David Benjamin's Blog
September 15, 2015
No entrance, by David Benjamin
— Jean-Paul Sartre
PARIS — Yesterday, coming up the stairs in our 17th-century no-elevator building, I paused wearily on the 108th step. It wasn’t just a matter of fatigue. I was gripped by a deep and bone-chilling ennui that made me question whether I ever wanted, in my whole miserable, squandered, iniquitous life, to climb the last three steps to our squalid and sparsely furnished maid’s-quarters garret in this unsavory corner of the Sodom & Gomorrah of Western Europe.
This isn’t my usual attitude, so I hastily searched my psyche for clues to a sudden overwhelming heartsickness that seemed to require that I fling myself down the stairs, scrambling my brains on each unyielding oaken step on route to my insensate death in the cobbled courtyard five floors below. It was the ghost — it had to be! He had crept in when the janitor flung open all the outer doors to swab the flagstones — of Jean-Paul Sartre.
OK. Maybe Camus, or Gide, even Robbe-Grillet. Heck, maybe all the way from Japan, shadowing my wife like an ethnic specter, it was Mishima, imitator of the Paris existentialists so slavish that he was the first (and only) Francophile to kill himself over the voluptuary decadence of postwar Tokyo. Clearly, some unseen force had thrown me into an existentialist funk. Probably Sartre. He used to teach high school in the neighborhood.
My unexpectedly tortured mind, as I froze on the staircase holding the groceries, asked “Why go on?” Go home, three more steps and what will greet you? The same thankless scribbling in the same cheaply furnished loft, its walls streaked with the same Parisian sunlight playing on the face of Hotlips — same wife cooking the same remarkable meals in the same cramped kitchen. Were I to complete this redundant, changeless ascension of 111 exhausting steps, I would be surrounded as always with the same bookcases jammed and stacked with the same books, same titles, same dead authors, half unread, some of which I’ll never read. And I see myself as dead as Sartre — I seem to have Sartre’s face! — as the world leans over the lip of my grave to ask, why so many books? You didn’t even read ‘em all! And they were mostly fiction! Nobody reads fiction anymore. Self-help! That’s where the market is. And this dead doofus, they’ll say as they toss dirt on my coffin, couldn’t even help himself up the last three steps!
Sartre probably had a hell of a time getting up the steps. That’s why he crept into my mind and filled it with existential irresolve. As I wallow in this vale of spiritual nausea, my depression swells with the realization that I could not explain to anyone under that age of 60 my existentialist symptoms — because nobody understands the word anymore.
Maybe nobody ever did. I was reading existentialists when I was 16 and I had little idea what these grim-thinking frogs were getting at. Nowadays, I don’t read “existential” unless it’s paired with “threat.” The news seethes with “existential threats.” But this dread peril is not — as I might have expected when I was 16 — tickets to a three-hour rendition of Krapp’s Last Tape with no intermission scheduled and the closest toilet across the street in an Alsatian brasserie.
No, nowadays, an “existential threat” is a foreign policy crisis. It’s a hellish scenario in which, for example, fifty ISIS zealots cross the Atlantic on a Kon-Tiki reed boat to behead the Statue of Liberty with iPhone-activated IEDs. No longer does “existential” mean Malraux leaning across a table at the Polidor from Ferdinand Céline, arguing the point or pointlessness of mankind’s fate as he plows ruts and builds monuments on this dying ball of maggoted manure that we call Earth. Existential’s just a newsword now, that means “real and scary.”
Maybe they’re right. Sartre’s ghost, clutching my soul with icy fingers on a staircase on rue St. Séverin is pretty real and scary. As I writhe in the grip of existential horror, I marvel at the stubborn curmudgeonism Sartre was able to muster up while living one of the 20th century’s most cerebral and sociable public careers. He had survived the war and he resided cozily in the world’s most favored and glorious city, in an era when money was pouring in from tourists, GIs and the Marshall Plan. He rose to celebrity in an era when a faithless playwright/philosophe could still be fashionable. He was the Strindberg of the mid-century jet set.
He dined ‘round midnight at La Coupole, between Simone Signoret and Simone de Beauvoir, with Yves Montand across the table. He had his own corner at Les Deux Magots. They put up his statue at the Rosebud, where Camus and Ionesco, Truffaut and Jean Renoir would drop by to pay for his pastis. He was seen, here, there, across the continent — cigarette in the corner of his mouth, the bitter trace of a sardonic smile on his lips — with Genet and Cocteau, Matisse and Picasso, Piaf and Brel, Charlie Parker and Bud Powell, Arthur Miller and Marilyn. Didn’t I see his photo with Audrey Hepburn, Josephine Baker, Eartha Kitt?
Staring at my last three steps, I wonder. How could a man who looked into the smoldering eyes and touched the hand of Eartha Kitt not be thrilled with life forever after? I spent two hours in her front row, when she was 70 years old, at the Café Carlyle and I wanted to take dance lessons, steal diamonds for her, pour her a bath of champagne, suck on her toes and drink from her navel.
So ended my funk, with memories of Eartha. I climbed the stairs, found her among my CDs, played “C’Est Si Bon”. Sartre’s ghost crumbled at the first husky note. He enfolded me in his wispy arms, smiling that defeated smile that no longer convinced me of its sadness.
I discovered that sweet, pretentious Jean-Paul is an even worse dancer than me.
March 10, 2014
The Weekly Screed (#666)
By David Benjamin
MADISON, Wis. — Hotlips, who was born in Hiroshima ten years after the Bomb, was among 51 honest-looking people who raised their right hands last week in a Milwaukee courthouse and lied their way into America.
It would be nice to accomplish this remarkable feat — U.S. citizenship — by telling the truth, but the system is designed for mendacity. Since immigration was formalized about a century ago, the process of vetting “applicants” has been run by flagrant bigots, bitter bureaucrats, soulless functionaries and obsessive-compulsive desk-straighteners from the U.S. Dept. of Suspicion and Paranoia.
A swarm of them surrounded us as soon as we set foot in the building. Their security shakedown — metal detectors, x-rays, wands, shoes off, clothes off, patdowns, veiled threats and dirty looks — made it clear that we’re the sort who have something to hide, and they were the bloodhounds who could find it, no matter where and how deeply we had tucked it away.
But, after all that rigmarole, they had to let Hotlips — and all her fellow aliens — into the building. She was invited. She’d won.
Almost.
Hotlips & the Aliens were survivors of a booby-trapped labyrinth that takes years and requires reams of paperwork. The drones and dwarfs of the U.S. Customs & Immigration “Service” serve only in name. Their mission is not really “naturalization.” It is exclusion, and these eagle-eyes find pretext for exclusion in clerical specks as miniscule as a dropped zip code or a misplaced apostrophe. Hotlips’ hopes were almost derailed by faulty fingerprint technology. The government’s machine couldn’t read two of her fingers. She had both fingers; both fingers had prints. But, because the cludgy software couldn’t read all of her delicate whorls and subtle ridges, she was deemed a dubious character who had to be “cleared” by her local police. (Of course, she was.)
After Hotlips & the Aliens cleared security, the functionaries were left with only one shot at exclusion. Before entering the courtroom for the big Oath, each Alien had to fill out a questionnaire. Since your interview a few weeks ago, it asked, have you a) committed a crime, b) joined a conspiracy dedicated to the overthrow of the USA, or c) traveled outside the country.
You see the trick here. The quiz was not only superfluous — because it came after the applicant had already been approved — it cunningly conflated a weekend trip to, say, Toronto, with armed robbery and espionage. The wise solution (to all three questions) was to lie. If Hotlips admitted that she’d gone to Japan for a week to see her mom (which she had), could they deny her citizenship after all? But how could they know about that trip? Could they know? Probably not. But if somehow they knew, they’d catch her — lying through her teeth to Uncle Sam. And then…
Hotlips, of course, followed her upbringing and told the truth. But she knew that, by doing so, she might have trudged all the way to the courtroom door only to be turned away from the Land of the Free by a cackling bureaucratic drone.
Luckily, Hotlips’ quiz didn’t draw the drone we feared, the fingerprint nazi. It went instead to a less vigilant grader, who shrugged at the trip to Japan. With that, Hotlips grabbed her precious white envelope, snuck past the fingerprint nazi and scurried into the oak-paneled courtroom. She was on her way at last to becoming a “natural” woman. All that remained was to utter the Oath.
Which is the biggest lie of all — the one that gets you over the razor-wire and beyond the guard towers. In its original 91 words, which didn’t exist ‘til 1929, all wannabe citizens promise to “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity” to the lands of their birth and coming-of-age, “without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.”
Here’s a promise only a psychopath could keep. A normal person could not — without some mental reservation — turn against the place where she grew up, where her forebears lived and died, where she still probably has parents, family and friends, where her memories were formed and took root and cannot be transplanted.
No one with a working conscience can make this sort of wrenching change in cold blood. If you can tear up your entire history without pausing to wonder what might have been, without a healthy pang of reservation, you’re a sorry exception to the human condition. You’re not the sort of citizen America wants. Pledging loyalty to a new nation and a whole new way of life is an occasion not for smug, patriotic certitude, but for a long look backward with mixed feelings.
Read critically, the Oath of Allegiance is the worst oath we’ve ever composed. It’s a clunky hodgepodge, cribbed from a 16th-century British loyalty oath (to the King) and amended (badly) during the 1950’s Red Scare with mandates to “bear arms” and to “perform noncombatant service” and “work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law,” whatever that means.
Yet, despite its empty promises and military-industrial embellishments, the Oath accomplishes a beautiful purpose. It pushes open Emma Lazarus’ “golden door,” and guarantees to everyone who utters it the rare, inviolable right to live in a nation that began as a fairly preposterous but really cool idea.
The judge talked to his new citizens for quite a while, reciting a civics lesson to a group of aspirants who’d been force-feeding themselves civics for months and knew the Bill of Rights better than most native-born Congressmen. The judge left out of his tutorial the part where a small band of bourgeois East Coast idealists, inspired not by kings or conquerors but by philosophers, turned a wilderness — against all odds — into a fiercely secular and usually progressive republic that has survived more than two centuries.
To his credit, the judge suggested that this nation “of the people, by the people, for the people” (his favorite phrase — he said it twice) overcame the inevitable temptations of nativism, racism, regionalism, religion and xenophobia. He dwelt on the fact that his 51 fresh-minted citizens that morning represented 28 countries. He celebrated — as did everyone else after he finally quieted down — that America was the unlikeliest nation ever born, a mulligatawny of mongrel dreamers gleaned from the outcasts and refugees of a hundred wars, a thousand tribes and a million small, faraway tragedies.
Despite my mental reservations, I felt rather stirred by the whole thing.
February 28, 2014
You gonna argue with a guy named Hensleigh Wedgwood?
Toll the world to thy chantry;
Sing to the bats' sleek sisterhoods
Full complines with gallantry:
Then, owls and bats,
Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister's moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!…"
— Robert Browning (1841)
MADISON, Wis. — I know exactly where Bob Fitzsimmonds is coming from, and so does the immortal poet Robert Browning.
It all started when Bob — Treasurer of the Virginia Republican Party — logged onto Facebook to shmooze with a girl named Heather. Yes. Heather. To paraphrase DirecTV, “Don’t shmooze on Facebook with a girl named Heather.”
Or, for that matter, Amber.
There on Facebook, for all the social-media world to read, Bob expressed his disapproval of a fellow Republican, Fairfax County Delegate Barbara Comstock, in these terms: “I have nothing against Barbara Comstock, but I hate sexist twat.”
On the Web, in general, this scandalous phrase — which drew a chorus of demands for Bob to resign his GOP post — was rendered as “… I hate sexist (expletive for female genitalia).” However, one website, The Raw Story, boldly asterisked the term into “tw*t,” while another, Mason Conservative just plowed right ahead and printed “twat,” possibly deciding that after we’ve all seen a few dozen Pussy Riot newsclips on CNN and CBS News, what the hell?
The same spirit probably inspired Frankly Curious Dot Com to post a link to all 152 twattish synonyms, among which the most poetic are “bat cave,” “hooded lady,” “moose knuckle,” “whispering eye” and “wizard sleeve.”
Alas, poor Bob. If only he’d called Barb a “sexist moose knuckle.” The media universe would have responded more with head-scratching than outrage.
At first, I was a little put off by Bob’s remark, because I’m a little squeamish about gross references to ladies’ goodies. Among these, I’ve always regarded “twat” as just one degree more shocking than the C-word — both of which George Carlin, a gentleman after all, would have probably never uttered on television.
Bob’s vulgarity troubled me, but his grammar was puzzling. I couldn’t help but mentally insert an “a” in front of “sexist twat.” Why did Bob omit the article? Or, if Bob is lumping Barb into a category, shouldn’t he render “twats” as a plural?
The scales fell off this apparent blunder when Bob issued his obligatory mea culpa, adding: “I used the wrong word. I thought it meant the same as ‘twaddle’.”
Of course! As a collective noun — like “rubbish” or “nonsense” — “twaddle” requires no article. It tolerates usage both singular and plural.
With this admission (and the recovery of his grammatical integrity), I swung over to Bob’s side, Republican or not. I’ve made reams of similar errors myself. In a letter to a college president once, I mistook “mordant” for “trenchant.” In a book that stayed in print for almost 20 years, I wrote “stoat” where I meant “shoat,” and “Butterfly McQueen” where I intended “Hattie McDaniel.” The latter two screw-ups haunted me ‘til I was finally able to publish a revised version of the book.
Further mitigating Bob’s goof is that none other than Robert Browning pulled the same boner in his poem, Pippa Passes. He referenced the “cowls and twats” of “monks and nuns,” thinking that a twat was an item of nunnish headgear. His “naïve” mistake, according to researchers, dates to a 17th-century poem, Vanity of Vanities that conflates Carmelite coochie with a Vatican beanie, as follows:
They talk’d of his having a Cardinall’s Hat
They’d send him as soon an Old Nun’s Twat
Innocent though they both might be, however, both Bobs, in trotting out “twat,” screwed the pooch. As I searched the literature, I found little consolation for either Fitzsimmonds or Browning in the naughty word’s origins. Most lexicographers couldn’t trace “twat” at all. One who tried found its source in an Old Norse word, thveit, meaning a cut, a slit or a forest clearing — which pretty much circled me back to “Oh my God. Why did he say that?”
Momentarily, on a British website called Thinking Twat Shirts, I thought I’d found a defense Bob from his detractors. The site said, “‘Twat’ is in fact an old English word meaning ‘one who likes to share their thoughts’. In medieval villages to be regarded as a ‘twat’ was something positive. It was the twats who voiced their thoughts and were generous in allowing other people into their world of ideas and opinions. Twitter is of course a modern medium for twats…”
At “Twitter,” I realized that whoever wrote this was pulling my leg.
Finally, as I was about to forsake the task of saving Bob FitzSimmonds’ ravaged reputation, I found it — proof that Bob was right all along! — in the Dictionary of English Etymology, Volume 3 by Hensleigh Wedgewood.
Quoth Prof. Hensleigh: “… Twattle. Betwattled, perplexed, confused, stupefied. The radical element twat corresponds to G[erman] zotte, signifying a bush of hair, whence zotteln, to entangle; den verzottelten bart…”
There, y’see? Rather than demanding Bob’s ouster, the impetuous media owe him a debt of gratitude. He enriched our vocabulary, made us all think (if only for one guilty moment) about naked women, and, best of all, betwattled the know-it-alls of the punditocracy with a lexical/anatomical conundrum that left all of us — guys and gals alike — feeling a little… well, pussy-whipped.
February 25, 2014
The Weekly Screed (#664)
By David Benjamin
“… ‘Watch it!’ [Cordell] Jude yelled to Adkins, who was mentally disabled, according to USA Today. Adkins then swung what looked like a pipe in the air and Jude shot and killed him — the pipe-like object turned out to just be a dog leash…”
MADISON, Wis. — Wayne LaPierre, head honcho of the National Rifle Ass’n. appeared to me last night in a dream — well, more of a nightmare.
Wayne was aghast over the verdict in the Michael Dunn case in Florida. Dunn had fired ten shots at a vehicle containing four black teenagers, killing one, Jordan Davis. Because he continued shooting at the car after the kid at the wheel wisely chose to flee, Dunn was convicted on three counts of attempted murder. But the jury, by a 9-3 vote, hung on a charge of first-degree murder in Davis’ death.
“I guess you’re upset,” I said to Wayne, “because a law-abiding gun owner, standing his ground against a quartet of rap-crazed thugs, was convicted of attempted murder for shooting out the tail lights of the thugmobile.”
“Yes, that bothers me, because I favor gunplay in every situation,” said Wayne, who, for some reason, was holding a bouquet of gladiolas. “But you’ve missed the real threat to Americans’ Second Amendment rights here.”
“Which is?” I asked.
“Which is,” replied Wayne, his voice rising an octave, “every law-abiding American’s clearly defined, unalienable, Constitutional right to defend himself against the deadly threat of the imaginary gun.”
“Imaginary gun?”
“Look, fella,” said Wayne. “You followed the trial. Michael Dunn stated absolutely that he saw a shotgun in the hands of that colored boy before Big Mike blew the raving, bloodthirsty thug into Kingdom Come.”
“Did you just say ‘colored boy?’”
“Don’t distract me, son,” said Wayne. “Do you realize that, if not for three courageous white people on that Jacksonville jury, the sacred principle of taking up arms against imaginary guns would have been crippled, perhaps beyond repair.”
“What principle? I’ve never heard of a law about imaginary — ”
“No, there’s no law!” said Wayne. “But American law enforcement has a long, honored tradition of shooting suspicious characters in the dark alleys of ethnic neighborhoods who appeared to be holding a gun that turned out to be imaginary and had to be replaced by what our brave police call a ‘drop gun.’”
“Yes, but that’s — ”
“As American as apple pie!” said Wayne. “As American as baseball!”
“Baseball?”
“Look, fella,” said Wayne. “Remember when you were 12 and you wanted to get up a baseball game but you only had six or seven kids. So, when your team was up, and you got two runners on base and there was nobody to bat, what did you have to do?”
“Well,” I said, “you put an imaginary man on base.”
“There you go!” said Wayne. “And if you hit a home run, that imaginary man would score. He was real enough to help you win the game. Right? And look at me, dummy. You’re having a dream, but you’re talking to me. I’m an imaginary man, beating the hell out of you in a real argument.”
“Wait a minute!” I said, struggling to make sense of my nightmare.
“Here, hold this,” said Wayne, handing me the bouquet of gladiolas. I took it. Grinning with triumph, Wayne crowed, “There. You see?”
“See what?”
“You’ve just demonstrated the ultimate refinement of the imaginary gun.” Wayne drew a 9mm Glock from his shoulder holster. “I handed you an object, You accepted it without thinking. I’m free now to blow your brains out.”
I stood dumbstruck, looking down the barrel of the huge handgun.
“You see, only three jurors in the Michael Dunn trial understood how real and deadly Jordan Davis’ imaginary shotgun could be, especially as it materialized and expanded into a veritable machine-gun, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, a Howitzer, in the bigoted — but sincere — mind of Michael Dunn. Only three astute jurors perceived that, armed with an imaginary gun, Jordan Davis was far better armed — metaphysically — than his killer could ever hope to be.”
“But I don’t understand,” I said helplessly. “A metaphysical shotgun?”
“What do you think you’re holding right now, son?” replied Wayne. “To me, or Michael Dunn, or that gunslinger in Arizona who blasted the retarded guy walking his dog, that isn’t a bunch of flowers. It’s a fully automatic, mega-clip AK-47, and you’re threatening to shoot my nuts off.”
“I am?”
“It doesn’t have to be gladiolas, either. It could be a copy of Vanity Fair, or a bottle of beer, or your pet lapdog. If I think you’re holding a gun, well then, I’ve got a God-given Constitutional right to pump you so full of cop-killer bullets that they’ll have to shovel you off the pavement. And no jury in America — well, at least the real America: Florida, Georgia, Mississippi — would convict me.”
Appalled but also aware that he was right, I asked, “ So, Wayne, you and the NRA want Congress to pass a law allowing deadly force against anyone holding any object that a trigger-happy stranger with a concealed weapon could construe — in his wildest flights of metaphysical paranoia — to be a gun.”
“Law? Who needs a law?” said Wayne, as my nightmare did a slow dissolve. “Right now, friend, as long as we can get one gun-owning white guy onto any jury, we can shoot pretty much anything — or anyone — that moves.”
