The Gangster as a Trumpesque Hero

Robert Warshow's line, "The gangster is a man of the city," chills me when I think of the oval office's occupant. Warshow's seminal essay, "The Gangster as a Tragic Hero," appeared in 1948, and has been read as a founding document of cultural studies. In Warshow's recognition of the need for critics to keep a finger on the pulse of popular culture, in his implicit rejection of a Victorian notion that only texts exuding what was deemed high moral or literary value were worth studying, lay genius: he saw how much of life and politics goes tragically unread. Warshow's idea of the gangster as a product of the city, "with the city's language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring, carrying his life in his hands like a placard, like a club," uncannily describes the gangster in the White House. Warshow describes the gangster as a man who makes his way independently, makes his life, imposing it on others. It's as if Warshow had heard America's top gangster brag that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters, or grab women "by the pussy" or ignore all requests to hand over his tax forms.  The gangster (usually a "he") embodies a perverse form of American individualism. The flip side of America's innovations in medicine, technology, art, is this nihilist--examples might include Julian Assange and certainly Roy Cohn.

Warshow's essay offers real answers to the question of how this shady thug rose to political power and remains at the height of it. One of the traits America traditionally honors is individualism--we love our inventors, our Edisons, our Singers, our Bessie Blounts, our Mary Andersons. The gangster, instead of inventing the sewing machine or the cotton gin or gadgets to help amputees feed themselves or the light bulb or the windshield wiper, invents an evil self. He becomes an asocial criminal personality, usually a murderer, who allows us to identify ourselves with him until the moment he is shot or, in the case of Tony Soprano, the screen goes black. We enjoy a guilt-free vicarious experience of his larcenous, scandalous, and cruel life but not of his ignominious death. For that part, we tell ourselves, "He got what he deserved--thank goodness it wasn't me." The lights go up, the popcorn container's empty, we go home with a clear head. Again, Warshow's spot-on: "the experience of the gangster as an experience of art is universal to Americans." 

Try reading Warshow's amazing essay here:
http://crmintler.com/AGH/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Warshow-GTH.pdf
and thinking about the monster in the White House.

The Mock Impeachment Song (with apologies to Lewis Carroll)

Did Zelensky leak the provocation POTUS put him through?

Did the trusted staff just have enough of “fake news” ballyhoo?

Could tiny fears be trawling through the Donald’s temp’ral lobe?

Since impeachment’s now the talk of everyone around the globe?

Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the probe?

Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the probe?

Will Giuliani make things even worse for Donald Trump?

Will Barr, Maguire, and other dudes exonerate his rump?

If there’s a chance Pelosi’s moxie proves the cover-up

And rids democracy of all that’s Trumpesque and corrupt

Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?

Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?

Clueless and Keyless in Germany

Today I felt nostalgic for the hardware store around the corner from my New York apartment, where I can bring in a set of keys, get 'em copied less than ten, chat with the nice owner about house supplies, and zip home with that new set of keys. No muss, no fuss.
It's different here in the land of the careful, the correct, and the completely regulated. The guy down at the key place took the keys in his hand and wondered what Schloss (the word can mean either "castle" or "lock") they were for? I said those were our housekeys and he cast a bemused, suspicious eye in my direction. I could almost see the thoughts running through his head. Judging by his expression, I was possibly:
(1) A deranged stalker trying to get into my ex-boyfriend's home and murder his child's rabbit
(2) A thief or a spy
(3) A lunatic--because who ever needs keys copied?
Tentatively, I asked--since I hadn't completely understood his tirade--whether this was "wegen Gesetz," that is, something to do with law, or just not possible. He shook his head at me, this guy who looks like a miracle of efficiency in the shoe-repair and key business, who has actually repaired my shoes, but who now thinks I'm a vampire because I want some keys copied. But I persisted. Did he know anywhere where I might get these keys copied? Smoke puffed from his ears. His look: I had made an off-color remark.
I called my husband, who left a long message involving certificates needed and other bureaucratic matters, disquisitions on the shape of the key and how that affects the situation. Interpretations, anyone? Me, I think it has something to do with German notions of privacy, which must not be violated, if you want to stay alive, that is. Keys open doors, after all, and the German home is a fortress, with windows that roll down securely (none of these flappy windowshades, that flip up with the merest breeze!)
Someday, I will have another set of keys to my house--I did emphasize to the locksmith that I was talking about my very own house--but I will need German negotiations, probably through my husband, before I get them.

Why Don't Europeans Just Speak European?

Ladies and Gentlemen, and other honored genders: I kid you not. That was a real question. My husband's graduate student, a German of Turkish ethnicity, was traveling in the USA and found, as he worked his way through California, that the further from the coast he got, the more he was asked questions like that. 
He was also asked why Germans had such a low opinion of the NSDAP (the Nazi Party). 
I can imagine the poor guy sweating, fingering his collar, gearing up for the question so many young Germans are still asked by Americans: "What was it like to live under Hitler?" 
Once upon a time in Jersey City, I taught students who had been educated in the local public school system and never strayed beyond the borders of their hometown. They could see the proud towers of the World Trade Center--which were still there--but despite the PATH train to lower Manhattan which they knew I, their teacher, took every single day, they were afraid to go there. 
"But my mom," they would say, or "my aunt," or "my dad" or even "my teachers" say it's really dangerous there, "especially the subway!"
"I'm still standing," I would say. "I take the PATH train every teaching day, and on the subway I read or grade papers."
Their eyes bugged. Awe.
I didn't inform them that occasionally I'd seen trouble: a subway car opened, a loud sound boomed, the car filled with dark smoke, and we all ran out. Only to run back in for our briefcases a minute later when smoke dissipated. Or the time, in a car so packed my knees hurt from the weigh of bodies leaning against them, when a voice yelled, "I got a blade!" But the police resolved that one too, almost before I had time to feel scared.
The point is, the kids in Jersey City dealt with worse most of the time. The car that hit a large, ugly student and then sued her for damages. The student health care center that offered no contraceptives or information about AIDS, when Jersey City had a rate of infection second only to New York. The priests who seduced their charges or fellow teachers, or children, but who stopped a student standing at the bus shelter to warn her of hellfire: she was "living in sin" with her boyfriend, the priest had discovered. The college president who was said to have fallen down the stairs dead drunk, breaking his neck. These kids told me that all those people in the Austro-Hungarian Empire spoke the same language. 
"Yeah, they did!" my brightest student informed me. "They're all European."
"The Germans spoke so many dialects they could barely understand each other. The Czechs. The Hungarians. The Poles, the Ukrainians, the Slavs . . . "
"But," insisted my student, "I thought . . . I mean, they're all white people."
Europeans. They're all Europeans, right?