The new
Daedalus
is out. I have to admit to having not read Daedalus with much fervor in the past, say, fifteen years (well, if ever, to be honest), but I was curious about the venerable journal now that it’s under the editorship of James Miller, professor of political science and director of liberal studies at the New School, and author, most notably, of Flowers in the Dustbin, a book about rock and roll that actually won a music-book award, to say nothing of his other books (one on Foucault, another on the SDS, another on Rousseau, plus History and Human Existence: From Marx to Merleau-Ponty).
Miller’s first issue (Winter 2002) is about inequality. Whoever would have suspected twenty or thirty years ago that inequality could be considered good or that a discussion about its attributes could fuel an entire 117 pages of intelligent commentary? I’m aware of the debates–say, since Reagan–about the societal advantages of greed and inequality, but has any decent person ever seriously thought that inequality was good for anything other than sustaining the kind of high culture that produces journals like Daedalus, and of course for people like Marie Antoinette and Kenneth Lay? Anyhow, as Daedalus has traditionally, the new magazine suffers painfully from the kind of writing academics do (“In this essay, I shall attempt…,” etc.) and the kind of writing policy wonks do (“The Luxembourg Income Study, which is the best current source of data on economic inequality in different countries, has calculated 90/10 ratios for fourteen rich democracies in the mid-1990s”).
Yet because
Daedalus
has in the end a liberal mind, the new issue provides, if you can plow through it, a strong restatement of the value (economic, political and moral) of equality; and convincing arguments that inequality is pretty regularly–if sometimes more subtly than one would imagine–an evil. A historical essay that happens to be written by my distant cousin Sean Wilentz offers, among other things, lively illumination of the idea, dimly seized by me in my sporadic and unsuccessful attempts to buy a house, that the ability to purchase real estate lies at the heart of all equality or inequality.
In spite of the general impenetrability, many of the pieces have good bits. Martha Nussbaum’s essay on women in India begins with an unforgettable story: A Bangladeshi woman waiting for a train at Howrah Station in Calcutta is first gallantly helped by railroad officials, and then drugged, kidnapped and gang-raped by four station employees; when she finally makes her way back to the station, battered, blood-stained and disoriented, she’s tricked once again by other kindly, courtly, decent-seeming chemin de fer types into another gang-rape hideaway. Amazingly (cheerful Indian ending), she survives to bring suit against her attackers. This one anecdote brings life to Nussbaum’s piece, while reminding us (as if one needed reminding, after the recent train burnings, etc.) that all the exotic incident and violence in Indian literature does not come from nowhere.
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Quarrel & Quandary
As long as we’re looking at venerable journals that I haven’t read recently (an ever-widening category, it seems), let’s talk about
Partisan Review
. I picked up the first issue of 2002 because it contains an article arrestingly titled “Melville’s Skull and the Idea of Jerusalem,” by Cynthia Ozick. Ozick is a great writer; her style is fluid and personal, and there is wonderful voice in everything she touches. This essay is no exception–if I agreed with any of its passions or arguments, it would be a beloved object of reflection. In it, among other things, Ozick claims that the modern state of Israel has at its foundations “ethical visionariness,” unlike the states of Europe and other contemporary nationalist movements. Zionism, she says, “is distinct because it is inextricably bound with a coherent concept of the moral obligations of civilization: land cannot mean land alone, land bare of civilized purpose, land bare of law.” This, by the way, is someone writing about Zionism not in the nineteenth century or two years ago, but today, as Israel’s tanks roll back into the territories (land bedecked, no doubt, in “civilized purpose,” so long as it remains occupied by those equipped with ethical visionariness). Ah, well; in her Zionist arrogation of all indignation, all righteousness, all suffering, Ozick even indicts Herman Melville for not recognizing Jerusalem’s holiness, because he preferred the whiteness of the whale. She can’t bear that.
Woman Is the Deejay of the World
Yoko Ono, an equally self-possessed woman, is on the cover of
Mixer
magazine, a decidedly unvenerable journal devoted to “music, clubs, life.” In my house, we have a Don’t Diss Yoko rule. Amazingly, my small sons have learned to despise her. They’ve informed me that Yoko “broke up the Beatles” and that she is “bad”–by “bad” they mean “bad.” The great thing about Yoko is that, at age 68, she goes on being herself. She recently refused to give Paul McCartney any special credit on the Lennon-McCartney songs that he in fact wrote himself (“Yesterday” comes to mind), keeping the old enmity with Sir Cheerful simmering. Ono’s latest prank: She’s become an occasional club deejay down in New York’s meatpacking district. “It’s weird,” says Peter Rauhofer, a city deejay, “when you’re in a deejay booth…and find Yoko Ono standing beside you…at 3 am.” He goes on: “Her manager asked me if I had a microphone, because Ono wanted to do some ‘orgasmic moans.’ I thought he was joking.” He wasn’t, of course. She does the moans, to the supposed delight of the dance floor. Later she repairs with a reporter for further insight to her “vast, conservatively decorated kitchen” in the Dakota. Yoko’s evolution from child of Japan’s banking aristocracy to alternative artist and outrageous darling of New York’s demimonde would make an instructive entry in the annals of inequality. But if someone has to be rich, it should be Ono. Why? Because at a happening in Hyde Park in 1968 or so, she blindfolded an entire fashionable audience with sanitary pads–and then silently left them there to contemplate their own ridiculous abandonment. That’s visionariness.
