From Without a Stitch in Time, a Peter De Vries short story collection:

“What I’m going to do is, I’m going to declare moral bankruptcy,” I said. “I mean, we keep using the term in that sense, why not follow it through? When a man can no longer discharge his financial obligations, we let him off the hook. Why not when he can no longer meet his ethical ones? I have too many emotional creditors hounding me, I tell you! That’s all there is to it. A man who simply cannot meet all the demands made on his resources, simply cannot be expected to keep his books balanced. It’s too much. Everybody keeps talking about moral bankruptcy but nobody does anything about it. Well, I’m going to. I’m going to declare it. I’m going into receivership. I’m going to pay everybody so much on the dollar.”

“In other words, Duxbury,” she said, calling me by my last name as people affectionately do, “you want to tell your wife about us.”

“I do,” I said, “and I’ve spoken those words only once before in my life.”

When a man lurches from a strict Dutch Calvinist upbringing to a job at the The New Yorker, this is the kind of humor we should expect him to write.

As far as I know, Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Maria Cross: Imaginative Patterns in a Group of Catholic Writers is the only book of literary criticism ever to be responsible for a war. It was on the basis of this book that Dag Hammarskjöld plucked its author from the Irish delegation at U.N. headquarters and sent him to head up the field office in Katanga, in the Congo, in 1961. “He was given to mysticism about literature,” O’Brien later shrugged, “as many Swedes are.” The job to be done in Katanga was simple: communicate to Moise Tshombe the U.N.’s strenuous request that he expel all Belgian officers and foreign mercenaries from his army, and furthermore inform him that although he had declared Katanga’s independence and reestablished some degree of law and order within its borders, the U.N. by no means regarded the province’s secession as a fait accompli. I have no idea why the Secretary-General thought a writer would be well suited for this. Perhaps he thought O’Brien’s polite letters of protest would be more persuasively worded than the other candidates’.

The choice was a bad one—and, in Hammarskjöld’s case, it was fatal. Without getting into what did or did not happen on that plane before it crashed in Northern Rhodesia, it is safe to say that Hammarskjöld wouldn’t have been on the plane in the first place if his hand-picked representative had not exceeded his mandate and started a war between U.N. forces and the Katangese army essentially on his own initiative. The question of whether that confrontation was necessary given the political realities of the post-independence Congo has been well treated elsewhere, as has the question of whether an independent Katanga would have been good or bad for Africa in the long run. The question that interests me is the extent to which Conor Cruise O’Brien’s literary bent was responsible for his bungling of the situation. Liberal-arts education is justified on the grounds that businessmen will be better businessmen and statesmen better statesmen if they are familiar with the thinking of poets and philosophers. Here we had a man for whom the liberal arts were a passion, and he was put in a position of real power partly on that basis. Did his literary sensibility have any discernible effect on his performance?

Yes, I think it did, but unfortunately the effect was bad. Everyone watching the Katanga crisis unfold at the time, and everyone who has reflected on it since, more or less agrees that the biggest source of trouble was miscommunication between U.N. headquarters and their man on the ground. O’Brien believed that his assignment empowered him to use force if he thought force had become necessary, and once he decided that it had, he believed that his dispatches in the run-up to Operation Morthor had made it clear to his superiors what he intended to do. This turned out not to be true, and headquarters had to scramble to find retroactive justifications for O’Brien’s attack—like the claim in one official report that a fire had been set in a U.N. garage, forcing their troops to retaliate. In his book To Katanga and Back, O’Brien calls bunk on this line:

It is hard to see how he [Hammarskjöld] and Dr. [Sture] Linner [head of the overall Congo operation] can altogether have escaped knowing the essentials . . . especially since the military command knew the military aspects of Operation Morthor. Morthor is a Hindi word. It does not mean ‘Sound the alarm; there is arson in the garage’ or ‘Let us now assist the provincial authorities to maintain order.’ It means ‘Smash.’

The literary man is marveling that the diplomats could have been so deaf to poetic connotation as to miss the symbolism of the name he had chosen. To which the diplomats, like sensible people, would have responded, “These are just names we pick so there’s something to put on the tab of the file folder.”

The irony is that Maria Cross has some very sharp things to say, in its chapter on Graham Greene, about Westerners who use Africa as a playground for their humanitarian impulses—a description that doesn’t quite fit O’Brien himself but certainly fits the Katanga operation. In his discussion of The Heart of the Matter (which is set in West Africa), O’Brien writes, “Scobie was a mechanism, seeking objects of pity as certain missiles are said to seek heat, and with much the same results.” An excellent line, but it must have seemed a little less clever when the bombs were falling over Elisabethville.

O’Brien once related his Katanga appointment to something Danton supposedly said when Fabre d’Eglantine asked him for a job: “Vous êtes poète? Alors je vous fais Ministre de la Marine” (“You are a poet? Then I shall make you secretary of the navy”). Considering how Danton and Fabre ended up, there may be something to the comparison. In any case, there is no proof in either story that poets make good politicians. We might submit one more piece of evidence for the prosecution. After Hammarskjöld’s death, an unfinished memoir was found in his apartment which included, among other things, poetry about his dead pet monkey—and this was not some private diary but a book he intended for publication. It may be that poets do not make good Secretaries-General either.

All absolutisms, appropriately enough, are not created equal. It is possible for a man to support one despot but condemn another, or to be a thoroughgoing monarchist at home and a republican elsewhere. A French aristocrat might go to Tsarist Russia and say, with perfect consistency, “I am a reactionary in France, but, my God, this is an appalling country!” (Paraphrase courtesy of Professor Withywindle.) That is what happened to the Marquis de Custine.

Custine was for Russia what Tocqueville was for the United States, and the two men, born fifteen years apart, had much in common. Both were aristocrats whose parents, under the Revolution, were either guillotined (Custine’s father) or imprisoned and very nearly guillotined (Custine’s mother and both Tocqueville’s parents). Both wrote masterpieces of similar length for similar reasons. Democracy had assumed a new level of importance in European affairs, and so had the United States and Russia—countries that were, coincidentally or not, the most democratic in the world and the least. Tocqueville studied the former to learn more about democracy in practice; Custine visited the latter to learn, as he put it, “new arguments against the despotism at home, the disorder that bore the name of liberty.” The difference was that Custine failed, returning to France a convinced advocate of the ideas he had left looking to refute.

Russia in 1839 even enjoyed popularity equal to that of Democracy in America. It was not quite as acclaimed, but it made up for this deficit with a hefty ladling of scandal. Tsar Nicholas I banned the book and violently rebuked his former guest for ingratitude and inaccuracy. He even withheld permission for Countess Hanska, one of his Polish subjects, to marry the novelist Balzac, because he heard that it had been Balzac who first suggested to Custine that Russia would make a good subject for a travelogue. Had he been more self-aware, Nicholas would have realized that his actions proved Custine’s point.

The tsar’s tantrum was not the biggest strike against the book’s respectability. Ten years before it was published, Custine had been found half-naked and bleeding in a ditch after some soldiers had taken offense at a sexual proposition. From that moment on he would be “France’s most distinguished and notorious homosexual” (according to George Kennan, who wrote a very good book about Custine’s opus, which he calls “the best guide to Russia ever written”). This was an enormous blow to a man whose social life revolved around salons, where whispers are easy to overhear and slammed doors are hard to reopen again, and he devoted much of his later life to foreign travel partly in order to avoid the pains of disgrace. There is nothing in the book that overtly suggests its author is gay—though there is something camp about the way our hero’s first meeting with Tsar Nicholas is nearly derailed when he breaks a heel—but one shouldn’t write off his sexuality as entirely irrelevant. Outsiders have always made the best observers, and in those cases where public humiliation doesn’t completely destroy a man’s capacity for empathy, it often enhances it.

Custine calls himself “an aristocrat both from character and from conviction,” so it is appropriate that it is the Russian courtiers, his counterparts, whose abased and precarious position under the all-powerful emperor first turns him against tsarism:

Things I admire elsewhere, I hate here . . . I find them too dearly paid for. Order, patience, calmness, elegance, respectfulness, the natural and moral relations that ought to exist between those who think and those who do, in short all that gives worth and charm to well-organized societies, all that gives meaning and purpose to political institutions is lost and confounded here in one single sentiment—that of fear. . . . In France, I imagined myself in accord with these rigorous disciplinarians; but since I have lived under a despotism which imposes military rule upon the population of an entire empire, I confess that I have learnt to prefer a little of the disorder which announces vigor to the perfect order which destroys life. . . .

I begin to perceive that I am here talking like the radicals in Paris. But, though a democrat in Russia, I am not the less in France an obstinate aristocrat: it is because a peasant in the environs of Paris is freer than a Russian lord, that I thus feel and write.

He was able to raise some of these objections with Russian aristocrats and even with Tsar Nicholas and other members of the imperial family, with whom he enjoyed a surprising level of intimacy thanks to his connections and his native charm. Even for a man well practiced in the art of tact, this must have taken some courage. Unfortunately, the answer he heard again and again only inflamed him further:

They say to me, “We would gladly dispense with being arbitrary, we should then be more rich and prosperous; but we have to do with an Asiatic people.” At the same time, they think in their hearts, “We would gladly dispense with talking liberalism and philanthropy, we should then be more happy and more strong; but we have to do with the governments of Europe.”

You can begin to see why a U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union was able to write of Custine during the Cold War, “I could have sent many pages verbatim from his journal and, after substituting present-day names and dates for those of a century ago, have sent them to the State Department as my own official reports.”

Russophiles will want me to point out that Custine’s low opinion of the tsarist system might have been a product of his low opinion of Russia in general. He denigrated their accomplishments by calling them “the Romans of the North—both peoples have drawn their arts and sciences from strangers.” As a deeply pious Catholic (religion had been a consolation during his national scandal), he bristled at their disparagement of his church and held the Orthodox religion in correspondingly low esteem: “The Russians in their prayers seem to me to think more of their emperor than their Creator. An ambassador about to be put to sleep in a Russian church by the Imperial liturgy is said to have remarked, ‘Awake me when you come to the subject of God.’” And as irritating as it must have been to be constantly addressed in the imperfect French favored by Russian aristocrats at the time, it would have been worse to be told again and again that, in the words of one particularly charmless woman, “there is a greater similarity between the French of the Old Regime and us, than between any the roof the European nations. With your aristocratic notions, you must surely find yourself more at home among us.”

There was one Russian family that earned from him nothing but the warmest admiration, and that was the family of the governor of Yaroslavl, whom he refers to only as “Monsieur ——.” Upon arriving in the city he is met by the governor’s young son:

“My father knows Paris,” said the young man; “he will be delighted to see a Frenchman.”

“At what period was he in France?”

The young Russian was silent; my question appeared to disconcert him, although I had thought it a very simple one. At first I was unable to account for his embarrassment; after discovering its cause, I gave him credit for an exquisite delicacy, a rare sentiment in every country and at every age. M. ——, governor of Yaroslavl, had visited France in the suite of the Emperor Alexander, during the campaigns of 1813 and 1814, and this was a reminiscence of which his son was unwilling to remind me.

A lovely story, but the praise is a bit more effusive than the reader has come to expect. Then it becomes clear why Custine is so well disposed toward the —— clan: By some bizarre coincidence, they are familiar with his writing. “All the members of the —— family vied with each other in doing me the honors of the house and of the city. My books were lauded with indirect and ingenious praises, and were cited so as to recall to my mind a crowd of details that I had forgotten.”

I can easily see why Custine is so often compared to Tocqueville, but there is another parallel that strikes me as far more interesting: Edmund Burke in his prosecution of Warren Hastings. It’s not just that both were reactionary Westerners surprised by their confrontations with the East. In each case, our author had established a reputation for siding with aristocrats against whom sophisticated observers were lobbing accusations of tyranny. Then the defender of authority encountered a ruler whom he really did consider a tyrant, a conviction that he was forced to explain in greater detail and with greater insight by virtue of having to distinguish between the faraway tyrant he disliked and the supposedly benign ones in his own backyard. Joe Sobran once wrote that the question one should ask any liberal, before asking him anything else, is “In what kind of society would you be a conservative?” That rule holds true with the positions reversed.

When I read Rebecca West’s description of the folk costume of Albanian men, I assumed she was lying or at least exaggerating:

No Westerner ever sees an Albanian for the first time without thinking that the poor man’s trousers are just about to drop off. They are cut in a straight line across the loins, well below the hip bone, and have no visible means of support; and to make matters psychologically worse they are of white or biscuit homespun heavily embroidered with black wool in designs that make a stately reference to the essential points of male anatomy. The occasion could not seem more grave, especially as there is often a bunch of uncontrolled shirt bulging between the waistcoat and these trousers. Nothing, however, happens.

Surely these “references” must be awfully subtle? Or perhaps the word “stately” is meant to be sarcasm? Can I trust anything West says about Albanians, given her notorious bias in favor of the Serbs? Or am I fool to expect the unembellished truth from a travelogue in the first place?

If you, too, have long wondered whether Albanian folk costume is as suggestive as West claims, the answer may lie in this old photograph, posted today on the Tumblr Folk Things and originally from the wonderfully specific site Balkan Threads.

Without wanting to start a conversation about the ways this garment may or may not evoke what it conceals, I will say that for the first time I can see how West’s description might be credible.

African literature has done a great deal to form the conventional wisdom about the cultural side of colonialism, that conventional wisdom being that African societies used to be communitarian, spiritual, and close to nature, but then these virtues were eroded by contact with the individualistic, calculating, and earthly-minded West. This generalization has enough truth in it to make a good starting point (at least for thinking about the cultural side of colonialism; the political and economic sides are obviously something else again). Unfortunately, when pressed to go into more detail about the exact nature of the West’s cultural inferiority, the argument often runs like this:

“The West is materialistic. It is spiritually impoverished.”

“How do you know?”

“They have motorcars.”

But a man may have a motorcar and yet be a saint. Capitalism and technology are not, in and of themselves, proof of spiritual impoverishment. African writers who set up Western culture as a bugaboo without displaying any familiarity with its riches are no better than the Western writers who romanticize tribal society based on a one-dimensional knowledge of it—the sort of Western writer who can’t tell the difference between a man who is close to nature and a man who is only close to nature because he is desperately poor, or the difference between a strong sense of community and oppression under a tin-pot dictatorship.

Which is why I have such admiration for An Ambiguous Adventure (1962) by Cheikh Hamidou Kane. It is exactly the sort of African novel that Westerners ought to read—one in which the main character is equally knowledgeable on Western and African culture and feels himself more drawn to his native one, but not simply because it is his native one. The narrator, Samba Diallo, is a young Senegalese man whose forward-thinking parents remove him from an Islamic school, where he had excelled, and send him first to a Western school in Senegal and then to France for university. (Cheikh Hamidou Kane himself studied philosophy and law at the Sorbonne.) His peers are impressed by his deep knowledge of history and philosophy, and some are dazzled by his African “authenticity,” but he finds himself less and less interested in joining their world and their way of thinking.

We know that Samba Diallo is able to articulate his reasons for this preference, because he does so at a dinner with a French university classmate, Lucienne, and her family. To put it in terms they will understand, he focuses his criticism on the Enlightenment:

It seems to me that this history has undergone an accident which has shifted it and, finally, drawn it away from its plan. Do you understand me? Socrates’ scheme of thinking does not seem to me, at bottom, different from that of Saint Augustine, though there was Christ between them. The plan is the same, as far as Pascal. . . . But don’t you feel as if the philosophical plan were already no longer the same with Descartes and Pascal?

It is not that they were preoccupied with different problems, but that they occupied themselves with them in different ways. It is not the mystery which has changed, but the questions which are asked of it, and the revelations which are expected from it. Descartes is more niggardly in his quest; if, thanks to this and also to his method, he obtains a greater number of responses, what he reports also concerns us less, and is of little help to us.

Lucienne’s father, a Protestant pastor, tell him to “hold firmly to this opinion. . . . Those who are on your side are fewer every day.”

Lucienne turns out to be a member of the Communist party, and she is a wonderfully well-drawn example of the kind of Western intellectual who would later visit such suffering upon Africa by making excuses for its dictators as long as they professed to be socialists:

“You have delved deeply into the Russian mind of the nineteenth century [she says], the Russian writers, poets, artists. I know that you love that century. It was filled with the same disquiet, the same impassioned and ambiguous torment. To be the extreme eastern end of Europe? Not to be the western bridgehead of Asia? The intellectuals could neither answer these questions nor avoid them. As you with the word I coined [négritude], so they did not like to hear talk of ‘Slavism.’ Yet who among them has not bent the knee, in filial devotion, before Holy Russia?”

Samba Diallo interrupted. “I was just saying that to you! And no priest or doctor would be able to do anything for this torment.”

“Yes, but Lenin?”

Critics have described Samba Diallo as an exemplary victim of colonialism in that he is a man buffeted by historical forces beyond his control. This was not my impression. He certainly recognizes that the end of Africa’s isolation is inevitable and his countrymen will have to adapt one way or another—the author compares this inevitability to “a woman who consents to intercourse: the child that is not yet conceived is calling to her . . . but in order that the child may be born, the country must give itself.” But for Samba Diallo, the pursuit of Western wisdom is not simply a form of self-defense or resignation; he truly feels its draw. When asked why he has chosen to study philosophy rather than something more practical like medicine or law, he answers:

“When I think about it now, I can’t help wondering if there hasn’t been a little of the morbid attraction of danger. I have chosen the itinerary which is most likely to get me lost.”

Like a moth drawn to the fire. What philosophically minded Westerner could not say the same?

Yumiko Kurahashi’s The Adventures of Sumiyakist Q (1969) is unlike any anti-Communist novel I have ever read, probably because it is a surrealist Japanese satire of Communism written by a female author, and there is reason to assume it is the only such book in existence. That pile of characteristics doesn’t occur together very often. For one thing, Japanese literature has no tradition of satire. I did not realize this until I read it in the translator’s introduction (“only deviations from accepted socials norms have tended to be the objects of criticism . . . where there have been attempts at satire in the twentieth century . . . one gets a stronger sense of personal grievance than of objective criticism”), and if he says it, I suppose it’s true. I have heard that Americans visiting Japan are warned not to speak hyperbolically because they are liable to be taken literally, and it is difficult to imagine satire without exaggeration. And while I hardly want to suggest that women never write anything but straightforward tales of flirtation and family, I can’t think of many great female novelists who are as political as Arthur Koestler or as experimental as Donald Barthelme, and I can think of no others who are both at the same time.

The novel takes place in the H Reformatory, where Q has been sent to serve as an instructor and, as a secret member of the Sumiyakist Party, to bring about a class revolution. (Sumiyakism is a stand-in for Marxism; the word translates to “charcoal-burners,” the same as “carbonari” in Italian.) His party training has taught him to anticipate the usual obstacles: the students and the menial staff, for instance, are illiterate, apolitical, and listless, and not at all interested in listening to him explain the tenets of historical materialism. His roommate, a theologian whose skin is red and crusty from constant self-flagellation, refuses to give up his irrational belief in God. His friend the literary instructor is more interested in writing an experimental pornographic novel than in observing the oppression around him. The one-eyed Doctor seems strangely well-read in the principles of sumiyakism, but considers it utter bunk. And the rector, who presides over all of them, is an obscenely fat man whose motto turns mens sana in corpore sano on its head: “An obese mind in a corpulent body.” Which takes on new shades of meaning when Q realizes that the meat served in the school cafeteria is harvested from reformatory “graduates” preserved in the Doctor’s freezer.

But these are not the obstacles to revolution that make Q so troubled or the reader so curious. The first interesting problem is that Q, who wishes to overthrow the school’s oppressors, can’t figure out who the oppressors are, if indeed any exist. There is an official calling himself “the overseer,” but it does not take long to notice that he has no power. He will occasionally inform Q of minor bureaucratic rules—like the one against entering the main building through the side door—but he never stops him or reports him to a higher authority, and no one but the overseer seems aware that such technicalities even exist. The rector is a tyrant, but a tyrant who will permit absolutely anything. He tells Q that instructors have no duties and are free to do anything or nothing, and when Q finally confesses that he is at the reformatory to incite a revolt, the rector only says, “Splendid, splendid!” The literary instructor, who has been at the school for a long time and answers Q’s questions about the way things are done there, explains it like this:

“Everything’s permitted here, you see. I suppose one could say with the theology instructor that if God does not exist then everything is permitted; but here it doesn’t matter if God exists or if he doesn’t, since one is free to do everything. The result of making use of this freedom is that the one freedom one does not have is that of knowing what is going on.”

This is philosophical satire. The political satire is where the book gets truly surreal and Marxism comes in for a real pasting. Every week the instructors are required to wager their entire salaries on a game of random chance. The winner of this arbitrary game gets the pot, and also gets to spend the night with the rector’s wife. Clearly the school was run on quasi-Marxist lines before Q ever showed up. But one instructor, with the rector’s permission, has set up a rival to the game by building a dog track on the grounds, where instructors and students are permitted to buy tickets in the betting parlor. Before dog racing can replace the traditional probability game as the school’s economic lifeblood, the impresario wishes to diminish the importance of size and natural gifts as much as possible, ideally with every dog finishing first equal. He has an impressive system of calculations based on each dog’s weight and past performance to determine what sort of “Harrison Bergeron” style handicaps to saddle them with—another step in the direction of Communism. The engineering instructor, who runs the game of chance, objects to this:

“The more you attempt to annihilate these disruptive, accidental factors, the more those factors remaining will take their revenge upon you. Even hastily assuming that you arrive at a situation whereby you can indeed impose such handicapping as you imagine will bring about your overall dead heat, should some accidental happening occur before the finish is reached—such as a dog wrenching its leg and falling, or two dogs running into each other—then your overall dead heat becomes impossible to realize.”

In the end, a sumiyakist revolution does occur, but not the kind that Q anticipated. Buy the book.

For reasons I cannot understand, the Japanese literary establishment’s biggest objection to Kurahashi was that her work was derivative to the point of plagiarism. Presumably they were thinking of different works than this one. Kurahashi admitted to a fondness for mimicry—“My novels are like an onion with one layer of pastiche after another”—but defended it as a necessary form of traditionalism. The translator’s introduction to Sumiyakist Q explains her argument: “Kurahashi said that the motive force behind the writing of her fiction was not that she had ‘something to say,’ but that she wished to create something in a certain style . . . thereby creating ‘imitations’ of these writers which would still be works that were totally her own.” Individuality and fidelity all in one, just as Oscar Wilde explained it. Rather conservative for an experimental novelist. Having understood her point of view, somehow it does not surprise me that in later life Kurahashi was most famous for her translations of Le Petit Prince and Shel Silverstein.

One contradiction remains. Kurahashi said she did not write because she had “something to say,” but if that was true, why write political satire? Sumiyakist Q was not her first venture into that territory. Her first short story to receive any attention, “Parutei,” which was written while she was studying for her masters in French literature (thesis subject: Sartre), is about a woman whose boyfriend convinces her to join “the Party” and who then becomes pregnant after a consciousness-raising session with a worker; she eventually leaves the Party on principle. Japanese universities saw violent radical protests in the decade leading up to Sumiyakist Q, and Communists were not a negligible force in national politics. Kurahashi herself lived in Portugal in the years right after Salazar and was forced to flee during the Carnation Revolution. She could not have been indifferent to politics.

The answer may be that she was less indifferent than disillusioned. In Sumiyakist Q, there are rumors of a war between the national government and uncivilized colonial rebels. Q decides that since the Party probably supports the savages as oppressed victims of the current order, he does too. He asks the Doctor for his opinion, and the Doctor says:

“Propositions such as ‘I oppose the war’ or ‘I support the war’ are of the same order as propositions such as ‘I love dogs’ or ‘I hate dogs,’ being empty philosophisms of the metaphysical variety. . . . Were I to say I opposed the war, no doubt this would structure a fixed emotional attitude on your part toward me, but I see no obligation to lend a hand in such a process. War is war, and all that we can do is put forward various hypotheses which aid our awareness of that fact.”

Sumiyakists latch on to radicalism because it “structures their fixed emotional attitudes” in a satisfying way—satisfying, but not satisfactory—and sumiyakists aren’t the only ones whose politics are born this way. There are not many anti-political political satires out there, and almost none that manage to avoid the trap of outright nihilism. That’s just one more way The Adventures of Sumiyakist Q is one-of-a-kind.

People who are genuinely concerned about having to face an apocalyptic scenario in their own lifetimes generally fall into one of a few categories. There are evangelical Christians anticipating the Rapture. There are foreign-policy paranoiacs who foresee nuclear war. And there are the environmentalists who figure they need a back-up plan for when the ozone layer gets shredded or smog becomes sentient or overpopulation turns the earth into a giant Japanese capsule hotel. I once got talking to a Brooklyn hipster who told me about her community garden and how it taught her and her neighbors such important skills. “I know what you mean. Like patience and gratitude and all the other old-fashioned virtues modern society lost when we moved off the farm.”

“No, I mean that when oil runs out, we’ll have to know how to feed ourselves. Like, I’ll be fine, because I raise my own chickens.”

And I don’t even want to talk about the fortysomething guy who told me we don’t need to stop global warming, we just need to slow it down to the point where the crisis won’t come until after space-flight technology is advanced enough to permit a mass interplanetary evacuation.

Joss Whedon lives in Los Angeles. Between the Christians, the warmongers, and the greens, which type of doomsayer do you think he encounters most often?

At the end of Cabin in the Woods [SPOILER], the redhead and the stoner allow an apocalypse to occur. The top geeks and film buffs of the conservative movement have been debating whether that choice makes moral sense on its own terms, and in the course of that debate introduced a few metaphorical comparisons. Jonah Goldberg said the kids were “objectively pro-genocide.” Ross Douthat brought up Omelas, with pro-life echoes. Foreign policy was a popular theme. Commentary accused Cabin of “enthusiasm for American decline,” Sonny Bunch (who started this whole discussion) compared the Old Ones to genocidal dictators, and I seem to remember someone else comparing Sigourney Weaver and Bradley Whitford to the CIA, which I guess makes the kids enemy combatants. Or maybe they were supposed to be draft dodgers.

Joss Whedon could have had these things in the back of his mind when he wrote the script. (He probably wasn’t thinking about radical Islam, though, since he already made his movie about the pro’s and cons of fanatical belief. It was called Serenity.) But if Cabin in the Woods can be traced back to a rant that Joss Whedon’s internal monologue has actually delivered in real life, my guess is that the rant sounded more like this:

Congratulations, mister cocktail-party dipstick, you are the 1,000th person this year who wants to tell me about the precautions he’s taking against the coming environmental apocalypse. You say you’ve got a bunker half a mile above sea level fully stocked with spam and organic toilet paper. You’ve learned how to bow hunt. You’ve got a hydroponic-farming expert on retainer. By the way, sucker, James Cameron hired the same guy, and he’s paying him a lot more money, so maybe you want to double that spam order.

But let me confront you with a blindingly obvious truth: If the apocalypse comes, you are almost certainly going to die. Your wife is going to die. Your friends are going to die. Even Mel Gibson is going to die, and he was in Mad Max. You work in PR. You couldn’t even find the craft service table on a post-apocalyptic movie set. You really expect to stay alive by kicking it Jeremiah Johnson style after the ocean takes over the San Joaquin Valley?

I don’t know why this is so hard for you to grasp. Your ancestors were plenty reconciled to the possibility of death: My mother might get bitten by a copperhead, my brother might catch the consumption, and I might get sent off to war or mauled by a puma or shot by a bandit. I’m not asking you to face all that. I’m not asking you to achieve some kind of Zen enlightenment where you are perfectly at peace with death because the universe is all one or whatever. I am just asking you to make the tiniest concession to your own mortality that can possibly be imagined: In the highly unlikely event of an honest-to-god apocalypse, absolutely everyone is going to die, including the two of us. That’s what an apocalypse means.

Fake Joss Whedon is just as annoyed as I am with fortysomething guys who earnestly believe that in thirty years, when Earth goes to pieces, humanity will survive by colonizing other planets. Actually, he’s probably even more annoyed, since they’ve plagiarized the entire premise of Firefly. The point is that sometimes, people need to be motivated into putting up a fight against armageddon, and sometimes they need to be told not to worry about armageddon so much. For the first, we’ve got Bill Pullman’s monologue from Independence Day. For the second, there’s Cabin in the Woods.

Our old friend Ben Hecht has agreed to appear before a literary society in a debate with his friend Maxwell Bodenheim:

When the evening arrived, Hecht walked to the foot of the stage and announced that the topic of debate would be—“Resolved: That people who attend literary debates are imbeciles.” He scanned the audience in silence. At last he said, “I shall take the affirmative. The affirmative rests.” He motioned to Bodenheim, who after an equally dramatic pause intoned, “I guess you win.” The pair beat their way out the back a hundred dollars richer.

From Ian Hamilton’s Writers in Hollywood.

A story of old Irish hero Daniel O’Connell, quoted in Sean O’Faolain’s biography:

I remember I was once counsel before Judge Day for a man who had stolen some goats. The fact was proved; whereupon I produced to old Day an old Act of Parliament, empowering the owners of cornfields, gardens, or plantations to kill and destroy all goats trespassing thereon. I contended that this legal power of destruction clearly demonstrated that goats were not property; and I thence inferred that the stealer of goats was not legally a thief, nor punishable as such. Poor Day charged the jury accordingly, and the prisoner was acquitted.

From Men and Wives by Ivy Compton-Burnett:

“Well, my Harriet. Well, my dear, I heard you talking in a way that reminded me of our youth. I said to myself, ‘Why, there is my Harriet chattering like a girl!’ This is a brave morning for you.”

“Godfrey,” said Harriet, shrinking back in a manner that made her husband do the same, “I wish you would not comment upon any action of mine that happens to be natural. What would you do, if you could not be yourself for a moment without creating a storm of comment? How can I avoid being unlike other people, if I am to produce stupefaction when I am as they are?”

The distinctive IC-B style (e.g., “‘Well, now, I am going to get up and go,’ said Sir Percy, carefully adapting his actions to his words”) isn’t to everyone’s taste, but you ought to investigate her if sitting blindfolded in an Edwardian parlor while a family afflicted with Asperger’s does psychological combat with the utmost courtesy sounds like your idea of a good time. I believe it is the paradise where Florence King will go when she dies.