No one is an exception to being human. Being human is exceptional.
Exceptionalism Must Go
I ‘love” these lines from Paul Celan’s poetry.
Death Fugue
1920 –
1970
Black milk of morning we drink you evenings
we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes
he writes when it darkens to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
he writes and steps in front of his house and the stars glisten and he whistles his dogs to come
he whistles his jews to appear let a grave be dug in the earth
he commands us play up for the dance
Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you mornings and noontime we drink you evenings
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes
he writes when it turns dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
Your ashen hair Shulamit we dig a grave in the air there one lies at ease
He calls jab deeper into the earth you there and you other men sing and play
he grabs the gun in his belt he draws it his eyes are blue
jab deeper your spades you there and you other men continue to play for the dance
Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you at noon we drink you evenings
we drink you and drink
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamit he plays with the snakes
He calls out play death more sweetly death is a master from Deutschland
he calls scrape those fiddles more darkly then as smoke you’ll rise in the air
then you’ll have a grave in the clouds there you’ll lie at ease
. . . . . . .
he plays with the snakes and dreams death is a master from Deutschland
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamit
Paul Celan, as is well-known, was a luminous poet and chronicler of the Holocaust (actually, I’m starting to wonder about the aptness of that capitalized “H” as monopolized by that historical moment, and indeed this post is mostly about that unease, but . . . ). He was born in Ukraine to German-speaking Jews. Another time of people living a sort of low-key cosmopolitanism, in a sense.
Celan took his own life early, perhaps unable or unwilling in the end to reckon with what he’d witnessed, what he’d borne witness to, what he’d testified to: the Holocaust.
The suffering of the genocidal object as blackened mother’s milk. What stronger image can there be, after all, for that basic break with the human covenant named Genocide?
And yet, genocide has become a popular sport now is a world ruled largely by mad men! Today, I woke up to hear Israel had bombed Iran, and Iran is threatening a terrible rebuttal.
Will there be a Third World War?
Some say it’s started already.
Today, Israel and Iran are exchanging volleys of hate out of jingoistic furor. Samuel Huntington had prophesied the Clash of Civilizations in 1993.
"The West versus the Rest"
This seems our permanent precipice these days. Any moment, anywhere, the third world war could start. Could this be the end of humanity?
Yes.
And if so, its root cause, I believe, would be loose cannon EXCEPTIONALIST NATIONALISMS.
America, of course, is usually primarily associated with the concept and practice of national exceptionalism. But what I argue in this post is that this phenomenon is by no means confined, if it ever was (think about the British empire! Rule Britannia!), to America anymore.
And I mean the phenomenon exists not just in bad ole public sphere, but in our own hearts and minds. Let’s not pretend innocence—we elect leaders who are the snake oil salesmen of the tenet.
Like the salesmen now dominating (a word I choose deliberately instead of “ruling”) America, Israel, Russia, India, and more. See how these and other nations are infected by the madness of their megalomaniacal leaders? In Buddhist cosmogony such creatures would be called “Hell Beings.”
Works for me.
Think, for instance—particularly with “Death Fugue” as backdrop— of how Israel, born of such suffering and such reckoning with insanity, is now a primary aggressor in global conflict networks. It is mass exporting the Jewish holocaust to Gaza against the consent and conscience of many Israelis and Jewish people worldwide, and despite its absurd inconsistency and historical incongruity. How come? Because in the end conflicts are usually about the interests of the upper classes, not the cannon fodder—You, Me. Their head honchos, who control the controls, are the mad men running the planet, apparently with not a blink of a startled eye at concocting their own potential species extinction.
I don’t usually relativize. But today’s world conflicts are relativizing the Holocaust and other historical genocides. So that we see that genocides are not race-specific. They are political hydras. They can and do arise again and again, irrespective of place, people, time and culture. Because they’re not about place, people, time, and culture. They’re about the abiding, eternal interests of the One Percent (or less).
So could Celan’s lines just as easily be about slaves in American plantation society in the past, and Palestinians in Gaza, Ukrainians in Russia-encircled Ukraine, or Rohingyas and other “bulldozered” minorities in India today?
Yes, they can. They are.
How do we stop all this, us ordinary folks who don’t want any more black milk to drink? Personally, how do I hope for my son and his children a future that’s livable?
We can start by demanding that citizens of countries like America, Russia, India and Israel reject NATIONALIST EXCEPTIONALISM as a political or cultural claim or value.
Any nation or race that adopts exceptionalism as its identity and default stance has broken its covenant with humanity and returned to a primitive State of Nature.
America’s “exceptionalism” is of course, too well known to require glossing. Trump’s MAGA is only the latest label for it. Similarly, Israel is founded on an almost identical theory of the manifest destiny and right of the Jewish nation to occupy historically Palestinian land. This theory is now being applied at the missile launcher’s mouth by a dedicated Netanyahu. Putin’s Russia reimagines itself as a revived/lost glorious Russian empire that never was but should have been, at the expense of sovereign neighbors like Ukraine.
India. Ah India. What a pity. Postcolonial India with its secular dream took its cue from an ancient syncretic tradition of governance and culture. That tradition was one of assimilating, certainly over time, recurring waves of new arrivals. That dream lies shattered at the base of a monolithic leadership that proclaims India can only be a Hindu Holy Land.
Exceptionalism, a concept largely alien in the deep time of India’s history, in other words.
Yes, national exceptionalism must go. Or we are doomed. We must stop electing leaders who win on the promise of making not all, but only a few of their electors great again. Of aggrandizing their nation at the expense of neighbors and the rest of the world.
Finally, what nurtures, croons over exceptionalism, among other things?
“Only connect,” E. M. Forster said. Exceptionalism is fed by ignorance and prejudice birthed in lacunae in deep knowledge and critical thought. And on that, here’s something from Wells-Wallace in the NYT.
Ponder it.
"Conventional wisdom places conspiracy theory at the political fringe, some recent research suggests the sweet spot for it is among those with left-wing economic beliefs and right-wing cultural ones.
One explanation that has acquired a special shine lately is that we have left behind an age of literacy, which was defined by a certain kind of critical thinking, and are entering something that more resembles an oral culture. This idea of an oral revival has been poking its way into the conversation every few years as a way of characterizing the downstream effects of podcasting and social video and TikTok. (A related term, recently coined by Kate Wagner, is “phoneworld.”) But I’ve always felt it was especially well described by Caleb Crain almost two decades ago, before all of that, in an essay called “Twilight of the Books”:
In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.
But what happens when history starts to resemble myth, when the inconsistencies reveal themselves not through deep study but in the most superficial scroll of our phones?
The new age of political paranoia obviously reflects a toxic efflorescence of grass-roots distrust, not to mention the structural pathologies of a new information environment. But sometimes I wonder whether we’re putting too much emphasis on those structures in trying to make sense of that paranoia. Is conspiracy theory downstream from culture, in other words, or from history? Is it a question of how information flows to us or what flotsam is coming our way? Probably the influence doesn’t run in just one direction, however comforting it may be to believe a less polluted information environment is just a few design tweaks away.
Much of the resulting pattern is horrifying and disorienting to me, including the way that paranoid thinking works to excuse actual conspiracy, making once-outrageous betrayals of public trust seem like an intuitive response to power. (Perhaps they are.) But given the recent run of history, I can’t say I’m entirely surprised so many have started to see the world more conspiratorially, either".
No one is an exception to being human. Being human is exceptional.