Recent years have seen what has been universally acknowledged by all but the most idiotically committed deniers of hard quantitative fact as spiking food prices, with an effect on the public worse than what is usually reported given the reality that the cheapest items are susceptible to higher-than-average price shocks (the margins were already slight to begin with), with all that means for those who can afford prices least; and what a great many consumers report as a degradation in the quality of many familiar food products (for example, supermarket bakery bread increasingly stale, prone to rapidly molding, etc.), such that the drop in value for the money has fallen relative even to the higher price; neither of which situations gets much coverage. (The price shock at the bottom end of the market tends to be a side remark in the news story if it rates a mention at all, while the signs of lower quality going with the higher prices are the kind of thing you see consumers discussing so much in fora like Reddit or TikTok that "everyone knows" that it's "not just me"--but so far the media hasn't deigned to acknowledge it in any significant way, and at least as yet no attempt at a comprehensive government or academic or other research study has substantiated it.)
Also not getting much coverage is what this really means for the consumer. The media treats us to plenty of grumbling about the price of staples like eggs--but just grumbling, as if it were all a case of essentially comfortable people irked at having to shell out a little more cash for superfluities of life ("You don't really need that!" they are ever quick to tell us), and (certainly if you believe the "Don't Worry, Be Happy" line editors of the Times shovel out to you) this mostly a matter of their being clueless or graceless because the rise in incomes leaves them no worse off. However, with all this coming after a half century of the American worker's purchasing power consistently falling relative to the essentials of everyday life (halved or worse in relation to the price of a home, the price of transportation, the price of health insurance, etc.), one would expect this to mean more hardship out there. And indeed that expectation has actually been affirmed by the statistics of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which show the proportion of U.S. households suffering "food insecurity" (and the more severe "very low food security") in 2021-2023 shooting back up toward the level we saw in the wake of the financial apocalypse of 2007-2008, all as there is reason to think things got no better in 2024. (Indeed, given the trend in income among the less affluent, cutbacks to the social safety net, and associated factors, they probably got even worse.)
Even granting that the news media has, in line with its Big Business character, elite staffing, pandering to the affluent reader and viewer, centrist-neoliberal prejudices and general obsequiousness to the powerful and the status quo they favor, never taken much interest in the lot of those who would be represented in the figures just discussed, its disconnect with economic reality seems ever more extreme, and ever more blatantly Agenda-driven. For even as the public faced the sort of hardship that hit it in the immediate wake of that Great Recession that never truly ended their functionaries sneered in our faces "It's Not the Economy, Stupid"--when it is really the case that the measure of stupidity is one's readiness to believe their propaganda.
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
Europe Rearms. Or Tries To. Sort Of?
Trying to follow a news story from day to day you are apt to find the news media--especially the mainstream news media--deluging them with little bits, typically presented without connections or context, all as what passes for help in making sense of them is the platforming of some Establishment functionary not looking to help you think things through for yourself, but rather eager to tell you what to think, which, because they are an Establishment functionary, is likely to be what they want you to think, irregardless of its relationship to reality (with which Establishment functionaries tend not to be on speaking terms, even though they often know enough to realize that it's not what they are saying). You can only make sense of things when you step back from the onslaught of pseudo-information and put the bits together for yourself--or let someone unlikely ever to get much of a mainstream platform talk you through it properly (as many genuine experts of the kind you won't ever see on the panel shows are perfectly happy to do).
So it has gone with the deluge of news about Europe's rearmament, yet another "news story" that is all sound and fury--and exactly the kind of tale that such sound and fury tends to signify. The leaders of European governments, and European Union institutions, make grand pronouncements, and throw around colossal numbers--hundreds of billions, maybe trillions, of euros, as if they are engaged in a bidding war with monopoly money. Yet, at least to go by what we see in public, the talk is completely unconnected with any specific plans or goals--what these vast sums of money are supposed to actually buy, what Europe's forces will look like after the money has been spent not spelled out. Indeed, they don't even seem to know that such targets might have any use here. And all that is to the extent that one can speak of "Europe's" forces at all. After all, serious talk of the integration and synchronization of European defense forces at the level of their militaries, or even talk of collaboration in the production of the weapons they need (or even what weapons they might be), has been pretty much nonexistent--in spite of how little military power the European governments dispose of individually, how we have seen even immense sums of money soaked up in accomplishing very little (remember Sergeant Olaf "I see nothing!" Scholz's hundred billion euro one-off of a few years ago?), and the hard reality that the rather fragmented and withered defense-industrial bases of the continent's various powers ("We can get you ten tanks by next year! Well, not new tanks, just refurbished tanks. Maybe. Do they actually have to be third-generation?" they say as tanks are getting smashed up by the thousands) can deliver that much less "going their way" rather than being made to pull together. Meanwhile said officials are proving rather artlessly dodgy on the matter of where they expect to get the added personnel for their bigger, more powerful, militaries. (Whatever you do, don't say conscription!)
Instead of such specifics what we get is the kind of grandstanding that makes politics "Showbusiness for Ugly People"--the performers in which Showbusiness never fail to remind the onlooker that in their low-rent corner of the show business world the most coveted role of all is that of war leader, the British leader wanting to be Churchill, the Frenchman wanting to be De Gaulle, the German and Italian wanting to be . . . well, better I leave that to your imaginations. Still, this rather shabby and vulgar display is not without its more practical political purposes. After all, posing as war leaders gives them an excuse to call for "unity," which is a professional politician's way of telling the people at the bottom to stop thinking of the problems of everyday life, and how their elected politicians broke their promises to them, and the way their society's elite are leading them all off a cliff, and instead do as the folks in the commercials in the Starship Troopers movies do when looking at the camera and saying "I'm doing my part!" in that way addicts to Greatest Generation piffle about World War Two just can't get enough of--the more in as the supposed necessity of hundreds of billions more for defense is a long-favorite excuse to take hundreds of billions from everything else, which is after all what they were intent on doing anyway. (Orwell readers, remind me--whether the war is with Eurasia or Eastasia, just who was the "real" enemy again?)
All the same, unserious as they are, and domestically-oriented as their agendas may be ("Those who have little shall have less") one should not trivialize the consequences of the talk for an international scene ever more conflict-ridden, ever more tension-filled, ever more dangerous as what a short time earlier seemed virtually unthinkable (like a major land war raging year after year on the European continent) becomes another hard fact of life over and over and over again. And disgraceful as the international media has been in its coverage of the talk over the money, it has been even more so in its failing to drive home the dangers of that still more serious situation they have so little tried to explain to Europe's publics, very few members of whom are eager to cosplay as Johnny Rico with killer drones flying about under the "leadership" of Sir "Free Gear Keir" Starmer, Monsieur "President of the Rich" Macron, or Herr "Manager der Reichen" Merz, let alone experience the potentially much worse that may lie ahead in an age in which elites absolutely refuse to remember that there is such a thing in the world as nuclear weaponry, and how seriously we have to take the fact of its existence.
So it has gone with the deluge of news about Europe's rearmament, yet another "news story" that is all sound and fury--and exactly the kind of tale that such sound and fury tends to signify. The leaders of European governments, and European Union institutions, make grand pronouncements, and throw around colossal numbers--hundreds of billions, maybe trillions, of euros, as if they are engaged in a bidding war with monopoly money. Yet, at least to go by what we see in public, the talk is completely unconnected with any specific plans or goals--what these vast sums of money are supposed to actually buy, what Europe's forces will look like after the money has been spent not spelled out. Indeed, they don't even seem to know that such targets might have any use here. And all that is to the extent that one can speak of "Europe's" forces at all. After all, serious talk of the integration and synchronization of European defense forces at the level of their militaries, or even talk of collaboration in the production of the weapons they need (or even what weapons they might be), has been pretty much nonexistent--in spite of how little military power the European governments dispose of individually, how we have seen even immense sums of money soaked up in accomplishing very little (remember Sergeant Olaf "I see nothing!" Scholz's hundred billion euro one-off of a few years ago?), and the hard reality that the rather fragmented and withered defense-industrial bases of the continent's various powers ("We can get you ten tanks by next year! Well, not new tanks, just refurbished tanks. Maybe. Do they actually have to be third-generation?" they say as tanks are getting smashed up by the thousands) can deliver that much less "going their way" rather than being made to pull together. Meanwhile said officials are proving rather artlessly dodgy on the matter of where they expect to get the added personnel for their bigger, more powerful, militaries. (Whatever you do, don't say conscription!)
Instead of such specifics what we get is the kind of grandstanding that makes politics "Showbusiness for Ugly People"--the performers in which Showbusiness never fail to remind the onlooker that in their low-rent corner of the show business world the most coveted role of all is that of war leader, the British leader wanting to be Churchill, the Frenchman wanting to be De Gaulle, the German and Italian wanting to be . . . well, better I leave that to your imaginations. Still, this rather shabby and vulgar display is not without its more practical political purposes. After all, posing as war leaders gives them an excuse to call for "unity," which is a professional politician's way of telling the people at the bottom to stop thinking of the problems of everyday life, and how their elected politicians broke their promises to them, and the way their society's elite are leading them all off a cliff, and instead do as the folks in the commercials in the Starship Troopers movies do when looking at the camera and saying "I'm doing my part!" in that way addicts to Greatest Generation piffle about World War Two just can't get enough of--the more in as the supposed necessity of hundreds of billions more for defense is a long-favorite excuse to take hundreds of billions from everything else, which is after all what they were intent on doing anyway. (Orwell readers, remind me--whether the war is with Eurasia or Eastasia, just who was the "real" enemy again?)
All the same, unserious as they are, and domestically-oriented as their agendas may be ("Those who have little shall have less") one should not trivialize the consequences of the talk for an international scene ever more conflict-ridden, ever more tension-filled, ever more dangerous as what a short time earlier seemed virtually unthinkable (like a major land war raging year after year on the European continent) becomes another hard fact of life over and over and over again. And disgraceful as the international media has been in its coverage of the talk over the money, it has been even more so in its failing to drive home the dangers of that still more serious situation they have so little tried to explain to Europe's publics, very few members of whom are eager to cosplay as Johnny Rico with killer drones flying about under the "leadership" of Sir "Free Gear Keir" Starmer, Monsieur "President of the Rich" Macron, or Herr "Manager der Reichen" Merz, let alone experience the potentially much worse that may lie ahead in an age in which elites absolutely refuse to remember that there is such a thing in the world as nuclear weaponry, and how seriously we have to take the fact of its existence.
Is the Relevance of "Democratic Peace Theory" Declining in Our Time?
It recently seemed to me that we hear less of "democratic peace" theory than we used to do, and indeed I decided to test this impression by checking the frequency of the term's usage logged by Google's Ngram. As it happened, Ngram logged a 37 percent drop in usage of the term between 2013 and 2022--in contrast with the 1139 percent rise it logged in the term's usage between 1986 and 2013.
This surge between the late 1980s and early 2010s, and plunge in the subsequent decade, seems to me very telling, a rough measure of the credence that Fukuyamaesque "liberal triumphalism" enjoyed between the signs that the Cold War was drawing to a close in the era of Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Great Recession that, in spite of much stupid rhetoric about the world having quickly got over it, the event being past, dealt the global economy a blow from which it is still reeling. The result has been the halt and erosion of the global economic integration so evident in the 1986-2007 period, more conflictual relations between the major powers, and of course, more illiberal domestic politics. Indeed, many Establishment commentators openly worry about the polarization of their countries' publics, the collapse of established political parties and the ascent of extremist figures to the national stage, and the propensity of chief executives to invoke emergency measures to get their way. And so now we hear less of democracy's spread, let alone any supposed pacification of the world by it--as instead those who talked much but understood nothing strike tough guy poses as they traffic in old-fashioned realpolitik.
This surge between the late 1980s and early 2010s, and plunge in the subsequent decade, seems to me very telling, a rough measure of the credence that Fukuyamaesque "liberal triumphalism" enjoyed between the signs that the Cold War was drawing to a close in the era of Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Great Recession that, in spite of much stupid rhetoric about the world having quickly got over it, the event being past, dealt the global economy a blow from which it is still reeling. The result has been the halt and erosion of the global economic integration so evident in the 1986-2007 period, more conflictual relations between the major powers, and of course, more illiberal domestic politics. Indeed, many Establishment commentators openly worry about the polarization of their countries' publics, the collapse of established political parties and the ascent of extremist figures to the national stage, and the propensity of chief executives to invoke emergency measures to get their way. And so now we hear less of democracy's spread, let alone any supposed pacification of the world by it--as instead those who talked much but understood nothing strike tough guy poses as they traffic in old-fashioned realpolitik.
The Decline of L.A. Film Production--and Hollywood's Mystique With It
Looking at the place of film in contemporary culture few would deny that it is less central than it was a few decades ago in what some call "the age of movies," all as Hollywood would seem to have lost something of its romance, something of its glamour. Certainly part of this has been the advent of television and its implications, from the decline of the "theatrical experience," to the collapse of the old studio system "dream factories" with their larger-than-life bosses and "last tycoon" underlings and their More Stars Than in the Heavens and the whole world-within-a-world they seemed to constitute. (Just ask yourself this: can you picture any filmmaker of today doing with the Hollywood of a quarter of a century earlier--the Hollywood of 2000 A.D.--what the great Billy Wilder did with the then-quarter-of-a-century-older Hollywood of Sunset Boulevard? I doubt even the most stubborn contrarian out there would actually try to argue on behalf of a "Yes" answer--while considering this it seems no coincidence that even the makers of new movies about Hollywood are drawn to that earlier period, as Damien Chazelle clearly was in his tale of silent-era Hollywood of a couple of years ago, Babylon.)
That romance and glamour didn't all vanish at once, and indeed hasn't vanished completely even now. (Thus do some still argue over whether the movie star still exists, properly speaking--as many find some amusement in playing "armchair movie executive.") Still, the trend has long been clear, and it can seem to me that other developments have added to it--not least, the decline of Hollywood as a place, and one might add, the romance of that place's location. The idea that this magical world-within-a-world overspread some forty square miles or so of golden Southern California when "California" and "Los Angeles" had been names to conjure with in a way less the case today--that here was where it all happened, with the bosses having their offices here, and the movies shot on the studio lots, and the stars and everyone else involved living and working and playing here--seems to have added to its fascination, with even darker or more satirical portraits of the place (like Nathanael West's Day of the Locust or B.P. Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?) paying tribute to that fascination in their way. In recent decades, with production venturing to places like Vancouver or Atlanta to exploit ill-conceived corporate welfare schemes that in rather on the nose fashion underline just how much politics is "Showbusiness for ugly people," that sense of American filmmaking as in some way an enchanted world of its own is going--and if that is a small thing next to the livelihoods upended as many workers in the field find themselves forced to relocate if they are to go on working in their jobs at all, and a deindustrialized Southland suffers yet another blow to its economy, it still remains the case that this dispersal is also taking another part of the industry's long-fading glamour, most likely for good.
That romance and glamour didn't all vanish at once, and indeed hasn't vanished completely even now. (Thus do some still argue over whether the movie star still exists, properly speaking--as many find some amusement in playing "armchair movie executive.") Still, the trend has long been clear, and it can seem to me that other developments have added to it--not least, the decline of Hollywood as a place, and one might add, the romance of that place's location. The idea that this magical world-within-a-world overspread some forty square miles or so of golden Southern California when "California" and "Los Angeles" had been names to conjure with in a way less the case today--that here was where it all happened, with the bosses having their offices here, and the movies shot on the studio lots, and the stars and everyone else involved living and working and playing here--seems to have added to its fascination, with even darker or more satirical portraits of the place (like Nathanael West's Day of the Locust or B.P. Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?) paying tribute to that fascination in their way. In recent decades, with production venturing to places like Vancouver or Atlanta to exploit ill-conceived corporate welfare schemes that in rather on the nose fashion underline just how much politics is "Showbusiness for ugly people," that sense of American filmmaking as in some way an enchanted world of its own is going--and if that is a small thing next to the livelihoods upended as many workers in the field find themselves forced to relocate if they are to go on working in their jobs at all, and a deindustrialized Southland suffers yet another blow to its economy, it still remains the case that this dispersal is also taking another part of the industry's long-fading glamour, most likely for good.
Of Hollywood's Golden Age, and the Fortunes of Great Powers
Looking back it can seem plausible that Hollywood's centrality within the film world in the twentieth century reflected America's centrality within the world economy in the same century--the country's having been the scene of a techno-industrial-commercial revolution that had it accounting for a third (and for some decades, even more) of the world economy, its productive methods a model for even those most skeptical of America's social model, its wealth a source of unprecedented power in the world for its businesses and its government, and its people, if far from fully sharing in the gains, still to a significant extent having a standard and way of living that fascinated the rest of the world. (Consumer culture as we know it, the auto-subtopian existence that Americans equate with a decent living standard--this was where they all began.)
It is commonly the case that when a country enjoys a "golden age" in the material ways it also enjoys a golden age culturally--great art, alas, that much less likely to appear in a time of stagnation, decline, poverty--and the American century was no exception. The fascination of many in the Old World was tinged with anxiety and even repulsion as they contemplated what seemed to them the "land of the future," with many thinking it a comparatively cultureless place--but then they tended to think in terms of old forms and old standards, with little receptivity to the new (like upper class, Eton-and-Balliol College-educated Briton Aldous Huxley sneering at modernity, progress, egalitarianism in the all too often uncritically taken Brave New World). The comparative vastness of the American film market afforded filmmakers prospects for resourcing their filmmaking greater than were to be had anywhere else in the world, with all that meant the technical potentials of American film, and the fascination of the rest of the world with American cultural products inextricable from America's more material strengths, had their part in bringing Hollywood films a world market, and drawing to Hollywood talent from far afield (with alongside the "push" effect of the interwar and Second World War years the "pull" of Hollywood enriching Hollywood with a generation of Central European talent in particular).
Amid all that, in an era in which America was in spite of the snobs making its mark within the high culture of the Western world, but "high culture" was increasingly taking on a decadent cast in its flight from contemporary reality and its challenges--a flight in which it continues a century on--such that one may argue for Hollywood having been to America's golden age what those nations' output in literature and the more traditional visual arts had been for Renaissance Italy, the Spanish, the Dutch and others in their periods as leading powers, all as the decline of Hollywood can seem in respects to track the decline of American power. Riding high in the years after World War II the decline of the studio system can seem to parallel the decline of the Bretton Woods-based world economic order, with an air of decadence setting in this cultural milieu as well about the time the country went off the gold standard, and the end of the "New Hollywood" and the onset of the crass high concept/blockbuster era going hand in hand with the ascent of neoliberalism, deindustrialization, the hollowing out of an economy living on speculation fueled by central bankers giving away free money to "investors." Indeed, reading Daniel Bessner's great article in Harper's last year, Hollywood can seem a microcosm of the larger economy in the age of short-termism and "shareholder value" and merger and acquisition games run amok, of traffic in old brands rather than the building up of new ones as the taking that is speculating edges out making, of global arbitrage in labor and other costs, declining prospects for the many as compensation explodes for a handful of "winners," and the general crapuleux idiocy and vulgarity that is the norm at the top in such times.
After decades of all that few would think either Hollywood or the American economy in a particularly healthy state--as those disheartened by the situation and desirous of regeneration find few grounds for hope in a scene where the self-satisfied elite thinks that it need only "stay the course," and the only alternatives that seem to ever get a mainstream are no alternatives at all. They offer just the same old thing in a rather thin new guise, a sequel no one ever asked for to a movie that wasn't worth seeing the first time.
It is commonly the case that when a country enjoys a "golden age" in the material ways it also enjoys a golden age culturally--great art, alas, that much less likely to appear in a time of stagnation, decline, poverty--and the American century was no exception. The fascination of many in the Old World was tinged with anxiety and even repulsion as they contemplated what seemed to them the "land of the future," with many thinking it a comparatively cultureless place--but then they tended to think in terms of old forms and old standards, with little receptivity to the new (like upper class, Eton-and-Balliol College-educated Briton Aldous Huxley sneering at modernity, progress, egalitarianism in the all too often uncritically taken Brave New World). The comparative vastness of the American film market afforded filmmakers prospects for resourcing their filmmaking greater than were to be had anywhere else in the world, with all that meant the technical potentials of American film, and the fascination of the rest of the world with American cultural products inextricable from America's more material strengths, had their part in bringing Hollywood films a world market, and drawing to Hollywood talent from far afield (with alongside the "push" effect of the interwar and Second World War years the "pull" of Hollywood enriching Hollywood with a generation of Central European talent in particular).
Amid all that, in an era in which America was in spite of the snobs making its mark within the high culture of the Western world, but "high culture" was increasingly taking on a decadent cast in its flight from contemporary reality and its challenges--a flight in which it continues a century on--such that one may argue for Hollywood having been to America's golden age what those nations' output in literature and the more traditional visual arts had been for Renaissance Italy, the Spanish, the Dutch and others in their periods as leading powers, all as the decline of Hollywood can seem in respects to track the decline of American power. Riding high in the years after World War II the decline of the studio system can seem to parallel the decline of the Bretton Woods-based world economic order, with an air of decadence setting in this cultural milieu as well about the time the country went off the gold standard, and the end of the "New Hollywood" and the onset of the crass high concept/blockbuster era going hand in hand with the ascent of neoliberalism, deindustrialization, the hollowing out of an economy living on speculation fueled by central bankers giving away free money to "investors." Indeed, reading Daniel Bessner's great article in Harper's last year, Hollywood can seem a microcosm of the larger economy in the age of short-termism and "shareholder value" and merger and acquisition games run amok, of traffic in old brands rather than the building up of new ones as the taking that is speculating edges out making, of global arbitrage in labor and other costs, declining prospects for the many as compensation explodes for a handful of "winners," and the general crapuleux idiocy and vulgarity that is the norm at the top in such times.
After decades of all that few would think either Hollywood or the American economy in a particularly healthy state--as those disheartened by the situation and desirous of regeneration find few grounds for hope in a scene where the self-satisfied elite thinks that it need only "stay the course," and the only alternatives that seem to ever get a mainstream are no alternatives at all. They offer just the same old thing in a rather thin new guise, a sequel no one ever asked for to a movie that wasn't worth seeing the first time.
Where Do Authors Stand Within the World of Celebrity?
Recently considering the standing of the novel today[LINK TO PIECE ABOUT DECLINE OF NOVEL], and the matter of celebrity[LINK TO NEW PIECE], it occurred to me that while I have written about celebrity of various kinds (that of actors, of musicians, of athletes), and even celebrity as such, I have not discussed authors much from that standpoint. I suppose that I did not even think to do so reflects the reality that authors, while not excluded from the world of celebrity when they attain a certain level of success, or at least visibility, also do not rank all that highly within the world of celebrity--in our times at least.
Consider those things that make a celebrity a celebrity rather than merely famous, or even merely famous because
1. They are not just famous, but famous among the general public in a "household name" way.
2. They tend to be highly visible--not just their name but their face well-known, in part because the public sees them at whatever work it is that makes them famous (on the screen or the stage or in the stadium where they give them an entertaining show).
3. Their performance tends to at least appear highly individual, and to be made possible by an extraordinary personal talent.
4. They are perceived as not just accomplished, but glamorous.
Consider how writers stack up here against, for example, singers.
In a culture where the written word matters less and less and fewer people pay attention to books, accomplishment in letters is less likely to make anyone a "household name."
Even if they do become famous we are more likely to know their names than their faces, in part because what they do doesn't lend itself to showy display before a public. The actor acts, the singer sings, the athlete plays in front of us. The writer doesn't write in front of us. In fact, when we see them they are taking time away from their writing, likely because their publishing contract made them do it--all as watching them write, aside from not being really interesting, wouldn't be a "performance" in the same way, the "performance" instead what we get when what they work on is published and we read it.
In part because few people pay attention to books, and because the accomplishment of a writer lacks that kind of performative-visual aspect, many simply don't recognize talent in writing the way they do acting or singing or athletic accomplishment. Personally moved by an actor or singer's performance, or perhaps even more easily impressed by an athletic feat. (Seeing a player hitting one out of the park, making a full-court shot, and of course, scoring four touchdowns in a single game, even people who know virtually nothing about the sport are likely ro know they have seen something extraordinary.) By contrast in the minds of many "anyone" can string words together, while the appraisal of the result is simply "subjective" (as every failing composition student is quick to say).
And of course, there is the plain and simple fact that writing is seen as "nerdish" in a way other artistic endeavor is not--with all that means in a nerd-bashing and generally anti-intellectual culture, and its prospects for glamorousness. It is the case, too, that publishing is less a young person's scene than the performing arts or sports, that the ability to spellbind with the written word is less likely to be linked to physical appearance or charisma than is the case with those who spellbind an audience from a stage.
Of course, like many others writers are for all that encouraged to constantly exploit and deepen whatever celebrity they may have, as seen in the aforementioned rituals of book publicity, like those book signings that the makers of atrocious films and television shows about authors love to shoehorn into the revolting crap they foist on the viewing public . And should an author, for example, see their book made into a movie doubtless they get some of the reflected glory of the Cinema. Still, if the movie reaches a bigger audience it is those who starred in the movie that I suspect people are more likely to associate with it than the author of the source material--the words "The Hunger Games" probably conjuring up in far more minds the image of Jennifer Lawrence than that of Suzanne Collins. The result is that even if after having made the journey to Park Avenue they take a second trip from there to Tinseltown, they are not likely to become truly of Tinseltown barring their becoming something other than a writer of fiction.
In all that there can seem a pattern. The low stature of authors within the celebrity world means that much less interest in what they do, while the lack of interest in what they do further depresses their stature--reflecting and reinforcing the shift of contemporary culture's center of gravity away from the written word in our time.
Consider those things that make a celebrity a celebrity rather than merely famous, or even merely famous because
1. They are not just famous, but famous among the general public in a "household name" way.
2. They tend to be highly visible--not just their name but their face well-known, in part because the public sees them at whatever work it is that makes them famous (on the screen or the stage or in the stadium where they give them an entertaining show).
3. Their performance tends to at least appear highly individual, and to be made possible by an extraordinary personal talent.
4. They are perceived as not just accomplished, but glamorous.
Consider how writers stack up here against, for example, singers.
In a culture where the written word matters less and less and fewer people pay attention to books, accomplishment in letters is less likely to make anyone a "household name."
Even if they do become famous we are more likely to know their names than their faces, in part because what they do doesn't lend itself to showy display before a public. The actor acts, the singer sings, the athlete plays in front of us. The writer doesn't write in front of us. In fact, when we see them they are taking time away from their writing, likely because their publishing contract made them do it--all as watching them write, aside from not being really interesting, wouldn't be a "performance" in the same way, the "performance" instead what we get when what they work on is published and we read it.
In part because few people pay attention to books, and because the accomplishment of a writer lacks that kind of performative-visual aspect, many simply don't recognize talent in writing the way they do acting or singing or athletic accomplishment. Personally moved by an actor or singer's performance, or perhaps even more easily impressed by an athletic feat. (Seeing a player hitting one out of the park, making a full-court shot, and of course, scoring four touchdowns in a single game, even people who know virtually nothing about the sport are likely ro know they have seen something extraordinary.) By contrast in the minds of many "anyone" can string words together, while the appraisal of the result is simply "subjective" (as every failing composition student is quick to say).
And of course, there is the plain and simple fact that writing is seen as "nerdish" in a way other artistic endeavor is not--with all that means in a nerd-bashing and generally anti-intellectual culture, and its prospects for glamorousness. It is the case, too, that publishing is less a young person's scene than the performing arts or sports, that the ability to spellbind with the written word is less likely to be linked to physical appearance or charisma than is the case with those who spellbind an audience from a stage.
Of course, like many others writers are for all that encouraged to constantly exploit and deepen whatever celebrity they may have, as seen in the aforementioned rituals of book publicity, like those book signings that the makers of atrocious films and television shows about authors love to shoehorn into the revolting crap they foist on the viewing public . And should an author, for example, see their book made into a movie doubtless they get some of the reflected glory of the Cinema. Still, if the movie reaches a bigger audience it is those who starred in the movie that I suspect people are more likely to associate with it than the author of the source material--the words "The Hunger Games" probably conjuring up in far more minds the image of Jennifer Lawrence than that of Suzanne Collins. The result is that even if after having made the journey to Park Avenue they take a second trip from there to Tinseltown, they are not likely to become truly of Tinseltown barring their becoming something other than a writer of fiction.
In all that there can seem a pattern. The low stature of authors within the celebrity world means that much less interest in what they do, while the lack of interest in what they do further depresses their stature--reflecting and reinforcing the shift of contemporary culture's center of gravity away from the written word in our time.
What Makes a Famous Person a "Celebrity?"
When we speak of celebrity we generally seem to take for granted that "everyone knows" what the term means--perhaps less unreasonably than when using a great many other terms with a sociological significance, but still not unproblematically. After all, the simplest and most common definition of "celebrity" is "a famous person," but I think most will agree that fame by itself does not a celebrity make, many people quite famous without being celebrities properly speaking. The result is that it seems worth spelling out the concept.
For a start, there seems some expectation that a celebrity not only be famous, but famous with the general public for having "done something great"; that people in general know who they are; that we can speak of them as a "household name." By way of contrast with this consider the case of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. They are certain to be very well-known within their field. They are likely to get considerable media attention on the day that the Nobel Academy holds the awards ceremony. However, unless they somehow parlay their stature as a scientist into a broader "public intellectual" status, at least, very few people are likely to know who they are--in comparison with those categories of person we are more likely to associate with "celebrity," such as actors, singers and athletes.
The obscurity of even scientists at the top of their field by comparison with actors and singers and athletes seems importantly reflective of the logic of celebrity, which status (especially in our day) has a lot to do with a certain kind of individual visibility. If you are a celebrity people know your face, in part because they have seen the celebrity's face while they were doing what it was that made them famous. People saw them perform in a dramatic or musical production, or play in a game. By contrast a scientist's work, however hard, brilliant, important, publicized it may be, does not make for a "show" the same way. The work goes on largely in their heads, with its physical aspects conducted in laboratories away from public view, the evidences of what went on there presented to the world in their published papers unclear or even incomprehensible to the layperson, etc., etc., such that it simply cannot make the same impact on their imaginations. And while the public by and large retains an obsolete view of science as an intensively individualistic endeavor (because it serves certain political or dramatic purposes than for any other reason), it is harder to ignore the increasingly collaborative reality of the sciences. This is not just because there is typically a lot of less celebrated work paving the way for the "breakthroughs" that gets so much attention, but because anyone who can simply count notices how many names were on the byline of that paper reporting that important discovery, and the contrast it makes with the ferociously individual accomplishment with which celebrity is associated, which is typically expected to come from a particular place, namely talent that no "ordinary" person possesses and can never make up for the lack of no matter how hard they work--not diligence, but prowess. And of course, there is what is supposed to follow from exceptional prowess, namely wealth, luxury, adulation by the many, their being sought after and desired, others fantasizing about being them (or being with them, the aspect of sex not to be underrated, perhaps the more in as society is getting more puritanical about this)--in short, glamour. Few consider even the most accomplished scientist in such terms--as indeed scientists laugh (perhaps not without some bitterness) at the ridiculous glamorization of their field by Hollywood.
Taken altogether this picture--combining general renown, individual visibility achieved through personal prowess lending itself to visual display, and winning the visible rewards that prowess is supposed to win--seems to me to cover the territory--what in Veblenian terms is its essential simple-minded barbarism--pretty well, though I think it worthwhile to acknowledge that I am describing an ideal here at an extreme end of the spectrum, and that some may fall in between the questionable "celebrity" of a famed scientist at one end, the more conventional celebrity of a famed singer or athlete at the other.
At the same time the matter can be somewhat confused by those who ordinarily would not really make the cut but try to make it seem as if they do--people who are famous, but intent on being celebrities, and helped in their quest by their courtiers and claqueurs within a fairly willing media. As with plutocrats who seem unlikely candidates for the performance of any great artistic or athletic or any other sort of feat before the eyes of the public (which doesn't necessarily stop them from trying to be, say, Brazilian jiu-jitsu champions), but whom they shove their faces in our faces all the time as their partisans keep telling us what "geniuses" and "supermen" they are. ("Smarter than you, smarter than you!" they insist, the more stridently insofar as they know they are irritating us.) At the same time, living in the age of reality TV we are deluged with people who are highly visible without being in any evident way accomplished--one reason, I think, why I have personally been resistant to recognizing reality "stars" as celebrities--though in the culture in which we live it is common to think of "being rich and famous" as somehow a worthy achievement in itself, entirely befitting that Veblenian conception of barbarism on which all this ultimately rests.
For a start, there seems some expectation that a celebrity not only be famous, but famous with the general public for having "done something great"; that people in general know who they are; that we can speak of them as a "household name." By way of contrast with this consider the case of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. They are certain to be very well-known within their field. They are likely to get considerable media attention on the day that the Nobel Academy holds the awards ceremony. However, unless they somehow parlay their stature as a scientist into a broader "public intellectual" status, at least, very few people are likely to know who they are--in comparison with those categories of person we are more likely to associate with "celebrity," such as actors, singers and athletes.
The obscurity of even scientists at the top of their field by comparison with actors and singers and athletes seems importantly reflective of the logic of celebrity, which status (especially in our day) has a lot to do with a certain kind of individual visibility. If you are a celebrity people know your face, in part because they have seen the celebrity's face while they were doing what it was that made them famous. People saw them perform in a dramatic or musical production, or play in a game. By contrast a scientist's work, however hard, brilliant, important, publicized it may be, does not make for a "show" the same way. The work goes on largely in their heads, with its physical aspects conducted in laboratories away from public view, the evidences of what went on there presented to the world in their published papers unclear or even incomprehensible to the layperson, etc., etc., such that it simply cannot make the same impact on their imaginations. And while the public by and large retains an obsolete view of science as an intensively individualistic endeavor (because it serves certain political or dramatic purposes than for any other reason), it is harder to ignore the increasingly collaborative reality of the sciences. This is not just because there is typically a lot of less celebrated work paving the way for the "breakthroughs" that gets so much attention, but because anyone who can simply count notices how many names were on the byline of that paper reporting that important discovery, and the contrast it makes with the ferociously individual accomplishment with which celebrity is associated, which is typically expected to come from a particular place, namely talent that no "ordinary" person possesses and can never make up for the lack of no matter how hard they work--not diligence, but prowess. And of course, there is what is supposed to follow from exceptional prowess, namely wealth, luxury, adulation by the many, their being sought after and desired, others fantasizing about being them (or being with them, the aspect of sex not to be underrated, perhaps the more in as society is getting more puritanical about this)--in short, glamour. Few consider even the most accomplished scientist in such terms--as indeed scientists laugh (perhaps not without some bitterness) at the ridiculous glamorization of their field by Hollywood.
Taken altogether this picture--combining general renown, individual visibility achieved through personal prowess lending itself to visual display, and winning the visible rewards that prowess is supposed to win--seems to me to cover the territory--what in Veblenian terms is its essential simple-minded barbarism--pretty well, though I think it worthwhile to acknowledge that I am describing an ideal here at an extreme end of the spectrum, and that some may fall in between the questionable "celebrity" of a famed scientist at one end, the more conventional celebrity of a famed singer or athlete at the other.
At the same time the matter can be somewhat confused by those who ordinarily would not really make the cut but try to make it seem as if they do--people who are famous, but intent on being celebrities, and helped in their quest by their courtiers and claqueurs within a fairly willing media. As with plutocrats who seem unlikely candidates for the performance of any great artistic or athletic or any other sort of feat before the eyes of the public (which doesn't necessarily stop them from trying to be, say, Brazilian jiu-jitsu champions), but whom they shove their faces in our faces all the time as their partisans keep telling us what "geniuses" and "supermen" they are. ("Smarter than you, smarter than you!" they insist, the more stridently insofar as they know they are irritating us.) At the same time, living in the age of reality TV we are deluged with people who are highly visible without being in any evident way accomplished--one reason, I think, why I have personally been resistant to recognizing reality "stars" as celebrities--though in the culture in which we live it is common to think of "being rich and famous" as somehow a worthy achievement in itself, entirely befitting that Veblenian conception of barbarism on which all this ultimately rests.
The (Illusory) Accessibility of the Literary Path to Celebrity
In considering the motivations for becoming a writer Upton Sinclair in Money Writes!, if possessing the highest regard for literature and those who go about the task heroically, did not mince words about the crasser side of the matter--indeed taking a rather sneering view of many of those who do try to become writers. As he acknowledges, living in a society where most can expect at best an objectively crummy working class life, constantly tantalized by the thought of how much better others than they were living, and told not to expect anything better or fairer by way of a change in society and instead look to their own efforts to raise themselves up within the hierarchy--to, as drawing on Pestalozzi he puts it, grow from fish into pikes--they credulously look to do just that. With celebrity the only alternative to crime as a way of dramatically changing their fortunes they try to become such, with many of them hitting on "becoming a writer."
Considering this it seems fair to attend not just to the attractions that writing has for many (a writer's independence, etc.) but also the seeming accessibility of the path. In contrast with, for example, being a musician, where one needs to at least know how to play an instrument, a would-be writer, strictly speaking, would seem to need only the literacy that has become universal to make a start. The material requirements (something to write with, a place where they can get some quiet and some privacy) may be hard for some to get, but are at least low in comparison with a musician's need for instruments and a place to practice, or the more specialized material and work space needed by many a visual artist. They may want and benefit from the help of others, but compared with a musician looking to organize a band, an actor organizing a troupe, a budding filmmaker trying to get together the cast and equipment for even the most bare-bones production, it can seem a thing they can do without if they must. And certainly in contrast with those in the performing arts they are under less pressure to bear the expenses of travel, let alone relocate entirely to a possibly unfamiliar and distant place on what may be very slender resources and few prospects of a living wage (it is no accident that so many of those who managed to become actors, even when their biographies do not indicate any significant help from connections, hail from the southern California and Tri-State areas), only their manuscript needing to travel--all as, indeed, they never have to stand in person before an audience.
Of course, what followed was rarely as tidy as those who thought his way expected. Then as now the writer's path was far and away most likely to prove a walk down a boulevard of broken dreams. But the start at least seems more plausible, and may seem to have become more so since Sinclair's day, with most of the likely candidates having some access to a computer, and the research resources of the Internet, and the option of submitting their work electronically, at no marginal cost. (I recall editors insisting on those wretched Self-Addressed Stamped Envelopes long after e-mail became a practical alternative and explaining this in public statements by saying that the added hassle and expense of mailing them was a way of eliminating "the bozo factor"--making those submitting to them waste their time to no useful end in that way idiot entitled authority figures love to do with those over whom they have power, and for whom they have only contempt. But they have become fewer with the years.) It has also been the case that those who get their fill of the form rejection letters, as mechanical and inhuman and demoralizing in our time as they were when young Martin Eden faced them, now have the option of self-publishing a book in print and electronic editions for no marginal cost at all, provided they are willing to do all the requisite work of turning their manuscript into a book themselves. Still, given what "the wages of writing" tell us about the returns to effort here the odds of a career have only worsened, not improved--so much so perhaps that, especially as alternative paths to celebrity unheard of in Sinclair's day beckon, it seems to me very plausible that people are losing interest in being writers someday, looking past the books telling them they can teach them to be a writer to the ones telling them they can teach them to be an online "influencer" instead.
Considering this it seems fair to attend not just to the attractions that writing has for many (a writer's independence, etc.) but also the seeming accessibility of the path. In contrast with, for example, being a musician, where one needs to at least know how to play an instrument, a would-be writer, strictly speaking, would seem to need only the literacy that has become universal to make a start. The material requirements (something to write with, a place where they can get some quiet and some privacy) may be hard for some to get, but are at least low in comparison with a musician's need for instruments and a place to practice, or the more specialized material and work space needed by many a visual artist. They may want and benefit from the help of others, but compared with a musician looking to organize a band, an actor organizing a troupe, a budding filmmaker trying to get together the cast and equipment for even the most bare-bones production, it can seem a thing they can do without if they must. And certainly in contrast with those in the performing arts they are under less pressure to bear the expenses of travel, let alone relocate entirely to a possibly unfamiliar and distant place on what may be very slender resources and few prospects of a living wage (it is no accident that so many of those who managed to become actors, even when their biographies do not indicate any significant help from connections, hail from the southern California and Tri-State areas), only their manuscript needing to travel--all as, indeed, they never have to stand in person before an audience.
Of course, what followed was rarely as tidy as those who thought his way expected. Then as now the writer's path was far and away most likely to prove a walk down a boulevard of broken dreams. But the start at least seems more plausible, and may seem to have become more so since Sinclair's day, with most of the likely candidates having some access to a computer, and the research resources of the Internet, and the option of submitting their work electronically, at no marginal cost. (I recall editors insisting on those wretched Self-Addressed Stamped Envelopes long after e-mail became a practical alternative and explaining this in public statements by saying that the added hassle and expense of mailing them was a way of eliminating "the bozo factor"--making those submitting to them waste their time to no useful end in that way idiot entitled authority figures love to do with those over whom they have power, and for whom they have only contempt. But they have become fewer with the years.) It has also been the case that those who get their fill of the form rejection letters, as mechanical and inhuman and demoralizing in our time as they were when young Martin Eden faced them, now have the option of self-publishing a book in print and electronic editions for no marginal cost at all, provided they are willing to do all the requisite work of turning their manuscript into a book themselves. Still, given what "the wages of writing" tell us about the returns to effort here the odds of a career have only worsened, not improved--so much so perhaps that, especially as alternative paths to celebrity unheard of in Sinclair's day beckon, it seems to me very plausible that people are losing interest in being writers someday, looking past the books telling them they can teach them to be a writer to the ones telling them they can teach them to be an online "influencer" instead.
Novel Reading a "Cultic" Activity By 2034: How Fares the Prediction?
Back in a 2009 interview with The Daily Beast Philip Roth predicted that in a quarter of a century, and likely less, novel reading would be "cultic," invoking the number of people still engaged in "reading Latin poetry in the original" as a point of comparison for how little it would be done (the circle of novel readers not quite as small as that, but not much greater).
In 2025 we are about two-thirds of the way to twenty-five years from his standpoint. Personally I think that his prediction for the state of things in 2034 is more dire than the reality is likely to be--but not so very much more dire. Consider how
* In the late '00s and early '10s young adult books were all the rage, and the trajectory that ended up following. At least part of the story was a lack of excitement about books for adults, and "adults" looking for easier reads, as well as young adult interest, with all that suggests for the vibrancy of letters and for the prevailing level of literacy--while the way the bubble popped circa 2015 without anything to compare since can seem suggestive of people of all ages doing even less reading than that.
* Whole genres of popular fiction have withered and all but vanished (consider where action-adventure fiction stands today relative to where it was circa 1990), as in other cases we have seen stagnation (certainly to go by how, for example, the "club" of bestselling authors of other kinds of thriller has seen just the same old names from year to year, decade to decade, old names surviving on likely dwindling numbers of old loyalists, instead of new successes).
* Even as Big Publishing mounted its counter-revolution against the e-book with sensational success, the mass-market paperback still disappeared from the shops for lack of buyers--and how the media treated both events as virtually non-stories.
* The slight impact of even recent bestsellers on the wider culture, as seen in the fact that for many years the film adaptations of even colossal bestsellers simply do not become first-rank blockbusters the way they did a short time earlier; and how, even with pop culture a principal terrain of the kulturkampf and all its obscene noxiousness, books constitute an ever-smaller part of the controversy, especially when we get away from the mainly symbolic fights over very limited aspects of the contents of school libraries. (By contrast the kind of arguments that people had over a book like Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, and certainly the way in which a serious social scientist like William Whyte discussed the book as sociologically relevant in his study of "the organization man,", aren't even a possibility now.)
Consider, too, the implications of a declining interest in literature and the humanities on college campuses that has gone so far as talk of the "end of the English major"--which I suspect is not just a response to the sneers at those subjects by the morons who pass for thought-leaders, or the (very understandable) worries about the earning prospects of those who major in them in a time of ever more outrageous tuition, worsening prospects for college graduates and a tendency on the part of employers to reward more vocationally-oriented course work and the demonstration of quantitative skills at the expense of other kinds of credentials and training, but simple disinterest among the young. The causes of the situation are numerous, but one that I do think worth stressing what Mr. Roth's biographer Blake Bailey acknowledges after a long career as a biographer of such figures, that the day when endeavoring to write "the great American novel" seemed a heroic endeavor is behind us, simply because "Nobody's paying attention"--a remark that, in contrast with the boosterism we usually get about book sales, the publishing business, reading, when we get coverage of them at all seems to me a breath of fresh air for its frankness. Indeed, even those who really find themselves taken with the written word are, if fancying a career that would lead to something better than a crummy working class existence, probably more likely to set up a camera and try to become "influencers" than pour their heart and soul into a manuscript, especially as the disappointment self-publishing has been proves ever harder to deny, and the never very likely path to acceptance on Park Avenue only continues to grow more implausible.
In 2025 we are about two-thirds of the way to twenty-five years from his standpoint. Personally I think that his prediction for the state of things in 2034 is more dire than the reality is likely to be--but not so very much more dire. Consider how
* In the late '00s and early '10s young adult books were all the rage, and the trajectory that ended up following. At least part of the story was a lack of excitement about books for adults, and "adults" looking for easier reads, as well as young adult interest, with all that suggests for the vibrancy of letters and for the prevailing level of literacy--while the way the bubble popped circa 2015 without anything to compare since can seem suggestive of people of all ages doing even less reading than that.
* Whole genres of popular fiction have withered and all but vanished (consider where action-adventure fiction stands today relative to where it was circa 1990), as in other cases we have seen stagnation (certainly to go by how, for example, the "club" of bestselling authors of other kinds of thriller has seen just the same old names from year to year, decade to decade, old names surviving on likely dwindling numbers of old loyalists, instead of new successes).
* Even as Big Publishing mounted its counter-revolution against the e-book with sensational success, the mass-market paperback still disappeared from the shops for lack of buyers--and how the media treated both events as virtually non-stories.
* The slight impact of even recent bestsellers on the wider culture, as seen in the fact that for many years the film adaptations of even colossal bestsellers simply do not become first-rank blockbusters the way they did a short time earlier; and how, even with pop culture a principal terrain of the kulturkampf and all its obscene noxiousness, books constitute an ever-smaller part of the controversy, especially when we get away from the mainly symbolic fights over very limited aspects of the contents of school libraries. (By contrast the kind of arguments that people had over a book like Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, and certainly the way in which a serious social scientist like William Whyte discussed the book as sociologically relevant in his study of "the organization man,", aren't even a possibility now.)
Consider, too, the implications of a declining interest in literature and the humanities on college campuses that has gone so far as talk of the "end of the English major"--which I suspect is not just a response to the sneers at those subjects by the morons who pass for thought-leaders, or the (very understandable) worries about the earning prospects of those who major in them in a time of ever more outrageous tuition, worsening prospects for college graduates and a tendency on the part of employers to reward more vocationally-oriented course work and the demonstration of quantitative skills at the expense of other kinds of credentials and training, but simple disinterest among the young. The causes of the situation are numerous, but one that I do think worth stressing what Mr. Roth's biographer Blake Bailey acknowledges after a long career as a biographer of such figures, that the day when endeavoring to write "the great American novel" seemed a heroic endeavor is behind us, simply because "Nobody's paying attention"--a remark that, in contrast with the boosterism we usually get about book sales, the publishing business, reading, when we get coverage of them at all seems to me a breath of fresh air for its frankness. Indeed, even those who really find themselves taken with the written word are, if fancying a career that would lead to something better than a crummy working class existence, probably more likely to set up a camera and try to become "influencers" than pour their heart and soul into a manuscript, especially as the disappointment self-publishing has been proves ever harder to deny, and the never very likely path to acceptance on Park Avenue only continues to grow more implausible.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
