BLOG OF PUBLIC SECRETS

Time 2020-09-22 20:05:06

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Around the turn of the last century, the detective novel emerged alongside developments in criminology. Most of these advancements, influenced by scientific positivism and social Darwinism, have turned out to be pseudo-science, even if they continue to shape popular perception – least of all due to the popularity of the detective genre. From the perspective of modernist criticism, Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie wrote lowbrow mass cultural works. What makes the Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot detective popular with mass audiences is that it allows relatively unsophisticated readers to imagine themselves to be a genius detective. All of this was overturned with the hard-boiled detective genre pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who were more aware of the socialist movement – these are everyman detectives rather than private school snobs – and uniquely situated to fictionalize the postwar malaise about the kind of underworld that keeps the spectre of fascism alive in the midst of mass democracy. The Euro spy genre later brought the film noir detective genre back into the orbit of the well-to-do, this time with the threat of world destruction added to the mix.Across these genres, what criminology seeks to understand is the mind and behaviour of the deviant. From a psychoanalytic perspective, intentional criminals are for the most part psychopaths. They are antisocial, irresponsible, restless, disconnected, emotionally shallow, indifferent to the feelings of others, prone to substance abuse or other forms of thrill-seeking and self-destruction, prone to outbursts of anger and aggressivity, they show no guilt feelings for their crimes, rationalize their misdeed through distorted reasoning and are unable to accept criticism. All of this of course is focused on the individual criminal at the expense of a social theory of crime. Criminology developed at the same time as fin de siècle decadence, a movement in the arts that combined Romantic excess with the contradictions of European imperialism at the time of the emergence of organized labour. By combining the aristocratic pretentiousness of the Bohemian avant-garde with bourgeois capitalism, the decadence movement was itself a culture of criminality, captured in novels like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. In the detective novel, decadence is represented to mass audiences as the skeletons in the closet of the ruling class. Unable to escape their surroundings, the wealthy often hire Neanderthal underlings to do their bidding. These hirelings often screw up and once found out bring into proximity the separate worlds of the rich and the lumpen. Unlike either of these, old money and the great unwashed, it is the task of the detective to demonstrate nobility of character. With Holmes, inwardness is added to stridency, making room for the socially awkward demands of erudition. This contrasts to the arrested development of the criminal subspecies, genetic throwbacks who threaten the achievements of civilization. However, since this same civilization is responsible for the social inequality of a decadent imperialist bourgeoisie, the atavistic are literally para-normal, or what Sigmund Freud defined as the return of repressed. The only thing that can save society from what it rejects is the work of middle-class professionals, the university-educated elite, as well as the journalists who relay their findings to the plebeian hordes. Like the superhero comic book, the detective novel is essentially about the vicious cycle of social reproduction and the maintenance of class hierarchy, which is dematerialized by the criminal and sublimated by the detective. Despite his pretentious demeanour, what makes Holmes more bourgeois than aristocratic is his hard work and skilled proficiency. What makes him seem aristocratic, then, is the way he makes his work seem effortless. In her 2016 book The Politics of Everybody, Holly Lewis adds queer theory and LGBTQ issues to the socialist feminist enhancement of Marxian analysis.1 Among the demystifications of gay radicalism that she puts forward is the rejection of the notion that the destruction of the heteronormative family is somehow threatening to capitalism. If LGBTQ+ politics is to be a radical left politics, some of the prejudices that gay radicals have against straights must be abandoned. Emphasizing solidarity also means abandoning the knee-jerk assumption that universality is the equivalent of white European male domination. However, Lewis also makes a false argument when it comes to universality, which is that you can characterize bourgeois capitalism as a universalism from above, and socialism as a universalism from below. This is odd coming from her since, among the many valuable axioms she develops at the end of her book, she argues that neither binary nor non-binary modes of thinking are the solution to our problems, which she defines for the most part in historical materialist terms. She argues for the replacement of the intersectional model of oppression with a unitary theory of solidarity and asserts that being queer or trans is neither inherently revolutionary nor inherently regressive. We could say the same thing about being straight. Although her assertion that queer communitarianism should be replaced with queer political demands makes good sense, the more questionable assertion is the idea that, for reasons of political strategy, queers must support people who do not accept queers. The issue resembles the strategic necessity of winning the populist right, especially working people, into the fold of the organized left. How it is that such “repressive tolerance” of the politically incorrect for the sake of progress would not constitute a left universalism from above is never explained. While there is no sense in which those who are unaccepting are less educated, the notion of being wrong implies a lack of some sort that could be filled with the correct political knowledge. The recent events in Kenosha and Portland, where armed protesters shot and killed counter-protesters, or vice versa, gives us a sense of just how desperate and dangerous the culture wars have become in today’s era of alt-right populism, woke neoliberalism and social movement anti-fascism. In one case, a 17-year-old from Illinois travelled to Wisconsin to join the Kenosha Guard, a group of self-appointed community guardians and opponents of Black Lives Matter protesters. Angered by what he and his reactionary comrades consider lawless rioting, Kyle Rittenhouse-Lewis, a self-styled avenger who had been hoping to become a police officer, shot and killed two white BLM protesters with an illegally owned AR-15 assault rifle. Previously charged with misdemeanours and now with two first-degree intentional homicides, Rittenhouse has now arrested his own development by becoming a “teenage terrorist” and icon of the fascist right.According to reports, the Kenosha police were supporting the armed militias as well as the more than 1000 National Guard military police sent to the region. Sadly, but not surprisingly, President Donald Trump argued that Rittenhouse was defending himself from attackers. Had he not shot two unarmed protesters, Trump said, he “probably would have been killed.”2 Visiting Kenosha, Joe Biden added little more than moral support for back identity politics while making no promises to improve anything either in terms of economic justice or police reform. Biden met with the family of Jacob Blake, who had been shot in the back seven times by Kenosha police, but said nothing about the victims of Rittenhouse, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber. It has been argued that the fact that they are working class whites did not fit Biden’s campaign strategy.3 A recent BLM march from Wisconsin to Washington D.C., was organized and supported by establishment Democratic Party figures like Al Sharpton and Kamala Harris, who restricted the problem of police violence to race issues. The Democrats have had almost nothing to say about the fact that throughout the protests in Washington D.C., New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and Portland, more than 500 cases of assault, vehicle attack and murder have occurred at the hands of far-right assailants.4The reverse parallel case concerns Michael Forest Reinoehl, who shot Patriot Prayer supporter Aaron Danielson in Portland, Oregon. Patriot Prayers are known to commit acts of violence against racial justice protesters. They tend to be Trump supporters. Although proudly anti-fascist, Reinoehl was known to be erratic and indifferent to legal norms. He told VICE News reporters that he acted in self-defence against a would-be assailant brandishing a knife against him and another protester. He claims that afterwards people have fired guns at his house, which is when he took his family with him into hiding. Reinoehl feared turning himself in to police who he said are collaborating with right-wing counter-protesters. After Trump demanded that police arrest Danielson’s killer, a judge in Oregon issued a warrant on charges of murder for Reinoehl’s arrest. Reinoehl was then killed by a special task force led by U.S. Marshals, who claim that he was resisting arrest and threatening the lives of law enforcement officers. The task force involved the Thurston County Sheriff’s Department, the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department, the Lakewood Police Department and the Washington Department of Corrections. All together, it is estimated that as many as 50 shots were fired at Reinoehl, who, like Osama bin Laden, stood no chance of surviving his arrest.5 Attorney General William Barr applauded the execution as a “significant accomplishment in the ongoing effort to restore law and order to Portland and other cities.” Barr also applauded the shooting of Jacob Blake and issued no condemnation of Rittenhouse. As reported by Niles Niemuth, the treatment of Reinoehl could not be further from the kid gloves used in the case of Rittenhouse, who has been hailed a hero by Fox News as he awaits extradition to Wisconsin.6 The criminalization of dissent by the corporate police state is now being aided and abetted by right-wing militias.If every fascism is a failed revolution, then the treason of the Sanders movement by both the Democratic Party establishment and the identitarian “left” can be held accountable for much of what has transpired since March 2020, including the bungling of coronavirus safety and economic security for unemployed workers. While the need for a third party immediately presented itself, the vacuum that was created by the DSA in its rush to prevent “sectarianism” was filled by a milquetoast Movement for a People’s Party, which has been endorsed by Cornel West and Chris Hedges. This potential party’s mix of populism, libertarianism and neoliberalism is almost certain to lead nowhere. Meanwhile, Rome burns. Reinoehl told reporters that he believed a civil war is imminent.7 While the term civil war is an exaggeration, in the last three months there have nevertheless been more than 8,700 demonstrations in support of BLM across 74 countries.8From the perspective of the establishment, Biden is no more supportive of protesters than Trump. Although the two presidential candidates blame one another for the clashes in the streets, both of them support the same law and order policies that defend the interests of the plutocracy. Citizens with different political views killing one another will do nothing to change this state of affairs. In fact, this sort of violence reinforces the neoliberal status quo. It is quite likely that both the protesters and their right-wing detractors know this. As strange as it may sound, and because this pseudo-conflict preserves political stasis, the recent shootouts are less a civil war than a new form of culture war. There are class issues at stake, but they take the form of petty-bourgeois adventurism. As with the fin de siècle, neoliberal societies knowingly avoid meaningful and progressive social change and instead resort to irrationalism, social inequality and aestheticized excess. In the early twentieth century, the solutions to bourgeois decadence were either communism or what eventually became national socialism. Since the postwar period, the petty-bourgeois consumer generation shifted politics away from the choice between socialism and barbarism towards the choice between cultural pluralism or cultural conservatism. After the neo-Romantic liberation movements of the 1960s led to the neo-conservative reaction of the 1980s, the left has been satisfied with winning culture wars, leaving the realms of economic, labour, environmental and foreign policy to conservatives. On the whole, this ping pong match defines the bipartisan agenda and the order global capitalism. The culture wars in the U.S. have affected minority rights, lifestyles, religion, education and culture. Quite often, progressive culture warriors make use of normative tropes as both a real and imagined bogeyman and incitement to social change. From Judeo-Christian values to the Protestant work ethic and patriotic fervour, the bugbear of the counterculture was conformity. The obsession with fighting a culture war against “suits” and “the Man” allowed capitalism to transmogrify into today’s post-political consensus, where identity struggles have been successfully incorporated into the mainstream, much to the dismay of self-styled outsiders. At the same time, the counterculture contained reactionary elements, which today have come to the foreground through postmodern relativism and nihilism. While this complaint was once standard for the conservative right, it is now, and quite rightly, heard from liberal and leftist quarters as well. Insofar as the left is unable and uninterested in building political consensus, it opts for what Heath and Potter refer to as the “rebel sell,” which in its woke version is less rebel than sell.9 To be anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic and anti-xenophobic is hardly a radical stance. Practically every corporate CEO supports this now official ideology. The stoking of culture wars, however necessary, has unexpectedly contributed to neoliberal hegemony. The bohemian ideology of the petty bourgeoisie is now the de facto morality of the managerial class, who philosophize about creativity and thinking outside the box. Where adversary culture once made demands and expected results, today’s agonism for agonism’s sake is satisfied with gestures of defiance. Millionaire basketball players who take a BLM knee on satellite broadcasts and who also take advice from Barack Obama on quickly ending the boycott are not shaking things up. How did Black Power radicalism end up here?Things might be different today if so many of the terms of the culture war had not been defined by the other side – the neocons. The left has been hampered by its self-defeating definitions of this group of people. Rather than explaining neoconservatism in class terms, the counter-cultural and postmodern left has been satisfied to explain the new right as people who once had power, see it threatened, or lost it, and want it back. This definition encourages leftists to be anti-capitalist at the same time that they must also be anti-European, anti-straight, anti-white and anti-male. Having accepted anti-universalism and anti-Enlightenment views, the postmodern left unwittingly found itself on the same ideological footing as the fascist ideologues of the previous turn of the century. All of this was more than suitable to anti-communist Cold War liberalism, which happily announced the end of ideology. Since systemic class exploitation is no longer the root cause of our problems, the critique of individual moral failing allows conservative ideology to make a comeback. Contempt for ordinary people and avoidance of responsibility for the public interest is now a “leftist” attitude in so-called academia and so-called activist circles. In other words, the job of the postmodern woke left, including its political class, is to prevent radicalization. Ignoring that it is thoroughly petty bourgeois, it has satisfied itself with the attitudes of anti-bourgeois bohemians, becoming in the process what David Brooks has referred to as bourgeois bohemians.10 The neocons, for their part, failed to recognize that the relativism of the New Left was simply part of the cultural contradictions of the same capitalism they championed.Taking up the standard of working-class common sense against the bad behaviour of the soi-disant radicals, the neoconservatives lamented the disappearance of meritocracy. Instead of capitalists being leeches, it was the New Left that was parasitic on everything from nationalism to religion, education, the family, gender relations, sexuality, business and even sports. After the death of Joe DiMaggio in 1999, the singer-songwriter Paul Simon stated that DiMaggio had the kind of unpretentious modesty that no longer exists in a society that magnifies and distorts popular heroes. “In these days of Presidential transgressions and apologies and prime-time interviews about private sexual matters,” Simon said, “we grieve for Joe DiMaggio and mourn the loss of his grace and dignity, his fierce sense of privacy, his fidelity to the memory of his wife and the power of his silence.” In contrast, the lionization of Rittenhouse by the far right expresses in inverted form what the left presumes is the motivating force behind such an obscene figure: the unearned sense of one’s place in the social universe. The would-be killer was driven by his mother to a city troubled by social injustice, scrubbed some graffiti off of a building and then arrogantly gave himself the right to take another’s life. This contrasts markedly with Reinoehl, whatever his failings, who modestly sought to defend innocent people from the violence perpetrated against them, even if it meant risking his own life. With the establishment having won over the last several decades much of what could be achieved for the benefit of the wealthy, the right now wants to make gains in the culture war. Trump’s election strategy is not altogether different from the Democrats in that regard. The fact that working-class Americans are fighting one another with guns is proof of the success of second amendment craziness. What kind of culture is normative in America in 2020? One answer to this can be found in the recent hyper-inflated obituaries for Chadwick Boseman. Known to have played the same kind of modest hero as Joe DiMaggio in the figure of Jackie Robinson (42, 2013), as well as other legends like Thurgood Marshall (Marshall, 2017) and James Brown (Get on Up, 2014), Boseman is best known, and glorified, as the superhero king T’Challa in the Marvel series of films – most notably Black Panther (2018). An homage to Boseman produced by ABC and called Chadwick Boseman – A Tribute to a King, was embarrassing to watch insofar as a young and talented actor was deified by his peers as a king, a god, a superhero and an ancestor.11Why depict an ordinary and even modest-seeming individual, who died of cancer, as a virtually invincible superhero? The shrill canonization of Boseman is perhaps an unintended result of the emphasis that today’s anti-racist black capitalism and woke neoliberalism places on identity as a form of victim politics. Since we are repeatedly told that racism is worse than ever, more eternal and less materially alterable through social solidarity, the death of a popular black actor is too much to bear and needs to be hyped with a compensatory apotheosis, which, as John McWhorter has argued, occurs when the BLM movement makes a victim of police violence into a martyr and a hero.12 The focus on black death, now academicized by Afropessimism, makes this shift of registers between victim and hero practically seamless.In comparison with Boseman, someone with credibility as a challenger and who is partly responsible for getting the Occupy Wall Street movement underway – David Graeber – is dismissively remembered by the New York Times books section as “something of a leader.”13 In any case, anarchist intellectuals typically make life choices that prevent obituary plaudits from reaching towards the high heavens. If Graeber earned his commendations through dedication to the well-being of others, Boseman – or rather the icon of anti-racist veneration that he has been made into – is a stand-in for other people of integrity, like Robinson and Marshall, who are in short supply these days. Another answer to this question of what is normative across the two sides of today’s culture war can be found in a recent issue of Time magazine called “The New American Revolution.” The issue profiles prominent African Americans – activists, artists, athletes and businesspeople.14 In between the lines of her interview, Angela Davis endorses Joe Biden as an imperfect candidate. This dovetails easily enough with the main function of the issue, which is to hype the latest music video by Pharrell Williams and Jay-Z called ‘Entrepreneur,’ which fist-bumps a set of successful business people, including the owners of one of Obama’s favourite soul food restaurants.15 These are said to be visions of a black future that fulfil a nation’s promise. In these times of depression, when COVID deaths are soon expected to surpass the number of American soldiers who died in World War II, the promise that black capitalism will serve the many and not the few is about as inspiring as the choice of Kamala Harris as Vice President. To be frank, the same could be said about the Black Panther character, which does as much for African Americans and Sherlock Holmes did for the working class in the dying days of the British empire. What is the connection between “the Man” that the 50s and 60s generation railed against and the “Black Man” that Pharrell drones on about? Drawing this counter-intuitive connection may reveal more than the white bread 50s America that leftists like to imagine conservatives dream about. Notes1. Holly Lewis, The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection (London: Zed Books, 2016).2. Samantha Lock, “Top Defender: What did Donald Trump say about Kyle Rittenhouse,” The Sun (September 1, 2020), https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12548981/donald-trump-defends-kyle-rittenhouse-gunman/.3. Patrick Martin, “Biden in Kenosha: Ignoring fascist killings, doubling down on identity politics,” World Socialist Web Site (September 4, 2020), https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/04/keno-s04.html.4. Jacob Crosse, “Republicans defend Kenosha gunman as nationwide protests continue,” World Socialist Web Site (August 29, 2020), https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/29/prot-a29.html.5. Conrad Wilson and Kimberley Freda, “Racial justice protester suspected in Portland shooting death killed by law enforcement,” OPB (September 3, 2020), https://www.opb.org/article/2020/09/04/michael-forest-reinoehl-protest-fatal-shooting-self-defense/.6. Niles Niemuth, “Federal task force kills suspect in slaying of right-wing Trump supporter in Portland,” World Socialist Web Site (September 5, 2020), https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/05/port-s05.html.7. VICE News, “Man Linked to Killing at a Portland Protest Says He Acted in Self-Defense,” VICE News (September 4, 2020), https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/v7g8vb/man-linked-to-killing-at-a-portland-protest-says-he-acted-in-self-defense.8. Jacob Crosse, “Protests against police violence continue across the US,” World Socialist Web Site (September 7, 2020), https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/07/prot-s07.html.9. Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2004).10. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon Schuster, 2010).11. See Mjhd videos, “Chadwick Boseman – A Tribute For a King,” YouTube (August 31, 2020), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ0xOVxSMcU.12. Bloggingheads.tv, “The End of Wokeness? | Glenn Loury John McWhorter [The Glenn Show],” YouTube(September 1, 2020), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ardDvpzHDIs.13. Sam Roberts, “David Graeber, Caustic Critic of Inequality, Dead at 59,” The New York Times (September 4, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/books/david-graeber-dead.html.14. See “The New American Revolution,” Time (August 31/September 7, 2020), https://time.com/collection/the-new-american-revolution/.15. Pharrell Williams, “Pharrell Williams – Entrepreneur (Official Video) ft. JAY-Z,” YouTube (August 21, 2020), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTOoY5MIkvM. https://dimitrilascaris.org/2020/06/09/pink-floyd-co-founder-roger-waters-endorses-dimitri-lascaris-as-next-leader-of-canadas-green-party/ This essay was written in May 2020. It is included is my forthcoming book, Cinema So Woke: Essays in Film, Theory and Politics.Abstract: Since 2010 several women have accused the filmmaker Roman Polanski of sexual assault crimes that would have occurred in the 1970s, around the same time as his conviction for the statutory rape of Samantha Geimer. With the 2019 release of Polanski’s film about the Dreyfus Affair, J’accuse, MeToo activists have protested the comparison that he has made between himself and Alfred Dreyfus, in particular, with regard to the way that his life has been exploited by the media. The film has more in common with MeToo than activists acknowledge. In particular, the emphasis on whether or not the public should judge the work or the artist reinforces a naïve approach to aesthetic autonomy that otherwise functions as a bulwark for more recent trends in post-structuralism that promote identity politics at the expense of a culture and politics of the left that is premised on notions of emancipatory universality. Film poster for Roman Polanski, J’accuse (France/Italy, 2019). Courtesy of Légende Films. George R. Whyte, the author of The Dreyfus Affair and former Chairman of the Dreyfus Society for Human Rights, concludes the preface to his book with the following:“Dreyfus was exonerated of all charges against him except that of being a Jew, and in 20 years of research and reflection on the Affair, its most penetrating summary came from a Parisian taxi driver whom I asked what he knew about the Dreyfus Affair: ‘Ah Monsieur,’ he explained, ‘a strange story. It was all about a French officer who was accused of being Jewish.’”1Considering that descendants of Alfred Dreyfus were deported to Auschwitz, Whyte’s argument is that prejudice against Jews survived well into the twentieth century. In other words, nothing was learned from the Dreyfus Affair. When France lost the territories of Alsace-Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian War, the French Army increased the number of bilingual recruits from that region. Dreyfus was one of those recruits. When he watched the German Army march into his home town, he made a vow to fight for the liberation of his country. As an assimilationist Jew, he defied the anti-semitism of the aristocratic and nationalist military and became an officer trainee in the General Staff headquarters. In that milieu, according to Whyte, Dreyfus’ Judaism was more important to his bigoted adversaries than it was to him – and that is what led to his martyrdom.One might make a similar observation about the question of prejudice and wrongdoing as it concerns the controversy surrounding Roman Polanski, whose 2019 film about the Dreyfus Affair, J’accuse, was criticized by the French Minister of Culture, Franck Riester, the Minister for Equality between Women and Men, Marlène Schiappa, and the spokeswoman for Emmanuel Macron, Sibeth Ndiaye. The film, known in English as An Officer and a Spy, also occasioned the MeToo hashtag #BoycottPolanski and led to measures to have Polanski suspended from ARP, the country’s Guild of Authors, Directors and Producers.2 MeToo campaigns compete for attention in a media environment that increasingly organizes politics around citizen indignation and protest narcissism, neither of which operates through the usual institutional channels and neither of which has proven to be particularly effective in bringing about structural changes that go beyond what Chelsea Manning has referred to as “equal opportunity oppression.”3 As film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has argued, why should the case of Polanski be given more attention by the American press than the crimes of Dick Cheney?4 The question is particularly apt in the context of Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden, who is one of Cheney’s accomplices in the “weapons of mass destruction” hoax that prompted the 2003 war against Iraq.5Is the hype around Polanski warranted or should it be dismissed as the kind of hysterical puritanism, Rosenbaum suggests, that does more to avoid issues than provide answers? The matter might be settled sooner if people agreed about the issues. A discussion on the subject was moderated by the New York Times in 2009 after Polanski had been detained in Switzerland for possible extradition to the United States, which caused the French Minister of Culture and Foreign Minister, as well as prominent members of the film industry, to come to Polanski’s defense.6 In this forum, novelist Jay Parini argues that one can separate the art from the artist. Many great artists are flawed human beings, he argues, and many wonderful individuals are terrible artists. Had Polanski been an ordinary person his crimes would have been forgotten. Theorist Mark Anthony Neal counters with the suggestion that famous artists like Michael Jackson use their celebrity to get away with improprieties that would not be forgiven other people. What endures, however, is the art. Producer Damon Lindelot argues that many great artists of the past, who were deemed subversive of social mores, would not be remembered if they had lived in the age of Google. Professor of English Mark Bauerlier defends artists, who in order make their work, cannot separate their lives from their practice. If to defend art is to defend artists, the norms of civil society nevertheless come to bear on the deviant impulses of talented artists. Art critic Charlie Finch suggests that artists should not get a free pass and the fact that Polanski is today known as much for his misdeeds as for his films causes his work to suffer. Historian Judith Surkis argues that sex scandals increase intrigue, which in this case plays into the difference between French and American attitudes.Public opinion tends to judge the Polanski Affair as a choice between the man and his work. Even Samantha Geimer, the woman who was raped by Polanski in 1977, puts the question in those terms: “Should a man’s personal life dictate the way we judge his work?”7 When J’accuse premiered in Venice, the head of the Film Festival jury, Lucretia Martel, told the press: “I don’t separate the man from the art. I think that important aspects of the work emerges [sic] in the man. A man who commits a crime of this size who is then condemned, and the victim considers herself satisfied with the compensation, is difficult for me to judge.”8 For his part, the festival director, Alberto Barbera, opined that the jury and the public are gathered to judge the film, not the person behind it.9 Journalist Alice Pfeiffer argues that the national drama around Polanski is part of the “toxic culture” of the untouchable artist, as is the case with the film director Christophe Ruggia, who was accused by actress Adèle Haenel of sexually assaulting her when she was a pre-teen. Having made Polanski into the Harvey Weinstein of France, the MeToo movement has obliged the public to reconsider their view of the director and his work:“Now, he is the focal point of a national debate that has divided the world of French filmmaking in two: namely, can one separate the artist and the man? Should his private life be taken into account when judging his output, or should a work of art be treated as an entity all its own and analysed free of context?”10As with most of the opinions that have been expressed on the matter, Pfeiffer telescopes separate subjects: the private person, the artist, the work and the social context. None of these are assessed in relation to the postmodern anti-humanism and end of history ideology that in the last decades are often thought to have displaced their more conventional Enlightenment and universalist premises.Mass media reporting on the question of whether or not people should be judging the man or his work reinforce what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as the doxa of the field of cultural autonomy. The need to protect the field from the “doxosophy” of commercialism as well as realpolitik is what Bourdieu argues made French novelist Émile Zola’s contribution to the invention of the “intellectual” a factor in political life.11 In the decades following developments in modernism, the avant garde and postmodernism, the fact that we no longer require an analysis of the emergence of the field of autonomy does not mitigate Bourdieu’s argument that the objective tensions between positions and position-takings within the field remain a matter of struggle. Insofar as identity politics and movements like MeToo and Black Lives Matter have been at the forefront of recent debates in culture, the question of struggle meets the issue of what Bourdieu referred to as the “social ageing” of a previous stage of the cultural habitus – the set of predispositions that characterize a person’s perception and practice within a specific field of endeavour. Insofar as J’accuse is understood as a work of art and Polanski its creator, and insofar as MeToo criticisms have an impact on culture and politics, it is helpful to distinguish between position-takings that leave the field of culture as it stands, and that therefore tend to refer to struggles for political power, and positions that influence changes within the field as such, which may not have any immediate consequences outside the field.Pfeiffer argues that the cult of the artist has prevented the MeToo movement from making important inroads. In France, she says, the mystique of the tragic genius allows people to live beyond social norms and even the law. Such journalistic bromides acknowledge the ideology of Romanticism that became the norm for the bourgeois cultural market and the modern invention of celebrity. However, they ignore how it is that such phenomena were challenged as early as the Realist and Naturalist movements. Media sensationalism does not typically allow knowledge of art history or much of anything else to get in the way of a scandal. Neither, however, does the field of art history in the era of so-called “progressive neoliberalism.”12 The MeToo campaign is in this sense not so different from other postmodern phenomena, which not only attack universalism as an inherently bourgeois and therefore reactionary concept, but at the same time recycle philosophical along with economic liberalism as a feature of the “new” spirit of capitalism.13 Postmodernism’s de-differentiating impulses, which tend to reinforce bohemian conceptions of art along with populist politics, disguise its acceptance of capitalist economic relations. As postmodernism spread from architecture and cinema to all areas of social life and thought – philosophy, history, science, law – the depthlessness that accompanied its sublime hysteria anchored the objective changes in the global economic order to a nihilistic resistance to meaning. The textualization of practices, from structuralism to social constructionism, replaced the autonomization of fields, transforming professionals into increasingly precarious service providers.14With speculation and capitalization now linked to sexual and racial difference, the market breaks down elite, vanguard and disaffected cultures in favour of new demotic patterns of consumption. No wonder then that Pfeiffer associates the debate around Polanski with the generational difference between older and younger artists. This is similar to debates in politics where, for example, the young supporters of Bernie Sanders are pitted against ageing Biden supporters, especially where issues of anti-racism and anti-sexism are concerned. However, as the left has come to understand, the focus on race, gender and sexuality has worked to obscure the class politics and economic relations that shape not only public policy but identity struggles as well. Contrary to what Pfeiffer suggests, films by female, black or queer directors are not inherently a threat to the system but are part of the same hegemony that marginalizes radicalism in the cinema and elsewhere. One reason, then, why Polanski’s J’accuse emerged as a flashpoint for the MeToo campaign is the fact that it does very little to illuminate these problems. The Rogues of ParisIn 1894, Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, the equivalent of today’s Guantánamo Bay. The organization that was responsible for the investigation was the Statistics Section of French military counter-intelligence, which had been investigating intelligence leaks through the German Embassy in Paris. When a leak concerning new artillery technology was discovered, the army’s General Staff scrambled to find the author of an incriminating piece of evidence, known as the “bordeleau.” General Auguste Mercier, the Minister of War, was more eager to find a culprit than the culprit and expediently limited his investigation to artillery officers. Once Alfred Dreyfus was chosen as the guilty party, all of the positivist science that was then in vogue in criminal detection was waylayed in order to secure a conviction. In essence, Dreyfus was found guilty because his signature did not match the evidence. Since he had to be its author, it was argued that he intentionally faked his handwriting style. Counting on the anti-semitism that was common in both the army and the public at large, the effort to push the case through a military court and convict Dreyfus led to a cascade of obfuscation, judicial misconduct, false accusations, character assassination, deceptions and forgeries, as well as protection of the man presumed to be the actual traitor, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. In 1895, Lieutenant-Colonel Georges Picquart, who had been Dreyfus’ military instructor at the time of his arrest, was appointed as head of the staff at the Statistics Section of the Military Intelligence Service. When one year later, Picquart had accumulated enough evidence to reopen the case and exonerate Dreyfus, the General Staff did everything to prevent a retrial, least of all by dispatching Picquart to the colonies. By the end of 1896, however, the matter was out of their control and enough information had made its way to the press to create a rift between the supporters and the enemies of Dreyfus – known as Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards.When on January 13, 1898, Zola published his broadside “J’accuse” in the newspaper L’Aurore, most of what could be known about the case was revealed, including the effort by the General Staff and the Statistics Section to cover up the facts. What made the article sensational, however, which caused Zola to be prosecuted and exiled for one year, was that it accused the government of negligence. The Affair divided the Supreme Court. In 1899, a review of the case was allowed to go forward and the faked evidence that was used to condemn Dreyfus was dismissed. Taking the matter out of the hands of the military, which had engaged in a conspiracy to frame Dreyfus, the Supreme Court overturned the judgement of 1894. Despite the fact that Esterhazy had by then confessed his authorship of the document that was used to convict Dreyfus, the General Staff continued to stonewall the case and so the defense agreed to an acquittal, accepting the charge of treason with extenuating circumstances. Pleading guilty, Dreyfus was later granted a pardon by the state, which also indemnified Zola and Picquart. Since the Affair had led to years of social unrest, violent riots and murders, the state attempted to encourage social harmony by giving amnesty to the people who were responsible for the prolonged deception. The case was reopened by the Supreme Court in 1904 and in 1906 Dreyfus was rehabilitated and reinstated with the rank of artillery major, which was lower than what could have been expected for an officer of his merit. He retired from the army in 1907 due to illnesses caused by his years in prison. Zola died in 1902 due to asphyxiation by fireplace fumes, an incident that was claimed by a Parisian roofer as a crime that he committed intentionally. Picquart was reinstated and later served as the Minister of War. The end of the Dreyfus Affair allowed the French nation to close one chapter in the history of anti-semitic prejudice. It is said to have strengthened democratic values, in part, by separating matters of church and state. It also demonstrated the power of the media to not only champion the cause of justice, but to manipulate public opinion and disseminate falsehoods. While Dreyfus was cleared of all charges, the persistence of anti-semitism as well as the development of Zionism as a consequence of the Affair created a fracture between socialist parties and a nascent fascist ideology that would eventually come to power with the establishment of the Vichy regime. Jean Dujardin as Picquart and Louis Garrel as Dreyfus in J’accuse (2019). Courtesy of Légende Films. As a preface to this story, Whyte’s statement is not unlike Roman Polanski’s treatment of the subject in his film, in which the question of anti-semitism is bookended in the exchanges between Dreyfus and Picquart. This is preceded by the opening scene, in which Picquart and Major Hubert-Joseph Henry are observing the formal military humiliation of Dreyfus, where his crime and punishment are announced, his sword is broken and his military rank is canceled. Dreyfus proclaims his innocence, declaring: Vive la France! Vive l’armée! Picquart says to Henry: “He looks like a Jewish tailor who is crying that all of his gold is going to the dump.” In a flashback, Picquart recalls that Dreyfus had asked him why he gave him a lower grade than he is accustomed to receive at the military academy. Picquart assures him that it is not because he is a Jew and further that he never allows his personal feelings to influence his judgement. He tells Dreyfus that he does not like Jews but that he also never discriminates. Clicking his heels, Dreyfus is satisfied with his answer. When confronting a mole in the Statistics Section – Major Henry, who later kills himself in disgrace or is assassinated so as to be silenced – Picquart distances himself from the army so long as it protects the guilty and punishes the innocent. At the end of the film, when an exonerated Dreyfus discusses with Picquart the question of his unfairly revised rank, which Picquart apologetically tells him is beyond appeal, Dreyfus says that it is nice for Picquart, after having done all that he did, to have been appointed to the government of the French republic. Picquart replies that it is strange to say, but that without him it likely would never have happened. Dreyfus rejects the claim, saying that Picquart earned the post because he did his duty. Dreyfus salutes his superior and clicks his heels. At the close of the film, in a manner that is typical for a Polanski film, the truth is discovered but anti-semitic prejudice survives. As is the case in The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Chinatown (1974) or The Ghost Writer (2010), either the bad guy has gotten away, the protagonist’s perception remains distorted or something more ominous endures. Based on a True StoryThe controversy surrounding J’accuse is perhaps not surprising given that Polanski was already, before its release, in the midst of a storm of sexual assault accusations. The tension was increased in the context of the Venice Film Festival with the publication of a press kit that contains an interview with Pascal Bruckner, the author of the novel that became the basis for Polanski’s Bitter Moon (1992), a story about a destructive sado-masochistic relationship that also ruins the lives of two unsuspecting innocents. Polanski says that he chose to make a film about the Dreyfus Affair because it has a timeless fascination as a story about a man who is falsely accused, and also because it has a contemporary relevance in the context of the rise of anti-semitism. He argues that Picquart was more an anti-semite out of popular custom than belief. By focusing on Picquart, Polanski has made the Dreyfus Affair into a police thriller. When asked by Bruckner if he thinks another Dreyfus Affair is possible, Polanski replies: “All the ingredients are there for it to happen: false accusations, lousy court proceedings, corrupt judges, and above all, ‘social media’ that convicts and condemns without a fair trial or a right of appeal.”15 He adds:“I must admit I am familiar with many of the workings of the apparatus of persecution shown in the film, and that has clearly inspired me. The way people see me, my ‘image,’ did indeed start to form with Sharon Tate’s death. When it happened, even though I was already going through a terrible time, the press got hold of the tragedy and, unsure of how to deal with it, covered it in the most despicable way, implying, among other things, that I was one of the people responsible for her murder, against a background of satanism. For them, my film Rosemary’s Baby proved that I was in league with the devil! It lasted several months, until the police found the real killers, Charles Manson and his ‘family.’ All this still haunts me today. Anything and everything. It is like a snowball; each season adds another layer. Absurd stories by women I have never seen before in my life who accuse me of things which supposedly happened more than half a century ago.”16Critics of Polanski, especially activists associated with MeToo, reacted strongly to the comparison he made in this interview between himself and Dreyfus. On the one hand, one should not be surprised that Polanski would do such a thing. As film critic Daniel Bird argues, Polanski has consistently used events in his own life as material for non-autobiographical films.17 As someone who began his film career as an actor, one might think that Polanski has applied the methods of Stanislavski to his work as a director. On the other hand, MeToo advocates have little patience for Polanski’s attempt to paint himself in the role of the victim. As a survivor of the Holocaust and the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, as well as abuse by the media and paparazzi, Polanski has without doubt been victimized. In the case of Geimer, however, he is also a victimizer. Although J’accuse won the Grand Jury Prize in Venice, its French release was pre-empted by the accusation by Valentine Monnier that she was raped by Polanski in 1975. Such allegations that are beyond the statute of limitations have also been put forward by Charlotte Lewis in 2010, and by Renate Langer, Robin M. and Marianne Barnard in 2017. All of the incidents would have happened to these women in the 70s while they were in their teens and Polanski in his forties.18Edith Vogelhut has also accused Polanski of sodomizing her, at age 21, while she was drugged and handcuffed. Although these cases are no longer subject to due process, their veracity is shadowed by the arrest of Polanski in 1977 for the statutory rape of Samantha Geimer, who was 13 years of age at the time. Polanski confessed to this as a part of plea bargain in which five other felony charges would be dropped so that the victim could avoid media exposure through a public trial. The other charges include rape by use of drugs, a lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, furnishing a controlled substance to a minor, perversion and sodomy. As the case became sensationalized, the acting judge, Laurence J. Rittenband, manipulated the legal process so that Polanski would serve more jail time than required by law and as agreed to by both the defense and the prosecution. Avoiding judicial misconduct, Polanski fled from the U.S. to France. Although he served a typical amount of time for unlawful sexual intercourse by undergoing several weeks of psychiatric evaluation in a correctional facility, his avoidance of a closing trial has since then allowed the state of California to reopen the case, detaining him through the courts in Switzerland in 2008 for possible extradition.19Although Geimer has always claimed that the invasion of her life by the media was many times worse than what Polanski did to her, and both her lawyer and Polanski’s lawyers have repeatedly attempted to have his status as a fugitive dismissed, the case exists in a state of juridical limbo, haunting all of Polanski’s work and causing Geimer and her family to undergo routine intrusions. The many ironies surrounding Polanski’s life and work are an instance of what Hegel referred to as the cunning of history. Whereas Polanski had an affair with Nastassja Kinski when she was 15, meeting her for the first time in the context of a threesome with a friend of hers, the affair did not seem to raise eyebrows. Nor did Polanski’s revelations in his 1984 autobiography indicate that cavorting with young schoolgirls at his chalet in the resort town of Gstaad was anything to be ashamed of. The depiction or suggestion of rape and sexual assault in such films as Repulsion (1965), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), What? (1972) Chinatown (1974), Tess (1979) and Pirates (1986) suggests that sexual perversion is a longstanding interest of his, that is, beyond his juvenile interest in delinquency while a student at the Polish Film Academy in Lodz and which has its most shining expression in Cul-de-sac (1966).The film Tess, which featured Kinski in the lead role as a fallen woman, is based on the Thomas Hardy novel Tess of the d’Ubervilles. Sharon Tate had been reading the book and gave her copy to Polanski the last time they saw one another. His dedication of the film to her memory gives a small indication that Polanski’s unusual sexual proclivities were not something that he was questioning at that time. Nor were most other people. The rape case did not prevent Tess from winning a César Award for Best Picture and Best Director, as well as three Oscars. By 1988, and during the filming of Frantic, Polanski began an affair with a much younger Emmanuelle Seigner, whom he eventually married. They now have two children. By 2001, Polanski was revisiting his youth in the Polish ghettos and his 2002 film The Pianist won him the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the César for Best Film and Best Director and an Oscar for Best Director. He also won Césars for The Ghost Writer (2010) and Venus in Fur (2013). Many of the difficulties of his troubled past seemed behind him. The Zeitgeist Did ItDespite the fact that J’accuse was nominated for 12 Césars, and Polanski won the prize for Best Director, the film was mired in controversy. Due to the media storm elicited by Monnier’s accusations, which had been previously reported to the government and the police but kept secret until the launch of the film, Polanski and the film’s cast avoided the César ceremonies. The board of France’s Film Academy and César awards collectively resigned after the Minister of Culture recommended that Polanski’s film should not be recognized. At the ceremony, Haenel made news by dramatically storming out of the theatre at the moment that Polanski’s film was awarded. While veteran actresses like Fanny Ardant and Brigitte Bardot came to Polanski’s defense, younger actresses like Céline Sciamma and Jessica Chastain shamed the industry. Despite the overall success of J’accuse, Polanski’s expulsion from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2018 seems to have been vindicated. After the nomination of J’accuse for a dozen awards, some 400 artists signed a statement demanding the restructuring of the Césars through the recruitment of more women to the board and the implementation of better gender parity.In terms of Marxist analysis, the Polanski Affair is clouded by the fact that MeToo is part of the same petty-bourgeois ideology that in previous decades championed the sex, drugs and rock ’n roll revolution of the postwar generation. In the Eastern bloc countries, it was jazz that was earmarked as morally decadent, and Polanski did not hesitate to collaborate on most of his early films with Krzysztof Komeda, Poland’s leading avant-garde jazz musician. With movements like MeToo, the carefree lifestyles of the consumer society have been transformed through a conservative emphasis on victimization rather than cultural revolution. This shift has been especially damaging to Polanski, who in the 70s more or less invented for himself a Vogue Hommes assignment to photograph nubile teens in their tender years. He refers to this shift with consternation:“I try to take some distance from it. We are living in a bizarre era that gives me the impression of a total reversal of the ideology of my youth and today. I had the chance to live in society that was infinitely more free. In the 1960s everything was becoming unlocked: expression, music, values. You would not have imagined groups of protesters in front of a cinema or a museum to prevent a film projection or an exhibition. It’s absurd. You see the owner of a McDonald’s undone because he had a relation with a consenting employee, or a Minister of Defence who 15 years ago put his hand on the knee of a journalist. People question evolution, the existence of the two sexes, vaccines, the fact that the Earth is round. We’re heading towards a sort of neo-obscurantism.”20Robert Harris, the author of the commissioned novel that was the basis for the screenplay for J’accuse, echoes Polanski, saying: “The zeitgeist has changed. Do you change with it? I don’t know, to be honest with you. Morally, I don’t see why I should change my position because the fashion has changed.”21There are several problems with Polanski’s complacency in this regard. Although the spirit of the times included pushing the boundaries of acceptable subject matter for artworks, from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1966) to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), sex with a minor was nevertheless illegal. Moreover, the sexual revolution that was spurred by the Kinsey Report and the contraceptive pill had by the mid-to-late 70s been requisitioned for feminist and psychoanalytic review. As the creator of Repulsion, a film that eventually met with the approval of the British Board of Film Classification as an accurate depiction of a homicidal schizophrenic, Polanski was not so much of an auteur as to refuse removing scenes from the film so that it was clear that the protagonist, Carol, had only imagined being raped. This not only prevented the film from being considered a morally ambivalent celebration of decadence, it also points to an aspect of Polanski’s work that tends to go unnoticed. Referencing the work of Brian McHale, film theorist David Caputo remarks that Polanski’s attention to human perception as the premise of much of his work allows him to destabilize ideological absolutes – a predilection that was no doubt influenced by his experience of Nazi persecution and Stalinist censorship. The result is that Polanski’s films depict a universe in which the sense of reality is often undermined if not inherently uncertain. Caputo writes:“It is this sort of ‘pushing’ of epistemological questions towards ever more basic queries that … causes epistemology to ‘tip over’ into the domain of ontology, a philosophical transition highly indicative of the shift from the ‘modern’ to the ‘postmodern’ condition. To put it another way, pushed to the limit, the ambiguity that envelops Polanski’s cinema is that which nudges epistemological concerns into ontological uncertainty or angst.”22Whereas Caputo wishes to bring scholarly attention to Polanski’s cinematic preoccupation with the ideas of the neuropsychologist Richard L. Gregory rather than the more typical interest in the biographical aspects of his work, this same observation about the shift from epistemology to ontology can also be made about Polanski’s self-serving definition of free love.While working on Repulsion, Polanski noticed that English women were sexually straightforward. This made him more at ease, he says, bringing him to a stage in his life when he understood that making love was no different from comedy, sport or music. Moreover, his proclivity for “therapeutic relaxation” was honed in the late 60s when sleeping around with the young teenage women from the finishing schools of Gstaad, whose “emancipated” manners he claims broke with decorum:“What was I doing there? What did we talk about, those girls and I? Music, books, school, skiing, friends, parents? What did we have in common? That’s a question I’ve often been asked. I’ve never tried to analyse such friendships closely. I can only say that like so many girls of their age, they had untapped reserves of intelligence and imagination. They weren’t using their bodies to further their careers; they weren’t on the lookout for parts; they didn’t want to hear about distribution rights or film finance – not even about the Manson murders. And they were more beautiful, in a natural, coltish way, than they would ever be again.”23After the Manson murders, Polanski says he knew that his films would be judged by their subject matter more than their quality. He surprised audiences with a graphic yet serious rendering of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. However, what bemused the audiences of this film was the intertitle at the start of the film that indicated “a Playboy production.” Sponsorship by the Hugh Hefner consortium caused an otherwise excellent film to be denied a London premiere with the British royals, only to be launched in January in New York at the Playboy Theatre, where it got panned by critics. By the time that Polanski was making What? on the French Riviera, a Rabelaisian take on the misadventures of an American innocent abroad, he himself had become the kind of “phallocrat” that is depicted in the film.24 With several of his friends in dire straits due to the hard drugs and hard living of the 70s, Polanski weathered the storm thanks in part to a deal for an American film in the detective genre. After the mild success of Chinatown, he directed and starred in the Roland Topor story of a man who gradually succumbs to the death instinct of the previous tenant of his rented Parisian apartment. He had become the prey, he wrote, accessible and vulnerable. At Cannes in 1976, The Tenant was subject to attacks by crowds and journalists. It led him to seek respite at Oktoberfest in Munich, where he met Kinski. He then organized a Vogue photo shoot for the young actress with a beach and pirate theme. Soon after he began doing research on police work for a film called The First Deadly Sin, which, surprisingly enough, preceded his blunders with Geimer. Blood for DraculaAs the illusio of the cultural field merged with the illusio of happiness in the Cold War society of affluence, and with Polanski, an escapee from the Soviet bloc, decidedly on the side of fast times and exploitation themes, the shift in register towards neoliberal identitarianism has resulted in hard times for a director of note. The focus on Polanski’s life is an inconvenient, for him, means to gauge how times are changing. The protraction of the petty-bourgeois habitus into a condition of decadence is similar to what happened to bourgeois realism by the fin de siècle. If the positivism, social Darwinism, imperialism and faux spiritualism of that era was accompanied by the rise of socialist internationalism, today’s era of Donald Trump authoritarianism and Jeff Bezos trillionairedom is caught up in a bipartisan endgame that announces not only ecological disaster but regression to quasi-feudal conditions. If Humbert Humbert in Lolita is doing a terrible thing but knows that he is doing a terrible thing, petty-bourgeois decadence describes a polity that knows it is doing terrible things but does not know that it is doing it anyway. Sexually speaking, petty-bourgeois decadence is more repressive than normativity because it denies the problem of drives and attempts to make the unconscious conscious, thereby forcing a non-relation. Politically speaking, today’s decadence suggests that desublimation can no longer reveal ideology; it is therefore no longer certain that fascism has been or can be defeated. With the left in tatters, not only does the atmosphere of McCarthyite witch trials return but so do its big lies, like WMDs, Russiagate and the weaponization of COVID-19 as “the China virus.” As Cold War cybernetics shifted from 60s structuralism towards social constructionism and network logics, identity politics filled a cultural vacuum opened up by post-Fordist globalization. Now that the nationalist and religious coordinates of identity have largely abated among the global petty bourgeoisie, crusades for representation and recognition occupy the social imagination.The question of “why Polanski, why now” therefore has a spontaneous answer in what Jacques Lacan referred to as the “discourse of the capitalist,” where the subject addresses the field of cultural production while producing himself or herself in almost complete obliviousness to the social relations that are organized in the global political economy.25 Whether we are discussing Hollywood hedonism or intersectionality, the culprit that escapes is capitalism. In each case, the news media feed on desultory content, fueled by high profile cases and celebrity, from repeat offenders like Bill Cosby and Jeffrey Epstein to wish fulfilment in the case of Woody Allen. Unable to fathom why so many have turned against him, Allen has commented: “I really can’t see any practical difference if people remember me as a film director or a pedophile or at all.”26 That is difficult to reconcile with this additional reflection:“[I]n fifty years of making films, working with hundreds of actresses, I’ve provided 106 leading female roles with sixty-two award nominations for the actresses, and never a single hint of impropriety with any one of them. Or any of the extras. Or any of the stand-ins. Plus, since being independent from studios, I have employed 230 women as leading crew members behind the camera, not to mention female editors, producers, and everyone always paid exactly equally to the men on my films.”27The moral indignation that went so far as to prevent the publication of Allen’s memoir, in which he defends his 25-year marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, is ascribed by the despairing comedian to a meaningless universe in which a lie detector test becomes a welcome opportunity. Not that someone is guilty by association, but Allen’s memoir fails to mention Epstein.The kind of “parasocial interaction” that causes delusional reporters, fans and the masses to think that celebrities owe them a pound of flesh allows someone like Polanski to counter-manipulate the public, which then leads someone like Bardot to congratulate the artist for saving French cinema from mediocrity.28 On the occasion of the César awards, where Pleyel Hall was expected to be surrounded with protesters, Polanski announced that he would avoid a public lynching, which, he said, would resemble a symposium rather than a festival.29 The statement echoes Polanski’s attitude during the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, where Rosemary’s Baby was being premiered. When Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Louis Malle attempted to organize artists in defense of Henri Langlois and in tandem with the anti-capitalist strikes of the time, Polanski told his colleagues that no one is preventing them from organizing a symposium, but that show business needs celebrities to survive. Polanski wrote:“Cannes now succumbed to the same heady fervor that gripped Paris. There were meetings, processions, demonstrations, rallies, and shouts of ‘Our comrades, the students from Nice, have arrived!’ By this time the general strike was spreading throughout France. (…) The staff of the [hotel] Martinez, who mistakenly believed me to be one of those responsible for the festival’s demise and their own considerable loss of earnings, turned sulky and snubbed me. The masses didn’t seem to appreciate the intellectuals’ efforts on their behalf.”30Polanski decided to leave the “revolution” at Cannes, as he referred to it in scare quotes, and drove to Rome with Tate in his Ferrari, followed by director Mike Sarne in his Roll Royce convertible. À chacun son Zola…Changed circumstances require that we rethink how it is that today’s artists and intellectuals relate not only to the masses but also to capitalism. The structural crisis of the culture industry and postmodern identity politics cannot be resolved within the terms of the neoliberal ideology through which we are expected to understand artists and artworks, nor for that matter the controversies that they sometimes provoke. Insofar as identity politics are the means through which we react, reflect and propose solutions, the autonomy of art or the independence of the artist is not directly what is at stake. As the cultural realm becomes ever more immanent to the political economy of neoliberal capitalism, the culture industry grinds away with its “woke” figures of authority and ciphers of regression.31 In this context, a totemic Polanski can act as the privileged host in what Mark Fisher referred to as the vampire castle, a multi-user social media dungeon where class consciousness is suppressed in favour of hoisting racists and patriarchs to their pétards.32 The notion of J’accuse as an allegory of Polanski’s personal experience of persecution is something that he can all too easily exploit, with, for instance, the incidental fact that he pleaded guilty to a class D felony and that the Harris screenplay for An Officer and a Spy was first titled D, named after the secret dossier ‘D’ that the Statistics Section had filled with concocted documents to bury their victim. Since Polanski settled a $500,000 lawsuit with Geimer in 1993, he is forbidden to speak about the case or about Geimer and her family. Make of such facts what you will.After the appearance of Marina Zenovich’s 2008 documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Polanski wrote a letter to Geimer, apologizing for having ruined her life with a media scandal. After feminist protests in 2013, Geimer stated that she does not want to be the poster child for the anti-Polanski campaign. Though nothing will change the fact that she was raped, she and her family have never considered sex to be shameful. Geimer refuses the role of victim that Polanski’s accusers demand of her. The claim of victimhood as a matter of ontology is rather the logic of incels: people whose politics warrant sex without consent. From the hardcore 70s, with its cautionary after-school scenarios, to Hollywood quotas and diversity riders, today’s crusaders counter socialist feminism with the rhetoric of empowerment, making social justice into a political weapon that is to be wielded within the coordinates of market logic, in relation to which, there is no alternative.One problem with the anti-patriarchy line, like that of anti-racism, is that it requires patriarchy to sustain its ideology. Polanski himself is disabused of most of what his critics use against him since his “belief” in the games of sex, culture and politics is external, which means that he recognizes something of what Slavoj Žižek refers to in Lacanian terms as the weakening of symbolic efficiency. This is made explicit in two scenes in J’accuse that reference the glory of despoliation. One is a scene where Picquart finds that his home has been searched and turned upside down by authorities. His books and various objects are strewn around a room with a grand piano at its centre – an allusion to the protagonist of The Piano’s survival of the Holocaust. The scenario is similar to Harris’ Fatherland (1992), an alternative history detective novel in which the investigator becomes himself investigated. After everything has been returned to its place, the grand piano remains in all its majesty, unharmed by the vile invasion.The other scene of despoilation is more subtle. At the start of the film, Picquart’s mistress, Pauline Monnier (played by Seigner), is shown lustily eating a strawberry as the people around her discuss whether or not the “accursed Jew” was allowed a fair trial. The scene is reminiscent of Žižek’s description of the big Other in terms of the ideological subjectivization of the anonymous mechanisms and rules that regulate social life. Although some desires may violate social norms, every transgression relies on those norms. For instance, the pursuit of happiness in a capitalist order depends on the right to exploit others. The enigma of desire, as the desire of the Other, is that the subject does not know their own desire directly but only interpassively, through social norms and structures of belief. In order to avoid traumatic exposure to the abyss of the Other, the subject resorts to fantasy, which provides an answer to the enigma of desire. Žižek writes:“The first thing to note about fantasy is that it literally teaches us how to desire: fantasy does not mean that when I desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality I fantasize about eating it; the problem is rather, how do I know that I desire the strawberry cake in the first place? This is what fantasy tells me. This role of fantasy hinges on the deadlock in our sexuality designated by Lacan in his paradoxical statement ‘There is no sexual relationship’ – there is no universal guarantee of a harmonious sexual relationship with one’s partner. Every subject has to invent a fantasy of his or her own, a ‘private’ formula for the sexual relationship.”33Fantasy not only solves the quandary about how to desire, but also what the subject’s desire is for others – its intersubjective character. Žižek mentions the case reported by Sigmund Freud of his young daughter eating strawberry cake. What was obvious to Freud was that she noticed how her parents were satisfied by the sight of her enjoyment, which made her the object of their desire.34Žižek’s notion of interpassivity describes the media sensationalism that, according to Geimer, varied from accusations of pedophilia and sympathy for a man who had experienced horrific events, to the seductions of a precocious lolita and an irresponsible mother who pimped her daughter in exchange for the possibility of advancing her career in Hollywood. It also fits Geimer’s description of the rape itself, which took place at the home of Jack Nicholson, after Polanski had given her champaigne as well as a Quaalude and then photographed her in a Jacuzzi. Being a somewhat insecure teenager who had been experimenting with sex and drugs with her school friends, Geimer was impressed yet at the same time unsure as to why Polanski wanted to photograph her for a French magazine. When he asked her to undress and get in the hot tub, she told herself that she should act like Marilyn Monroe. She writes: “I’m fine with taking off my top, I’m fine that he doesn’t care about anything I have to say, and the way he acts all indifferent to me, and I can even deal with spending all this time with him because everyone tells me he’s a great artist.”35 Despite her protestations, Polanski later took her into a bedroom where, concerned that she might become pregnant, he sodomized her. About this, she says: “I was like. Wait, was that my butt? Do people actually do that?”36 In the process of molesting the girl, Polanksi repeatedly asked her if she liked what he was doing, more to secure her compliance than her consent. Geimer’s incredulity regarding what seemed unreal to her extends to her reaction to the arrival of Angelica Huston at Nicholson’s house, her family’s distress and much of what ensued in terms of the police investigation and grand jury testimony. Surrounded by adults with different agendas, she had difficulty knowing which expectations to respond to. “I knew I hadn’t wanted to have sex with Roman, but did that make it rape? I thought rape had to be violent. When I was told that what he had done was a serious crime because of my age, I was shocked.”37 Whatever happened, she argues, it was not “making love,” as Polanski describes it in his autobiography. She says that over the years she has never had bad dreams about the rape, which she insists was a horrible experience, but that she has had nightmares about “the legal morass, the publicity [and] the questioning in the courtroom.”38 Given Polanski’s popularity in Europe in the 70s, it was easiest for the press to see him as the victim of an aspiring model and America’s obsession with celebrity. Class ActionWith regard to the question of position-taking, the film critic David Walsh is decidedly on the side of class analysis and against identity politics. Writing for the World Socialist Web Site, Walsh has consistently criticized identitarianism as petty-bourgeois ideology and a facet of what Leon Trotsky denounced as zoological materialism. In 2009, well before the emergence of MeToo as a mainstream phenomenon, Walsh recognized how the effort to extradite Polanski was part of an ideological coalition between liberal feminists and right-wing demagogues.39 Portraying Polanski as a monster, he argues, results in law-and-order hysteria as well as puritanical witch hunts, as evidenced by mainstream journalists demanding that Polanksi should be taken out and shot, a sentiment that ignores the fact that his case has been prosecuted and that Geimer wishes it be closed so that she can get on with her life. As feminism moves closer to the field of power, the neoliberal rhetoric of “respectability” reinforces reactionary attitudes that disadvantage working people. One might think that in the age of Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy the opposite would do just as well. Either way, the phony egalitarianism of populists, Walsh argues, does not improve the lives of the people they claim to be concerned about but increases the prosecutorial power of the state, which is ultimately wielded against socialist opposition. Such concerns are not decided by the social status or the identity of someone who is caught up in a scandal or a court case. For example, Walsh asks, should socialists at the time of the Dreyfus Affair have been against Alfred Dreyfus because he was a right-wing military officer?In times of mass discontent, outrage about social inequality is incoherently directed against people like Polanski as a means to draw attention away from fundamental economic and political issues. Sex scandals have been particularly well-suited for this purpose. One proof is that people are satisfied to attack people like Polanski while war criminals, torturers and banksters go free. Further, the power of the U.S. to intimidate the Swiss judiciary over a criminal offense that occurred three decades ago goes unnoticed. Ditto for Sweden, Ecuador and Great Britain in the case of Julian Assange, who is innocent of the sexual charges against him and of collusion with whoever it was that leaked the emails that revealed how in 2016 Hillary Clinton conspired with the Democratic National Convention to undermine the Bernie Sanders campaign. With the release of J’accuse, World Socialist Web Site critic Alex Lantier noted the importance of the film in the context of the resurgence of reactionary organizations like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party and the far-right French Action movement. “Significantly,” Lantier writes, “the right-wing hysterics of the #MeToo campaign, in contact with French President Emmanuel Macron’s government and authorities in America, have launched a ferocious campaign against J’accuse, trying to prevent the showing of a film recounting one of the most critical battles in the history of the socialist movement.”40 The same Minister of Culture who advised César jurors to not award Polanski a prize has worked to republish the writings of Charles Maurras, a well-known anti-Dreyfusard who later became one of the architects of the Vichy regime. MeToo advocates go so far as to accuse supporters of Polanski and viewers of the film as rape apologists. Slogans used at screenings of the film, in particular by groups associated with Dare to Be Feminists, included: “Polanski rapist, cinemas guilty, public complicit,” and “We believe Polanski’s victims.”41 These slogans were confirmed by the Culture Minister, who argued that the development of consciousness against sexist violence makes Polanski a source of tensions.42 Polanski protests during the Césars ceremony, February 28, 2020. Image courtesy of Charles Baudry. As with the censorship of Woody Allen, artists affiliated with Polanski have suffered career setbacks as elected officials, including socialists, seek to ban the film and stymie his work. According to Lantier, claims that to see and appreciate the film makes someone a rape apologist degrades public debate in favour of the financial aristocracy that is served by the Macron government, which has celebrated Philippe Pétain, the Nazi collaborator, as a national hero.43 Campaigns like MeToo, which ultimately represent the interests of the middle class, collude with neoliberal regimes and thereby help to move mainstream politics further to the right. Degeneration of Art and PoliticsIn 2019, Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, decided to remove two paintings of sunflowers by Emil Nolde from the walls of her office. Journalists presumed that Nolde’s anti-semitism and association with the Nazi Party made him no longer acceptable as décor. The fact that the Nazis at one time had categorized Nolde’s Expressionist work as “degenerate” could have been reason enough to allow the work to remain. Either way, Merkel did not offer any explanation for her decision.44 This news story brings to mind Janet Wolff’s discussion in Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art of her decision to use the image of Nolde’s Sunflowers (1932) for the cover of the second edition of the book and as evidence of her belief in the specificity of the aesthetic, especially as it has been subject to new art history methods, including Marxist, feminist and postcolonial criticism.45 Wolff’s work provides a means to grapple with the position-takings of left and right-wing critics as well as the field positions that have opened up in the context of Cultural Studies. Whereas Wolff doubts whether much of the work that is designated post-structuralist constitutes actual sociological analysis, the legitimate practice of the sociology of art is deemed to be a challenge to established humanist methods and values. One of her concerns is to not allow sociology to reduce aesthetic value to social and political issues but rather to acknowledge the specificity of the aesthetic and the autonomy of its institutions. To some extent, the historicity of aesthetic theory, especially as it relates to Enlightenment philosophy, is avoided in favour of the “social nature” of aesthetic experience and judgement. As Wolff argues, her work is a sociology of aesthetics and not a philosophy of art.46 Yet, if aesthetic value is irreducible to social, political and ideological coordinates, as she contends, the genesis of the theory and the practice of autonomy is ultimately less relevant than the position-takings that then make its specificity of prime importance. Disinterestedness has a history, but interestedness does not explain what makes art different from non-art. Despite the dispositions that have grown around them, popular art forms are not inherently superior to traditional art forms. Accounting for the class character of the genesis of the aesthetic disposition, she argues, does not invalidate that disposition. Whereas traditional humanist and hermeneutic defenses of the aesthetic are easy enough to criticize, class analysis alone is not enough to answer the question as to why some works are better than others, or why works of art offer aesthetic gratification.47 Further, what happens when a work that is politically incorrect, like Nolde’s Sunflowers, is found to be sophisticated, enjoyable or technically accomplished, and is therefore deemed valuable? What, she wonders, does she appreciate about the painting?48While the answer to this enigma is provisionally resolved in Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, a clearer picture emerges when it is combined with Wolff’s The Aesthetics of Uncertainty.49 In the former, Wolff is at pains to separate her sociological and materialist approach from the legacy of Western Marxism and Marxist aesthetics. While she presumes that Bourdieu’s sociology challenges the universalist tendencies of aesthetic theory, this is not quite accurate. A genetic sociology, insofar as it contributes to the Marxist theory of art, is primarily concerned with the critique of capitalist social relations and therefore makes the concrete universal of the totality the premise of its emancipatory reasoning. From this perspective, it is feminism, postcolonialism and indeed, social classes that do not exist independently of the capitalist system.50 It is for this reason that Bourdieu argues in Distinction that the working-class and petty-bourgeois habitus are subordinated to bourgeois disinterestedness – even if it has been argued since then that the petty-bourgeois habitus today plays a hegemonic role.51One gains a sense of Wolff’s desire to displace Marxism with a seemingly more comprehensive materialism in her discussion of Herbert Marcuse. Whereas Marcuse goes further than Georg Lukács’ critique of false totalities and of the aesthetic as a reaction to reified experience, his theory of art, as described for instance in The Aesthetic Dimension, remains, according to Wolff, universalist and humanist.52 She then goes on to criticize Louis Althusser’s structuralist theory of knowledge, which defines art as an ideological epiphenomenon. Wolff discounts the notion that Marcuse’s theory of art has Hegelian premises. The likely reason that she does this is because Marcuse’s decidedly Hegelian Marxism functions as one of the best examples of the ground that she wishes to stake for herself, namely, “a sociologically informed theory of the aesthetic.”53 One point to be made here is that it is not necessary to defend the belief in “objective standards” for aesthetics, as she argues, so much as it is necessary, if one wants to account for culture and its institutions, to explain it.In The Aesthetics of Uncertainty, Wolff moves further into the realm of academic post-structuralism and Cultural Studies. Her stated purpose, based on the postmodern sociology of Zygmunt Bauman, is to confront the “universal truths” of Enlightenment thought.54 Aesthetic experience and judgement are now deemed to be provisional and negotiated in relation to the gendered, racial and sexual bias of traditional aesthetics. The demise of unified theory and meta-narratives, she argues, calls for the recognition of cultural diversity and communitarianism as a consequence of the loss of faith in universals.55 Post-structuralism is now accepted as the alternative to monolithic theories, along with deconstruction, psychoanalysis and critical theory. Whereas these make for apparently more progressive and less totalitarian prospects than easy targets like anti-scientific creationism, religious fundamentalism and the conservative appeal to beauty and quality, a more difficult challenge would be to consider that the alignment of centuries of doubt with discourse theory is hardly a solution to neoliberal ideology.56The question of whether Wolff is at all concerned to challenge the alliance of postmodernism with neoliberalism is brought home in her discussion of post-Holocaust art. The well-founded aversion to the aestheticization of the Holocaust has led to arguments on the relative merits of beauty as a means to engage sympathetic reflection.57 While the extreme sadism and inhumanity of the systematic genocide of millions of human beings is thought by some to be unrepresentable, the real issue, she says, is the responsibility to understand and account for the Holocaust. The portrayal of violence risks producing gratuitous fascination, which merely reproduces the original crime and pre-empts the educative and empathetic intention of artworks. Abstraction is limited in this regard and differs significantly from the expressive realism that was produced by artists while in the concentration camps – though one should acknowledge that modernist forms of realism were the order of the day among artists in the 1930s. Abstract and avant-garde works are ruled out since it is presumed that such practices rely on competent viewers and are therefore too exclusive to meet the needs of Holocaust representation.Wolff does not say why it is that the work of modernist avant-gardists like John Heartfield, Käthe Kollwitz or Paul Klee should be dismissed from consideration. One can presume that the “historical” avant-gardes that are associated with Expressionism, Constructivism, Dada and Surrealism are considered inoperative since they failed to prevent the Second World War and the rise of fascism. Insofar as the idea of doubt doubles the transcendent principle of aesthetics in Wolff’s text, John Roberts’ theory of the avant garde, which combines Theodor Adorno’s notion of the adisciplinarity of the aesthetic with a post-art programme that is critical of autonomy, makes for a decidedly more radical theory of art that can simultaneously disclose and challenge the contemporary conditions of culture and politics.58 In any case, the kinds of leftist political commitment that the early avant gardes are associated with are by and large anathema to the countercultural logic of most postwar practices. Wolff seems to prefer work that is non-mimetic as well as non-abstract – such as that made by Ben Shahn, R.B. Kitaj, Anselm Kiefer and Cyril Reade – and which she says relies on the dialogic participation of the viewer. Her concern in this regard is for the work to encourage a “retrospective contemplativeness” that reconstructs traumatic historical experiences. This middling approach avoids the difference between what is properly retrospective and what flounders in the “terra incognita” of provisional, and one might assume, eternal undecidability.59Since the theoretical quandary about politics cannot be reduced to aesthetic versus anti-aesthetic strategies, Wolff’s discussion also avoids what it is that makes a contemporary work avant-garde. What she claims as an anti-anti-aestheticmove is rather an anti-aesthetic aesthetic move that defends the diversity agenda of postmodern academics.60 The communitarianism that The Aesthetics of Uncertainty promotes against a socialist alternative is a form of organic archi-politics combined with politically correct para-politics.61 If there is a Marxist agenda in this at all, it has long ago been suppressed and neutralized. Since universality is proscribed from the outset, and therefore so is class struggle, the realm of aesthetics requires exclusions that are the product of capitalist social relations. While a culturalized politics is ostensibly directed against the resurgence of the far right, this now neoliberalized politics has more in common with reactionary politics that it acknowledges.62 A political equivalent to this trend in culture is something like the attack against the democratic socialism of Bernie Sanders by the Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren campaigns, which denounced the candidate and the movement behind him as having a masculinist agenda – packaged for mass consumption as the Bernie Bro meme. In terms of sexuality, it is the kind of politics that sanctions the queering of sex while it censures heterosexuality as normative privilege. The logic is also prevalent in the racialist agenda, where for example the New York Times ‘1619 Project’ redefines the American Revolution as a slaveholders’ revolt. In each instance, identity groups compete for what is naively defined as hegemonic power. Such “radical” democracy, as theorized by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, is anathema to the universalist politics of class struggle.63 Too Me or Not Too Me?In The Shape of the Signifier, Walter Benn Michaels argues more forcefully than Wolff in favour of the ontology of the work of art and its meaning.64 In this, he criticizes the kind of postmodern theory that focuses on the so-called “materiality” of the work, its textualization and the subject position of the participant-reader. As with the pretense of identity politics to be concerned with the constituencies that its advocates claim to represent, such seemingly “critical” methods are not at all concerned with aesthetics and artworks. The reason for this is that meanings implicate people’s beliefs rather than simply their responses, their embodiment or their identity.65 Different subject positions do not disagree about anything fundamental, or generic, as Alain Badiou would call it.66 They are simply different. The post-historical world that replaces the struggle between socialism and capitalism with identity struggles, Michaels argues, is similar to the one that solves ideological problems with the satisfaction of consumer demands.67The postmodern end of meta-narratives transforms the histories of past injustices – slavery, anti-semitism, sexism – into a matter of constituency rather than common history, beliefs, principles and ideology. Like a genealogical family tree, post-historicism attempts to explain how people came to be who or what they are. When justice has been served, the question of how and why the injustice occurred no longer matters. Identity politics and the dispensation with history as the source of ideology are not part of a politics, but are rather, part of the postmodern condition.68 As Barbara Foley has it, identity politics are less valuable as explanatory frameworks than they are as an ideological reflection on the times in which they became prominent.69 If they are a politics, or an aesthetics, they do more to obscure than elucidate a class project, which does not require memory but universalist postulates that can guide practice. The problem on today’s postmodern “left” is that people need to be convinced that socialism is preferable to capitalism, and further, that socialism most comprehensively meets the exigencies of human emancipation. A politics of indeterminacy, like an aesthetics of uncertainty, must, as Ellen Meiksins Wood argued, accept the capitalist character of the democracy that it hopes can escape the conditions of exploitation.70 To return to the claim by Whyte that anti-semitism survived the Dreyfus Affair, or the orientation of MeToo activists that Geimer survived Polanski, the ideological sleight of hand that occurs in both cases is the valorization of identity over the persons involved. “The Jew,” Michaels writes, “is subsumed by their Jewishness.”71 Discrimination is the denial of someone’s universality on the basis of their identity. Polanski’s claim that the young women he loved were attractive to him because they did not have ideological investments or career concerns partakes of the same kinds of pseudo-events for which people do not live in history but only in sweet, or bitter, memories. What makes Polanski’s J’accuse a film that is geared to our times, whether you are for or against it, is the question of whether or not emancipation can be correlated to the politics of identity. Notes1. George R. Whyte, The Dreyfus Affair: A Chronological History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) xxvii.2. Rachel Donadio, “France’s Growing Pushback Against Roman Polanski,” The Atlantic (November 23, 2019), https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/11/roman-polanskis-officer-and-spy-receives-pushback/602506/.3. On the class function of new social media leaders in the NGO sector, see Endnotes, “Brown v. Ferguson,” Endnotes #4 (October 2015), https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/4/en/endnotes-brown-v-ferguson. On the political limits of identitarian activism, see Adolph Reed Jr., “The limits of anti-racism,” Left Business Observer #121 (September 2009), http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Antiracism.html.4. Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Roman Polanski and the Catastrophe of Public Discourse,” jonathanrosenbaum.net (May 29, 2018), https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2018/05/roman-polanski-and-the-catastrophe-of-public-discourse/.5. Ryan Grim, “Joe Biden, Five Years Before Invasion, Said the Only Way of Disarming Iraq Is ‘Taking Saddam Down’,” The Intercept (January 7, 2020), https://theintercept.com/2020/01/07/joe-biden-iraq-war-history/?comments=1.6. The Editors, “The Polanski Uproar,” The New York Times (September 29, 2009), https://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/the-polanski-uproar/.7. Samantha Geimer, with Lawrence Silver and Judith Newman, The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski (New York: Atria Books, 2013) 316.8. Nancy Tartaglione, “Venice Jury President Lucretia Martel Clarifies Comments On Roman Polanski: No Prejudice Against Competition Film ‘An Officer and a Spy’,” Deadline (August 28, 2019), https://deadline.com/2019/08/venice-film-festival-jury-president-lucrecia-martel-statement-roman-polanski-an-officer-and-a-spy-1202706241/.9. Ariston Anderson, “Venice Chief Alberto Barbera Defends Lack of Women Directors, Roman Polanski Inclusion in Lineup,” Hollywood Reporter (July 25, 2019), https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/venice-film-fest-chief-alberto-barbera-defends-lack-women-directors-roman-polanski-inclusion-1226993.10. Alice Pfeiffer, “Years After The MeToo Movement Began, Why Is The World Of French Cinema Still Honouring A Known Rapist?” Vogue (March 3, 2020), https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/roman-polanski-cesar-awards-2020-me-too.11. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1992] 1995) 347.12. Nancy Fraser, “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond,” American Affairs 1:4 (Winter 2017), 46-64; Marc James Léger, “Art World as Zombie Culture: Excellence, Exodus and Ideology,” in The Neoliberal Undead: Essays on Contemporary Art and Politics (Winchester: Zero Books, 2013) 5-16.13. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, [1999] 2005).14. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1998). See also Vivek Chibber, “Rescuing Class from the Cultural Turn,” Catalyst 1:1 (Spring 2017), https://catalyst-journal.com/vol1/no1/cultural-turn-vivek-chibber.15. Pascal Bruckner, “Interview with Roman Polanski,” An Officer and a Spy Venice Biennale Film Festival press kit, 2019, https://medias.unifrance.org/medias/191/74/215743/presse/an-officer-and-a-spy-presskit-english.pdf.16. Bruckner, “Interview with Roman Polanski.”17. Daniel Bird, Roman Polanski (Harpender: Pocket Essentials, 2002) 8.18. Polanski responds to these accusation in Hervé Gattegno and Aurélie Raya, “Exclusif – Roman Polanski: On essaie de faire de moi un monstre,” Paris Match (December 11, 2019), https://www.parismatch.com/Actu/Societe/Exclusif-Roman-Polanski-On-essaie-de-faire-de-moi-un-monstre-1664159.19. Samantha Geimer’s lawyer, Lawrence Silver, has collaborated with Polanski’s attorneys to bring the extradition case to a close, which has prompted retaliation by the California courts. See Lindsay Kimble, “Roman Polanski’s Victim Samantha Geimer Is ‘Pleased’ the Director Won’t Be Extradited, Says She Recovered ‘A Long Time Ago’,” People (October 31, 2015), https://people.com/celebrity/roman-polanskis-victim-is-pleased-he-wont-be-extradited/. For a synopsis of Polanski’s detainment in Switzerland and its legal precedents, see Jeffrey Toobin, “The Celebrity Defense: Sex, fame, and the case of Roman Polanski,” The New Yorker (December 14, 2009), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/12/14/the-celebrity-defense?verso=true.20. Polanski cited in Gattegno and Raya, “Exclusif – Roman Polanski.” Translation by the author.21. Robert Harris cited in Clarisse Loughrey, “Robert Harris says he won’t change position on Roman Polanski ‘because the fashion has changed’,” The Independent (June 24, 2018), https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/robert-harris-roman-polanski-position-fashion-changed-marr-bbc-latest-a8414186.html. See also Michael Cieply, “In Polanski Case, ’70s Culture Collides With Today,” The New York Times (October 10, 2009), https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/movies/11polanski.html?_r=1 hp.22. David Caputo, Polanski and Perception: The Psychology of Seeing and the Cinema of Roman Polanski (Bristol: Intellect, 2012) 60.23. Roman Polanski, Roman by Polanski (New York: William Morrow, 1984) 328. The French version of the book is more simply titled Roman, which is a play on Polanski’s first name and the French word for novel. See Roman Polanski,Roman, trans. Jean-Pierre Carasso (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1984).24. Polanski, Roman by Polanski, 344.25. On the discourse of the capitalist, see Jacques Lacan, Lacan in Italia, 1953–1978 / Lacan en Italie, 1953–1978 (Milan: La Salamandra, 1978). For a description Lacan’s four discourses – university, analyst, master and hysteric – see Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grieg (New York: W.W. Norton, [1991] 2007).26. Woody Allen, Apropos of Nothing (New York: Arcade, 2020) eBook, 527. Although Allen is known to have been friends with Jeffrey Epstein and defended Epstein in 2011 after sexual abuse allegations were brought against him, there has to date been no connections drawn between Allen and Epstein’s involvement in sex trafficking. See E.J. Dickson, “Accused Sex Trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s Political Connections: A Guide,” Rolling Stone (July 9, 2019), https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-lists/jeffrey-epstein-political-connections-sex-trafficker-856642/woody-allen-4-856678/.27. Allen, Apropos of Nothing, 501.28. Ellis Cashmore, Celebrity/Culture (New York: Routledge, 2006) 254.29. Melanie Goodfellow, “Roman Polanski to skip César ceremony to avoid ‘public lynching’,” Screen Daily (February 27, 2020), https://www.screendaily.com/news/roman-polanski-to-skip-cesar-ceremony-to-avoid-public-lynching/5147703.article.30. Polanski, Roman by Polanski, 295, 297.31. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression,” in Brian Wallis, ed. Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984) 106-36.32. Mark Fisher, “Exiting the Vampire Castle,” The North Star (November 22, 2013), available at https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/exiting-vampire-castle/. See also Brian Dixon, “Looking Down That Deep Hole: Parasitic Intersectionality and Toxic Afro-Pessimism,” Black Agenda Report (February 1, 2018), https://www.blackagendareport.com/looking-down-deep-hole-parasitic-intersectionality-and-toxic-afro-pessimism-part-2.33. Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 2006) 47-8. For further discussion on the desublimation of sexuality as the “operator of the antihuman” and as the major contender for an alternative to the ersatz absolute of hedonism, see Alenka Zupančič, What Is Sex? (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2017) and Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).34. Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 49.35. Geimer, The Girl, 75.36. Geimer, The Girl, 80.37. Geimer, The Girl, 129.38. Geimer, The Girl, 15-16.39. David Walsh, “The sordid coalition pursuing filmmaker Roman Polanski,” World Socialist Web Site (October 8, 2019), https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/10/pola-o08.html.40. Alex Lantier, “J’accuse (An Officer and a Spy): Roman Polanski’s masterpiece on the Dreyfus Affair,” World Socialist Web Site (November 19, 2019), https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/19/jacc-n19.html.41. On the defense of Polanski and due process by the legal profession, see Will Morrow, “French female lawyers publish open letter defending filmmaker Roman Polanski and the presumption of innocence,” World Socialist Web Site (March 13, 2020), https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/03/13/lawy-m13.html.42. Alex Lantier, “Roman Polanski gets César for best director for J’Accuse, in repudiation of #MeToo,” World Socialist Web Site (February 29, 2020), https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/02/29/pola-f29.html.43. Alex Lantier, “#MeToo collaborates with fascistic forces to block showing of Polanski’s film J’Accuse,” World Socialist Web Site (February 15, 2020), https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/02/15/pers-f15.html.44. Javier Pes, “Angela Merkel Purges Artworks by Emil Nolde from Her Office as a New Exhibition Explores His Nazi Past,” Artnet News (April 11, 2019), https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/nolde-berlin-nazi-history-1514296.45. Janet Wolff, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, second edition (London: Macmillan, [1983] 1993) xi, xiii.46. Wolff, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, 79.47. Wolff, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, 32-33.48. Wolff, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, 24.49. Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).50. For a discussion of the difference between concrete universality and nominalism as well as so-called materialism, see Slavoj Žižek, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Humanity (London: Allen Lane, 2018) 65.51. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Harvard University Press, [1979] 1984); Tony Bennett, “Habitus Clivé: Aesthetics and Politics in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu,” New Literary History 38:1 (2007) 201-28; Marc James Léger, “Welcome to the Cultural Goodwill Revolution: On Class Composition in the Age of Classless Struggle,” in Brave New Avant Garde: Essays on Contemporary Art and Politics (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012) 82-99.52. See Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, trans. Erica Sherover (Boston: Beacon Press, [1977] 1978). For Marcuse’s discussion of how capitalism has transformed art into a conformist and affirmative medium, see Biophily2, “Herbert Marcuse – Art as Revolutionary Weapon (1970),” YouTube (October 1, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9livubNajl4.53. Wolff, Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art, 46.54. Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty, 1.55. Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty, 2.56. See Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent, Foucault and Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Polity, [2014] 2016).57. Wolff, “The Iconic and the Allusive: The Case for Beauty in Post-Holocaust Art,” in The Aesthetics of Uncertainty, 57.58. See John Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant Garde (London: Verso, 2015).59. For art criticism developed along these lines, see Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2000).60. Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty, 70. See also Marc James Léger, “Retroactivating the Idea of the Avant Garde,” Journal of Avant-Garde Studies #1 (2020) 1-18.61. See Slavoj Žižek’s discussion of these concepts in “The Lesson of Rancière,” in Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, [2000] 2004) 71.62. On this subject, see Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).63. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). For criticism of the latter, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1995). See also Žižek’s contribution to Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000).64. Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004) 6-7.65. Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 8.66. See Alain Badiou, with Fabien Tarby, Philosophy and the Event, trans. Louise Burchill (Cambridge: Polity Press, [2010] 2013).67. Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 10.68. Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 170.69. Barbara Foley, “Intersectionality: A Marxist Critique,” Science and Society 82:2 (April 2018) 273.70. Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Why Class Struggle Is Central,” Against the Current (September/October 1987) 8.71. Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 148. Krystal: So, it’s time again for the moment when we reveal the official list of Rising winners and losers. [chuckles] Saagar: That’s right but this time we also have Kyle Corin on the show as an unofficial “post-Socratic” panel to weigh in on our weekly selection. But to start things off, the loser this week is the campaign to smear House candidate Alex Morse without any evidence of wrongdoing. Shame on those vampires on the woke left who are all too eager for another culture war victim. Krystal, what do you have for us? Krystal: Well, with regard to Washington… Saagar: Yeah. Krystal: … it’s almost impossible to say who’s a winner and who’s a loser when both parties are doing their darndest to be the unelectable lesser of two evils. All things being equal, the winner this week is Wall Street, which was really happy about Joe Biden’s choice of Kamala Harris as his running mate. However, the prize itself goes to Barack Obama, whose backroom orchestration of the Biden nomination is now capped off by the Harris VP pick. Harris’ neoliberal centrism is a brilliant insurance policy on the Obama legacy. If the Biden-Harris ticket wins the election, the neoliberal project will have once again proven itself to be the only game in town. If they lose, then accusations of racism and sexism will be available as a convenient alibi for the failure of this same neoliberal agenda. Hillary 2.0 will be blamed on the Bernie Bro left and the so-called “white working class” all over again, and the Democratic establishment will be able to carry on with its austerity, social inequality, criminalization of the poor, imperialist foreign policy and neglect of the ecological threat. And to make matters worse, Congress has decided to take four weeks of holiday time while the country is being ripped apart by the coronavirus pandemic, as unemployment benefits expire and so does the moratorium on evictions. America’s political representatives are going on a month-long “recess” while school reopenings are already leading to outbreaks of COVID-19. Not very inspiring, especially for the Democrats, who have a chance to prove their worthiness in comparison with the Trump Republicans, but all that will be forgotten when AOC gives her pre-recorded 60-second speech at the DNC! Saagar: Sounds about right, Krystal. Let’s see what Kyle and Corin have to say about all this malarkey. Corin: Okay, so I’m probably gonna say something stupid about this, but it looks like Joe Biden selected Kamala Harris for VP. Is she like, some badass cop whose gonna make America law and order again? Is she gonna make 2 litre soda bottles illegal and that kind of shit? Kyle: Aww, it’s bad, bro. I can’t tell you how bad this is for the country, man. She’s a neoliberal hack, man. She’s pro military-industrial complex, police unions. She puts people in jail for smoking weed, dude. She laughs about locking people up. Corin: But didn’t that Bernie Bro guy, Shaun whatshisname, the Black Lives Matter activist, say she’s like, the stuff of his wet dreams or something? Kyle: Naw man, they’re Clintonite New Democrats, dude. They’re why we have more people in jail per capita than anywhere else. Way worse than China. I don’t know why people always compare the U.S. prison count to the Chinese prison count. [laughs] Maybe it’s because “we have freedom” and they don’t or something like that. They’re gonna make America neoliberal again. Harris and Biden are the right-wing of the Democratic Party. Corin: I thought neoliberal meant, like neo-liberal, like, make America liberal again and that sort of shit, like JFK and FDR. Kyle: Naw, dog, that’s the identity politics and the woke anti-racism and anti-sexism. That’s why Bernie says it’s a “historic” moment for America. I love that guy, I really do, but he’s just bending the knee at this point. Like Biden said “listen here Jack” and Bernie turned into a ham sandwich. It’s sad to watch. She’s like Clinton and Obama, locking up immigrants, covering for the banks, supporting imperialism … and what happens? Wall Street gets a hard on for her because she’s going to make them rich. So bankers are all whacking off for the first African-American vice president – or whatever she is, half Jamaican, half Indian. God knows what Black Lives Matter has to do with any of this. She’s supposed to be “for the people,” but now people are satisfied if their elected officials look like Judge Judy. She says that leaders should reflect the people they are supposed to represent. So as a black woman she’s supposed to represent the diversity of the people, but instead she represents billionaires with diversified stock portfolios. It’s sad, man. Corin: Yeah, like now we’re supposed to say “Auntie Kamala” and shit, like “Bob’s your uncle” and she’s the prize in your Cracker Jacks. Please don’t arrest me, my eyes look like glazed donuts. Kyle: It’s fucked up. This new congresswoman from Georgia, Maggie Green or something, she’s like blowing up signs that have the word ‘socialism’ written on it with a machine gun and shit. [laughs] Her slogan is “save America, stop socialism!” [laughs] She’s talking about the “hate America left” and is going to be telling people that Kamala is an Antifa terrorist or a Moscow operative. She wants to help Trump stop China with tweets and stand up to the “tax and spend” D.C. swamp. So like, policy gets displaced right away into culture wars, as though Kamala Harris wants to take your guns away: “she’s just like Bernie … she vacations in Cuba and is part of a paedophile ring”! It’s messed. [laughs] Corin: I heard that your joke about Trump abruptly leaving the White House to get a McRib got used by the Republican National Committee on Twitter or something. I love those things, and the Bacon Burger. Bring back the McBacon Burger, those things are scrumpdillyicious, bro – maybe even better than the Crispy Chicken at Popeye’s. You can order those fuckers spicy because the spicy isn’t as spicy as they make it seem. They’re nice and soft on the inside and crispy on the outside. Shout out to Popeye’s mad chicken and fries, and mashed potatoes for Molly. Molly really likes their mashed potatoes. Kyle: Yeah, but dude, breaking news: she’s not going to legalize marijuana, so you won’t be able to satisfy your munchies if you’re paranoid about Homeland Security and national guardsmen at the drive through. Harris goes along with all of that Russiagate bullshit that Hillary Clinton promoted, getting hawkish about North Korea and Marge Simpson and crap. Her sister was a policy advisor for Hillary in 2016 – so that’s why people are calling this ticket Hillary 3.330. She’ll do anything to get convictions and lock people up, even if it’s illegal, with cops making up shit and she rubber stamps it saying it’s all good. She wants everything law and order for this aseptic high tech Elysium universe where people like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are raking in billions while people are losing their homes and going on unemployment. And she doesn’t care if people are cooped up in prisons, like stuffed in cages and with no health standards. She wants to keep them in chains as long as possible as a source of cheap labour. So inmates are sent out to fight wildfires for two bucks a day. Then she wants put kids’ parents in jail for truancy. Like, if you play hookie, instead of getting a pink slip, your dad goes to prison and your mom has to come up with 2000 bucks. Corin: Zeus! [drinks Dr. Pepper] Kyle: So she’s law and order on poor people but looks the other way for police and politicians. So no wonder Obama and Wall Street think she’s the perfect candidate. Big money donors love her because they can control her. She tries to look good on things like Medicare for All and $15 minimum wage, but she does that so people get pushed off food stamps. So there’s always a catch, like with Obamacare. So it’s like Cornel West says: Auntie disaster, just shy of Grandpa Trump. Corin: Yeah, she sounds like a real bitch. I usually have mad respect for people who don’t give a shit and are just doing their thing, but she seems like the same failed strategy as the last time. Kyle: It’s like the wealthy get everything and everybody else gets nothing, just misery. Corin: Yeah, like Chipotle has those banging ass tacos. I’ve been crushing Chipotle so long somebody should hit me up with something. I spent so much money there, somebody should say “bless this dude” with free Chipotle for life. But it’s the people who don’t need it, like Chrissy Teagan or something like that, who get it instead. Kyle: Yep, that’s how it works, dog. I wouldn’t want people who watch this show to think we push products to get free stuff – like makeup girls, “influencers” or whatever, who reach out to companies to get free stuff. Corin: Like those pyramid schemes that go after your bread with shampoo and dietary shit. People take advantage of people who are nice and will answer the phone or open the door or whatever. Everything’s corrupt. People sell out and they gotta do stuff and sell shit, but you gotta keep it real with people and tell them: no, I’m not interested in your fuckin … product that’s gonna change the world or something like that. Like look at my fucking Crocs. They’re fucking comfy. They have a lot of rubber, so it’s like, if you’re walking on a hard surface, like wood or cement, you don’t even know it. They’re made out of crude oil and they’ll probably end up floating in the middle of the ocean at some point, even if I put them in the proper recycling. But the point is they’re ugly, they’re super comfy, but super ugly, so you have to let people know these things so that they make them better looking next time. Kyle: Yeah, because any day they could go belly up. It’s like one day Taco Bell is huge and then it’s Chipotle and it’s all over for Taco Bell when they thought they were selling all the tacos in the universe, like tacos from Earth to Neptune and back ten times. It’s like Sears or Macy’s. Or it’s like a casino – one day you’re at the top and then you re worth Dickee McGeezaks. Like politicians in Congress sold off all this stock before the crash. They knew it was coming. Regulation on Wall Street is non-existent. Corin: It’s not fair because in a real casino, you gotta get blackjack, once in a while. It’s crazy because it’s such a big part of our economy … we’re so fucked. Like when Anna Nicole Smith was dating some older guy. It’s in people’s nature to pull somebody down who’s on the rise. We’re just not supportive people. Like I was watching Millionaire Matchmaker and a football player is on a date and the person Googles him and it changes the dynamics. Things start to look weird on the optics. Like Crocs start to get too clunky or too comfy, if that’s even possible. Kyle: When good stuff happens, it’s easy to undermine it. No one calls bullshit – no one is cool with doing that anymore. It’s easy to undermine the left by using our ideas against us. Corin: But that doesn’t apply to Joe Biden. They just brush it off when he does bad things. But the left, the DSA, they’ll immediately denounce people. That’s what they do. Kyle: It’s so easy to undermine the left. In 1970 this person said something off-colour, before they were even born, and everybody’s out to get them. It’s like even their parents said we should abort this baby we want to name Kanye because he’s going to be a Trump supporter later on. But it doesn’t work the way you intended. It’s called the “grandfather paradox.” Even if some Congressman says he would do that, it wouldn’t turn out the way you want it and instead of Joe Biden it’s Amy Klobuchar who’s the nominee and Bernie gets busted for saying he doesn’t think she would be a good president because she s lame. Corin: They’re never heard of again, like Al Franken, the guy from SNL. He’s never been seen again. It’s like the whole Steve Bartman thing, the Cubs fan who interfered with the ball. Everybody wanted to kill that guy. Kyle: And Kamala Harris was part of that. She was one of the first people to call for his resignation as Senator because of allegations of sexual misconduct, even if none of it was proven and anyway would have been below misdemeanour level. So it’s like a race to the bottom. Both parties are competing to lose the election and to lose people’s confidence, as though the more of a loser you are, the better your chances of winning. And they say the left likes to lose. Corin: Government is like Yelp, they give each other only bad reviews because they want to steal their customers. People expect that the food should be good but then they have a bad meal so everybody’s like, fuck ’em all, we’re going on holidays to play golf and shit, when instead they should be sending people free masks. I’m like, I can’t vote for Andrew Yang because I can’t do the math. I’m just confused at what they do in Washington. Kyle: Good ideas go nowhere if it’s too positive. They keep their ratings down so no one gets their expectations up. Corin: The polls are down. They can’t vote by mail. Is the mail on or is it down? I tried to send a basketball to Canada but it got sent back. So you lose confidence that the system works and next thing you know everything is UPS and people are delivering stuff in their cars and driving like some fucked up racecar driver to make all their deliveries on time. Kyle: It’s gonna get scary, bro. Corin: Yeah, it’s weird. Imagine trying to give someone an answer without knowing what you’re doing? Kyle: Occam’s razor: take the simplest answer. Corin: Who’s razor? Oh damn, I thought it was Gillette. Is this the best VP we can get? The View will be happy about Kamala Harris because it’s like your McRib joke – they don’t have to think about anything. They’ll have her on and make her dance. Kyle: But you can’t say that because they’ll say you re racist. They’ll get Hollywood to try to make you feel like you’re conservative. They’re worse than the Republicans with culture wars. As long as a Dem is in office they re happy and they think everything’s okay. Or as long as it’s a woman or black person then it’s progress. We make it look like we’re on the left, so we’re all in on identity stuff while corporations are ripping people off. Corin: That’s why I give people props about being positive about Cori Bush. It’s like the conspiracies around Dr. Pepper. They tell you there’s a big shortage and there’s no more Dr. Pepper, but I went to the gas station to get a Diet Coke, and there it is. They said it’s not supposed to be there. So it’s like they tell you that you can’t have Cori Bush but then you go to the store and they had Cori Bush all along. They just didn’t want you to know about it because they’re promoting Kamala Harris now. Kyle: It’s like the boy who cried wolf. I bought mad Twinkies when they said it’s the end. I thought they might go away forever. Corin: It’s like those fucking Tamagachis. There were just four buttons on the bottom and you gotta keep pressing. Or like, I have three dogs. One smells bad. I’ve got these real comfy slippers and he slobbers over one of them. It smells so bad because his fucking breath is kicking. Kyle: Just Febreze the slipper and use Listerol for the breath, man. It depends what your dog eats. Corin: That’s gotta be toxic. Listerine is a tough battle. That shit burns. The more stinky your breath is, the more it burns. There’ll be a medical journal article on it in five years because it’s so potent. Kyle: No, it’s refreshing. I like the burn of it! That’s just life. It is what it is. It’s like this blue shit, Cool Mint Listerine. Scope won’t do it. Let it fuck you up! Saagar: So, we came for Secular Talk, but we stayed for Corin’s World. What does that tell you, Krystal? Krystal: Ima get down for a Dr. Pepper and a taco! [chuckles] No, seriously though, what these pro-Wall Street shape-shifters amount to is just another Trump down the road.

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