As the impeachment “trial” opens in the Senate today, here is special DAILY curated to commemorate that.  I am hopeful at some point in the next few days I can remove the quotation marks from around the word “trial” and Moscow Mitch will be unsuccessful in his cover-up and the gaslighting of the Trump defense team will not be taken as seriously as it has so far by the media’s pundit class which has bought into it with its warped sense of false equivalency.

Let us begin by remembering the eloquence and dignity of Barbara Jordan during an earlier time. Who would have ever imagined that we would remember the Nixon era as one that comparatively could be considered more decent than the future one that has become our present state of affairs for this is no longer about politics during this Trump Interregnum.  This is about decency.  Stand on the side of decency.

BARBARA JORDAN

 

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MARK TWAIN’S DISPATCH FROM WASHINGTON IN 1868 DURING ANOTHER MOMENT OF IMPORT AND IMPEACHMENT IN D.C.

Territorial Enterprise, March 13, 1868

MARK TWAIN’S LETTERS FROM WASHINGTON.

The Grand Coup d’Etat

WASHINGTON, February 22.

This birthday of Washington was historical before; it is doubly so now. Yesterday the news spread abroad over the town that the President had sent General Thomas to eject Secretary Stanton from the War Office and assume the duties of the post himself. It was an open defiance of Congress – a kingly contempt for long settled forms and customs – a reckless disregard of law itself! It was the first time, in the history of the nation, that the Chief Magistrate had presumed to dismiss a Cabinet officer without the consent of the Senate while that body was in season.

The excitement was intense, and it steadily augmented as night approached. Hotels and saloons were crowded with men, who moved restlessly about, talking vehemently and accompanying their words with emphatic gestures. The sidewalks were thronged with hurrying passengers, and everywhere the sound of trampling feet and a discord of angry voices was in the air. Old citizens remembered no night like this in Washington since Lincoln was assassinated.

Strangely enough, the men who should have been most concerned about the storm were the only souls that rode serenely above it. Mr. Seward and the President sat at a state dinner in the White House, cheery and talkative among distraught and pensive guests; General Grant was at the theatre; Stanton made his bed in the peaceful War Office, and General Thomas capered gaily among fantastic maskers at a carnival fandango! Meanwhile the tempest swept the continent on the wings of the telegraph.

The Senate sat at night, and multitudes flocked to the Capitol to stare and listen. The House resolved to make Saturday a working day for once, and both bodies decreed that for the first time since Washington’s death Congress should transact business on the anniversary of his birthday.

This morning “impeachment” was in every body’s mouth; Thomas’ arrest was discussed in he streets and in the hotels; Stanton was lauded by Republicans for sleeping in the War Office and holding the political fortress – and cursed by the Democrats; that Hon. Judd and Schenck watched with him till 3 A. M., and that Hon. Thayer remained all night, brought those gentlemen a fair share likewise, of the praise and the blame.

By 9 o’clock – full three hours before the sitting of Congress, long processions of men and women were wending their way toward the Capitol in he nipping winter air, and all vacant spaces about the doors were packed with people waiting to get in. When I reached there at noon, it was difficult to make one’s way through the wide lobbies and passages, so great was the throng. There was not a vacant seat in the galleries, and all the doorways leading to them were full of tiptoeing men and women, with a swarm of anxious citizens at their backs, eagerly watching for such scanty crumbs of comfort as chance opportunities of glancing between their shoulders or under their arms. I went immediately to the reporters’ gallery – it was about full, too, and excited doorkeepers and sentinels were challenging all comers and manfully resisting an assaulting party of men, women and children who were the fathers, brothers, wives, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, schoolmates, admirers of editors, correspondents, reporters, members of Congress, Cabinet officers and the President of the United States – and consequently they demanded to know why they couldn’t go into the reporters’ gallery! That was it – why couldn’t they? Some people are unreasonable, and some don’t know anything; these parties belong pretty exclusively to the one or the other of these classes. They were all – every one of them – going to have the doorkeeper discharge. They said so. [Surely such exceedingly influential people would not threaten what they could not perform.] But they did not get in. But others had got seats who were not strictly of the press, I suspect; twenty perhaps – among them several ladies. They were a good deal in the way, but the did not mind that. I was glad to see that it did not discommode them.

The scene within was spirited – it was unusual, too. The great galleries presented a sea of eager, animated faces; above these, more were massed in the many doorways; below, in the strong light, a few members walked nervously up and down, outside the rows of seats; a very few were writing – telegrams no doubt; the great majority had their heads together in groups and couples, talking earnestly; in every countenance strong feeling was depicted; a member from Maine was making a speech about a patent cooking stove, but never a soul was listening to him. Some said the stove business was gotten up by the Democrats to stave off impeachment; others said the Radicals got it up to gain time and give the Reconstruction Committee a chance to make up its report. Everybody waited impatiently, and watched the door sharply – they wanted to see that Committee come. By and bye Mr. Paine entered and there was a buzz; but it was a disappointment – he only spoke a word to a colleague and went out again. The tiresome stove man finished. It was a relief to the galleries, who somehow seemed to look upon this trifling about cooking stoves as a fraud upon themselves, and a sort of affront, as well, thrust forward, as it was, at a time when any idiot ought to know that impeachment was the order of the day!

No committee yet. Something must be done. Motion to adjourn, “in honor of Washington.” Amendment – to read Washington’s Farewell Address. Both were voted down. Ayes and nays called on both, and the long, tedious, monotonous calling of names and answering followed. The vote was no – everybody knew what it would be before. Before the roll call was finished, Boutwell came in [sensation]; afterwards, at intervals, Bingham [sensation], Paine [sensation], several other committee men, and finally Thad. Stevens himself. [Super-extraordinary sensation!] The haggard, cadaverous old man dragged himself to his place and sat down. there was a soul in his sunken eyes, but otherwise he was a corpse that was ready for the shroud. He held his precious impeachment papers in his hand, signed at last! In the eleventh hour his coveted triumph had come. Richelieu was not nearer the grave, Richelieu was not stirred up by a sterner pride, when he came from his bed of death to crown himself with his final victory.

The buzzing and whispering died out, and an impressive silence reigned in its stead. The Speaker addressed the galleries in a clear voice that reached the farthest recesses of the house, and warned the great concourse that the slightest manifestation of approbation or disapprobation of anything about to be said, would be followed by the instant expulsion of the offending person from the galleries; he read the rules, at some length, upon the subject, and charged the Sergeant-at-Arms and his subordinates to perform their duty without hesitation or favor. Then Mr. Stevens rose up and in a voice which was feeble but yet distinctly audible because of the breathless stillness that hung over the great audience like a spell, he read the resolution that was make plain the way for the impeachment of the President of the United States!

The words that foreshadowed so mighty an event sent a thrill through the assemblage, but there was no manifestation of the emotion save in the sudden lighting of their countenances. They ventured upon no applause, nor upon any expression of dissent. Mr. Brooks of New York took the floor, and in a frenzied speech protested against impeachment, and threatened civil war if the measure carried. Mr. Bingham made an able speech in favor of the movement. The ball was fairly opened now, and speech followed speech from 2 in the afternoon till almost midnight. During all that time the galleries were filled with people, and their excited interest showed no symptoms of abatement. The House adjourned to meet at 10 A. M. on Monday, instead of at noon. It has been a tremendous day. The nation has seen few that were so filled with ominous signs and bodings of disaster.

When it was moved to-day to read Washington’s Farewell Address, Mr. Ingersoll inquired of a neighbor if it would not be more appropriate to read Andrew Johnson’s Farewell Address! In this connection I will remark that the following was picked up in one of the lobbies. It was entitled

“ANDREW JOHNSON’S FAREWELL ADDRESS.
“Soft you; a word or two before you go.
I have done the State some damage, and they know it;
No more of that: – I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; some things extenuate,
But set down naught in malice; then must you speak
Of one that ruled not wisely nor too well;
Of one, easily jealous, and, being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme, did
Like the base Judean, throw a pearl away,
Richer than all his tribe!”

How the delegations from the Pacific coast will stand on impeachment, no man can tell till Monday. You know as well as I, that the Oregon delegation will be likely to favor it; that the Nevada and California Senators will be likely to favor it; that Ashley and Higby in the House will be likely to favor it, and Johnson and Axtell be apt to oppose. But these gentlemen cannot be seen to-night, and it would be hard to guess what effect the flood of telegrams may have that will roll in upon us tomorrow from all parts of the country.

 

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One of Philip Guston’s many drawings of Richard Nixon in which his penis-nose grew with every lie he told.

Sarah Cowan wrote in the Paris Review the month after Trump’s election in 2016:

“A lot of work after the election looks very different,” I overheard someone say in Hauser & Wirth as we followed the saga of Poor Richard, Philip Guston’s satirical drawings of Richard Nixon’s rise to power. The show had been installed on November 1 as a last minute idea; on opening night it drew an amused crowd of boomers and millennials, the distance in their experience bridged by the convincing sense of security many of us had that doomed week. When I returned to the show less than a month into the Trump transition, the drawings had turned on us: a joke at the expense of our smugness.

Guston made most of the drawings in August 1971, in Woodstock, egged on by his friend Philip Roth, who had taken Nixon as the subject of his novel Our Gang. Just a month earlier, Nixon, who had built his political career as the wunderkind of the House Un-American Activities Committee, announced he was planning to visit China. Poor Richard and its preparatory sketches ride the arc of this hypocrisy, from Dick’s beginnings in California, where, lonely, poor, and studious, he dreams of the White House, crushing hammers and sickles in his path. He poses for photographs with his arm around the necessary demographics—hippies, blacks, “mom and pop” whites—bearing a grin betrayed by a hungry glare. Guston dresses him in a police uniform, a Ku Klux Klan hood, blackface, and, in the final panels, offensive Orientalist costumes as he sets sail confidently on his ill-fated “journey of peace.” 

As Philip Roth wrote, “The wonder of Nixon (and contemporary America) is that a man so transparently fraudulent, if not on the edge of mental disorder, could ever have won the confidence and approval of a people who generally require at least a little something of the ‘human touch’ in their leaders.”

 

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THE WORLD OF WRESTLING

by Roland Barthes

(excepted from Mythologies)

The grandiloquent truth of gestures
on life’s great occasions.

–Baudelaire

The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theaters. And in fact wrestling is an open-air spectacle, for what makes the circus or the arena what they are is not the sky (a romantic value suited rather to fashionable occasions), it is the drenching and vertical quality of the flood of light. Even hidden in the most squalid Parisian halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve.

There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.* Of course, there exists a false wrestling, in which the participants unnecessarily go to great lengths to make a show of a fair fight; this is of no interest. True wrestling, wrongly called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema. Then these same people wax indignant because wrestling is a stage-managed sport (which ought, by the way, to mitigate its ignominy). The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees.

This public knows very well the distinction between wrestling and boxing; it knows that boxing is a Jansenist sport, based on a demonstration of excellence. One can bet on the outcome of a boxing-match: with wrestling, it would make no sense. A boxing- match is a story which is constructed before the eyes of the spectator; in wrestling, on the contrary, it is each moment which is intelligible, not the passage of time. The spectator is not interested in the rise and fall of fortunes; he expects the transient image of certain passions. Wrestling therefore demands an immediate reading of the juxtaposed meanings, so that there is no need to connect them. The logical conclusion of the contest does not interest the wrestling-fan, while on the contrary a boxing-match always implies a science of the future. In other words, wrestling is a sum of spectacles, of which no single one is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion which rises erect and alone, without ever extending to the crowning moment of a result.

Thus the function of the wrestler is not to win; it is to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him. It is said that judo contains a hidden symbolic aspect; even in the midst of efficiency, its gestures are measured, precise but restricted, drawn accurately but by a stroke without volume. Wrestling, on the contrary, offers excessive gestures, exploited to the limit of their meaning. In judo, a man who is down is hardly down at all, he rolls over, he draws back, he eludes defeat, or, if the latter is obvious, he immediately disappears; in wrestling, a man who is down is exaggeratedly so, and completely fills the eyes of the spectators with the intolerable spectacle of his powerlessness.

This function of grandiloquence is indeed the same as that of ancient theater, whose principle, language and props (masks and buskins) concurred in the exaggeratedly visible explanation of a Necessity. The gesture of the vanquished wrestler signifying to the world a defeat which, far from disguising, he emphasizes and holds like a pause in music, corresponds to the mask of antiquity meant to signify the tragic mode of the spectacle. In wrestling, as on the stage in antiquity, one is not ashamed of one’s suffering, one knows how to cry, one has a liking for tears.

Each sign in wrestling is therefore endowed with an absolute clarity, since one must always understand everything on the spot. As soon as the adversaries are in the ring, the public is overwhelmed with the obviousness of the roles. As in the theater, each physical type expresses to excess the part which has been assigned to the contestant. Thauvin, a fifty-year-old with an obese and sagging body, whose type of asexual hideousness always inspires feminine nicknames, displays in his flesh the characters of baseness, for his part is to represent what, in the classical concept of the salaud, the ‘bastard’ (the key-concept of any wrestling-match), appears as organically repugnant. The nausea voluntarily provoked by Thauvin shows therefore a very extended use of signs: not only is ugliness used here in order to signify baseness, but in addition ugliness is wholly gathered into a particularly repulsive quality of matter: the pallid collapse of dead flesh (the public calls Thauvin la barbaque, ‘stinking meat’), so that the passionate condemnation of the crowd no longer stems from its judgment, but instead from the very depth of its humours. It will thereafter let itself be frenetically embroiled in an idea of Thauvin which will conform entirely with this physical origin: his actions will perfectly correspond to the essential viscosity of his personage.

It is therefore in the body of the wrestler that we find the first key to the contest. I know from the start that all of Thauvin’s actions, his treacheries, cruelties and acts of cowardice, will not fail to measure up to the first image of ignobility he gave me; I can trust him to carry out intelligently and to the last detail all the gestures of a kind of amorphous baseness, and thus fill to the brim the image of the most repugnant bastard there is: the bastard-octopus. Wrestlers therefore have a physique as peremptory as those of the characters of the Commedia dell’Arte, who display in advance, in their costumes and attitudes, the future contents of their parts: just as Pantaloon can never be anything but a ridiculous cuckold, Harlequin an astute servant and the Doctor a stupid pedant, in the same way Thauvin will never be anything but an ignoble traitor, Reinieres (a tall blond fellow with a limp body and unkempt hair) the moving image of passivity, Mazaud (short and arrogant like a cock) that of grotesque conceit, and Orsano (an effeminate teddy-boy first seen in a blue- and-pink dressing-gown) that, doubly humorous, of a vindictive salope, or bitch (for I do not think that the public of the Elysee- Montmartre, like Littre, believes the word “salope” to be a masculine).

The physique of the wrestlers therefore constitutes a basic sign, which like a seed contains the whole fight. But this seed proliferates, for it is at every turn during the fight, in each new situation, that the body of the wrestler casts to the public the magical entertainment of a temperament which finds its natural expression in a gesture. The different strata of meaning throw light on each other, and form the most intelligible of spectacles. Wrestling is like a diacritic writing: above the fundamental meaning of his body, the wrestler arranges comments which are episodic but always opportune, and constantly help the reading of the fight by means of gestures, attitudes and mimicry which make the intention utterly obvious. Sometimes the wrestler triumphs with a repulsive sneer while kneeling on the good sportsman; sometimes he gives the crowd a conceited smile which forebodes an early revenge; sometimes, pinned to the ground, he hits the floor ostentatiously to make evident toall the intolerable nature of his situation; and sometimes he erects a complicated set of signs meant to make the public understand that he legitimately personifies the ever- entertaining image of the grumbler, endlessly confabulating about his displeasure.

We are therefore dealing with a real Human Comedy, where the most socially-inspired nuances of passion (conceit, rightfulness, refined cruelty, a sense of ‘paying one’s debts’) always felicitously find the clearest sign which can receive them, express them and triumphantly carry them to the confines of the hall. It is obvious that at such a pitch, it no longer matters whether the passion is genuine or not. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theater. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private. This emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its exterior signs, this exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle of triumphant classical art. Wrestling is an immediate pantomime, infinitely more efficient than the dramatic pantomime, for the wrestler’s gesture needs no anecdote, no decor, in short no transference in order to appear true.

Each moment in wrestling is therefore like an algebra which instantaneously unveils the relationship between a cause and its represented effect. Wrestling fans certainly experience a kind of intellectual pleasure in seeing the moral mechanism function so perfectly. Some wrestlers, who are great comedians, entertain as much as a Moliere character, because they succeed in imposing an immediate reading of their inner nature: Armand Mazaud, a wrestler of an arrogant and ridiculous character (as one says that Harpagon** is a character), always delights the audience by the mathematical rigor of his transcriptions, carrying the form of his gestures to the furthest reaches of their meaning, and giving to his manner of fighting the kind of vehemence and precision found in a great scholastic disputation, in which what is at stake is at once the triumph of pride and the formal concern with truth.

What is thus displayed for the public is the great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice. Wrestling presents man’s suffering with all the amplification of tragic masks. The wrestler who suffers in a hold which is reputedly cruel (an arm- lock, a twisted leg) offers an excessive portrayal of Suffering; like a primitive Pieta, he exhibits for all to see his face, exaggeratedly contorted by an intolerable affliction. It is obvious, of course, that in wrestling reserve would be out of place, since it is opposed to the voluntary ostentation of the spectacle, to this Exhibition of Suffering which is the very aim of the fight. This is why all the actions which produce suffering are particularly spectacular, like the gesture of a conjuror who holds out his cards clearly to the public. Suffering which appeared without intelligible cause would not be understood; a concealed action that was actually cruel would transgress the unwritten rules of wrestling and would have no more sociological efficacy than a mad or parasitic gesture. On the contrary suffering appears as inflicted with emphasis and conviction, for everyone must not only see that the man suffers, but also and above all understand why he suffers. What wrestlers call a hold, that is, any figure which allows one to immobilize the adversary indefinitely and to have him at one’s mercy, has precisely the function of preparing in a conventional, therefore intelligible, fashion the spectacle of suffering, of methodically establishing the conditions of suffering. The inertia of the vanquished allows the (temporary) victor to settle in his cruelty and to convey to the public this terrifying slowness of the torturer who is certain about the outcome of his actions; to grind the face of one’s powerless adversary or to scrape his spine with one’s fist with a deep and regular movement, or at least to produce the superficial appearance of such gestures: wrestling is the only sport which gives such an externalized image of torture. But here again, only the image is involved in the game, and the spectator does not wish for the actual suffering of the contestant; he only enjoys the perfection of an iconography. It is not true that wrestling is a sadistic spectacle: it is only an intelligible spectacle.

There is another figure, more spectacular still than a hold; it is the forearm smash, this loud slap of the forearm, this embryonic punch with which one clouts the chest of one’s adversary, and which is accompanied by a dull noise and the exaggerated sagging of a vanquished body. In the forearm smash, catastrophe is brought to the point of maximum obviousness, so much so that ultimately the gesture appears as no more than a symbol; this is going too far, this is transgressing the moral rules of wrestling, where all signs must be excessively clear, but must not let the intention of clarity be seen. The public then shouts ‘He’s laying it on!’, not because it regrets the absence of real suffering, but because it condemns artifice: as in the theater, one fails to put the part across as much by an excess of sincerity as by an excess of formalism.

We have already seen to what extent wrestlers exploit the resources of a given physical style, developed and put to use in order to unfold before the eyes of the public a total image of Defeat. The flaccidity of tall white bodies which collapse with one blow or crash into the ropes with arms flailing, the inertia of massive wrestlers rebounding pitiably off all the elastic surfaces of the ring, nothing can signify more clearly and more passionately the exemplary abasement of the vanquished. Deprived of all resilience, the wrestler’s flesh is no longer anything but an unspeakable heap spread out on the floor, where it solicits relentless reviling and jubilation. There is here a paroxysm of meaning in the style of antiquity, which can only recall the heavily underlined intentions in Roman triumphs. At other times, there is another ancient posture which appears in the coupling of the wrestlers, that of the suppliant who, at the mercy of his opponent, on bended knees, his arms raised above his head, is slowly brought down by the vertical pressure of the victor. In wrestling, unlike judo, Defeat is not a conventional sign, abandoned as soon as it is understood; it is not an outcome, but quite the contrary, it is a duration, a display, it takes up the ancient myths of public Suffering and Humiliation: the cross and the pillory. It is as if the wrestler is crucified in broad daylight and in the sight of all. I have heard it said of a wrestler stretched on the ground: ‘He is dead, little Jesus, there, on the cross,’ and these ironic words revealed the hidden roots of a spectacle which enacts the exact gestures of the most ancient purifications.

But what wrestling is above all meant to portray is a purely moral concept: that of justice. The idea of ‘paying’ is essential to wrestling, and the crowd’s ‘Give it to him’ means above all else ‘Make him pay’. This is therefore, needless to say, an immanent justice. The baser the action of the ‘bastard’, the more delighted the public is by the blow which he justly receives in return. If the villain–who is of course a coward– takes refuge behind the ropes, claiming unfairly to have a right to do so by a brazen mimicry, he is inexorably pursued there and caught, and the crowd is jubilant at seeing the rules broken for the sake of a deserved punishment. Wrestlers know very well how to play up to the capacity for indignation of the public by presenting the very limit of the concept of Justice, this outermost zone of confrontation where it is enough to infringe the rules a little more to open the gates of a world without restraints. For a wrestling-fan, nothing is finer than the revengeful fury of a betrayed fighter who throws himself vehemently not on a successful opponent but on the smarting image of foul play. Naturally, it is the pattern of Justice which matters here, much more than its content: wrestling is above all a quantitative sequence of compensations (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth). This explains why sudden changes of circumstances have in the eyes of wrestling habitues a sort of moral beauty: they enjoy them as they would enjoy an inspired episode in a novel, and the greater the contrast between the success of a move and the reversal of fortune, the nearer the good luck of a contestant to his downfall, the more satisfying the dramatic mime is felt to be. Justice is therefore the embodiment of a possible transgression; it is from the fact that there is a Law that the spectacle of the passions which infringe it derives its value.

It is therefore easy to understand why out of five wrestling matches, only about one is fair. One must realize, let it be repeated, that ‘fairness’ here is a role or a genre, as in the theater: the rules do not at all constitute a real constraint; they are the conventional appearance of fairness. So that in actual fact a fair fight is nothing but an exaggeratedly polite one: the contestants confront each other with zeal, not rage; they can remain in control of their passions, they do not punish their beaten opponent relentlessly, they stop fighting as soon as they are ordered to do so, and congratulate each other at the end of a particularly arduous episode, during which, however, they have not ceased to be fair. One must of course understand here that all these polite actions are brought to the notice of the public by the most conventional gestures of fairness: shaking hands, raising the arms, ostensibly avoiding a fruitless hold which would detract from the perfection of the contest.

Conversely, foul play exists only in its excessive signs: administering a big kick to one’s beaten opponent, taking refuge behind the ropes while ostensibly invoking a purely formal right, refusing to shake hands with one’s opponent before or after the fight, taking advantage of the end of the round to rush treacherously at the adversary from behind, fouling him while the referee is not looking (a move which obviously only has any value or function because in fact half the audience can see it and get indignant about it). Since Evil is the natural climate of wrestling, a fair fight has chiefly the value of being an exception. It surprises the aficionado, who greets it when he sees it as an anachronism and a rather sentimental throwback to the sporting tradition (‘Aren’t they playing fair, those two’); he feels suddenly moved at the sight of the general kindness of the world, but would probably die of boredom and indifference if wrestlers did not quickly return to the orgy of evil which alone makes good wrestling.

Extrapolated, fair wrestling could lead only to boxing or judo, whereas true wrestling derives its originality from all the excesses which make it a spectacle and not a sport. The ending of a boxing-match or a judo-contest is abrupt, like the full stop which closes a demonstration. The rhythm of wrestling is quite different, for its natural meaning is that of rhetorical amplification: the emotional magniloquence, the repeated paroxysms, the exasperation of the retorts can only find their natural outcome in the most baroque confusion. Some fights, among the most successful kind, are crowned by a final charivari, a sort of unrestrained fantasia where the rules, the laws of the genre, the referee’s censuring and the limits of the ring are abolished, swept away by a triumphant disorder which overflows into the hall and carries off pell-mell wrestlers, seconds, referee and spectators.

It has already been noted that in America wrestling represents a sort of mythological fight between Good and Evil (of a quasi-political nature, the ‘bad’ wrestler always being supposed to be a Red). The process of creating heroes in French wrestling is very different, being based on ethics and not on politics. What the public is looking for here is the gradual construction of a highly moral image: that of the perfect ‘bastard’. One comes to wrestling in order to attend the continuing adventures of a single major leading character, permanent and multiform like Punch or Scapino, inventive in unexpected figures and yet always faithful to his role. The ‘bastard’ is here revealed as a Moliere character or a ‘portrait’ by La Bruyere, that is to say as a classical entity, an essence, whose acts are only significant epiphenomena arranged in time. This stylized character does not belong to any particular nation or party, and whether the wrestler is called Kuzchenko (nicknamed Moustache after Stalin), Yerpazian, Gaspardi, Jo Vignola or Nollieres, the aficionado does not attribute to him any country except ‘fairness’–observing the rules.

What then is a ‘bastard’ for this audience composed in part, we are told, of people who are themselves outside the rules of society ? Essentially someone unstable, who accepts the rules only when they are useful to him and transgresses the formal continuity of attitudes. He is unpredictable, therefore asocial. He takes refuge behind the law when he considers that it is in his favor, and breaks it when he finds it useful to do so. Sometimes he rejects the formal boundaries of the ring and goes on hitting an adversary legally protected by the ropes, sometimes he reestablishes these boundaries and claims the protection of what he did not respect a few minutes earlier. This inconsistency, far more than treachery or cruelty, sends the audience beside itself with rage: offended not in its morality but in its logic, it considers the contradiction of arguments as the basest of crimes. The forbidden move becomes dirty only when it destroys a quantitative equilibrium and disturbs the rigorous reckoning of compensations; what is condemned by the audience is not at all the transgression of insipid official rules, it is the lack of revenge, the absence of a punishment. So that there is nothing more exciting for a crowd than the grandiloquent kick given to a vanquished ‘bastard’; the joy of punishing is at its climax when it is supported by a mathematical justification; contempt is then unrestrained. One is no longer dealing with a salaud but with a salope–the verbal gesture of the ultimate degradation.

Such a precise finality demands that wrestling should be exactly what the public expects of it. Wrestlers, who are very experienced, know perfectly how to direct the spontaneous episodes of the fight so as to make them conform to the image which the public has of the great legendary themes of its mythology. A wrestler can irritate or disgust, he never disappoints, for he always accomplishes completely, by a progressive solidification of signs, what the public expects of him. In wrestling, nothing exists except in the absolute, there is no symbol, no allusion, everything is presented exhaustively. Leaving nothing in the shade, each action discards all parasitic meanings and ceremonially offers to the public a pure and full signification, rounded like Nature. This grandiloquence is nothing but the popular and age-old image of the perfect intelligibility of reality. What is portrayed by wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction.

When the hero or the villain of the drama, the man who was seen a few minutes earlier possessed by moral rage, magnified into a sort of metaphysical sign, leaves the wrestling hall, impassive, anonymous, carrying a small suitcase and arm-in-arm with his wife, no one can doubt that wrestling holds that power of transmutation which is common to the Spectacle and to Religious Worship. In the ring, and even in the depths of their voluntary ignominy, wrestlers remain gods because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a Justice which is at last intelligible.

*In Moliere’s L’Ecole des Femmes and Racine’s Andromaque.

**In Moliere’s L’Avare.

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In the First Person series at the Paris Review, Laura Kipnis wrote the following essay back in May last year.

LOVE IN THE TIME OF TRUMP

A few months before the election, when eleven six-foot-five effigies of a naked Donald Trump, then the 2016 Republican presidential nominee—bulging paunch, saggy ass, mottled limbs, constipated visage, and puny dick—popped up around the country, I briefly liked being an American. We were tragic absurdists, a nation of disgusted pranksters. The statue had no balls. Like most women, I’ve never been entirely clear on what balls are for, or why they’re meant to symbolize traits like courage and daring. Aren’t they actually the most vulnerable spot on a man—is that how men conquered the world, by costuming their vulnerabilities as mettle? (Something I wish I were better capable of, for the record.)

The country’s disgusted fascination with Trump’s body united us, or so I briefly thought. We were riveted: by the shameless comb-over, the Orangina skin, the stubby fingers, the clown-car neckties. It was a sick pleasure—you couldn’t take your eyes off him, no matter how much you despised him. Trump made it seem right-minded to despise him for his aged, saggy ass, and by extension all male bodies, aged and saggy or not, because that’s where their privilege resides—in their anus mouths and the gross stuff that came out of them, and where their sweaty hands traveled, and making every last thing about their all-important dicks. At some level, you sort of knew that bodily aesthetics shouldn’t bear the burden of moral judgments or political animus, but as far as Trump, we were going to hand him his saggy ass and send him on his way.

That didn’t exactly happen, as the history books will forever record. What won’t be preserved—and what you might not ordinarily think would even be the case—is how seemingly extramarital events, like an election, seep into your actual marriage like runoff from a backed-up sewer and stop you from wanting to touch your husband’s body (except when extremely drunk). Or how the imperiled condition of liberal democracy could mean that if it were ever possible to sustain a deep human connection between a man and a woman (a balancing act between intimacy and disgust in the best of times), it was now largely a thing of the past.

After the election, I located and ordered a smaller replica of the naked Trump effigy online, fabricated by the same anarchist collective that made the big ones, and which now resides on a shelf above my desk, looming over me, throttling my imagination. Sometimes I can practically feel its hot, foul breath on my neck. The keyboard is like a hostile psychoanalyst, I avoid it at all costs. Everything I write feels like an infected wound, for instance the book I’m supposed to be finishing (now a year late). Everything I write feels like it’s secretly about my marriage. For all of this, I blame my husband. I’m a blamer, obviously, but it’s not as though he’s blameless.

To wit: the dinner party, the Sunday before Election Day, where J., the supposed “leftist,” announced that Trump being elected, reprehensible as he was, would be better for the country than Hillary being elected if you cared about radical social change and not just preserving the status quo. The chaos of a Trump presidency and the political realignments it would force would at least open up the chances for a more radical left, not to mention the end of the Republican Party. It was time to stop voting for “the lesser evil.” Anyone voting for another establishment centrist like Hillary was just voting for inertia.

There ensued a lot of yelling about the Supreme Court and Trump’s racism and J. being a ruling-class stooge. Hitler was a “change agent” too, spluttered one of the other guests, making violent air quotes. “Can’t pull the lever for a woman,” sneered a drunken woman friend of the couple whose apartment we were in, an old-school feminist filmmaker who’d had a brief spurt of acclaim decades ago with the movie about hooker-assassins. People looked at me like, What the fuck? I shrugged like, What are you going to do? “Save your liberal outrage,” J. was saying, never happier than when setting people off with his contrarianism, which at the beginning I liked about him (not boring), although it had recently occurred to me that him moving through the world playing the Big Id forced the rest of us (i.e., me) into the role of superegos and scolding parents, since how many ids can there be in one room? At the moment, it was irritating me. For one thing, I never wanted to be anyone’s parent, I’m a committed maternity-dodger. Also the fact that he’d managed to upend a glass while gesticulating and the woman next to him was blotting the resulting puddle with her napkin—J. has a way of getting other people to clean up his messes. It crossed my mind that my husband covertly related to, or even envied, Trump’s bulldozer of an id more than he cared about reinventing the left, about which, sure—that’s going to happen.

In the cab going home, I said, trying to keep it light. “What the fuck was that about voting for Trump? Are you insane?” He answered with a twitch of his eyebrows (which needed trimming, I noted). If I didn’t remind him to trim them they’d sprout across his forehead like pubic hair (will women ever stop trying to rein in men?). I was feeling more aggrieved than I reasonably should have—at the moment Clinton seemed to have a solid-enough lead—but being unreasonably aggrieved is pretty much marriage-degree zero, as I’ve learned over the last five years (it was my first marriage, his second). Trump’s pussy-grabbing tape had been released the month before; just locker-room talk he’d pooh-poohed like he was a linebacker for the Giants. Something was bristling in the political firmament as far as the male-female thing went. Even I was feeling it, despite having no vast investment in electoral politics (I’m a registered political fatalist). “There are no atheists in foxholes” kept going through my head, though I wasn’t sure it applied.

“You’re not really voting for him,” I either asked or declared as the cab bounced up Sixth. “We live in a blue state,” he said faux-equably, “what does it matter?” To which I replied, “It matters to me. I would consider it a betrayal.” “Voting is something we do in private,” he said. “Behind a curtain. It’s not subject to spousal review.”

“Don’t think we’re ever having sex again if you vote for Trump,” I mock-threatened.

Was he serious? Was I? We didn’t have sex that night—I’d drunk too much and was a little queasy. Then came the election. At one level things went on, unthinkable as that was. At another level everything turned to shit, then died—my optimism, for instance. The world smelled foul. Some ineffable thread or continuity that I hadn’t realized was actually holding everything together had given way.

One version of marriage is that it provides a refuge from the world, or at least keeps it at bay, but the world has become way too encroaching.