Life In A Windowless Room - Jack London, Darwin, Machiavelli And The Despair Of A Political Idealist

Bob Muzelle was getting on in years, time to retire, relax in a chaise lounge, and go to bed early; but after decades of fighting the good fight, confronting racism, sexism, and rampant capitalist greed, beaten and bruised by Bull Connor's thugs and Donald Trump's ICE, he couldn't just fade away.. Social justice was not just an occupation, but an ethos, a raison d'etre.  Without it he would be nothing, a shell of a man, a stick figure, a silhouette. 

'Now, Bob', said his wife Corinne, taking him in her arms and comforting him like a baby, just as she had done throughout the years. 'Isn't it time?'. 

Corinne although she had stood by him in all the years of cold water flats, secondhand dresses, Hamburger Helper, and junkyard cars, wanted at least a few untroubled, undisturbed moments of her own. Life with Bob had not been easy, and to be quite honest, she had had quite enough of this morose, unhappy man. 

She, unlike her husband, had not aged in place; and from the leftist firebrand of the Sixties, lover of Mark Rudd and confidant of Stokely Carmichael, huddled happily with her comrades in a basement in the East Village till now she had not remained the same.

Over the years she had become more an intellectual woman, satisfied with life as it is not what it should be.  In her thirties bemusement at the continued political hysteria of her husband and his friends set in - puzzlement at his dogged pursuit of salvation, his insistence on redemption, and his growing belief in Armageddon.

 

Later, still faithful to her husband, but more of a caretaker than a lover, she became restive, irritable, and angry.  She was sick and tired of traipsing through copies of The Daily Worker and back editions of The Nation and Ramparts strewn on the floor; listening to alternate radio every morning, shortwave broadcasts from Havana in the evening, and drop-ins and coffee and cigarettes in the kitchen every other day.  

It was the Village again, the same conspiratorial huddles, power salutes, hugs, and promises - the lot of them straggling in after a day of protest on the Mall, ragged, beaten but deliriously happy. 

Bob was stuck in the Sixties, old ideas rattled around in his head and were written down in new manifestos.  The world outside was an even more horrible, desperate place than it had been at the beginning of his political journey. He began shouting out the front door, picking up yesterday's placards and waving them at passing cars.  He was, as Corinne had feared for some time, demented. 

'Give a liberal enough time and he will become a conservative' was the old saw that proved true again and again. Most Sixties radicals were living in the suburbs with desultory interest in politics at best.  Live and let live - not quite que sera sera but at least a calm sanguineness - was the meme around town, and the likes of Bob were increasingly regarded as old wood, better stacked and covered, dried and cured to go finally up the chimney in smoke. 

Some of his old partisan friends actually changed their tune. How could one not after seeing history repeat itself in the same predictable ways. The Twentieth Century - the hundred years of Stalin, Hitler, Mao Ze Tung and Pol Pot, the Rwandan genocide and tribal slaughters from Borneo to Chad - was as bloody and brutal if not more so than any period of history; and the Twenty-First was starting off to the beat of the same drums. 

 

Corinne Muzelle was one of these turncoats, although out of respect for her husband she kept her reformation under wraps.  On the sly she attended libertarian sessions at the Cato Institute, moved on to more conservative forums, and finally to political certainty.   

There is something compelling about the story of Buck, the hero of Jack London’s story The Call of the Wild, the epitome of animal determinism.  After years of being yoked to his human masters, tied and tethered in a society alien to his own, he finally escapes, and his male aggressiveness and dominance for so long stymied and subverted, emerge.  

He hears the call of the wild – an irresistible appeal to the basic, primitive, primordial nature of every animal being.  There is a completeness and perfection in the male character of Buck – he has no feminine side – and his will is male, one unmistakably virile, potent, and forceful. 

London, writing in a pre-feminist, post-Victorian era, accepted male dominance as a given – a hardwired, deeply-rooted, ineluctable force of human nature and society, so the literary allusion was not surprising.  After all, he wrote not many years after Ibsen and Strindberg had written their proto-feminist plays in which men are subjugated to female power.  

Hedda Gabler rules her weak, impotent husband and controls the destiny of her lover.  She admits, a woman created in Fredrick Nietzsche’s image, that the only validation of life in a meaningless world is the expression of pure will.  

Both London and the Scandinavians had one thing in mind - the absolute, indomitable will of human nature.  Whether cast in terms of male and female dominance or in more general Darwinian terms, the message is clear.  Unless and until the human genome is rewired and reconfigured, the territorial aggressiveness of human nature will persist.  

Darwin's The Origin of Species and its central theme of the survival of the fittest, has never been challenged.  In every species and subspecies of the animal kingdom the same survivalist imperative exists. 

Cooperative units - those social idylls singled out by internationalists - exist only to increase strength, a solidarity not of a higher philosophical order but out of military advantage.  Cooperation is a tool of survival.  Allies join together in cooperation against a mutual enemy; compromise offers a temporary hiatus to war.  Clausewitz was right - war is but another means of diplomacy. 

Machiavelli was the first to understand the hardwired nature of human activity and apply it to politics.  He saw nothing unusual or abhorrent about war.  War was only wrong when it was waged improperly, under unfavorable circumstances or at the wrong time and place. 

Although Corinne was not an intellectual and had read neither Clausewitz or Machiavelli, she understood London and Ibsen.  She identified with Hedda Gabler, an amoral, willful actor in a Nietzschean drama.  Hilde Wangel and Rebekka West, Ibsen's women whose only ambition was dominance, control and the expression of pure will were no different; nor were Shakespeare's Richard III, Tamora, Lady Macbeth, or Dionyza.  

It was increasingly hard for Corrine to disassociate her husband, Bob, from the ethos of a progressivism which denied human nature, the indisputable persistent, characteristic human violence of the past and the present, competition, and countervailing force and remained insistent on progress through faith, love, and charity. 

Bob was an ineffectual, increasingly unhinged Don Quixote tilting at windmills - a man out of touch, addled by his own inverted intensity, demented by inchoate passion. 

Where was the man she married?  Or had she even married a man?

Jack London was right.  The Wild will always be wild and the untamed and unintimidated will always dominate.  The only peace and accommodation occurs when to equally matched and armed adversaries stand off - tooth-and-claw in the tundra or the Cold War. 

Political evolution takes its toll.  Corinne could no longer look at Bob with the same patient, understanding eyes.  He was a fool, a dupe, a man reveling in his ignorance and own brand of received wisdom.  He lived in rooms without windows. 

The jig was up, and sunken costs meant less and less.  It was time for Corinne to move on.  The few years she might have left would not be spent moping, crying over spilled milk, seeing bogeymen in every dark corner, howling at the moon like a rabid wolf.