Nashville. We visit the full size concrete replica of the Parthenon. It sits vast and unapologetic in the sun. Why is it here? Why here, rather than anywhere else? These questions bewilder us.
It's a sign that we belong to Old Europe, for all that we think we don't we agree. Imagine: there are people who have less of a relationship to history than us!
History, history: it's being destroyed! Mocked! But our hosts have been documenting old Nashville in their photography. Old Nashville, what's left's of it … They've been breaking into old warehouses and factories. They've taken pictures of orphaned walls and broken windows. It's messianic, W. says. They're discovering a past is full of lost opportunities, byways untaken …
Our hosts are also people of history. They are as baffled as we are by the replica Parthenon. We take pictures of one another posing on the steps. We feel like replica Platos and Aristotles. W. says that I am a replica Diogenes, and that I should strip naked and masturbate in the sun like my cynical forebear.
At Katie K.'s Prairie Style, W. decides to be my dresser. He knows I've always wanted a Nudie Suit, or at the very least a Western-style shirt. I want Rhinestone embroidery! I want fringes!
W. fetches me Western-style shirts, bootlace ties and cowboy boots, while I stand in the dressing room in my underpants. But nothing will do. I still don't look like a Rhinestone Cowboy.
Later, as we sit out on the porch drinking Plymouth Gin, W. explains the features of messianism.
The peculiarity of the Jewish religion (and by this, he means the religion of Cohen and Rosenzweig), W. says, is that it is immediately and directly ethical and political. The idea of God is not first of all metaphysical, from which an ethics or a politics can be deduced. Its only meaning is ethical and political, from which the shortcomings of metaphysics can be deduced.
For the Jew (the Jew of Rosenzweig and Cohen), redemption doesn't lie ahead of time, in some distant future, W. says, but is already within the present, deep inside it. What matters is our relation to it. What matters is relating to the same world in a different way.
The highest expression of Judaism (the Judaism of Rosenzweig and Cohen) lies in the messianic idea, where social justice comes to the world as a whole. The idea of the Messiah in Judaism is always a social and political vision of the world, as opposed to the personal and individual viewpoint of the idea of the Messiah in Christianity, W. says.
The messianic idea (Rosenzweig and Cohen's account of the messianic idea) is the hope that the past and the present might be redeemed in the future, that world history will not be merely the repetition of the same violence and injustice against the weak and oppressed, W. says. It's the hope that the present, and the conditions that hold sway over the present, will not be endlessly repeated.
That the future might irrupt at any moment; that the present might be broken from the past of which it appears to be an indefinite continuation: that's what redemption means, says W. – 'You're trying to redeem Nashville', he tells out hosts. It's a thankless task, they tell us.
Our hosts tell us about the Cherokee, Choctau and Chickasaw people, who used to inhabit the Tennessee plains. They tell us of Andrew Jackson, who made his career as an India killer. They tell us of rural poverty and urban poverty, and of the main industry of the state, which is not included in the list of industries in our guidebook. The production of privilege and exclusion, that's what it's all about, they tell us. That's what really matters in Nashville.
Ah, when did it all go wrong? We think of the first migrants to America, not those who crossed via the vanished land bridge from Siberia, but the aborigines who arrived even before then, crossing the ocean. They were hunter-gatherers, of course, says W. It was before the disaster of agriculture, to which he traces the origins of capitalism. The mid-Neolithic, that's where it all went wrong, he says. Once you have agriculture, you have concentrations of wealth, W. says. You have military specialisation. Man becomes a wolf to man.
Perhaps we should become foragers, like our early ancestors, I suggest. Perhaps we should just wander forth, living on berries and roadkill and whatever else we find. He'd give us five days before we died, W. says, and that's generous.
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