Category: politics

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Medic carrying a wounded Palestinian child in Gaza. Photo courtesy Fars Media Corporation/Wikimedia Commons.

As I explained in a previous post, I don’t usually write on current political events outside of Facebook and Twitter posts, but there are limits. I will not keep my head down and my mouth shut in the face of what 15 out of 17 judges at the International Court of Justice have ruled is plausibly a GENOCIDE being committed by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza, until very recently with the unqualified support of the governments and major opposition parties of the two countries, Canada and the United Kingdom, of which I am a citizen. 

Since January, I have posted a number of pieces on the conflict in Gaza (and its implications for civil liberties in North America and Europe) on my Substack, some of which I have subsequently revised and published in the online magazine Canadian Dimension.

The fullest statement of my position (briefly, that “while I unreservedly condemn Hamas’s actions against civilians on October 7, I can see no moral standpoint from which I could do so that would not oblige me equally to condemn Israel’s retaliatory violence—and vice versa”) can be found in the long article “Eyeless in Gaza.”

My most recent Substack/Canadian Dimension articles are:

A moral crossroads for the West: Is Benjamin Netanyahu about to cross his Rubicon? Substack, 14 March and Canadian Dimension, 14 March

The threshold of intent: Closing in on a Final Solution in Gaza? Substack, 25 March and Canadian Dimension, 25 March

Details and links to the earlier articles can be found in my earlier post Silence is complicity.

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I was horrified at the mass shooting yesterday at Charles University in Prague, a location I know well. May the wounded recover and the dead rest in peace. Apparently the shooter, 24-year-old history student David Kozák, was inspired—if that’s the right word—by American examples. This is one bit of American culture Europe doesn’t need. I hope the Czechs fix their gun laws (as the UK, Australia, and New Zealand did after their own massacres) before, as in the US, it gets politically impossible to do so.   

It seems apt to repost this.

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“To articulate the past historically … means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger … In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

Theses on the Philosophy of History—Walter Benjamin’s last text

Hope Obscured. Photo taken at Tate Modern, London, December 2019. Copyright Derek Sayer 2023.

I was one of those writers who were honored at the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards ceremony in Toronto last Sunday. What should have been a joyous celebratory occasion was inevitably overshadowed by the horrific events unleashed by Hamas’s brutal assault on Israeli civilians on October 7—which, let me be clear, I utterly and unreservedly condemn. After much soul-searching the organizers decided the ceremony should go ahead, as a gesture of affirmation of faith in the redemptive power of culture. I think this decision was the correct one even if the audience was much smaller than usual and there was a heavy security presence at the door.

Among those I talked with, there was no politicking but just profound sorrow, grief, and apprehension—above all fear for the fate of civilians, especially the children, who were already paying the price of politicians’ belligerence and intransigence on both sides. Fear, also, for the future, both immediate and longterm.

The proceedings began with a recitation of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. It put me in mind of two other recitations of the same prayer, which I had recounted in the book for which I received the award, Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History.

The first recitation took place in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) concentration camp following one of the most infamous Nazi reprisals of World War II. In retaliation for the Prague assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia (and architect of the Final Solution), by Czechoslovak paratroopers based in Britain, on 10 June 1942 German security forces sealed off the little village of Lidice, where they shot 173 adult males and deported 205 women to concentration camps. Ninety-eight children were taken to be “appropriately raised,” of whom 81 were subsequently murdered in the gas vans at Chelmno. None of the victims had played any part whatsoever in Heydrich’s assassination, though some had relatives fighting for the Czechoslovak resistance abroad. It was a collective punishment, of the sort the 1949 Geneva Convention (4) specifically outlawed (article 33) in the hope of preventing such atrocities ever happening again.

Following the shootings,

The troops doused the buildings with gasoline and set them on fire. Thirty Jewish prisoners were trucked in from Terezín. When they arrived in the burning village at 4:00 in the afternoon they were given pickaxes, shovels, 350 grams of bread, and 30 grams of margarine; taken to the place where the men’s bodies were heaped up; and told to dig a mass grave twelve meters long, nine meters wide, and three meters deep by six the next morning “or else they can quietly lay down with the others.” One of them, the journalist and broadcaster František R. Kraus, wrote a powerful account of his experience soon after the war ended. It was a Czech Jew who sang a requiem over the bodies of Lidice’s Christian dead:

“Suddenly the church breaks apart: a new metallic thundering breaks up the walls, the ringing of the bells resounds clearly, there is a thumping in the tower, flames roar up again, then suddenly the ringing stops, torn away from the roof the bell hurtles down, breaks through the wooden floor and ends with huge clattering on the stone floor, white smoke rolls out of the fallen nave. . . . Next to me stands Karl Langendorf, young, beautiful, the composer, he stands there like a marble statue, his mouth wide open, he raises and lowers his fists. . . . Then low singing sounds from his lips, it is Antonín Dvořák’s Requiem . . . Requiem aeternam dona eis domine et lux perpetua luceat eis [Eternal rest grant them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them] . . . Dies irae, dies illa [Day of wrath, that day] . . . a windy morning rises from the blood-drenched east and Karl Langendorf sings Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus . . . Dominus Deus Sabaoth [Holy, holy, holy . . . Lord God of the Sabbath] . . . bricks drop onto the empty church benches, jump high again and dance to and fro as if it were a festive church holiday, then the beams clatter down and break the roof, walls and vaultings shake, pictures of saints in gold frames fall from the old walls, and thunder to the ground . . . mass is being celebrated for the last time here.”

The grave diggers arrived back in Terezín to find candles burning at the heads of their bunks, “just as at that time, when the first of our comrades were hanged. Comrades are singing the monotonous melody of the Kadish [sic], stop, smother their joy.” “I sink back. My eyes pass over the barred windows. Outside the night is of the deepest black. And beneath me, on the lower bunk, Karl Langendorf sings quietly: ‘Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. . . .’ Then he adds in a low voice: ‘But Lidice is in Europe!’ Kraus survived the war to write one of the earliest Holocaust memoirs, titled Plyn, plyn . . . , pak oheň: vězeň č. B 11632 (Gas, gas . . . , then fire: Prisoner #B 11632), published in Havlíčkův Brod in 1945. Karel Langendorf, as he is named in Czech sources, was transported to Auschwitz on 18 May 1944. He did not survive.

Postcards from Absurdistan, pp. 180–2

The second recitation of the Kaddish was by the great Prague Jewish reporter Egon Erwin Kisch, who spent most of World War II as a refugee in Mexico. It was in Mexico City that he learned of the murder of two of his brothers in the Holocaust.

“In Mexico Kisch suffered horribly from the fact that Prague was occupied,” Lenka [Reinerová, another Prague Jewish writer and Kisch’s fellow refugee in Mexico City] told a Czech TV interviewer in 2001. “When we were alone, Egon spoke in Czech with me in Mexico—out of nostalgia and homesickness.”

Nostalgia and homesickness did not blunt the raging reporter’s insatiable curiosity. Egon’s Entdeckungen in Mexiko (Discoveries in Mexico, 1945) contained twenty-four essays on a wide range of topics, including sports among the ancient Maya, how to make tortillas, the hallucinogenic properties of peyote, and the cultural history of the cactus. He attends a Sabbath service in the village of Venta Prieta, whose thirty-seven Jewish inhabitants, “in no way distinguishable from other Indians or Mestizos,” were descended from Spanish Jews who fled the Inquisition in the sixteenth century.

“My father and mother were born in Prague, lived there, and are buried there. It never could have occurred to them that one day one of their sons would be reciting the prayer for the dead for them amid a group of Indians, in the shadow of the silver-laden mountains of Pachuca. My parents, who lived their entire lives in the Bear House of Prague’s Old Town, never dreamt that their sons would sometime be driven out of the Bear House, one of them to Mexico, another to India, and the two who were unable to escape the Hitler terror, to unknown places of unimaginable horror. My thoughts roamed farther—to relatives, friends, acquaintances, and enemies, sacrifices of Hitler, all entitled to be remembered in the prayer for the dead.”

quoted in Postcards from Absurdistan, pp. 279–80.

Here, for the record, is the speech I gave at the Canadian Jewish Awards ceremony on Sunday. I shortened it a little in the delivery—this is the fuller text I had prepared in advance. Its resonances will, I hope, be obvious.

I am greatly honored to receive the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Scholarship, and would like to thank all those involved—especially the jury, upon whom I inflicted a very much longer book than I sat down to write in the fall of 2018.  I am particularly gratified for my work to be recognized in this way when I am not Jewish and Postcards from Absurdistan does not pretend to be a work of Jewish history.  But one cannot write the history of Prague without foregrounding the part played by Jews in that history—for over a thousand years—and it means a lot to me that the jury thinks I have done them justice. 

Postcards from Absurdistan is the final volume in a trilogy of books which take Prague as an alternative vantage-point on modernity.  In his unfinished magnum opus The Arcades Project, the great German Jewish critic Walter Benjamin nominated Paris, the so-called “city of lights,” as the “capital of the nineteenth century,” and set out to discover “the prehistory of modernity” in the “dreamworlds” incarnated in its material fabric and cultural products.  I thought Prague might be treated analogously, as a site in which to excavate the dreamworlds of the very much darker twentieth century.  

My subtitle  “Prague at the End of History“ is deliberately ironic, because history was declared at an end no fewer than three times during Bohemia’s turbulent twentieth century: by the Nazis, when they incorporated Prague into their ‘thousand-year Reich’ in March 1939; by the communists, who proclaimed socialism ‘achieved’ in 1960; and by many Western commentators, who were confident that the 1989 revolutions in Europe heralded (in Francis Fukuyama’s words) ‘the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’  

Each was the illusion of its epoch. Each proved spectacularly wrong.  Prague is a place where modernist phantasmagoria of history-as-progress have repeatedly unraveled.  The period covered in Postcards, from the Munich Agreement to the fall of communism, were the years of peak unraveling.

At a time in which democracy is once again under global assault, the dark half-century of Prague’s modernity considered in Postcards holds up a disturbing mirror to our own historical crossroads.

Postcards from Absurdistan is not a conventional academic history book, but a tapestry woven out of a multitude of fragments—a “collection of close readings, insightful narratives, obscure gems, and sometimes-funny, sometimes-wrenching reflections,” as the jury generously describes them.  Like Benjamin, “I want to allow “the rags, the refuse” that gets lost in the grander narratives of modernity, to “come into their own.”   These fragments are intended to function as dialectical images, to use Benjamin’s term, in which “It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.”

As well as providing a model (The Arcades Project) and a method (literary montage), Walter Benjamin makes a brief appearance in the book.  This particular passage takes off from the First International Exhibition of Caricatures and Humor, a deliberate antifascist provocation that took place at the Prague gallery of the Mánes Artists’ Society in the spring of 1934,. The exhibition was organized by one of the main characters in my story, the cartoonist, writer, avant-garde artist, anti-fascist activist and sometime Czechoslovak ambassador to France, Adolf Hoffmeister.

At this point I read the following extract from Postcards from Absurdistan:

The exhibition drew protests from the German, Austrian, Italian, and Polish governments, not to mention that eternal censor of social morality the Vatican. The Czechoslovak government ordered several works to be removed; the ensuing brouhaha ensured that the show had sixty thousand visitors by the time it closed. All the leading Czech caricaturists of the time were represented. The most eminent foreign participants were George Grosz, Otto Dix, John Heartfield, Thomas Theodor Heine, and Erich Godal. By then, Grosz was already in America, and Dix had been fired from his position at the Dresden Academy (he would later be forbidden to paint anything but landscapes). Heartfield, Heine, and Godal had arrived in Prague as refugees in 1933.

Heartfield and Heine moved on again in 1938—Heartfield to England (where he was soon interned on the Isle of Man) and Heine to Oslo and then (in 1942) Stockholm. Godal made it to the United States, where he became a political cartoonist for Ken magazine and the New York newspaper PM. His widowed mother Anna Marien-Goldbaum, whom Godal had been forced to leave behind, was less fortunate. Finally given an exit visa from Germany in 1939, she was one of more than nine hundred Jewish passengers on the MS St. Louis, which sailed from Hamburg to Havana on 13 May. The ship was turned away from Cuba and was then refused permission to dock in the United States (by president Franklin D. Roosevelt) and Canada (by prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King). A US State Department telegram sent while the ship was close enough to the coast to see the lights of Miami stated that the passengers must “await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States.”  The New York Daily Mirror published two letters “from an aged mother on the wandering steamship to her son, an artist, in New York” on 6 June 1939. “It is so strange how near, and yet how much cut off we really are,” Mrs. Goldbaum wrote. The St. Louis turned back to Europe the same day. Anna Goldbaum was marooned in Belgium. She was deported to the death camps within a year.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. As the Western world faced another “refugee crisis” in 2015, the Nigerian American writer and photographer Teju Cole remembered Walter Benjamin—“not so much Benjamin the scholar of surrealism as Benjamin the despairing refugee. The Benjamin who fled, like millions of others, for fear of his life”—who committed suicide in 1940 in the little town of Port Bou on the Franco-Spanish border rather than be sent back to occupied France. “The receipt made out to the dead man, the difunto Benjamin Walter, by the Hotel de Francia, for the four-day stay . . . include[d] five sodas with lemon, four telephone calls, dressing of the corpse, plus disinfection of his room and the washing and whitening of the mattress.” “The itemization reminds me of two things,” writes Cole. “Less, of the usual little list of what I drank or ate (mineral water, Toblerone), what I spent, when I check out of these frequent hotels of my life. More, of the little plastic bags I saw at the public morgue in Tucson, containing the last few personal effects of unknown travelers recovered from the Sonora desert in Arizona. A few dollars, a few pesos, photograph of a family, a mother’s passport to remember her by.” These are the rags and the refuse, the dialectical images that condense the terrible recurrences of the past in the present, blowing Benjamin’s “phantasmagoria of history” to smithereens. 

“Every refugee is alike, but each generation fails refugees in its own special way,” explains Teju Cole.

Right now the world is drowning in ancient memories—pogroms, expulsions, the Holocaust, the Nakba—whose contemporary mobilization is fueling hatred on both sides. I do not suggest that we can or should forget—any of the injustices, on either side. Those who have committed atrocities should be brought to account. But the one thing that needs to be remembered amid the fog and fury of war, and not just in the Middle East, is our common humanity. Otherwise what hope is there for any of us?

May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life, for us
and for all Israel; and say, Amen.

He who creates peace in His celestial heights,
may He create peace for us and for all Israel;
and say, Amen.

from the Kaddish, as translated at myjewishlearning.com

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I have recently published an article in Britské listy in a series in which historians reflect on the pros and cons of researching on the history of a country that is not their own. Its organizer Muriel Blaive described the aim of the series as follows:

In May 2021, Jill Massino and I organized a roundtable at the annual congress of the Association for the Study of Nationalities in New York. It was entitled The Benefits and Burdens of the “Invisible Suitcase”: Writing Contemporary History as an Outsider.

Some of the greatest historians of the contemporary period are “outsiders” to their country of study, for instance Robert Paxton and Christopher Browning in the case of France and Germany during the Second World War. Outsider perspectives enhance, complement, and complicate existing narratives, and, as such, help to produce a more nuanced and complex portrait of the past. Yet our collective experience is that Western historians of communism in Central Europe struggle to establish their legitimacy among societies that remain attached to an ethnonationalist definition of identity. Also, many people believe that only contemporary witnesses are entitled to speak about contemporary history. This roundtable offered the cumulated experience of four scholars: Marci Shore, Jill Massino, Jan Čulík, and Muriel Blaive. We reflected on the way in which our status has affected our research, our writing, and our reception. As a result, our roundtable also offered insight into the societies we are studying and into the stakes involved in the production of history.

Britské listy has kindly offered us to publish our texts, as well as a few others on the part of colleagues who attended the panel and participated in a very lively discussion. 

My contribution began with reflections on a conversation in a Prague pub with a Czech colleague thirty years ago on a 1949 set of Czechoslovak postage stamps that he found absolutely unremarkable and I found utterly surreal. I titled the article “The Density of Unexpected Encounters.”

English text here.

Czech text here.

Earlier contributions were Marci Shore’s “Ostranenie, or the Epistemological Advantages—and Disadvantages—of Marginality,” and Anna Müller and Jadwiga Biskupska’s “Objectivity and the Polish Question: Two Answers.”

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Christian Michelides, Stolperstein für Milena Jesenska, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

The Guardian did not think the following letter, responding to a column by the self-proclaimed feminist Zoe Williams, worth publishing. The “terrible gift” to which Williams refers was a book that she identifies as Kafka’s Milena: Life of Milena Jesenská. No such book exists: she might be referring to Jesenská’s daughter Jana Černá’s Kafka’s Milena (which has no subtitle) or Mary Hockaday’s biography Kafka, Love and Courage: The Life of Milena Jesenská. It probably doesn’t matter, since Williams considered her father’s gift an insult and didn’t bother to read the book.

19 December 2022

Dear Editor,

I take issue with Zoe Williams’s article “I unwrapped Dad’s terrible gift …” (December 19).  Humour is humour, but Milena Jesenská deserves better than to be ridiculed as “KAFKA’S FUCKING MUSE” (sic). Jesenská was a pioneering advocate of women’s emancipation, who as an independent journalist and translator practiced what she preached.

For the record: “Metamorphosis” was published in 1915, five years before Franz and Milena first corresponded in connection with her translating his work into Czech.  Their love affair was almost entirely epistolary, lasted less than a year, and was likely not consummated.  Jesenská was then in her early twenties.  She had a life before, after, and beyond Kafka. 

She went on to became one of Czechoslovakia’s most distinguished journalists, whose reportage on events in Central Europe in the 1930s (the rise of Nazism, the Vienna Anschluss, persecution of Jews, the Munich Agreement, the invasion of Czechoslovakia) is of lasting value to historians.  Her writings on refugees are especially moving and have lost none of their pertinence today.  

Milena was arrested by the Gestapo for resistance activities in November 1939 and died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in May 1944.  In 1995 the World Holocaust Remembrance Center Yad Vashem listed her as Righteous among the Nations—that is, “non-Jews who took great risks to save Jews during the Holocaust.”

Perhaps Williams should open that “terrible gift.”  Better yet, she could dip into Kathleen Hayes’s excellent selections in The Journalism of Milena Jesenská: A Critical Voice in Interwar Central Europe.  Zoe’s Dad was doing her a favour. What better role model could a young, female Guardian journalist ask for?

Sincerely,

Derek Sayer

Professor Emeritus

University of Alberta

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The third and final volume in my Prague trilogy, Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History, is out today in North America in hardback and Kindle editions. More details here (Princeton) and here (amazon.com).

Early reviews are positive:

“Necessary. It should be in every academic library” (Library Journal, starred review)

“Derek Sayer’s Postcards from Absurdistan is an encompassing review of cultural and sociopolitical Prague from tumultuous 1938 onward, detailed with compassion for the Czech people … Fascinating and capacious, Postcards from Absurdistan surveys Prague’s anguished recent past, raising concerns for its future amid new global conflicts and challenges.” (Foreword Reviews)

“Covering literature, the graphic arts, music, philosophy, architecture, and photography, Sayer profiles a staggering cast of artists and intellectuals … The book is littered with memorable vignettes, including [Egon Erwin] Kisch learning in Mexico City that his brothers back in Prague have been killed … (Publishers Weekly)

Postcards from Absurdistan will be published in the UK and Europe on January 3, 2023.

Frontispiece. Jan Reegen, Rita, 1950, tempera, on a protectorate newspaper and a Union of Czech Youth poster, 62.5 by 43.5 cm, Galerie Ztichlá klika v Praze. From Marie Klimešová, Roky ve dnech: české umění 1945–1957, Prague, 2010.

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“STOP immigrants and Drahoš. This land is ours! Vote Zeman.” Election posters all over the Czech Republic, January 2018.

“This is the order of the moment for every one of us, it is the historical task of our generation … Our new republic cannot be built as anything other than a purely national state, a state of only Czechs and Slovaks and of nobody other than Czechs and Slovaks! Although our land is beautiful, fertile, rich, it is small and there is no room in it for anybody other than us … Every one of us must help in the cleansing of the homeland.” Prokop Drtina, Minister of Justice in postwar Czechoslovak National Front Government, 17 May 1945.

The Bohemian Germans of whom Drtina wanted the homeland “cleansed” had lived in the Czech Lands of Bohemia and Moravia since they were invited in by Czech kings in the 13th century.  The chronicle of František Pražský, written in the 1340s, records that as early as 1315 Czech lords complained of “these foreigners who are in the kingdom,” requesting instead that the king favor “us, who were born in the kingdom …”

Six hundred years later Communist Party leader Klement Gottwald echoed the lords’ complaint in Brno on 23 June 1945, denouncing “the mistakes of our Czech kings, the Přemyslids, who invited the German colonists here” and demanding that Czechs expel “once and for ever beyond the borders of our land … an element hostile to us.”

Between 1945 and 1946 over three million Bohemian Germans (and thousands of Hungarians) were forcibly expelled from Czechoslovakia.  At least 15,000 people, and probably many more, perished in one of the worst examples of ethnic cleansing in 20th-century Europe.  Czechs made up 70% of the population of the Czech Lands of Bohemia and Moravia—the present-day Czech Republic—in 1939.  In 1950 they made up 94%.

The Sudetenland was resettled by Czechs and Slovaks, who showed their gratitude by voting in huge numbers for the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in the elections of 1946.  To this day, the region remains one of the most desolate and depressed parts of the country.  Needless to say the former Sudetenland voted heavily for Zeman in the election of 2013 (in which, astonishingly, the events of 1945-6 became a major issue between Zeman and his liberal opponent Karel Schwarzenberg) and again in 2018.

As I said in my previous post, history is never past.

PS.  Before the war Prokop Drtina was a prominent member of the National Socialist Party who became Edvard Beneš’s personal secretary and confidant.   He was a member of the London-based Czechoslovak government-in-exile, familiar to Czechs from his BBC radio wartime broadcasts as Pavel Svatý.  He went on to become one of the “bourgeois ministers” in Klement Gottwald’s communist-led coalition government, whose collective resignation in February 1948 precipitated the coup d’état that led to 42 years of communism in Czechoslovakia.  Drtina unsuccessfully attempted suicide three days later and was imprisoned until 1960.  Later he became a signatory of the dissidents’ Charter 77.  He died in 1980, with no end of communist rule in sight.  His autobiography, published by the émigré publishing house 68 Publishers in Toronto in 1982 and in Czechoslovakia for the first time in 1991, is called Czechoslovakia My Fate.

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“Years ago we saw No-Man’s-Land, in a film, and because the film took place in 1918, we thought, fools that we were, that it was past history.  We went home from the cinema with a feeling of pride in the free radiant future toward which the people of today walk hand in hand.  At that time we had not yet experienced the strange twists and turns, the detours, dead ends, blind alleys, that history creates” (Milena Jesenská, “In No-Man’s-Land,” Přítomnost [The Present], 29 December 1938; translated by A. G. Brain, in Jana Černá, Kafka’s Milena, Northwestern University Press, 1993, p. 201).

Three months later Czechoslovakia was dismembered and Bohemia and Moravia invaded by Hitler’s Wehrmacht and turned into a Protectorate of the Third Reich.  Milena Jesenská was arrested in November 1939.  She died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in May 1943.

Today, almost 100 years after Czechoslovakia declared independence from Austria-Hungary and 28 years after the Velvet Revolution, Czech history veers off down another inimitably Czech country lane.

Miloš Zeman, who has warned that if the Czech Republic accepts more refugees from Syria (currently it has admitted a grand total of 12) “unfaithful women will be stoned, thieves will have their hands cut off and we will be deprived of the beauty of women, since they will be veiled” was re-elected as President of the Czech Republic.  At least the margin of victory was narrow (51.36% to Jiří Drahoš’s 48.63%) and the major cities of Prague, Brno and Plzen turned out in force for Drahoš.

Moral: history is never past.  Good thing Václav Havel appreciated the absurd.

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Three days after I posted my reflections on Trump’s Cabinet, Brexit voters, and Rolling Stone’s top twenty albums of all time on my blog, this appeared on Stereogum.  Another petrifying coincidence.

“The Beatles finish 2017 [sic!] with the top two selling vinyl LPs of the year: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (72,000 — powered in large part by the album’s deluxe anniversary reissue in 2017) and Abbey Road (66,000). The soundtrack Guardians Of The Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. 1 is the third biggest with 62,000.”

Trump defends his “I am a stable genius” tweet at Camp David, surrounded by loyal toadies.  All white, all but one male, and almost all past retirement age (Paul Ryan was just born old).  And still partying like there’s no tomorrow.

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A New Year’s feuilleton for 2018

What do Rolling Stone magazine’s top twenty albums of all time and Donald Trump’s cabinet have in common, and what does it say about the state of the world at the beginning of 2018? 

1  The greatest albums of all time

I saw The Who perform My Generation at Rochester Odeon, where they were jointly headlining with the Spencer Davis Group, on April 23, 1966.  Rochester is a small town in Kent in south-east England, the Odeon was our local cinema, and I was 15.  It was my first rock concert.  The Spencer Davis Group topped the British charts that week with Somebody Help Me, their second #1 single of the year.  But it was My Generation—which had peaked at #2 in the UK the previous November but never got any higher than #74 on the US Billboard Hot 100—that became legendary.  The Who never had a UK or US number 1.  Still, Rolling Stone magazine ranks Pete Townshend’s “immortal fuck-off to the elders in his way” as #11 in its “definitive list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.”

“I hope I die before I get old” screamed lead singer Roger Daltrey.  Drummer Keith Moon obliged when he succumbed to an overdose of barbiturates in 1978 at the age of 32.   Bassist John Entwistle partied on to age 57, when the stripper he had taken to bed the night before woke to find him dead of a cocaine-induced heart attack in his Las Vegas hotel room early one morning in 2002. Townshend and Daltrey continue to perform as The Who.  By the time they headlined Superbowl XLIV in 2010 both were on the verge of qualifying for their UK state pensions (Townshend was 64, Daltrey 65).  On that occasion they tactfully omitted My Generation, but it is usually a highlight of every show.

Nowadays Daltrey is a high-profile Brexit supporter. “We went into the Common Market in 1973,” he told the Daily Mirror.  “Do you know what was going on before we went in?”

It was the 1960s.

The most exciting time ever—Britain was Swinging.

Films, Theatre, Fashion, Art and Music.

We were the World leaders.

You had Harold Pinter, The Beatles, John Osborne, Mary Quant, The Stones, Queen … and The Who.

This was all before we joined the EU. We were just Kids but we were filling stadiums all round the World.

Britain was the centre of the World.

You got that because Britain was doing its own thing.

It was independent. Not sure we’ll ever get that again when we’re ruled by bureaucrats in the European Union.

Exactly which EU regulations would have prevented Harold Pinter, John Osborne, Mary Quant, and The Beatles from doing their own thing, Daltrey doesn’t say.  He neglects to mention that The Beatles debuted All You Need Is Love for the European Broadcasting Union program Our World—the first live international satellite television production—in June 1967, and that The Rolling Stones recorded their masterpiece, Exile on Main Street, at Keith Richards’s mansion Nellcôte in the south of France.  The album’s title references the fact that the band fled the UK for the Côte d’Azur in 1971 to escape the long arm of the British taxman.

Daltrey is not the only aging rocker nostalgic for a half-remembered golden past.  Despite having previously dismissed Brexit as a “romantic delusion of Victorian isolation” in which “There’ll be no industry, there’ll be no trade, there’ll be nothing—a slow, dismal, collapse,” John Lydon—better known as Johnny Rotten, the infamous lead singer of the 1970s punk band the Sex Pistols—proclaimed in March 2017 that “The working class have voted and I support them.  Let it be a nice exit.  A truly brilliant British exit.”  He went on to describe Nigel Farage as “fantastic,” adding that Donald Trump (whom he insisted was not racist) was “the political Sex Pistol.”  Everybody’s favorite Beatle Ringo Starr (who lives in Los Angeles) also thought Brexit was “a great move,” while former Smiths’ frontman Morrissey hailed the EU referendum result as “magnificent.”

It’s not quite Eric Clapton’s rant on the stage of the Birmingham Odeon on 5 August 1976, but it’s getting there:

Fucking wogs, man. Fucking Saudis taking over London. Bastard wogs. Britain is becoming overcrowded and Enoch [Powell] will stop it and send them all back. The black wogs and coons and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans don’t belong here, we don’t want them here. This is England, this is a white country, we don’t want any black wogs and coons living here … Enoch for Prime Minister! Throw the wogs out! Keep Britain white!

Clapton is ranked #2 on Rolling Stone’s list of 100 greatest guitarists.  It must have galled him to lose the #1 spot to Jimi Hendrix, a black American whose career took off after he moved to the UK in late 1966.

The Who don’t make the top twenty in Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” but their 1970 effort Who’s Next checks in at a creditable #28.  The list echoes Daltrey’s assessment of the 1960s as “the most exciting time ever.”  No less than seven of the top ten albums—The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (#1), Revolver (#3), Rubber Soul (#5), and White Album (#10), Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited (#4) and Blonde on Blonde (#9), and The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (#2)—were released between 1965 and 1968.  This was peak sixties, understood as a cultural phenomenon rather than a chronological decade.  The sixties went together with sexual intercourse, which as Philip Larkin famously observed began “In nineteen sixty-three … Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban/And the Beatles’ first LP.”  They ended in a swirl of violence at Altamont Speedway in San Francisco on December 6, 1969 when Hell’s Angels killed a black teenager, Meredith Hunter, as The Rolling Stones were performing on stage.

The remaining three albums in Rolling Stone’s all-time top ten are Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? (#6, 1971), the Stones’ Exile on Main Street (#7, 1972), and The Clash’s London Calling (#8, 1980).  Entries 11-20 in the list marginally expand the timeframe to include Elvis’s mid-1950s Sun Sessions (#11), Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (#12, 1959), Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks (#16, 1975), and Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run (#18, 1975)—and give us yet more peak sixties with Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? (#15, 1967), The Velvet Underground and Nico (#13, 1967), Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks (#19, 1968), and the Beatles’ Abbey Road (#14, 1969).  Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991) at #17 and Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1982) at #20 round out the top twenty, bringing the total number of albums recorded after 1975 to three.

Acoustic recording has been with us since the turn of the twentieth century, electrical recording since the mid-1920s, and the long-playing record since 1948.  Yet 15 of Rolling Stone’s top twenty albums of all time hail from the single decade 1965-75, and 11 of these date from 1965-9.  The Beatles alone produced a quarter of the albums in this list (and three of the top five).  For those of us with long enough memories this cannot but bring back that astonishing week of April 4, 1964 when John, Paul, George, and Ringo held the #1-5 positions in the Billboard Hot 100 with “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Twist and Shout,” “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Please Please Me.”  Who could doubt that Britain was the center of the world?  I was 13.

The Rolling Stone editors compiled their “definitive list of the 500 greatest albums of all time” in 2011 on the basis of two polls, one carried out by a panel of 271 “artists, producers, industry executives and journalists” in 2003, and the other undertaken “by a similar group of 100 experts” in 2009 to pick the best albums of the 2000s.  I don’t know who these experts were, but that the most recent album to make their top twenty was recorded twenty years earlier, in 1991, speaks volumes.  So does the fact that despite the enormous indebtedness of Anglo-American popular music to Afro-American musical genres only four of the top twenty albums—and only one in the top ten—are by black artists.  The only female singer to make the top twenty is Nico, who fronted the Velvet Underground’s 1967 debut but thereafter left the band.  My generation, baby.

2  The highest IQ of any cabinet ever

Many Rolling Stone readers would no doubt resent the comparison, but this arrogant equation of the formative musical landmarks of a generation with the best of all time brings to mind the hyperbole of Donald Trump, for whom never in history has there been so huge an inaugural crowd, so massive a tax cut, so persecuted a president.  His cabinet, Trump claimed, had “by far the highest IQ of any Cabinet ever assembled.”  Whatever its intelligence, just like Rolling Stone’s top twenty albums that cabinet was also conspicuously old, white, and male.

Trump’s first cabinet contained 18 white men (as compared with Obama’s 8, George W. Bush’s 11, Clinton’s 10, and George Bush’s 12) and only 6 women and members of ethnic minorities—two of whom, Elaine Chow and Nikki Haley, did double duty as both.  None of the latter occupy major offices of state, as Condoleeza Rice did under George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton did under Obama.   While the racial and gender biases of Trump’s cabinet have been widely noted—along with its members’ unprecedented wealth, which Quartz values at $9.5 billion, more than the bottom third of all American households combined—less attention has been paid to the cabinet’s age composition.

At 70, Trump is the oldest man to begin a first term as US president, beating the record of 69 set by Ronald Reagan—whose dementia symptoms, according to his son, already manifested during his first term.  Trump likes to be surrounded by folks from my generation.  The average age of his first cabinet was 62 years, compared with 58 for Obama’s and 55 for George W. Bush’s.  This is the oldest cabinet in American history.

Of the 24 current US cabinet members and cabinet rank officials, Wilbur Ross (80), Dan Coats (74), Sonny Purdue (71), Jeff Sessions (71), and Robert Lighthizer (70) are older than any Obama or Bush appointee, while Linda McMahon (69), Jim Mathis (67), Rick Perry (67), John Kelly (67), and Ben Carson (66) are all also at or past the normal US retirement age.  If we add Rex Tillerson (65) and Elaine Chao (64), fully half of the US cabinet is over 64—the age at which, on Rolling Stone’s #1 album of all time, Paul McCartney looked forward to a quiet retirement doing the garden, digging the weeds, while his lover dandled their grandchildren on her knee.  Betsy DeVos (59), Mike Pence (58), David Schulkin (58), and Ryan Zinke (56) are in their later fifties.  Only four members of cabinet—Alex Acosta (48), Kirstjen Nielsen (45), Nikki Haley (45), and Scott Pruit (49)—are under 50.  The rest are all old enough to remember where they were when Elvis died.

The same pattern prevails across the legislative and judicial branches of US government.  In 1981, the average age of congressmen was 49 and of senators 53.  The comparable ages today are 59 and 63—on average, Congress has aged by ten years since Ronald Reagan first entered the White House.  In the current Congress 14.4% of congressmen are 65-69, 14.2% are 70-79, and 2.35% are over 80, while 20% of senators are 65-69, 17% are 70-79, and 8% are in their eighties—meaning that over 30% of congressmen and almost 45% of senators are past the normal retirement age of the rest of US society.   The gap between the average age of Americans and that of their congressional representatives is the same as that between the most recent entry in Rolling Stone’s top twenty albums and the date the list was compiled—twenty years, which is to say a full generation.

The average age of US Supreme Court justices is over 69, and the projected age when a justice will leave the Supreme Court is now 83—ten years later than it was in the 1950s.  Assuming good health, Trump’s controversial nominee Neil Gorsuch, who joined the court at age 49, can expect to still be there in 2050.  People over pension age lead both the Republican and Democratic parties: Mitch McConnell may be 75, but Chuck Schumer is 67, Elizabeth Warren 68, Hillary Clinton 70, and Nancy Pelosi 77.  Bernie Sanders, who is currently regarded by many on the left as the only candidate who can beat Trump, is a sprightly 76.  Should Sanders be elected in 2020 and survive his first year in office the US would have its first octogenarian president (Reagan was “only” 77 at the end of his second term).

While Americans seem to regard their gerontocracy as unremarkable, this pattern is strikingly out of line with other western democracies.  The average age of Theresa May’s cabinet in the UK is 56, and only one minister, 69-year-old David Davis, is over 62.  Some might think it appropriate that he is the minister in charge of Brexit.  In France the average age of ministers is 54.6, while Prime Minister Edouard Philippe is 46 and President Emanuel Macron is 39.  The average age of Angela Merkel’s cabinet is 52.  Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is the only member of his government over the age of 60, and 13 of his 22 cabinet members are under 50.  Canada’s Justin Trudeau is now 45, and presides over a gender-balanced and ethnically diverse cabinet whose average age is 50.  New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is just 37.

Most of these folks are way too young to remember the Summer of Love, Woodstock, or Altamont.  Not to mention the assassination of JFK and Martin Luther King, the marches from Selma to Montgomery, the Vietnam War, Watergate, or any of the other formative political experiences of my generation.

It is an ironic coincidence, in this context, that in 2016—the year Trump was elected—the number of millennials (those then aged 18-34) in the US population reached 75.4 million, surpassing the 74.9 million baby boomers for the first time.  Generation X (those aged 35-50) is projected to overtake the boomers by 2028.   The boomers are understood here as those who were aged 51-69 in 2015, i.e. people born between 1946 and 1964, but many scholars have argued that from a cultural standpoint the boomer generation is better understood as having begun with people born in the early 1940s.  Many of those most closely identified with the sixties, including The Beatles (b. 1940-43), Bob Dylan (b. 1941), and Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones (b. 1942-3), were war babies.  So were Roger Daltrey (b. 1944), Pete Townshend (b. 1945), and Eric Clapton (b. 1945).  When The Who immortalized my generation, this was the cohort they were talkin’ ’bout.

However we date the start of my generation, in Donald Trump’s cabinet and other US institutions of government not only is power heavily concentrated in its hands, but this concentration has increased even as the proportion of over 50s in the population has declined.  We are hangin’ in there for dear life, baby, and gatecrashing all tomorrow’s parties.

In the 2016 American presidential election boomers formed the single largest age cohort of Donald Trump’s voters.   Clinton emphatically outperformed Trump among 18-24 year olds (56%-34%), 25-29 year olds (53%-39%) and 30-39 year olds (51%-40%), but Trump took 53% of the vote of those aged 50 and over.  Indeed, 62% of his voters were over 45.

Much like Rolling Stone’s top twenty albums of all time, Trump’s supporters reflect America’s divisions of race and gender as well as age.  Whites voted 58% for Trump and 37% for Clinton, while Hispanics voted 65% for Clinton and 29% for Trump and African-Americans voted 88% for Clinton and 8% for Trump.  Overall, Trump won the votes of 53% of men and only 41% of women.  But 63% of white men voted for Trump—and so did 53% of white women despite his advocacy of “grabbing them by the pussy.”  While white non-Hispanic Americans made up 61.3% of the US population in July 2016, 87% of Trump’s supporters were white.  Only 4% of Afro-American women voted for Trump as against 96% for Clinton.

As I mentioned earlier, the political institutions of the UK are not as gerontocratic as those of the US.  The average age of UK Members of Parliament is 51, only two years higher than it was in 1979, and Britain’s youngest MP Mhairi Black was just 20 when she was first elected in 2015.   But age did play a crucial role in the Brexit referendum.  The slender majority (52%-48%) in favor of leaving the European Union was delivered by a similar Trumpian combination of mostly older, predominantly white voters.

As in the US presidential election race, class, locality, and educational level also played a part in shaping people’s choices (though gender was not as significant an axis of division).   But on average, the older the voters the more likely they were to vote leave.  While 73% of those aged 18-24 and 62% of those aged 25-34 voted to remain in the EU, a majority of my generation—and 65% of over-65s—chose to leave.  Twenty-seven of the 30 areas with the highest proportion of elderly people in the UK voted leave, while London, whose proportion of inhabitants aged 65 and over is well below the national average, voted decisively (60%) to remain.

None of this is to say that age is the only factor in shaping these votes.  Nor is it to deny that large numbers of older people are as appalled by Trump and as devastated by Brexit as I am.   Many of them—including some old-time rockers like Bruce Springsteen, Bob Geldof, and Neil Young—have been prominent in resisting the sharp right turn in Anglo-American politics.  But the fact remains that it was the votes of my generation (or more accurately, the white part of it) that took Britain out of the European Union and put Donald Trump in the White House.

We are the elders now, and it is us that are standing in the way of the young.

3  Why don’t you all f-fade away?

As we enter 2018 I am not enthused by the prospect of a future in which classic rock radio stations have Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pet Sounds on endless repeat while the refugee and migrant hordes are kept at bay by Trumpian walls.

Instead, I despair at the breathtaking selfishness of my generation—the healthiest, wealthiest, and longest-lived generation the planet has ever known, in part because of the seventy years of peace safeguarded by the framework of international institutions, including the UN and the EU, that the Brexiteers and Trumpers are busy demolishing.  Yes, I know Europe and the US offshored their wars after 1945, but this too was part of my generation’s extraordinary—and entirely unearned—good fortune.

Certainly these privileges have not been shared equally.   But it is fair to say that more baby boomers—especially white baby boomers—have enjoyed security of employment, home ownership, decent pensions, rising living standards, and affordable healthcare and education than in any generation before or since.   They seem determined to keep these privileges for themselves, at whatever cost to their grandchildren.

The young are meantime trying to make their way in a world in which job security and guaranteed pensions have become a thing of the past, home ownership is beyond most pockets, post-secondary education comes at the price of crippling debt, the welfare state is under siege, and politicians react to climate change by withdrawing from international agreements and making a demagogic bonfire out of environmental regulations.  In the UK Roger Daltrey-style nostalgia for a non-existent golden-age past has also robbed them of the opportunity to live, marry, and work freely across the 28 countries of the EU—an opportunity the baby boomers have enjoyed for over 40 years.

Today’s Anglo-American world is ruled by the most privileged members of an entitled and narcissistic generation that will not consider sharing its wealth or its power.  My generation played a disproportionate part in voting them into office.  The new gerontocratic order is epitomized in Donald Trump’s cabinet.  But it is also reflected in Rolling Stone magazine’s exclusionary list of the top twenty greatest albums of all time.

I cannot help thinking it would have been better if a few more of us had died before we got old.  Just enough that the young really could say fuck off to their elders, and not just through their music.