Monday Links: Nazi drug use, Nobel Prize in Literature bets, and a wonderful takedown of Tom Wolfe’s attack on Darwin
Workers at the Temmler factory in Berlin produced 35m tablets of Pervitin for the German army and Luftwaffe in 1940. Photograph: Temmler Pharma GmbH & Co KG, Marburg
Read High Hitler: How Nazi drug abuse steered the course of history.
The story Ohler tells begins in the days of the Weimar Republic, when Germany’s pharmaceutical industry was thriving – the country was a leading exporter both of opiates, such as morphine, and of cocaine – and drugs were available on every street corner. It was during this period that Hitler’s inner circle established an image of him as an unassailable figure who was willing to work tirelessly on behalf of his country, and who would permit no toxins – not even coffee – to enter his body.
“He is all genius and body,” reported one of his allies in 1930. “And he mortifies that body in a way that would shock people like us! He doesn’t drink, he practically only eats vegetables, and he doesn’t touch women.” No wonder that when the Nazis seized power in 1933, “seductive poisons” were immediately outlawed. In the years that followed, drug users would be deemed “criminally insane”; some would be killed by the state using a lethal injection; others would be sent to concentration camps. Drug use also began to be associated with Jews. The Nazi party’s office of racial purity claimed that the Jewish character was essentially drug-dependent. Both needed to be eradicated from Germany.
Some drugs, however, had their uses, particularly in a society hell bent on keeping up with the energetic Hitler (“Germany awake!” the Nazis ordered, and the nation had no choice but to snap to attention). A substance that could “integrate shirkers, malingerers, defeatists and whiners” into the labour market might even be sanctioned.
Read Tom Wolfe’s Reflections on Language. It’s long, but worth your time. Haay mahirap talagang magmarunong kung kayabangan lang ang puhunan mo.
At this point you might be thinking, well, Wolfe’s criticism of Chomsky might be bogus (and maybe that is Everett’s fault anyway), but Wolfe is a man of letters who has spent his life immersed in language. Should we not hear out his positive thesis on language? Sure, why not. And as it turns out, Wolfe is more than happy to share it with us.
“One bright night it dawned on me—not as a profound revelation, not as any sort of analysis at all, but as something so perfectly obvious, I could hardly believe that no licensed savant had ever pointed it out before. There is a cardinal distinction between man and animal, a sheerly dividing line as abrupt and immovable as a cliff: namely, speech.”
Wait…what? It has been Chomsky’s position forever that language is a distinctively human phenomenon. This is taught in linguistics 101. It is in every popular and not-so-popular book Chomsky has ever written about language. It is in all the secondary literature about Chomsky, and, if you are too lazy to read any of that but are writing about him at least take the time to Google “Chomsky” and read his freaking Wikipedia page, I mean, since you are supposedly writing a book about the man and his work and… what am I saying? —you don’t even have to read an article; there are memes with this on it ALL OVER THE INTERNETS. Here’s one. It’s free. Enjoy.
I simply cannot fathom how Wolfe can claim this idea for himself without slitting his wrists in a fit of self-loathing. How else could he write entire book criticizing Chomsky’s method and his mathyness, and his shtetl Jewishness, and his faux-manly shirts (cf the picture above) and his politics and his spic and span air conditioned office and then, at the end of it all announce that he, Wolfe, has this brilliant insight – an insight that heretofore no licensed savant has ever had — and it turns out to be… a Chomsky Internet meme. And oh yeah, I almost forgot: He does this just a few chapters after accusing Darwin of not properly crediting someone else for their ideas. (For the record, Chomsky also argued that the language faculty is not the product of natural selection, but we can only sort out so many Wolfe confusions per paragraph).
All of which leads to the question, how on God’s Green Earth did this crap even get published? I understand that the author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test could walk into any publisher with scribbling on a piece of toilet paper and they would publish it. The question is, why didn’t they clean this mess up? Steven Pool, writing in The Guardian, wonders too:
“An author less famous and bankable than Wolfe would surely have been saved from such embarrassment by more critical editorial attention. Even a cursory fact check could still have prevented howlers such as the statement that “Einstein discovered the speed of light” (no he didn’t).”
It’s a lovely thought, but the problem is that if a fact checker had a go at this book and removed all the howlers, there would be absolutely nothing left. As I said in the beginning, Wolfe’s goal in this book was to smash one or two of our intellectual icons, and an icon did end up smashed to pieces. The problem is that Wolfe is that icon.
(Blogger’s note: ARAY.)
Read: Who Will Win the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature?
Famous, Famous-ish, and Not-at-All Famous Non-American Writers Who Are Not Going to Win
Haruki Murakami (Japanese novelist and jogger; 4/1 odds)
John Banville (Irish novelist; 20/1 odds)
Milan Kundera (Czech novelist and playwright; 50/1 odds)
William Trevor (Irish novelist, short story writer, and playwright; 66/1 odds)
Rohinton Mistry (Indo-Canadian novelist and short story writer; 66/1 odds)
Margaret Atwood (Canadian novelist, poet, and essayist; 66/1 odds)
Paul Muldoon (Irish poet; 66/1 odds)
Salman Rushdie (Indo-British novelist, short story writer, and Facebook user; 66/1 odds)
Tom Stoppard (English playwright and screenwriter; 66/1 odds)
Colm Toibin (Irish novelist, short story writer, and essayist; 66/1 odds)
Julian Barnes (English novelist and essayist; 66/1 odds)
Don Paterson (Scottish poet; 100/1 odds)
A. S. Byatt (English novelist; 100/1 odds)
James Kelman (Scottish novelist, short story writer, playwright, and essayist; 100/1 odds)
Hilary Mantel (English novelist and short story writer; 100/1 odds)
Wouldn’t it be amazing if Ursula Le Guin won? And Philip Roth is due.