May 15, 2025 : Issue #91

WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse

WELCOME

John Stuart Mill on the political force of sheer stupidity, the Cuban formulation of “underdevelopment,” and General DeGaulle on what you actually need to be convincing them of; and Bill Morrison layers Antony & Cleopatra at the Met, while Jay Lynn (formerly Ramiro) Gomez emerges from her chrysalis in LA, and Hans Noë passes on.

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The Main Event

“THERE IS SO MUCH DENSE SOLID FORCE IN SHEER STUPIDITY”

Murch and Mill.

Good friend of our Cabinet, the legendary film and sound editor Walter Murch (who incidentally has an extraordinary volume due out this summer from Faber & Faber, Suddenly Something Clicked, a mega memoir/manual/manifesto sequel to his lapidary In the Blink of an Eye of several decades back, so keep your eyes peeled for that!)—anyway, Walter was showing me, as is his wont, this remarkable passage culled from his own far-flung polymath explorations, this one from a follow-on speech given by the British philosopher John Stuart Mill during his brief stint (1865-8) as a parliamentarian in the House of Commons, on March 31, 1866, clarifying remarks from a few days earlier:

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party. There is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power.

The immediate pertinence of these remarks to the current situation in the United States (not to mention several similarly besieged liberal democracies around the world) could not be more obvious, and I quickly took to quoting it everywhere I went (occasionally substituting the word “racism” for “stupidity,” though in many ways they are one and the same), however, more recently I have begun to doubt the wisdom, not to mention efficacy, of such a rhetorical gambit.

For with regard to the first misgiving, is “stupidity” (as some inherent lumpen essence) itself the right formulation? Aren’t we in fact dealing with something much more like the old Cuban formulation of “underdevelopment”—how it isn’t so much the case that great masses of people are underdeveloped (or “stupid”) as that such masses have for generations been being underdeveloped (or “stupefied”), and systematically so, underdevelopment in that sense being an active process, usually undertaken, with malice aforethought and for profit, by the ones doing the underdeveloping. (Read, for example, Fox News, or the generations of plantation owners and their progeny in the South who actively nurtured anti-black racism among poor whites as a means of keeping both groups permanently subjugated. Speaking of which, again, read Fox News.)

As for the second misgiving, that of efficacy, I’m reminded of a story I used to hear about Charles De Gaulle (perhaps apocryphal in that I haven’t been able to locate any textual confirmation just now, though it sounds just like him). The story goes that on August 25, 1944, the day of the Liberation of Paris (a day which kept having to be postponed while the Allies waited for the London-based De Gaulle to make it up to the front lines so he could be seen to be leading his Free French forces in the liberation of their own capital)—

anyway, De Gaulle was proudly tramping down the Champs Elysees at the head of his army when he came upon one of his adjutants, a leader of the French Resistance forces who’d spent the whole war behind the lines deep in the Auvergne (though in regular shortwave contact with the General back in London the entire while), coming up to meet him from the other end of the boulevard. They embraced, De Gaulle exulting, “Isn’t all this marvelous!” to which the adjutant responded, “Indeed, Mon Général, though I do have a serious nit to pick with you, for what is the deal with this edict of yours, folding the {collaborationist} Vichy army into the ranks of our own resistance forces, such that I no longer get to address you directly but have to do so by way of an intervening Vichy commandant?” To which De Gaulle smiled indulgently, replying, “You don’t get it, do you? The point is not to get them to acknowledge how you defeated them but rather to get them, to let them, imagine that they were with you all along.” Which indeed was the very essence of Gaullism, a program of mass-indoctrinary consolation that held firm for over two decades, that is, effectively, until May 1968, when the immediate post-war generation rose up in revulsion, in part at the way their parents had been yammering on and on about how they had all been valiant supporters of the legendary Resistance when in fact most of them had been cowed collaborationists the entire while. (See Marcel Ophul’s searing two-part 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity on the extent of French collaboration during the Nazi occupation, a film so shocking that it was banned from being shown over French television all the way up through 1981!)

Such that, yeah, yammering on and on about MAGA stupidity, as seemingly obvious and obviously consoling as such sublime posturing may feel, may not actually be that effective a rhetorical, let alone political, stance in the months ahead, leading up to the 2026 midterms (should Trump and Roberts and the Republicans even allow those to be held, but that’s another story). Rather, Democrats needs to acknowledge their own (neoliberal) failings over the past several (Clintonian and Obamaesque) decades in addressing the authentic needs and experience of many of those who have been drawn to MAGAism (those folks weren’t simply imagining things), and then find a way of helping them to realize the ways that they have nevertheless been being had (“getting owned” in their own chosen parlance) by the very con artists who’ve been passing as their leaders across the Trumpist ascendency (and the reactionary waves that have preceded it). A tough project, but one that at least Bernie and AOC and Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker and Robert Reich and Naomi Klein and Jonathan Tasini and few others do seem to be attempting, and a lead well worth following.

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MEANWHILE, SOME ART NOTES FROM ALL OVER

Those of you based in New York have no doubt been hearing about the Metropolitan Opera’s first-time staging of John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra, based on Shakespeare though reset in something like the Fascist Italy of the twenties and thirties, but you may not realize that the backdrop braiding of exceedingly rare and highly evocative archival video footage from the time with select live action video projections is the contribution of our old friend Bill Morrison, the cutting-edge experimental filmmaker most recently behind the Oscar-nominated multi-screen real-time police killing short documentary Incident that we featured in our issue 86A and before that such masterpieces as Decasia and Dawson City Archive. Yet another reason to try to sample the production (if you can somehow afford to!) before it closes on June 7.

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Meanwhile, real veterans of the Cabinet will perhaps remember our zoom conversation with Jay Lynn Gomez back in issue #4, the young Latina artist who in her earlier incarnation as Ramiro Gomez focused such achingly empathic attention on the legions of domestic workers who make the easy lives of California’s elite and not-so-elite even remotely possible (subject of my lavishly illustrated 2016 monograph, Domestic Scenes: The Art of Ramiro Gomez, arguably more pertinent than ever today!)—especially those living in or passing through Southern California—will want to visit “Butterfly Dreams,” Gomez’s new show of recent work at the Charlie James Gallery, focusing this time, somehow just as movingly and empathically, on the arc of her own gender transformation and that of friends she has been making along the way. Through May 31, at 961 Chung King Road in downtown LA’s Chinatown.

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POSTSCRIPT

Hans Noë (1928-2025)

Veterans of the Cabinet will no doubt recall Hans Noë (the subject of our issues 37, 38 and 39A), the pre-war scion of the remarkably cosmopolitan town of Czernowitz along the Romanian/Ukranian frontier of the old Austro-Hungarian empire who somehow survived the entire Holocaust in deep hiding, after which, surfacing in New York, he went on to study with Tony Smith and subsequently Mies van der Rohe, emerging into a distinguished if modest architectural career and a protean variety of other side-gigs (including reviving and then helming the bustling Soho diner Fanelli’s, still under the stewardship of his son the sculptor Sasha Noe, his other son Alva being the eminent philosopher and chair of the department at Berkeley). In a retirement which lasted over thirty years, in virtually complete secrecy, he himself returned to his roots as an artist, pursuing a dazzling array of sculptural variations in the solitude of the upstate home he had designed and shared with his vivid wife Judy. For years he labored on, a sort of Hidden Master. Only there toward the end did he begin to show the work, which is when I first got to know and write about him. On the eve of his first showing, in an exhibition for which I was privileged to write the catalog, he told me (and I recorded) how that upcoming prospect had been provoking a whole revision of the story he’s long been telling himself about his life:

I used to imagine my general distaste for self-promotion and my indifference toward fame as sort of emblematic of a certain kind of moral or at any rate aesthetic superiority. With high considered self-regard, I was refusing to enter into that whole delusional rat race. But I’m no longer so sure: I think rather that my problem may simply have been one of fear, a prolonged form of PTSD, as it were, with its roots wending back to my experience of the war, when survival enforced an entire regime of perpetual hiding, since any and every calling of attention to oneself could so easily have proven fatal not only for myself but for my entire family. And maybe it’s just that I never got over that way of being in the world.

Maybe it hadn’t so much been a question of his having been a Hidden Master, I concluded, as a hiding one, and now there, at the very end—enormous changes at the last minute!—his cover was getting blown. Well, good for him and good for the rest of us.

Hans could be a cussedly difficult character, steeped in all manner of self-sabotage and torqued exasperation, but hidden within that crusty carapace was an entirely dear man and an inspired, grace-flecked artist. And I’d like to think that he had attained some measure of surcease when just the other day, a few weeks shy of his ninety-seventh birthday, he passed away peacefully, in his sleep.

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ANIMAL MITCHELL

Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive

animalmitchellpublications@gmail.com

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