Pet Shop Boys have always soundtracked our times, from the AIDs era (try “King’s Cross”) to Obamatime (“More than a Dream“). Earlier this season their prophetic “Bullet for Narcissus” was tuned to a Secret Service officer on guard as Trump ranted at a rally…
“I’ve got eyes in the back of my head
For anything suspicious
And if my number’s up
I’ll take a bullet for Narcissus
This Narcissus, his power is his dream
His politics are simply mean
He doesn’t trust what he hasn’t seen
He’s so banal, he’s made it mainstream”
Strapped up, strapped in, “wearing the vest,” the SS guard keeps hearing synth shots as he surveys the “big event…
People think he’s heaven-sent
Devoted crowds who chant his name
I sometimes think he lives for fame
Oh Narcissus
It’s so delicious
To watch his makeup run
He sweats and panicky
Fakes reality
He only cares for number one…”
Trump doubled down on number one in his convention speech. Certain pundits claimed he tried in the opening minutes of his address to jump off from his brush with bullets to reach humane territories of feeling. But those lands remained all Sahara to him. When he went on about the projectile ripping through his ear and the blood flow, his self-enrapture seemed like a farcical repeat of Celine’s opening passage in La Guerre where the evil fascist genius evoked his tragic experience waking up wounded on a World War I battlefield:
I must have been lying there for part of the following night as well. My whole ear was stuck to the ground with blood, my mouth too. Between the two there was an immense noise. I slept in the noise and then it rained, hard. Kersuzon next to me was stretched out heavy under the water. I moved one arm toward his body. Touched it. The other one I couldn’t. I didn’t know where my other arm was. It had flown in the air, twisted into space, then fallen back down and jabbed into my shoulder, in the raw part of the meat. It made me scream at the top of my lungs every time and then it got worse. Afterwards, though still shouting, I managed to make less noise than the horrific din bashing my head in, on the inside, like a train. It didn’t do any good to resist. This was the first time in that whole nightmare full of shells whistling by that I slept, in all the noise that was possible, without entirely losing consciousness—that is, in horror. Except for a few hours when they operated on me, I never completely lost consciousness. Since December ’14, I’ve always slept like that—in excruciating noise. I caught the war in my head. It’s locked in my head.
Trump was locked in his own head (as ever) in his RNC address, but this unreliable narrator is no Celine. Trump’s account of his wounding devolved into a vague ramble; In La Guerre, the French edge-lord kept finding words for experiences of human extremes, grounding his feelings in sentences as phenomenal as a raging hardon.
Celine’s defenders have cited his battlefield agonies to justify his impulse to anathematize Jews (in the notorious anti-Semitic pamphlets he wrote in the late 30s). His mighty explainers are lame, but that doesn’t mean what’s irrepressible in Celine should be repressed. Philip Roth, not a writer given to excusing Jew-bashers, once bowed to Celine—”brutal, fierce, the driven witness of an elemental world who takes us deeper and deeper into the night. Death, dying, crime, guilt, grievance, lunacy, sex—all that and more is his daily business.”
What’s his biz tell us about the dailiness of neo-fascism in America? That question occurred to me when Celine’s alter-ego in La Guerre, recuperating from his injuries in the backlines, finds himself being paid by a prostitute to act like a cuckhold. His job is to hide in the closet while the prostitute beds English soldiers, then show out as an aggrieved husband and demand recompense from the johns. Celine takes us inside the closet and his anti-hero’s head—where the war buzzes on—as he watches his lover/whore get brutalized by a soldier-client. (“There’s a man who hadn’t fucked in months…I thought he’d kill her.” Not that he minds: “how beautiful it is.”) American alt rightists often deride leftists as “cucks.” But this text by Celine, the echt fascist writer, suggests that’s probably a projection. God knows, our America First G.O.P. is full of hacks ready to play their parts in Trump’s theater of domination.
Which brings us to J.D. Vance and his Indian-American wife, Usha. I was struck by how he deployed her in his Convention speech to traduce those who “say…America is an idea.” Vance allowed there was something to the whole schmear about Constitutionalism, “rule of law and religious liberty.” But he counterposed all that to his family’s burial plot in Eastern Kentucky, claiming he once insisted his Indian wife dig it. She needed to know that in marrying him, “that’s what she was getting.”
Now that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.
Vance’s blood and soil bullshit must be resisted on the plane of ideas and on the level of feelings. Columnist Jeff Jacobs went high:
J.D. Vance is wrong. America’s greatness is rooted precisely in the ideas that Vance regards as secondary. His wife’s American identity does not inhere in the burial plot of the family she married into. It is bound up, rather, in the worldview her parents adopted when they left their native India and put down roots in America…
How does a person become an American? By taking on American principles, above all those enshrined in the Declaration of Independence — that we are created equal and endowed from birth with the rights to life and liberty. At the heart of “American exceptionalism” is the recognition that full-fledged membership in our nation is not a matter of birth, blood, ancestry, or soil. America is the embodiment of certain ideas, and to be fully American one need only pledge allegiance to those principles…
How can Vance — who enlisted in the Marines after 9/11 — claim with a straight face that “people will not fight for abstractions”?…
…What was the Civil War if not a fight for “abstractions”? Abraham Lincoln led the nation in what began as a war to preserve the Union, then became a war to end slavery. In his matchless address at the Gettysburg battlefield, Lincoln laid out in his first two sentences the transcendent abstraction for which the Union fought:
”Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
I’m always up for Lincoln’s propositions but I’ll let Jacobs handle the “transcendent” while I go a little lower. Not below the belt (I hope), though I’ve got my eyes on Usha. Maybe, like J.D., she’s changed her mind about Trump and no longer believes (as her husband used to) that America’s Narcissus is “noxious,” “reprehensible,” an “idiot,” and “cultural heroin.” It’s not easy to read her face. Yet she doesn’t seem entirely at ease in the midst of Trumpist spectacles.
I wonder how Usha will feel down the line. J.D.’s all in of course. Celine may have illumined the candidate’s current movement of mind when the voice of La Guerre—another ex-soldier in a hurry—flashes on a woman he’s left behind as he boards a ship that will take him to a new country…
It’s funny there seem to be beings loaded with baggage, they come from infinity, set down before you their heavy baggage of emotions like at the market. They’re not mistrustful, they pour out their merchandise any which way. They don’t know how to present things properly. You don’t really have time to search through their things, you pass on, you don’t go back, you’re in a hurry yourself. That must make them sad. Maybe they pack up again? Or just abandon their things? I don’t know. What becomes of them? We don’t have a clue. Maybe they set off again until nothing’s left? And then where do they go? Life is enormous all the same. You can lose yourself anywhere.