“Perhaps the only way to grant any justice” to the refugees who have died in the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts, or anywhere on their journey toward a dignified life, Valeria Luiselli wrote in her 2017 essayTell Me How it Ends is by “hearing and recording [their] stories over and over again so that they come back, always, to haunt us and shame us.” This story, she writes, must be “narrated many times, in many different words, and from many different angles, by many different minds.” Her essay chronicled Luiselli’s time as a court interpreter for undocumented children facing deportation in New York City; with her new novel, Lost Children Archive, she turns to the stories of the children who never arrived.
LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE: A NOVEL by Valeria Luiselli Knopf, 400pp., $27.95
The plot reads as if ripped from 2018’s headlines, even if it is ostensibly set sometime in 2014, when over the course of nine months the number of child refugees from Mexico and Central America detained at the southern border of the Unites States surged to over 80,000. The authorities saw the “crisis” as a problem to be managed—what do we do with all these children?—rather than reckoning with the conditions that prompted their flight. “No one thinks of the children arriving here now as refugees of a hemispheric war,” Luiselli writes. “No one is asking: Why did they flee their homes?”
The surge of young refugees prompted the Obama administration to create a priority juvenile docket, so that the immigration cases of unaccompanied minors from Central America would go to the top of the court’s list. The effect was as intended: A greater number of children were deported back to the intolerable conditions they risked their lives to flee. “In legal terms,” Luiselli wrote in Tell Me How it Ends, the priority juvenile docket was a way “to avoid dealing with an impending reality suddenly knocking at the country’s front doors.” That reality is still knocking. During the month I read Lost Children Archive, tear gas was being launched from the U.S. side of the Tijuana border at members of the migrant caravans that walked from Honduras to Baja, California and two Guatemalan children, Jakelin Caal Maquin, 7, and Felipe Alonzo-Gómez, 8, died within weeks of each other under the custody of Customs and Border Protection.
How can one make art that takes such an issue as its theme, or that, more importantly, honors the lives of its most vulnerable victims? How can one not?
Lost Children Archive begins with a family packing for a road trip across America’s Southwest. Their trunk contains seven bankers boxes of their “collected mess.” Boxes I-IV belong to the husband, a sound documentarian who has recorded “echoes” of Apache history throughout the Southwestern landscape. He packs notebooks with titles like “On Documenting,” “On Listening,” “On Reenactment,” and a treatise on Native American history. The mother, a radio journalist reporting on the growing “immigration crisis” at the border, fills a box with reports and maps of migrant deaths in the desert. The final two boxes belong to the older son, 10, and the younger daughter, 5, who gradually accumulate notes and Polaroids from their trip.
This collected archive gathers and presents the sets of concerns of the story: questions of family-making, historical awareness, and political responsibility. It also points to what can never be recorded—the stories of the refugee children lost to the desert through which the family travels, children who have “lost the right to childhood.”
“The story I need to tell,” the mother narrates, “is the one of the children who are missing, those whose voices can no longer be heard because they are, possibly forever, lost.” Yet, that’s not quite what Luiselli does: Rather than write a novel in which she fictionalizes the lives of migrant children, she has written a novel all about the impossibilities and difficulties of creating such a novel. The mother, too, spirals into doubts as she considers her own audio piece on the plight of migrant children facing deportation: “Political concern”: “How can a radio documentary be useful in helping more undocumented children find asylum?” And even if it could, is she the right person to make it?
Constant concerns: Cultural appropriation, pissing all over someone else’s toilet seat, who am I to tell this story, micromanaging identity politics, heavy-handedness, am I too angry, am I mentally colonized by Western-Saxon-white categories, what’s the correct use of personal pronouns, go light on the adjectives, and oh, who gives a fuck how very whimsical phrasal verbs are?
These concerns could be read as Luiselli’s thinly-veiled anxieties about her own books. One of the novel’s most insistent themes is the tension between preservation and exploitation. When looking through her soon-to-be ex-husband’s boxed archive, the narrator finds Sally Mann’s Immediate Family and senses Mann’s portraits confessing that each “moment captured is not a moment stumbled upon and preserved but a moment stolen, plucked from the continuum of experience in order to be preserved.” She plucks from the lives of her own children—in one of the novel’s first scenes, she and her then-new husband record her daughter farting while she sleeps. But later she hesitates: “I don’t want to turn this particular moment of our lives together into a document for a future archive.”
The mother is not the only character in Lost Children Archive who borrows from others. The husband is intent on recording “an inventory of echoes” of the Apaches (if you are confused by what this actually means, you are not alone; at one point, he records the ambient sounds of Geronimo’s grave.) These echoes are meant to represent an “absence turned into presence, and at the same time, a presence that makes an absence audible.” The metaphor gets a bit overcooked throughout the novel—at times it feels like echoes echo the echo of other echoes echoing. Characters in a book the mother reads to her stepsonecho the “real lost children” migrating across the desert, who echo the mother’s own two children who, in their own games, echo “bands of Apache children,” and who, later in the novel, like “the real lost children” end up lost themselves. While an echo can be revealing, it can also just be repetitive.
Amid these reverberations, Luiselli’s narrator voices her suspicion that the methods of storytelling cannot sufficiently represent contemporary experience. “Something has changed in the world,” she writes. “We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it.” While driving through North Carolina, the family walks into a bookstore and the mother overhears a book club in the middle of a discussion. What follows is a comically rendered consideration of the purpose and efficacy of autofiction. The members say things like, “Despite the quotidian repetition … the author is able to hinge on the value of the real.” The consensus of the group “seems to be that the value of the novel they are discussing is that it is not a novel. That it is fiction but also it is not.”
The comment is very pointed, since Lost Children Archive, while not necessarily a work of autofiction certainly has its own heavy-handed dose of truthiness. If the novel is and is not fiction, and the mother narrating is and is not Luiselli, Luiselli can evade the potentially uncomfortable questions raised in her nonfiction. “Why did you come to the United States?” Luiselli asks the children in Tell Me How it Ends, and she also has to ask that of herself. While she doesn’t offer an answer, her own story of immigration—the right kind of immigrant with the right documentation for the right process—serves as a foil to the stories she translates. We don’t know what the mother’s story is in Lost Children Archive, or how her experiences relate to or contrast with those of the refugees. Her family, we are led to believe, is ambiguously brown. The mother was not born in United States; the husband “was also born in the south,” but their own story of migration is curiously absent.
Things get murkier when it comes to the husband’s fascination with Native American history. To be sure, the novel’s insistence on connecting colonial genocide and the current immigration “crisis” is incisive. But what is the husband’s own relationship to settler colonialism? When pressed on why he had become suddenly fascinated with the Apache, and with Geronimo specifically, the husband’s mumble of an answer—“because they were the last of something”—leaves too many questions unanswered in the text.
The most telling gap in the story comes when the two children decide to get lost in the desert. Midway through the book, the point of view shifts from the mother to the son, and we follow him and his sister as they walk from western New Mexico into the Chiricahua Mountains, and, over a 20-page-long sentence, the son’s narration is transposed with the stories of refugees crossing the border. This turn is at once mesmerizing and baffling—the many children’s voices become merged and disembodied, their experiences crescendo into a somewhat mythical unreality.
More than once, the mother has wondered aloud how her own children would fare under the circumstances faced by child refugees. When the children play a game of reenactment, imagining themselves thirsty and lost in the desert, the mother first finds the game “irresponsible and even dangerous” but then wonders if “any understanding, especially historical understanding, requires some kind of reenactment of the past.” She asks, “I wonder if they would survive in the hands of coyotes, and what would happen to them if they had to cross the desert on their own. Were they to find themselves alone, would our own children survive?” The same question appears in Tell Me How it Ends: “Were they to find themselves alone, crossing the desert, would my own children survive?”
These questions are meant to elicit empathy—if one can imagine one’s own children facing such horrors, one might care more about the horrors that other children face. But to ask, what if it were me? elides a more uncomfortable question: why is it not? The first question does little more than allow the mother to believe that she has carried out some form of moral reckoning, albeit from her own position of relative safety as, presumably, a documented immigrant or a citizen (the book surprisingly never clarifies this). The second question might reveal how her family’s position of safety benefits from the same state apparatuses that allow such horrors to even exist. That question implicates them; it suggests that understanding might require, more than empathy, a sense of political responsibility.
In England, listeners Start the Week with the BBC radio program of that name, a superior chat show about new books and whatnot. On Monday, June 9, 1997, one of the guests was Eric Hobsbawm, who was by then perhaps the best-known historian in the country, or even in the world. It was his eightieth birthday, and after the show, despite his half-hearted protestation, a cake was cut and champagne opened. Five weeks earlier, Tony Blair and his New Labour Party had won in a landslide at the general election, and Hobsbawm raised a glass to that. The new government soon repaid the compliment, and the following year Hobsbawm became a Companion of Honour at Blair’s recommendation, kneeling before the Queen at Buckingham Palace as she placed the ribbon round his neck.
ERIC HOBSBAWM: A LIFE IN HISTORY by Richard J. EvansOxford University Press, 800 pp., $39.95
Although Hobsbawm expressed some disdain for the 1960s, it was then that he first became prominent. Tony Judt once wrote of “a discernible ‘Hobsbawm generation,’” those “who took up the study of the past . . . between, say, 1959 and 1975, and whose interest in the recent past was irrevocably shaped by Eric Hobsbawm’s writings.” The books Hobsbawm published in those prolific years—Primitive Rebels, The Age of Revolution, Labouring Men, Industry and Empire, and Captain Swing—showed the influence of the French Annales school, with its emphasis on the longue durée, a broad sweep of social and economic as well as political change. And there was also a new interest in “history from below,” the story, for too long neglected, of the toiling mass of the people, and their struggle against oppression, or sometimes against progress: “Captain Swing” was the mythical leader of riots that swept parts of rural England in 1830, protesting against the introduction of new harvesting machines.
Over the next two decades, Hobsbawm ascended far beyond the confines of academic history. Although he retired from his chair at London University when he was 65, it was only to become a professor at the New School in New York. The next two volumes of his “Age” trilogy, The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire, reached a much larger public, and by his seventies he was making a good deal of money. His 1994 coda to the trilogy, The Age of Extremes, on “the short twentieth century, 1914–1991,” was garlanded with praise (if not unanimous), made the British best-seller list, and was translated into an astonishing 30 languages. Hobsbawm became a Fellow of the British Academy, a holder of too many honorary doctorates to list (including Oxford, Chicago, and Vienna), a Commander of the Brazilian Order of the Southern Cross, and a member of the Athenaeum Club in London, traditional home of bishops and vice chancellors. All in all, he was not only a media star. He conspicuously belonged to what’s called the Establishment.
This was the extraordinary culmination to an extraordinary story, with an extraordinary beginning. Hobsbawm’s parents were both Jewish. His father, from London, married his Viennese mother in Zurich but moved for business reasons to Alexandria, when Egypt was a somewhat ambiguous part of the British Empire. Eric was born there, a British subject, in the fateful year of 1917. The Hobsbawms moved to Vienna, where he spent his early childhood (he spoke German with an audible Viennese lilt all his life) in genteel poverty. One evening his father came home “from another of his increasingly desperate visits to town in search of money to earn or borrow” and collapsed and died. Eric was eleven, and fourteen when his mother also died.
He went to live with an aunt in Berlin, where private sorrow was overtaken by public events. As a schoolboy he was swept up in mass politics, working for the German Communist Party, and bravely distributing its leaflets, even after Hitler became chancellor in January 1933 and began his reign of terror. Soon after that, Eric and his sister were brought to England, where several family members lived. Although he found London sadly provincial, he flourished mightily, learning English at remarkable speed, winning highest grades in almost every subject. He went on to King’s College, Cambridge, where more plaudits awaited, graduating in 1939 with a double starred First in history, editorship of the undergraduate magazine, and membership of the Apostles, the self-consciously clever elite club.
But that was only part of his life. Hobsbawm joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1936, the year of the Spanish Civil War and the first Moscow Trials. Many were attracted to communism then, but nearly all those converts later shed party and creed. Hobsbawm almost uniquely remained a party member for 55 years, until communism itself was thrown onto what Trotsky had called the dustheap of history. He was an active Communist until 1956, and although he grew increasingly detached as he watched the decline and fall of Soviet Russia and its empire, he was also completely impenitent.
That story of his early years was brilliantly and succinctly told by Hobsbawm himself in his 2003 memoir, Interesting Times. This authorized biography by Sir Richard J. Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History, is less brilliant, and far less succinct. Evans is an academic historian, former Regius Professor at Cambridge, and author of a three-volume history of the Third Reich. His book is thoroughly researched, largely based on Hobsbawm’s own copious papers, but diligence is not matched by a sense of proportion or lightness of touch.
On occasion before now, Evans’s obduracy has been invaluable. In a famous libel action in 2000, which became the subject of the dramadoc Denial, the extreme right-wing provocateur David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt, an American historian, and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel when she had described him, correctly enough, as a Holocaust denier. Although English libel laws are heavily weighted in favor of plaintiffs, Penguin defended the case in court, and won a famous victory. The crucial witness for the defense was Professor Evans (played by John Sessions in the movie), whose testimony demonstrated not that Irving was a racist and neofascist—which would have been superfluous—but that he was a fraudulent historian.
Here that same obduracy is a real drawback. The book is far too long, more chronicle than biographical work of art, and Evans writes with plodding earnestness, aggravated by the fact that he is in such awe of his subject. He dedicated his last book, The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815–1914, to Hobsbawm’s memory, and this book is profoundly admiring and almost morbidly defensive; at the same time it’s almost too revealing. One reviewer praised Hobsbawm’s memoir for its reticence about his personal life, a reticence that Evans, for all his humorless manner, doesn’t emulate. Where Hobsbawm merely wrote of his deep unhappiness when his first marriage broke up in the early 1950s, we learn from his biographer that Muriel, Hobsbawm’s first wife, “needed to be fucked all night long.” Could this be too much information?
And yet Evans discredits Hobsbawm even as he tries to defend him. After the Daily Worker had said in 1937 that the whole British labor movement recognized “the scrupulous fairness” of the Moscow Trials and “the overwhelming guilt of the accused,” young Eric offered his own justification: “The accusations are not intrinsically impossible,” he wrote. “That the Trotskyists should wreck seems clear,” which Evans can only feebly call “unconvincing.” Hobsbawm stuck to the party line after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939, and actually co-wrote with Raymond Williams a defense of Stalin’s attack on Finland months later. Reading Evans, unconvincing himself, I was often reminded of H.G. Wells’s saying that the ideal biographer would be a “conscientious enemy”: someone hostile to his subject and what he stood for, but compelled in honesty to try to understand him and his beliefs.
After five years in the army, Hobsbawm returned to King’s as a junior fellow, but he was checked in further academic promotion, and possibly in publication as well, likely for political reasons: Although there was no purge of Communists from universities in England as there was in the United States, to be a known Communist was a disadvantage. He and several others openly formed the Communist Party Historians’ Group after the war, and paid a weird visit to Russia over the Christmas of 1954, “a dispiriting trip for foreign communist intellectuals, for we met hardly anyone there like ourselves,” Hobsbawm obtusely said. He did find a post at Birkbeck College, where he spent 35 years, the last 15 of them as a professor. This admirable institution, part of the University of London, is for mature students who often have day jobs, and teaching them in the evenings left Hobsbawm’s own days free for reading. He did little archival research, but his books are founded on a huge breadth and depth of printed sources in numerous languages.
Having cut his teeth on the laboring poor, the labor movement, and plebeian rebellion, Hobsbawm put that breadth of learning to use in great works of synthesis, depicting the almost unimaginable political, social, and economic transformation of Europe between French Revolution and Great War. He was criticized for paying too little attention to the world outside Europe (as Marx himself had done), but he was a man of his time, and in any case that “age of empire” was inescapably one defined by what Europe did to the rest of the world.
Always with Hobsbawm, the concrete particular illustrates the general. As he narrates revolutions in travel and communication, he tells of the great migrations that transformed the United States, as well as of those forgotten Italian “swallows” who went to and from Buenos Aires every year as seasonal laborers. Almost more remarkably, 200,000 Americans—equivalent to one-twentieth of the American population in the first years of the Republic—were among the million tourists who visited Switzerland in 1879. And he has a gift for apt quotation. Hobsbawm came to love Italy and to be revered there, but he recognized the emptiness of the Risorgimento in a country where in 1860 only one person in 40 spoke anything we would call Italian, and where many people felt like the mother he quotes, telling her son to escape the draft, “Scappa, che arriva la patria” (“Run away, the fatherland is coming”).
From Hobsbawm’s early days as a Communist, the British domestic security service, MI5, kept files on him. Evans has seen these files and makes much use—not to say heavy weather—of them, deploring such surveillance. Most of these reports aren’t especially illuminating, although one eavesdropper in Cambridge in 1953 recorded a fellow of King’s saying that “Hobsbawm would shoot us with regret,” and another that he “was thoroughly out of date with his Communism and was still in the ‘popular front’ era.”
People of that generation who had been Communists, for whatever length of time, resented the suggestion that they might have served as Soviet agents, but Hobsbawm doesn’t offer them much comfort. Although he said that he didn’t know any of the “Cambridge spies” before the war—Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby et al.—he added, “We knew such work was going on, we knew we were not supposed to ask questions about it, we respected those who did it, and most of us—certainly I—would have taken it on ourselves, if asked. The lines of loyalty in the 1930s ran not between but across countries.” No doubt so, and the same might have been said by John Amery and William Joyce, who helped Germany rather than Russia, and were hanged as traitors.
In early 1940, Hobsbawm was drafted into the British Army but never left English soil during the war, or rose higher than sergeant, despite trying to get a commission, no doubt because the security services had their eye on him. He lamented that he hadn’t been able to make better use of his obvious gifts, maybe at Bletchley Park, the house where numerous Kingsmen, including his colleague, the mathematician Alan Turing, broke the Germans’ Enigma code, shortened the war, and incidentally created the modern computer. But if he boasted that he would have served as a Russian spy had he been asked, then maybe MI5 got it right in his case.
Most of Hobsbawm’s remaining comrades left the Communist Party in 1956, after the Russian invasion of Hungary and Khrushchev’s secret speech condemning Stalin. Hobsbawm did not. He said that the suppression of Hungary had been “a tragic necessity,” and although he dropped out of party activity, he never renounced or denounced communism. At the very end, he said, “Much of my life, probably most of my conscious life, was devoted to a hope which has been plainly disappointed, and to a cause which has plainly failed: the communism initiated by the October Revolution,” a recognition of the blindingly obvious for which he was nonetheless hailed by some. The best answer came from Robert Conquest. He was Hobsbawm’s exact contemporary, and briefly, in the late 1930s, a fellow Communist, before he became the outstanding historian of the horrors of Soviet communism, beginning with his 1968 book The Great Terror. Conquest pointed out that it wasn’t a question of “a cause which had plainly failed”: It could never have succeeded.
And yet while acknowledging defeat, Hobsbawm continued to insist that communism had been a noble endeavor. Even if he had known at the time the full extent of human loss, he believed that the “chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing,” and the deaths of 20 million people would have been justified. He said that in an interview in 1995, and in the same year, he told another interviewer that by remaining in the Communist Party all his life, he had “retained the moral high ground.”
He had shown the same grotesque self-righteousness much earlier, as Evans recounts. The writer Neal Ascherson was once a favorite and brilliant pupil of Hobsbawm’s at King’s, but before Cambridge, Ascherson had been drafted into the Royal Marines for National Service, and fought as a subaltern in the British campaign against Chinese communist insurgents in Malaya. Shortly after he arrived at King’s, there was a college festivity to which new undergraduates were invited, and by way of dressing up Ascherson put on his Malaya campaign medal. When Hobsbawm saw it, he said angrily, “You should be ashamed to wear that.” Ascherson went down to the front lawn and “walked around it, weeping,” never to wear the medal again.
This was in October 1952. Two months earlier, on “the night of the murdered poets,” 13 prominent Russian Jews—including the former members of the wartime Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and the country’s best-known Yiddish writers—were arrested, taken to the Lubyanka, tortured, and, after a form of trial, all shot. Although those trials and executions were secret at the time, Soviet anti-Semitism was not. In his own memoir, Hobsbawm sheepishly admitted that ignorance of the reality of Soviet life was not an excuse. He read the Daily Worker as well as the “bourgeois press,” and knew about the campaign that Stalin’s henchman Andrei Zhdanov had launched in 1948 against “rootless cosmopolitans,” Stalin’s way of saying “Jews” when he wanted to shoot a few more of them.
The MI5 report quoted another don who said that Hobsbawm “would probably not survive if the Russians came,” a truth Hobsbawm himself never once seems to have recognized. Maybe the reason why “we met hardly anyone there like ourselves” in Russia was that such people had all been killed by the regime he supported. What conceivable right did he have to tell anyone else to be ashamed of himself? Even at the end of his life, it didn’t seem to occur to him or his admirers that if they insisted on identifying socialism with a system whose salient features were slave labor, judicial torture, gang rape, racial persecution, and mass murder, then most people would find it neither surprising nor indeed regrettable that by the end of the twentieth century what they called socialism was dead.
“I love to read Eric Hobsbawm,” the American economic historian David Landes once began a review, and so do I. As a member of Judt’s “Hobsbawm generation,” I’ve enormously profited from reading him. If only one could enjoy Hobsbawm the historian while ignoring his politics. Evans is no help, as he writhes in defensive contortions, trying to wish away the problem. When someone wonders whether a self-proclaimed fascist would have received the honors that Hobsbawm did, Evans snarls that, “of course, fascism, unlike Communism, was a political creed characterized by anti-intellectualism and made no contribution whatsoever to historical knowledge and understanding.” But surely Evans might have noticed that some of the most famous imaginative writers of the past century were drawn to fascism, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Hamsun, and Céline among them. So what? Yeats’s great late poems make a profound “contribution” to literature and even to our understanding of ourselves, but no one says that on that account we should take a more lenient view of his yearning for an Irish Mussolini.
How much of a contribution communism, as opposed to Marxism, made to historical knowledge may be debatable. Indeed, how far was Hobsbawm at his best really a “Marxist historian”? It’s amusing to look back on the way that the Communist Party Historians’ Group divvied up English history—Rodney Hilton the medievalist, Christopher Hill on the seventeenth century, Hobsbawm for more recent times—and attempted to stretch and squeeze each period on the procrustean bed of Marxian technique, with varying degrees of success. Hill made particularly energetic efforts to show that the English Civil War of the 1640s was a class conflict, but this work has been largely discredited, whereas Hobsbawm survives, maybe because he so often managed to transcend ideology.
One of Hobsbawm’s most eloquent admirers is Perry Anderson of the New Left Review, who thinks that The Age of Extremes was his masterpiece. I disagree, and I’m afraid that part of the problem is inescapably political. For all of Marx’s genius in describing his own society in his own time, the fact is that nothing that he said would happen did happen. Hobsbawm wrote that “without the Leninist ‘party of a new type’ of ‘professional revolutionaries,’” it is inconceivable that within 30 years of the October Revolution “one third of the human race would find itself living under Communist regimes.” But such a cadre or cabal carrying out a putsch was one of the developments quite unforeseen by Marx. So were the rise of fascism and the advent of the social-security state, and on all of these Hobsbawm is evasive and unconvincing.
Even the “Age” trilogy has its problems. Anderson gently chides Hobsbawm for paying too little attention to the bourgeoisie in The Age of Extremes, but just as serious is the way that the preceding trilogy ignores what was, at least numerically, by far the largest class in nineteenth-century Europe: the peasantry. While Hobsbawm was fascinated by agrarian society, his focus was on the Primitive Rebels and Bandits about whom he wrote so well. But rebels and bandits were unrepresentative: Most peasants were devout and submissive, which is of course why Russian and Chinese Communists hated them so much, and waged war against them.
Reading Hobsbawm can be perplexing, because what he thinks he is telling us is not at all what he is best at. Anderson has also said that aesthetics may turn out to have been Marxism’s strongest suit, which is just as well, a cynic might reply, considering how weak its economic and political suits have been, but it’s true that Hobsbawm was marvelous when describing bourgeois culture in its heyday. In his collection of essays Fractured Times, it’s hard not to detect a yearning for that lost world. He writes brilliantly about “Mitteleuropa,” Habsburg Vienna, and his favorite writer, Karl Kraus, who was a critic of that bourgeois society but also a product of it. He relishes art nouveau civic architecture, which he perceptively notes was characteristic not of national capital cities “but of the self-conscious and self-confident bourgeoisies of provincial or regional ones”—Munich, Glasgow, Helsinki, Barcelona. He even has maps, like the one telling us where Wagner’s Siegfried was originally performed, from Riga to Barcelona to Buenos Aires.
Still more unmistakable is his distaste for modern “commercialized worldwide mass culture.” In later years, Hobsbawm became a pronounced cultural conservative, damning the ’60s for its sex, drugs, and rock, and for its architectural spoliation, while saying very correctly that the most conspicuous artistic development of the late twentieth century was the final and total bankruptcy of the avant-garde (he scarcely needed to cite minimalist music, Jeff Koons, and the “literary novel”). Maybe his conservatism wasn’t just cultural: He praised “the most admirable of human movements, the Enlightenment,” and not long before he died in 2012, Professor E.J. Hobsbawm, Companion of Honour, said to a friend of mine that maybe constitutional monarchy was after all the best political arrangement.
He outlived the dreadful political system he had so long believed in, and his books outlive those beliefs. “Time that with this strange excuse,” as Auden put it, “Pardoned Kipling and his views, / And will pardon Paul Claudel, / Pardons him for writing well.” Eric Hobsbawm too.
Photograph Source Sgt. 1st Class Gordon Hyde – Public Domain
Now that President Donald Trump’s sleight-of-hand has just moved $1 billion and soon possibly $5.1 billion more from the Pentagon’s $674 billion FY2019 allocation to furnish labor and materials to build his border wall, he’s opened precedent to actions he’s probably never imagined. But domestic activists surely can—and will—if fast enough. So could those in Congress once they stop caterwauling about his “reprogramming” Defense funds they stipulated only for “repairs to existing structures.”
The Corps of Engineers has been assigned to build that “emergency” wall—plus fix roads, lighting in the Yuma-El Paso areas—with Army personnel, construction materials, and vehicles on the American taxpayers’ allocation to the Pentagon’s spending. For FY2020 its take of a proposed $750 billion from federal appropriations is nearly 53 percent of $1.4 billion in the discretionary spending section.
However, because of that action and the Pentagon’s past use of “reprogramming,” the doors could also swing wide to “reprogramming” billions for two real and major national emergency crises threatening our domestic security, let alone the Constitutional guarantee of providing for the common defense, ensuring domestic tranquility, and promoting the general welfare of the American people. The two threats are the oncoming environmental catastrophies and infrastructure repairs to prevent the pending collapse of the nation’s bridges, highways, railways, waterways, dams, levees, and airports.
Moreover, today’s taxpayers certainly know by now that the Pentagon has cash available to cover this kind of “defense,” considering decades of audit avoidance. The public has long suspected billions have covered waste, cost overruns, and defunct or questionable projects, like the recent $11.5 billion order for 141 of the technically troubled F-35 fighter jets at $89.2 million apiece.
Tell that to California’s forest fire victims who’ll probably never recoup their collective $12.4 billion in losses of homes and businesses. Or those suffering from the devastating Midwestern floods that may reach far more than $3billion. And particularly the still-recovering thousands of Puerto Ricans two years after Hurricane Maria ($94 billion). Coastal areas are expected to be under natural “attack,” as in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy struck New Jersey and New York City ($70.2 billion) risking the lives of 50 million. The West Coast is bracing for the planet’s “Big One,” an 8.0earthquake which in Los Angeles alone carries a prediction of 1,800 dead, 50,000 injured, and $200 billion damages. Those living near dams, whether age-cracked or erosion-undermined, had to be unnerved two years ago when a 30-foot hole developed in California’s Oroville dam requiring the evacuation of 100,000.
Even when the Pentagon was called the “War Department” up to 1949, its leaders were masters at the ability to shift Congressional appropriations to respond to domestic priorities, especially addressing horrifying natural disasters. Its past and present history on that score demonstrate current officials are well aware that these two oncoming juggernauts are far more immediate and critical to Americans than protecting corporations’ billion-dollar “national interests” by building and maintaining 800 bases around the globe.
The Pentagon has had a heroic past where its branches took on the heaviest and immediate burden of disaster relief on land and waterways and even in reinstalling utilities when local power companies were overwhelmed. Its greatest moment domestically was in the rescue-and-relief operations of the great 1927 Mississippi seven-state flood, America’s worst natural disaster so far. Its men and women saved more than a million lives, one journalist reporting that:
Within two days, its people were on the front lines: 800 large ships from the Navy and 128 small boats from the Coast Guard pulled 43,853 people off rooftops, chimneys, utility poles, railroad cars, collapsing levees and treetops. The Coast Guard’s 674-member rescue team also saved 11,313 head of livestock and rushed 72 injured refugees to hospitals. The Navy and National Guard flew endless rescue-and-supply missions. The Army furnished tents, cots, blankets, rations, and field kitchens to the thousands of refugees in 154 levee camps—even teaching basic plumbing skills.
Because the tightfisted President Coolidge refused to part with a dime of public money to cover the stratospheric costs of these actions, Department officials obviously “reprogrammed” its allocations to cover their emergency mission.
In the early 1930s, the Pentagon’s Corps of Engineers became the key administrator for the immense coast-to-coast, billion-dollar infrastructure programs of the Great Depression’s WPA (Works Project Administration) of President Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Corps taught nearly nine million destitute and unemployed men and women (18-65) how to build or repair everything from dams and bridges to roads, hospitals and schools throughout the U.S.
Meantime, the Army itself also was the mover-shaker of nearly 3.5 million single men (18-25) in the New Deal’s CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) to fix equally immense environmental disasters on federal and state lands—everything from reforesting the country and reseeding Dust Bowl areas to fighting fires and erosion’s devastation.
The CCC-ers were directed by other departments and agencies (Agriculture and Interior, National Parks and Forest Services), but the Army furnished transport to its3,000 camps —Alaska to Puerto Rico and California to New York—as well as tents, barracks, and equipment. They lived Army style and were fed, clothed, given medical/dental care, and educated (40,000 learned to read; thousands took vocational and college-level classes by mail).
A Columbia University Earth Institute spokesperson has noted the Pentagon has been keenly aware of climate change since 1990 and up to the Trump regime has been “actively working” on how to cope with “the worst effects of global warming, including flooding, extreme heat, extreme weather, and more.”
Former Defense secretary Chuck Hagelin 2014 revealed those plans and needs for the heavy lifting required to forestall an Armageddon:
Among the future trends that will impact our national security is climate change. Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict. They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe.
…. The military could be called upon more often to support civil authorities, and provide humanitarian assistance and disaster relief in the face of more frequent and more intense natural disasters….Politics or ideology must not get in the way of sound planning. Our armed forces must prepare for a future with a wide spectrum of possible threats, weighing risks and probabilities to ensure that we will continue to keep our country secure. By taking a proactive, flexible approach to assessment, analysis, and adaptation, the Defense Department will keep pace with a changing climate, minimize its impacts on our missions, and continue to protect our national security.
Among the needs Hagel foresaw were:
* Fixing coastal military installations vulnerable to flooding.
* More frequent humanitarian-assistance missions from increasingly intense natural disasters.
* Weapons and other critical military equipment to cope with more severe weather.
As for infrastructure, even back in 2017 long neglect by federal and state governments was estimated to cost taxpayers an astronomical $4.59 trillion, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). They add that the railway portion alone needs $154.1 billion in upgrades.
Failure to act now, it continually warns procrastinating officials, means even greater repair efforts and costs—or facing destruction, especially in the vast rural areas. For urban businesses and residents, broken transportation systems equal lost profits, lost business-tax revenues, lost jobs, and, thus, lost tax payments to local, state, and federal governments.
But president after president, Congress after Congress in recent years have given only lip service to addressing these needs, seemingly because of astronomical costs and immensity just for repairs, let alone construction and maintenance of new ones. It’s cheaper to just declare a national emergency and cut a check for a few millions in relief. Or toss paper towels at disaster victims. But also because these needs are not their needs.
Yet public fury is simmering about paying $5.6 trillion for endless wars since 9/11—including building, staffing, and maintaining at least 800 bases abroad. They may not be aware that Environmental Protection Agency has suffered significant retrenchment in regulations and key staff cuts since Trump’s people have applied the snickersnee, but they have begun to see and feel the disastrous fruits of current governmental neglect. So it is with almost no action on infrastructure: gigantic potholes, cracked pavements, traffic-clogged highways, bridges near collapse, lead-laced drinking fountains, deadly train wrecks, polluted waterways, diminishing wetlands, and dangerous deterioration of dams.
For example, Trump’s 2018 State of the Union’s speech assigned Congress to spend $1.5 trillion on new infrastructure over, say, 30 years, but said nothing about repairing older infrastructure. The treasury barely has $200 billion available, meaning that the rest would require gutting other federal programs—especially for social programs—and require state and local governments to float municipal bonds instead of using their tax revenues or raising them. As with President Obama, it’s been all words, no action in Trump’s halfhearted demand, signaled by his 30-year timeline.
Nor has Congress bestirred itself despite a specifics-heavy bill to fix the infrastructure with a public-works—15 million jobs—offered by Sen. Bernie Sanders and six colleagues. Its $1 trillion price tag would be repaid over the years, the text promises, by rolling back the GOP’s tax cuts for the rich and closing loopholes exploited by Wall Street billionaires.
The Pentagon’s purported concern for both infrastructure and the environment thus far has not offered to pick up the ball by its historic “reprogramming” appropriations for previous potential national disasters of the kind forecast by the ASCE or legions of environmental experts. Its “ox” will be equally gored.
The irony is that the Pentagon was one of the principal lobbyists, designers, and overseers for President Eisenhower’s 1956 $25 billion-dollar, 41,000-mile, four-lane divided interstate highway system, the largest public-works project in U.S. history. His military background and personal knowledge all but shouted that America’s roads, bridges, and tunnels were in such shambles they’d never withstand an enemy attack. Equally, the Pentagon’s view was that highways and bridges would be so clogged by millions of fleeing civilians, it would be impossible for rapid movement of men and material. America’s highways, Ike noted, had “appalling inadequacies to meet the demands of catastrophe or defense, should an atomic war come.”
The Interstate Highway bill’s original name, “The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act,” certainly reflected Ike’s and the Pentagon’s heavy and urgent hands. Passage was lightning fast. Within two months of introduction in April it was law by June. As one historian said about military factors in design:
…throughout the system, mile-long stretches of concrete pavement double as emergency landing strips for military aircraft. Many Army posts, especially where division-level units are garrisoned, are near interstate highways.
Curiously, Ike and the Pentagon knew that in WWII, railroads moved more than 90 percent of military freight and men were equally important to be in superb shape. But Congress obviously recognized that more voters traveled by car than rail so this essential got sidetracked, as it were.
Financing was a matchup of 90% federal money to 10% from states, all deposited into a Highway Trust Fund holding fuel and vehicle taxes and investment proceeds. Considering the Pentagon’s intense interest and direction of this massive project—and inclusion of its name in the original bill—the huge startup costs obviously had to have been initially defrayed once again by “reprogramming” allocation money into construction.
Though the program was a public-works project, it could not wait for a new WPA to be organized and so the country’s largest companies such as Kiewit went after the contracts which did provide thousands of jobs building and repairing the Interstate system’s current 48,489 miles.
In short, years of precedents to “reprogram” expenditures indicate that if the Pentagon can shift them to build a border wall blocking immigrants, surely they can do the same for these two far, far greater priorities in protecting the nation’s infrastructure and environment.
To build Trump’s wall will require diverting only a few hundred troops. But to solve both infrastructure and environmental challenges will remove thousands from active duty—which the Pentagon can’t spare, particularly because the Army itself is short 64,000 to 74,000 recruits.
But this and the two chief objectives could be achieved—plus a positive image for the Pentagon—if its leaders “reprogrammed” the Army’s recruitment system to include the resurrection of the WPA/CCC to attract 18-25 year-olds interested either in environmentalism or engineering. Or degree-holders waiting to get jobs in their fields. A recruit would spend two years either in the new WPA or CCC, then have a month to decide whether to spend the next two on active duty or take a discharge with noVA benefits?
Even if only half of the recruits finished the initial two years, the Army would be gaining thousands of healthy, drug-free, disciplined, purposeful, top-of-the-line soldiers—and potential careerists. Troublemakers and the troubled would have been washed out within weeks. And those opting out after two years would have acquired field experience with state-of-the-art equipment and techniques. They would have enrich resumes for a leg up on career prospects.
Costs would be minuscule compared to the ASCE’s staggering infrastructure projections and ruinous estimates for the nation’s environmental needs. Taxpayers would no tbe funding private corporations because the program’s expense would be already covered within Pentagon allocations and earmarked for training, housing, food, uniforms, healthcare, pay—and construction costs like those 800 bases. Its warehouses certainly house plenty of supplies for erecting temporary barracks and tented camps, food and clothing—not to mention tools, equipment, stockpiles of building materials, fuel, and heavy construction machinery and vehicles. Environmental goods also are readily available in Corps of Engineers storehouses.
Reprogramming Pentagon dollars to address the nation’s critical infrastructure and environmental needs has everything to recommend it.
The Trump Administration and Congress would sigh with relief that those nagging domestic problems are being solved. The national debt would not increase to pay private industry for these immense undertakings, something FDR did by refusing to privatize the WPA/CCC programs. The Pentagon not only would fill its empty ranks with top-flight troops but regain its heroic standing with the public for providing its monumental resources for the real“common defense” of this country in the critical years ahead.
It could then risk asking Americans, “so what’s not to like about today’s Pentagon?”
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“At 99 percent of the speed of light, the entire sky converged before our eyes,” intones Monte (played by Robert Pattinson), one of the lonely sailors aboard a mysterious starship, early on in Claire Denis’s new film High Life. “The sensation of moving backwards even though we’re moving forwards, getting further from what’s getting nearer. Sometimes I just can’t stand it.” He’s one of several prisoners huddled aboard a brick-shaped vessel, zooming toward a black hole to carry out an energy experiment that will result in their certain death. Denis’s film confronts that funereal irony with her characteristic bleak wit and sense of invention. Monte’s mission is utterly futuristic, but the circumstances in which his crew mates find themselves are familiar—they’re going forward and backward simultaneously, making great progress for humanity at great moral cost.
Throughout her directing career, Denis has reveled in the intimacy and skin-crawling horror that can bubble up when bodies are thrown together in some unusual context—whether that’s the Djibouti outpost where lustful soldiers clash in her masterpiece Beau Travail, or the Parisian dating scene, as in last year’s Let the Sunshine In. High Life follows that format, taking a bunch of nervy convicts and cramming them into a cold, clinical environment to be both physically and emotionally tested. But the film is also a surprising departure for Denis in a number of ways: It’s her first science-fiction movie, it’s entirely in English, and it’s her first collaboration with Pattinson, a marquee idol who has transformed into one of art cinema’s most exciting presences in recent years.
High Life is a nebulous, sometimes gory, and other times strangely lurid experience, lightyears away from the stately, epic tone of sci-fi classics like 2001. Denis is working with a smaller budget and a limited number of sets, but her film is still suffused with the awe-inspiring mixture of dread and calm that only outer space can conjure. There’s nary an action scene or death-defying set piece, but the bizarre situation unfolding aboard Monte’s unnamed vessel is chilling enough to make the viewer question the value of life. The prisoners are staring down the inscrutable void of a black hole, and as the film progresses, they start to reflect that existential terror in all kinds of fascinating, and sometimes even hopeful, ways.
Monte and his companions—who include the gardener Tcherny (André Benjamin), the passionate Boyse (Mia Goth), and the sociopathic Ettore (Ewan Mitchell)—are all outcasts from society, their lives deemed disposable when weighed against a world-saving mission. High Life’s fragmented screenplay (written by Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau, and Geoff Cox) gradually reveals the characters’ back stories as it cuts between various timelines. Much of the movie’s early portion, however, focuses on Monte and an infant girl he’s raising named Willow—both of whom, it’s revealed, are the last surviving prisoners. As the pair stumbles around the deteriorating craft, Denis fills the soundtrack with the wrenching sound of the baby’s crying, until Monte finally begs Willow to stop before he loses it. Later on in the film, as the details of the child’s birth unravel, it becomes clear that Denis is telling a story about love being stretched to its absolute limits.
The few glimpses Denis allows of Earth are drearily industrial, while the ship itself, designed by the artist Ólafur Eliasson, is more of a gilded cage: a smooth-looking series of boxes, grilles, and panels that are almost oppressively free of personality.The prisoners are subjected to nightmarish experiments by Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche), a fertility specialist who is trying, and failing, to create new life in the most hostile of environments. Binoche plays Dibs as a sort of cosmic witch; she sports an impressive tangle of jet-black hair and has all kinds of surgical torture devices at her disposal (including a chamber called a “Fuck Box” that’s exactly as visceral as it sounds). But really, she’s a soul as tormented as everyone else on the ship—someone wrestling with the possibility that humanity, as an ongoing endeavor, might be doomed.
That’s the grim undercurrent boiling away in many a Denis film, but particularly here, as befitting a tale that speculates on the end of the world. Yet even as the situation aboard the ship gets stranger and tenser, High Life keeps cutting ahead to that eerie coda of Monte and his daughter, alone together, barreling toward unavoidable death but inextricably bonded. For all its body horrors and apocalyptic conclusions, High Life is one of Denis’s most loving and tender creations.
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