So I Just Read Les Misérables

 

This regards the 1987 Signet Classics edition of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, complete and unabridged, translated by Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee, based on the original French to English translation by C.E. Wilbour. All spoilers to follow.

I'd tried reading Les Misérables several years ago but quite honestly got tired with Hugo's overwrought prose somewhere in Volume II. Since the world is ending and I ran out of library books, I figured this was a good time to give it another go. I'm glad I did because while Hugo doesn't get any less wrought as the story grows, it's both a fascinating exploration of 19th Century society in the shadow of revolution and an insight into the psyche of the time, still wrestling with old aristocratic habits and new republican ideals.

But having said all that - and planning to say more - what really defines this gargantuan novel is a morality play, centered on the character of Jean Valjean. Imprisoned for stealing bread and kept for four times his original sentence because of repeated escape attempts, he is both sympathetic while being hardened and cunning enough to be a compelling hero. Some might be attempted to call him Byronic but rather his turn from a life of wickedness - or what society deems wicked - to the good is much more religious. Embittered and alienated from all humanity at the start, the kindness and forgiveness of a provincial bishop sets him on his path to redemption at the start to which he pursues with as little regard for the mores and norms of society as when he was a criminal but with rather with a focus on compassion and relieving the suffering of others.

Valjean finds his project of human betterment embodied in the orphaned Cosette. Orphaned by his own charitable machinations in his guise as Monsieur Madeleine, the benefactor from nowhere who builds up the factory town Montreuil-sur-Mer. A factory that employs - and degrades and throws away - Cosette's martyred mother Fantine. But before he can swoop in and save the poor orphan, Valjean's past catches up with him in a morality play within a morality play.

Enter Inspector Javert, Hugo's embodiment not of Good but of Order. Javert's commitment to law and authority is tautological - it must be obeyed because it is law and authority - and he takes visible pleasure in subjecting others to the law's severity. At first suspecting the beloved Mayor Madeleine of being the convict Valjean, he later recants his theory as some poor dolt in a neighboring town is arrested for stealing apples and roundly accused of being the infamous Valjean. Real name Champmathieu, he is subjected to a Kafkaesque trial in which his insistence upon his true identity is proof of his guilt.

This play within a play serves to illustrate Hugo's larger point about the society of his day and law and order. How stealing bread or simply mistaken identity can condemn someone to lifelong ignominy, the old feudal castes persisting under different names, as further demonstrated when "Monsieur Madeleine" storms the trial to proclaim himself the true Jean Valjean, to which everyone reacts with incredulity. He can't possibly be a convict because he is a respected mayor and businessman.

However, as much as Hugo challenges these lingering ideas of inherent goodness and wickedness, of castes assigned either success or misery for all time, he still cannot break free of the essentialist view of human nature. This Great Man theory is a constant theme through Hugo's novel, often in tension with his professed republican ideals. For all his focus on the dignity and suffering of the lower classes, it's only through the superiority of Mayor Madeleine - the reformed Jean Valjean - that uplifts the community of Montfermeil. When he surrenders himself to the law to save Champmathieu, the whole town goes back to seed.

The long digression on the Battle of Waterloo further cements this paradox in Hugo's thinking. Hugo talks glowingly of Napoleon, of how his incredible successes had to be ordained by Providence, and contrasts this with the dull and offensively un-brilliant Wellington. But the dull guy won.

To go on my own brief digression - and Hugo would approve, having dedicated an entire chapter to the history of the sewers of Paris - this Great Man theory so enraptured the French post-Napoleon that it arguably led to their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. The Grand Armee had long been accustomed to being the instrument of their supreme commander's genius, but where Napoleon III proved timid and dejected the mid-rank officers of the Prussian forces quickly exploited every opportunity to drive the fight across Europe and back to Paris. Not through any particular genius but rather through disciplined efficiency.

Speaking of the siege of Paris and glorious Great Men getting ground under by forces of history, the tension between Hugo's conflicting ideals also manifests in the dichotomy between Enjolras and Thenardier. The former a young republican idealist and leader of a sort of proletariat salon of downwardly mobile intellectuals styling themselves revolutionaries, the latter an unscrupulous thief and con artist always striving after a new payday. Thenardier appears first in the narrative, he and his wife nominally accepting Cosette into their home to care for her while Fantine works herself to an early grave to provide for the little girl. Thenardier naturally makes the little girl a Cinderella-like slave, while constantly demanding more and more payments from Fantine, citing the many expenses incurred raising Cosette. Which is a blatant lie.

When Valjean escapes the chain gang yet again and comes to rescue Cosette - his coat sewn up with bank bills from his Madeleine fortune - Thenardier lets the little girl go for a song and a mere 15,000 Francs. He's got a good grift going with a tavern at the time, where his wife gets to lord it over everyone and his own daughters get to play with dolls and a kitten. But when this family appears again, they are fallen much lower in circumstances and are living in a squalid boardinghouse. Thenardier is left to composing fraudulent letters begging well-to-do Parisians - or who he thinks are well-to-do - for a little remittance here and there, while quite literally whoring his own daughters out to his criminal contacts. As much pains as Hugo goes to in portraying society beating down the "good" scoundrels like Jean Valjean, here he offers no such compassion for low and grasping people in a chapter even named "The Noxious Poor."

Contrast with the impoverished in matter but not in spirit Enjolras and his coterie. At first secondary to the bildungsroman of Marius that makes up the second half of the novel, they represent the boiling political radicalism that claimed descent from the Revolution but doesn't have much to show in terms of concrete plans - at least as presented by Hugo. They have plenty of noble airs and when the uprising of 1832 comes, they all take up arms and man the barricades gladly, but they have no real plans beyond dying gloriously for "the cause."

Really, the particulars don't concern Hugo so much as Progress. Like Hegel, he sees a deliberate direction to history, rising from the barbarous Ancien Regime into the glorious Republic of freedom and reason. And in service of this Progress, the violence of the barricades is completely warranted. Enjolras feels morally empowered by his ideals to kill not just the gendarmes mobilized to suppress the uprising but also to execute those whose rebellion is too sloppy and undisciplined. He even plans to execute a police spy within the barricade - the long absent from the narrative at this point Inspector Javert - but is bamboozled by Jean Valjean who arrives to rescue not just his nemesis Javert but also Marius, who is due for a wedded ever after ending with Cosette. In the process, he manages to assist the barricade without taking a single life - allowing Hugo to maintain Valjean's sainthood while also indulging in the thrill of revolutionary violence.

In the midst of all this bloody climax though, we get to see an unintentionally more compelling character. Eponine, daughter of Thenardier whose arc takes her from playing with a kitten in the Thenardier Inn to walking barefoot and broken through the slums of Paris illustrates how society fails the unfortunate. She descends through the lower strata of acceptable morality not out of any personal failings or even mistakes, but rather from the misfortune of birth. Her father - and mother, to a lesser degree - are the few truly wicked in Hugo's novel and their vulgar machinations drag their daughter into ignominy, poverty, and an untimely death. A better illustration of how society fails the less fortunate than the transcendent sainthood of Jean Valjean.

All of this being said, I can appreciate how much of a classic Les Misérables is but I wouldn't recommend it as a quarantine read. You'd have a better time with George Eliot's Middlemarch, which offers a more digestible prose style and greater psychological depth. But if you've read that already, you should give Hugo's magnum opus a go.

Darkly Through a Mirror: 2020 to 2030

Elections are the least of your worries.

Climate change is on track for maximum damage in the next decade. Barring a catastrophic global war - not impossible - emissions will not be reduced, arctic ice will continue to melt, and this global hot house will get a lot hotter. So let's speculate on what's gonna get worse and what you can do to survive.

1. War is Coming Back in Style.

Whether or not the Beltway insiders get their longed for conflict with Iran or if all the armchair fascists will have to content themselves with border bush wars, the trend in militarizing American culture is due to accelerate. Trump already telegraphed this, unintentionally as he's more autistic Cassandra than Machiavellian schemer, packing his first season White House with generals. Democrats enable this, being just as if not more deferential to the brass than the GOP. When the Pentagon launches its coup on a President Sanders, plenty of professional liberals will cheer them on.

Meanwhile, regarding those border wars, they’ll be fed as much by climate migration as the full blown fascism of white suburbanites. The National Guard will eventually get involved which, depending on who they’re ordered to side with and who they actually side with, could kick off a hot civil war that all the alt-right violence has presaged in the past couple years. What will surprise all the MAGA-sucking chuds is how it doesn’t break down along a clean Mason-Dixon line or even the expected Democrat and Republican divide  but between urban and suburban/rural. The rurals will make good fighters but they’re commitment to the small business tyrants calling the shots will wax and wane with the seasons. And as the parched and mismanaged countryside fails to keep the supermarkets stocked, the suburbanites will realize their error and start scrambling for the cities – though not after they’ve tried to ethnically cleanse every cul de sac.

2. The New Feudalism.

The cities are where it’s at, for better and for worse. Already logistically integrated for delivering food, power, and most important of all water they will be able to outlast the dying howl of the suburbanites. They’ll also win every straight out battle as they have just as many guns as the NRA pickup truck squadrons but more people to man the barricades. War comes down to people and American cities have them to spare.

Once the Y’allqaeda attacks cease, the cities can benefit from real green innovations in solar power and rooftop gardens. They won’t have to defer to the hippie-hating Reaganites in the retirement exurbs and as anyone who’s spent real time in Brooklyn or Philadelphia can tell you, urban conservatives are much more agreeable to welfare programs and public works than their nominally ideological cousins haunting the outer strip malls.

But it won’t be all wine and DSA roses. These same cities also host the financial and corporate powers that brought us to this wretched state of affairs in the first place. So while you should flee to a city now, you should be very careful about which city. Some of them are just broken: Baltimore, Gary, Milwaukee – all ravaged by opiates and austerity. You’d stand a better chance tramping it with the rurals – who won’t all be white nationalists, as that’s a strictly suburban middle class phenomenon. Others will be too technocratic and oligarchic to be livable, especially New York City which will let Brooklyn drown in the rising seas as it extracts Brooklynite taxes to build a wall around Lower Manhattan. Wall Street is too sure of its own importance to consider moving, even as the waters come in. And the promise of all that wealth trickling down will keep a steady stream of migrant workers flowing into ever more cramped proletariat blocks and squats, their simmering rebellion kept in check by an NYPD that would already qualify as a standing army. Imagine the Mega-City One of Judge Dredd, just with trash everywhere and worse humidity than Atlanta.

3. Socialism and Barbarism.

The worst of both worlds will be SoCal and Denver. Not because they’re saturated with old money power but because outside their respective downtowns it’s all suburbs and strip malls. This will be where the bloodiest battles will be fought, along explicitly racist lines throughout SoCal and in a nihilistic war of all against all in the Mile High City, which already leads the nation in mass shootings. Boulder might survive, being more left than San Francisco and more armed than Texas.

The best – all things considered – will be the Twin Cities and Great Lakes. Beyond escaping the worst of the rising temperatures, these regions boast generous fresh water (I can’t emphasize water enough), much more leftish leanings than the East and West Coast sprawls – especially Minneapolis – and get you closer to the true mid-century goal: Canada. This is not to idealize the Great Northern Frontier – you’ll find just as many reactionaries polluting the Toronto and Vancouver suburbs – but northward is the only sensible option as the Colorado River runs dry, hurricanes batter down even New England, and fires spread from California into the Pacific Northwest. Get there now, before they militarize their own border!

The Empire Strikes Out

Last week, the American Empire ended. It was short lived, as empires go, but managed to cover the most square miles across the globe with military bases and go directly from savagery to debauchery without any of that pesky civilization in between. Unless you still think the Eisenhower era wasn’t monstrous.

It may not look it, especially with Trump and his chickenhawks insisting no Americans – meaning nobody who mattered – died in Iran’s ballistic missile strike. Iran is saying 80, so by the rules of warfare body counts, we can estimate about a dozen US or US-allied casualties. None of whom compare strategically to Soleimani, but that’s not the point. The point is Iran, a supposedly third world backwater theocracy fired not one but two dozen missiles from their country across the border into another. Two dozen missiles demonstrating the capacity for more – if they spend this many in a choreographed show of force, how many can they call up if under direct threat by the US military? – as well as demonstrating the grit and determination to engage US forces on open military terms, rather than just through deniable proxies or the other impoverished peasants the American war machine has battled across the Islamic world for the past two decades. A serious and technologically capable opponent.

And Trump blinked.

A decade ago, even under Obama, a foreign nation launching missiles – not car bombs, not IEDs, actual weapons of war – at US troops would precipitate a thunderous response. Since the Clinton Pentagon of full spectrum dominance, the US military has cultivated a vast and vicious arsenal of scaleable mayhem. Nuclear capable artillery is just one of the reasons Americans can’t have cheap insulin. There’s also fleets of space age aircraft that cost whole congressional districts and even got to be deployed in a real fight on the night of the missiles. They didn’t engage Iranian aircraft but may have shot down a civilian jetliner – not a first for US air forces over Iran. But rather than deploying any of its hugely expensive arsenal, the American Empire waited out the missiles and, once the dust cleared, put on a dog-and-pony press conference to insist they didn’t just totally get their shit kicked in. For all his swagger and bluster, Trump is thankfully terrified of a real fight.

Thankfully, because while the US military could still win a battle with Iran, they would lose the war. And not the way they’ve lost to the Taliban or Iraqi insurgents but in hard material ways that would impact the American homefront – not because Iran is so formidable an opponent but because American hegemony has been collapsing.

Let’s assume Trump didn’t wimp out last week. Let’s assume he took the reins off all the conventional and “special” forces the US has deployed throughout the Gulf. There are even mid-rank officers chomping at the bit to go after Iran, because they blame Iran for the failure in Iraq and aren’t that bright. All of these elaborate, advanced, and very expensive weapons and troops the US is poised to use would immediately run into the one thing they haven’t experienced or expected in generations: an actually serious military opponent. Iran has the hardware and manpower to stop any US advance in its tracks, thanks to the shallow draught of the Gulf, the mountainous geography of the Iranian plateau, and the incredible vulnerability of American sea power to the sort of ballistic missile attacks just carried out.

Even once American forces could penetrate Iran’s defenses – likely after calling up reinforcements like Rumsfeld was forced to do for the much smaller and weaker Iraqi defenders in 2003 – any attempt at occupation would collide with a population universally opposed to a foreign presence on their soil. “Regime Change,” that idiot dream of neoconservatism, would immediately give way to conquest, which would need to be fought block by bloody block. Already popular American opinion has refused to rally around the flag for Trump’s assassination of Soleimani and the Iranian’s retaliatory fireworks show. The sinking confidence in official institutions ushered in by the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crash would quickly spiral into a popular disconnect, protests devolving into riots, and martial law being instigated by a police culture all too eager to murder their own neighbors. In defeating Iran, America would turn itself into a failed state and international pariah.

That’s not even counting the impact Iran can have beyond the immediate battle with an American invasion force. All the allegations of Iran terrorizing oil shipments through the Persian Gulf confess the reality that they really can disrupt the biggest oil export line in the world. The same missiles and irregular attacks that will sink an American carrier can shut down the Strait of Hormuz, causing enormous economic damage worldwide. Hezbollah and other Iran-friendly militias have already made it clear they will go all in against Israel just for a retaliation to last week’s Iranian retaliation. The American neoconservatives and their evangelical fellow travelers will finally get the crusade against all Islam they’ve desired since 2001 - and will quickly see they are outnumbered across the whole Middle East. Every day will be Benghazi.

That’s still a good scenario. When faced with such a serious, implacable foe and with a cruel dunderhead like Trump at the helm the inevitable question is “What about nukes?” The US has them and despite all the propaganda to the contrary Iran definitely does not. Once Marine battalions are retreating back to the shores of the Gulf, even the “reasonable” people middle class rubes have placed their hopes in might be arguing for a nuclear strike. A limited one, of course, at least at first. Limited to the battlefield or targeting Tehran and other population centers, two outcomes are certain: First, Russia and China will not launch in retaliation, no matter how friendly they are now with Iran, because mutually assured destruction would then be in effect. Beijing is too busy plotting out its Chinese Century to fall for that and the Kremlin – while being more cavalier on tactical nuclear deployment – isn’t looking for a kamikaze strike on their geopolitical rivals either. Second, and more important, nobody has to nuke the US back to retaliate over the ravaging of Iran.

Even if the nukes never enter the picture, the US launching a wildly unpopular war on the regional power most responsible for defeating ISIS could trigger the actual doomsday scenario of the United States Dollar being dropped as a reserve currency. It’s not the massive and massively expensive American armed forces ensuring imperial power so much as an international demand for dollars. Oligarchs from Russia to China to France can’t get enough of them and it’s how the US has managed to remain a top global economy despite hollowing out its own manufacturing sector. But abandon that reserve currency – something that’s already in the works – and the whole house of cards collapses. The mortgage crisis will look like a slow afternoon in comparison, the Great Depression merely a rainy day. And it won’t just wreck the financial markets and the suburban small business clowns – without that inflation-proofing granted by dollar hegemony, all the grand plans of DSA and the Sanders campaign really will be impossible to pay for.

So it’s for the best Trump blinked and we should all hope he keeps blinking. His whole existence was always an argument against the American system and it’s appropriate he be the one to preside over its final dissolution. Post-imperial life can be positive for nations, it’s how the Brits managed to finally do good things like the NHS and Monty Python. By not following through on his bullying, Donald Trump can end the era of Pax Americana and then Americans can have some actual peace in their lives.