Second Time as Farce

I return at times to Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. I am not alone. Marx comments, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Farce is a term that refers to something that is meant to be serious but that has become ridiculous. Marx suggests that though men do make their own history, they do not make it under circumstances of their choosing; they make it under circumstances that are drawn from the past into the present. Marx then suggests why events turn to farce. He writes, “And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.” The present in borrowed names, clothes and manners pretending it is the past become farce just as the skits in Saturday Night Live that mimic the current political situations and characters. The present becomes farce and though funny it is also sad. Freud will suggest that often behavior represents the return of the repressed and in the present those behaviors look ridiculous and inappropriate. I suppose that if Trump’s first presidency was tragic—and it certainly was for the nation, democracy and decency—then this second one will be farce. I have only to look at his choice of cabinet members and presidential advisors to recognize that whatever seriousness might have once existed in the office of the presidency has been by him and his minions in the present lost.

Trump often describes himself as a great man: he refers to his first term of office as the greatest in history!  His lies are laughable. Great man? Isaiah Berlin says, “What are great men? They are ordinary human beings who are ignorant and vain enough to accept responsibility for the life of society, individuals who would rather take the blame for all the cruelties, injustices, disasters justified in their name than recognize their own insignificance and impotence in the cosmic flow which pursues its course irrespective of their wills and ideals.” Not exactly a perfect description of Donald Trump but certainly close enough a portrayal of this very ignorant, pathologically narcissistic man. In fact, however, Trump takes responsibility for very, very little, preferring instead to blame others for his own self-serving and ill-informed decisions. In his posturing as “a great man” he reminds me of Seinfeld’s George Constanza who passes himself off to others as whatever is at the moment convenient: a marine biologist, an architect, a lingerie salesperson! George is all farce. So is Trump. George is harmless but Trump is dangerous.
           And sometimes it has seemed to me that other second iterations do occur as farce. In Gustav Flaubert’s 1869 novel Sentimental Education, I find a description very much reflective of our time. Flaubert might have intended sarcasm, but the population that is described was all too real and dangerously serious. In the years following the suppression of the rebellion of 1848, itself a rebellion appearing to Marx as farce, Flaubert’s narrator describes the social scene and politics,

. . . everyone agreed on the urgent need for decentralization . . . to divide Paris into numerous high streets and re-establish villages, transfer the seat of government to Versailles, put the university in Bourges, do away with libraries, entrust everything to the general staff. And they extolled country life, t, the uneducated man naturally having more sense than everyone else! Hatred was rife: hatred against primary school teachers and wine merchants, against philosophy classes, history lessons, novels, red waistcoats, long beards, all independence, any display of individuality. For it was necessary to restore the principle of authority, no matter where it came from . . .

I could not help but compare this sentiment in what is a very political novel about events in France during the crises of mid-19th century to our present-day atmosphere of the ascendent Republican regime. Though I don’t suspect that Trump wants to move the capital of the nation to say, Mar-a-Lago, he does seem to be attempting to brand the world by his arrogance, greed and self-serving posturing. His boasts that he would buy Greenland and re-invade Panama exemplify his ignorance and bullying stances in the world. And wouldn’t his threat to jail his critics and close the media that exposes his profound ignorance sound farcically like the Reign of Terror during the latter years of the French Revolution, a history of which Trump must be woefully oblivious.  I am considering the banning of books, the criminalization of librarians who continue to advocate for free speech, the spewing of calumny and hatred that vomits from the mouths of Trump and his acolytes, the condemnation of education and teachers by people who know very little about education and who attack the schools and teachers for promulgating justified criticism of the nation. The attempt by Trump and his appointed minions to dismantle the government and leave those most powerless and least capable to the whims of whoever is in temporary power at the moment appears to me as a blatant exercise of cruelty and power grabbing. I have wondered how it could be possible that a novel written more than two centuries before could describe our present situation now understood as farce.

And then there is this, spoken not by Greta Grunberg or any other contemporary Jeremiah apprehensive about the effects of climate change and global warming. “The Russian forests are groaning under the ax, millions of trees are being destroyed, the dwelling of wild beasts and birds are despoiled, rivers are subsiding, drying up, wonderful landscapes vanish never to return, and because lazy man hasn’t sense enough to stoop down and pick up fuel [peat] from the ground . . . Man is endowed with reason and creative powers so that he may increase what has been given to him, but up to now he has not created but only destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wild life is becoming extinct, the climate is ruined and every day the earth gets poorer and uglier. . .” No, this sentiment is not spokenBy Greta Thunberg in this century but by Mikhail Lvovich Astrov, a doctor, in Anton Chekhov’s 1897 play, Uncle Vanya. As Yogi Berra so aptly said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

I have often wondered why there is nothing new under the sun! How could things happen twice as Marx had said the first time as tragedy and then again as farce. This is not to say that the ever-present epidemics and genocides or climate denigrations are farce—but my experience teaches me that Marx is correct. This past pandemic so vehemently mishandled by so-called leaders was a replication not only of the occurrence of the epidemic of the flu in 1918. Wikipedia reports that the pandemic broke out near the end of World War I, when censorship in the warring countries suppressed bad news to maintain morale, but newspapers attributed the outbreak in Spain, creating a false impression of neutral Spain as the epicenter and that led to the "Spanish flu" misnomer. Limited historical data makes the geographic origin of the pandemic indeterminate, with competing hypotheses on the initial spread. Sounds so familiar to  Trump's response to the 2020 Corona outbreak. It sounds not a little like President Reagan’s refusal to recognize and provide aid during the AIDS crisis. George Bush’s failed Afghan war occurred not a dozen years after his father’s invasion of Iraq. Today’s climate crisis continues the environment’s destruction as it did in 1897. Do we really learn nothing? Isaiah Berlin writes,
 

Happy are those who live under a discipline which they accept without question, who freely obey the orders of leaders, spiritual or temporal, whose word is fully accepted as unbreakable law; or those who have, by their own methods arrived at clear and unshakeable convictions about what to do and what to be that brook no possible doubt. I can only say that who rest on such comfortable beds of dogma are victims of forms of self-indued myopia, blinkers that may make for contentment, but not for understanding of what it is to be human.

Ignorance and weakness rules, as always. Isaac had re-dug the wells his father had previously turned, and like his father before him passed his wife Rebekah off as his sister to Pharaoh even as Abraham had told Pharaoh that Sarah, his wife, was his sister. We are the product of our histories and that we unconsciously repeat. Our acts become farce. Freud has taught that understanding those histories is a first step toward changing direction but those that Berlin describes opt for ignorance rather than understanding. For these individuals—sometimes turned mob—what is sought is comfort and ease, a sense of stasis in identities and relationships. Once in power always in power. Such people want no disruption to the lives they live, no threat to their often-imagined and even unearned place in the world. As a result they repeat the life they have lived in changed circumstances and their responses to circumstances are not reflective of that change. Often, they are ridiculous. Second time as farce. They repeat because in the present they live out their pasts and do not and would not know it. Jacob’s cry that God was in that place and he didn’t know describes for me these myopic individuals. These individuals alone and in groups know no other way and would not learn an alternative. 

It amuses me to consider, then, David Brooks’ article in The Atlantic. Brooks decries the meritocracy established by James Conant, the President of Harvard in the post-World War II years. Brooks writes that Conant’s intention was “to eliminate admission criteria based on bloodlines and breeding and replace them with criteria centered on brainpower. His system was predicated on the idea that the highest human trait is intelligence, and that intelligence is revealed through academic achievement.” Hence begins the development of standardized tests to measure academic achievement. But as it turns out, academic achievement is intimately connected to financial resources: affluent parents spend a great deal of money to ensure that their children can enter elite institutions. Schools in high socioeconomic communities have far greater resources than schools in less affluent areas; high SES parents have the means to purchase elite private schools and tutors to greatly increase their academic achievements. But Brooks’ article echoes Nicholas Lemann’s 1999 book The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, but Brooks neglects to cite Lemann’s work nor the work of hundreds of educators that actually includes me who have long argued against the present educational establishments that has moved steadily towards inequality by giving priority to standardized, scientific testing.

First time as tragedy and second as farce.