Oh, it can be enough, he said. You have to know what you’re doing. For example, how to make a deal with Motswana.
I said Say more about that.
Makhoa make deals standing up and shaking hands. But the Batswana make deals with everybody squatting or sitting. It may have something to do with everybody being on the same leveclass="underline" when men are standing, somebody is always going to be taller. I think the feeling is that squatting people are at least temporarily all the same height. Be that as it may. A deal made standing up doesn’t feel real to a Motswana, especially a deal over something major. He won’t tell you that, but it doesn’t bind him in the same way and he might follow through or he might not. By the way, I’m aware that I said men. I’m talking about traditionalists.
No question he was showing off for me with this — but why, if any further association with him was as out of the question as he seemed to want me to understand?
Not that there aren’t problems to be avoided, he said. Do you want to know what the worst problem is in most projects once they start running decently?
I did. Of course I thought I already knew that the worst thing in the world was what urea does to nightsoil. Silly me, he was now talking at a more elevated level — the psychosocial. The correct answer was ressentiment, did I know the word? I thanked God I’d kept quiet. It happened I did know the word, which led to a small coup. There is a classic that touches heavily on the concept. Envy, by somebody Schoeck. I had read it and Denoon hadn’t. He hated having to admit not having read anything describable as a genuine classic. He would routinely stoop to saying he knew a certain work. This was an unfailing sign that he was guiltily concealing that he hadn’t read it or had only read part of it. He stopped doing it during my reign.
Of course I know about ressentiment, I said. It’s from French sociology and means roughly rancor expressed covertly, especially against our benefactors. Then I mentioned the Schoeck and was surprised to see how much not knowing this particular book discomfited him. He took some comfort in my inability to remember Schoeck’s first name.
Anyway, he said, so say we have some average collection of poor Africans, farmers, and here come some white experts to induce development, say by setting up an integrated rural development project in the most sensitive way anybody has figured out to date. Time passes. Things begin to work. But a funny thing: the best of the poor, the most competent, the ones doing best and the ones who’re even the most like you spiritually, are the ones who are going to present you with leis and bouquets of ressentiment. Why? What can be done? I am talking about your mainstream development project here, by the way.
This had to me faintly the tinge of a crypto job interview. I told myself I was wrong.
No adult wants to be helped, I said. It’s definitional. Probably I should qualify adult as male adult: it’s different with women. But take the French and the British and us. You’d think they’d at least pretend to like us for part of a generation or so after we save them from being turned into provinces of the Third Reich. You can help women but beware helping men. Nations are male. I thought that here there was a slight change for the better in the quality of his attention. There was. Later he acknowledged it.
After a rather strained passage wherein he made it overabundantly clear that I should never for a moment think he had raised the question of ressentiment because it was rearing its head at the site, we got on to anti-Americanism. The exact nexus eludes me now. But he was making numerous fine distinctions vis-à-vis anti-Americanism. For example, British anti-Americanism was hardly worth noticing because it was just one more facet of the larger phenomenon of British self-worship. The only race the British had ever liked while they were subjecting it to empire had been those dashing pederasts of the Sahara, the Bedouins in their lovely robes. The French and British could go fuck themselves, especially the British. There were only two countries in Europe Denoon could stomach, Italy and Denmark, and that was because they were the only ones to attempt to protect their Jews during World War II. Everybody else had jumped in with both feet or, the same thing, studiously done nothing. Churchill, trying to come up with an especially thoughtful token of his esteem for FDR, had settled on a sumptuous little private edition of Kipling’s anti-Semitic poetry. Now ironically the Israelis were making themselves unforgivable.
At intervals throughout this occasion I was undergoing an event like a blackout or seizure, but with text, where I would incredulously ask myself if it could possibly be true that I had begun this encounter by urinating into the main crucible of an experiment to save the poorest of the poor. It was like seeing titles in a silent movie.
Next he irritated me almost to the breaking point, which I deserve some kind of an award for concealing. Terrible as America was becoming, he wasn’t responsible. Oh la, I thought. And why wasn’t he responsible? One, he always voted, by absentee ballot if necessary, and always for the minority party candidate most perpendicular to what was becoming standard national operating procedure. There was a tiny relic of the original Debsian socialist party he had been partial to, but which unfortunately was no longer running presidential candidates. Not, he unnecessarily reminded me, that he, Denoon, was a genre socialist. And two, he hadn’t paid federal taxes, thanks to the overseas exclusion, for nineteen years. I saw red. I swore inwardly this would come up again between us if anything would, in spades, when it was safe. All I could think of was the semi-immortal Edmund Wilson, distracted by being famous, failing to get around to paying his taxes for years out of pure sloth, then wrapping himself in the antiwar flag when the IRS knocked on his door. Anybody decent has urges against paying taxes when the realpolitik gets too egregious, but in America not paying your taxes is not an option for the average person. There is such a life and death thing as a credit rating. At that moment I could thank God I was never going to be famous. This man thought he was cleaner than thou despite the fact that it was only the luck of his genius that had brought him into this realm where he neither had to face paying taxes for the things he excoriated nor to consider renouncing his citizenship. Of course I agreed with him about Chile and Guatemala, but was I supposed to feel morally coarser than he was because under the Brazen Head I was going to be paying for crueler things than anything I had dreamed of yet? Not that I had ever had to pay that much. It was oblivious privilege speaking through Denoon, and elitism. I thought of that poor hapless blue-collar deserter being ordered shot by Eisenhower while Ezra Pound got to poetize and eat petits fours for the rest of his life. It was too breathtaking for me. But apparently my fate is to resonate against my will to representatives of certain elitisms I intellectually reject. Ultimately I developed a more tout pardonner perspective toward Denoon on this: after all, here was the son of a man so very pure he had demolished the family vacuum cleaner in a rage after reading in a newsletter that Electrolux was owned by a Nazi collaborator.
I needed to get from this tract of discourse over to something more restful and with fewer pitfalls, so I asked if there had ever been any anthropologists associated with his project. This was more than a mistake, because everything was wrong with anthropology, according to him. No: no anthropologist had ever been allowed near the site. Most of the official great names in anthropology were mediocrities. Some were creeps. Malinowski had screwed Trobriand women. Boas had made things up about the Tlingits: if you went back and looked at his field notes they bore only a glancing resemblance to what he’d put in his books. No advance in general theory in forty years. Anthropology: a bolus, anecdotal. The few interesting contributions to anthropology that there were had been made by rich dilettantes like Theodore Besterman. What is the conceptual distinction between anthropology and sociology? On it went. It was hard to keep up with his anathemas. I kept semiagreeing with him, although I felt like screaming due to the implications for present company. I told myself this must be an exercise to see how well I stood up under being told my specialty was somebody’s bête noire and I was the torchbearer for a discipline that was turning into a social control system like industrial psychology, a figleaf for multinational corporations and the World Bank. Anthropology departments had given cover to CIA operations. He could name names. On it went. Does everything have to be an ordeal? I thought. The basic premise of doctoral programs is bad enough, to wit, driving the academic weak sisters out of the program through trial by ordeal until only the strong remain. He was right and he was wrong. I think I was judicious. He was wearing me out. I had to hold back. I think I showed I was reserving comment re some of his thrusts. I think I did. Anthropology is not negligible, even if it’s still only information so far. The point was to be supportive of his general iconoclasm but not to concede I was a charlatan and knew it. Fortunately it stopped. I was saved by a woman screaming in a shanty somewhere close by. Denoon sprang over to the fence and listened into the darkness, but there was no repetition.