Happy New Year, everybody. Did you hear the one where George W. Bush executed Saddam Hussein for killing Iraqis? Can it get better than that? Well, sure. As a one liner that is almost as good as Henny Goodman's, Take my wife... please.
These ruminations have inspired me to propose that the LBO list start submitting entries for the Carl Remick Prize for history's funniest videos.
Now of course I am speaking metaphorically. Anybody speak metaphorical, out there? Okay, video is just a symbol for any imaginary record of history. The important point is that history has had a lot of these sorts of great moments where mere absurdity has turned to the surreal and then beyond to the realm of meta-irony.
I'll give you a couple of my favorite examples of meta-irony (a word I am borrowing from Octavio Paz) to get the ball rolling here.
Let's go back in time. Imagine 420 AD, and we are in the bedroom room where Augustine lays dying. Imagine the old bishop of Hippo languishing on his death bed as the monophysite hordes who have seiged the city for eighteen months, suddenly they come storming through his door, blood smeared faces and gleaming swords flashing, ready to kill the very next trinitarian they find. Boy they hit pay dirt that day. The old reprobate heaving his last breath in the twilight moments of his life on earth saw a terrible miasma between his yellow feet and the bed posts and suddenly wondered if the holy ghost was welcoming him to the heavenly hosts, or if the legends of Satan had arrived. In his dismay, he cried, ``Oh, Lord, what am I?'' The Arian with an axe in hand answered, ``Your dead, motherfucker.''
I love to imagine moments like that. They might be fictious, but they have a certain, je ne se qua.
Even more thrilling and yet absurd is the thought that Hegel stayed up all night to put the finishing touches on his introduction to the Philosophy of Mind only to be reminded of the concrete nature of human history by Napoleon's artillery barrage at dawn that opened the battle of Jena. About 96,000 rabid French only a mile away were getting ready to kill Prussians and they were not asking, are you a free thinker sir?
Hegel scurried off to his publisher in Naumburg with his manuscripts bundled up on the first conveyance he could hire out of Jena that morning. Ah, history whispered to his philosophical mistress: tear our pleasures with rough strife my dear, times winged chariot hurries near and quaint honor turns to dust.
I was equally thrilled to learn that Leo Strauss drafted Ernest Cassirer, Julius Gutmann, and Carl Schmitt to recommend him to the US Rockefeller Foundation for a grant to study Rousseau in 1928. I mean think on that. Strauss would go to Paris to ruminate on the great flaws of political liberalism in the English and French Enlightenment curtesy of US capital, Weimar's Jewish liberal elite, and the soon to be appointed legal consultant to the National Socialist Supreme Court. One and all pulled together to support the short fat boy from Marburg. And who exactly did Strauss honor as his central influence at this point? Not one of 20thC philosophy's unsung giants, Ernest Cassirer. And no, not one of the preeminent Jewish philosophers of the century, Julius Gutmann. No, Strauss picked Carl Schmitt of course. What a champion for the advancement of the political philosophy of liberal democracy. Oh, yes a real prince of high principles. No wonder Hannah Arendt despised him.
So, how about it folks? Let's celebrate the end of another year, and raise our glasses:
Into this Universe, and why not knowing, Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing: And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.
What, without asking, hither hurried whence? And, without asking, whither hurried hence! Another and another Cup to drown The Memory of this Impertinence!
Well, the Persians did have their moments, but alas these were long ago.
CG