The Great Disenchantment

I have given much thought, in my life, to a certain intellectual history that characterizes the stages from the early modern age until now in terms of increasing rationality and the dis-enchantment of the world. This story seemed wrong to me – wrong on the level of ordinary life, at least, and probably wrong on the level of intellectual life within the epoch of capitalism – or more broadly, the epoch of industrial production. Just as the money-nexus did not replace the gift economy, but rather relies upon it, so, too, did the collapse of the belief in an enchanted realm, a realm in which the rules of causality are bent to the charisma of certain figures, happen only partially, with the forms of it still in use as a support for the administered world, the world of parity products and neo-liberalism. Read a fairy tale and watch a police series on Netflix and you will see causality bend in both cases, adhering in both cases to our greater belief in charisma than in contingency. Cause and effect, deduction and inference, obey rules that were discovered at least in part long before the Great Disenchantment of the world happened, but they go against elements of the human grain as it has adapted to thousands of years of agricultural community to be repressed too absolutely as we bid goodbye to peasant cultures. What is culturally dominant is a compromise. This is not to say nothing has happened since 1499 – it would be sheer blindness to insert “universal human behavior” directly into history like it was some lego piece in a toy construction. Rather, there is a surprising elasticity in collective belief systems, which allow parallel and bifurcating systems to flourish and remain at once as distant from each other as the hot tip and the rabbit’s foot.  This is why I liked and disagreed with Doug Sikkema’s article for the New Atlantis, “Disenchantment, Actually: Modern disenchantment may be a myth, but it is still the water in which we swim.” It is a review of The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences by Williams College religion professor Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm.  More here

choleric in the time of writing

Salmagundi (the Summer issue) features an essay by Dubravka Ugresic, entitled Artists and Murderers, that is right up my alley in terms of being a scathing and total denunciation of the world of art and culture in the time of genocidaires and businessmen (the two types often trading positions, now collecting civilians in camps and massacring them, now setting up chains of folky fast food restaurants). It seems that in Croatia, where Ugresic hails from, the writing, artmaking and artcollecting fields, which were once overflowing with the botched, the bewildered and the bohemian, the eccentric heiress and the surrealist poet,  are now booming thanks to the participation of the usual masses of  scum: politicians, celebrities, and the whole herd of tv talk show guests who at one point or another stole, killed, defrauded, scored, screwed, lied, and otherwise made their heap out of an almost transcendental assholery. You see them in the glam magazines, they roost in the lists of the 100 most influential. Or, more innocently, they are heirs of the heap, children of the rich, having traded in Daddy’s very real semi-automatic for a goldplated squirt gun. Croatia, in other words, sounds much like the United States. Here’s a couple of grafs:

“All that would be fine. Why not let a thousand flowers bloom? Each of us can be nourishment for the mind of a child, in the words of a Croatian amateur poet in celebration of literature. Murderers and criminals are, however, remarkably ambitious, their appetite is growing, it is not enough for them that they have published their own books, have had their own solo and group shows, garnered media attention; they want acclaim, they want the society which they have bestrewn with their artworks to bow down before them. Front and center at every theater's opening night, at every new show, they pontificate on the aesthetic values of each movie, book, performance. But even that is not enough, they aspire to wield total control over any realm of art inhabited by their hobby. They are more than happy to join committees, editorial boards, councils, they become members of juries, elbow their way onto school curricula, into primers, textbooks, anthologies. Their hunger is insatiable.”

And this, after Ugrasic receives an email from a friend explaining at length who were the drowned and who the saved in the current cultural industry in Croatia, lamenting that she is the only person in the world who can’t get her book published because – well, she really is a writer:

“The email from my friend sparked my imagination. Chilled by the nightmare vision of millions of people worldwide from an array of occupations clutching their books, and millions more adamant that it was only a matter of time before they, too, had their book in hand, and inspired by the movie Fifty Shades of Gray, which I watched along with millions of other earthlings, I went off to a store that sold practical merchandise. There I purchased the strongest rope I could find, sturdy iron stakes (as if off to scale a mountain), a drill. The salespeople jollied me into buying it all and as a bonus they threw in adhesive strips. The usually snarky salespeople proved unexpectedly solicitous in my case.

I'd decided to end it all. As far as suicidal practices and strategies go I may be an amateur, but I am well-read. Recent statistics suggest that women who commit suicide no longer rely on pills nor do they lean toward the good-old technique of slitting wrists; instead they tend to embrace the Bye-bye World! trajectory of the "male" technique of - hanging. This, then, was why a key item on my shopping list was the rope. Only a few months later we learned that hanging is not a man's preference; General Slobodan Praljak, having heard his sentence read out in The Hague, downed a little flask of poison before the "cameras of the world." One might say that his theatrical instinct had the upper hand; he did die. On television screens lingers his grimly frozen head, his gaping mouth, looking more like an immense fish than a human being.”

This is my kind of stuff, served piping hot. My pantheon leans towards the critics of the grotesque who through a sheer hatred of vice (and a entropic decline in the love of virtue) became grotesques themselves: Swift, Leon Bloy, Karl Krauss, Pasolini.

So read the essay – it is very funny, very sick – and look around you.

on the decline of storytelling

As I went out one evening – not really just one evening, but a dateable dusk, with my son, Adam, here in Paris, October 14 – I came across a number of photographs pinned to a brick wall on Rue des blancs manteaux. It was a warm Sunday. Rue des blanc manteaux always has a crowd going down it on Sundays, when the automobiles are banned,  and this always brings out a number of buskers and beggars as well, looking for pocket change or at least an audience. Adam was interested in this scene. We passed a harpist entangled in his reverb and speculated about the difficulty of moving his huge instrument – which towered over his sitting figure - around the city. We passed a painter, or at least someone who painted vaguely impressionistic street scenes, the kind of thing spawned by such memories of impressionism as those sustained in the heads of tourists, who might think that this school of art is still of current interest. And perhaps, I thought, their interest in the work might be their real and genuine encounter with art, so who am I to turn up my nose? Nevertheless, when Adam tugged at me and made me turn back to the photographer’s piece of sidewalk property, I did not feel that democratic charity was called for: I looked at it and saw it was bad, very bad.

On the wall there was a sign (dancers from 1980-1990) and a series of colored photographs depicting ballerina like dancers. Most of them, on second glance, were the same dancer. And again, here she was in profile, and in repose.  There was a vaguely David Hamilton air about it all, although the dancer was not a gauzy nymphet. Down on the sidewalk itself there were spread similar photographs, plus a scarf and a plate with some remains of a meal and a bottle that held some clear liquid that could be eau or could be eau de vie. The photograph that attracted my six year old son’s attention was of a woman’s face in profile, the whole stained red, with brownish cracks in a web across the image. Adam is a boy who is always alert for horror imagery, and he took it for granted that the red stain meant blood. We were discussing whether this was so when the vender and begetter of the photos came up to us. See the rest here. 

News from the post-anthropocene era

Another corporate gift to our children: Trump's EPA fires science panel because they were scientists and all. And scientists wildly believe the climate is changing disastrously because of... science! What could be sillier. Instead, believe your stock portfolio. So here is to the people making 2050 such a bad place to live. Thanks, and fuck you throughout all eternity.

11 degrees of shakespeare

Shakespeare he's in the alley

With his pointed shoes and his bells...

The discovery of degrees of separation is supposed to have been a mid-20^th century event. The story goes that Stanley Milgram invented this idea and did a famous experiment to show how many degrees of separation there are between two arbitrarily chosen persons. The experiment involved sending a package through the mail to an arbitrarily chosen person and telling that person that the package was intended for a certain other person. The receiver was to send the package to someone who might know the ultimate recipient.  Milgram published his work in 1967.

All credit to Milgram. In an article on the small world hypothesis, as it is called in The Cut, Thomas Macmillan mentions some of Milgram’s predecessors:  

‘Some thinkers, however, had been quietly wondering if apparently unconnected people might in fact be linked. The idea of six degrees of separation is sometimes traced to a 1929 essay by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy. And Milgram’s work was preceded by some calculations by political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool and mathematician Manfred Kochen who in the 1950s estimated a greater than 50-percent chance that any two people could be linked by two intermediate acquaintances.”

However, I recently came across an essay by Leigh Hunt, written in 1834, which could have been called 6 degrees of William Shakespeare – instead of its real title, Social Geneology. Hunt’s idea is much like Milgrams, save for the fact that it is diachronic:

“It is a curious and pleasant thing to consider, that a link of personal acquaintance can be treaced up from the authors of our own times to those of Shakspeare, and to Shakspeare himself.”

And this is how Hunt diagrams the links:

With some living poets, it is certain. There is Thomas  Moore, for instance, who knew Sheridan. Sheridan knew Johnson, who was the friend of Savage, who knew Steele, who knew Pope. Pope was intimate with Congreve, and Congreve with Dryden. Dryden is said to have visited Milton. Milton is said to have known Davenant ; and to have been saved by him from the revenge of the restored court, in return for having saved Davenant from the revenge of the Commonwealth. But if the link between Dryden and Milton, and Milton and Davenant, is somewhat apocryphal, or rather dependent on tradition (for Richardson, the painter, tells us the latter from Pope, who had it from Betterton the actor, one of Davenant's company), it may be carried at once from Dryden to Davenant, with whom he was unquestionably intimate.  Davenant, then, knew Hobbes, who knew Bacon, who knew Ben Jonson, who was intimate with Beaumont and Fletcher, Chapman, Donne, Drayton, Camden, Selden, Clarendon, Sydney, Raleigh, and perhaps all the great men of Elizabeth's and James's time, the greatest of them all undoubtedly. Thus have we a link of " beamy hands " from our own times up to Shakspeare.

I love this list. Instead of the mystery of influence, which has long served as a linking word between the texts of authors, here we have a recognizable map of degrees of separation.  It is a fun exercise to see how many degrees of separation one has from William Shakespeare. My map would go something like this: I interviewed Carol Muske-Dukes, who told me that she met her late husband at a party held at her friend Jorie Graham’s mother’s house. Jorie Graham’s mother is Beverly Pepper, a sculpture, who knew Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway’s wife.  Hemingway knew Ford Maddox Ford, whose great aunt, Frances Rossetti, had a brother who was Lord Byron’s secretary. From Byron it is easy to proceed back down the links Leigh Hunt points to: Byron was great friends with Tom Moore, with whom he’d “go a-roving”, for instance. So from this I get 14 degrees from Will Shakespeare. I think I probably could do better than this if I cast a wider net. My grandfather’s father knew Mark Hanna, President McKinley’s eminence gris, due to the fact that he tried to sell the government on his torpedo invention; Hanna was on  the board of directors of a railroad with Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Henry’s brother. Charles remembered John Quincey Adams, his grandfather, who, when merely a teen, worked with his father, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin on diplomatic assignment in Paris during the American Revolution, and met the great whigs, among whom of course there was Sheridan. There are other ways I could do this: undoubtedly John Adam father knew Cotton Mather, whose own father was the child of the second marriage of John Cotton. John Cotton was the great debater and opponent of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island. Roger Williams clerked under Sir Edward Coke, Elizabeth’s hardhearted justice, who investigated the Essex rebellion, which was lead by Shakespeare’s patron, and interrogated Shakespeare’s partner with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Augustine Phillips. I imagine Shakespeare at least knew of Coke, and probably met him.  So I can end up anywhere from nine to eleven degrees from Shakespeare.

This is a great game, and if I were a coder, I’d make it into a Facebook quiz and earn a sum that I could retire on. Being merely a sucker, I give it away free and challenge one and all to top my degrees.

Patience and the restless sleeper

There’s a thing about living in France that always amazes some outward suburban zone of my American brain: I go into the store, I get checked out by the cashier, I pull out my credit card, I put it in the little credit card machine, and a word appears on the screen: Patientez.

Be patient. In the United States, when dealing with machines, the signs and recordings are rarely rooted in such a quasi-moral, such a Ciceronian admonition. Rather, they tell you that they are busy processing your information. Or maybe they tell you that all operators are busy and please wait on the line until the next operator is available. But to be asked to wait is a moral degree away from being asked to be patient. Waiting, after all, can be done impatiently – it is all physics, it is all being a body in a place in time. Patience, however, is being a certain kind of subject, having a certain kind of attitude.

I’ve long had a Barthesian revery that if I could just understand the “patientez” sign, I would grasp some larger mythological characteristic of France. See the rest here.

the trouble with the saudis and the trouble with the Americans

If I went to sleep in 2002 and woke up yesterday and read Tom Friedman's non-apology for kissing the ass of Saudi Arabia's young dictator - I would not know that it wasn't still 2002. The Middle Eastern "expert" clique is still morally corrupt and intellectually bankrupt, roll over Beethoven and give Grandma the news.

Also relics of 2002 is the cry that the only reason we are allies with, or complicit with, or in bed with, or making passionate love to the Saudis is cause of oil.

This is a half-truth. If you check, you'll notice that the level of American imports of oil from Saudi Arabia are at 1987 levels. We could easily do without that oil - we could substitute oil from Iran in one diplomatic turn, or Venezuela.

But the truth of the chestnut is that, as a result of decades of oil sales, the Saudi royal house and its hangers on had trillions of dollars to invest. Since the seventies, one of the best places to park your money and see it grow has been in the American financial sector. Money followed the usual track, then, which is how Saudi money is mixed up in whatever giant enterprise or IPO is on tap at the moment. The Saudis were notoriously dumb about this in the seventies, and the princes are notoriously lazy, but the had some smart hangers on, and they were able to buy fleets of smart American MBA types, and so the learning curve and American foreign policy bent together. The Saudis definitely made a smart move by investing in American media - at one point, notoriously, al -waleed bin talal owned a hefty piece of Fox News, as well as bits of Times-Warner, et al., which didn't hurt. The money went out, as well, to think tanks, lobbyists, and the ivory towers. Oftentimes, this was touted as some multi-cultural opening to Middle East culture, with the subtext, that the opening would be subservient to Saudi sensibilities, being muted. Sometimes, as recently, it is just your open, convivial corruption, typical of the T-Rump era. As for instance Harvard and MIT's offering of their prestige to Bin Salman in return for a chance to get in on an academic gold rush. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/30/elite-universities-selling-themselves-mit-harvard-saudi-arabia-mohammed-bin-salman

Even these modalities of Saudi influence would not explain the Saudi-American lockstep. To explain that on the political level, it is necessary to look at how the US (and the UK, and France) has used massive arms sales to the Saudis as an offset to the de-manufacturing policies they have generally pursued to keep consumer prices low and the return on investment for the wealthy high. Here, one must doff one's partisan hat: the status of the U.S. as the leading arms seller in the world became policy under Bill Clinton. Since then, it has been sealed in place through all the changes in the white house.

Here's a report from 1995 about the beginning of it all.

"In fiscal years 1993 and 1994, the executive branch (and Congress) signed-off on a staggering $100 billion of government and industry-negotiated arms deals. Moreover, the administration actively assisted industry by subsidizing marketing activities, lobbying foreign officials to "buy American," and financing several billions of dollars of sales.

The "new" guidelines call for business as usual: "the United States continues to view transfers of conventional arms as a legitimate instrument of U.S. foreign policy-deserving U.S. government support when they enable us to help friends and allies deter aggression, promote regional stability, and increase interoperability of U.S. forces and allied forces."

The prosperity of the nineties was the coming together of many streams, and this was definitely a politically fruitful one. Arms sales doubled in Clinton's first four years in office.

One could tell similar stories about other countries. Britain is notorious for sucking up to the Saudis to keep its airplane manufacturing alive. And so on.

Let's round out this little screed with an even more depressing observation. In 2002, Americans accepted, without a qualm or a quiver, the idea that certain weapons were weapons of mass destruction and certain weapons weren't. As the biggest arms dealer in the world, the U.S. was in a moral pickle here, but admirably, through a lack of any analysis of the phrase whatsoever, we were able to thread the needle that allowed the U.S. to sell the jets that could deliver nuclear missiles and even the missiles themselves, but not the atomic warheads - and pat itself on the back for its liberal and democratic way of life. Back in those days, this drove me crazy. Around the time that Libya "gave up" its atom bomb program - in return for contracts with the west that would sell it other weapons - I wrote a little blog column about it all.

268. Why can't my right hand give my left hand money? -- My right hand can put it into my left hand. My right hand can write a deed of gift and my left hand a receipt. -- But the further practical consequences would not be those of a gift. When the left hand has taken the money from the right, etc., we shall ask: "Well, and what of it?" And the same could be asked if a person had given himself a private definition of a word; I mean, if he has said the word to himself and at the same time has directed his attention to a sensation. – Wittgenstein

The philosopher treats a question like an illness. – Wittgenstein.

The disarmament of Libya is the latest episode in the preposterous policies generated by the bogus classification, “weapons of mass destruction.” The moniker applies, ironically, to weapons that have very rarely been implicated in mass destruction. The Uzi, the tank, the bomber – these very vendable items, of course, aren’t weapons of mass destruction. Rather, with its right hand, the West has stocked every country that could afford it with a supply of such things. That right hand has been busy, as even a cursory look at the arms sales totals could tell you. It is here, especially, that the 9/11 lie – the lie that 9/11 ‘changed everything’ – is stripped of its plausibility. While political factions in America throw charges of lying at each other, they both are comfortable with the structural lie, the one that kept Bush 1 and Clinton in the arms sales business, and that keeps Bush 2 there too. And the Swedes, Brits, French, Germans … let’s not leave out anybody. The Russians, of course, primus inter pares.

Ah, but then we have the sweep of the punitive left hand, disarming rock n roll tyrants like Khaddafi and putting all the editorial writers of the NYT to sleep with sweet dreams.... Libya giving up its laughable nuclear capacity is being taken as a sign of disarmament. We suspect that, long term, this is really a move to re-arm – to buy all the conventional weapons that Khaddafi longs for, and that the EU and the US longs to sell him. It has, after all, been a moneymaker in the past. Libya’s interest is not to regain some international stature – it is to keep up with its neighbors, to which it has been hostile in the past. In fact, recently Khaddafi has been stirring up coups in Mauretania. This, of course, without using the weapons of mass destruction – weapons of conventional destruction will do very nicely, thank you very much. So much for the tie between WMD and aggressive behavior. "

So this is just to say: our problems long long pre-date Trump. We don't need resistance, we need transformation.

Announcing Willett's Magazine

My distinguished pals:
I've been working on creating a magazine that would combine my wit - or witlessness - as I peacock it on this blog with the writings and musings, hopefully, of other peeps who I will pay in cash money - don't get excited, not a lot of cash money, this is me we are talking about - for their contributions. Of course, to pay in cash money I am going to have to beg for donations, which I'm going to do by going to one of those dumb crowdbegging sites and jumping through hoops and, presumably, bothering everybody who ever had the misfortune to link to me with my cup and doffed cap.

The name of the mag is Willetts. It is here.  Please think of sending me, at the paypal on this site, a donation. And those of you with ideas, from memoiring to reviews, or who would like me to commission a review, please drop me a line at rogergathmann@gmail.com

Today's article at Willard's is about the Abe Fortas Case: a lesson for Democrats.

Mother Jones, a magazine that has taken up the mantra of tut-tutting neoliberalism and run with it, has published an article that claims that it is a “liberal fantasy” to think of impeaching Brett Kavanaugh. The writer of the piece is their correspondent for covering the court, Stephanie Mencimer, so presumably she knows what she is talking about. This is her “wake up to the coffee” graf:

It’s never going to happen. If the Democrats can’t stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation in the Senate, there’s no way they’re going to be able to boot him from the bench after he’s secured his lifetime appointment. No Supreme Court justice has ever been successfully impeached and removed by Congress. The last time Congress even tried was in 1804. 

This, for Mencimer, disposes of the issue. Then she goes on to troll a bit how we don’t appreciate an “independent judiciary” anymore, like the elite slaveholders who founded the U.S. did.

Well, I have many bones to pick with the last part, but it is the first part I would like to direct my vitriol to.

Liberals would do well, at this point, to look to the Republican-directed pressure that was put on justices from the Warren court. One case stands out: Abe Fortas

When Abe Fortas died in 1982, his obituary was featured on the front page of the NYT. Since that time, his story has slipped into the national amnesia, save for that part of the national brain that consists of the Federalist society and its groupies. You could date the rightward shift, and the organization of one of the most powerful but underrated forces in the U.S., conservative legal activism, from the nomination of Abe Fortas by Lyndon Johnson to the post of Chief Justice, after Earl Warren stepped down.

Here’s the obituary thumbnail:

“Mr. Fortas resigned from the Court amid an uproar over disclosures that he had accepted a $20,000 fee from a foundation controlled by Louis E. Wolfson, a friend and former client who at the time of the payment was under Federal investigation for violating securities laws. His resignation ended a stormy three-and-a-half-year tenure on the Court, which included an abortive effort by President Johnson to name him Chief Justice, and made Mr. Fortas the only Justice in the history of the Supreme Court to resign under the pressure of public criticism.”

This happened in 1969, giving Richard Nixon his opportunity to put his impress on the Court.

So how did this happen?

In 1965, when LBJ nominated Abe Fortas, the editors of the New Republic commented:

“When the President nominated his friend Abe Fortas for the Supreme Court, he was rewarding Mr. Fortas' long-held, passionate faith in the statesmanship and liberalism of Lyndon B. Johnson - a faith not widely held or easily maintained in liberal and intellectual circles ten or even five years ago. But the President was able to reward a friend while at the same time appointing one of the ablest lawyers of his generation, and a lawyer who takes an exalted view of the court he is about to join. Little more than a year before his nomination and subsequent confirmation by the Senate, Mr. Fortas wrote of the court while paying tribute, in the Yale Law Journal, to another old friend. Justice William O. Douglas. "A man may live a long and active life - even in the aquarium of public office - without revealing and, indeed, without discovering his essential convictions. There are many hiding places; there are many factors which invite avoidance of this painful confrontation: the pressures of too little time; the exigencies of the moment; the rationalization engineered by the overwhelming virtue of self-preservation; the primacy of the need to accommodate one's views to those of others; the driving need for immediate results.”

Fortas here was worshipping at the idol of the lifetime appointment – the foundation of the “independent judiciary” so beloved by the Mother Jones correspondent. These words seem a little strange to us now: they speak more of a Straussian belief in the white lie, as the rulers nudge us into what they want us to do, then a faith in democratic forces and the wisdom of the crowd.

So what happened when Fortas was nominated to be Chief Justice in 1968 and the aquarium of public office was hurled at his head?

Fortas’s downfall was engineered by two deeply racist Dixiecrats, James Eastland of Mississippi and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. We can follow the story in further New Republic editorials:

Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who after the GOP convention must be reckoned a power in the Republican Party and in the country, told his delegation at one point in Miami Beach that if it held firm for Nixon he (Thurmond) would be mightily encouraged in his battle against the Fortas nomination. Shouts and handclaps greeted his assurance to the Carolinians that "We hope to defeat Mr. Fortas' confirmation" and "If we can defeat this confirmation, in my judgment it will be a turning point in this nation."

Strom was right. The Fortas hearings were all about how buddy-buddy Fortas was with LBJ. This might not seem like a reason to deny him the seat, but it was the excuse for what Eastland and Thurmond really wanted – a thoroughgoing excoriation of the Warren court and all its deeds, the worst of which, for the two racists, was the legal crushing of the idea that blacks were second class citizens forever and ever. But this motive, as always in the South, was merged with the idea that it was all the fault of the communists. As Thurmond said on Meet the Press:

… his decisions have turned loose criminals on technicalities; they have allowed communists to teach in schools and colleges; they have allowed communists to work in defense plants and his decisions have reversed the local communities and the lower courts on the matter of obscenity." And: "We [of the Senate Committee] are not trying him for impeachment but we are trying him (sic) to determine his qualifications to be Chief Justice and we think his decisions on the Court, in the way I have related them, show that he is not qualified to be the Chief Justice. In fact, I don't think he is even qualified to be on the Court."

Evidently the Republicans of Thurmond’s day disagreed with the Collins doctrine that Senators should not look at the ideology of candidates. I think that is a rule that is only evoked for far right wing candidates, anyway.

Abe Fortas remained on the Court after the battle of 1968. His downfall was coming, though, especially when the Thurmondesque president,  Richard Nixon, was elected. I would recommend reading an excellent Washington Post piece dated May 16, 1969, the chronology of Fortas’s downfall was unfolded. It started when William Lambert, a Life Magazine reporter, received a tip from anonymous government official that he should look into the relationship between Fortas and a crooked businessman named Wolfson, recently imprisoned for stock manipulation (yes, Virginia, at one time they actually imprisoned crooked businessmen, instead of bailing them out with huge loans).

Word spread in D.C. The news must have made John Mitchell, the new Attorney General, smile a bit and puff a bit more on his pipe. Mitchell, somehow, didn’t have compunctions about the fantasy of getting rid of a sitting Supreme: he saw how he could catch a rat and went about it. An assistant Attorney General interviewed Lambert.  And the Life news story came out with information about the 20,000 dollars given Fortas by the “charitable” foundation set up by Wolfson.

The Republicans went on the attack in the House, while in the Senate Ted Kennedy said this was a very serious charge. It should be noted that Fortas’s friendship with LBJ would not make him a friend of the Kennedies.

On May 6, Nixon met with the Republican caucus and urged them (to repressed giggles, no doubt) not to make Fortas a partisan matter. One of the attendees asked if there was more on Fortas to be discovered. To which Mitchell gave the one word answer: yes.

On May 10, Mondale was the first Senator to suggest Fortas resign. The Republicans must have been happy about that. In the house, H.R. Gross of Iowa (GOP) called for empaneling a Federal jury to make a sweeping investigation of Fortas. But in the end, Fortas’s resignation brought him relief from the hounds.

This is a story about Democrats running water for the Republicans. There will not be a similar scene if the Dems take the house, and Representative Nadler really investigates Kavanaugh. But Democrats can take some hints from the Fortas affair. Leak to the press. Keep the pressure up. And use the power you have to call for a larger investigation of the Justice. If you don’t get him to resign, you can wound him to the extent that the Supreme Court will definitely start smelling of illegitimacy. Because… the Supreme Court is illegitimate. It is the result of sheer brute political strength, exerted by the GOP. As an arm of the Republican party, the respect one should, theoretically, have for an “independent judiciary” is simply a farcical exercise in swallowing the dictates of the D.C. elite and pretending it is some kind of civic duty. Our civic duty, at this point in time, is the exercise of countervailing power,  civil disobedience, and protest at the Court. Probably for a long, long time.