2020 Flashback: Generalized Precarity and Subversive Pragmatism / Albena Azmanova

This one’s for the ladies. It’s about that model of Victorian Era womanhood, Queen Victoria. She ruled during England’s most appallingly violent and nostalgically pined-for periods of global colonialism. But it wasn’t all blood, quinine, and glory. It was also the apotheosis of European royal inbreeding. But it wasn’t all inbred monarchs presiding over racist colonial violence and drinking gin and complaining about the savages and the beastly heat. It was also a time of behind-the-scenes Downton Abbey-style upstairs-downstairs soap opera angst.

In 1861, Queen Victoria lost both her husband, Prince Albert, and her mother. The loss of her mother was a source of grief, no doubt, but to lose Albert, the love of her life, sent her into an extended state of mourning. She was just coming out of it in 1878 when her daughter, the Grand Duchess of Hesse, died. The following year she turned sixty. The combined traumas caused her to remark on having begun to feel her age. The loss seemed to be somehow making the years accumulate more rapidly than they were for less tragic monarchs.

Two years later her close friend and political ally Benjamin Disraeli, who’d been born Jewish, died Anglican. Two years after that her confidant of over two decades, John Brown, one of her less barbaric Scottish subjects, rumored to also have been her lover, passed away. At around the same time she suffered a fall that left her with chronic rheumatism. And one year to the day after the death of Brown, her youngest and favorite son Leopold died.

The 1885 recalling of Gladstone, whom she despised, to the office of Prime Minister, and its whiplash reversal in 1886, although concluding in results she favored, really took the stuffing out of the old bird. She passed the Golden Jubilee of her reign with fanfare and overall national popularity, but it was clear by this time that being old was making her unhappy. Mood wise, she was not aging gracefully.

Sometime near the end of the 1880s, in secret, with her latest confidant, Abdul Karim, by her side, Victoria traveled to the wilds of deepest, darkest Ireland. This wasn’t her first trip to the Emerald Isle, and it wouldn’t be her last, but the errand she pursued on this particular sojourn was kept concealed from all but Karim. Abdul, who probably was never her lover but was rumored to be, was called the Munshi because he served Her... read more

I’m coming to you today from the shipyard in Popham, ME, where dry-dock professionals are currently refitting the fishing trawler, the SS Merkin, to be airlifted for use by the Ukrainian Navy should the hostilities become pelagically noir – or, whatever, move into the Black Sea. Somehow.

Must there be nations? Well, whether or not there must be, there are. Must a nation have a leader? Well, most do. Must the leader be wealthy? Well, most are.

If there must be nations, and if a nation must have a leader, and if a leader must be wealthy, maybe they shouldn’t be the wealthiest person in the nation. And maybe the wealthiest person in the nation, leader or not, shouldn’t be wealthier than the nation itself or be able to leverage their wealth to determine national policies. Just as a rule of thumb.

There are a lot of things wrong with the way wealth is distributed, especially now, and there are a lot of things wrong currently with the leadership of nations. It’s hard to imagine that the two problems aren’t somehow related.

Economic wealth and political power both give the bearer delusions of strength beyond their actual physical abilities. They become so used to getting what they want, it’s only natural that many of them tend to esteem themselves superhuman.

The opposite is also true, however. The über-privileged are also prone to indulge delusions of fragility. King Charles VI of France famously believed he was made of glass and took elaborate precautions to avoid accidentally shattering. Napoleon is said to have been afraid of cats, and this fear is also said (by me) to have stemmed from the worry that he might step on their tails and be visited by them in the night where they would steal his breath in revenge. Emperor Augustus Caesar was under the delusion that he contained a highly conductive fluid that would attract a fatal lightning strike. Genghis Khan was irrationally fearful of being eaten by dogs, even small fluffy ones. The celebrated novelist, Balzac, had a fear of burning up in the sunlight, as did the Count of Dracula.

Two moderately old sayings should be kept in mind, though:

1.     The rich are different.

2.     It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

The wealthy and powerful are physiologically different from the rest of us losers, based on a peer reviewed... read more