Incomprehension

Humans have various ways of not facing the violence they perpetrate. The first consists in degrading the oppressed: they are not truly human. Consequently, the harm done to them is not really evil and innocence is preserved. Undoubtedly the most powerful and most common is denial. This is what the term 'terrorism' is used for. It is a category designed to prevent thought, in particular the thought that ex nihilo nihil: that nothing comes from nothing. That events do not fall from the sky. That there is an economy of violence, which functions on the basis of a negative reciprocity. And that it could be summed-up by a paraphrase of Lavoisier’s principle: nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything returns. The countless acts of violence inflicted on the Palestinian people were bound to return. Only those whose sole intellectual operation is condemnation were guaranteed not to see anything coming beforehand or understand anything afterwards. Sometimes incomprehension is not a weakness of the intellect but a trick of the psyche: its categorical imperative. You have to fail to understand to fail to see: to fail to see a causality you are part of – and therefore not so innocent.

Just listen

Last Thursday, in the music humanities class I teach at Columbia University, two students were giving an in-class presentation on the composer John Cage. His most famous piece is "4'33"," which directs us to listen in silence to surrounding noise for exactly that amount of time.

I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building. Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of "From the river to the sea." Two students in my class are Israeli; three others, to my knowledge, are American Jews. I couldn't see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.

I like McWhorter as a linguist, but he has an extraordinary talent for saying remarkably stupid things about any other subject. (Is this a linguist thing? I'm thinking of Pinker.) And his incomprehension of the point of "4'33" is the least stupid part of the column, of course.

Update: Somebody set him to music.

Metaphor

So what are the rich people up to?

This year's dress code for the Met Gala is based on The Garden of Time, a 1962 short story by J.G. Ballard...

Actually, a bunch of airhead celebrities and trust-funders basing their masque on a J.G. Ballard story is a J.G. Ballard story. Personally I'd rather see them go with "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan", but I'm not known for subtlety.

The story is about the good-looking, sophisticated Count Axel and his wife, who live in a beautiful villa full of rare books, fine paintings, busts and vases. They live a decadent life on their beautiful estate, which includes an exquisite pool and garden. But outside the walls, the landscape is empty as far as the eye can see – until an unruly rabble appears in the distance. Each time Count Axel cuts a flower from his garden, however, time spools back, and the brutish mass recedes behind the hills.

... nope, can't think of a sarky remark that enhances that.

To keep the crowd at bay, the husband tries to turn back time by breaking off flower after flower, until there are no more blooms left. The mob arrives and ransacks the estate, and the two aristocrats turn to stone.*

Again, some jokes tell themselves.

The vivid, thought-provoking short story is often seen to act as a metaphor for the evolution of human history and the endless cycle of creation and destruction...

Perhaps, but this year's Met Gala using the story as a theme is a metaphor for something else, I think you'll find.

Other articles on the ball, like, undoubtedly, the guests, very much focus on the flowers thang.

[* This quote is from NYT rather than Harper's Bazaar.]

St George

Everybody in this picture looks so happy they should be wearing ponchos.