For some years now I have found myself gravitating toward the literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in my "discretionary" fiction reading. I suppose this is because I am too much of a "modern" to be very drawn to what came before--and not "Modernist" enough for what came after.
That said I am much more interested in some parts of that stream of literature than others, the Symbolists, Decadents and company having little interest for me. Good old realism/naturalism appeals to me more strongly than ever these days--particularly where it has been combined with that "discovery of society" of which Karl Polanyi wrote.
Maybe it helps in this that the art critics of our time are so dismissive of such work. Critical respectability has, I think, tended to make me skeptical of the claims for the value of a literary work, rather than the opposite--especially given what the critics have so often been, all the way down to our times.
Monday, November 4, 2024
"Traditional vs. Self-Publishing"
Back when there was more talk about the phenomenon of self-publishing than we hear now due to the comparative novelty of e-book readers, print-on-demand and services like Createspace and Kindle Direct, established, traditionally-published writers made characteristically pompous statements about why an aspiring writers should forgo the seemingly quick and easy path of publishing themselves in favor of the route of getting a publishing firm to take them and their book on.
I will not for a moment deny that self-selection is a far from perfect system for deciding what is put before the reading public; that writers need the input and support of others if they are to produce the best work of which they are capable; that if the digital technologies of the twenty-first century make it possible to convert a manuscript into a book available for worldwide sale in short order at no cost, the editing, copyediting, design, marketing of a book have not been appreciably automated at all, making publishing a book anything but a one-person job; and that if in spite of all these obstacles people can and do produce self-published works that would do any publisher credit, and indeed shame those publishers when one fairly and honestly compares them with the dreck they foist on the public as they assume those insufferable elitist "We are professionals" airs, the return on effort--how hard they have to work to reach an audience, let alone make a dollar at what they do--is far, far lower outside than inside traditional publishing. Accordingly, what a writer should really want is not to self-publish, but to have a competent, capable publisher that will treat them and their work with respect.
The problem is that the odds of their getting such a publisher are pretty much nil. Superstars get a lot of deference, but even established writers who are not superstars are apt to find themselves and their work treated pretty miserably by the business. (They are, after all, mere "labor.") Meanwhile at least 99 percent of aspiring authors--especially if they come from the "99 percent"--have no chance of getting even that much attention. The reality of the publishing business, exactly what Balzac described in Lost Illusions, is such that there is no meaningful choice for them between self-publishing and traditional publishing. After all, publishers are capitalists for whom books are a speculation, and no more; they traffic not in literature but in Names; and because the name of a nobody who is no name is a poor speculation, as capitalists they have absolutely zero interest in giving the newcomer a chance in the absence of some ulterior motive; making the cruelty of the death march through the slush piles that those who approach them endure the worse because it is completely pointless.
The result is that their real choice is that between self-publishing, or giving up all hope of ever publishing altogether--and to say otherwise is to mislead horribly. But then the point of the talk was never to enlighten listeners, just in their grubby, self-serving way direct them away from the self-publishing that the jobbing writers of the day saw as a threat to their livelihoods.
Of course, those days seem far behind us now--because Big Publishing succeeded in crushing the self-publishing revolution, and because those who are managing to make some sort of living writing have other things to worry about, like the collapse of reading generally, even as Big Publishing and the media which reports on it continues to offer mostly upbeat boosterism when talking about the business.
I will not for a moment deny that self-selection is a far from perfect system for deciding what is put before the reading public; that writers need the input and support of others if they are to produce the best work of which they are capable; that if the digital technologies of the twenty-first century make it possible to convert a manuscript into a book available for worldwide sale in short order at no cost, the editing, copyediting, design, marketing of a book have not been appreciably automated at all, making publishing a book anything but a one-person job; and that if in spite of all these obstacles people can and do produce self-published works that would do any publisher credit, and indeed shame those publishers when one fairly and honestly compares them with the dreck they foist on the public as they assume those insufferable elitist "We are professionals" airs, the return on effort--how hard they have to work to reach an audience, let alone make a dollar at what they do--is far, far lower outside than inside traditional publishing. Accordingly, what a writer should really want is not to self-publish, but to have a competent, capable publisher that will treat them and their work with respect.
The problem is that the odds of their getting such a publisher are pretty much nil. Superstars get a lot of deference, but even established writers who are not superstars are apt to find themselves and their work treated pretty miserably by the business. (They are, after all, mere "labor.") Meanwhile at least 99 percent of aspiring authors--especially if they come from the "99 percent"--have no chance of getting even that much attention. The reality of the publishing business, exactly what Balzac described in Lost Illusions, is such that there is no meaningful choice for them between self-publishing and traditional publishing. After all, publishers are capitalists for whom books are a speculation, and no more; they traffic not in literature but in Names; and because the name of a nobody who is no name is a poor speculation, as capitalists they have absolutely zero interest in giving the newcomer a chance in the absence of some ulterior motive; making the cruelty of the death march through the slush piles that those who approach them endure the worse because it is completely pointless.
The result is that their real choice is that between self-publishing, or giving up all hope of ever publishing altogether--and to say otherwise is to mislead horribly. But then the point of the talk was never to enlighten listeners, just in their grubby, self-serving way direct them away from the self-publishing that the jobbing writers of the day saw as a threat to their livelihoods.
Of course, those days seem far behind us now--because Big Publishing succeeded in crushing the self-publishing revolution, and because those who are managing to make some sort of living writing have other things to worry about, like the collapse of reading generally, even as Big Publishing and the media which reports on it continues to offer mostly upbeat boosterism when talking about the business.
Of "Artistic Freedom"
In Money Writes! Upton Sinclair early on acknowledges the time he spent laying the intellectual groundwork for his survey of American literature as it stood circa 1927, and answered those who would take issue with it the argument that "You cannot understand a plant except you know the soil and climate in which it has grown," with the "soil and climate" here the "political and economic" forces that make literature what it is--in his view, and I think in the view of those who have not been robbed of their judgment by the Cult of High Modernism, an "unwholesome thing" that "is poisoned with pessimism."
Sinclair explained this as a matter of "the great Fascist magazines and publishing houses of America, with their direct Wall Street control . . . determin[ing] American literature and art," and the fact that these "by official decree" had "banished" all "truth-telling and heroism," so that for the writer "there is nothing left but to jeer and die"--or " retire into a garret and starve," this the kind of "freedom" the artist has.
A near-century on there is little to dispute in that--except to acknowledge that old-fashioned garrets may be harder to come by these days, and that self-publishing, entirely in line with the differences between what the cyber-utopians promised and what we actually got, has yet to make a whit of difference regarding the control of the media and of culture.
Sinclair explained this as a matter of "the great Fascist magazines and publishing houses of America, with their direct Wall Street control . . . determin[ing] American literature and art," and the fact that these "by official decree" had "banished" all "truth-telling and heroism," so that for the writer "there is nothing left but to jeer and die"--or " retire into a garret and starve," this the kind of "freedom" the artist has.
A near-century on there is little to dispute in that--except to acknowledge that old-fashioned garrets may be harder to come by these days, and that self-publishing, entirely in line with the differences between what the cyber-utopians promised and what we actually got, has yet to make a whit of difference regarding the control of the media and of culture.
On the Demand for "Humility" in Film Directors: A Few Thoughts
In Vincent Minnelli's cinematic classic The Bad and the Beautiful producer Jonathan Shields gets into an argument with director Von Eilstein over the shooting of a particular scene in their film. In the course of the subsequent argument Von Eilstein tells Shields that "In order to direct a picture you need humility."
Von Eilstein ends up out of the project, the direction of which Shields personally takes over in a spirit of "Humility? Humility? Why I'll be the humblest person you ever saw! You just watch me!"--and the all too predictable result is an artistic and financial cinematic disaster that finishes Shields' previously thriving career (such that the onetime Hollywood Player is, in the present day of that flashback-laden movie, all washed up and pleading with the people he betrayed to give him another chance).
Von Eilstein's remark stuck in my memory not just because of its significance within a film that has a lot to commend it, but as a reminder of an earlier era's notions of just what it is that directors do. That movie was made in the waning days of a studio system in which directors were important to filmmaking, and not always humble about that importance, but in which the image of the tyrant on set was more apt to be associated with the producer who so often had his name splashed across the poster David O. Selznick style, and studio bosses like Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn.
It was made, too, a whole decade before Andrew Sarris brought the "auteur theory" to America, with all that followed from it--the director not necessarily expected to know, to decide, to interfere in every last little detail of a movie's making for the sake of realizing their own authorial vision, but presiding over an unavoidably more collaborative endeavor, more like the technostructure-helming Chief Executive Officers that a John Galbraith wrote about in the age of "the organization man" than the dictatorial CEOs who are so fawned over by the elite's courtiers in the "leadership"-besotted business press so quick to call anyone with high office or a lot of money a "genius."
I suspect that, more than the writings of Sarris, lies behind our image of the film director today.
Von Eilstein ends up out of the project, the direction of which Shields personally takes over in a spirit of "Humility? Humility? Why I'll be the humblest person you ever saw! You just watch me!"--and the all too predictable result is an artistic and financial cinematic disaster that finishes Shields' previously thriving career (such that the onetime Hollywood Player is, in the present day of that flashback-laden movie, all washed up and pleading with the people he betrayed to give him another chance).
Von Eilstein's remark stuck in my memory not just because of its significance within a film that has a lot to commend it, but as a reminder of an earlier era's notions of just what it is that directors do. That movie was made in the waning days of a studio system in which directors were important to filmmaking, and not always humble about that importance, but in which the image of the tyrant on set was more apt to be associated with the producer who so often had his name splashed across the poster David O. Selznick style, and studio bosses like Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn.
It was made, too, a whole decade before Andrew Sarris brought the "auteur theory" to America, with all that followed from it--the director not necessarily expected to know, to decide, to interfere in every last little detail of a movie's making for the sake of realizing their own authorial vision, but presiding over an unavoidably more collaborative endeavor, more like the technostructure-helming Chief Executive Officers that a John Galbraith wrote about in the age of "the organization man" than the dictatorial CEOs who are so fawned over by the elite's courtiers in the "leadership"-besotted business press so quick to call anyone with high office or a lot of money a "genius."
I suspect that, more than the writings of Sarris, lies behind our image of the film director today.
Is There Really a Political Divide by Gender Within Generation Z?
It seems to have become fashionable to claim the opening of a chasm between men and women of the younger generation in this political era--with women skewing left, and men right. Indeed, the editorial board of the Washington Post declared last November that the divide might threaten the institution of marriage itself (!).
I have to admit myself skeptical of such claims, frankly, because the mainstream news media loves, Loves, LOVES to play up "polarization." This is partly because this enables it to bemoan that polarization in that way that lets their centrist selves feel that they are the "adult in the room" (Oh how they love that hackneyed phrase!), but more importantly because emphasizing divisions of gender, ethnicity, region, religiosity, "culture" and all the rest gets us away from those matters of hard interest and policy that the media does not love reporting about (as that study discussed in the Columbia Journalism Review demonstrated quantitatively, not least by looking at the front page of the Post itself).
Moreover, it seems there is more than the media's well-known prejudices in support of such skepticism. As Vox's Zack Beauchamp demonstrates, the conclusions that those promulgating the gender divide narrative derived from polling data are far from unimpeachable, or broadly supported, especially if one remembers just how large a matter politics is. Thus Mr. Beauchamp in the end, while admitting that it is not the most satisfying answer, says that the only honest one is "We don't know"--which seems to me excellent reason to be attentive to what we actually do know, which is that there has been an enormous public-elite divide on many of the issues that transcends the lines the media like to stress, and the truth an uncomfortable one for the guardians of the "conventional wisdom."
I have to admit myself skeptical of such claims, frankly, because the mainstream news media loves, Loves, LOVES to play up "polarization." This is partly because this enables it to bemoan that polarization in that way that lets their centrist selves feel that they are the "adult in the room" (Oh how they love that hackneyed phrase!), but more importantly because emphasizing divisions of gender, ethnicity, region, religiosity, "culture" and all the rest gets us away from those matters of hard interest and policy that the media does not love reporting about (as that study discussed in the Columbia Journalism Review demonstrated quantitatively, not least by looking at the front page of the Post itself).
Moreover, it seems there is more than the media's well-known prejudices in support of such skepticism. As Vox's Zack Beauchamp demonstrates, the conclusions that those promulgating the gender divide narrative derived from polling data are far from unimpeachable, or broadly supported, especially if one remembers just how large a matter politics is. Thus Mr. Beauchamp in the end, while admitting that it is not the most satisfying answer, says that the only honest one is "We don't know"--which seems to me excellent reason to be attentive to what we actually do know, which is that there has been an enormous public-elite divide on many of the issues that transcends the lines the media like to stress, and the truth an uncomfortable one for the guardians of the "conventional wisdom."
Is Every Day Now Eliza Doolittle Day?
With the idiots of the media abuzz with talk of chatbots for over a year now (we can seem to be going from "The Singularity is Near!" to "The Singularity is Here!"), some have bothered to look into the history of the technology in however clumsy a way, and in the process reminded those who had forgotten (and informed those who never knew) of the fact that the first chatbot, created way back in 1964, was named ELIZA--after the then-recent hit stage and film musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, My Fair Lady.
At one point in the play Eliza, amid the rigors of her training in elocution, has a daydream in which, Eliza a celebrated figure in society, the King of England proclaims an "Eliza Doolittle Day," in which "All the people will celebrate the glory of you . . ."
So it has gone this past year--every day seeing the "glory" of what the still-skeptical see as a mere autocomplete talked up by Silicon Valley types longer on hucksterism than their highly touted "INNOVATION!" in their turn talked up by their (to use a politer word than they deserve) courtiers in the press, inflating a new technological bubble here, because that is pretty much all that anyone does these days, after which it may all well pass into obscurity.
At one point in the play Eliza, amid the rigors of her training in elocution, has a daydream in which, Eliza a celebrated figure in society, the King of England proclaims an "Eliza Doolittle Day," in which "All the people will celebrate the glory of you . . ."
So it has gone this past year--every day seeing the "glory" of what the still-skeptical see as a mere autocomplete talked up by Silicon Valley types longer on hucksterism than their highly touted "INNOVATION!" in their turn talked up by their (to use a politer word than they deserve) courtiers in the press, inflating a new technological bubble here, because that is pretty much all that anyone does these days, after which it may all well pass into obscurity.
What Do We Mean by "Freedom of Speech?" And the Defense of the Right to That Freedom?
The remark "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" is famously attributed to the eighteenth century French philosophe Voltaire.
For the purposes of this discussion whether or not the attribution has been established as historically accurate is completely irrelevant, what matters instead the reason why so many cite the words in the first place--their summing up what it truly means to stand for free speech, a readiness not only to uncompromisingly defend that speech of which one approves, but also that which they disapprove, for the sake of sheer principle.
Not many live up to this standard, least of all those who most loudly claim to do so these days. As Aurelien Mondon has written (in discussion of the situation in France, though it seems to me we see the same trend everywhere else), "it has become commonly accepted in public discourse that free speech simply means the right of the powerful to offend without any consequences or any potential criticism."
Such a standard of freedom of speech is a perversion of the concept. This is not only because it completely rejects the spirit of defending speech on principle rather than because one approves the particular statement, but also because the fight for freedom of speech has, above all, been to defend the right of those out of power to speak--while this conception of "free speech" pointedly sacrifices their right to giving the powerful yet more latitude that they already have; to, as a practical matter, enabling them to "punch down" with even more complete immunity than they already possessed. Indeed, considering it I am reminded of Winston Churchill's remark that "[s]ome people’s idea of free speech is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage."
Anyone who sincerely cares about freedom of speech should be disgusted with such an idea of the freedom having so come to prevail. However, you are unlikely to hear much from those who think that way. After all, the mainstream media we have is firmly on the side of the powerful, and of their punching down--and inclines to the view that people who actually have principles are insane "ideologues" who may well be allowed to exercise their "freedom of speech," but never where an appreciable audience might be likely to hear them, not if they have anything to say about the matter.
For the purposes of this discussion whether or not the attribution has been established as historically accurate is completely irrelevant, what matters instead the reason why so many cite the words in the first place--their summing up what it truly means to stand for free speech, a readiness not only to uncompromisingly defend that speech of which one approves, but also that which they disapprove, for the sake of sheer principle.
Not many live up to this standard, least of all those who most loudly claim to do so these days. As Aurelien Mondon has written (in discussion of the situation in France, though it seems to me we see the same trend everywhere else), "it has become commonly accepted in public discourse that free speech simply means the right of the powerful to offend without any consequences or any potential criticism."
Such a standard of freedom of speech is a perversion of the concept. This is not only because it completely rejects the spirit of defending speech on principle rather than because one approves the particular statement, but also because the fight for freedom of speech has, above all, been to defend the right of those out of power to speak--while this conception of "free speech" pointedly sacrifices their right to giving the powerful yet more latitude that they already have; to, as a practical matter, enabling them to "punch down" with even more complete immunity than they already possessed. Indeed, considering it I am reminded of Winston Churchill's remark that "[s]ome people’s idea of free speech is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage."
Anyone who sincerely cares about freedom of speech should be disgusted with such an idea of the freedom having so come to prevail. However, you are unlikely to hear much from those who think that way. After all, the mainstream media we have is firmly on the side of the powerful, and of their punching down--and inclines to the view that people who actually have principles are insane "ideologues" who may well be allowed to exercise their "freedom of speech," but never where an appreciable audience might be likely to hear them, not if they have anything to say about the matter.
Of Class and Accent in Britain and America: A Few Thoughts
In The English Tribe Stephen Haseler, considering Englishness and Britishness as the twentieth century drew toward its end, with "Europe" looking very much like Britain's future (how remote all that seems now!), he considered among much else the development of a distinct upper-class English accent in the country's public schools by late Victorian times, reinforced by social and other pressures at Oxbridge, the Bar, the Church and the Court (in short, the gamut of what AJP Taylor called "The Thing!"), "which would serve as the authoritative voice of Englishness, and . . . mark out rulers from ruled" not just at home but internationally (as the language of a not merely national but imperial ruling class) which has since come to be called "Received Pronunciation." In turn, the then-emergent means of mass communication reinforced in a manner Haseler did not hesitate to call Orwellian and totalitarian--indeed, "the most 'totalitarian' piece of cultural engineering" the country saw in the entire twentieth century.
I am inclined to agree, and struck by how after the passing of all that the accent was supposed to represent and serve--empire and hegemony and the Victorian social order, the plausibility of a view of Britain at the center of and dominant force in world affairs--and what many regard as the sheer obnoxiousness of the accent (Haseler himself uses words like "ungenerous" and "unengaging" to describe it), it has endured, and so too at least some of the respect shown its users. In the United States, certainly, people of conventional mind commonly equate this Received Pronunciation with superior intelligence, education, culture in that way memorably satirized by Michael Bluth's mistaking every one of a mentally disadvantaged woman's utterances for profound thoughts simply because she spoke them in that accent on Arrested Development.
I am inclined to agree, and struck by how after the passing of all that the accent was supposed to represent and serve--empire and hegemony and the Victorian social order, the plausibility of a view of Britain at the center of and dominant force in world affairs--and what many regard as the sheer obnoxiousness of the accent (Haseler himself uses words like "ungenerous" and "unengaging" to describe it), it has endured, and so too at least some of the respect shown its users. In the United States, certainly, people of conventional mind commonly equate this Received Pronunciation with superior intelligence, education, culture in that way memorably satirized by Michael Bluth's mistaking every one of a mentally disadvantaged woman's utterances for profound thoughts simply because she spoke them in that accent on Arrested Development.
Of "Mere Rhetoric"
I agreed with that Professor that the latter is indeed the common understanding, and that this case of affairs means an impoverishment of the term which helps close our minds to an important area of human endeavor--one with which, for whatever it is worth, I have personally had to do for a very long time as not just a writer, but a composition instructor. Still, he struck me as exceedingly, depressingly, oblivious to the reasons why we ended up in that situation--our living in a society that devalues verbal communication and its study, and a commercial culture and a political culture which through their crassness and viciousness foster only cynicism about what people say, reducing the consideration of "rhetoric" to sneering at "mere rhetoric," such that the common understanding can scarcely be any other than what he regretted its being.
"Money Doesn't Buy Happiness"
It seems worth acknowledging that there is truth in the saying that "Money doesn't buy happiness."
However, money does buy your way out of a lot misery--and other obstacles--and so makes finding happiness a lot easier, a fact which should not be slighted.
It is just as with the saying that "If you don't have your health, you don't have anything." Rich and sick is not great--but it is a lot easier to protect your health when you do have money. And if you fall sick, you can get along a lot better in that condition if you have money than if you don't have it, a fact which also ought not to be slighted.
However, money does buy your way out of a lot misery--and other obstacles--and so makes finding happiness a lot easier, a fact which should not be slighted.
It is just as with the saying that "If you don't have your health, you don't have anything." Rich and sick is not great--but it is a lot easier to protect your health when you do have money. And if you fall sick, you can get along a lot better in that condition if you have money than if you don't have it, a fact which also ought not to be slighted.
"Money Doesn't Matter"
We live in a society which few will deny is defined by its capitalistic nature and market values are treated as ultimately the only values that matter; where "success" and "failure" and status and power are equated with money to the point of individuals being "worth" what they have; where it is impossible to meet one's most basic physical needs at all without acquiring a certain not very low minimum sum of money such that many die all the time for its lack and comfort, all as a dignity and freedom are impossible without a good deal more money than that; where any responsible individual is supposed to orient their whole life and the upbringing of their children toward the making of money; where those who have more money than they can ever spend in a lifetime organize society around the maximization of their chances to make as much more money in as short a time as possible with the consequences for everyone and everything else irrelevant to them regardless of how disastrous they may well be, "Let the bodies pile in their thousands" merely the beginning of such callousness, as they concede absolutely nothing to claims for any other good.
Yet we are also told constantly that "Money doesn't matter."
How does one reconcile this contradiction?
One can do it very simply by recognizing that the statement that "Money doesn't matter" is a lie, or at the very least incomplete. When people tell you that "Money doesn't matter" what they mean is that your not having money does not matter to them, all as, of course, their having money matters enormously to them.
In short, it is a hypocritical screen for callousness--and an exceedingly stupid one at that. Alas, stupid hypocrisy on behalf of callousness is par for the course in this culture.
Yet we are also told constantly that "Money doesn't matter."
How does one reconcile this contradiction?
One can do it very simply by recognizing that the statement that "Money doesn't matter" is a lie, or at the very least incomplete. When people tell you that "Money doesn't matter" what they mean is that your not having money does not matter to them, all as, of course, their having money matters enormously to them.
In short, it is a hypocritical screen for callousness--and an exceedingly stupid one at that. Alas, stupid hypocrisy on behalf of callousness is par for the course in this culture.
Too Much a Modern? A Few More Thoughts
There is the fact that I have been little inclined to go along with authority--and its prejudice--in favor of the superiority of the old to the new, the ancients or the Elizabethans to, for instance, the moderns, and so ready to believe that the moderns are just as worthy, and perhaps more so (that, however much some may reject it, there can be such a thing as progress in the world of the arts.
There is the fact that I care more about what writers say and how they say it--in fact, preferring their saying something important and interesting without much in the way of graces to their elegantly saying something banal, and been interested in the big wide world out there and looking at it and picturing it to us rather than the hazy imaginings of, for example, a Medieval mind as Johan Huizinga described it (which, certainly going by Ian Watt, seems a very modern, post-Scientific Revolution preference).
There is, where how a thing is said, my preference for clarity and efficiency in the conveyance of the content to ostentatious decoration (with this, too, a rather modern, post-Scientific Revolution view apparently).
There is my impatience of the bowing and scraping before power and authority and patron we got so much of in older literature, bowing and scraping before tradition and piety--my sympathies instead consistently lying with the defiant, and the impious, and the iconoclastic; those who rebelled, who satirized, who offered truth rather than what the powerful wanted to hear.
There is, alongside my aforementioned appreciation for the "discovery of society," what went along with it, the discovery of history, too--the discovery of past, and present, and future, as we have known them only in modern times.
All this has left me reading a good deal of old work with interest in its historical significance and admiration for its pioneering new forms or its technical accomplishment rather than real enjoyment--an experience that, I think, is more common than those who read older works let on. Being frank about that has, I think, been useful to me in studying literature. But it is probably not very helpful to one pursuing a career of studying literature, the literary priesthood not caring to look at things so closely, or caring much for those who think for themselves rather than accept the judgments of Tradition, the prestige of the Postmodern, and the longstanding distaste of the critical elite for much of what I have described here.
Of Literature's Priesthood
Of course, endeavoring to do that myself I have from the start found myself disagreeing with the received judgments all the time--and noticing how little others try to do what I did. Rather the scholars of literature have tended to act as a priesthood of literature, upholding tradition, respecting authority, telling others what to think just as they are themselves told what to think rather than thinking for themselves and encouraging others to do the same, and accordingly preaching on behalf of respect for some things and disrespect for others (which, frankly, played its part in driving me toward a more questioning attitude in the first place).
Considering the last part, how the priests deal with the "laity," one can see this as a matter of the professional generally to take a condescending view of everyone else in the world as incapable of understanding a really meaningful explanation. However, it seems to me that this is also a matter of the priests not having sought explanation themselves. Critics of art, who have often been practicing artists, and even more often at least been aspiring artists, tend to share the artist's outlook--which tends to be unconscious, intuitive, impressionable, and moved to awe and deference rather than consider what is put before them critically (they become Bardolators because they so easily become idolators), leaving them unequipped to answer those who look at the world a different way, as I did in trying to figure these things out for myself.
The Varieties of Literary Appreciation
What I refer to instead is the fact that when most people pick up a work of literature, as with the novels we are apt to see on the bestseller list, they expect an entertainment which will hold their interest, give them particular pleasures, and leave them emotionally satisfied at the end, a work's giving them which is what they refer to when they say that a book is "good" (as they are often hard-pressed to offer any more explanation than that it is "good," or not).
However, anyone who sticks with a course of literary study for long is likely to find that even books which do not please that way can have their interest. They may find the book engaging because of, for instance, technical aspects that may not give much entertainment. They may look upon it as a historical relic, the way an archaeologist might a piece of pottery from a past era. They may even take an interest in it as a puzzle (an approach that, I think, has a lot to do with the propensity of literary scholars to offer exceedingly abstruse explanations of literary works). And so on and so forth, the work interesting even when it is not interesting in the more usual, commonplace way.
Alas, I think the literary priesthood--to the extent that they are willing or able to explain their standards to the public at all--think all this too subtle for the laity, or maybe just too much at odds with their desire to cultivate a mystique around the works whose cults they tend and by extension themselves, so that they commend to the public a simple-minded awe at what they place on their pedestals, often so high it can scarcely be seen from the floor on which the mere mortals stand.
The Biggest "Platform of Envy" of All
In Sonya Sarayia's ten year retrospective on David Fincher's The Social Network she recalled her own early experience of Facebook as increasingly one of a "toxic . . . platform of envy . . . that turned all of [her] anger and frustration inward, corroding my self-esteem and sending me into a sustained depression" by way of its subjection of her to her acquaintances' boasting.
Considering that my thought is that while this is certainly how many experience Facebook, it isn't just Facebook that functions as a "platform of envy." That term can be used to describe the whole mainstream media--a media which has always been staffed by courtiers of the rich and powerful whose services to them include endless flattery of them before the eyes of the world; which invented and exploited to the full the cult of "celebrity" in all its foolishness; and that in the digital age all this has got a whole lot worse because of its extreme pervasiveness (and, perhaps, more people "finding themselves desperate to escape an increasingly wretched workaday lot by becoming celebrities themselves").
In the face of all this idiocy anyone who does not have an army of claqueurs applauding them nonstop the way the billionaires and Fortune 500 CEOs and entertainment industry A-listers and politicians do is likely to feel pretty worthless if they let it reach them, all as, I imagine, few are truly immune to it--which seems to me a good reason to be very careful of where we venture online, curate what news we really think we need very carefully, and probably more often than we are doing, simply turn off the screen and look at something else, anything else, before we let the scum of the media-industrial complex drive us insane.
Considering that my thought is that while this is certainly how many experience Facebook, it isn't just Facebook that functions as a "platform of envy." That term can be used to describe the whole mainstream media--a media which has always been staffed by courtiers of the rich and powerful whose services to them include endless flattery of them before the eyes of the world; which invented and exploited to the full the cult of "celebrity" in all its foolishness; and that in the digital age all this has got a whole lot worse because of its extreme pervasiveness (and, perhaps, more people "finding themselves desperate to escape an increasingly wretched workaday lot by becoming celebrities themselves").
In the face of all this idiocy anyone who does not have an army of claqueurs applauding them nonstop the way the billionaires and Fortune 500 CEOs and entertainment industry A-listers and politicians do is likely to feel pretty worthless if they let it reach them, all as, I imagine, few are truly immune to it--which seems to me a good reason to be very careful of where we venture online, curate what news we really think we need very carefully, and probably more often than we are doing, simply turn off the screen and look at something else, anything else, before we let the scum of the media-industrial complex drive us insane.
The Facebook Movie We Should Have Got Instead of The Social Network
One of the more interesting bits of Sonya Sarayia's ten year retrospective on David Fincher's The Social Network was her recollection of her own early experience of the Facebook social media site, which was as an increasingly "toxic . . . platform of envy . . . that turned all of [her] anger and frustration inward, corroding my self-esteem and sending me into a sustained depression" as upon graduation she was subjected to the ceaseless boasting of acquaintances about how wonderfully they were doing. She also mentions that when she first heard that there would be a movie about Facebook she thought it would be about the experience of using the web site, as with "that peculiar sense of isolation in the midst of purported connectedness" or "the minor agonies of wanting people to like you on the internet."
In short, a movie that would actually look at the human experience of real people.
Of course what she and everyone else got instead was "Mark Zuckerberg, Tech God Totally Unlike You Lowly Proletarian Trash, but Maybe Not a Perfect Person."
As for a movie that would deal seriously and intelligently with what social media has meant for humans the way Ms. Soraiya had in mind . . . I think we're still waiting on that one. And barring some extraordinary change in how Hollywood works, we'll go on waiting a long time, probably so long that by then social media as we know it will have ceased to exist and made any such effort a piece of historiography about the past, rather than a movie about the here and now.
In short, a movie that would actually look at the human experience of real people.
Of course what she and everyone else got instead was "Mark Zuckerberg, Tech God Totally Unlike You Lowly Proletarian Trash, but Maybe Not a Perfect Person."
As for a movie that would deal seriously and intelligently with what social media has meant for humans the way Ms. Soraiya had in mind . . . I think we're still waiting on that one. And barring some extraordinary change in how Hollywood works, we'll go on waiting a long time, probably so long that by then social media as we know it will have ceased to exist and made any such effort a piece of historiography about the past, rather than a movie about the here and now.
"The Mix of Elitism and Banality" and the Chattering Classes
Some years ago The New Republic, offering its list of "DC's most over-rated thinkers," named Fareed Zakaria for his "mix of elitism and banality."
Still, if as Zakaria proved again and again in the Newsweek columns through which I first came into contact with what he passes off as "thought" that he ca n be described that way he is far from alone in being so. At most he epitomizes what is in fact the norm among the "experts" that the centrist media platforms, with this not a bug but a feature--centrist ideology, after all, being above all concerned with safely bounding political discussion with any concern for the links between one issues and another, any interest in root causes, any desire to actually solve a problem, out of bounds, all as it expects everyone to defer to the Establishment by way of deference to its "savants, lawyers, doctors . . . their so-called men of talent," for whom and whom alone recognition as "expert" is reserved, tell the public to think (rather than helping it make educated judgments). The result is that much as we hear about "both sidesism," this is the exception as what we usually get is "one sidesism" with at best slight variations (on the really big questions the media speaks with one voice, very loudly), as what may be a very large part of the spectrum of opinion on a subject is shut out of the discourse altogether, making for a discussion as emotionally unengaging as it is intellectually stultifying, and leaving the elitists in which the centrist has such great faith inevitably presiding over exchanges of banalities, with their pretense of doing anything else actually making what they are doing more obvious, rather than less.
Anyone who would say anything interesting, relevant, true, can thus expect to not be invited to the news show, not appear on the panel, not get the column, with only very rare exception.
Still, if as Zakaria proved again and again in the Newsweek columns through which I first came into contact with what he passes off as "thought" that he ca n be described that way he is far from alone in being so. At most he epitomizes what is in fact the norm among the "experts" that the centrist media platforms, with this not a bug but a feature--centrist ideology, after all, being above all concerned with safely bounding political discussion with any concern for the links between one issues and another, any interest in root causes, any desire to actually solve a problem, out of bounds, all as it expects everyone to defer to the Establishment by way of deference to its "savants, lawyers, doctors . . . their so-called men of talent," for whom and whom alone recognition as "expert" is reserved, tell the public to think (rather than helping it make educated judgments). The result is that much as we hear about "both sidesism," this is the exception as what we usually get is "one sidesism" with at best slight variations (on the really big questions the media speaks with one voice, very loudly), as what may be a very large part of the spectrum of opinion on a subject is shut out of the discourse altogether, making for a discussion as emotionally unengaging as it is intellectually stultifying, and leaving the elitists in which the centrist has such great faith inevitably presiding over exchanges of banalities, with their pretense of doing anything else actually making what they are doing more obvious, rather than less.
Anyone who would say anything interesting, relevant, true, can thus expect to not be invited to the news show, not appear on the panel, not get the column, with only very rare exception.
"The Cinema of Pseudomaturity": Summing Up '90s Indie Film
In the wake of the '90s-era fuss over independent film David Walsh raised the question of what exactly the term "independent" is supposed to signify in a filmmaker--and concluded on the basis of the movies they actually made that an independent filmmaker is no more than a "commercial filmmaker whose films have not yet made anyone a great deal of money--a hack commercial filmmaker in training."
It seemed to me then and still seems to me now that there is a good deal of insight in that understanding of the phenomenon, but it did not include what seemed to me a distinctive something that seemed to me characteristic of the films of figures like Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino. I have raised it from time to time over the years, discussing various of its characteristics--the pretentiousness, the edgelordism and the rest, and saw in it a certain sort of youthful attitude, namely that of the college graduate who spends his nights drinking Yoo-hoo as he plays video games in his mother's basement pretending he instead spends them downing shots of whiskey as he plays poker with his equally cool friends in his smoke-filled bachelor pad.
So do they remain now, even with the gray hair and the wrinkles still giving us just the "Cinema of Pseudomaturity."
It seemed to me then and still seems to me now that there is a good deal of insight in that understanding of the phenomenon, but it did not include what seemed to me a distinctive something that seemed to me characteristic of the films of figures like Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino. I have raised it from time to time over the years, discussing various of its characteristics--the pretentiousness, the edgelordism and the rest, and saw in it a certain sort of youthful attitude, namely that of the college graduate who spends his nights drinking Yoo-hoo as he plays video games in his mother's basement pretending he instead spends them downing shots of whiskey as he plays poker with his equally cool friends in his smoke-filled bachelor pad.
So do they remain now, even with the gray hair and the wrinkles still giving us just the "Cinema of Pseudomaturity."
The Supply Side-Mentality and the STEM Cult
"STEM!"
"STEM!"
"STEM!"
"STEM!"
The chant is loud, and strident, and unceasing.
It seems plausible that the chant is so loud and so strident and so unceasing precisely because the thinking behind it is so vacuous in so many, many ways--not least the fact that, in spite of the deference of their courtiers to the endless whining of employers who think labor can never be abundant enough or cheap enough, there really is no hard evidence of some desperate shortage of the engineers who are the real object of the concern (certainly to go by the actual underemployment of recent graduates in engineering and related fields), the more in as more and more young people are going into those fields all the time.
The tendency to overlook that reality reflects something all too rarely spelled out about the chant, which is its essentially supply-side nature. The thinking seems to be that the country gets more people to study STEM--and then somehow its manufacturing base is supposed to flourish, just like that. Where the long-term investment in the relevant sectors and plant to put the STEM-trained to work is supposed to come from does not arise--in spite of the fact that, as examination of the statistics shows, for a half century now American investors have, in spite of the union-breaking and tax cuts and deregulation that Reagan promised would mean an American manufacturing renaissance, and the consistent hewing of his successors to such policies, been little interested in manufacturing, preferring speculation in real estate and financial instruments and so on (with the country's deindustrialization, of course, confirming this in detail). The idea that having some more engineering majors looking for jobs is supposed to all by itself make investors' money flood into manufacturing is a piety of the market fundamentalism still prevailing--and as piety so often is, a diversion from actualities that elites regard as best unconsidered by the general public.
"STEM!"
"STEM!"
"STEM!"
The chant is loud, and strident, and unceasing.
It seems plausible that the chant is so loud and so strident and so unceasing precisely because the thinking behind it is so vacuous in so many, many ways--not least the fact that, in spite of the deference of their courtiers to the endless whining of employers who think labor can never be abundant enough or cheap enough, there really is no hard evidence of some desperate shortage of the engineers who are the real object of the concern (certainly to go by the actual underemployment of recent graduates in engineering and related fields), the more in as more and more young people are going into those fields all the time.
What's Thomas Frank Been Up to Lately?
Since 2000 Thomas Frank has had a major book out every presidential election year--One Market Under God (his study of '90s-era market populism), What's the Matter With Kansas? (probably still his most famous work, about the use of the culture wars to sell an elite economic agenda), The Wrecking Crew (a study of "government by people who hate government" from the Reagan era forward), Pity the Billionaire (about how, even though the 2007 financial crisis and Great Recession looked like the end of the line for the neoliberals, they rallied to triumph yet again), Listen, Liberal (which had for its subject how American "liberalism" and the Democratic Party supposed to be its standard-bearers went astray), and finally The People, No (a history of "anti-populism" in America).
It being 2024 one would have expected to see his latest months ago--and perhaps done so the more eagerly in as his last (The People, No) was more a work of fairly distant history than contemporary affairs, more background to analyzing the present than analysis of the present than his other works, and in that, at least in his interview with Seymour Hersh, he did indicate that he was working on a new book. Alas, he has had nothing out so far as I can tell, any details on when or even if something will be out are elusive--and, once again, Frank's general media profile is a lot lower than it used to be, all of which seems to me to bear out the impression that the scope the mainstream is willing to afford his analyses has only gone on shrinking through this century.
It being 2024 one would have expected to see his latest months ago--and perhaps done so the more eagerly in as his last (The People, No) was more a work of fairly distant history than contemporary affairs, more background to analyzing the present than analysis of the present than his other works, and in that, at least in his interview with Seymour Hersh, he did indicate that he was working on a new book. Alas, he has had nothing out so far as I can tell, any details on when or even if something will be out are elusive--and, once again, Frank's general media profile is a lot lower than it used to be, all of which seems to me to bear out the impression that the scope the mainstream is willing to afford his analyses has only gone on shrinking through this century.
Why Does Cedar Leiter Have a Mid-Atlantic Accent?
In his James Bond continuation novel For Special Services John Gardner described Cedar Leiter as having a "Mid-Atlantic accent." Characterizing this accent as "without a hint of what the British think of as an American accent," not having had "what the British think of as an American accent" clarified for me I initially thought he meant that Britons did not think of the accent of the Mid-Atlantic states as American-sounding. However, I later realized that he referred not to the regional accent of the middle of the Eastern seaboard but rather the mix of Northeastern U.S. and British Received Pronunciation that America's elites fostered in their prep schools and the media and tried, unsuccessfully, to turn into a U.S. equivalent of Britain's RP.
Looking back it seems an odd detail given Cedar's background. She was, after all, the daughter of Texan Felix Leiter--while if she had been to an upper-class private school (as seemed probable) a woman as young as herself in 1982 was of a generation unlikely to get that training. Perhaps Gardner was simply behind the times on this point--or, in a novel in which Gardner, in contrast with his inclination in the preceding Licence Renewed to make James Bond's new adventures seem as '80s as possible, had decided on giving us a "throwback" in this detail as in so many others in this book in which (even while he could not resist parodying and subverting the Bond formula and image) he was drenching the reader in the '50s-era series' past, and quite prone to metafictional evocations of the cinema of yesteryear.
Looking back it seems an odd detail given Cedar's background. She was, after all, the daughter of Texan Felix Leiter--while if she had been to an upper-class private school (as seemed probable) a woman as young as herself in 1982 was of a generation unlikely to get that training. Perhaps Gardner was simply behind the times on this point--or, in a novel in which Gardner, in contrast with his inclination in the preceding Licence Renewed to make James Bond's new adventures seem as '80s as possible, had decided on giving us a "throwback" in this detail as in so many others in this book in which (even while he could not resist parodying and subverting the Bond formula and image) he was drenching the reader in the '50s-era series' past, and quite prone to metafictional evocations of the cinema of yesteryear.
The Failed Attempt to Give America its Own "Received Pronunciation"
The reader may have heard of something called "the mid-Atlantic accent." First coming across the term (it may have been when I was reading John Gardner's For Special Services; Gardner describes Felix Leiter's daughter Cedar as having a "mid-Atlantic accent") my thought was of the "mid-Atlantic states" on America's eastern seaboard, and took it for a regional accent belonging to the people of Maryland and its close neighbors, perhaps.
However, in this case the term "mid-Atlantic" referred to not the middle of the Atlantic seaboard but the middle of the Atlantic ocean--halfway between America and Britain--in a figurative sense, the accent being a compound of both the accent of the Northeastern United States and the English Received Pronunciation that, by the late nineteenth century, had emerged as the accent of Britain's elite. Some of the relevant history seems obscure, but it appears that there was deliberate copying of Britain's "RP," with, just as in Britain, much of this going on in the private schools of the country's elite, and in the emergent mass media--on the radio, in movies.
In the United States, however, the effort to develop a distinct elite accent was a comparative bust in the long run, taken almost for an individual eccentricity in the case of a George Plimpton rather than a badge of Authority, and today an anachronism. ("Why does Audrey Hepburn talk like that?" one might wonder watching one of her movies. "Is that Cary Grant guy English or American or what?" Watching Charade they can wonder these things about both of the movie's leads.)
Did this failure do anything to make America a more egalitarian place than it would have been otherwise? Diminish its social divides? It seems to me that the situation is so bad that way that one would have a hard time proving that--but for all that I suspect that it is probably for the best that the United States does not have this added bit of cultural baggage to cope with as well.
However, in this case the term "mid-Atlantic" referred to not the middle of the Atlantic seaboard but the middle of the Atlantic ocean--halfway between America and Britain--in a figurative sense, the accent being a compound of both the accent of the Northeastern United States and the English Received Pronunciation that, by the late nineteenth century, had emerged as the accent of Britain's elite. Some of the relevant history seems obscure, but it appears that there was deliberate copying of Britain's "RP," with, just as in Britain, much of this going on in the private schools of the country's elite, and in the emergent mass media--on the radio, in movies.
In the United States, however, the effort to develop a distinct elite accent was a comparative bust in the long run, taken almost for an individual eccentricity in the case of a George Plimpton rather than a badge of Authority, and today an anachronism. ("Why does Audrey Hepburn talk like that?" one might wonder watching one of her movies. "Is that Cary Grant guy English or American or what?" Watching Charade they can wonder these things about both of the movie's leads.)
Did this failure do anything to make America a more egalitarian place than it would have been otherwise? Diminish its social divides? It seems to me that the situation is so bad that way that one would have a hard time proving that--but for all that I suspect that it is probably for the best that the United States does not have this added bit of cultural baggage to cope with as well.
William Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Balzac's Human Comedy: Some Thoughts
As I remarked when discussing William Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon a while back it was the comparison of William Makepeace Thackeray with Balzac that made me think Thackeray worthwhile. While I did indeed find it worthwhile, Barry Lyndon made quite a different impression on me than Balzac--Grimmelshausen the writer I constantly found myself in mind of as I read that book.
Reading Vanity Fair one might think of Balzac because of that novel's greater proximity to Balzac's post-Revolutionary France in that period, and the role played by financial operations and inheritance in the plot. In fairness the book does, as is the case with Balzac, depict a society where all that was solid was melting into air in the cash nexus, but very differently. The copy on the back of my volume describes the story's pace as "leisurely"--and the book is indeed too much so to feel properly Balzacian, Thackeray never quite conveying that desperate intensity of his characters in the pursuit of their objects that Balzac so often did, exemplified by how as the story approaches its finish he does not check in on one of his two principals, Becky Sharp, for over a hundred pages (!). Rather than a mad chase their path through the story feels like a lackadaisical stroll, all within a story that, compared with Balzac, or even Thackeray's earlier Barry Lyndon, is far more domestic (even the portion about the Battle of Waterloo giving us more about the wives and other hangers-on back in Brussels than the events on the battlefield!) and genteel (Thackeray himself remarking his "wish . . . deferentially to submit to the fashion at present prevailing, and only to hint at the existence of wickedness in a light, easy, and agreeable manner, so that nobody's fine feelings may be offended").
At the same time Thackeray never seems quite so invested in the goings-on as the often cold-eyed Balzac could be in the stories of characters for which he often seemed to feel more, and I think, made the reader feel more than Thackeray does.
Reading Vanity Fair one might think of Balzac because of that novel's greater proximity to Balzac's post-Revolutionary France in that period, and the role played by financial operations and inheritance in the plot. In fairness the book does, as is the case with Balzac, depict a society where all that was solid was melting into air in the cash nexus, but very differently. The copy on the back of my volume describes the story's pace as "leisurely"--and the book is indeed too much so to feel properly Balzacian, Thackeray never quite conveying that desperate intensity of his characters in the pursuit of their objects that Balzac so often did, exemplified by how as the story approaches its finish he does not check in on one of his two principals, Becky Sharp, for over a hundred pages (!). Rather than a mad chase their path through the story feels like a lackadaisical stroll, all within a story that, compared with Balzac, or even Thackeray's earlier Barry Lyndon, is far more domestic (even the portion about the Battle of Waterloo giving us more about the wives and other hangers-on back in Brussels than the events on the battlefield!) and genteel (Thackeray himself remarking his "wish . . . deferentially to submit to the fashion at present prevailing, and only to hint at the existence of wickedness in a light, easy, and agreeable manner, so that nobody's fine feelings may be offended").
At the same time Thackeray never seems quite so invested in the goings-on as the often cold-eyed Balzac could be in the stories of characters for which he often seemed to feel more, and I think, made the reader feel more than Thackeray does.
Of the "Apologists and Admirers of Injustice, Misery, and Brutality"
In the course of his novel Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray referred to the "apologists and admirers of injustice, misery, and brutality." Thackeray specifically had in mind those who approve injustice, misery, and brutality in the rearing of children, thinking that bullying plays a salutary part in all this for bully and bullied alike, but while this attitude is particularly disgusting here one finds it just about everywhere in society--with the "apologists and admirers" no rarer these days than in his own.
Considering the apology and admiration it seems worth saying that such persons are more prone to apologize for and admire injustice, misery and brutality when they are suffered by others and not themselves--especially when those suffering them are what would be "unworthy victims" in their book.
This is all the more the case as, when they are on the receiving end of injustice, misery and brutality they howl for justice, relief, gentleness louder than anyone else--in a manner redolent of the self-pity of which their kind so love to accuse everyone else when they dare protest the kind of treatment they dole out to them.
Considering the apology and admiration it seems worth saying that such persons are more prone to apologize for and admire injustice, misery and brutality when they are suffered by others and not themselves--especially when those suffering them are what would be "unworthy victims" in their book.
This is all the more the case as, when they are on the receiving end of injustice, misery and brutality they howl for justice, relief, gentleness louder than anyone else--in a manner redolent of the self-pity of which their kind so love to accuse everyone else when they dare protest the kind of treatment they dole out to them.
Of "Chickenshit"
The term "chickenshit" is by no means new but would seem to have seen its usage surge again and again to new heights over the years.
Famously associated with the period of the Second World War, it seems that, according to Google's Ngram viewer, usage of the term surged tenfold between 1939 and 1945. According to historian Paul Fussell's 1990 book Wartime the term denoted "behavior that makes military life worse than it need be," not least "petty harassment of the weak by the strong . . . sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline . . . insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances."
The person of what may be called "conventional" mind--respectful of power and disrespectful of those who have none, unquestioning of received wisdom and contemptuous of those who do question it, ever ready to suck up and punch down and thus do their part in facilitating bullies--tends to dismiss charges that such a thing exists, but that is not because this particular evil is absent, but because they are of conventional mind, while I would hasten to add this is hardly unique to military institutions. Quite the contrary, it would seem to pervade any hierarchical institution where scope exists for the exercise of petty power and authority--while I suspect that in just about every one of them such practice, contrary to what its defenders may feebly attempt to argue, gets in the way of that institution's ability to perform its essential task. If those who have authority and power and responsibility have time for "petty harassment," "sadism," "insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances" they are not attending to whatever useful functions they may have had--while those on the receiving end, subjected to the harassment, sadism and the rest, start seeing everything to which they are subjected as that, and give it exactly the consideration that such things deserve, which becomes a problem when a matter actually is not chickenshit. But of course those mentally of a kind so as to defend this behavior--those whom William Thackeray memorably termed the "apologists and admirers of injustice, misery and brutality"--will never admit to that and it may not be much good arguing with them to any such end, for after all, YOU CAN'T WIN AN ARGUMENT WITH AN IDIOT.
Famously associated with the period of the Second World War, it seems that, according to Google's Ngram viewer, usage of the term surged tenfold between 1939 and 1945. According to historian Paul Fussell's 1990 book Wartime the term denoted "behavior that makes military life worse than it need be," not least "petty harassment of the weak by the strong . . . sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline . . . insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances."
The person of what may be called "conventional" mind--respectful of power and disrespectful of those who have none, unquestioning of received wisdom and contemptuous of those who do question it, ever ready to suck up and punch down and thus do their part in facilitating bullies--tends to dismiss charges that such a thing exists, but that is not because this particular evil is absent, but because they are of conventional mind, while I would hasten to add this is hardly unique to military institutions. Quite the contrary, it would seem to pervade any hierarchical institution where scope exists for the exercise of petty power and authority--while I suspect that in just about every one of them such practice, contrary to what its defenders may feebly attempt to argue, gets in the way of that institution's ability to perform its essential task. If those who have authority and power and responsibility have time for "petty harassment," "sadism," "insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances" they are not attending to whatever useful functions they may have had--while those on the receiving end, subjected to the harassment, sadism and the rest, start seeing everything to which they are subjected as that, and give it exactly the consideration that such things deserve, which becomes a problem when a matter actually is not chickenshit. But of course those mentally of a kind so as to defend this behavior--those whom William Thackeray memorably termed the "apologists and admirers of injustice, misery and brutality"--will never admit to that and it may not be much good arguing with them to any such end, for after all, YOU CAN'T WIN AN ARGUMENT WITH AN IDIOT.
Thackeray and Balzac: A Few More Thoughts
Recently considering the comparison of Thackeray with Balzac I found it overdrawn on the basis of the novels by Thackeray I had read, particularly his most famous, Vanity Fair. I previously remarked how domestic and genteel the work was by comparison with Balzac's, but I don't think this exhausts the matter, with one aspect of this how things ended up with Becky. In his "delicate" telling (how far are we from a work like Cousin Bette, or The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans!) Becky neither attains the success of a Eugene de Rastignac, nor suffers the catastrophe of a Lucien de Rubempre, but just ends up somewhere in the middle at the end of a rather meandering narrative, with much relegated to a postscript. It is all rather lacking in intensity rather at odds with Emily Brontë's comparison of Thackeray with an Old Testament prophet, and it may well be that this is a matter of a faintness of social vision that tells us that, yes, the actors do behave selfishly and at times disgracefully, but in such a way that rather than it all seeming to be a matter of people responding to the crushing force of circumstances it can seem like the kind of thing a certain kind of mediocre mind delights in calling "human nature," and certainly gives no sense of being bound up with a society's being in a state of great transformation (in Karl Polanyi's view, the great transformation). It may be relevant here that Thackeray has not Balzac's interest in all strata of society (when Thackeray writes of people without money in Chapter 36 it is those who manage to live luxuriously on nothing at all, for a time anyway, that he concerns himself with, rather than the great majority who have nothing and truly suffer deprivation as a result), and that he also has not that author's interest in the "machinery of civilization" as Henry James called it (what would Balzac have done with the financial affairs which brought down John Sedley?), and what may be cause or reflection of all this, Thackeray's tendency toward an attitude of self-satisfied irony toward all he surveys (down to the very last page).
For all that I do not feel as if I wasted my time in reading Vanity Fair. But I do think that given what I personally look for in my fiction these days the book was definitely oversold.
For all that I do not feel as if I wasted my time in reading Vanity Fair. But I do think that given what I personally look for in my fiction these days the book was definitely oversold.
Upton Sinclair on the Media's "Giving the People What They Want"
It remains a commonplace that business generally and the media particularly "just give the people what they want"--the proposition that in a market society "the consumer is king" excusing business for any regrettable thing it does (they got's to make a living), by laying the entire responsibility for everything wrong with what business does at the feet of the Great Unwashed. A rather simple-minded view, it comes especially easily to those in awe of the elite, fearful of challenging power, and disdainful of the general public and its working people--which is to say, pretty much everyone allowed access to the political mainstream.
Quite naturally criticism of the view is not at all new, but it is worth remembering that in his now century-old Money Writes! Upton Sinclair specifically took on that view, and indeed gave his fifth chapter over to debunking the nonsense, explicitly remarking the utterance of "that formula every ten minutes in the offices of every yellow journal and tabloid in America . . . every popular magazine . . . every producer of theatrical and cinema excrement" as an excuse, and declaring the formula "twenty-five years out of date" in a world where advertising was a major industry, with "several thousand schools, colleges and universities of commerce in the United States" training that industry's personnel in wanting what the businessmen want them to want, extending to overcoming the "sales resistance" their actions inevitably produce in service of that consumer culture that had already emerged full bloom in America in the 1920s and in the process "destroyed the line which used to be drawn between necessities and luxuries." Indeed, the idea that business is just "giving the public what it wants" seemed to him already "ancient history" in his time, such that "the younger generation of writers never heard of it, and will refuse to believe that it ever happened."
Still, Sinclair also points out that the lie worked with the public, as when he discussed the theme of his next chapter, the end of the "muckraking" era. To use that stupid and distasteful term, what had happened was that in the first two decades of the twentieth century, for all the news media's considerable failings, exposes of society's evils had some prominence within its content ("hundreds of exposures . . . hundreds of thousands of single facts stated" that were never "disproved in a court of law"), but after the war and its associated reaction the space for such work shrank. The official line went that "the public . . . had become disgusted with the excesses of the muckrakers" and the public believed it, in spite of its having been false--false not only in the sense of the "excesses" having been those of the ones "who made the muck, not . . . those who raked it," but told that its "disgust" was what brought the reportage to an end when really it was the shrinking tolerance of a revolution-haunted elite for any challenge to "things as they are."
Meanwhile, if the younger generation of writers of his day never believed the "what the public wants" piffle they were certainly more sophisticated than the writers of our own day, who seem to swallow the foolishness whole. But then a lot was lost in that post-war period Sinclair lamented, and apparently never properly recovered down to our time a century later.
Quite naturally criticism of the view is not at all new, but it is worth remembering that in his now century-old Money Writes! Upton Sinclair specifically took on that view, and indeed gave his fifth chapter over to debunking the nonsense, explicitly remarking the utterance of "that formula every ten minutes in the offices of every yellow journal and tabloid in America . . . every popular magazine . . . every producer of theatrical and cinema excrement" as an excuse, and declaring the formula "twenty-five years out of date" in a world where advertising was a major industry, with "several thousand schools, colleges and universities of commerce in the United States" training that industry's personnel in wanting what the businessmen want them to want, extending to overcoming the "sales resistance" their actions inevitably produce in service of that consumer culture that had already emerged full bloom in America in the 1920s and in the process "destroyed the line which used to be drawn between necessities and luxuries." Indeed, the idea that business is just "giving the public what it wants" seemed to him already "ancient history" in his time, such that "the younger generation of writers never heard of it, and will refuse to believe that it ever happened."
Still, Sinclair also points out that the lie worked with the public, as when he discussed the theme of his next chapter, the end of the "muckraking" era. To use that stupid and distasteful term, what had happened was that in the first two decades of the twentieth century, for all the news media's considerable failings, exposes of society's evils had some prominence within its content ("hundreds of exposures . . . hundreds of thousands of single facts stated" that were never "disproved in a court of law"), but after the war and its associated reaction the space for such work shrank. The official line went that "the public . . . had become disgusted with the excesses of the muckrakers" and the public believed it, in spite of its having been false--false not only in the sense of the "excesses" having been those of the ones "who made the muck, not . . . those who raked it," but told that its "disgust" was what brought the reportage to an end when really it was the shrinking tolerance of a revolution-haunted elite for any challenge to "things as they are."
Meanwhile, if the younger generation of writers of his day never believed the "what the public wants" piffle they were certainly more sophisticated than the writers of our own day, who seem to swallow the foolishness whole. But then a lot was lost in that post-war period Sinclair lamented, and apparently never properly recovered down to our time a century later.
The Humanity of The Simpsons--and the Inhumanity of the '90s
A few years ago The Simpsons creator Matt Groening gave an interview to Smithsonian Magazine. The piece had many interesting tidbits--not least how Homer got his name (and what relation the name "Homer Simpson" had to Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, something I had wondered about for decades).
One of the more interesting was Groening's remark about the increasingly "mean and sour" tone of "sitcom banter" from the '70s on, which got to the point "that half the time someone would say something in a sitcom, and it seemed like the spouse’s response should be, 'I want a divorce.'"
I don't disagree about that, but I do think it surprised me hearing it from Groening. After all, at the time of its debut The Simpsons was a new arrival on the upstart FOX Network, the home of shows like Married . . . With Children, and if perhaps not quite to the same degree, edgy enough by the prime-time sitcom standards of the day to outrage the culture warriors (the more in as, much more than is admitted, people thought then and still think now of cartoons as something for children only).
Still, it is a reminder that for all of Homer's antics--which in the course of a single season of the show saw him do things that would probably get a person divorced in real life--Homer was in the end a loving husband and father, with the comedy often coming out of that.
It is also a reminder that the show (which originated as a The Tracey Ullman Show sketch in 1987, even if it only aired its Christmas special in the second half of December 1989 and its first "proper" episodes in 1990, and had its glory days in the subsequent years) was ultimately more of the '80s--the era of The Cosby Show and Growing Pains and the rest--than of the '90s--that era of the "extreme!" in which amid a sense of national nervous breakdown the "cool" thing to do was supposed to be to ride that breakdown like a surfer does a giant wave, for the sheer "extreme!" thrill of it.
By contrast South Park was much more reflective of that decade's nihilistic outlook--and the fact that the show is not just still on the air, but still treated as culturally significant, is a reminder that the "national nervous breakdown" just went on getting worse and worse.
One of the more interesting was Groening's remark about the increasingly "mean and sour" tone of "sitcom banter" from the '70s on, which got to the point "that half the time someone would say something in a sitcom, and it seemed like the spouse’s response should be, 'I want a divorce.'"
I don't disagree about that, but I do think it surprised me hearing it from Groening. After all, at the time of its debut The Simpsons was a new arrival on the upstart FOX Network, the home of shows like Married . . . With Children, and if perhaps not quite to the same degree, edgy enough by the prime-time sitcom standards of the day to outrage the culture warriors (the more in as, much more than is admitted, people thought then and still think now of cartoons as something for children only).
Still, it is a reminder that for all of Homer's antics--which in the course of a single season of the show saw him do things that would probably get a person divorced in real life--Homer was in the end a loving husband and father, with the comedy often coming out of that.
It is also a reminder that the show (which originated as a The Tracey Ullman Show sketch in 1987, even if it only aired its Christmas special in the second half of December 1989 and its first "proper" episodes in 1990, and had its glory days in the subsequent years) was ultimately more of the '80s--the era of The Cosby Show and Growing Pains and the rest--than of the '90s--that era of the "extreme!" in which amid a sense of national nervous breakdown the "cool" thing to do was supposed to be to ride that breakdown like a surfer does a giant wave, for the sheer "extreme!" thrill of it.
By contrast South Park was much more reflective of that decade's nihilistic outlook--and the fact that the show is not just still on the air, but still treated as culturally significant, is a reminder that the "national nervous breakdown" just went on getting worse and worse.
How Did Homer Simpson Get His Name?
Back in that patch when my personal reading was still dominated by purveyors of action-adventure like Clive Cussler Nathanael West was one of the first Literary writers I read on my own time, without recommendation by an instructor or anyone else I knew personally. I ended up reading three of his books--the reimagining of Voltaire's Candide to a Depression-era America on the verge of going fascist, A Cool Million, Miss Lonelyhearts, and probably the most highly regarded of them, The Day of the Locust (the canonical stature of which is, of course, confirmed by its having the #73 spot on the Modern Library's list of the 100 Best Novels published in English during the twentieth century).
To be honest I enjoyed A Cool Million more than the others--precisely because of their touches of Modernist storytelling. Still, if Day of the Locust was often frustrating, it was intriguing enough that bits of it remain with me.
One of the sillier ways in which this was the case was the fact of a major character in the novel being named Homer Simpson, which has ever since had me (and apparently, a great many others) wondering if there was not some intriguing connection between the character and the Homer Simpson everybody knows.
Of course, try hard enough and you can probably find points of comparison in any two objects. Comparing the Homer of the book to the Homer of the show there was, for instance, his comical lapse into extreme verbal incoherence while under very severe stress. (As the narrator explains when the words are pouring out of Homer "A great deal of it was gibberish," and what wasn't gibberish "wasn't jumbled so much as it was timeless. The words . . . behind each other instead of after," while "several sentences were simultaneous and not a paragraph.") There was also the way Homer lost his temper in the scene that produces the riot that caps the tale.
Still, character, situation, story--they are all very, very different, and that was as far as I got. However, a few years ago The Simpsons creator Matt Groening gave an interview to Smithsonian Magazine in which he explained that in high school he had read the book and, while writing "a novel about a character named Bart Simpson," the choice of name had appealed to him as appropriate to his own story because "Simpson" had "simp," a shortening of "simpleton," in it, and his father's name was Homer.
As it happens Matt Groening's mother is Margaret Wiggum, while Matt also has two sisters who go by Lisa and Maggie.
I imagine that many accustomed to thinking of works of fiction as mosaics of abstruse allusions of the kind professors of literature make careers out of explaining (or at least, pretending to explain) expected something more profound, or at least more obscure, than that. Alas, whatever literary critics may imagine, or pretend to imagine, in real life artists' choices are often just that simple--as indeed they have to be, if artists are ever to get anything done. Not everything needs to be a "symbol"--or can be.
To be honest I enjoyed A Cool Million more than the others--precisely because of their touches of Modernist storytelling. Still, if Day of the Locust was often frustrating, it was intriguing enough that bits of it remain with me.
One of the sillier ways in which this was the case was the fact of a major character in the novel being named Homer Simpson, which has ever since had me (and apparently, a great many others) wondering if there was not some intriguing connection between the character and the Homer Simpson everybody knows.
Of course, try hard enough and you can probably find points of comparison in any two objects. Comparing the Homer of the book to the Homer of the show there was, for instance, his comical lapse into extreme verbal incoherence while under very severe stress. (As the narrator explains when the words are pouring out of Homer "A great deal of it was gibberish," and what wasn't gibberish "wasn't jumbled so much as it was timeless. The words . . . behind each other instead of after," while "several sentences were simultaneous and not a paragraph.") There was also the way Homer lost his temper in the scene that produces the riot that caps the tale.
Still, character, situation, story--they are all very, very different, and that was as far as I got. However, a few years ago The Simpsons creator Matt Groening gave an interview to Smithsonian Magazine in which he explained that in high school he had read the book and, while writing "a novel about a character named Bart Simpson," the choice of name had appealed to him as appropriate to his own story because "Simpson" had "simp," a shortening of "simpleton," in it, and his father's name was Homer.
As it happens Matt Groening's mother is Margaret Wiggum, while Matt also has two sisters who go by Lisa and Maggie.
How Do Showbiz Hopefuls See Themselves and the World?
If Homer Simpson's name was the detail of Nathanael West's Day of the Locust most likely to spring to my mind, other aspects of the book have stayed with me in the decades since I read it--not least how it was probably the first proper "Los Angeles" novel I ever read, packed with all the standard elements, like the marketing of climate and health to people back east, the at times surreal oddities of its architecture, the endless driving that goes with living there, the way bizarre religious cults just seem to spring out of the soil and grab hold of the imaginations of the newcomers who never quite put down roots to replace they lost, and of course, the pervasiveness of so much of the place with things Hollywood and the obsession with things Hollywood.
In contrast with, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, which shows the film world from its uppermost heights (the standpoint of a figure such as the inspiration for the novel's protagonist, Irving Thalberg), Locust deals with the people who are only marginal in that world, or even just hoping to be part of it--the minor studio employees whose work does not see their faces on screen or in the press, the bit players and extras with big dreams that will almost certainly never come true.
The difference between the reality of what people hope for and what they actually get here (which can seem a variant on the then-hugely important literary theme of the American Dream and its betrayals) is a central theme of the book, and naturally West has something to say of what goes on in the mind of those chasing the dream, describing how would-be movie star Faye Greener explains her own ideas to an interested audience as a mix of "badly understood bits of advice from the trade papers," material from "fan magazines" and "legends that surround the activities of screen stars and executives," all as "[w]ithout any noticeable transition, possibilities became probabilities, and wound up as inevitabilities"--most importantly the possibility-become probability-become inevitability of "success."
The description has for me a depressing ring of truth about it, relevant not just to those in Hollywood but all those who play a longshot in the hopes of becoming a "somebody" instead of a "nobody," whether on Broadway, or Park Avenue, or online--their thoughts a farrago of the distorted and often dishonest material marketed to the public, and the readiness to transform a knowledge of the (remote) possibility of becoming a star with the far more pleasing belief that they are almost there--the more in as we live in a society where those who set the tone are as relentless as they are cynical in promoting this kind of "aspirational," "You can do it too!" thinking for the sake of deflecting the attention of the nobodies from a situation where the structure of society means that they are just life's "extras," and can expect to be treated as such until the day they die.
In contrast with, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, which shows the film world from its uppermost heights (the standpoint of a figure such as the inspiration for the novel's protagonist, Irving Thalberg), Locust deals with the people who are only marginal in that world, or even just hoping to be part of it--the minor studio employees whose work does not see their faces on screen or in the press, the bit players and extras with big dreams that will almost certainly never come true.
The difference between the reality of what people hope for and what they actually get here (which can seem a variant on the then-hugely important literary theme of the American Dream and its betrayals) is a central theme of the book, and naturally West has something to say of what goes on in the mind of those chasing the dream, describing how would-be movie star Faye Greener explains her own ideas to an interested audience as a mix of "badly understood bits of advice from the trade papers," material from "fan magazines" and "legends that surround the activities of screen stars and executives," all as "[w]ithout any noticeable transition, possibilities became probabilities, and wound up as inevitabilities"--most importantly the possibility-become probability-become inevitability of "success."
The description has for me a depressing ring of truth about it, relevant not just to those in Hollywood but all those who play a longshot in the hopes of becoming a "somebody" instead of a "nobody," whether on Broadway, or Park Avenue, or online--their thoughts a farrago of the distorted and often dishonest material marketed to the public, and the readiness to transform a knowledge of the (remote) possibility of becoming a star with the far more pleasing belief that they are almost there--the more in as we live in a society where those who set the tone are as relentless as they are cynical in promoting this kind of "aspirational," "You can do it too!" thinking for the sake of deflecting the attention of the nobodies from a situation where the structure of society means that they are just life's "extras," and can expect to be treated as such until the day they die.
It Can't Happen Here and It Didn't Happen Here
While drafting a post about Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here I repeatedly got the title wrong, writing It Didn't Happen Here instead.
This is because there is another book by that very title, cowritten by star of the mid-century centrist intellectual ferment Seymour Martin Lipset (with Gary Wolfe Marks).
His book, the title of which played off of the title of Lewis' classic, addressed not the failure of European-style fascism to take root in America, but the failure of socialist movements to make much headway in the country. In doing so Lewis' choice of title can seem misleading, promising to address one topic but addressing another--but from the standpoint of the horseshoe theory-minded center, which pretends that the "extremists" of the right and left are essentially alike, the implicit equivalence is a natural thing to claim, all as, of course, the left and not the right is what really keeps the centrist awake at night, as they remind every intelligent observer of the political scene all the time.
This is because there is another book by that very title, cowritten by star of the mid-century centrist intellectual ferment Seymour Martin Lipset (with Gary Wolfe Marks).
His book, the title of which played off of the title of Lewis' classic, addressed not the failure of European-style fascism to take root in America, but the failure of socialist movements to make much headway in the country. In doing so Lewis' choice of title can seem misleading, promising to address one topic but addressing another--but from the standpoint of the horseshoe theory-minded center, which pretends that the "extremists" of the right and left are essentially alike, the implicit equivalence is a natural thing to claim, all as, of course, the left and not the right is what really keeps the centrist awake at night, as they remind every intelligent observer of the political scene all the time.
Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, and Nathanael West's A Cool Million in 2024
In his biography of Sinclair Lewis Richard Lingeman argues that Lewis, like many of America's other literary greats of the early twentieth century, was a victim of the "cultural" Cold War, which in line with the Anti-Communism elevated to national religion status at the time denigrated any literature that admitted that there was such a thing as society and wrote about it with open eyes, while exalting literature that did the opposite in the process. (It seems entirely symbolic that the clinically insane, wrong-about-pretty-much-everything CIA functionary James Jesus Angleton was deeply into Modernism, and an admirer and friend of Ezra Pound.)
Lingeman also suggested that these many decades later, in a less overheated atmosphere, Lewis' reputation might enjoy something of a revival.
So far as I can tell no such thing has happened--in part because the atmosphere never became less overheated, the cultural Cold War's victory reflected not in that it ended with the completion of its ostensible job of defeating the Soviet Union and the movements with which it was associated, but in that it became so entrenched for so long that no one even noticed it anymore as it went on doing its job of fighting off dissents that neither began nor ended with the Russian Revolution and the state it created. The critical standards of the twentieth century remain the critical standards of the twenty-first century in a society that, as Philip Cunliffe put it in his remarkable counterfactual history Lenin Lives!, has been organized around the defeat of the left, the Cold War never ended on this level or any other--as we are endlessly reminded by those who scream "Marxist!" as an epithet, usually incorrectly for lack of actual Marxists to condemn or even remind them what Marxism actually looks like (Did they even remember that Marx guy? Or Lenin?), and the supposedly horseshoe theory-abiding center continues to punch relentlessly at an ultra-marginalized left that has always been and very much remains its real target while coddling an ever-more powerful right.
Indeed, if Lewis' book about a fascist takeover of America, It Can't Happen Here (1935), has got a bit of attention in recent years--the book, which seems to have become a bestseller for a while, and a stage play based on it--it does not seem to have revived interest in his broader body of work. Or for that matter, in the other writers who similarly essayed the theme of a fascist takeover of the country, as Nathanael West did a year earlier than Sinclair in his novel A Cool Million (1934). An adaptation of Voltaire's Candide to Depression-era America, with the creed of Horatio Alger aspirationalism standing in for old Pangloss' optimism, it is relevant that as hapless Lemuel Pitkin has his misadventures across a supposed Land of Opportunity, in the background a sleazy ex-president of the United States/criminal businessman is, in the name of all those received values, leading a fascist movement with the intent of making himself an American dictator. In contrast with Candide, where at the end of all the horrors they suffer the protagonist and his friends at least find a bit of peace by the shores of Marmara at tale's end, Pitkin's destruction is complete--and America's, for said ex-president has indeed realized his object of making himself America's Fuhrer.
Searching news stories of the past decade I came up with only a single mention of the book in a piece in Vulture way back in 2016. To the credit of its author Christopher Gilson and his editors the piece "gets it right," but it says a lot that no one else with a platform at all comparable gave it such attention at the time, or has given it such public mention in the many years since. This would seem an indication of West's star having sunk even lower than Lewis' over the years, in spite of his having had a bit of help from Hollywood (the 1975 cinematic adaptation of his other book, Day of the Locust, having at least a semi-classic status, while the name with which it furnished a young Matt Groening has of course been immortalized). However, much else may be at issue here as well--not least the greater harshness of the satire, evident in the way that if Lewis' book at least saw America in the end save itself from the dictatorship of Berzelius Windrip, there is no such redemption for the country in West's novel, closing as it does on the aforementioned unhappy note.
Lingeman also suggested that these many decades later, in a less overheated atmosphere, Lewis' reputation might enjoy something of a revival.
So far as I can tell no such thing has happened--in part because the atmosphere never became less overheated, the cultural Cold War's victory reflected not in that it ended with the completion of its ostensible job of defeating the Soviet Union and the movements with which it was associated, but in that it became so entrenched for so long that no one even noticed it anymore as it went on doing its job of fighting off dissents that neither began nor ended with the Russian Revolution and the state it created. The critical standards of the twentieth century remain the critical standards of the twenty-first century in a society that, as Philip Cunliffe put it in his remarkable counterfactual history Lenin Lives!, has been organized around the defeat of the left, the Cold War never ended on this level or any other--as we are endlessly reminded by those who scream "Marxist!" as an epithet, usually incorrectly for lack of actual Marxists to condemn or even remind them what Marxism actually looks like (Did they even remember that Marx guy? Or Lenin?), and the supposedly horseshoe theory-abiding center continues to punch relentlessly at an ultra-marginalized left that has always been and very much remains its real target while coddling an ever-more powerful right.
Indeed, if Lewis' book about a fascist takeover of America, It Can't Happen Here (1935), has got a bit of attention in recent years--the book, which seems to have become a bestseller for a while, and a stage play based on it--it does not seem to have revived interest in his broader body of work. Or for that matter, in the other writers who similarly essayed the theme of a fascist takeover of the country, as Nathanael West did a year earlier than Sinclair in his novel A Cool Million (1934). An adaptation of Voltaire's Candide to Depression-era America, with the creed of Horatio Alger aspirationalism standing in for old Pangloss' optimism, it is relevant that as hapless Lemuel Pitkin has his misadventures across a supposed Land of Opportunity, in the background a sleazy ex-president of the United States/criminal businessman is, in the name of all those received values, leading a fascist movement with the intent of making himself an American dictator. In contrast with Candide, where at the end of all the horrors they suffer the protagonist and his friends at least find a bit of peace by the shores of Marmara at tale's end, Pitkin's destruction is complete--and America's, for said ex-president has indeed realized his object of making himself America's Fuhrer.
Searching news stories of the past decade I came up with only a single mention of the book in a piece in Vulture way back in 2016. To the credit of its author Christopher Gilson and his editors the piece "gets it right," but it says a lot that no one else with a platform at all comparable gave it such attention at the time, or has given it such public mention in the many years since. This would seem an indication of West's star having sunk even lower than Lewis' over the years, in spite of his having had a bit of help from Hollywood (the 1975 cinematic adaptation of his other book, Day of the Locust, having at least a semi-classic status, while the name with which it furnished a young Matt Groening has of course been immortalized). However, much else may be at issue here as well--not least the greater harshness of the satire, evident in the way that if Lewis' book at least saw America in the end save itself from the dictatorship of Berzelius Windrip, there is no such redemption for the country in West's novel, closing as it does on the aforementioned unhappy note.
The Courtiers and the Peasants
Journalists, like the artists they so often resemble in many ways, and are often aspiring to be, are a highly impressionable bunch particularly susceptible to being in awe of those who have wealth and power. Thus when they, for example, refer to some Global Fortune 500 CEO as a "Sun King" or somesuch, they do so not with the irony of the wise at the pretensions of a figure all too apt to be revealed as a fool, fraud and criminal, or a democratic disgust at elite vaingloriousness, but the awe of courtiers contesting for the honor of holding the Sun King's chamber pot (if not rendering more intimate service still) in the belief that the King really is God's appointed on Earth, that their proximity to such glory makes them glorious--and the combination of cynical awareness that sucking up to such gets one ahead with the complete lack of dignity that permits them to go about the task wholeheartedly.
However, the general public does not necessarily share the artist's sentiments, or have much respect for those who do hold them--perhaps the more in as they have so often been led to believe that the journalist is a Tribune of the People, rather than a Courtier to the Kings making their lives miserable, and feel continually betrayed in the process.
However, the general public does not necessarily share the artist's sentiments, or have much respect for those who do hold them--perhaps the more in as they have so often been led to believe that the journalist is a Tribune of the People, rather than a Courtier to the Kings making their lives miserable, and feel continually betrayed in the process.
Artists Aren't the Only Ones Who Are Impressionable
In discussing the propensity of artists for glorifying the powerful Upton Sinclair refers to--besides the hard realities of economic and political power that dictate the terms of worldly "success" for the artist--the mentality that makes so many artists glorify the powerful so very willingly, and in particular the impressionability that is part of the package. That impressionability, which necessarily includes a susceptibility to being impressed by position and the trappings of rank, the deference that power commands and the allure of luxury, leaves artists easily awed by those who have the benefit of all those things, and their work reflects the fact.
So, too, does this seem the case with journalists and with historians. While their work--properly done--differs profoundly from that of the poet or the novelist I suspect impressionability played its part in their choosing their particular line of work. One may add that like artists journalists incline to the telling of stories, with their desire to tell what they think is a good story often getting the better of what is supposed to distinguish them from the producer of fiction, namely that they are supposed to tell us What Really Happened. Indeed, all too often the journalist and the historian give the impression of being frustrated novelists as they go about their work--generally not to its betterment, as the cleaving of both journalists and historians to explaining the world in terms of the doings of Great Men, and their passing off the mediocrities and worse that hold power as such, reminds us constantly.
So, too, does this seem the case with journalists and with historians. While their work--properly done--differs profoundly from that of the poet or the novelist I suspect impressionability played its part in their choosing their particular line of work. One may add that like artists journalists incline to the telling of stories, with their desire to tell what they think is a good story often getting the better of what is supposed to distinguish them from the producer of fiction, namely that they are supposed to tell us What Really Happened. Indeed, all too often the journalist and the historian give the impression of being frustrated novelists as they go about their work--generally not to its betterment, as the cleaving of both journalists and historians to explaining the world in terms of the doings of Great Men, and their passing off the mediocrities and worse that hold power as such, reminds us constantly.
James Ponsoldt's The Circle and the Tyranny of Generic Classification
I missed James Ponsoldt's The Circle when it first came out back in 2017 but caught it on streaming some years later. As I had largely missed the film's publicity at the time of its release--and I must admit, also not read Dave Eggers' book--I saw the film with very few expectations. I will not go so far as to claim that it is a latterday classic, but when I saw just how poorly it was received (a 16 percent on Rotten Tomatoes!) I thought it deserved better than it got, indeed a lot better. It also seems to me that I am not alone in thinking so, as while the audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes is almost as bad as that of the critics (21 percent), the users of the Internet Movie Data Base give it a far from great but still better than absolutely horrible 5.4.
It also seems to me that there is something worth saying about the extreme negativity of the professional critics toward this film. Part of it, quite frankly, is that critics today as much as ever have a deep bias against socially critical material, and often hide this behind bad faith claims that a work which is socially critical is somehow really saying nothing at all. (We saw plenty of this with Todd Phillips' Joker, for example.) It was not that The Circle said nothing, or said something "outdated" in a "condescending" fashion, or as Peter Griffin had it, that it "insists upon itself," or anything else of the sort, but rather that it all too clearly said something relevant but which they did not want said that excited them to their displays of contempt, the more in as it was a Tom Hanks and Emma Watson-starring wide release opening in three thousand theaters rather than a small arthouse film (watching which the critics tend to be more indulgent when a movie has a Message, plausibly because so few will see it).
Indeed, it seems plausible that the critics are especially sensitive to any challenge to the Cult of Silicon Valley, with all it has meant for the legitimation of neoliberalism in our time, and which in so many cases these days is their employer with all that means, given the digitalization and corporatization of the media, and the way the "move fast and break things" crowd has bought up that media, and not hesitated to exercise the political power that comes with its ownership.
However, it also seems to me that the film version of The Circle was the more vulnerable to such attack because of the way in which it was categorized for marketing purposes, The Circle sold as a "thriller." Judged by the standard most people have in mind when people hear the word "thriller" (especially in this period in which thrillers are more and more associated with shock and with action rather than a Hitchcockian cultivation of tension) the movie is at best unconventional, and at worst rather limp. Had it been presented as the darkly satirical comedy-drama the film actually is I suspect some at least would have been less harsh in their judgment--but alas, such things are more difficult sells in the world the movie marketing folks Pauline Kael so rightly called out a near half century ago have made.
It also seems to me that there is something worth saying about the extreme negativity of the professional critics toward this film. Part of it, quite frankly, is that critics today as much as ever have a deep bias against socially critical material, and often hide this behind bad faith claims that a work which is socially critical is somehow really saying nothing at all. (We saw plenty of this with Todd Phillips' Joker, for example.) It was not that The Circle said nothing, or said something "outdated" in a "condescending" fashion, or as Peter Griffin had it, that it "insists upon itself," or anything else of the sort, but rather that it all too clearly said something relevant but which they did not want said that excited them to their displays of contempt, the more in as it was a Tom Hanks and Emma Watson-starring wide release opening in three thousand theaters rather than a small arthouse film (watching which the critics tend to be more indulgent when a movie has a Message, plausibly because so few will see it).
Indeed, it seems plausible that the critics are especially sensitive to any challenge to the Cult of Silicon Valley, with all it has meant for the legitimation of neoliberalism in our time, and which in so many cases these days is their employer with all that means, given the digitalization and corporatization of the media, and the way the "move fast and break things" crowd has bought up that media, and not hesitated to exercise the political power that comes with its ownership.
However, it also seems to me that the film version of The Circle was the more vulnerable to such attack because of the way in which it was categorized for marketing purposes, The Circle sold as a "thriller." Judged by the standard most people have in mind when people hear the word "thriller" (especially in this period in which thrillers are more and more associated with shock and with action rather than a Hitchcockian cultivation of tension) the movie is at best unconventional, and at worst rather limp. Had it been presented as the darkly satirical comedy-drama the film actually is I suspect some at least would have been less harsh in their judgment--but alas, such things are more difficult sells in the world the movie marketing folks Pauline Kael so rightly called out a near half century ago have made.
Awkwardness in Contemporary Life: A Few Notes
The idea that contemporary life is somehow notably awkward seems to have been popular these past few decades. (Adam Kotsko, in fact, devoted a whole book to it.)
There seems reason for that--and not just the postmodernist tendency to shy away from the large social questions and instead obsess over the "little things in life." We really do seem to be living in a society where the gap between the received rules, and our ability to follow them because of the actual terms on which we are compelled to live our lives, seems to be widening to a degree of which a critical mass of people is all too aware and about which they are sufficiently discomfited to call attention to the fact, all as there seems to be no progress whatsoever toward consensus about a newer set of rules that would make more sense in the new circumstances.
Consider, for instance, the conventional idea about how an "adult" is supposed to live in North American society. You are "all grown up" when you have progressed sufficiently in a career to enjoy a "stable" job that has enabled you to start and maintain a family at a middle class standard of comfort and security--expectations that, if they were more an aspiration for most then than a reality even at the height of the post-war boom, have become less and less plausible since. Yet the expectations remain, with the young often protesting, and their elders responding only with scorn, sure that rather than victims of the neoliberal societal model, and the way it has turned college into a quasi-financial bubble loading the game's losers with debt, a lousy job market for even the holders of so-called "useful" college degrees in times when the business community's courtiers sniff about "labor shortages," the exorbitantly priced housing inevitably following from an economy where housing is an "investment" rather than shelter and housing policy expected to enrich real estate speculators rather than provide human beings with places to live, etc., their elders insist that the young have no one to blame but themselves for their problems, dismissing what they say on their own behalf as the whining of "Betas," and not letting facts or logic get in the way of their gleefully punching down at them.
As the situation implies the lack of any new consensus reflects a sharpness of political division--a reactionary politics of backlash and cultural war, and a bitter "status politics" on both sides of the divide escalating higher and higher into ugly forms of bigotry, with a good deal of class snobbery in the mix (with those who fall short of upper middle class norms fair game for abuse)--all in a situation of increasingly frayed nerves amid growing societal dysfunction and declining prospects and the ever more brutal educational and career demands the complacent call "competitiveness," and of course, an unhinged cult of self-assertion in its meanest and stupidest forms that makes of culture heroes the asshole, the bitch, the bully. Thus is everyone, rather than attempting to display what urbanity and tolerance may be reconcilable with the demands of decency and dignity, instead sure that they have the right and even duty to impose their prejudices on the world at large, and ever on the lookout for offense as they accord themselves the right to police everyone else's behavior in a way that would be called "police harassment" if a police officer did it--and everyone, the more in as this is an age of ubiquitous, The Circle-like surveillance, being watched and judged and condemned for failure all the time according to multiple and completely inconsistent sets of rules, always seemingly doing "the wrong thing."
Some, much more than others, get the worst of it. Those who don't have power, those who find themselves outsiders in a particular grouping, those who perhaps even at a neurological level less easily fit in --the attention to neurodiversity these days seeming to me a reflection of, at least as much as anything else, the ever-rising penalty on imperfection in conformity that has been so bound up with the pathologization of behaviors that might once upon a time have been taken in stride. Still, few indeed wholly escape the awkwardness of the times, and the penalties exacted for it.
There seems reason for that--and not just the postmodernist tendency to shy away from the large social questions and instead obsess over the "little things in life." We really do seem to be living in a society where the gap between the received rules, and our ability to follow them because of the actual terms on which we are compelled to live our lives, seems to be widening to a degree of which a critical mass of people is all too aware and about which they are sufficiently discomfited to call attention to the fact, all as there seems to be no progress whatsoever toward consensus about a newer set of rules that would make more sense in the new circumstances.
Consider, for instance, the conventional idea about how an "adult" is supposed to live in North American society. You are "all grown up" when you have progressed sufficiently in a career to enjoy a "stable" job that has enabled you to start and maintain a family at a middle class standard of comfort and security--expectations that, if they were more an aspiration for most then than a reality even at the height of the post-war boom, have become less and less plausible since. Yet the expectations remain, with the young often protesting, and their elders responding only with scorn, sure that rather than victims of the neoliberal societal model, and the way it has turned college into a quasi-financial bubble loading the game's losers with debt, a lousy job market for even the holders of so-called "useful" college degrees in times when the business community's courtiers sniff about "labor shortages," the exorbitantly priced housing inevitably following from an economy where housing is an "investment" rather than shelter and housing policy expected to enrich real estate speculators rather than provide human beings with places to live, etc., their elders insist that the young have no one to blame but themselves for their problems, dismissing what they say on their own behalf as the whining of "Betas," and not letting facts or logic get in the way of their gleefully punching down at them.
As the situation implies the lack of any new consensus reflects a sharpness of political division--a reactionary politics of backlash and cultural war, and a bitter "status politics" on both sides of the divide escalating higher and higher into ugly forms of bigotry, with a good deal of class snobbery in the mix (with those who fall short of upper middle class norms fair game for abuse)--all in a situation of increasingly frayed nerves amid growing societal dysfunction and declining prospects and the ever more brutal educational and career demands the complacent call "competitiveness," and of course, an unhinged cult of self-assertion in its meanest and stupidest forms that makes of culture heroes the asshole, the bitch, the bully. Thus is everyone, rather than attempting to display what urbanity and tolerance may be reconcilable with the demands of decency and dignity, instead sure that they have the right and even duty to impose their prejudices on the world at large, and ever on the lookout for offense as they accord themselves the right to police everyone else's behavior in a way that would be called "police harassment" if a police officer did it--and everyone, the more in as this is an age of ubiquitous, The Circle-like surveillance, being watched and judged and condemned for failure all the time according to multiple and completely inconsistent sets of rules, always seemingly doing "the wrong thing."
Some, much more than others, get the worst of it. Those who don't have power, those who find themselves outsiders in a particular grouping, those who perhaps even at a neurological level less easily fit in --the attention to neurodiversity these days seeming to me a reflection of, at least as much as anything else, the ever-rising penalty on imperfection in conformity that has been so bound up with the pathologization of behaviors that might once upon a time have been taken in stride. Still, few indeed wholly escape the awkwardness of the times, and the penalties exacted for it.
"Cringe" Comedy is All About Vicarious Gracelessness
One of the more wearisome terms of contemporary cultural commentary is "cringe," and especially its usage to denote a subgenre of comedy that centers on the audience's "cringe" reaction toward a character's embarrassing themselves in some manner--with Michael Scott in the American version of The Office, and the reactions he induces in viewers, notorious as exemplifying this.
Of course, laughing at others' embarrassment has probably been a staple of comedy for as long as comedy has been around. Yet while there have been a great constancies in such matters as comedy, there have also been changes--and it seems to me that there may be something significant in the attention given to "cringe."
It seems plausible, even probable, that the pervasiveness of cringe comedy is related to the cultural preoccupation with awkwardness, which seems to have taken off at about the same time that the notion of "cringe" as a distinct style of comedy did--and to be related to what has made awkwardness so significant in contemporary life, gracelessness. Watching Michael Scott make a fool of himself I suspect few laugh because they remember the times when they were acting like Michael Scott, but because they think of themselves as having never been quite like Scott, feeling superior to him and all the other Michael Scotts of the world, and meanly delighting in feeling absolutely graceless toward him as the show's writers positively wallow in Scott's making a muck of to the situation whenever he opens his mouth, the more in as he is completely oblivious to what he has done to others and himself.
Of course, laughing at others' embarrassment has probably been a staple of comedy for as long as comedy has been around. Yet while there have been a great constancies in such matters as comedy, there have also been changes--and it seems to me that there may be something significant in the attention given to "cringe."
It seems plausible, even probable, that the pervasiveness of cringe comedy is related to the cultural preoccupation with awkwardness, which seems to have taken off at about the same time that the notion of "cringe" as a distinct style of comedy did--and to be related to what has made awkwardness so significant in contemporary life, gracelessness. Watching Michael Scott make a fool of himself I suspect few laugh because they remember the times when they were acting like Michael Scott, but because they think of themselves as having never been quite like Scott, feeling superior to him and all the other Michael Scotts of the world, and meanly delighting in feeling absolutely graceless toward him as the show's writers positively wallow in Scott's making a muck of to the situation whenever he opens his mouth, the more in as he is completely oblivious to what he has done to others and himself.
Of Awkwardness and Gracelessness
It seems to me at least plausible that, as Adam Kotsko has suggested, a heightened awkwardness has become characteristic of contemporary life. However, it also seems to me that it would not matter so much were it not for what has also been characteristic of contemporary life--the absence of social graces. If we saw more of those we would probably suffer less from awkwardness, because awkwardness would not be so ruthlessly punished--while there would probably be less awkwardness simply because a critical mass of the population might have come to sufficient agreement about the rules of social interaction to make social life a bit more bearable than it is now.
What Are Social Graces?
I recently found it surprisingly difficult to find a convenient definition of "social graces" online to which to refer in this item. The search engine I used instead kept referring me simply to various definitions of "grace," often religious ones, and most of them quite far removed from what I was seeking.
Still, if convenient definitions were difficult to find online I do not think it would be seen as too disputable were I to say (in line with the best of those definitions I was able to find) that "social graces" are a matter of the skills requisite for dealing successfully with others in "polite society." However, what really distinguishes social graces from mere display of "politeness" or "etiquette" is that they are not a matter of simple correctness according to well-defined rules, but a matter of how one acts when the rules are not so clear, or when others do not adhere perfectly to those rules because social graces come down to that ability to smooth social interaction, make it bearable and even pleasing, in part by enabling others to feel at ease. This requires an alertness, a consideration, a creativity not reducible to such matters as the proper forms of greeting or which fork to use with which dish. Indeed, it requires tolerance for others' foibles--letting things go, and holding things back.
That a simple explanation of all this was elusive online seems to me highly symbolic of our situation today in regard to such graces. After all, just how much of such graces do you see, and expect to see? Ours, after all, is a culture which exalts self-assertion at its most idiotic, and those engaging in it most freely, thinking such a lack of consideration for others as proof of one's own strength, as such "strength" seems to be what people of low and conventional mind desire to possess above all else in an era in which the "apologists and admirers of injustice, misery and brutality" supply the conventional wisdom, and make of the bully and the troll, the braggart and the swaggerer, and all the others of their disgusting ilk, not the despised social outcasts they deserve to be, but the culture heroes of the day.1
Thus does the public watch "reality" shows in which vulgarian mediocrities who got every conceivable break yet attribute their billions solely to their own utterly unevidentiated "genius" pour contumely on aspirants to "success" before the eyes of the whole world, as all concerned think the revolting demeanor of "the panelists" is yet further proof of their "genius." Thus do they think the "freedom of speech" is no more and no less than the right of the powerful to punch down at the helpless without anyone punching back at them (the "unbound but protected" victimizing those in the other category). Thus do they salivate at any excuse to "cancel" somebody, indeed claim that their acting on their bigoted vindictiveness is some social duty. And so on and so forth, ad infinitum and ad nauseam.
At the same time those others who do not behave in these ways, and indeed find them objectionable, are surrounded by so much of this behavior that they are apt to have precious little consideration or tolerance to spare for anything but coping with it. They would be gracious if they could--but the mental and emotional resources that would enable them to let things go and hold things back have in all too many cases been used up, even overtaxed, in the course of their just getting through the day.
In a culture like that the existence of social graces is apt to seem like the existence of the Loch Ness monster. We have a fuzzy photo from 1934 that we are told captured it on film. Some people say they have seen it with their own eyes. A percentage of those surveyed think it exists on the basis of such "evidence." However, in the end its existence is far from well-confirmed, and reason abounds for skepticism about whether there ever was anything to be photographed or seen in the first place.
1. The quote's from William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, to whose credit the remark was not intended to be complimentary.
Still, if convenient definitions were difficult to find online I do not think it would be seen as too disputable were I to say (in line with the best of those definitions I was able to find) that "social graces" are a matter of the skills requisite for dealing successfully with others in "polite society." However, what really distinguishes social graces from mere display of "politeness" or "etiquette" is that they are not a matter of simple correctness according to well-defined rules, but a matter of how one acts when the rules are not so clear, or when others do not adhere perfectly to those rules because social graces come down to that ability to smooth social interaction, make it bearable and even pleasing, in part by enabling others to feel at ease. This requires an alertness, a consideration, a creativity not reducible to such matters as the proper forms of greeting or which fork to use with which dish. Indeed, it requires tolerance for others' foibles--letting things go, and holding things back.
That a simple explanation of all this was elusive online seems to me highly symbolic of our situation today in regard to such graces. After all, just how much of such graces do you see, and expect to see? Ours, after all, is a culture which exalts self-assertion at its most idiotic, and those engaging in it most freely, thinking such a lack of consideration for others as proof of one's own strength, as such "strength" seems to be what people of low and conventional mind desire to possess above all else in an era in which the "apologists and admirers of injustice, misery and brutality" supply the conventional wisdom, and make of the bully and the troll, the braggart and the swaggerer, and all the others of their disgusting ilk, not the despised social outcasts they deserve to be, but the culture heroes of the day.1
Thus does the public watch "reality" shows in which vulgarian mediocrities who got every conceivable break yet attribute their billions solely to their own utterly unevidentiated "genius" pour contumely on aspirants to "success" before the eyes of the whole world, as all concerned think the revolting demeanor of "the panelists" is yet further proof of their "genius." Thus do they think the "freedom of speech" is no more and no less than the right of the powerful to punch down at the helpless without anyone punching back at them (the "unbound but protected" victimizing those in the other category). Thus do they salivate at any excuse to "cancel" somebody, indeed claim that their acting on their bigoted vindictiveness is some social duty. And so on and so forth, ad infinitum and ad nauseam.
At the same time those others who do not behave in these ways, and indeed find them objectionable, are surrounded by so much of this behavior that they are apt to have precious little consideration or tolerance to spare for anything but coping with it. They would be gracious if they could--but the mental and emotional resources that would enable them to let things go and hold things back have in all too many cases been used up, even overtaxed, in the course of their just getting through the day.
In a culture like that the existence of social graces is apt to seem like the existence of the Loch Ness monster. We have a fuzzy photo from 1934 that we are told captured it on film. Some people say they have seen it with their own eyes. A percentage of those surveyed think it exists on the basis of such "evidence." However, in the end its existence is far from well-confirmed, and reason abounds for skepticism about whether there ever was anything to be photographed or seen in the first place.
1. The quote's from William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, to whose credit the remark was not intended to be complimentary.
Upton Sinclair on America's Private Schools
Today the pseudo-libertarian prejudice that is the basis of the country's conventional wisdom holds the private to be superior to the public in efficiency, to the point of always holding out the promise of superior service at lower cost, even as the investors on whose behalf the enterprise is ultimately run make a bundle. That prejudice extends to the public's view of the schools, with private schooling assumed to be superior to public--the more in as private schooling is so much associated with an overglamorized elite, and the conventionally-minded prone to attribute the careers that their alumni enjoy after graduation have not to the class privilege of which those graduates are the beneficiaries (as with the doors open to them because of the families they were born into), but "education" in the narrower sense of what their time there was supposed to have done for their minds.
Interestingly in the volume of his Dead Hand books devoted to what we would today call the K-12 levels of the country's education system Upton Sinclair showed himself to be under no illusions of that sort. If the country's public schools were highly variable in quality, and the overall standard depressingly low, it was the case that the private schools were likewise highly variable in quality, with even elite schools far from what they ought to have been, and for reasons equally reflective of the society that produced them. The schools' purpose, after all, was to take off the hands of rich parents the burden of raising their own children, and train them not for later study or a life of work but membership in the privileged stratum that is often a training in inanity and irrelevancy (Sinclair citing, among much else, his own wife's Fifth Avenue finishing school), while along with poverty and deprivation wealth and privilege pose their own obstacles to learning--for no one has less reason to worry about preparing for a future than those whose futures are already set, or has more access to alternative activities that would be more fun than hitting the books, or more likely to see the teacher as a servant and social inferior with all the respect a spoiled brat is likely to accord such.
Indeed, in the course of his book Sinclair cites a survey of those who had distinguished themselves in a Harvard class in various ways, which showed that while the privately educated students dominated athletics and extracurriculars, they did not claim a disproportionate share of the academic honors, the public school graduates (admittedly, apt to have had the best educations that the country's very unequal public schools could offer) holding their own perfectly well here.
I do not know that a similar survey would produce a similar result today--but even if it would not I also know no reason to think the situation in the country as a whole is terribly different from what Sinclair reported, even as a large part of the public believes otherwise, and the media we have ceaselessly encourages them in what is almost certainly a delusion.
Interestingly in the volume of his Dead Hand books devoted to what we would today call the K-12 levels of the country's education system Upton Sinclair showed himself to be under no illusions of that sort. If the country's public schools were highly variable in quality, and the overall standard depressingly low, it was the case that the private schools were likewise highly variable in quality, with even elite schools far from what they ought to have been, and for reasons equally reflective of the society that produced them. The schools' purpose, after all, was to take off the hands of rich parents the burden of raising their own children, and train them not for later study or a life of work but membership in the privileged stratum that is often a training in inanity and irrelevancy (Sinclair citing, among much else, his own wife's Fifth Avenue finishing school), while along with poverty and deprivation wealth and privilege pose their own obstacles to learning--for no one has less reason to worry about preparing for a future than those whose futures are already set, or has more access to alternative activities that would be more fun than hitting the books, or more likely to see the teacher as a servant and social inferior with all the respect a spoiled brat is likely to accord such.
Indeed, in the course of his book Sinclair cites a survey of those who had distinguished themselves in a Harvard class in various ways, which showed that while the privately educated students dominated athletics and extracurriculars, they did not claim a disproportionate share of the academic honors, the public school graduates (admittedly, apt to have had the best educations that the country's very unequal public schools could offer) holding their own perfectly well here.
I do not know that a similar survey would produce a similar result today--but even if it would not I also know no reason to think the situation in the country as a whole is terribly different from what Sinclair reported, even as a large part of the public believes otherwise, and the media we have ceaselessly encourages them in what is almost certainly a delusion.