One Week On

I have awakened from the nightmare. For the past five years my wakeful hours took place in nightmarish landscapes and events that were characterized by willful deceits, calumnies, incivilities, indecencies, criminalities, and by malicious attacks on basic human and inalienable rights. I carried this waking nightmare about with me daily and even the brightest sunlight could not dispel the darkness that the Trump administration and its cowardly sycophants had spread. Every morning I awoke to the horror that he was and that he had ruthlessly shaped, and there was no way to escape its assaults from which I and others suffered. Over the past five years I had written too often about my experience of Trump and what is now referred to as Trumpism, and sometimes the writing, though it expressed my anger always gave voice to a despair that the writing could never exorcise. I had no escape from the nightmare because it occurred into the days.
     I have now awakened from the nightmare of the Trump presidency, and the persons and images of which it was cruelly constructed have begun to somewhat dissipate. Now my breath began to return to its regular rhythms and my heartbeat returns to a more normal tempo. The heaviness I had carried over the past five years has someone attenuated, and despite the gray and wintry weather of the Midwest I feel somewhat lighter and warmer. But what has lingered all-too powerfully is the fear that gripped me in sleep in the midst of the nightmare. Though the manifest content of the nightmare has left, the nightmare continues to live in the feelings upon which it was constructed and which it generated. The nightmare doesn’t reside only in the frightening images of the dream or even in the whole narrative that composes it, but in the feelings that remain upon awakening. And so today, though he is gone and hopefully never coming back, I don’t yet feel safe or secure: the feelings I have suffered these past five years under his brutal reign continue to plague my days. As Joe Biden took the oath of office, it became true that Trump’s autocratic and anti-democratic reign of terror was over. I wept with relief. The joy that I experienced at the celebratory events that were the inaugural ceremony, the magnificence of the poem offered by Amanda Gorman, the virtual concert that celebrated the new era, and the incredible fireworks display that lit up the Washington skies, gave me hope. But in the morning the fear that the nightmare had bred remained and I was afraid.
     Still his sycophantic minions continue in promulgating deceit, subterfuge and calumnies that threaten my days and my nights. 

     There are nightmares that I have never forgotten, and I think this will be one of them.

 

 

 

 

Detectives 2

Inspector Hackett, in Benjamin Black’s novel, Elegy for April, reflects that he was happiest when he had just graduated police college and was just a Guard on the beat. Now, a higher ranked detective—an Inspector—though he is better paid, in possession of an office all his own and has earned the respect of those below and even above him—yet he enjoys much less pleasure than he did when he was just a beat policeman. “There was no comparison,” he avers, “between his present conditions and what they had been in those early days when he came up first to Dublin from the Garda Training College at Templemore and was handed his badge and truncheon and sent out into the streets.” Hackett feels that the policeman who walked the street on the beat—what in the slang was referred to as the flatfoot—was “what the policeman was supposed to be, a guardian of the peace.” While everyone slept in the darkness of night, while everybody went to their work or to the schools and libraries for their studies, the police officer who “pounded the pavement” guaranteed the safety and sleep of the citizenry. “Without him there would be mayhem, robbery, and rapine, blood in the streets . . . It was a solemn duty, the duty of care with which the policeman was entrusted.”

     Hackett’s expression speaks from an idealism that no longer holds much influence, if, indeed it ever really did. But isn’t that what idealism aspires to: a perfected and impossible nature of things. We do not now live in the best of times. Henning Mankell’s detective, Kurt Wallander, says that “It had become more difficult to be a police officer. They were living at a time characterized by a sort of criminality that nobody had experienced before.” Even the police now do not feel safe. And our histories and on-going contemporary events have cast a dark pall on the professional reputations of the police forces. Perhaps . . . But I do not mean to engage with this argument here. Rather, I want to consider what Hackett might mean when he suggests that promotion to Inspector seemed to him “not so much a promotion as a dilution of duty.” What Hackett might point to here is a distinction between the ultimate purpose of the work of a beat policeman and that of a detective. I am these days interested in detectives: in pandemical isolation I read a great many detective novels and watch on the telly not a few British detective shows. Hackett refers here to his belief that the primary role of the policeman is to guard the peace and protect life. The effect of the work of the beat policemen is to make the civilian population safe and secure as they pursue their lives.
     Now, Hackett does not define what exactly he means by his promotion to the rank of detective as a dilution of duty, but I would like to suggest what he might have intended in that feeling. Hackett considers the beat policeman to be “a guardian of the peace . . . at all times of the day, but especially at night, when law-abiding citizens were abed and all manner of peril and menace might be let loose upon the city.” The policeman defends life. But the detective is called into action only after all manner of peril and menace has been let loose: the detective doesn’t defend the peace though his/her work might have the effect of restoring it,  but the detective does not so much protect life in his work as s/he pursues death. At the center of the detective novel is a murder, and the narrative follows the detective as he attempts to solve the violent crime and reveal the murderer. The detective immerses him/herself in the business of death, engaging with coroners, forensic pathologists, and suspects, but for the detective the condition of greater society does not enter into his/her vision. The detective is called into action by death and s/he is immersed in that death until the murderer is accused and removed from society.  Death is what motivates the detective, and in his work the detective is immersed in death. There is little noble in the work that the detective engages; rather, his activity engages with only the slimiest elements of society. And so the dilution that Hackett ascribes to his promotion from a beat policeman to the rank of Inspector-detective might refer to his belief that in the latter role he no longer protects and guards the peace; rather the detective only begins work when the peace and order of society has already broken down and he must muck about in the detritus. “Cursed spite, that ever I was born to make it right,” might be the motto of the detective.

Detectives I

It started as a distraction and there was much from which I wanted to be distracted. I resist now making a list. But the diversion began with a steady viewing of British detective shows: Lewis, Inspector Morse, Grantchester, Vera, Pie in the Sky. More have followed as the events evolved. These shows kept me free of the immediate presence of the dangerous politics that has overwhelmed the country for the past four years and that accelerated throughout the election campaign and the subsequent mad attempt to overturn the result by an insanely narcissistic Trump and his sycophantic enables in Congress and in the media. My immersion at one time in marxist thought had ensured me that there is a political level to any production: I learned from Kenneth Burke that “Critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose.” There have been studies of the detective novel that attempt to answer their appearance and ideologies, and I appreciate the notion that all artifacts of the culture are socially symbolic acts that require study. But in these British detective shows though their context and ideological situation might be political, the avoidance for the most part of political intrigue kept the horror of the present at bay for ninety minutes at a time. that level of the political remained minimum when it was mentioned at all. Sometimes a show might broach issues of politics, but the show was never about politics; the show was about the murder and its solution by the well-dressed and relatively polite detectives. And if you want to know the truth (a line I learned from Holden Caulfield), most of the murderers in Lewis and Inspector Morse were academics and intellectuals all of whom lived in very large, expensive and expansive homes.
     The shows were as interested with the personalities of the detectives as they were with their discovery of the culprit. In traditional literary language these detectives were round characters: they had depth and psychological presence, and their personal lives were an important aspect of the shows. They were more than detectives: they were humans who operated by their own strengths and with their own demons. Inspector Morse was an educated and intelligent man who loved opera to which he listens in his flat and in his car: Morse reads and quotes from classic literature in the practice of his work. But he often erred in his work and didn’t seem able to quite establish steady relationships with women.  As for Lewis, which was a sequel to Inspector Morse, Sergeant Hathaway is a Cambridge graduate who almost became a priest before he lost his faith and joined the force. But he could recognize the allusions of the mostly Oxford intellectual crowd, and sometimes even solved the murder based in his academic knowledge. In Pie in the Sky, epicure and police detective Henry Crabbe opened a well-reviewed and successful restaurant as he prepared for retirement: often the restaurant figures as an important scene of action and almost half of each episode takes place in the restaurant and involves the staff who become like family to Henry and his wife, Margaret, the latter, a professional accountant, who for financial reasons actually owns the restaurant and works in it as host. Vera’s crankiness and solitariness is an obvious factor in each episode, and her acknowledgment of a troubled early family life played prominently in the show. Often an episode of Vera would end with the image of her drinking scotch alone in her office or a darkened room in her rather isolated home; sometimes a final image in an episode is of Vera walking alone from the scene of discovery. Sidney Chambers, the vicar in Grantchester who becomes a partner to detective Geordie Keating, drinks and smokes heavily to bury his frustrations and impossible relationship with Amanda Kendall. Sidney also is troubled by his experience in combat in World War II. Sidney’s presence does ground the show in a standard Christian morality, but in the character of Leonard, Sidney’s gay curate the show on social issues. These characters interested me well beyond their detective roles.
     I am aware that programs that Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue also rounded their characters, but in in a single hour’s show there was always a significant amount of violence and gunfire, screaming and fighting that took place.

I do not have to cringe or close my eyes during any episode of the British detective shows. In the shows I was watching the detectives do not carry guns, handcuffs or batons. For the most part they do not engage in fist fights with the suspects, or anyone else for that matter, and they put the unbound suspect into the rear seat of the car without constraint or accompaniement. The violence in the shows exists solely in the murder (usually up to three events!), but the viewer never sees the actual attack. The final result is seen but not the act itself. I watch the shows about murder and its detection but I am never appalled by them. The body might be viewed and especially during the post mortem. but never the act of putting it there. There exists a certain civility in the shows that actually seems to calm me despite the occasion of the murder about which the plot is concerned.
     In these shows the male detectives all wear shirts and ties and the females wear dresses and pant suits. The latter also sometimes wear high heels, and they even sometimes run after suspects in them and whom they actually catch. Dungarees (jeans) are never part of the uniform even when they meet in a pub after work. The detectives all drive well-polished and expensive automobiles. Morse owns a classic Jaguar.
     These shows all are situated in smaller venues and not in noisy and dirty city streets: in Oxford, Cambridge, and Northumberland in Northeast England, I have marveled at how many murders occur in these rather small and sometimes rural settings, and I guess this might suggest how corrupt even these seemingly bucolic and quiet places are despite their beauty and seeming quiet. Finally there is no paradise that exists without serpents. And though at show’s end order is restored,  the next episode reveals another corruption in the environment.
     I have enlarged my menu of detective shows, but I am referring here to only those I began to watch at the beginning of the pandemic, back in. March 2020.