Sipping Wine with the Fascisti

Over the past couple years, as anyone who knows me personally knows, I’ve become the worst sort of insufferable wine dork. The sort of person who enthusiastically reaches for the wine list, only to go “oh…” and say to the table “well, this should probably be OK…”

Which is how I got to watching Mondovino, the 2004 documentary about the battle within the wine world between global capital – represented by mogul Robert Mondavi coming off bluff and American, wine consultant Michel Rolland who comes off like a full-on action movie Euro-villain, complete with pointy beard, car phone, cigarillo, and namedrops of Charles Aznavour and Gérard Depardieu, and finally the legendary wine critic Robert Parker (who honestly just seems like a bit of a sweetheart) – on one side, and a plucky set of artisanal producers in goofy rustic hats on the other side, as well as NYC wine distributor Neal Rosenthal, who compares the big names to George W. Bush (hell yeah).

Throughout, one thing that all say, though, is that wine is a civilizing factor. Not only does it elevate the discourse – “symposium,” let it be remembered, once meant a party where you got schnockered on the stuff – but they repeat that it is a consummate art, blending the lessons of nature with the handicraft of  man, something I myself pretty much believe. But in conveying this message, here are some choice quotes on the subject, taken from the film.

“I think [Berlusconi] is helping, not just with wine, he’s much more open, trying to make things work better, trying to make the bureaucracy more modern.” – James Suckling, then senior editor, Wine Enthusiast

OK, we all have our moments… eh…

“Without art, without culture, it’s virtually impossible to make great wine. Generally, the indigenous people here have no sense of initiative.” – Arnaldo Eckart, Vinos Cafayate, the flagship producer in the Argentinean appellation of the same name

Great job guys. Amazing.

“In [the fascist period], Italian industry was stimulated and encouraged.” – Piero Antinori, of the legendary Antinori wine dynasty, and founder of Tignanello, the wine bougie enough to lend its name to Meghan Markle’s lifestyle blog

“Italy at that time needed a strong energetic hand. And fascism did bring about a certain order.” - Albiera Antinori, his niece

Well fuck!

It’s a funny word, “fascism.” Widely misapplied of course. In my youth, for instance, it generally applied to teachers enforcing quiet rules during study hall, and much abused since. It’s an epithet I’m particularly skeptical of, considering how broadly it can be applied (regardless of the Umberto Eco definition or any other attempt to define the concept), but these guys are at the very least amiable to the idea not just in practice but in name, despite decades of reflection on the insanity of Europe 1930-45.

I’ve long been confused by this aristocratic version of conservatism, which bears little in common with its American counterpart, other than an opposition to liberal and leftist views. Its roots are instead in blood and soil, or after the Second World War, a nebulous conception of “culture.” And therein lies the rub, as these conservatives deem themselves to be cultured, that thereby justifies the actions that follow suit as those of virtuous men, and the resultant barbarity is merely deemed an unfortunate epiphenomenon of their actions, rather than an essential characteristic.

This stands in stark contrast to the American vision of conservatism, particularly in an era in which the grandes dames Eastern establishment Republicans – Nelson Rockefeller, et al. – have long since faded into memory. Rather, the boorish and suburbanized American right has a bit of a tendency to devalue the concept of high culture writ large, instead favoring a point of origin not in laissez-faire capitalism and/or Evangelical Christianity – two things that have a bit of a tendency to go together, a conflation of the Kingdom of Heaven and the C-Suite. Sure, they fight culture wars, but these culture wars are decidedly not over Vivaldi’s status within the canon or the nature of an authentic Roquefort, but over salacious Megan Thee Stallion lyrics and M&Ms.

Given this relegation of conservative principle to religious and market forces, the Vivaldi and Roquefort wind up being liberal-coded, at least among the professional classes. The PMC finds themselves drawn to the local and the refined, regardless of the political valences by which that expresses itself in the world writ large. The actual material implications are irrelevant, because in a post-1960s world, this attitude constitutes both distinction (Bourdieu shout out whaaaaaa!!) and a rejection of the admitted plastic ugliness of mainstream American society. And in this way, there is a mistaken conflation of values and consumption, a Frasier Crane attitude that cannot bear the idea that its stated values and its explicit desires are incommensurate.

This isn’t too complicated, and one thing Mondovino points out, as they discuss the market cap and production statistics of every winery they visit, is that this level of artisanship is largely illusory. The great Bordeaux houses are shown to be what they are, which is to say savvy business enterprises that rely largely on the allure and aura of terroir and tradition as marketing devices.

Let it be remembered that despite what the European nostalgists of food and wine might say, this is nothing new. When the famed 1855 Classification was instituted in Bordeaux, it was not based on the unique qualities of the soil and climate – geology, meteorology, and agronomy still being infant sciences at the time – or even the subjective taste of some initial panel of gouty barons. Rather, the basis was simply the market prices as they existed in 1855, with Lafite, Latour, Margaux, and Haut-Brion being the most expensive at the time and therefore earning the title of “first growth.” The 1855 Classification then cemented this status (humming “reification” under my breath right now), with the only substantive change coming in 1973 when Chateau Mouton-Rothschild was promoted from second to first growth – and in certain sectors, c’était une scandale.

Post-1960s, and back in the Anglosphere, this became the model for the corporate artisanal, exploited en masse. Think about the early days of Starbucks, back in the ‘90s. This wasn’t just a cuppa joe, this was craft, complete with global-village aesthetics in the storefronts and the names of exotic destinations for the beans – you’re not just having a cup of coffee, you’re going to Bali, man! Never mind that it is an industrial product just like any other produced in the sorts of appalling conditions that one can get away with in the Global South, never mind that the company that produces it will mercilessly crush any attempt at union organizing and aggressively greenwashes its activities, this is “fair trade” coffee, even if it’s the diarrheaccino that Jenny from Sales is sipping on her way into the office. You consume the good thing, and you yourself become the good thing.

The conservatives – whether the Ferragamo-wearing gout cases or the American boors – have no such hang-ups.

For a point of comparison to all these types, think about the Ratliff family in the most recent season of White Lotus. We have Saxon, the punchable-face finance bro eldest son, who makes a point of demonstrating how much he doesn’t give a fuck, and his mother Victoria (played to a T by Parker Posey), who fawns over luxury scents – “cut grass, tuberose” – while complaining in equal measure about the various filths and impurities and affronts to her Carolinian upper-class propriety, whether in the form of Southeast Asia being Southeast Asian, or the army of uncouth and mildly criminal wealthy expats (more later, a whole essay worth there), and in between there’s the father, Timothy, a bit of a white-collar crook himself just starting to face the consequences of his actions. On the other side, we have the daughter, Piper, the not-quite-Buddhist seeker who eventually realizes what a princess she actually is, and between all of them there is the younger son, Lochlan, the teenage dope who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing and occasionally gives out a handy to blood relatives. I could keep going, trope upon trope, extending the metaphor to its breaking point, but let’s stop there. 

But I’m writing this cynical take as they’re delivering the carciofi alla giudia with a glass of Fiano. I am clearly part of the problem.

So what do I do with that? Do I hem and haw about my consumer choices in a desperate attempt to find morality and authenticity?

Indeed, it’s in my recent position as an actual food and drink editor (ayyyyyy) that I actually have to be around all of these tropes (in addition to a large number of actually lovely people), and at least attempt to make nice-nice with them, even as I clench my molars. As much as I like the foie gras and the pigeon, I am ill-equipped for the social dimension of this world.

For now, I order the grappa – the carciofi and the amatriciana were perfectly fine – made from the must of the legendary Ornellaia wine. Even if I can’t help but side-eye the name “Antinori” on the bottle.

The Fascist Writer

In recent weeks, largely due to a New York Times article, the name of Julius Evola has been circulating around the world of political magazines and blogs, a name that I would have thought would mostly be forgotten, at least outside of a handful of far-right groups and vaguely new age spiritual sects. And yet, it seems that the mostly-forgotten Evola has now gotten something of a reboot, thanks to his influence on the policies and thought of current reichsleiter Steve Bannon.

I shouldn't be too surprised. Apparently, Bannon is quite the fellow bookworm, not surprising, given his generally haggard and unkempt appearance. He bears a remarkable similarity to the monastically bearded, anti-Western propagandist of Putin's Russia, the sociologist Aleksandr Dugin.

But given the remoteness of Evola's ideas from the folksy anti-elitism, evangelical Christianity, and free-market enthusiasm that act as the main lodestones for the American right, it makes for quite the contradiction in terms. Rather, Evola is the sort of thinker that has long been popular among members of the European right, who have a tendency to express things in terms of peoples that have existed since time immemorial. If you look to the neo-fascists that currently plague France, Hungary, Greece, and Russia, it's not too hard to find Evola and his fellow travelers.

You may quite likely have never heard of him, but this philosopher (if you can call him that, he'd likely have shunned the term) and ideologue was one of the handful of post-Nietzschean thinkers whose stars rose brightly in the early years of fascism, only to come crashing down almost immediately after World War II. Strongly favoring tradition over progress, elitism over egalitarianism, mystical immediacy over analysis, organic over historical notions of culture, and myth over theory, Evola was one of those rare thinkers who actually put his concepts into practice, in both a vaguely pagan esotericism as well as providing an intellectual basis for Mussolini's rise to power.

Like many of his fellow right-wing intellectuals in the early 20^th Century, he couldn't escape lingering associations with fascism, and his last major work, Ride the Tiger, published in 1961, implored those with “noble souls” to survive what he believed to be the destructive onslaught of a modern society in which the traditional formations had largely been obliterated.

Most of those far-right thinkers who did survive World War II with their reputations tattered but intact framed their arguments in terms of poetic and literary writing. Emil Cioran, Ezra Pound, Knut Hamsun, the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, all were outspoken fascists for whom analyses of their work would inevitably have to include a reconciliation of their thought and their artistic production. And yet, despite their violent distaste for modern society, all four used the most intense of modernist techniques to convey their desire for a more traditional existence. As in the poems of T.S. Eliot, as in the novels of Yukio Mishima, modernist experiment is used to illuminate the nature of modernity, in the hopes of pushing people back into the primordial.

The ideas of a handful of more philosophically inclined thinkers managed to continue, albeit in a reduced form. Oswald Spengler continued to have a lingering if largely negative influence, largely due to his discontent with the Nazis who claimed him as a prophet. Carl Schmitt, by casting politics in terms of theology, managed to lecture and write for years after the war, providing a tool for political analysis across the spectrum. And of course Martin Heidegger, while he disavowed his Nazi past and his tendency to give lectures in full brown uniform, still carries an obsession with immediacy, intuition, and authenticity that makes it remarkably easy to see why he drew his profoundly anti-modern conclusions.

There's an undeniable allure here.

If I go back to my late teens, I'd heretofore received my intellectual development on a steady diet of positive science and liberal democratic theory, which went together in John Locke-step. When I idolized rebels against the system, it was because the system itself was behaving in a corrupt and irrational fashion. My punk icons hated the simpering middle-class, Protestant politics of the Reagan era, my lost-generation icons revolted against the loneliness and phoniness of the newly moneyed America in the years following World War I. The good things were science, social democracy, the natural world. The bad things were organized religion, capitalism, artifice.

But when I began to examine more ardently anti-Enlightenment perspectives, they were bracing. I read Nietzsche, of course, as every snotty, smart teenage boy with an authority problem does, and loved the sheer flippancy of a “philosophy” delivered entirely through aphoristic zingers. Then out into Emil Cioran, Rimbaud, Mishima, Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, none of whom much cared for the systematic qualities of the modern world. And then onward to Heidegger. At his most brilliant, in the Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger was like a hairy black spider crawling up my neck, telling me my reality was false. Following Heidegger, I read Antonio Gramsci, the imprisoned Italian Marxist who wrote on how concepts like “common sense” and “common knowledge” disguised the political agenda of the bourgeoisie.

For a brief moment, it became easy to swallow all of this whole. The rejection of the individual subject as an invention of Western metaphysics, the full-throttle rejection of Enlightenment ideals, the primacy of subjective experience over any supposedly objective experience, and the all-encompassing power of mythic narrative.

The ideas are so much sexier than their rivals, more radical, somehow more dangerous than the staid alternative.

Yet, at the end of the day, I couldn't shake the fact that these were an equally rigid system, and one which led the mind to some awfully dark places. Without any kind of reconstructive technique, these critiques – and they were primarily designed as and should be interpreted as critiques, not signposts – lead to a particularly dull helplessness. The way that so many of these romantically inclined, more intuitively driven writers and thinkers tried to find out was through a supposed transcendental authenticity. And that is the road that leads to fascism.

Throughout all my hemming and hawing, the “authenticity” factor always seemed to me to be total bullshit. Sure, modern America was a disingenuous, holographic state held together by false hopes and run by a loose-knit assemblage of squabbling financial elites via mass surveillance, but the horror seems to be everywhere, across time and space. Unlike the fascists, I see no nobility in Medieval or Confucian hierarchy, or in a figurehead representing the popular will, or in a world in which scientific method is subordinated to a unified and symbolically rich semiosphere under a beneficent godhead.

That yearning for some kind of anti-modern transcendence remains among the general populace, whether the ideologically committed or the terrified, and I suppose it's largely because the modern world can be an awfully scary place.

And so, periodically, people are tempted to return to a womb of supposedly eternal truths, to follow primeval myth or nationalist flag-waving rather than undertake the challenge of analysis. And I shouldn't be too surprised when I find that the leading scholars of the fascists have been reading the same books as me.

Life During Wartime

Yesterday, as I spent the afternoon sitting in the park reading a book, a grenade was lobbed by an unknown party into a crowd of protesters at the Victory Monument, a few minutes' walk down the street, injuring 30.

It's a cliche to say that in times of war, one should live life as normal, so as to not "let the terrorists win." And there's truth there-- after all, we run countless risks in our ordinary lives without thinking it, and besides, we need to live our lives regardless.

Over the past week or so, the streets have turned into ghostly, empty passageways leading to the loci of mass protest sites, barricaded by piles of tires and guarded by militants wearing bandannas and armbands covered in slogans. The tension has been there.

But when the additional threat of unknown and unknowable violence, committed by unknown parties who seem tied to neither camp in the current political fracas, the tension turns to fear, and that spot on Ratchawithee Road becomes blackened dread.

Terrorists, it's typically argued, use the methods of terror to project their voice. And a good Foucauldian would also say that it's a claim of biopower, the use of dead bodies for political means. But what often seems ignored is the spatial dimension, the way the active group crudely hacks out a piece of landscape. It's not for themselves, it's not claimed territory.

And when the terror itself is not claimed, there is no voice. The bomb site is pure threat, a scar across the face of the city.

It has been suspected that the leaders of the protest and their well-placed supporters among Thailand's commercial and aristocratic elite are using Reichstag tactics to levy public opinion, or to force a military takeover of the government. But there is no evidence for this, and I doubt any will arise. And as for the government's forces, they have no interest in creating chaos-- the police are being held back, and all they want is their electoral victory in a few weeks' time.

But it's this unknowability that reflects the polygonal nature of the Thai body politic. The international media, along with the more partisan members of the local media, depict a simplistic picture of two groups, red and yellow, in favor of Yingluck Shinawatra's Pheu Thai government and the legacy of the Thaksin government before her versus those against them. But you have a broad range, including red shirts who have been disappointed by Yingluck's tenure and by the self-righteous populist hucksters in the Pheu Thai party, swaths of the PDRC group led by Suthep Thaugsuban who find Suthep himself to be ungainly and corrupt, the hardcore supporters at either end, the former supporters of Suthep who are bothered by his increasingly unbending and anti-democratic demands, the hardline monarchists with their hateful phobias of modernity and egalitarianism, and you have the vast body of Thais who are alienated by the whole damn thing. Now compound this with the machine politics of the Thai parliament in which invisible lines of patronage and clientelism dominate, with cliques led by thuggish big men, old alliances formed in boys' boarding schools and military college graduating classes and century-old Chinese immigrant business alliances and common lines of descent from illustrious ancestors.

This big something, so much messier and more disparate than the 24-hour news cycle is willing to admit, creates a situation where it becomes entirely unsurprising that some cabal somewhere, meeting in the soft-lit halls of power, is willing to hand a few thousand baht to some poor peasant or out-of-work builder to lunge a bomb into a crowd on a bright Sunday afternoon.

And I know I am still the outsider to it all, the youthful foreigner who only half understands the signs and speeches in their original language.

But the notion of an outsider's perspective having any value at all seems to be at present roundly dismissed. Yes, the media perspective has been shoddy. But the PDRC has been accusing any journalist who asks hardball questions, or, for that matter, questions the wisdom of ousting a democratically elected government, as being a Yingluck supporter. Keep in mind these are the same people who tried to commandeer the media and force them to only broadcast the news from their perspective a month ago, and who lack any apparent sense of irony.

But the thing is, when outsiders are told they cannot understand an issue because of their nationality, rather than taking this a stern rebuke, they tend to be reminded of the rants of Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon, of the apologists for workers' rights abuses in Dubai and Singapore, and if we're to be a bit melodramatic, of the darkest moments of 20th Century Europe.

As I walk to work, I'm haunted by two specters: that of the authoritarianism that threatens to strangle me, and that of the terrorism that threatens to bleed me out in the street.

And that authoritarianism and that terrorism are united in their opacity. I'm living in a city that seems to be blanketed in a heavy fog of disinformation and violence. In a bit of jargon that George Orwell would have been proud of, a military spokesman, when asked about the tanks being held in Bangkok, answered that "the matter will be further explained on a later date."

When will it be resolved? The government has set an election date-- knowing full well they can expect a victory-- for the 2nd of February, but maybe that will be delayed. The PDRC refuses to negotiate, demanding an people's council (read: junta), and the more extreme members of his camp are suggesting scare tactics like shutting down all air control in Thailand. I'm reminded of the little boy who refuses to share his toy, and when asked to, simply smashes it against the wall.

For now, all I see in the future is awfulness. Even in the scenario I want to happen-- a peaceable election-- we will in all likelihood, see high emotions and ineffectual governance. The reforms needed will be difficult to pass and even more difficult to  implement. Democracy can flourish in Thailand, but until then, I sleep in a war zone.

The Human Condition at Poipet

For all of the exoticism advertised by the Tourism Authority of Thailand, the baking plains of East Central Thailand remind me far more of Arkansas or Tennessee more than the sun-dappled beaches one sees on billboards. This is the Thailand of scrapyards and used car lots, hand-painted signs directing motorists to stop for coffee or noodles, Coca-Cola billboards, and bonfires burning in gravel lots with solitary huts of plywood and tin rusting in the corner. In the distance, the worn-down nubbins of old mountain ranges emerge from the level plain, eaten away at by millions of monsoon seasons, countless mudslides, and the humidity that transforms the ancient granites and metaconglomerates into quartz fragments and vermilion-colored silicate mud.

The highway terminates at the syphilitic border settlement of Aranya Prathet. Beyond is the Cambodian city of Poipet, a casino town just a few hours from Bangkok. In the wastelands around the border, you can feel the ghostly presence of the countless Khmer Rouge refugees who once streamed across the border in the late 1970s, and Aranya Prathet, with its desultory town square and squalid market, seems a testament to the cruelty and ugliness of old wars.

I get out my pen and notebook in the buffet in a lightless casino basement, which is as depressing and tawdry as a lightless casino basement in a Cambodian border town sounds. The food here has a sickly, sugary, fatty quality to it-- rubbery, greasy eggs, croissants that leave oil slicks on the roof of your mouth, gristly, gray pork-- that mirrors the activities going on outside the buffet gate.

Upstairs, 50 year old Thai women in jewel tones, all of them looking like they're participating in an Imelda Marcos lookalike contest, affix themselves to video poker and roulette wheels that rotate electronically under glass like pies at a diner. This isn't Las Vegas or Macau or Monte Carlo or even Atlantic City. This is the equivalent of those bleak Mississippi and Illinois towns that look to legalized gambling as a way to rebuild their devastated, post-industrial communities.

All, here, is luxury. Or rather, "luxury," ease, cheap entertainment: low-stakes gambling, gaudy stained-glass chandeliers that look stolen from the bar of an Applebee's, sugary cocktails, sour-faced hostesses, stages festooned with lavender bunting, and grotesque singers in the Wayne Newton mode, hair thinning, with the overfed yet sickly look common to decaying third-tier celebrities and Henry VIII.

A casino is made all the more disgusting by the sheer earnestness of it, its plainspoken and hard-nosed attitude, Nevadan decadence on top of Chinese cynicism and wreathed with Southeast Asian bourgeois kitsch. Why yes, the architecture seems to say, we want your pension money. The great race to build bigger and more high-tech casino resorts in Vegas throughout the '80s and '90s built greater and greater temples to Mammon. But in Poipet, they don't even bother to cover up the corrugated ceiling-- this is a temple to, at most, the 99 baht sale.

But, at the end of the day, what makes Poipet more horrifying than its American equivalents it that it is a Southern casino town transported to the third world, staffed by refugees and surrounded by filthy-faced Khmer children picking up trash and hawking cheap plastic trinkets, looking sad and stoic. Beyond the green zone of entertainment venues, the surrounding landscape of Cambodia's Banteay Meanchey Province is littered with landmines and inhabited by some of the poorest, most exploitable people on the Asian continent.

This is the face of modern fascism. The fascist architecture that marks Poipet isn't the grand scale neoclassicism of Albert Speer, but rather the hearty gemütlichkeit of fake Bavarian cottages, the plastic imitations of a mythic past-- look no further than the stabbing concrete attempt at an Angkorian gate that marks the entrance to Cambodia. Inside the hulking entertainment palaces, the middle classes ensconce themselves in the fantasy of affluence. Outside, a peasant girl, her face smeared with red clay dust, stares into the smoke from the trash heap, and watches as it obscures the rising evening star.

Image and Material

About a month ago, I was wandering through the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. Amid the textiles and pottery, I came on a painting by a not terribly well-known Thai artist named Pongdej Chaiyakut.

From another angle:

In the grid, we have an unsettling group of images: crushed skulls, moon-faced generals in uniform, baby elephants that look weirdly fetal and primordial, stray dogs with their assholes open.

This is, in reality, the imagery of what people see every day in the news and on the streets, rearranged and contorted as if seen in a dream. The viewer is really seeing the lurid crime scene photos plastered across the front page of every Thai scandal sheet newspaper; the massive military parades, commandants in sunglasses saluting the tricolored flag; and the grimy curs that lurk on every street corner, mangy and sunburned, too lackadaisical and degenerate to even bark.

The farang tourists come to see a sun-drenched little kingdom by the sea, the golden Buddhas that recline amid temple bells, the heavily misted monsoon forests that tumble down the sides of the mountains; in this romanticized vision, even the peasants and urban poor are little more than pastiche images providing local color. Look underneath the freeway, and find another world entirely.

And what I love about artists like Pongdej is their unabashed willingness to confront this other world.

Ordinary people in Thailand have fought, tooth and nail, for real democracy since the fall of the absolute monarchy, against the petty despots that have so often come to power here. It's taken decades, but the country seems, shakily, in fits and starts, to be moving toward that ideal.

Yet there is the lingering taste of fascism. Its aesthetic expresses itself everywhere. At the level of "high culture," it is faux Greco-Roman concrete, and epic, three hour long nationalistic cinema in which the integrity of the kingdom is perpetually assaulted by faceless outside forces. At the level of popular culture, it is soap operas and the tabloid press. In a fascist climate, focus group-tested media becomes therapy. Intellect becomes paranoia, despondence.

What we get is a hologram. The horror and grit as well as the humanity and the beauty of daily life are trapped within a fleeting image. Inundated in reproduced image, it becomes harder and harder for us to accept what goes on under the dancing sheen of digital light.

As someone who claims to be politically and socially aware, I try to and have to keep alive the hope that someday, somewhere, people will awaken from their stupor. Marx called this principle class consciousness, Thomas Paine called it common sense. I can't say I know what an ideal society might look like. All human action is buried in obscurity and contradiction. But at the end of the day, I am trying to hold onto the same vision: that guided by some distant star, we can find out how to be less awful to each other.