April 2019 – Common Infirmities

Yeoman Trump: Saul Steinberg and the fascist politics of outer-borough resentment

Reading How Fascism Works by Yale philosopher Jason Stanley — which is interesting, though not quite the general theory of fascism that the title promises, but something more like a Prolegomenon to a Theory of Trumpism — I was interested by his discussion of the valorisation of rural life as a fundamental feature of fascism, and of Trumpism.

Fascist politics feeds the insulting myth that hardworking rural residents pay to support lazy urban dwellers, so it is not a surprise that the base of its success is found in a country’s rural areas… Anticity rhetoric had a central role in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections… Fascist politics targets financial elites, “cosmopolitans”, liberals, and religious, ethnic, and sexual minorities. In many countries, these are characteristically urban populations. Cities therefore usefully serve as a proxy target for the classic enemies of fascist politics.

Among the many peculiarities of Trump’s appeal — the lifelong sybarite as hero of self-identified Christian conservatives, the draft-dodger as champion of the military, the man who built an empire off cheating ordinary workers as tribune of the (white) working class — is the profound support that a Manhattan real-estate developer, with an almost comically New York accent, found among anti-cosmopolitan small-town and rural voters.

This is where I think Saul Steinberg’s classic representation of New York psychology can help us. Objectively you might think that the scion of an ultra-wealthy New York real-estate empire is an urban insider. But they were from Queens. Seen from 9th Avenue, Donald Trump was just another outer borough yokel. He might as well have been digging potatoes out on Long Island. McKay Coppins described this well in The Atlantic at the start of Trump’s presidency

Though he was born into a wealthy family, partaking of the various perks and privileges afforded to millionaires’ offspring, Trump grew up in Queens—a pleasant but unfashionable borough whose residents were sometimes dismissed by snooty Manhattanites as “bridge-and-tunnel people.” From a young age, he was acutely aware of the cultural, and physical, chasm that separated himself from the city’s aristocracy. In several interviews and speeches over the years, he has recalled gazing anxiously across the East River toward Manhattan, desperate to make a name for himself among the New York elite.

The most successful politicians have a howling vortex of resentment at their core, that resonates somehow with the resentments of a large fraction of the populace. If there’s anything genuine about Trump’s political persona it is this: He genuinely shares the feeling of the average American that educated elites are looking down at them. And no amount of money or cheering crowds can fill that void.

The power of baselines

From today’s Guardian:

It took decades to establish that smoking causes lung cancer. Heavy smoking increases the risk of lung cancer by a factor of about 11, the largest risk ratio for any common risk factor for any disease. But that doesn’t make it peculiar that there should be any non-smokers with lung cancer.

As with my discussion of the horrified accounts of obesity someday overtaking smoking as a cause of cancer, the main cause is a change in the baseline level of smoking. As fewer people smoke, and as non-smokers stubbornly continue to age and die, the proportional mortality of non-smokers will inevitably increase.

It is perfectly reasonable to say we should consider diverting public-health resources from tobacco toward other causes of disease, as the fraction of disease caused by smoking declines. And it’s particularly of concern for physicians, who tend toward essentialism in their view of risk factors — “lung cancer is a smoker’s disease” — to the neglect of base rates. But the Guardian article frames the lung cancer deaths in non-smokers as a worrying “rise”:

They blame the rise on car fumes, secondhand smoke and indoor air pollution, and have urged people to stop using wood-burning stoves because the soot they generate increases risk… About 6,000 non-smoking Britons a year now die of the disease, more than lose their lives to ovarian or cervical cancer or leukaemia, according to research published on Friday in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

While the scientific article they are reporting on never explicitly says that lung cancer incidence in non-smokers [LCINS] is increasing, certainly some fault for the confusion may be found there:

the absolute numbers and rates of lung cancers in never-smokers are increasing, and this does not appear to be confounded by passive smoking or misreported smoking status.

This sounds like a serious matter. Except, the source they cite a) doesn’t provide much evidence of this and b) is itself 7 years old, and only refers to evidence that dates back well over a decade. It cites one study that found an increase in LCINS in Swedish males in the 1970s and 1980s, a much larger study that found no change over time in LCINS in the US between 1959 and 2004, and a French study that found rates increasing in women and decreasing in men, concluding finally

An increase in LCINS incidence could be real, or the result of the decrease in the proportion of ever smokers in some strata of the general population, and/or ageing within these categories.

What proportion of lung cancers should we expect to be found in non-smokers? Taking the 11:1 risk ratio, and 15% smoking rate in the UK population, we should actually expect about 85/(15×11)≈52% of lung cancer to occur in non-smokers. Why is it only 1/6, then? The effect of smoking on lu estimated that lung cancer develops after about 30 years of smoking. If we look back at the 35% smoking incidence of the mid 1980s, we would get an estimate of about 65/(35×11)≈17%.

The meddling EU

I think maybe the leftist Euroskeptics have a point:

Henceforth mushroom steaks will be called “fungus slabs”. The meat of a nut will be the “nut turd”. Coconut milk is exempted, but what was formerly called coconut meat will now be known as “interior coconut lumps”.

This has nothing at all to do with protecting meat and dairy producers, and it has everything to do with the outcry from carnivorous consumers who buy “veggie sausages” as a main course to go with their veggies, and then are outraged to find that they’re not really “sausages” at all.

Mother’s milk may only be referred to as human mammary excretions. The “milk of Paradise” that Kubla Khan drank will, in future editions, be “slime of heaven”.

Weirdly, “salad cream” is exempted. The German Käsefüsse (cheese feet), for stinky feet will still be permitted, owing to their animal origin.

Strangest of all is the restriction on the word burger. While it has its origins in the word hamburger, from a meat dish common in Hamburg — oddly, this has not received AOC protection — among the earliest uses of the term “burger” is for the vegeburger, attested by the OED in a 1945 advertisement. The word “hamburger”, on the other hand, will be banned entirely, as it tends to promote cannibalism.

Henceforth a nothingburger will be called a nullity on a bun.

“Sausage” is only allowed to be of animal origin, even though the word has its origin in the Latin salsicia, meaning “salted”. And the English word meat itself, unlike the German Fleisch (and its English cognate flesh) has traditionally meant any kind of food, as in the phrase “meat and drink”, and the now somewhat archaic word sweetmeats.

Performances of Romeo and Juliet in the EU will now require that the third act be revised to remove the line

Thy head is as full of quarrels, as an egg is full of meat.

Because eggs have no meat, and it would be misleading to suggest to the audience that they do.

The strange and disturbing life of Hugo Bettauer

I’ve become fascinated by the early-20th-century Austrian writer Hugo Bettauer, author of the prescient satire on antisemitism Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City without Jews). It’s a fascinating look at how Nazism (and allied antisemitic movements) appeared, a decade before it came to power in Germany, when it still seemed a tolerable subject for humour. Among the more striking features of the novel: The Austrian chancellor who proposes the law describes himself as a great friend and admirer of the Jews, in a frighteningly devious speech. The middle-class Viennese women, in Bettauer’s depiction, are distraught at the loss of the Jewish men, with whom most of them were having sexually adventurous and lucrative extramarital affairs. The Jews themselves are portrayed as essentially indifferent to their expulsion (with one important exception), and many of them move to the obviously more tolerant and cosmopolitan Germany. And when the Jews are ultimately allowed to return it is not because anyone has any sympathy for them, but only because it has become clear how useful they are for the economy, and how boring life in Vienna is without them. In one of the weirdest bits of rhetoric, an elderly lawyer, speaking to the salt-of-the-earth waiter in the now empty (because mainly Jews used to populate the cafes) traditional Viennese cafe, remarks

Wien versumpert, sag’ ich Ihnen, und wenn ich als alter, graduierter Antisemit das sag’, so ist es wahr, sag’ ich Ihnen! Ich wer’ Ihnen was sagen, Josef. Wenn ich gegessen hab’, muß ich, Sie wissen’s ja am besten, immer mein Soda-Bikarbonat nehmen, um die elendige Magensäure zu bekämpfen. Wenn ich aber gar keine Magensäure hätt’, so könnt’ ich überhaupt nichts verdauen und müßt’ krepieren. Und wissen S’, der Antisemitismus, der war das Soda zur Bekämpfung der Juden, damit sie nicht lästig werden! Jetzt haben wir aber keine Magensäure, das heißt, keine Juden, sondern nur Soda, und ich glaub’, daran wer’n wir noch zugrund’ geh’n!«

Vienna is rotting, that’s what I say, and when an old dedicated antisemite like me says that, you can believe it. Let me tell you something. After I eat, you know I always have my little bit of bicarbonate of soda, to fight the stomach acid. But if I didn’t have any stomach acid, I wouldn’t be able to digest anything, I’d just croak. And you know, antisemitism was just the soda to fight against the Jews, so that they didn’t get too annoying! But now we have no stomach acid, that is, no Jews, but only soda, and I think we’re all going to perish.

Curious about his life, I had a look in Wikipedia, and found numerous brief remarks that each seemed like there was material for a feature-length movie hidden behind it, if not for a whole miniseries. The son of a wealthy stockbroker, Bettauer ran away from home at the age of 16 to Alexandria, “where the Austrian Consul sent him straight back again”.

In Zürich he married the love of his youth, Olga Steiner, with whom, after the death of his mother, he emigrated to the United States. During the crossing, in a disastrous speculation Bettauer lost his entire fortune.

Unable to find work in the US, despite acquiring US citizenship, Bettauer and his wife moved to Berlin, where he became a prominent journalist.

In 1901 after the suicide of the director of the Berliner Hoftheater, whom he had accused of corruption, Bettauer was expelled from the Kingdom of Prussia

Following a divorce and then remarrying during another eventful crossing to America, and half a decade as a journalist in New York, he returned to work for the Neue Freie Presse in Vienna, where he was then excluded from army service in WWI because of his US citizenship. In one of the oddest turns,

In 1918, after an altercation caused by a defective typewriter, he was fired from the Neue Freie Presse.

He went on to become a prominent and controversial novelist — Greta Garbo’s first international film was based on one of Bettauer’s novels — until he was assassinated by a Nazi dentist in March 1925. The assassin was declared insane, and released after 18 months in a psychiatric clinic.