My Struggle with "Mein Kampf"

The Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg, today

At the end of August and beginning of September, I had the privilege of presenting a paper at a conference devoted to the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) in Nuremberg, Germany, hosted by the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (Erlangen-Nürnberg). The current Earl of Shaftesbury was in attendance for the entire three days, which I must say was sporting of him, considering that at times he must have found it  painfully boring. I, however, had a wonderful and stimulating time, seeing the sites of such a beautiful city, and meeting with fellow enthusiasts to talk about my favourite philosopher.

I cannot let this opportunity pass without thanking the conference organizer, Patrick Müller, for his invitation and for his gracious hospitality. I am not much of a traveler, and usually after a week away, I am anxious to come home. This time, however, I didn’t want to come home, and at least part of the credit for this must go to Patrick. So Patrick: If you read this, thank you. Other credit is due to the people of Nuremberg, whom, in my admittedly limited interactions with them, I found to be polite, upright, and generous (those who know me will also know that these are about the highest compliments I can bestow upon a people).

On my last day in the city, Patrick took me on a little walking tour of the former Nazi Party rally grounds. Given that Nuremberg was the spiritual heartland of Nazism, it is passing strange that although it was heavily firebombed in the Second World War — over 90% of the Altstadt was destroyed — the Allies somehow managed to leave the Nazi Party’s massive congress hall and rally grounds more or less intact. Thus, there are many reminders of the moral stain of Nazism in an otherwise stupifyingly beautiful city.

The juxtaposition of Nuremberg’s National Socialist past and its decent, generous, cultured citizenry today, left me with a need to learn more, to piece together the quasi-biological puzzle of how today’s Bavarians (or Franconians) could have been generated from such a seemingly different moral species. This is what led me to (re)read Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

If you ever want to feel very uncomfortable, make yourself seen reading this book on the subway. You will get stares. The people doing the staring generally fall into two groups. The first are the people who wonder why it is you would be reading this verboten book. You must have some scholarly reason, or else it’s assigned reading for a course, otherwise you wouldn’t touch it. They are understandably puzzled.

The other group does not wonder, and they are not puzzled. They know — or at least they believe they know — that you’re reading Mein Kampf because you’re a degenerate crypto-Nazi racist of some kind. They do not hide their expression of disgust and hostility. They secretly wish the book could be burned and that you could be quietly shipped off to some place for re-education (or worse). Their gaze is most uncomfortable. The feeling is much akin to that dream that almost all of us have had — you know the one: you are at school or work and you suddenly realize you’re in your pyjamas or are stark naked. Only imagine that instead of being in the nude, you are embarrassed to find yourself wearing an SS uniform and a monocle.

If you can stand up to the withering gaze of ill-wishers, Mein Kampf is worth reading, which is why I was appalled a decade ago when Heather Reisman, founder and CEO of Indigo Books and Music (Canada’s answer to Barnes and Noble), announced that the book would no longer be sold in her stores. It was of course her right to make that decision. But the decision was still a dumb one.

(Incidentally, I was an employee of Indigo at the time, and I’m pretty sure that I personally played an inadvertent role in her decision. But that is a story for another day.)

In any case, the following are a few of my reflections on Hitler’s manifesto.

His Shallowness

Compared to authors of just about any stripe, Hitler’s intellect is clearly in the featherweight class. Yes, he constantly — and self-consciously, in my opinion — refers to his voracious reading habits. And yet, few are the actual books he refers to, and he has seemingly read few if any of the great classics, German or otherwise. On the other hand, he writes often of his consumption of pamphlets and newspapers. But no great intellect can be formed from such ephemeral confections, any more than a healthy body can be built from bubble gum and chocolate bars.

Hitler manipulates a bastardized lexicon of quasi-German Idealism, comprising such terms as “subjective”, “objective”, “will”, “concept”, “freedom”, etc. He clearly has little notion of their original philosophical context. It is as if it took some 150 years for Kant’s ideas to filter down to the very dregs of the German people, to be finally collected into the fetid and overflowing sewers of Hitler’s mind.

His Austrian-ness

I was also struck by repeated reminders that Hitler was Austrian, not German. He considered himself to be German, in the pan-Germanic sense, but his pan-Germanism seems at its core to have been a reaction to his experience as the citizen of a decaying multi-ethnic Hapsburg Empire, in which Germans were perceived to be in political decline relative to the other peoples of the Empire. Hitler’s was a paranoid garrison mentality. Thus his constant nightmares about the “Slavization” or “Czechization” of the German people. He loathed Vienna precisely because of its multiculturalism, something which we in a country like Canada have tentatively learned to celebrate, or at least have learned not to view as an existential threat.

His Anti-Semitism

Which leads to his anti-Semitism. There is little that is original in Hitler’s worldview. As I said, he was an intellectual featherweight, and the main elements of his political fantasies were cobbled together from ideas that were very much part of the Austrian alptraum. To the extent that they could be said to hold together in some kind of a coherent whole, Hitlerian Nazism could be said to be an ideology. But upon reading Mein Kampf, I could not fail to notice the extent to which one of the most conspicuous elements of this ideology, its anti-Semitism, fails to be fully integrated into it. It is there, obviously. And it’s not that it was inconsistent with Nazism. It’s that it seems somehow tacked on, like an extraneous element having less to do with theoretical conviction than with idiosyncratic, personal hatred. Hitler’s anti-semitism is somehow Hitler’s anti-Semitism.

When Hitler describes the growth and development of his anti-Semitism, something doesn’t quite ring true. He claims to have come into it relatively late, as the result of a gradual awakening. To some extent, the Jew represents for Hitler an object case study of all that is wrong with the Other, with all the foreign elements that are infecting the Austrian body politic. Thus, the Jew is somehow both capitalist representative of Manchester liberalism (p. 93) and “the leering grimace of Marxism” (p. 51). Insofar as he is Zionist, the Jew is an ultranationalist. In any case, he is clannish, preferring his own kind, while plotting the destruction of the Austro-Germans among whom he resides. And yet at the same time he is portrayed as inherently nationless, not only through lack of a homeland, but through extreme selfishness, greed, and lack of fellow-feeling. At the same time that Hitler portrays Jews as only concerned with their own kind, he also portrays them as atavistically individualistic, claiming that if they didn’t have Aryans to prey upon, they would claw each other to death. There is more than a little tension in these contrasting portrayals.

How can all these contradictory characteristics be imputed to one people? Unless perhaps the Jew is for Hitler merely the embodiment of all that is not-German and therefore bad. But if that is the case, why is it Jews in particular that are made to play this role? Why not some other people? After all, they made up a relatively small proportion of the Austro-Hungarian population. Why not Slavs instead?

And yet, in Mein Kampf Hitler reserves a hate-filled linguistic violence for the Jews, a venomous diction he rarely if ever deploys on Slavs or Czechs or any other nationality. These latter he at least accords recognizably human motivations: they will destroy the Germans if allowed, but they do so only by playing a game that every self-respecting people must play, the game of survival. And yet, the Jews are somehow outside this brutal game and the odd sort of grudging sportsmanship it entails. They are somehow cheaters rather than players. They are not players because they are not humans. By contrast with how he speaks of Czechs or Russians or the English (he seems to have felt some degree even of admiration for the latter), here is an all-to-common animadversion on the Jews:

“Later I often grew sick to my stomach from the smell of these caftan-wearers. Added to this, there was their unclean dress and their generally unheroic appearance…. Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultured life, without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light — a kike!” (p. 57)

Such language betrays a visceral loathing that goes well beyond the putative objectivity of a political ideology. This is personal. It betrays not so much a philosophical conviction as a psychological pathology. Where it comes from, I’m not sure. But I am led to doubt that it was acquired through some passive and gradual process of “education” or intellectual realization.

His Emotional Flatness
  
 There were two occasions on which Hitler wept (or claims to have wept). The first was when his mother died. This event, which we must remember left Hitler an orphan in his late teens, is dealt with in a sentence or two. One never really gets the impression that he cared all that much — just as one never really gets the impression that he cared that much for his father, despite repeated references to him as “the old gentleman”.

The other occasion was during the First World War, when while recovering in hospital from poison gas, his eyes bandaged, he found out that Germany had surrendered. He claims to have buried his head in his pillow and cried. But his description of this emotionality somehow doesn't ring true. Again, the account seems more than a little contrived. When Hitler claims to cry, one has trouble believing it.

His Egoism

Karl Marx did not write The Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital as intellectual autobiographies. Would the history of communism have been different if he had? I don’t know. But whatever change Marx wanted to make in the world, it wasn’t all about Marx. The overthrow of the bourgeoisie would come from class consciousness, not from how Marx’s personal biography worked itself out.

It was different with Hitler. He rolled up the entire history and destiny of the German people into a little ball, and he called it “my struggle”. As if the cosmic fate of millions turned on his own fate. There is a name for such a person, just as there is a name for someone who believes he can control the weather with his thoughts: we call them “crazy”.

Another name for Hitler’s condition might be Messianism. And indeed, insanity and Messianism do often arrive at the dance as a couple. But the actual Messiah, like Marx, was clearly not as absorbed with his own unique role in history as was Hitler. Jesus offered a message of salvation, which you could take or leave. It was others who imputed to him his special role in human history and eschatology. Hitler, on the other hand, seemed to view his own life story as world history. His “struggle” to become an architect was the German people’s struggle, and every setback in his life, such as failing to get into art school, was the result of some vast conspiracy against the German people. Now, as a grad student I once failed to get a fellowship, and I have had papers rejected for publication. But it would take considerable ego on my part to view this as a vast conspiracy against my nation by some foreign enemy whom it is my special destiny to somehow defeat with the aid of the united will of my people. To think this way is, well, bizarre. It is at least a little bit psychopathic.

I have tended to be suspicious of interpretations of Hitler that make him out to be some kind of unnatural monster, a moral singularity, mostly because I tend to think that there is nothing constructive in such a view; it rather lets the rest of us off the hook for the monstrous characteristics lurking in almost all of our souls, a few rare moral saints notwithstanding. I always thought of Hitler-types as the limiting condition of the less admirable parts of our own characters. In viewing Hitler as a moral singularity, we can comfort ourselves with the analgesic thought that Hitlerism couldn’t happen here, amongst us, because maybe there will never be another Hitler, he being too strange, outlandish, unnatural. Of course, every sane person in her heart of hearts knows that this is bullshit, that Hitler was a human being of some kind. But this not-so-noble lie gives us succour.

However, reading Mein Kampf has led me to think that perhaps there is a grain of truth to that interpretation, that “moral singularity” thesis. There was a certain idiosyncratic pathology to the man. On the other hand, reading the book has also reinforced my belief that there doesn’t seem to have been anything particularly brilliant or charismatic about this little creature. Which unfortunately leaves me back where I started, with the question of how it is that he gained so many followers? And so I still find myself unable to mentally connect the humane Bavarian or German of today with the Nazi of yesteryear.
_____________

N.B. In quoting from Mein Kampf, I have used Ralph Manheim's translation (Boston: Mariner Books, 1998).

Philosophy for the Like-Minded

I have a doctorate in philosophy, to which I devoted four and a half years of my life in study and research. Therefore, I consider myself to have some residual claim to the title “philosopher”, despite no longer teaching the subject nor holding a faculty position in a university. Nevertheless, it is with a due sense of grief that I discover myself no longer able to read papers or monographs in academic philosophy without at least one of the following three reactions: (i) intense boredom, (ii) intense headache, or (iii) intense frustration at the smugness, obtuseness, and/or utter pointlessness of what I’m reading. Thus, although I still claim to be a philosopher, I generally only do so if I need to speak to or refute other philosophers. In short, I consider the title to be neither honorific nor a source of any great pride, and I wear it with discomfort.

To paraphrase that great and wise wit La Bruyère, one can mark the beginning and end of a love affair by how uncomfortable a man and a woman are when left together in a room. I have fallen out of love with philosophy. I entered the discipline with fear and trembling, and I leave it with considerable disgust and embarrassment (at ever having been in love with it in the first place). My former colleagues seem just as embarrassed for and disgusted with me. And that, I’m afraid, is the end of the affair.

Or not quite. I recently picked up a philosophy book and tried to read it. I had a fond wish to rekindle an old flame, and I thought that a newish book by an academic philosopher writing on an area of applied ethics, purporting to be based on a series of lectures, and with whose ideas I am in general agreement, just might do the trick. But alas, once you break up, things are never quite the same when you hook up again. It’s best not to even try. Since falling out of love with philosophy, I confess I have strayed. I have had flirtations with history, politics, economics, poetry, law, you name it. I have been promiscuous. And when I am left alone with philosophy, I can’t quite get my mind off the other charming ladies. With her, I am alternately ashamed, bored, and annoyed. I need to find a way of extricating myself from the relationship with some modicum of decency. So I can’t wait until this book is finished.

The book in question is Jeff McMahan’s Killing in War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009). As with much other academic philosophy, it goes out of its way to make what should otherwise be an exciting subject mind-numbingly pedantic. Needlessly complicated ways are found to state claims that are trivially true to anyone smarter than the average fruit fly; common platitudes are presented as if they were profundities that no one had ever thought of before. Or else, other claims that are by no means obvious — or even plausible — are offered as if they were self-evident, with little or no argument to back them up. To be fair, they are often claims that all like-minded academics might very well agree with, and so perhaps the author feels little need to back them up. The trouble is, if you haven’t had your common sense educated out of you, or if you lack sufficient leisure and grant funding to be able to believe in the absurd, you will be utterly baffled by what most academic philosophers write, even in ethics, a subject which we should be able to expect to have at least some connection with the lived experience of the masses outside the groves of academe.

I am being a bit cruel, a bit arch, but only to make a point. In truth, one could read far worse examples of what I’m talking about than McMahan’s book. And as I said, I’m in general agreement with much of what he argues in it. Still, there are times when he falls into the common philosophical sin of relying on what I have elsewhere called the “ethicist’s royal ‘we’”. This is the tendency to make or rely on the claim that we all believe that X is good or that Y is bad, where in fact “we” (in the universal sense) do not all believe this, or where “we” simply refers to like-minded academic philosophers of a certain disposition — usually upper middle class, white, and very uncritically left-leaning.

Here is one example from McMahan’s book. Traditionally, in “just war” doctrine, a distinction is made between ius ad bellum and ius in bello (roughly, justice in going to war versus justice in the conduct of war). This distinction has led to the tendency to view combatants in a just war as morally equivalent to their enemy combatants (who, by inference, are combatants in an unjust war). Thus, it may be wrong for one side to enter into a war with another, but once this has been done, whether the war is just or unjust, combatants from both sides are morally justified in killing one another according to ius in bello. Of course, the right to kill non-combatants in a just war is a separate matter. And I leave aside what seems to be implicit throughout McMahan’s book, that it is always or usually clear to both sides whether a war is just or unjust (it is usually not clear, which makes much of his argument moot). But the idea is that, once war is declared, combatants on the unjust side have a job to do, and they are bound to play by the same rules of “the game” as combatants on the just side. On both sides, combatants are tools or agents of the parties who declare war. Or something like that. Killing of enemy soldiers is permitted in much the same way two boxers are morally permitted to pummel each other; the justness or unjustness of the war doesn’t enter into it.

However, McMahan believes that just and unjust combatants are not morally equivalent according to ius in bello. Unjust combatants are not morally justified in killing just combatants; just combatants are morally justified in killing unjust combatants (within the constraints of just war doctrine). I am in general agreement with his position, though I’m not sure where it gets us. In any case, McMahan has to defend himself from possible counterexamples to his view. These counterexamples involve situations in which it seems that some agent is justified in acting on behalf of another in the achievement of an unjust aim. Such situations are supposed to be relevantly analogous to the case of soldiers fighting on the unjust side of a war. McMahan picks out two such cases, offered by the philosopher Frances Kamm. The cases are:

(i)    A lawyer acts to evict a poor tenant from a building on behalf of his client.

(ii)    Someone smashes a beautiful vase on behalf of a paralyzed person who owns it.

Both of these situations exemplify much of what is wrong with academic ethics, though in somewhat different ways. The second example seems horribly contrived. It is hard to imagine circumstances in which such a situation would come up. Counterexamples and thought experiments in ethics often lose much of their force when they can’t be made to seem plausible. I would almost venture to say that if you cannot find either a plausible everyday example, or else a real and poignant historical example, then you do not have a counterexample. Also, besides being contrived, the second situation is also underdescribed, and because of this the principal’s intention and the agent’s action seem unmotivated and unintelligible. If the owner of the vase wants to do this act, then one is tempted to assume he has at least some reason for it. Why does the owner wish his vase to be destroyed? Perhaps he believes it is cursed. Perhaps it was in some way the cause of his being paralyzed. Maybe he knew he was dying and couldn’t bear the thought of someone else acquiring it. Or maybe he simply doesn’t believe that it is beautiful and is just taking up space (notice that the example seems to rely on an implied claim that there is an ethical duty not to destroy something you own which someone else finds beautiful; this claim is itself dubious and in need of separate argumentative support). In short, it is a silly and unconvincing example.

The first counterexample, the one about the poor tenant, seems less contrived and therefore more plausible, at least in the sense that it is regrettably an everyday occurrence. But again, there is an “ethicist’s royal ‘we’” implied here. After all, why should we assume that a poor person, simply by virtue of being poor, has the right to squat on someone else’s property, and that therefore it would be wrong to evict him? Is it because the landlord is rich? We do not know this, nor should it necessarily make a difference in our reasoning. Does the landlord have a duty to provide a place to live for poor non-paying tenants? If so, this claim at least merits some kind of an argument in its support. It may seem obvious to comfortable left-leaning academic philosophers earning a six-figure salary and who are not being asked to make such a sacrifice themselves. It doesn’t seem all that obvious to me. It may also be of considerable relevance how the tenant came to be poor. If he is shiftless, irresponsible, and largely the author of his own miserable fate, does the landlord still owe him the same duty?

Kamm argues that although it would be wrong for the landlord to kick him out, it would not be wrong for the lawyer to do it on his behalf. When McMahan refutes this counterexample, it is telling that he doesn’t call into question its implied premise that a landlord is morally obligated to allow a poor tenant to squat on his property. McMahan accepts this antecedent, but with regard to the consequent he seems to waiver between a) biting his own bullet and condemning the lawyer for being complicit in a wrong, or b) excusing the lawyer on the grounds of his contract with his landlord client. The first strategy is at least consistent with his overall argument, though he would find many who would in fact deny the lawyer’s guilt, whatever they thought of the landlord’s. The second strategy doesn’t sit so well with his overall thesis regarding the moral status of unjust combatants. Through his tacit, unquestioningly liberal (and personally costless) support for the poor, McMahan is forced to tie himself into logical knots to defend his thesis. He has been reflexively wed to spurious but fashionable dogma and, philosophically, it has cost him.

I would have taken the different strategy of simply denying Kamm’s antecedent: other things being equal, and taking the paucity of facts provided by Kamm as it stands, I simply deny that it is wrong for the landlord to evict the poor tenant, and by extension I deny that it is wrong for the lawyer to do so on his behalf. Thus, the counterexample is really no counterexample at all. I do not deny that there would be something wrong with a landlord who felt no regret about doing so, or with a lawyer who positively enjoyed this duty (assuming again that the poor tenant is himself guiltless). But feeling regret for an action is not the same as being morally unjustified in doing it. Similarly, a just combatant in war may feel regret for killing an enemy combatant, but this does not mean that he was morally unjustified in doing so.

I don’t claim that what I have just argued is all that original or profound, and to some readers it may seem downright obvious, even if it is painful to accept. But I can tell you that most academic ethicists, well-meaning lefties that they are, would be shocked at what I have just argued — or at least at the plain way I have argued it. Luckily for them, they are rarely faced with heretics like me. So they can continue to find ways of arguing against each other on certain philosophical issues without ever really disagreeing on the basic (and unwarranted) assumptions about distributive justice they all hold dear. And thus, because they skirt around core issues, their arguments too often seem meaningless or beside the point to outsiders.

Postscript

So I have fallen out of love with philosophy. But as the song says, breaking up is hard to do. I still have personal friends who are philosophers, but as time goes on, I find I have less and less to talk about with them, and they with me. We have come almost to speak different languages on many philosophical issues. I am always ready to bring in arguments from other disciplines with which I am enamored (e.g. history or economics), and of which they are largely ignorant. I in turn, find their unwillingness to engage with other disciplines maddening. I want an open relationship. I want to see other people, and I want philosophy to do the same.

One of these philosopher friends is a case in point. I still run into her occasionally, but most of our interaction these days is conducted through Facebook, which perhaps is for the best. Even so, I keep expecting any day now to find that she has “unfriended” me for my heterodox views. This friend flies her flag high on all issues concerning “social justice” (a term of art I find almost meaningless, since it has become merely a catch-all for whatever boutique ideas are fashionable among left-leaning intellectuals on any given week). It’s not so much her particular views that stick in my craw, since I actually agree with her on a few of them. And sometimes our disagreements are more over means than ultimate goals. She wants a better world with less poverty, and so do I. I just think that in general her ideas are more likely to hurt the poor than help them. No, it’s not her ultimate goals that annoy me. It is rather the way she assumes that all “reasonable” people (i.e. privileged intellectuals like her) believe what she believes, and that if you don’t believe them, you are either stupid or morally degenerate.

I have genuine disagreements with her, and the positions that I have taken are not stupid (not to say they are not possibly mistaken), and I hold them out of genuine moral conviction rather than mere self-interest. And the fact is, when I have tangled with her intellectually on these issues, it has never taken me very long to back her into some tight corner of intellectual self-refutation. You see, she spends so much time talking among like-minded left-leaning intellectuals that she seems to become paralyzed when presented with an opponent who strays from the accepted dogmas of “social justice”, who comes at her from outside her comfortable echo chamber. And because she only communicates with the like-minded, she is never called out on those of her “arguments” that are, frankly, bullshit. So I like to play this role for her. Socrates would do no different.

In honour of Labour Day this year, this friend posted what she thought was a clever little item on Facebook. It was a Victorian picture of a child working at what looked like some kind of loom or weaving machine. The caption read:

IF YOU’RE GLAD YOUR SEVEN-YEAR-OLD CHILD DOESN’T HAVE TO WORK IN A FACTORY, THANK A UNION.

Her like-minded Facebook friends, most of them fellow academics, slapped their flippers together in approval at this cleverness. Rather than do the same, I looked upon this as a “teachable moment” for her. My comment consisted of a link to the Wikipedia entry on the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, along with the following remark:

“Actually, you can thank a certain Tory politician and aristocrat. It’s rather anachronistic to credit labour unions.”

The sound of flippers stopped, to be replaced by the sound of proverbial crickets. Labour unions, in more or less the form we now have them, arose in the last thirty years or so of the 19th century. By then, factory labour by seven-year-olds had been abolished by such legislation as Shaftesbury’s Factories Act of 1833 (outlawing the employment of children under nine in textile factories) and its successors. Unions had little or nothing to do with the outlawing of child labour in industrial nations, since that had already been largely accomplished before unions existed.

To be fair, if unions had been around, they likely would have pushed for an end to child labour, but only because children were competition, representing a downward pressure on adult workers' wages. It is for much the same reason that unions used to try to exclude Chinese and black workers from the labour force.

But hey, an academic philosopher rarely lets facts get in the way of a pet theory, especially when the theory lies entirely outside the philosopher’s professed area of expertise. I should know: I’ve devoted an entire blog to expounding ideas outside my area of expertise (tongue planted firmly in cheek).

Cole Berlin: An Elegy

Cole Berlin, towards the end

Who remembers Jobriath? Who listens to his music now? And yet, for a brief summer afternoon in popular culture, he was an occurrence in fame’s sky, as present and as cosmically superfluous as a solar eclipse. The eclipse appeared in the year of my birth, 1973 and was officially over by 1975. Jobriath is now only a very small footnote in the history of glam rock. He was overhyped, he was cursed with stupendously bad management, and just as importantly, he was very openly gay. He was not half-assed about his homosexuality. He was never bisexual, as the other glam rockers of the time played at being. No, Jobriath took pride in his self-description as the “Fairy Godmother of Rock”. He was musically talented, though his music — much like the man himself — was complicated. He was a showman, and he had an aesthetic sense that makes Lady Gaga seem rather jejune. But the world simply was not ready for Jobriath. Would it be ready now? It's hard to say. But alas, Jobriath is no more.

Jobriath’s real name was Bruce Wayne Campbell. For reasons I can only partly explain, I am less interested in Mr. Campbell’s glam career than I am in the persona he adopted later, the New York City piano player and cabaret singer named Cole Berlin (the name is a portmanteau of Cole Porter and Irving Berlin). Cole Berlin plied his trade in the lounges of New York City, with a regular gig at a restaurant called The Covent Gardens. He lived in a pyramid-shaped apartment on the rooftop of the Chelsea Hotel. He supplemented his relatively small income by occasional prostitution. He also wrote plays, without success, and he tried to start an acting career, to much the same effect. At some point in 1981 Cole began to feel ill. The disease from which he suffered was new at the time, and as yet it had no settled name. By the time it killed him in August of 1983, it was being called AIDS.

To my knowledge, there are only two songs of Cole Berlin’s available in recorded form. One of them consists of his performance in a 1981 BBC program about the Chelsea Hotel and its inhabitants. He is interviewed in his pyramid apartment, and he plays a ditty called “Sunday Brunch” on his white piano. He looks a bit puffy, maybe from the booze and pills, and it’s possible that he was already feeling ill (I’m not sure precisely when it was shot, although it was possibly as early as 1979). But still, you can’t help noticing that he was a natural performer.

Why does the story of Cole Berlin fascinate me? I’m not sure. I suppose it’s because all such stories of abject failure fascinate me. You see, despite all the lies that theologians and self-help gurus profit from peddling, failure — not success — is nature’s default position. No matter how fortunate and successful one may be, each and every one of us eventually ends up a failure, even if only in that one thing we generally try hardest to succeed at: remaining alive. The sad ending of Cole Berlin merely administers this valuable lesson to us in distilled form.

Sad as Cole Berlin’s ending sounds, it gets even sadder. Consider this story, told by Hayden Wayne, a musician who had been in Jobriath’s band. After Jobriath’s career ended, Wayne lost touch with him.  A certain actress had landed a big role in a popular soap opera. Her career was flourishing. She recently moved into a new apartment in New York City, which happened to be in the Chelsea, and she was proudly showing it off to some friends, one of whom was Wayne. This was sometime in December 1983. She pointed out all the furniture and the white-lacquered piano and mentioned that she had managed to buy the contents of the flat for a mere $4000. Her lawyer advised her that she could get it even cheaper. However, she didn’t wish to haggle with the seller, a man who was plainly distraught at the recent death of his son.

The Chelsea Hotel… the white piano… the rattan furniture… the pyramid-shaped apartment. It suddenly dawned on Wayne whose apartment this had been.

The actress went on to relate how the man’s son had been dead for four days before they found him. The neighbours had apparently been complaining about the smell. And thus ended the life of Cole Berlin, a.k.a. Jobriath, a.k.a. Bruce Wayne Campbell.

What does one do with a story so sad? Well, I wrote song lyrics. I woke up at 3:15am one day with these lyrics in my head. I had to write them down. I know many people claim to write lyrics or poems in such flashes of inspiration, and often they are not telling the strict truth. In my case, I do not exaggerate. Well, except for the “West 23rd” line — I had to look up the address. Although I write a lot, I have little inclination towards the sort of writing that rhymes or has a meter (my Christmas haiku are a rare exception).

I have no music for these lyrics, nor am like to. So if you can set them to something, be my guest. I only ask that you credit me and that, if recorded, you send me a copy.

*    *    *    *    *

I rang the bell, she let me in
To her pyramid in the New York dusk.
She dragged me through from room to room,
I trailed in her complacent musk.

“I just love this place,” she said.
“Isn’t it divine?
The furniture’s all rattan,” she said.
“And all of it is mine.”

Cole Berlin, the Pharaoh’s boy,
Two-twenty-two, West 23rd,
Was NYC’s new Sunday brunch,
The Covent Gardens’ native son,
The Hotel Chelsea’s naked lunch.

“Don’t you love this place?” she asked.
“Isn’t it superb?
The white piano’s a baby grand.
It was headed for the curb.”

Living in a pyramid
Kept Cole’s razors very sharp.
His coughing bounced around those walls,
But no one heard him in the end.
No one was listening in the end.
His hand was unheld in the end.

“I think I’ll put a bar right there —
I must apologize for the smell.
My cleaner has been everywhere,
But that smell, my God! It’s always there!”

Cole Berlin, the Pharaoh’s boy,
Two-twenty-two, West 23rd,
Was NYC’s new Sunday brunch,
The Covent Gardens’ native son,
The Hotel Chelsea’s naked lunch.

© James Pratt, 2012.

Noble Savages and Jesuitical Relations

Jesuit Relations

Sainte-Marie

In the winter of 1985, I went on an overnight class trip to Sainte-Marie among the Hurons (Sainte-Marie-au-pays-des-Hurons), a reconstructed 1640s French Jesuit mission near Midland, Ontario. The purpose of the mission was to bring Christianity to the local Huron Indians. We were there in February. It was cold. As such, it gave a very good idea of the kind of harsh conditions the blackrobes would have endured. Although I must have learned a lot about life in the early seventeenth-century Canadian wilderness, mostly what has stuck with me is the constant desire to be warm. At night, I seriously wondered whether I would still be alive in the morning. We slept in sleeping bags on cold pallets that were only about four feet in length (apparently the blackrobes were rather short of stature), so besides being cold, I was also very stiff and sore.

I remember a few other things about the trip. For instance, I can recall the film we were shown upon arrival at the site. It told of how the Hurons were ultimately destroyed by smallpox and war with the Iroquois. And of course, we learned in great detail about the death and martyrdom of Fathers Brébeuf and Lalemant at the hands of Iroquois captors in 1649. They died bravely, we were taught, without uttering a cry or groan, after suffering the most savage of tortures. I use the word “savage” advisedly: the Jesuits were scalped, they had boiling water poured over them, they were forced to wear “necklaces” of red-hot axe hatchets, and they were flayed and otherwise mutilated. After death, their hearts were removed and eaten. Such gruesome stories seemed tailored to the imaginations of eleven- and twelve-year-old children, especially boys. In any case, it was made clear to us who wore the white hats and who wore the black ones in this story. The blackrobes were the good guys, the Iroquois were the villains, and the Hurons were caught somewhere between them. Obviously, the real story must have been rather more complicated than this film would have us believe.

Brébeuf and Lalemant must have been men of almost superhuman faith and strength of character, or so we were instructed. Imagine, then, my surprise on a return trip to Sainte-Marie nearly two decades later, when I again sat down to watch the film. You see, it has since been heavily edited to tell a different story. First of all, the Indians the mission served were no longer called “Hurons”; they were now “Wendat”. This makes sense, since it is what they called themselves. We learned about how the Wendat were a peaceful people who lived at one with nature, how they thrived, and how everything was just idyllic for them before the Europeans arrived on the scene with their diseases and their new religion. Of Fathers Brébeuf and Lalemant we now heard next to nothing; they were killed by Iroquois, end of story. No martyrdom, no gruesome torture. As a matter of fact, the film even somehow managed to blame Europeans for the warfare between the Wendat and the Iroquois that led to the destruction of the mission (on very tenuous grounds, to put it charitably). The historical interpretation throughout the Sainte-Marie site seemed to follow the film’s change of focus: the mission now had little if anything to do with the Jesuits who built it and lived in it. Instead, it was a merely a prop, a slightly embarrassing backdrop to showcase Canada’s First Nations peoples and their preternatural nobility in the face of diabolical European evil. The purpose of Sainte-Marie now seems to be to make its mainly white visitors feel a due sense of shame and regret for nebulous crimes they had no hand in.

Seeing the film was an excellent lesson for me in how history may be shamelessly re-written to suit the tastes of civil servants and lobby interests, and how certain unpalatable facts can be made to disappear down the memory hole. Now don’t get me wrong. I am all for having the history of the Wendat taught in more detail. They were an inextricable part of the Sainte-Marie story, and in precisely the same way that the Jesuits were. Without both the Jesuits and the Wendat, there is no Sainte-Marie. However, we do no favours to anybody in erasing or whitewashing facts. And the fact is, Brébeuf and Lalemant were brutally butchered, and the Indians were every bit as capable of savage violence as the Europeans who were arriving on their shores in ever greater numbers. I am a firm believer in the notion that as human beings, we are all savages or potential savages. There is very little of moral superiority in the history of any people when it is looked at in the harsh sunlight of truth.

Mantle

About eight or nine years ago my wife and I spent a day helping with the archaeological excavation of a Huron (Wendat) village near Stouffville, Ontario, dating to the period from 1500 to 1530. At the time we were there, the excavation was at a fairly early stage, but it was already evident that this village was huge. The dig was fascinating. Here are a few things we learned: The Wendat were obviously hooked into some extensive trade links, as was made evident by the large quantities of flint on the site, of a kind that would need to have been imported from hundreds of kilometers away. We learned that in order to build the defensive palisades of the village, and to clear the land to grow enough corn to support a large population of some 2000 souls, they must have cut down all the forest within an 80 to 100 kilometer radius of the site. The fact is that all of these villages were temporary; the inhabitants would remain on a site only until the soil was exhausted, or until they could no longer walk the vast distances necessary to gather the remaining wood or to plant and harvest corn ever further afield. Once they had stripped the land bare, they would pull up stakes and moved on. Like a plague of locusts. Like a plague of… us.

These Wendat paid great attention to the building of palisades and used a staggering quantity of wood in their construction. That fact, in addition to the prevalence of carbonized post holes representing layers of palisade that had burned down, made it plainly evident that warfare seemed to occupy the inhabitants almost as much as trading or cultivation. So much for the image of the peace-loving noble savage, living at one with nature.

Nevertheless, even the archaeologists at the site, who knew better, wanted us to believe in this “noble savage” mythology, for they kept a sort of Indian-for-hire on site. His role seemed to be to burn a little sweet grass and pray native prayers on command, all to assuage the spirits that inhabit the place. It was all nonsense, of course, but white folks tend to find such mumbo-jumbo somehow spiritually edifying. It was all part of making the experience “authentic” for us weekend excavators. I could have happily done without it. It stank of fraud. It was about as “authentic” as a cheap plastic dream catcher. The only real question was whether this Indian actually believed in this nonsense, or whether he simply knew how dumb and gullible white people are. I suspect the latter.

What’s worse, this particular Indian-for-hire was Iroquois. The archaeologists didn’t trouble themselves to find an actual Wendat elder. After all, an Indian is an Indian, right? The supreme irony of having Wendat culture interpreted by someone from a tribe that was the Wendat’s mortal enemy was not lost on me, I can assure you.

Interestingly, the village we excavated, now called the “Mantle” site, has recently been in the news. Besides the fact that it ended up being one of the biggest such villages ever excavated, archaeologists recently found an iron axe buried very deliberately beneath one of the longhouses. Thanks to a maker’s mark, the axe could be identified as being of Basque manufacture. Astoundingly, the axe must have made its way, through long and complex trade linkages, from a Basque whaling station in Newfoundland, all the way along the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario, and up into the interior. The Wendat acquired the axe in the pre-contact period, a century or so before the actual arrival of Europeans in their territory in 1610.

CBC radio ran a news piece about Mantle that was notable mainly for its adherence to what is now a standard narrative structure when any Canadian media outlet runs a story about “First Nations” people and culture.

(The very term “First Nations” is dubious. Even if it makes sense to call them “nations”, many of these so-called “nations” are of relatively modern construction. And many of them were not the first such nations at all in the territories in which they now happen to reside. Many of these so-called “nations” fought each other to the death over those lands before the arrival of those Europeans from whom they now claim them. As far as I’m concerned, “First Nations” is pure Canadian political cant, inflationary linguistic nonsense foisted on gullible and well-meaning Canadians of European descent by their cowardly political class. I avoid using it, much as I avoid such other terms from the CBC Newspeak lexicon as “sex worker” (prostitute) and “sovereigntist” (separatist traitor). Be advised that whenever I use the term herein, it will always be within scare quotes.)

The CBC narrative structure for stories involving Indian history and culture involves interviewing one or two white experts, whether archaeologists or historians, followed by a self-appointed native “elder” or other Indian-for-hire who is allotted space to make absurd statements with zero plausibility, and backed by zero evidence, but which are presented by the CBC as if they represent objective fact, because based on supposed oral tradition that never existed until this “elder” was invited to speak on the CBC. These statements usually involve magic spirits, demons, and further peddling of the “noble savage” myth.

Here’s how it played out in the CBCs story on Mantle. An archaeologist in charge of the excavation dutifully describes the site, the finding of the axe, how its provenance was ascertained, the likely route it would have taken in arriving at Mantle, etc. Why was it buried under the longhouse? Don’t really know, he says. It’s a bit of a mystery. You see, he’s an archaeologist, and the material record simply doesn’t allow him to answer this question.

 Now cue the obligatory wise old Indian, brought in to fill the gap in the evidence with fairy stories, prejudice, and superstition. The wise old Indian proceeds to weave a tale about how the Wendat were a peaceful people who lived in harmony with nature, thereby directly contradicting the material evidence. And then he offers his theory of why the axe was buried beneath the longhouse. The Wendat buried it there because of its bad karma, because it shadowed forth mysterious omens of the coming doom the natives would suffer at the hands of the white devils. And so they naturally buried it to protect themselves from the evil. Or something like that. In all honesty, what he was saying made little sense to my narrow Western mind, hobbled as it is by the curse of critical thought.

It was all very predictable. After all, what CBC story with a “First Nations” angle would be complete without a reminder of how evil the white man is, and how morally and naturally superior are their hapless native victims? Yet they rather outdid themselves this time, managing to work an “Indian good/white man evil” subtext into a story that had little if anything to do with white men (the meaning of the term “pre-contact” seems to have been lost on the producers). Apparently, the Wendat lived in a topsy-turvy world of backwards causation, where white people whom the Wendat had never met are held morally responsible for bad things they won’t be in a position to do for another century.

Yet, this native man’s nonsense was peddled by the CBC with the deepest gravity, as if it had some kind of validity by virtue of the mere fact that it spewed forth from the mouth of an Indian.  One man’s half-baked tale of spirits, premonitions, and bad juju magic was presented as if it were a valid or useful complement to the archaeological evidence. That is like presenting astrology as if it were a valid or useful complement to astronomy.

Even on its own terms, the “bad mojo” theory of the axe’s burial there doesn’t hold together. If its possessors truly believed the axe to be evil (and leaving aside the question of why they would acquire — presumably at great expense — such an evil object in the first place), would they not bury it far away, at least beyond the village walls? Would you bury such an object right underneath your home and hearth? Would you bury nuclear waste within your town’s limits, or would you want it as far away and as deep underground as possible?

The fact is, we can never know for sure why the axe was buried where it was. Any conjecture on the subject is just that — conjecture. Other opposing theories can be offered which have as much plausibility, or more. For example, the owner might have thought that the axe would bring good luck, and so buried it under his house, much like we might hang a lucky horseshoe over a doorway. Or else, it might have been buried there to hide it from thieves or from Iroquois raiders, precisely because it was such a treasured object. After all, it is not hard to believe that whoever acquired it didn’t get it cheaply. I don’t imagine metal axes from Europe were a commodity easy to get one’s hands on in Ontario circa AD 1500.

There is a sort of cultural schizophrenia in the way a story like that of the Mantle village is typically presented. On the one hand, an Indian-for-hire spins an outlandish tale for the consumption of a largely white audience; the audience is meant to find the story enchanting while finding the Indian people depicted in it as quaint, innocent, vaguely noble, and very much a valorized “Other”. At the same time, archaeologists stress the ways in which the lives the Indians led and the structures they built are little different from ours. Thus, the village is described as the “Manhattan of its time” or as a medieval European walled town of the same period. Their society and economy are described as being highly organized, complex, productive, sophisticated. In short, their form of life is made out to be recognizably our own.

But it is a double-edged sword: If the Indians were “just like us” in all these ways, then it is likely that they were just like us in their vices too. They polluted their land, they depleted their resources, and they devoted a lot of time and effort to slaughtering one another. Their problems were our problems, only on a smaller scale.

I sometimes think we do neither ourselves nor “First Nations” peoples any good by pretending that the latter are anything more than human beings with human problems. Of course, at least this is better than the old way, of pretending that they are something less.