book written so persistently in the first person, is that Nelson never tries to describe this mood or, more globally, the impact of the Bacon paintings on her as spectator.  In fact, the book is full of brilliant statements about what this or that artist is doing in his or her work, but whenever it comes to describing the viewer’s response, Nelson invariably turns subjectivist: each audience member’s mileage will vary.  She is fond of reporting on the unexpected responses of her students to works she had experienced differently.  But she never tangles with the question of the legitimacy of her responses—or to the question of how faithful to those responses she should be.

In short, why should she look at Bacon’s paintings at all.  To be even more blatant (and philistine?) about it: what do Bacon’s paintings contribute to the world?  Is the world a better place because they exist?  That’s crass, I know.  But surely art doesn’t get a free pass just be announcing itself to be art.  Why should it not have to justify its existence in the same way that everything else does? And aren’t we bowing to the tyranny of received institutional authority when we think we ought to (some kind of imperative is at work here) look at Bacon’s paintings.  It is very hard for me to imagine any kind of purely aesthetic argument (art for art’s sake) for the value of Bacon’s paintings.  There must be something they are thought to deliver (in the way of insight or feeling/emotion) that underwrites claims to their greatness.  So what is that something?  Showing us that humans can turn subjects into objects, that living bodies are vulnerable to mutilation, that some people take pleasure in mutilating?  Are those things we did not know, that we need Bacon to tell us?  And what are to do with such knowledge?

I am tempted to follow Brecht here; having walked through a Bacon retrospective, just what is it I walk away with, and toward what ends will I direct the knowledge and/or feeling I have gained/experienced in viewing the paintings?  My complaint is that Nelson short circuits the discussion—much as she says that Bacon’s paintings short circuit “context” and “story.”  Bacon’s paintings become themselves a “brute fact,” hanging there on prestigious museum walls, echoing the “brutal facts” the paintings depict.

Do I want Bacon explained away by some back story about his psychological depravity?  No, not at all.  What I want is some story, some context, that makes his paintings do something besides shock and disgust.  Because I don’t see the value in shock (Nelson can be very witty about the avant-garde’s endless repetition of its stock moves) and I don’t see what more than that Bacon’s paintings aim for.  I am not a good art critic—and writers like Berger, T. J. Clark and Nelson at her best often make me see things I didn’t see for myself.  I want someone to do that for me regarding Bacon before I am willing to grant either his importance or his genius.

But I didn’t come here today to talk of Bacon.  I actually want to write about Nelson’s intriguing attempt to bridge the art/life divide, to finesse their being two separate things even as they sustain some sort of relation to one another.  Nelson’s idea is that the artistic object is a “third thing” that exists between people—and through which they relate.  She is partly influenced by Arendt’s notion of the “in-between,” of the distance, the space, that exists between people—and which enables their connection.  Intimacy collapses the in-between and thus overwhelms individuality, tending toward a collapse of selves into one another.  Here’s Nelson’s version of art’s functioning to establish the “in-between.”

“Rather than lambast that which mediates as our enemy, each [of a group of writers Nelson admires] makes a concerted effort to reclaim the value of the ‘third term.’  ‘In the logic of emancipation,’ Ranciere writes, ‘there is always a third thing—a book or some other piece of writing—alien to both [teacher and student] and to which they can refer to verify in common what the pupil has seen, what she says about it and what she thinks about it.’ The emancipatory value of the third thing, as Ranciere sees it, lies in the act that no one can own it; no one can own its meaning.  Its function is to mediate, but not in the sense of imitating or representing a reality from which spectators are barred.  Here, ‘the mediate’ relates people to each other, with relation signifying the process of being brought together and given a measure of space from each other at the same time” (46).

This seems to me a lovely and very productive way to think about art, one that preserves at one and the same time art’s separation from “life” and art’s contribution to that same life.  Nelson returns to this notion of the “third thing” several times in her book—and ends by invoking it one last time.

“A paradox is more than the coexistence of opposing propositions or impulses.  It signals the possibility—and sometimes the arrival—of a third term into a situation that otherwise appeared to consist of but two opposing forces.  Roland Barthes elaborates the third term—which he calls the Neutral—with the utmost beauty and intelligence in his 1977-78 lectures titled The Neutral. . . . For, as Barthes suggests, insofar as certain third terms—however volatile or disturbing—baffle the repressive forces of reduction, generality, and dogmatism, they deserve to be called sweetness.” [The last sentence of Nelson’s book] (269).

Note that “certain” third terms can do this job.  But Nelson’s book never attends to how specific works play this function—or, crucially, to how different works perform it differently.  What happens when Bacon is our third thing instead of Matisse?  That a book on the art of cruelty ends with the word “sweetness” suggests that even cruel art can be sweet if it opens a pathway out of dogmatism.  But Nelson never does the work of showing us how this all goes down.  Place Bacon between us—dear reader and me, the writer—and what Happens?  I don’t know (can I admit to not really wanting to know?).  I certainly would love to hear Nelson’s account of what happens, an account that avoids the “generality” she says that third terms help us overcome.  I want, in other words, this notion of the third term “cashed out” (to invoke that much maligned phrase from William James).

Because I do, in fact, find the idea of art as a stimulus to, even a producer of, relations deeply appealing.  It makes the aesthetic a “space of appearances,” an intersubjective zone of discovery, where what is discovered is my identity, your identity, and our identity—a discovery unavailable without the catalyst of the work.  “Identity” is not a great word here, but I use it in hommage to Arendt’s notion of the ways in which we create/discover ourselves through interactions with others. That art works may have some special way of provoking those interactions seems right to me—and places art works in relation to “the world” (again, using that term in an Arendtian fashion) in evocative ways.

I am not on firm ground here.  I am working from a set of intuitions and prejudices.  I certainly do not want to take the position that the cruel art work (or any art work) must have “redeeming value.”  In fact, I want to jettison the notion of “redemption” (in all forms and in all applications of the term).  But shorn of the idea of redemption, I still want to think (as specifically as possible) about what an art work does.  So thinking of the art work as catalyzing human relationships seems promising to me.  What kinds of relations do cruel works foster?  How do they move audiences to new places?  My claim is that all art works do something; they are operators on their viewers.  So let’s figure out what they are doing.

Meaningful and Meaningless

I am currently reading Terry Eagleton’s Radical Sacrifice (Yale UP, 2018), which is a typical Eagleton book: breezy, opinionated, easy going down.  Eagleton always gives me things to chew on.  Yes, his late religious turn is annoying.  So far, this book is built around the perverse effort to convince us that the crucifixion is not comic (i.e. leading to the happy ending of the resurrection), but the aufgeheben of sacrifice because it demonstrates how sacrifice leads to nothing.  A quixotic enterprise.

But I want to think about something rather different here.  Eagleton gives us his version of the idea that life is so precious, so valuable, exactly because we know it is temporary.  Death, in other words, gives life value.  Maggie Nelson quotes Elaine Scarry a few times in her (Nelson’s) book on the art of cruelty as saying that beauty calls forth our urge to protect it, to act justly toward it, precisely because the beautiful is so fragile, so vulnerable, so transitory.  Nelson retorts that those same qualities can also incite cruelty and violence.  The beautiful thing can enrage us in its helplessness, its forlorn fragility.  Something in us wants to throw a brick through that beautiful plate glass window.

Can the same thing be said of life (i.e. that its fragility can call forth aggression)?  I am not sure; my thought today is a bit tangential to that idea.  Death, I think, is utterly meaningless.  A simple, but total, void.  It is very hard to process the idea that at death consciousness simply ceases; that there is nothingness beyond that door.  It is not a passage into something else.  It is just a complete and utter end.  All darkness.  In many ways, this fact is unthinkable.  We are so used to consciousness, to processing our experiences, that the very idea of no experience and no consciousness is a void so complete that we cannot comprehend it.  Various artists—those addicted to the sublime—can even find this void seductive.  But more usual is to refuse to believe it.  It is a truism that it is very hard to believe in one’s death.  But I go further: it is very hard to believe in death at all.

Even though, at the same time, we process the death of others with remarkable casualness.  Very, very few ever consider not carrying on themselves when a loved one dies.  Certainly that thought doesn’t arise when a spouse dies.  It is more likely to be the response to one’s child’s death.  Even then, adding my death to my child’s is not very common.  In short, death is both unthinkable and something we live through with relative aplomb.  We move on—as the saying goes.

The meaninglessness of death heightens, clarifies, the meaningfulness of life.  So that life is not just precious and valuable, but also replete with meaning.  It is, in some ways, a task we are handed with life: make sure this life is meaningful, work at making it meaningful.  But, in other ways, life is condemned to meaning, as Merleau-Ponty put it.  We can’t avoid telling stories about it, examining it, imputing significance to its various incidents.  That the void of death will be as blank as the void before birth is always hovering there as an incitement to meaning.

But—and here is the scary thought—if the value of life is heightened, highlighted, by the nothingness of death, then the value of life is perhaps best demonstrated by the embrace of death.  I don’t quite know how to make that logic lucid.  It’s a statement I want to flesh out, but don’t know quite how to do so at this moment.

Here’s a cousin of that thought that is easier to explain.  Since life is so valuable and its value disappears with death, then the most potent way humans have to dramatize the value of something else (i.e. something that is not life, but which a self also insists is valuable) is to lay down one’s life for that other thing.  This is the power of martyrdom.  Freedom (to take one example) is so valuable, that I will trade my life for it—even though, of course, my dead self cannot enjoy the freedom I have sacrificed my life for.  I guess we can reverse the formula: an unfree life is not valuable, is not worth living.

Why this thought is scary is because it traps humans into what comes to seem an inescapable game of chicken.  You claim something is valuable?  Then prove it.  Lay down your life for it.  Not a game that anyone can win.  It just creates devastation, meaninglessness, death all around it.  They create a desert and call it noble belief that some things are so valuable, so sacred, that they are worth dying for.  The problem is that life is the ultimate standard of value—and so humans are pushed to place it on the table as their wager in disputes over what is valuable.  You are not really serious, the logic goes, until you put your life on the line.  And other humans are all too ready to take that life when it is wagered in that way.

A final, different, thought: it is also always shocking for one of my sensibilities, one to whom my own life and the lives of those around me feel utterly precious, to witness the casualness with which others give up their lives.  Soldiers come first to mind, but there are also the ranks of the reckless, the thoughtless, who put themselves in danger’s way.  Either they are suffering from a delusion of invulnerability (usually the explanation offered for the foolhardy behavior of males between the ages of 14 and 24) or (what I suspect is more usually the case) they have never believed their lives are worth much.  Nothing in their world has introduced or reinforced that idea.  To forfeit one’s life heedlessly is an indictment of the world that has not bred into your bone the belief that one’s life matters, that it is significant, that its unfolding and its continuance is full of meaning.

Yet another perspective on these themes: sacrifice functions as a way to make the meaningless (death) meaningful.  Since the sacrifice aims to extract something of value from death, to make death something that provides “a return,” it can be seen as an attempt to bring death into a narrative that confers meaning upon it.  Thus, sacrifice not only enacts a control over death (i.e. that humans, through their social order and its institutions get to decide the time, place and manner of death in stark contrast to the usual fact that death is visited upon us from without), but the death also bears fruit, has a purpose, is not the stark and simple end of life, but a contributor to life.

More radically—or perhaps it is more phantasmagorically—sacrifice can be seen as the dissolution of identity, of self, required to pass into a new, transformed (presumably better or more desirable) self.  This is the logic of baptism—a feigned death by drowning—taken literally.  The stale status quo must be put to death in order to clear the stage for the appearance of the new.  Violence as a midwife, as a creator.  The trouble, of course, is that this seems a Pyrrhic victory.  Unless the death is not literal, but some kind of staged representation (thus the dramatic art of tragedy), the dead person is not around to enjoy his or her new identity/reality.  In short, such thinking is way too close for my tastes to the oft-heard notion that a good war is just what this decadent society needs to “cleanse” it of its ills.  This idea is no more attractive when it takes a left-wing form (imagining the end of capitalism through a violent revolution) than it is in its right-wing variants.

In sum: the attempt to make death meaningful may prove much, much worse than an acceptance of its full meaninglessness.  Making it meaningful stands as a sore temptation to inflict it or embrace it—in order to secure the meanings one claims it can contain and, even, unlock.  Better it seems to me to maintain that life is the locus of value and death the dissolution of that value—and thus to shun death until it proves itself unavoidable.  Anything that encourages humans to aid death in its work should be viewed with suspicion.

Shame

From Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011):

‘[Sister Helen] Prejean’s logic rests on the hope that shame, guilt, and even simple embarrassment are still operative principles in American cultural and political life—and that such principles can fairly trump the forces of desensitization and self-justification.  Such a presumption is sorely challenged by the seeming unembarrassability of the military, the government, corporate CEOs, and others repetitively caught in monstrous acts of irresponsibility and malfeasance.  This unembarassability has proved difficult to contend with, as it has had a literally stunning effect on the citizenry.  They ought to be ashamed of themselves! we cry over and over again, to no avail.  But they are not ashamed, and they are not going to become so” (32).

I don’t have much to say to this statement—beyond noting how completely it echoes my own experience and sentiments.  The administration at my university is just about completely non-accountable at this point.  Which made me think that “public shaming” (as I tried to do in the newspaper editorials I wrote about their actions) was the only recourse left.  But they have proved immune to shaming, might even take it as proof that they are doing their “tough jobs” of protecting the university’s interests.

It does not make me feel a sap.  I realize more and more that a certain self-image of integrity is central to my own serenity.  Of course, complacency about one’s self is an ever-present danger.  Pharaseeism afflicts us all.  But I do abide by the rule of “never say no to a student.”  Whatever they ask for, they shall receive—just as the same all-inclusive indulgence is extended to my children.  I have no right, given my job and my salary, to turn students down.  And abiding by that rule is one way I maintain my self-respect.

So the question about the shameless is: where does their self-respect reside?  Where is the line they would not cross, the action they would not permit themselves?  I have always liked what I call “Kant’s rule of publicity”: basically Kant argues in one of his political essays that any action is morally dubious if the agent of that action would prefer it being kept a secret.  We reveal our awareness of an action’s non-morality when we strive to keep it unknown.  (Yes, there is the tradition of keeping benevolent actions a secret—a tradition mostly honored in the breach these days by our publicity-seeking philanthropists—but the existence of this sub-set of good actions needn’t detract from Kant’s larger point.)  The attempt to keep things secret is an acknowledgement of shame and guilt.  But it does seem Nelson is right: when malfeasance is “outed” these days, the impulse is to brave it out, to never show the weakness of admitting guilt or manifesting shame.

And there is the even more gob-smacking pride in offensive behavior, as politicians compete to see who can most vociferously endorse torture and taking food stamps away from the hungry, and CEOs boast about how far they can drive down wages and take away benefits for their workers.  Oh, brave new world!

National Socialism versus Social Democracy versus National Capitalism

Sheri Berman’s The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century (Cambridge UP, 2006) has been sitting on my shelf a long time, but I only just got around to reading it, partly in response to John Quiggin’s recent declaration that he has given up on the term “social democracy.”  My discussion of that decision is here  and here.

One virtue of Berman’s book is that it shows how both Mussolini and Hitler were socialists—that is, both the fascists and the Nazis established strict governmental control over the economy (“the primacy of politics” over economics in Berman’s phrase).  In particular, the fascists and the Nazis developed full employment programs that used public works as a last resort for the unemployed, created or enhanced social welfare and insurance programs, and established firm state control over capital flows and investment.  The enthusiasm for Mussolini, in particular, that many (not just clowns like Ezra Pound) expressed in the late 1920s and early 1930s becomes much more understandable when reading Berman’s account of his regime’s fairly successful attack on the poverty and inequality capitalism wrought in post-World War I Italy.  Of course, the fascists and the Nazis did not dismantle capitalism entirely; in particular, they did not threaten private ownership.  But they did sharply curtail the autonomy of property; the Faustian bargain made by the capitalists was that they would accept a lesser level of profit and massive government interference in what and how they produced things in return for “order” and for a guarantee that property would not be confiscated or nationalized.  But, especially, by the standards of our own dark times, Mussolini’s and even Hitler’s economic policies look “progressive.”  For starters, their policies were Keynesian, depending on large public expenditure to provide employment and to jump start a depression economy back to something like prosperity.

Of course, much of that Keynesian spending was on the means for war.  Both regimes can look like giant potlatches—building up vast stores of military hardware in order to destroy them all in an orgy of destruction.  And the regimes had the same attitude toward citizens as they did toward tanks: they are expendable; plenty more where they came from.

The point, naturally, is not to praise Mussolini or Hitler.  The Nazis, in particular, dismantled liberal democracy in incredibly short order.  All other parties were outlawed by six months after Hitler’s becoming Chancellor.  And the left-wing economics were yoked to right-wing nationalism, to the mythos of the fatherland and of “blood.”  Violence was baked in from the start, as Walter Benjamin told the world in 1936.  The only possible end game was war—and that was explicit, a feature not a bug.

But Berman’s work led me to a rather different dark thought.  What does it mean to say that the only successful assaults on capitalism in the 20th century were accompanied by the destruction of democracy?  We might be able to dismiss Lenin and Stalin’s madness quickly by saying that the economics were impossible even apart from political crimes.  But what happens if we say that Mussolini’s Italy came pretty close to achieving an economic realm that most social democrats can recognize as their aspiration?  In short: can we get to social democratic heaven if we hold resolutely to the democratic part?  Does democracy—the rule of law, elections, legislative bodies, civil liberties along with property rights—afford capitalists too many tools for withstanding any and all attempts to gain political control over capitalist practices?  The impatience with liberal democracy everywhere evident in the 1930s reflected the inability of democracies to act quickly and decisively.  The post-2008 actions of the EU, especially, with its ongoing (even now, ten years later) constant kicking of the can down the road, appear to confirm the claim that democracies find it hard to act.  (The exception, always noted, is the US response to World War II; slow to get going, the historians say, but what a behemoth once roused; but it took a war for the US to end its depression, with precisely the kinds of Keynesian spending and government intervention into the economy that even the New Deal could never install.)

So here’s the horrible thought: only a non-democratic regime, one that steps on the “rights” of property owners and the many ways that the rich can control elections and elected officials, will be able to break the stranglehold that capitalism has on modern political communities.  Capitalism both strives to escape political (democratic) accountability wherever possible—and uses all the intricacies of democratic procedures to its advantage in holding off change.  Well-intentioned liberals and leftists, who play by the rules, are played by the business barons.  We are getting a demonstration of that dynamic now.  We had the corruption free, good governance folks who were the Obama administration; the absolute epitome of high-minded liberals.  And now we are seeing the kinds of ethics that prevail among the pocket-lining hacks of the right, who could care less if the agencies they preside over actually function.

It has become clear—if it wasn’t in the past—that the Milton Friedman insistence that capitalism and democracy went hand-in-hand is simply wrong.  Capitalism hates democracy, as the US support of right-wing dictators throughout the world should have made clear.  But the more worrying thought is that democracy does not pose an existential threat to capitalism, just an annoyance, a low-grade fever, that capitalism has learned how to keep under control.  Capitalism can tolerate low-grade democracy, just as it can tolerate gay marriage, antagonistic art works, and academic freedom, confident in its ability to not let such things get out of hand.  True, the right is always hysterically claiming that chaos is nigh—if not already here.  But such fulminations on Fox don’t register in the corporate boardrooms, not the ways that tax and regulation evasion strategies do.

In short: for social democracy to work, the left has to get the democracy part in order first.  This is Berman’s “primacy of politics.”  Without a very firm democratic mandate, establishing the economic policies of social democracy would seem a non-starter.  But there are so many structural obstacles to establishing that mandate that stand in the way—even if the needed majority existed.  (Thus, something like gun control offers an object lesson in all the ways majority opinion can be thwarted in the scheloric American political system.)  With the democratic hill so high to climb, hope for the economic transformation wanes.  We know what needs doing: higher taxes, public housing, fully funded public education and public transit, universal health coverage, etc. etc.  But the ability of our political system to deliver any of these things is very doubtful.

And (again it is very odd to say this) the fascists and Nazis look good in comparison to the current political landscape.  They mobilized nationalism to authorize the state’s taking control of the economy—and molded that economy in ways that, to a fairly large extent, benefited the majority.  (Another horrible thought: you can only mobilize people by providing them with an enemy to fear and hate; the Carl Schmidt notion.  So you couldn’t really form the democratic majority that would take control over capitalism unless you identified a “class enemy” or a “non-national” enemy.  Someone has to be “not us” and a legitimate target of rage and mistreatment.  You can only benefit the majority by persecuting the minority.)

But how do the fascists and Nazis look good?  Because at least they were using the poison of nationalism and the powers of the state to rein in capitalism.  Today’s right wing aims to serve capitalism, not control it.  They mobilize the state to augment capitalism’s power.  National capitalism instead of national socialism.  Singapore, China, the UK, and the US.  Different degrees of assaults of civil liberties; different degrees of direct state subsidies to corporations.  But the same basic model based on the same nationalistic principle: the nation’s glory resides in its wealth, along with the fraudulent promise that the prosperity at the top will generate (trickle down) prosperity for those below them.  Perversely, this vocabulary of national greatness is accompanied by a dismantling of all public services or any notion of public goods.  Capitalism will provide all that is needed; market failures do not exist, just as externalities are not admitted.  The state exists to smooth capitalism’s path—and to beat the nationalistic drum.

I understand that these dark musings are the voice of despair speaking.  Our world has become so cruel, the hypocrisies of the right so all encompassing, and the use of democracy’s trappings to forestall any change in a leftist direction so pervasive, that fears such as those expressed here seem inevitable.  It is simply not clear that our political system can deliver the changes needed.  Its inability to do something as simple as ban assault weapons feeds that fear.  There’s plenty of overt oppression—from mass incarceration to the unfreedoms experienced everyday at the workplace by most employees—just as there is plenty of overt corruption (all those politicians on the billionaire’s dole).  But there is also the general grinding of the gears in the Circumlocution Office, which keeps enthralled, obsessed people like me (there are so many of us!) reading the newspaper every day to monitor the drip, drip, drip, as if something this time, against all our prior experience, is going to come of it.  But nothing ever does come of it—and some days it seems that that perpetual inaction is precisely the point.