During the run-up to and aftermath of the release of Gladiator II I tracked the discussion of the movie's box office prospects, and then its actual theatrical performance, as well as the fallout therefrom. For convenience's sake I have gathered together the items (some of them fairly short) on this one page, in order of appearance and dated--while also updating the links from posts referencing them so that they all lead here.
June 24, 2023
Gladiator 2? Seriously?
The original Gladiator was a visual marvel, while being absolutely silly stuff from the standpoint of history. (Its plot was more like alternate history, and clumsily wrought alternate history at that, while it made Roman politics look like the spectacles of the WWE so in vogue about the time of the film's making.)
The result is that despite gestures in the direction of Anthony Mann-like historical epic it worked mainly as an action movie, and at that an '80s-style "You killed my favorite second cousin" action movie (betrayed super-soldier seeks revenge, etc.) with the novelty of a period setting--and its story wrapped up tidily at the end.
Especially as other such films having comparable success seems a long shot (thus did the attempts at imitation peter out fairly quickly in the early '00s), there seems no good reason to revisit it--especially a quarter of a century on when enthusiasm for any such idea must have declined, as the American public grew only more reserved toward period pieces.
But revisit it is what they are doing--the movie not only greenlit but actually in production.
My expectation is that extending an already silly narrative will produce something sillier still--all as few of the public show up, and the Hollywood Suits whose courtiers in the press ceaselessly talk them up to the general public as the "smartest guys in the room" will put another gaping hole in their studio's books.
April 18, 2024
Gladiator 2: What Are its Chances of Profitability?
The release of a new trailer for Gladiator 2 has, of course, caused a spike in chatter about the film--overwhelmingly enthusiastic, to go by what I have seen. The critical and commercial failure that was Ridley Scott's prior historical epic, Napoleon (and the fact that Napoleon's failure has been the norm for Scott's epics) seems utterly absent from the dialogue as instead the commentators, befitting their function as les claqueurs, fixate on Scott's one real "win" in the form with 2000's Gladiator--while overlooking any problems with the concept of a follow-up, which seem quite evident in the trailer they are celebrating. The movie, a sequel to a movie where both the hero and the villain died, and which presumably made what followed an "alternate history" given its extreme remoteness from the facts (the Roman Republic restored!), looks less like follow-up than do-over of the first, scaled-up and disguised as a sequel, with (per usual for Scott) the spectacle coming in far, far ahead of anything else for all the melodramatic implications of the bits of dialogue, the blaring music.
In fairness I think more people will show up for this one than did for Scott's "vision" of Napoleon as Arthur Fleck in period costume. But will enough of them show to justify the colossal expenditure on this movie?
As might be expected these days amid pandemic, inflation, elevated interest rates, strikes and much else Gladiator 2 is a movie that was massively budgeted to begin with and then went way overbudget--its cost of production nearly doubling from the original $165 million to the $310 million spent. We are told by journalists claiming access to "insiders" that the "net" cost of production was actually $250 million, but even if true (and the studios have been known to underreport costs here) that is still quite a bit of money--and just part of the total final bill. After all, counting promotion and distribution and other such expenses the ultimate outlay for a movie comes to two to three times the cost of production (certainly when we take into account post-theatrical promotion and distribution for home viewing, etc.). Working with the $250-$310 million range, this works out to somewhere between $500 million and $900 million or so.
Given the limits of post-theatrical earnings at least 60 percent of that will have to be made from ticket sales--which is to say, $300 to $550 million. Given that the studio typically keeps a bit less than half of the proceeds from the ticket sales one would have to picture a gross double that--somewhere between $600 million and $1.1 billion grossed just to get the production past break-even.
As it happened the first Gladiator made $460 million back in 2000--which works out to about $840 million in today's terms, or the mid-point of that range. That in itself is cause for concern, as it means the movie can do as well, or better than, its hugely successful predecessor, and still lose money. Exacerbating the problem is that such money is not so easily made now as it was just a few years ago, with sequels offering splashy spectacle in particular a tougher sell than before--and this specific movie a particularly unnecessary-looking sequel that, because of the plot of the first film, does not have the original's stars, appearing almost a quarter of a century after that first film. I do not think the public's interest can be taken for granted, while interest among the younger cohort, for which period pieces are a particularly tough sell, will be something to watch closely, along with the matter of just how spendthrift the film's backers and makers have been. My gut reaction is that if all it takes to get into the territory of profitability is $600 million (almost a third less than what the original made) this movie may have a tough time achieving that, but that it would be doable. By contrast the billion dollar, let alone the $1.1 billion, mark (far above the original's gross, and perhaps more than any movie may make this year according to at least one analyst) seems like a real longshot.
December 3, 2024
Is Gladiator 2 a Flop?
Admittedly the entertainment press doesn't think so.
Still, consider the situation as it stands.
Seventeen days into Gladiator II's international release the movie has collected $209 million internationally, while ten days into its North American release it has made $111 million in that market. Assuming not unreasonably that the movie has already made 80 percent of its international total by this point, and 60 percent of its North American total, one would expect the movie's final take to come to around $445 million. Alternatively were one to take the $185 million figure for the final domestic take implied by the calculations presented above and expect this to amount to 40 percent of the final worldwide gross the way the domestic take did for the original, one gets a figure of $460 million, some $15 million more, while if one is prepared to allow for a margin of $15 million the other way as well we get $475 million.
A gross in the range of $445-$475 million (which may be more than some see it making) may sound like a lot of money. The bullish will point out that this has the movie matching what the original made ($465 million), ignoring the dollar's losing almost half (46 percent) of its purchasing power since 2000 according to the Consumer Price Index. The result is that merely matching the original's gross in current dollars means the movie's making about half what the original did in real terms.
We get an even worse picture when we think in terms of the cost of the film. The original Gladiator was made for a little over $100 million, which permitted a very healthy profit indeed on a gross of (roughly) a half billion. By contrast the sequel would be making a half billion dollars--after an outlay of $250-$310 million on the production, an expenditure of two to three times as much.
We do not ordinarily think of a sequel that made half as much as the original as a success.
We also do not (given the economics of film production and distribution) think of a movie, or anything else, that costs three times as much as its predecessor for the same return a success, with this certainly carrying over to a movie that costs $250 million+ to make (and $120 million more to distribute and market) grossing a half billion dollars. And indeed, as I argued back in April, the bar for profitability may be higher for this one than the range discussed here--a loss still quite plausible even after the post-theatrical income from streaming, TV rights, physical media, etc. is taken into account.
Still, with rare exceptions the press has been fairly upbeat about how Gladiator 2 is doing.
A plausible explanation for the gap between rhetoric and reality is that the entertainment press is on the whole claquing for this one--at least in part because it fits in with the narrative that Hollywood so badly wants to believe, namely that, contrary to the evidence of 2023, and what must be regarded as the ambiguous evidence of the public response to the thinned-out release slate of a 2024 mere weeks short of its end, franchise-addicted Hollywood's formula for generating blockbusters remains viable. And it is not going to let a little thing like movies actually losing their backers money get in the way of that.
NOTE: The item was subject to some minor corrections on December 8, 2024.
Gladiator 2's Failure: Some Thoughts
Recently appraising Gladiator 2's box office performance I have inclined to the view that the movie is proving a commercial disappointment at the box office--not a total, The Marvels/Flash-style catastrophe, but far from what it would take to really justify a $300 million movie, and that the outcome was far from unforeseeable.
Consider the first Gladiator film that came out when many of those who voted in the recent presidential election were not yet even born. The movie was basically a blend of "You killed my favorite second cousin!" action movie with Attitude Era WWE in period costume. The approach had enough novelty, narratively, visually and in other ways to make for one of the more original and entertaining summertime spectacles of those years--but the film's cachet owed to its being taken for something more, the period setting evoking the epics of the last days of Old Hollywood, enough so to fool the more superficial critics into mistaking its puffed-up kayfabe (the ultimate wrestling feud!) for Historical Drama, and awarding it a slew of Oscars that action movies usually do not get, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor (in a way, epitomizing Ridley Scott's career as a prolific maker of historical "epics" who apparently has no interest in or understanding of history whatsoever).
Alas, I suspect that the movie's just looking like an epic rather than actually being one limited its impression on viewers, with all that meant for any appetite for a return to Scott's Rome (the more in as the movie left even less room for a sequel than most, with hero and villain both dead, and history taking a wildly implausible turn in his story that would not stand up to any serious follow-up). And I dare say that the historical epics of old that Gladiator was able to exploit the existence of some nostalgia for in 2000 are that much more distant from the memory of today's moviegoing audience on the whole--all as, much as people enjoyed it, the original Gladiator doesn't generate much nostalgic pull of its own. (It's no Star Wars that way, no Top Gun, no 2002 Sam Raimi-helmed Spider-Man even.)
The result was that the very belated follow-up was just a transparent cash grab with a blend of sequel and remake as hazy as it is unimaginative, selling much more on spectacle than the predecessor did in an age in which audiences have had so much spectacle that it is ever harder to really make them feel that here is something they have never seen before--while American audiences, certainly, have long been harder to sell on this particular kind of spectacle, even if the movie has the benefit of being less shopworn than, for instance, the superheroic adventures of which they have seen so many. The resulting, tepid, appeal translated to a tepid response from ticket-buyers.
Is "Glicked" Confusing Perceptions of Gladiator 2's Box Office?
I remember how back in the summer of 2023 the media telling us that the "Barbenheimer" meme juxtaposed the two big feature film releases of July 21 of that year (Barbie and Oppenheimer) went "viral" online, Internet users reveling in the ironies of the contrast between a movie about plastic toys and a movie about (however much the media prefer to tell us it is about something, anything, else) THE DANGER OF NUCLEAR WAR THAT HANGS OVER ALL OF US EVER MORE THREATENINGLY AS OPPENHEIMER DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER NOLAN HIMSELF SPELLED OUT TO THE BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS LEST ANYONE MISS THE POINT.
I don't know that I believe that the Barbenheimer stupidity really did go "viral" the way the media claimed it did--precisely because everything I have seen about how the Internet works has left me only more and more convinced that things really don't go viral that way, that indeed the media just tells us they did, because it helps them push a particular narrative.
Still, whether or not Barbenheimer really did go viral or not the phenomenon did have one important feature in common with the great majority of those things we are told went viral--namely that it is extremely stupid, and each and every unfortunate contact with it like nails on a chalkboard.
Naturally the media, which can never resist repeating its stupidities, seized on the chance to reuse the marketing concept by talking up "Glicked"--the release of a screen adaptation of the revisionist Broadway musical prequel to The Wizard of Oz, Wicked, the same weekend as the bloody Roman pseudo-epic Gladiator II. (They slapped together the "Gl" from Gladiator and "icked" from Wicked. Get it? Ha. Ha. Ha.)
The expectation was that just as Barbie and Oppenheimer both performed way above expectations at the box office, saving the until then really dismal summer season of 2023, so would Wicked and Gladiator. As it happened, neither movie quite lived up to the expectations observers held for it on their mutual opening weekend, each coming in under the range that Boxoffice Pro projected the Wednesday of their week of release.* Still, Wicked did just well enough then and after to be considered a very palpable hit (with $262 million banked after ten days in release, and decent prospects through the season), while Gladiator has . . . done less well. Apparently on track to end up with half what the original did after inflation, it may be that even with post-theatrical income counted in the movie will be reckoned a money-loser, though few seem willing to admit that. This is, I think, primarily because the entertainment press is pushing the narrative that Hollywood's model of blockbuster filmmaking is as salable as ever, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary--but it may be that the "Glicked" foolishness intended to help sell both movies is playing its part, predisposing observers to think of Gladiator II as a success, and even letting it benefit from association with the much more successful Wicked in the minds of the easily befuddled.
* Wicked, supposed to open with $120-$140 million, picked up only $114 million.
January 7, 2025
What Can We Say of Gladiator II Now?
Gladiator II opened in North America below expectations that had not been particularly high for a $250 million movie, let alone a high-profile sequel to a New Classic hitting theaters the Friday before Thanksgiving--grossing $55 million over the Friday-to-Sunday period (against the $60-$80 million Boxoffice Pro had consistently forecast for the preceding month). Of course, rather more than in the summer the holiday season sees films open less than impressively but much more than make up for it with very long legs (as James Cameron's three movies all managed to do on the way to high rankings on the all-time blockbuster lists). Gladiator II, however, did not prove one of these, as of its sixth weekend not much more than tripling its opening weekend gross ($163 million), leaving it with less than the original Gladiator took in current dollars, and maybe half what it made in real terms ($188 million back in the summer of 2000, $345 million when adjusted for November 2024 prices). The movie has done a little better in the international market than the original--as period pieces tend to do--but as the fact that the domestic/foreign split's about the same indicates (it was 42/58 in the case of the original, 38/62 in the case of the sequel), not enough so to make much difference.
The result is that the $450 million mark the much cheaper original reached at a time when that was more impressive than it is now is one toward which the movie is still straining, and may not quite make it--calling into question the movie's profitability. It will take a really robust post-theatrical performance to get the revenue to the break-even point, never mind past it--all as room remains to wonder if come the spring we will not see it on Deadline's list of the year's biggest money-losers.
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
My Posts on the DCEU's Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom's (aka Aquaman 2)'s Box Office Performance (Collected)
During the run-up to and aftermath of the release of the DCEU's feature film Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom I tracked the discussion of the movie's box office prospects, and then its actual theatrical performance, as well as the fallout therefrom. For convenience's sake I have gathered together the items (some of them fairly short) on this one page, in order of appearance and dated--while also updating the links from posts referencing them so that they all lead here.
June 6, 2023
Aquaman 2, China and the Film's Chances of a $1 Billion Gross
Aquaman is, to date, the biggest money-maker the DCEU ever had--and its only current-dollar billion-dollar hit. However, the movie was only a "respectable" grosser at home by first-rank superhero movie standards (its $335 million rather less than what Wonder Woman made the year before). What really put it over the top was its especially strong overseas gross--accounting for some 71 percent of its worldwide income (also a franchise high).
The result is that, all other things being equal, one might hope for a strong performance on the part of the sequel, with even a significant drop in the real-terms gross from the original's ($1.15 billion when it came out in December 2018, more like $1.4 billion in 2023 dollars) allowing it to be the kind of $1 billion hit so elusive for Hollywood's live-action films these days.
Alas, all things are not equal, with one factor well worth remembering that China was especially important in making the movie such a success. (Without its $292 million gross there the movie would have ended its run with just $850 million.)
With China so important--accounting for a quarter of the worldwide box office gross--should Aquaman 2 suffer the way many more recent American releases have in China the film could already be expected to do significantly less well. (Should, for example, the film do only half the business in China that its predecessor did--which would be a lot better than, say, the Ant-Man sequel managed--that would in today's terms mean almost $200 million off the top.) Meanwhile the movie faces other, significant, headwinds:
* The five year wait since the last film--and the slight turnout of DCEU films in those five years, with all that meant for sustaining interest in, or even awareness of, the brand.
* The end of the DCEU as we know it, undermining any attempt to make Aquaman 2 "an event."
* Bad (frankly, very bad) buzz about the film itself.
It may also be that The Flash, if indeed poorly received after the breathless hype (as seems possible), may not be helpful to the next DCEU release.
The result is that, if Aquaman 2 is, apart from Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (which has missed its chance), and Indiana Jones 5 (the prospects of which are fading), the most likely contender for a $1 billion gross of any live-action movie coming out this year, I can easily picture it too falling short of the mark.
July 10, 2023
What Will Aquaman 2 Make? A Box Office Prediction
In considering what the final DCEU film, Aquaman 2, may make later this year one can find a basis for guesses in analogies with other comparable films--and application of these to what might be expected for it on the basis of the original Aquaman.
An obvious starting point is how major superhero franchise films have been doing lately--with and without the China market over which so many question marks hang (and which was so important to the first Aquaman movie's success).
At one end of the spectrum Guardians of the Galaxy 2 made $864 million at the global box office--which comes to $1.07 billion in May 2023 dollars. Without China's $100 million in ticket sales it comes to more like $948 million.
Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is likely to finish up with not much less than the original in current dollars--about $850 million. Without China the figure is more like $763 million. The result is that the film's gross is, in China's absence, about a fifth down, and this the best any such movie seems likely to do these days.
At the other end of the spectrum Black Panther 2 made just over half (53 percent) of what the original Black Panther did in real terms. Exclusion from China was a factor, but even when we set China aside the movie still made just 58 percent of what the original did.
So let us assume that in the best-case scenario the movie makes 80 percent of what the original did outside China, in the worst-case scenario, just 60 percent.
Meanwhile let us consider the film's prospects in China. In the worst case the film will not come out there at all, but should it come out one may take the Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man franchises as suggestive of the range. In China Guardians of the Galaxy 3 did, if less well than elsewhere, relatively well by the standards of Hollywood in China these days, taking in 70 percent of what Guardians of the Galaxy 2 did. By contrast Ant-Man 3 took in just 30 percent of what Ant-Man 2 did there.
In May 2023 dollars Aquaman took in $1.04 billion outside China. It also took in $350 million in China, for a take of nearly $1.4 billion overall.
The most positive scenario, with 80 percent of the non-China gross, and 70 percent of the China gross, of the original, would come to a $1.09 billion total take (less than a quarter down from the original's gross).
The least positive scenario within the range discussed here would come to more like $730 million (scarcely half what the original made).
Round for the nearest fifty million, and you end up with a range of $750 million-$1.1 billion, with, splitting the difference, somewhere around $900 million the middle of the range.
If a significant comedown from what might have been hoped from the strength of the original's reception, this would probably be the best gross of any superhero movie, or any live-action movie, this year. However, just as this kind of calculation was (as I warned back in April and as has since been amply confirmed) overoptimistic in the case of Indiana Jones 5 (which conventionally should have been a safe bet for a billion-dollar gross given the performance of prior entries in the series), given the headwinds it faced (which have all too clearly mattered), so it may be with Aquaman 2--given very poor buzz about the quality of the film, the way the DCEU seems to be going less than gracefully, the poor impression made by the overhyping and subsequent disappointing reception of The Flash. Indeed, just as I warned about the possibility of a Solo-like collapse on the part of Indiana Jones 5, so does it seem worth warning about the possibility of a similar collapse in the case of Aquaman 2. Just as Indiana Jones 5 now looks like it will struggle to make forty percent of what might have been normally expected for it (and Aquaman 2's preceding DCEU universe film, The Flash, looks as if it is doing the same Aquaman 2, instead of the circa $900 million that could be expected for it amid the lowered expectations of today's global box office, could likewise find itself falling short of the half billion dollar mark, and even the $400 million mark.
To sum up: in May 2023 dollars, a likely range of $750 million-$1.1 billion, $900 million as the figure I think most likely assuming a "normal" run, with, not to be forgotten, a real prospect of collapse seeing it make less than half that (<$400 million) in these not-so-normal times.
November 3, 2023
Fandango's Poll and Aquaman 2
Fandango's recent poll found that the film movie audiences seem to be looking forward to most is Captain Marvel 2.
Aquaman 2 came right after it.
Right now Captain Marvel 2's prospects are none too bright. The implication is that Aquaman 2 will do worse--this sequel to the DCEU's biggest hit (its sole billion-dollar hit) ending up on a level with its poorest performer by far, The Flash.
If so it would be another blow to the increasingly battered DCEU, and the increasingly shaky superhero genre of which it has been so large a part this past decade—and box office-watchers should keep the possibility in mind as the tracking-based estimates for the movie start going public in the coming weeks.
November 24, 2023
Aquaman 2: Boxoffice Pro Posts its First Long-Range Forecast for the Film's Domestic Gross
Considering Aquaman 2 (aka Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom) I did wonder if the movie would not defy the trend of franchise failure. After all, the first Aquaman film was relatively well-received, this only the second film in the sequence (in contrast with characters of which the public had had time to grow more weary), and the trailer looked very credible (certainly a lot more exciting than the one for Captain Marvel 2). Still, the pattern of failure has been fairly consistent (underlined even by the only comparative success of Guardians of the Galaxy 3), the always more vulnerable DC Extended Universe has done very badly indeed this year (with Shazam 2, Blue Beetle and of course The Flash), while the fact that the DCEU is not so much building to a triumphant climax as being handled like a canceled TV show "burning off" its last unaired episodes. The result is that I tried not to be overly negative, but all the same, taking up the subject back in July it seemed to me necessary to allow for a scenario of collapse at the box office in which the film fell short of not just the billion-dollar barrier the first such movie broke, but >$400 million globally.
Now Boxoffice Pro (just as it did with Captain Marvel 2 back in October) is affirming the anticipation of collapse with the publication of its first tracking data-based long-range forecast for the film, specifically an opening weekend take in the range of $32-$42 million (versus The Flash's $55 million and Captain Marvel 2's $47 million), and a domestic total range of $105-$168 million (such that at the low end it could take in less than The Flash). Compared with the first film the total gross would be about 60 to 75 percent less than the movie made in real terms ($335 million in 2018-2019, equaling $410 million in today's terms), a drop comparable to what Captain Marvel 2 suffered in comparison with the first Captain Marvel film.
Such figures make a very considerable worldwide multiplier necessary to turn a domestic performance like this one into a respectable, break even-approaching earner, and alas, in contrast with that other series that Aquaman star Jason Momoa appeared in this year, Fast and Furious, this series has little such hope. Fast X made four times its domestic gross internationally ($559 million to its $146 million in North America)--but superhero movies, a particularly American passion, tend not to do so well internationally, with the first Aquaman, which made about two-and-a-half times what it did domestically abroad, as good as it gets. Moreover, one should note that this was overwhelmingly due to a very strong response from China, which is very unlikely to be forthcoming this time given the reception of more recent American films there. The result is that Aquaman 2 would be doing well to make three times its domestic gross globally, which in even the most positive current scenario detailed by Boxoffice Pro would leave it a half billion at best, as much worse becomes imaginable (such that it could end up with a lot less than $400 million).
Of course, there is still a month to go before that movie actually hits theaters--but as The Flash and Captain Marvel 2 both showed, the movie's prospects could decay rather than improve, while, even if the faintness of the competition this year should seem a point in the movie's favor, it by no means guarantees its "cleaning up." The way the box office works these days the lack of appetizing alternatives on the menu does not mean that others will order up this one--and so for now the safest guess would seem to be the DCEU's last movie concluding the franchise's run with a whimper rather than a roar of triumph, with all that implies for the fantasy of a mighty new DCEU finally satisfying the WBD's longstanding Marvel envy, to say nothing of the superhero film, the franchise film, the blockbuster as we know it more broadly and the fate of a Hollywood which, battered by events beyond its control (like the pandemic, and the geopolitical turn hurting it in China) has also inflicted plenty of wounds on itself--while showing not the least sign of behaving more intelligently in the years ahead.
January 26, 2024
Aquaman 2 vs. Captain Marvel 2 at the Box Office
In a month of global release Aquaman 2 has collected almost $400 million at the worldwide box office.
Compared to the original film (which took in almost a billion dollars more in its run in inflation-adjusted terms), this is a disaster--a gross of less than one-third of what its predecessor made. Indeed, the neighborhood of $400 million was about what I estimated back in September when talking about a scenario of collapse for the Aquaman series.
However, there is no question that it is far superior to what that obvious point of comparison, Captain Marvel 2, managed in the same season--about twice as much in fact (Captain Marvel 2 having barely broken the $200 million barrier before hitting streaming). One may add that the Aquaman sequel did this in spite of having its own burden of unhelpful factors, like the equally long wait since the last film (five rather long years from the end of 2018 to the end of 2023), the fact that it was coming after not a comparative hit for its "cinematic universe" the way Captain Marvel 2 did (the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel, if not all that might have been hoped for, still pulling in over $800 million just a half year before Marvel hit theaters) but the debacle that was the release of The Flash, and the weakness of its own promotional campaign, which gave many the impression that the studio was all but refusing to throw good money after bad.
Does this at all refute the claims of superhero fatigue and franchise fatigue? Absolutely not. In fact it confirms them when we consider just how badly one megabudgeted superhero epic after another flopped, especially from June forward, underlining how little the audience's showing up for them can be taken for granted now as compared with before the pandemic. Still, I am doubtful that those who make the decisions will heed the lessons. Rather I suspect that the studio bosses will seize on anything and everything that can seem to justify their "staying the course"--treating Aquaman 2 as a comparative success story for not doing as badly as Captain Marvel 2, even with so much against it (and play up the reception of Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and anything else they can think of), as grounds that they can still make this work--that all they need is better writers" and more "adult supervision" for directors, and all will be well--all as the onlookers well aware that they are just digging a bigger hole for themselves await their chance to once more tell them "I told you so."
February 2, 2024
How Did Aquaman 2 Play in China?
Back in 2018 a significant factor in the first Aquaman film's success was its exceptionally robust performance internationally, especially in China. Grossing just short of $292 million there, this made it the DCEU's sole billion-dollar success to date (and that when, five inflationary years earlier, a billion was worth quite a bit more than it is now).
Speculating about the sequel's likely overall gross I acknowledged that that level of success in China was very unlikely (the opportunities for Hollywood there have shrunk considerably these past several years), but it still seems worth considering how the movie did there. According to Box Office Mojo the film has, to date, picked up just under $60 million in China--about a fifth of what the original did before inflation, about a sixth after, a drop of 83 percent or so from what the film made.
This is considerably worse than the film's North American or international performance outside China.* The North American gross stands at about $118 million--about 71 percent down from the original's inflation-adjusted gross, while the gross for the world outside China stands at about $353 million, and just 67 percent down from the first film's gross for the "non-Chinese market." (Indeed, had the film's gross relative to its predecessor in China held up merely as well as it did in the rest of the world it would have made twice as much money, putting Aquaman on the road to a half billion dollar gross.)
The fact that this sequel to a movie so well-received in China five years ago has fallen so much further there than elsewhere (where those backing the movie might have hoped for the opposite, that the sequel would have held up better in China than in other markets) can seem a reminder of just how rough the going is for American film in China generally these days, adding to its already enormous stateside problems.
* The original Aquaman made $335 million domestically and $1.152 billion globally. Adjusted from December 2018 to December 2023 prices this gives us figures of about $410 million on the domestic front and $1.41 billion globally. By comparison the movie has made a little under $120 million at home, and $410 million worldwide.
June 6, 2023
Aquaman 2, China and the Film's Chances of a $1 Billion Gross
Aquaman is, to date, the biggest money-maker the DCEU ever had--and its only current-dollar billion-dollar hit. However, the movie was only a "respectable" grosser at home by first-rank superhero movie standards (its $335 million rather less than what Wonder Woman made the year before). What really put it over the top was its especially strong overseas gross--accounting for some 71 percent of its worldwide income (also a franchise high).
The result is that, all other things being equal, one might hope for a strong performance on the part of the sequel, with even a significant drop in the real-terms gross from the original's ($1.15 billion when it came out in December 2018, more like $1.4 billion in 2023 dollars) allowing it to be the kind of $1 billion hit so elusive for Hollywood's live-action films these days.
Alas, all things are not equal, with one factor well worth remembering that China was especially important in making the movie such a success. (Without its $292 million gross there the movie would have ended its run with just $850 million.)
With China so important--accounting for a quarter of the worldwide box office gross--should Aquaman 2 suffer the way many more recent American releases have in China the film could already be expected to do significantly less well. (Should, for example, the film do only half the business in China that its predecessor did--which would be a lot better than, say, the Ant-Man sequel managed--that would in today's terms mean almost $200 million off the top.) Meanwhile the movie faces other, significant, headwinds:
* The five year wait since the last film--and the slight turnout of DCEU films in those five years, with all that meant for sustaining interest in, or even awareness of, the brand.
* The end of the DCEU as we know it, undermining any attempt to make Aquaman 2 "an event."
* Bad (frankly, very bad) buzz about the film itself.
It may also be that The Flash, if indeed poorly received after the breathless hype (as seems possible), may not be helpful to the next DCEU release.
The result is that, if Aquaman 2 is, apart from Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (which has missed its chance), and Indiana Jones 5 (the prospects of which are fading), the most likely contender for a $1 billion gross of any live-action movie coming out this year, I can easily picture it too falling short of the mark.
July 10, 2023
What Will Aquaman 2 Make? A Box Office Prediction
In considering what the final DCEU film, Aquaman 2, may make later this year one can find a basis for guesses in analogies with other comparable films--and application of these to what might be expected for it on the basis of the original Aquaman.
An obvious starting point is how major superhero franchise films have been doing lately--with and without the China market over which so many question marks hang (and which was so important to the first Aquaman movie's success).
At one end of the spectrum Guardians of the Galaxy 2 made $864 million at the global box office--which comes to $1.07 billion in May 2023 dollars. Without China's $100 million in ticket sales it comes to more like $948 million.
Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is likely to finish up with not much less than the original in current dollars--about $850 million. Without China the figure is more like $763 million. The result is that the film's gross is, in China's absence, about a fifth down, and this the best any such movie seems likely to do these days.
At the other end of the spectrum Black Panther 2 made just over half (53 percent) of what the original Black Panther did in real terms. Exclusion from China was a factor, but even when we set China aside the movie still made just 58 percent of what the original did.
So let us assume that in the best-case scenario the movie makes 80 percent of what the original did outside China, in the worst-case scenario, just 60 percent.
Meanwhile let us consider the film's prospects in China. In the worst case the film will not come out there at all, but should it come out one may take the Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man franchises as suggestive of the range. In China Guardians of the Galaxy 3 did, if less well than elsewhere, relatively well by the standards of Hollywood in China these days, taking in 70 percent of what Guardians of the Galaxy 2 did. By contrast Ant-Man 3 took in just 30 percent of what Ant-Man 2 did there.
In May 2023 dollars Aquaman took in $1.04 billion outside China. It also took in $350 million in China, for a take of nearly $1.4 billion overall.
The most positive scenario, with 80 percent of the non-China gross, and 70 percent of the China gross, of the original, would come to a $1.09 billion total take (less than a quarter down from the original's gross).
The least positive scenario within the range discussed here would come to more like $730 million (scarcely half what the original made).
Round for the nearest fifty million, and you end up with a range of $750 million-$1.1 billion, with, splitting the difference, somewhere around $900 million the middle of the range.
If a significant comedown from what might have been hoped from the strength of the original's reception, this would probably be the best gross of any superhero movie, or any live-action movie, this year. However, just as this kind of calculation was (as I warned back in April and as has since been amply confirmed) overoptimistic in the case of Indiana Jones 5 (which conventionally should have been a safe bet for a billion-dollar gross given the performance of prior entries in the series), given the headwinds it faced (which have all too clearly mattered), so it may be with Aquaman 2--given very poor buzz about the quality of the film, the way the DCEU seems to be going less than gracefully, the poor impression made by the overhyping and subsequent disappointing reception of The Flash. Indeed, just as I warned about the possibility of a Solo-like collapse on the part of Indiana Jones 5, so does it seem worth warning about the possibility of a similar collapse in the case of Aquaman 2. Just as Indiana Jones 5 now looks like it will struggle to make forty percent of what might have been normally expected for it (and Aquaman 2's preceding DCEU universe film, The Flash, looks as if it is doing the same Aquaman 2, instead of the circa $900 million that could be expected for it amid the lowered expectations of today's global box office, could likewise find itself falling short of the half billion dollar mark, and even the $400 million mark.
To sum up: in May 2023 dollars, a likely range of $750 million-$1.1 billion, $900 million as the figure I think most likely assuming a "normal" run, with, not to be forgotten, a real prospect of collapse seeing it make less than half that (<$400 million) in these not-so-normal times.
November 3, 2023
Fandango's Poll and Aquaman 2
Fandango's recent poll found that the film movie audiences seem to be looking forward to most is Captain Marvel 2.
Aquaman 2 came right after it.
Right now Captain Marvel 2's prospects are none too bright. The implication is that Aquaman 2 will do worse--this sequel to the DCEU's biggest hit (its sole billion-dollar hit) ending up on a level with its poorest performer by far, The Flash.
If so it would be another blow to the increasingly battered DCEU, and the increasingly shaky superhero genre of which it has been so large a part this past decade—and box office-watchers should keep the possibility in mind as the tracking-based estimates for the movie start going public in the coming weeks.
November 24, 2023
Aquaman 2: Boxoffice Pro Posts its First Long-Range Forecast for the Film's Domestic Gross
Considering Aquaman 2 (aka Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom) I did wonder if the movie would not defy the trend of franchise failure. After all, the first Aquaman film was relatively well-received, this only the second film in the sequence (in contrast with characters of which the public had had time to grow more weary), and the trailer looked very credible (certainly a lot more exciting than the one for Captain Marvel 2). Still, the pattern of failure has been fairly consistent (underlined even by the only comparative success of Guardians of the Galaxy 3), the always more vulnerable DC Extended Universe has done very badly indeed this year (with Shazam 2, Blue Beetle and of course The Flash), while the fact that the DCEU is not so much building to a triumphant climax as being handled like a canceled TV show "burning off" its last unaired episodes. The result is that I tried not to be overly negative, but all the same, taking up the subject back in July it seemed to me necessary to allow for a scenario of collapse at the box office in which the film fell short of not just the billion-dollar barrier the first such movie broke, but >$400 million globally.
Now Boxoffice Pro (just as it did with Captain Marvel 2 back in October) is affirming the anticipation of collapse with the publication of its first tracking data-based long-range forecast for the film, specifically an opening weekend take in the range of $32-$42 million (versus The Flash's $55 million and Captain Marvel 2's $47 million), and a domestic total range of $105-$168 million (such that at the low end it could take in less than The Flash). Compared with the first film the total gross would be about 60 to 75 percent less than the movie made in real terms ($335 million in 2018-2019, equaling $410 million in today's terms), a drop comparable to what Captain Marvel 2 suffered in comparison with the first Captain Marvel film.
Such figures make a very considerable worldwide multiplier necessary to turn a domestic performance like this one into a respectable, break even-approaching earner, and alas, in contrast with that other series that Aquaman star Jason Momoa appeared in this year, Fast and Furious, this series has little such hope. Fast X made four times its domestic gross internationally ($559 million to its $146 million in North America)--but superhero movies, a particularly American passion, tend not to do so well internationally, with the first Aquaman, which made about two-and-a-half times what it did domestically abroad, as good as it gets. Moreover, one should note that this was overwhelmingly due to a very strong response from China, which is very unlikely to be forthcoming this time given the reception of more recent American films there. The result is that Aquaman 2 would be doing well to make three times its domestic gross globally, which in even the most positive current scenario detailed by Boxoffice Pro would leave it a half billion at best, as much worse becomes imaginable (such that it could end up with a lot less than $400 million).
Of course, there is still a month to go before that movie actually hits theaters--but as The Flash and Captain Marvel 2 both showed, the movie's prospects could decay rather than improve, while, even if the faintness of the competition this year should seem a point in the movie's favor, it by no means guarantees its "cleaning up." The way the box office works these days the lack of appetizing alternatives on the menu does not mean that others will order up this one--and so for now the safest guess would seem to be the DCEU's last movie concluding the franchise's run with a whimper rather than a roar of triumph, with all that implies for the fantasy of a mighty new DCEU finally satisfying the WBD's longstanding Marvel envy, to say nothing of the superhero film, the franchise film, the blockbuster as we know it more broadly and the fate of a Hollywood which, battered by events beyond its control (like the pandemic, and the geopolitical turn hurting it in China) has also inflicted plenty of wounds on itself--while showing not the least sign of behaving more intelligently in the years ahead.
January 26, 2024
Aquaman 2 vs. Captain Marvel 2 at the Box Office
In a month of global release Aquaman 2 has collected almost $400 million at the worldwide box office.
Compared to the original film (which took in almost a billion dollars more in its run in inflation-adjusted terms), this is a disaster--a gross of less than one-third of what its predecessor made. Indeed, the neighborhood of $400 million was about what I estimated back in September when talking about a scenario of collapse for the Aquaman series.
However, there is no question that it is far superior to what that obvious point of comparison, Captain Marvel 2, managed in the same season--about twice as much in fact (Captain Marvel 2 having barely broken the $200 million barrier before hitting streaming). One may add that the Aquaman sequel did this in spite of having its own burden of unhelpful factors, like the equally long wait since the last film (five rather long years from the end of 2018 to the end of 2023), the fact that it was coming after not a comparative hit for its "cinematic universe" the way Captain Marvel 2 did (the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel, if not all that might have been hoped for, still pulling in over $800 million just a half year before Marvel hit theaters) but the debacle that was the release of The Flash, and the weakness of its own promotional campaign, which gave many the impression that the studio was all but refusing to throw good money after bad.
Does this at all refute the claims of superhero fatigue and franchise fatigue? Absolutely not. In fact it confirms them when we consider just how badly one megabudgeted superhero epic after another flopped, especially from June forward, underlining how little the audience's showing up for them can be taken for granted now as compared with before the pandemic. Still, I am doubtful that those who make the decisions will heed the lessons. Rather I suspect that the studio bosses will seize on anything and everything that can seem to justify their "staying the course"--treating Aquaman 2 as a comparative success story for not doing as badly as Captain Marvel 2, even with so much against it (and play up the reception of Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and anything else they can think of), as grounds that they can still make this work--that all they need is better writers" and more "adult supervision" for directors, and all will be well--all as the onlookers well aware that they are just digging a bigger hole for themselves await their chance to once more tell them "I told you so."
February 2, 2024
How Did Aquaman 2 Play in China?
Back in 2018 a significant factor in the first Aquaman film's success was its exceptionally robust performance internationally, especially in China. Grossing just short of $292 million there, this made it the DCEU's sole billion-dollar success to date (and that when, five inflationary years earlier, a billion was worth quite a bit more than it is now).
Speculating about the sequel's likely overall gross I acknowledged that that level of success in China was very unlikely (the opportunities for Hollywood there have shrunk considerably these past several years), but it still seems worth considering how the movie did there. According to Box Office Mojo the film has, to date, picked up just under $60 million in China--about a fifth of what the original did before inflation, about a sixth after, a drop of 83 percent or so from what the film made.
This is considerably worse than the film's North American or international performance outside China.* The North American gross stands at about $118 million--about 71 percent down from the original's inflation-adjusted gross, while the gross for the world outside China stands at about $353 million, and just 67 percent down from the first film's gross for the "non-Chinese market." (Indeed, had the film's gross relative to its predecessor in China held up merely as well as it did in the rest of the world it would have made twice as much money, putting Aquaman on the road to a half billion dollar gross.)
The fact that this sequel to a movie so well-received in China five years ago has fallen so much further there than elsewhere (where those backing the movie might have hoped for the opposite, that the sequel would have held up better in China than in other markets) can seem a reminder of just how rough the going is for American film in China generally these days, adding to its already enormous stateside problems.
* The original Aquaman made $335 million domestically and $1.152 billion globally. Adjusted from December 2018 to December 2023 prices this gives us figures of about $410 million on the domestic front and $1.41 billion globally. By comparison the movie has made a little under $120 million at home, and $410 million worldwide.
How a Fixation on Teaching Formulas Undermines Student Writing
When teaching educators are often torn between emphasizing deeper instruction that will go a longer way to building skills, and emphasizing what is easily communicated, easily learned, easily tested for, rather than what is actually likely to prove really useful but which is less susceptible to quick and easy conveyance and testing. (This is all the more the case insofar as the instructor must deal with students who are working below the level they are supposed to be, the students have little or no interest in the course the instructor teaches, and the instructor and students must face the prevailing cult of punitive standardized testing gone mad.)
One result is an attraction to formulas, which are relatively easy to communicate, and memorize, and in some ways check for--but the successful application of which is a trickier matter that tends to get neglected in the fixation on formula, with particularly pointed consequences in a class like English composition, where the development of a skill is everything.
Consider the famous writing formula, the "three-prong thesis statement," in which one presents a thesis (the claim, analytical in nature, which their paper exists to argue for) with three supporting arguments in a single sentence, as shown in the following (admittedly banal) example:
However, when we look at the substance of the supporting claims we see that it is not really satisfying a three prong thesis statement. Rather we have one "prong" repeated three times in slightly different language, giving the impression that there are actually three different supporting claims when there is only one such claim.
A college education helps us get a better job. Very well. But then we are told that it helps us "find better employment." What do they mean by "better employment?" Well, they mean that you get a better job--so it is really the same thing over again.
Now the claim about having a "brighter future" may look different. But in what way does the college education lead to such a brighter future? While some will wax rhapsodic about the enlargement of the mind by education, etc., it is the benefits of the "better job" that they are most apt to have in mind. Thus, if less blatantly, the writer has repeated themselves again.
The result is that if they have superficially fulfilled the requirement of providing three supporting arguments for their position at that deeper level they have failed to do so--producing the appearance of three supporting arguments, rather than actually giving us three arguments.
Indeed, in their rigid, if superficial, adherence to the three prong formula they have produced a piece of writing which is worse than if they had cast the formula aside to give us one argument. Why? Because more important than any formula is what the formulas are supposed to do for those who know and use them--enable them to present an argument with economy and clarity, which is exactly what does not happen here.
A writer who does this violates the principle of "economy of expression" with their words when they give us the same argument three times over. They should say something once, as concisely as possible, and then move on.
Additionally, they make their writing confusing by promising us three supporting arguments, and then giving us the same thing over and over again in slightly different words. The whole reason for presenting a thesis statement early on in the fashion described above is to tell us in advance what we are getting. This has us expecting one thing--but they present something else. After all, where we expected a second, different, argument, or a third, we find ourselves with no more than we had before. Approaching their paper in good faith we may think that we missed something, so that we might pause and try to puzzle it out, or go back and reread it--taking up more of our time, and distracting us from the overall argument.
Frankly, it would have been far better if they wrote a thesis statement with just one prong ("Getting a college education is important because it helps you get a better job."), as that would at least have afforded greater focus and clarity. And I would tell my classes that in so many words. However, many students went on writing those "three-prong statements" anyway, the importance of the form having been drilled into them until it seemed more important than the actual content the structure was supposed to organize.
In pointing this out I am not denying the usefulness of formulas, just the insistence on teaching the formula without teaching skill in applying them to specific situations by forming a judgment for which no learnable quantity of heuristics can plausibly substitute, and in fact can only be used correctly by people who already have that judgment. In its absence the formulas just make their writing a worse mess than it would otherwise be for lack of that judgment to which the training should have accorded much more attention.
One result is an attraction to formulas, which are relatively easy to communicate, and memorize, and in some ways check for--but the successful application of which is a trickier matter that tends to get neglected in the fixation on formula, with particularly pointed consequences in a class like English composition, where the development of a skill is everything.
Consider the famous writing formula, the "three-prong thesis statement," in which one presents a thesis (the claim, analytical in nature, which their paper exists to argue for) with three supporting arguments in a single sentence, as shown in the following (admittedly banal) example:
Getting a college education is important because it helps you get a better job, find better employment, and have a brighter future.The central analytical claim--about the importance of a college education--certainly has three supporting claims backing it up. And on that level this sentence may seem to fulfill the expectation of a three prong thesis statement.
However, when we look at the substance of the supporting claims we see that it is not really satisfying a three prong thesis statement. Rather we have one "prong" repeated three times in slightly different language, giving the impression that there are actually three different supporting claims when there is only one such claim.
A college education helps us get a better job. Very well. But then we are told that it helps us "find better employment." What do they mean by "better employment?" Well, they mean that you get a better job--so it is really the same thing over again.
Now the claim about having a "brighter future" may look different. But in what way does the college education lead to such a brighter future? While some will wax rhapsodic about the enlargement of the mind by education, etc., it is the benefits of the "better job" that they are most apt to have in mind. Thus, if less blatantly, the writer has repeated themselves again.
The result is that if they have superficially fulfilled the requirement of providing three supporting arguments for their position at that deeper level they have failed to do so--producing the appearance of three supporting arguments, rather than actually giving us three arguments.
Indeed, in their rigid, if superficial, adherence to the three prong formula they have produced a piece of writing which is worse than if they had cast the formula aside to give us one argument. Why? Because more important than any formula is what the formulas are supposed to do for those who know and use them--enable them to present an argument with economy and clarity, which is exactly what does not happen here.
A writer who does this violates the principle of "economy of expression" with their words when they give us the same argument three times over. They should say something once, as concisely as possible, and then move on.
Additionally, they make their writing confusing by promising us three supporting arguments, and then giving us the same thing over and over again in slightly different words. The whole reason for presenting a thesis statement early on in the fashion described above is to tell us in advance what we are getting. This has us expecting one thing--but they present something else. After all, where we expected a second, different, argument, or a third, we find ourselves with no more than we had before. Approaching their paper in good faith we may think that we missed something, so that we might pause and try to puzzle it out, or go back and reread it--taking up more of our time, and distracting us from the overall argument.
Frankly, it would have been far better if they wrote a thesis statement with just one prong ("Getting a college education is important because it helps you get a better job."), as that would at least have afforded greater focus and clarity. And I would tell my classes that in so many words. However, many students went on writing those "three-prong statements" anyway, the importance of the form having been drilled into them until it seemed more important than the actual content the structure was supposed to organize.
In pointing this out I am not denying the usefulness of formulas, just the insistence on teaching the formula without teaching skill in applying them to specific situations by forming a judgment for which no learnable quantity of heuristics can plausibly substitute, and in fact can only be used correctly by people who already have that judgment. In its absence the formulas just make their writing a worse mess than it would otherwise be for lack of that judgment to which the training should have accorded much more attention.
Why Do the Critics Say Theodore Dreiser is Humorless?
It seems to be a cliché of the critical writing about the work of author Theodore Dreiser that his writing is humorless (New York Times reviewer Henry Longan Stuart, for instance, taking the view as not only irrefutable but generally accepted in a since anthologized and much-cited piece). Coming to this cliché I did not give it much thought until I read Dreiser's memoir A Book About Myself, in which he proved to be anything but, and still more after reading The Titan, which had me laughing out loud again and again--the book at times unintentionally funny, admittedly, funny mainly because of how it appeared in light of what Dreiser had had to say in his memoir, but most of the time it was funny because Dreiser was, in fact, being humorous, and this more important because it is as a writer of fiction that we judge Dreiser.
I can think of two possible explanations for Dreiser's reputation on this point that seem to me worth bringing up because they have to do with a lot more than the reaction of the critics to just this one writer.
1. The charge of humorlessness is a critical attack on what the critics perceive as his politics. One of the cheapest, stalest, lamest (and therefore most readily used and little challenged) counter-attacks by those who uphold the status quo against its critics is that they are lacking in humanity. These people, they say, profess all these ideals, but have no feeling for the fellow humans whose lives they say they want to improve. No love, no sense of the richness and variety of life, no soul--and no sense of humor. Thus seeing Dreiser write critically of the prevailing order and its mores they gabble on and on about his prose being newspaper copy, and fling the "no sense of humor" charge at him.
2. The critics really did fail to see the humor in his books, because if they bothered to read him at all rather than just repeat others' opinions they were just too plain stupid to get the joke (never underestimate the obtuseness of professional critics), or because the way their not necessarily-stupid-but-at-the-very-least-misaligned-brains work did not allow them to perceive his humor as humor. Critics' ability to pick up on satire has always been uneven, with the more trenchant the satire the more uncertain their recognition--and this the more in as the critics belong to that long line of Establishment litteratteurs who believe that comedy, like everything else, must punch down. When they see a writer punching up, however hilariously, they see not humor but only blasphemy which they must punish--and punish Dreiser they have, relegating him to the status of, in David Walsh's words, "a dead dog." Which, after all, is probably why you came across this blog post--because so few are bothering to discuss Dreiser at all that for lack of anywhere else to direct you the search engine and artificial intelligence algorithms led you here.
I can think of two possible explanations for Dreiser's reputation on this point that seem to me worth bringing up because they have to do with a lot more than the reaction of the critics to just this one writer.
1. The charge of humorlessness is a critical attack on what the critics perceive as his politics. One of the cheapest, stalest, lamest (and therefore most readily used and little challenged) counter-attacks by those who uphold the status quo against its critics is that they are lacking in humanity. These people, they say, profess all these ideals, but have no feeling for the fellow humans whose lives they say they want to improve. No love, no sense of the richness and variety of life, no soul--and no sense of humor. Thus seeing Dreiser write critically of the prevailing order and its mores they gabble on and on about his prose being newspaper copy, and fling the "no sense of humor" charge at him.
2. The critics really did fail to see the humor in his books, because if they bothered to read him at all rather than just repeat others' opinions they were just too plain stupid to get the joke (never underestimate the obtuseness of professional critics), or because the way their not necessarily-stupid-but-at-the-very-least-misaligned-brains work did not allow them to perceive his humor as humor. Critics' ability to pick up on satire has always been uneven, with the more trenchant the satire the more uncertain their recognition--and this the more in as the critics belong to that long line of Establishment litteratteurs who believe that comedy, like everything else, must punch down. When they see a writer punching up, however hilariously, they see not humor but only blasphemy which they must punish--and punish Dreiser they have, relegating him to the status of, in David Walsh's words, "a dead dog." Which, after all, is probably why you came across this blog post--because so few are bothering to discuss Dreiser at all that for lack of anywhere else to direct you the search engine and artificial intelligence algorithms led you here.
Ten Things People Often Forget When They Talk About English Composition
The title of this post is, I think, fairly self-explanatory--so without further ado let us get on with the list it promises, the items in which, I think, are also fairly self-explanatory.
1. Writing is a Skill.
2. Academic Writing is About Content First and Foremost, Not Form, with the Premium on Being Able to Communicate Clearly--Especially if the Subject Matter is Complex.
3. Form is Not Reducible to Formulas. (You Actually Have to Exercise Judgment in Their Use.)
4. You Can't Write Well Unless You Can Read Well.
5. General Knowledge Matters. (You Actually Need Knowledge of the World to Get the Most Out of What You Read.)
6. Don't Underestimate the Importance of the Reading That We Don't Do in School.
7. You Can't Write Well Unless You Can Actually Think.
8. You Can't Write Well Unless You Have Some Interest in What You Are Writing (and Therefore Thinking) About.
9. You (Probably) Won't Learn if You Think You Have Nothing to Learn.
10. You Can't Expect a Couple of Semesters of Writing Class to Completely Make Up for a Very Weak K-12 Training in the Relevant Skills.
Ignoring these ten not terribly convenient truths leaves the problematic remedy for the very serious problem of the actual average level of college students' writing skills even less effective than would otherwise be the case--and ignoring them is pretty much all that anyone seems to do in regard to them.
1. Writing is a Skill.
2. Academic Writing is About Content First and Foremost, Not Form, with the Premium on Being Able to Communicate Clearly--Especially if the Subject Matter is Complex.
3. Form is Not Reducible to Formulas. (You Actually Have to Exercise Judgment in Their Use.)
4. You Can't Write Well Unless You Can Read Well.
5. General Knowledge Matters. (You Actually Need Knowledge of the World to Get the Most Out of What You Read.)
6. Don't Underestimate the Importance of the Reading That We Don't Do in School.
7. You Can't Write Well Unless You Can Actually Think.
8. You Can't Write Well Unless You Have Some Interest in What You Are Writing (and Therefore Thinking) About.
9. You (Probably) Won't Learn if You Think You Have Nothing to Learn.
10. You Can't Expect a Couple of Semesters of Writing Class to Completely Make Up for a Very Weak K-12 Training in the Relevant Skills.
Ignoring these ten not terribly convenient truths leaves the problematic remedy for the very serious problem of the actual average level of college students' writing skills even less effective than would otherwise be the case--and ignoring them is pretty much all that anyone seems to do in regard to them.
Value for the Money? Britain's Post-War Military-Industrial Record
Considering Britain's defense acquisitions policy when I was writing Geography, Technology and the Flux of Opportunity, and later the working papers that grew into Britain's Defense Policy, 1945-1979, it seemed to me that, if Britain's defense spending was a far cry from that of the far bigger and richer United States, and so could not have produced anything like the range and depth of American military capability, Britain also got less value for the money that it did spend. (Thus Britain, in spite of American assistance, significant sacrifices and initial ambitions ended up far, far behind the superpowers in the size and variegation and capability of its nuclear arsenal. Thus did Britain strain to maintain a carrier force of four small, obsolete ships built in World War II even as the U.S. deployed a force of twenty large ships capable of carrying large wings of supersonic fighters, including the first nuclear-powered supercarriers. And so forth.)
That situation seemed to me to partly be a matter of a pattern I noticed then and which has remained relevant down to the present (something to remember as Keir Starmer essays the Showbusiness for Ugly People performers' dream role of wartime leader), namely how exaggerated notions of what Britain could afford, and the addition to that of a second layer of exaggeration in outsized expectations of "doing a lot with a little" (like being a world power on a two billion pound a year budget), kept running up against an unforgiving reality that forced retrenchment time and time again. This retrenchment after retrenchment entailed a great deal of waste as one program, one project, was canceled after another without result in a way that quickly told.
However, Britain's industrial and monetary weakness had a more direct significance for the country's military projects. After all, Britain's industry was broadly far behind that of the U.S. in completeness (consider Britain's limitations in key areas like machine tools even then) and modernity (where the U.S. government substantially recapitalized the country's already world-class industry, Britain ran its already aged plant into the ground amid an all-out production effort), leaving it more reliant on imports for important inputs, while what it could make it would generally make with less efficiency than others--as testified by how circa 1950 labor productivity in British manufacturing was scarcely one-third that of the United States. Where defense orders are concerned the far more limited orders Britain's armed forces could be expected to place relative to their American counterparts, along with Britain's more limited ability to compete in the defense exports market, meant that the country's defense industry could not enjoy the economies of scale that the U.S. would. And in contrast with a U.S. that at the time had the benefit of a gold-backed dollar, Britain's weakened currency made any importation more taxing monetarily.
This industrial weaknesses, the diseconomies of smaller scale, and the reliance on more and more painfully gained imports, meant that there could be no comparison where the efficiency of defense spending was concerned. Indeed, they meant that it made less and less sense to try and maintain what was already an increasingly superficial self-sufficiency in this area, the more in as Britain could ill-afford the resources that trying to do so required absorbed. The country, after all, was in dire need of industrial rejuvenation in the post-war period, and if the sorts of writers who tend to take up the topic prefer to snivel and sneer at the outlays on the welfare state in those years (never mind that they were indispensable to social peace at home in that fraught period), the larger sums spent on the warfare state, and the direct and indirect consequences of that spending in that critical period, seem the real drag on a British economy that never got the rejuvenation it needed--a state of affairs that has endured down to the present, as, in line with the traditions of British neoliberalism generally and Blairite New Laborism particularly, the last remnants of Keir Starmer's promised "Green New Deal" fall by the wayside.
That situation seemed to me to partly be a matter of a pattern I noticed then and which has remained relevant down to the present (something to remember as Keir Starmer essays the Showbusiness for Ugly People performers' dream role of wartime leader), namely how exaggerated notions of what Britain could afford, and the addition to that of a second layer of exaggeration in outsized expectations of "doing a lot with a little" (like being a world power on a two billion pound a year budget), kept running up against an unforgiving reality that forced retrenchment time and time again. This retrenchment after retrenchment entailed a great deal of waste as one program, one project, was canceled after another without result in a way that quickly told.
However, Britain's industrial and monetary weakness had a more direct significance for the country's military projects. After all, Britain's industry was broadly far behind that of the U.S. in completeness (consider Britain's limitations in key areas like machine tools even then) and modernity (where the U.S. government substantially recapitalized the country's already world-class industry, Britain ran its already aged plant into the ground amid an all-out production effort), leaving it more reliant on imports for important inputs, while what it could make it would generally make with less efficiency than others--as testified by how circa 1950 labor productivity in British manufacturing was scarcely one-third that of the United States. Where defense orders are concerned the far more limited orders Britain's armed forces could be expected to place relative to their American counterparts, along with Britain's more limited ability to compete in the defense exports market, meant that the country's defense industry could not enjoy the economies of scale that the U.S. would. And in contrast with a U.S. that at the time had the benefit of a gold-backed dollar, Britain's weakened currency made any importation more taxing monetarily.
This industrial weaknesses, the diseconomies of smaller scale, and the reliance on more and more painfully gained imports, meant that there could be no comparison where the efficiency of defense spending was concerned. Indeed, they meant that it made less and less sense to try and maintain what was already an increasingly superficial self-sufficiency in this area, the more in as Britain could ill-afford the resources that trying to do so required absorbed. The country, after all, was in dire need of industrial rejuvenation in the post-war period, and if the sorts of writers who tend to take up the topic prefer to snivel and sneer at the outlays on the welfare state in those years (never mind that they were indispensable to social peace at home in that fraught period), the larger sums spent on the warfare state, and the direct and indirect consequences of that spending in that critical period, seem the real drag on a British economy that never got the rejuvenation it needed--a state of affairs that has endured down to the present, as, in line with the traditions of British neoliberalism generally and Blairite New Laborism particularly, the last remnants of Keir Starmer's promised "Green New Deal" fall by the wayside.
Punching Up, Punching Down, and the "Sense of Humor"
It seems that in recent years we have heard a lot about humor "punching up" or "punching down"--phrases useful because they do remind one that comedy does indeed punch out at something.
Still, one can argue that which direction one is punching in may make a great deal of difference morally.
When someone punches "up" the idea is that the target of the joke is someone life has treated fairly well, for aren't they sitting up there? They might prefer not to be laughed at all if they can help it, but fundamentally they're secure, or have reason to be, and so they "should be able to take a joke," especially one made by someone standing below them in the social scale, and essentially harmless.
By contrast punching down does the opposite, hitting out at those life has treated less well--less well than the one making the joke. They aren't so secure. The expectation that they "should be able to take a joke," especially from this source, isn't necessarily as reasonable. Frankly the mockery easily crosses the line into bullying, as those making the joke affirm when, if the butt of the joke protests, they retort "What? Got no sense of humor?"
Maybe they don't. And maybe they shouldn't be expected to have the "sense of humor" required to take another punch with good grace, having taken too many punches already just getting through the day, so that the only decent thing to do is to not add to their misery--or at least, acknowledge that after throwing a punch at them others have the right to criticize them for having done so.
Alas, these days those eager to defend the right of the bully to punch down with immunity are all too prone to present themselves as advocates of "free speech," and the mainstream media being what it is (and for all the evidences of degeneracy, has always been in significant degree), the organs of the press prone to treat their most dishonest claims with the respect they never show the truly downtrodden.
Still, one can argue that which direction one is punching in may make a great deal of difference morally.
When someone punches "up" the idea is that the target of the joke is someone life has treated fairly well, for aren't they sitting up there? They might prefer not to be laughed at all if they can help it, but fundamentally they're secure, or have reason to be, and so they "should be able to take a joke," especially one made by someone standing below them in the social scale, and essentially harmless.
By contrast punching down does the opposite, hitting out at those life has treated less well--less well than the one making the joke. They aren't so secure. The expectation that they "should be able to take a joke," especially from this source, isn't necessarily as reasonable. Frankly the mockery easily crosses the line into bullying, as those making the joke affirm when, if the butt of the joke protests, they retort "What? Got no sense of humor?"
Maybe they don't. And maybe they shouldn't be expected to have the "sense of humor" required to take another punch with good grace, having taken too many punches already just getting through the day, so that the only decent thing to do is to not add to their misery--or at least, acknowledge that after throwing a punch at them others have the right to criticize them for having done so.
Alas, these days those eager to defend the right of the bully to punch down with immunity are all too prone to present themselves as advocates of "free speech," and the mainstream media being what it is (and for all the evidences of degeneracy, has always been in significant degree), the organs of the press prone to treat their most dishonest claims with the respect they never show the truly downtrodden.
Is the Public Really So Interested in Sex Scandal?
The conventional wisdom has long held that "sex sells" and that the broad public has a profound fascination with "celebrity." Accordingly it seems entirely natural for the media to devote immense amounts of time to the coverage of "sex scandals."
However, as the turn of advertising in recent years demonstrated, the reality is more complicated than this rationale. It isn't "sex" that sells, but the "sex-y." And there is far more difference of opinion in the world about what is "sexy" than what is just "sex"--with this mattering because what people personally find to be sex but at the same time un-sexy is so repellent to them that they become outraged at the media showing it to them at all. And it is the case that a great deal of sex scandal is un-sexy in the extreme.
At the same time it seems that the fascination with celebrity just isn't what it used to be, with this going not just for many kinds of celebrity specifically (thus have we had the decline of the movie star and the supermodel and the sports star) but celebrity itself. The result would seem to be that, however much particular cases may confuse matters (pop singers admittedly do better than most, certainly to go by who the public Googles), the doings of celebrities are also a matter of declining interest for them.
Of course, one may respond to that by pointing out (as media critics have done since at least Thorstein Veblen, that the news media does not orient itself to the public at large, but rather a more limited portion of it--the portion that pays for subscriptions, the portion that advertisers most want to reach, a layer not too old or too young, comparatively affluent, and a good many other things going with all that besides. This is all the more the case given the importance of the Internet in the media world of today, and the subtler but still profound role of the "digital divide" in contemporary life--and that those who do spend lots and lots of time online differ in important ways from the rest of the public, in part because of what they bring to the web, but perhaps also because of how so much use of the web shapes their outlook. Still, it does at least go to show that the matter is more complicated than the truism might have it--and call into question just how much the attention to sex scandal is a matter of the media "Giving the people what they want" rather than the media "Giving the people what it wants to give them," in line with its ample motive to stress such fare.
However, as the turn of advertising in recent years demonstrated, the reality is more complicated than this rationale. It isn't "sex" that sells, but the "sex-y." And there is far more difference of opinion in the world about what is "sexy" than what is just "sex"--with this mattering because what people personally find to be sex but at the same time un-sexy is so repellent to them that they become outraged at the media showing it to them at all. And it is the case that a great deal of sex scandal is un-sexy in the extreme.
At the same time it seems that the fascination with celebrity just isn't what it used to be, with this going not just for many kinds of celebrity specifically (thus have we had the decline of the movie star and the supermodel and the sports star) but celebrity itself. The result would seem to be that, however much particular cases may confuse matters (pop singers admittedly do better than most, certainly to go by who the public Googles), the doings of celebrities are also a matter of declining interest for them.
Of course, one may respond to that by pointing out (as media critics have done since at least Thorstein Veblen, that the news media does not orient itself to the public at large, but rather a more limited portion of it--the portion that pays for subscriptions, the portion that advertisers most want to reach, a layer not too old or too young, comparatively affluent, and a good many other things going with all that besides. This is all the more the case given the importance of the Internet in the media world of today, and the subtler but still profound role of the "digital divide" in contemporary life--and that those who do spend lots and lots of time online differ in important ways from the rest of the public, in part because of what they bring to the web, but perhaps also because of how so much use of the web shapes their outlook. Still, it does at least go to show that the matter is more complicated than the truism might have it--and call into question just how much the attention to sex scandal is a matter of the media "Giving the people what they want" rather than the media "Giving the people what it wants to give them," in line with its ample motive to stress such fare.
Why the News Media So Loves Sex Scandals
In defending its devotion of immense amounts of attention, platform space, resources, to the coverage of tawdry stories the Talking Heads of the media often, explicitly or implicitly, blame the broader public.
"They made us do it!" they say--for instance, when they saturated the public consciousness with coverage of the prosecution and trial of one Orenthal James Simpson for over a year--as they reminded us after Mr. Simpson's recent passing when it became a cliché of the coverage of the event that his trial "captivated the nation."
Of course this was a lie, a lie highly characteristic of how media functionaries cognize the world in its being a lie, and a very stupid one at that by even the very low standard of intelligence prevailing among the operators of the media-industrial complex, but also in its inversion of reality in the way to which said operators are so prone. For the public didn't force them to subject it to "All O.J., All the Time" in 1994-1995. It was the news media that forced "All O.J., All the Time" on the public.
So did it go, a couple of years later, when the sickening reduction of the news to tabloid garbage escalated yet again in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. More clearly than was the case with O.J. the public was repulsed by the affair--as it demonstrated by punishing the Republican party in the mid-term election that caused them to be subjected to the sordid episode day and night, night and day, so much so as to cause some commentators to suggest that the "culture war" had peaked and the world was moving on.
Those commentators were (sadly) wrong about that, the two parties and the political tendencies they stood for too committed to culture war to give up on it, as the last quarter-century has shown us. But the public revulsion at the whole episode was very real.
Still, that never caused the media to back off or even tone down the practice, as we have been reminded time and again in the generation since--and frankly there was no reason to expect the media to do so, since it has never been the slave to public taste that its functionaries so much whine about being. The truth is that they give the public sex scandal because rather than this being demanded of them, or their misapprehension about "what the people want." And it only partly has to do with how such stuff appeals personally to a press corps consisting of people who think, act, speak the part of gossipy courtiers to "the power elite."
What matters most is the fact that, contrary to the pretensions certain currents within identity politics sex scandal is entirely unthreatening to the status quo. A scandal in the world of high finance or government procurement, in the treatment of workers or the operation of the criminal justice system, in the exposure of consumers to danger or the environment to pollution--all of these tend to involve crimes of the powerful against the public, the exposure of which crimes often proves the tip of a very large iceberg, and attention to which makes many question the status quo. (What we misleadingly call "Watergate" went way, way beyond the planting of a few listening devices.)
Because of their nature sex scandals are very, very unlikely to do that. Indeed, they tend to shore up the status quo because they divert attention from (or eliminate space for) other, more material, matters, and indeed to the extent that the public does respond to them the associated sanctimoniousness, moral panic, appeals to prejudice that in this way as in so many others show the press corps to be a pack of Julius Streichers, fan the flames of culture war, with the results this past quarter of a century has shown. This is all the more the case given that, just as the Scythian philosopher Anacharsis observed of written laws, the unwritten standards against which the conduct of sex scandal offends, like cobwebs, catch the smaller and weaker actors, but not the really big malefactors. Some movie actor or independent film producer may be ruined by even a totally baseless charge--but others in spite of a whole multitude of well-founded and well-evidenced charges go on to the highest offices in the land and keep them, not even visibly slowed down by their rake's progress through life. And so the Streichers sink their teeth into them, grateful for the excuse to cover this and not something else as they set about their bad day's work.
"They made us do it!" they say--for instance, when they saturated the public consciousness with coverage of the prosecution and trial of one Orenthal James Simpson for over a year--as they reminded us after Mr. Simpson's recent passing when it became a cliché of the coverage of the event that his trial "captivated the nation."
Of course this was a lie, a lie highly characteristic of how media functionaries cognize the world in its being a lie, and a very stupid one at that by even the very low standard of intelligence prevailing among the operators of the media-industrial complex, but also in its inversion of reality in the way to which said operators are so prone. For the public didn't force them to subject it to "All O.J., All the Time" in 1994-1995. It was the news media that forced "All O.J., All the Time" on the public.
So did it go, a couple of years later, when the sickening reduction of the news to tabloid garbage escalated yet again in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. More clearly than was the case with O.J. the public was repulsed by the affair--as it demonstrated by punishing the Republican party in the mid-term election that caused them to be subjected to the sordid episode day and night, night and day, so much so as to cause some commentators to suggest that the "culture war" had peaked and the world was moving on.
Those commentators were (sadly) wrong about that, the two parties and the political tendencies they stood for too committed to culture war to give up on it, as the last quarter-century has shown us. But the public revulsion at the whole episode was very real.
Still, that never caused the media to back off or even tone down the practice, as we have been reminded time and again in the generation since--and frankly there was no reason to expect the media to do so, since it has never been the slave to public taste that its functionaries so much whine about being. The truth is that they give the public sex scandal because rather than this being demanded of them, or their misapprehension about "what the people want." And it only partly has to do with how such stuff appeals personally to a press corps consisting of people who think, act, speak the part of gossipy courtiers to "the power elite."
What matters most is the fact that, contrary to the pretensions certain currents within identity politics sex scandal is entirely unthreatening to the status quo. A scandal in the world of high finance or government procurement, in the treatment of workers or the operation of the criminal justice system, in the exposure of consumers to danger or the environment to pollution--all of these tend to involve crimes of the powerful against the public, the exposure of which crimes often proves the tip of a very large iceberg, and attention to which makes many question the status quo. (What we misleadingly call "Watergate" went way, way beyond the planting of a few listening devices.)
Because of their nature sex scandals are very, very unlikely to do that. Indeed, they tend to shore up the status quo because they divert attention from (or eliminate space for) other, more material, matters, and indeed to the extent that the public does respond to them the associated sanctimoniousness, moral panic, appeals to prejudice that in this way as in so many others show the press corps to be a pack of Julius Streichers, fan the flames of culture war, with the results this past quarter of a century has shown. This is all the more the case given that, just as the Scythian philosopher Anacharsis observed of written laws, the unwritten standards against which the conduct of sex scandal offends, like cobwebs, catch the smaller and weaker actors, but not the really big malefactors. Some movie actor or independent film producer may be ruined by even a totally baseless charge--but others in spite of a whole multitude of well-founded and well-evidenced charges go on to the highest offices in the land and keep them, not even visibly slowed down by their rake's progress through life. And so the Streichers sink their teeth into them, grateful for the excuse to cover this and not something else as they set about their bad day's work.
Political Centrism and the Flying Car
Political centrism, in the sense of the self-styled "anti-extremist," "non-ideological," "neither left nor right" ideology that emerged in the early Cold War and has constituted the American mainstream ever since, is best understood as conservative Anti-Communism. However, that ideology has been confusingly labeled "liberal" because (in contrast with those who more commonly bear the conservative label in the U.S.) it accepts the conservative understanding that life is not static; that occasionally small changes are necessary to preserve the big things that matter; and that defeating a radical challenge may require some degree of compromise--and what that understanding seemed to require of them in their moment. In the wake of a generation of world war and depression and fascism, with the old order discredited and mass movements evident everywhere and the Soviet Union a force in the world, simply preaching pessimistic bromides about "human nature" and the rest was simply not going to suffice to ward off what centrist conservatives saw as the challenge from the "extreme left," a necessity existing not only for their crushing hopes in Communism but their being given hopes in the capitalism that the centrist was determined to preserve, the system being made to "work for everyone" (or at least, the vast majority of the public persuaded that it could be) a precondition of its survival. Moreover, the advent of the consumer society, New Deal-style reform and Keynesian political economy had them believing they had the tools to do just that at tolerable cost, especially as the post-World War II boom got underway.
Of course, the post-war boom, after all, was the product of a host of exceptional circumstances which did not, could not, last, obviously in trouble by the late 1960s, and a thing of the past by the 1970s (at least, where the advanced industrial world was concerned). Meanwhile the memory of war and depression receded, and if there was a sense among Western elites that deprived and traumatized millions may have been susceptible to socialist appeals, few seem to have thought 1975 at all comparable to 1945 that way--perhaps in part because they did not think much could be done about it at a price they thought acceptable. Meanwhile the right pulled harder in its direction, and a center that had never been all that much in love with reform followed more readily, the more easily in as the apparent threat from the left faded away to nothing in what was supposed to be "the end of history" and "globalization" made it appear to be the case that they couldn't go another way even if they wanted to do so. Delivering improvements in people's lives, or even hopes of such improvement, no longer seemed necessary, for the logic went, There Is No Alternative, and when others reminded the center of how it had once been reform-minded its politicians and commentators were apt to snap "You're still on that?" in that way of authority figures flabbergasted that people they thought their inferiors would presume to so much as recall to them past promises (or crimes).
The attitude toward the flying car is symbolic of that. The promise of the mid-century centrist that the system could deliver the goods came down to the promise of a "world of tomorrow" that was a better version of the world of today. In the world of today the automobile was at the very heart of the "Keynesian Fordist" model, which had at its core the "automotive-industrial complex" that, nourished by the "military-industrial complexes"' colossal orders and other subsidies (like highway systems), gave the country and the world cars, suburbia and all that went with them. The world of tomorrow, improving on that, would give a whole society's people wings as it had (presumably) given them wheels, making those cars fly, an image that can seem to symbolize the centrist promise in its combining constancy with positive change. However, it has since become fashionable to sneer at the thought of the flying car--less because of the technical implausibility or physical hazard such vehicles may represent, or the ecological failings of a society which tried to put every person in a plane the way it had a car (at least, with anything resembling today's technological base), but because of the discomfort of authority with having recalled to them the promises of a better world they made when it was convenient, miserably failed to keep, and would prefer forgotten.
Universal health care? You're still on that?
Flying cars? You're still on that?
Of course, the post-war boom, after all, was the product of a host of exceptional circumstances which did not, could not, last, obviously in trouble by the late 1960s, and a thing of the past by the 1970s (at least, where the advanced industrial world was concerned). Meanwhile the memory of war and depression receded, and if there was a sense among Western elites that deprived and traumatized millions may have been susceptible to socialist appeals, few seem to have thought 1975 at all comparable to 1945 that way--perhaps in part because they did not think much could be done about it at a price they thought acceptable. Meanwhile the right pulled harder in its direction, and a center that had never been all that much in love with reform followed more readily, the more easily in as the apparent threat from the left faded away to nothing in what was supposed to be "the end of history" and "globalization" made it appear to be the case that they couldn't go another way even if they wanted to do so. Delivering improvements in people's lives, or even hopes of such improvement, no longer seemed necessary, for the logic went, There Is No Alternative, and when others reminded the center of how it had once been reform-minded its politicians and commentators were apt to snap "You're still on that?" in that way of authority figures flabbergasted that people they thought their inferiors would presume to so much as recall to them past promises (or crimes).
The attitude toward the flying car is symbolic of that. The promise of the mid-century centrist that the system could deliver the goods came down to the promise of a "world of tomorrow" that was a better version of the world of today. In the world of today the automobile was at the very heart of the "Keynesian Fordist" model, which had at its core the "automotive-industrial complex" that, nourished by the "military-industrial complexes"' colossal orders and other subsidies (like highway systems), gave the country and the world cars, suburbia and all that went with them. The world of tomorrow, improving on that, would give a whole society's people wings as it had (presumably) given them wheels, making those cars fly, an image that can seem to symbolize the centrist promise in its combining constancy with positive change. However, it has since become fashionable to sneer at the thought of the flying car--less because of the technical implausibility or physical hazard such vehicles may represent, or the ecological failings of a society which tried to put every person in a plane the way it had a car (at least, with anything resembling today's technological base), but because of the discomfort of authority with having recalled to them the promises of a better world they made when it was convenient, miserably failed to keep, and would prefer forgotten.
Universal health care? You're still on that?
Flying cars? You're still on that?
The List of the 100 Most Web-Searched People and What it Says About Celebrity Today
The web traffic analysis company Glimpse recently published its list of the 100 people most searched for in 2024 (based on its sampling of Google's traffic).
As might be guessed in this exceptionally fraught election year the presidential election was significant in the rankings. (Thus did Donald Trump make the #1 position, Kamala Harris #10, while such figures as Elon Musk and Joe Rogan also owe their places in the upper ranks of the list to the election, these placing at #3 and #20, respectively.)
But what about the figures from the world of entertainment who more conventionally dominate the list? These were present, too, of course, accounting for seven of the top ten spots--with six of them coming from the music world, starting with Taylor Swift at #2, and continuing with Ariana Grande at #4, Drake at #5, Billie Eilish at #6, and so on. Athletes do pop up here and there, with Cristiano Ronaldo at #9, LeBron James at #14, Travis Scott at #15, but they are a weaker presence (while in the case of Scott one would wonder whether he would rank so highly without his association with Swift), all as even those who have made a significant name for themselves as actors tend to have a strong presence in music as well, as with Selena Gomez at #18. Only with Tom Holland at #38 does an actor who is not also well-known as a singer or rapper first appear (and one might wonder if he is not, like Scott, helped in this by his higher-ranked and more musical girlfriend, his Spider-Man franchise co-star Zendaya, who in 2024 was up at #28).
All that seems to affirm the view that amid this period in which, amid cultural fragmentation and much else, traditional celebrity is in decline, the pop stars are doing better in holding on to their cultural cachet than their counterparts in sports, acting and certainly fashion.
As might be guessed in this exceptionally fraught election year the presidential election was significant in the rankings. (Thus did Donald Trump make the #1 position, Kamala Harris #10, while such figures as Elon Musk and Joe Rogan also owe their places in the upper ranks of the list to the election, these placing at #3 and #20, respectively.)
But what about the figures from the world of entertainment who more conventionally dominate the list? These were present, too, of course, accounting for seven of the top ten spots--with six of them coming from the music world, starting with Taylor Swift at #2, and continuing with Ariana Grande at #4, Drake at #5, Billie Eilish at #6, and so on. Athletes do pop up here and there, with Cristiano Ronaldo at #9, LeBron James at #14, Travis Scott at #15, but they are a weaker presence (while in the case of Scott one would wonder whether he would rank so highly without his association with Swift), all as even those who have made a significant name for themselves as actors tend to have a strong presence in music as well, as with Selena Gomez at #18. Only with Tom Holland at #38 does an actor who is not also well-known as a singer or rapper first appear (and one might wonder if he is not, like Scott, helped in this by his higher-ranked and more musical girlfriend, his Spider-Man franchise co-star Zendaya, who in 2024 was up at #28).
All that seems to affirm the view that amid this period in which, amid cultural fragmentation and much else, traditional celebrity is in decline, the pop stars are doing better in holding on to their cultural cachet than their counterparts in sports, acting and certainly fashion.
The "Neo" Liberals of the Democratic Party and the Centrist Outlook
For quite a number of years those few who mention the "neoliberals" who came to prominence within the Democratic Party in the 1980s at all (a tendency identifiable with such persons as Gary Hart) have mainly been centrists (a Jonathan Chait, a Bill Scher) who, either in extreme ignorance or extreme bad faith, claim to know nothing of "neoliberalism" in the sense in which it has been more commonly used--as a term referring to an economic theory, policy, model of global significance in the way popularized by David Harvey some two decades ago in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism.
Of course, in pointing this out it is only fair to acknowledge that the Democratic Party neoliberals did embrace neoliberalism in the other, Harvey, sense of the term, exalting markets and attacking government as they maligned social programs, labor unions and government workers as the source of the country's "uncompetitiveness," and singing odes to "entrepreneurs" and the "information age" that has been so important to the associated propaganda (Gary Hart, indeed, a Democratic party counterpart to the information age-hype besotted Newt Gingrich, with whom he found much common ground in their days together on Capitol Hill--as Gingrich himself owned). Still, these neoliberals were not embracing a label that, as yet, had not become so closely attached to the economic policy-model with which most identify the term today. Rather, certainly to go by what that key theoretician of the movement Charles Peters had to say, the "Neo" liberals defined themselves in relation to "Old" liberals in the American sense, rather than liberalism in the eighteenth century, "libertarian" sense that is elsewhere the more common usage, and which is evoked in the term "neoliberalism."
In considering that opposition I think it would be a mistake to downplay the extent to which there was a fundamental clash of economic ideas that had them on opposing sides when the "neoliberal turn" came. However, as Charles Peters spelled it out in the version of "A Neoliberal's Manifesto" he published in the May 1983 edition of his magazine The Washington Monthly, Old liberals were guilty of four particular failings not simply reducible to being wrong on economic policy, abiding by the rules "Don't Say Anything Bad About the Good Guy" (and "Don't Say Anything Good About the Bad Guys"), "Pull Up the Ladder," "The More the Merrier," and "Politics are Bad and Politicians Are Even Worse."
Unpacking all this what one got was a condemnation of "Old" liberals for attachment to particular principles, disadvantaged groups, and established programs, and their aversion to "grubby" politics--the Old liberal commitment to using government to help the disadvantaged, and the traditional Progressive insistence on honest, "clean," government--which may be usefully compared with the standard of legitimate discourse that is so central to centrism. Neither that standard of discourse, nor centrism, are explicitly raised in Peters' "Manifesto"--indeed, the meaning of these terms is rarely ever spelled out in part let alone whole in American discussion (for many reasons)--but almost always relevant to explaining American politics, then as now, because of the way it permeates so many premises and assumptions that are not always spoken, and of which they are not always conscious. As described here the centrist prides themselves on the "non-ideological," "pragmatic," "pluralistic," "civil" politics they regard as the hallmark of "adults in the room" sanity, maturity and responsibility, in which they reject principled stands and talk of right and wrong as "ideological" and "ethical" and "extremist," instead overseeing the unavoidably grubby haggling among interest groups, none more or less worthy than any others and who had best be civil toward each other and not put each other down and make reasonable compromises with each other if they were to get along and keep a liberal society from sliding down the steep and slippery slope to an Orwellian hellscape that their ideology says that anyone's doing anything else whatsoever will surely produce. Peters accused the Old liberals of having sinned against all that by defending particular groups and policies, by taking principled stands on what is right and wrong and ethical and not ethical, by being ready to be adversarial in their commitments and the "good guys vs. bad guys" view to which all this led, and their distaste for what any normal person would recognize as corruption. Meanwhile Peters stressed what good players by the centrist rules the "Neo" liberals were by contrast in talking up their supposedly "nothing is sacred" attitude when it came to doing what they thought needed to get done to "move the country forward" (their eagerness to kill Social Security and other "entitlements," their spoiling for a chance to be "tough" with labor and schoolteachers and the rest) that saw them not just ready to reject and punish supposed "good guys" but "reach across the aisle" to work with the supposed "bad guys" in the spirit of "bipartisanship" so dear to the centrist (as Hart was to do with Gingrich).
Taking the package altogether one can see this as not just an attack from the more rightward element within the Democratic Party on its more leftward element and its supporters and causes reflective of "the neoliberal turn," but (entirely consistent with that direction of attack given centrism's essential conservatism) an attack on the liberals that used centrist political theory as an important basis, one that most certainly mattered. In sneering at those who use terms like neoliberal the aforementioned Bill Scher quipped that "nobody has spotted a neoliberal in the wild since Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign"--apparently ignorant of the fact that if the exposure of an extramarital affair destroyed Gary Hart's political career (how quaint that notion seems today!), and that not in 1984 but 1988 when Hart was very much "spottable in the wild," Bill Clinton, a prominent figure in the Neoliberal movement as chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, continued to bear the standard for the tendency. And indeed, bore it all the way to the White House with, whatever Mr. Scher may think or claim to think, Charles Peters himself lauding Clinton's ascent in a piece in a not-so-very-obscure newspaper called the New York Times as "The Second Coming of Neo-Liberalism," and, of course, Bill Clinton living up to the expectations of him as a neoliberal in both senses of the term during his two terms in office, which have defined the Democratic Party ever since--and in turn, defined American politics ever since, not least through how they have again and again brought the party defeat, with all its implications for the national political scene as a whole.
Of course, in pointing this out it is only fair to acknowledge that the Democratic Party neoliberals did embrace neoliberalism in the other, Harvey, sense of the term, exalting markets and attacking government as they maligned social programs, labor unions and government workers as the source of the country's "uncompetitiveness," and singing odes to "entrepreneurs" and the "information age" that has been so important to the associated propaganda (Gary Hart, indeed, a Democratic party counterpart to the information age-hype besotted Newt Gingrich, with whom he found much common ground in their days together on Capitol Hill--as Gingrich himself owned). Still, these neoliberals were not embracing a label that, as yet, had not become so closely attached to the economic policy-model with which most identify the term today. Rather, certainly to go by what that key theoretician of the movement Charles Peters had to say, the "Neo" liberals defined themselves in relation to "Old" liberals in the American sense, rather than liberalism in the eighteenth century, "libertarian" sense that is elsewhere the more common usage, and which is evoked in the term "neoliberalism."
In considering that opposition I think it would be a mistake to downplay the extent to which there was a fundamental clash of economic ideas that had them on opposing sides when the "neoliberal turn" came. However, as Charles Peters spelled it out in the version of "A Neoliberal's Manifesto" he published in the May 1983 edition of his magazine The Washington Monthly, Old liberals were guilty of four particular failings not simply reducible to being wrong on economic policy, abiding by the rules "Don't Say Anything Bad About the Good Guy" (and "Don't Say Anything Good About the Bad Guys"), "Pull Up the Ladder," "The More the Merrier," and "Politics are Bad and Politicians Are Even Worse."
Unpacking all this what one got was a condemnation of "Old" liberals for attachment to particular principles, disadvantaged groups, and established programs, and their aversion to "grubby" politics--the Old liberal commitment to using government to help the disadvantaged, and the traditional Progressive insistence on honest, "clean," government--which may be usefully compared with the standard of legitimate discourse that is so central to centrism. Neither that standard of discourse, nor centrism, are explicitly raised in Peters' "Manifesto"--indeed, the meaning of these terms is rarely ever spelled out in part let alone whole in American discussion (for many reasons)--but almost always relevant to explaining American politics, then as now, because of the way it permeates so many premises and assumptions that are not always spoken, and of which they are not always conscious. As described here the centrist prides themselves on the "non-ideological," "pragmatic," "pluralistic," "civil" politics they regard as the hallmark of "adults in the room" sanity, maturity and responsibility, in which they reject principled stands and talk of right and wrong as "ideological" and "ethical" and "extremist," instead overseeing the unavoidably grubby haggling among interest groups, none more or less worthy than any others and who had best be civil toward each other and not put each other down and make reasonable compromises with each other if they were to get along and keep a liberal society from sliding down the steep and slippery slope to an Orwellian hellscape that their ideology says that anyone's doing anything else whatsoever will surely produce. Peters accused the Old liberals of having sinned against all that by defending particular groups and policies, by taking principled stands on what is right and wrong and ethical and not ethical, by being ready to be adversarial in their commitments and the "good guys vs. bad guys" view to which all this led, and their distaste for what any normal person would recognize as corruption. Meanwhile Peters stressed what good players by the centrist rules the "Neo" liberals were by contrast in talking up their supposedly "nothing is sacred" attitude when it came to doing what they thought needed to get done to "move the country forward" (their eagerness to kill Social Security and other "entitlements," their spoiling for a chance to be "tough" with labor and schoolteachers and the rest) that saw them not just ready to reject and punish supposed "good guys" but "reach across the aisle" to work with the supposed "bad guys" in the spirit of "bipartisanship" so dear to the centrist (as Hart was to do with Gingrich).
Taking the package altogether one can see this as not just an attack from the more rightward element within the Democratic Party on its more leftward element and its supporters and causes reflective of "the neoliberal turn," but (entirely consistent with that direction of attack given centrism's essential conservatism) an attack on the liberals that used centrist political theory as an important basis, one that most certainly mattered. In sneering at those who use terms like neoliberal the aforementioned Bill Scher quipped that "nobody has spotted a neoliberal in the wild since Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign"--apparently ignorant of the fact that if the exposure of an extramarital affair destroyed Gary Hart's political career (how quaint that notion seems today!), and that not in 1984 but 1988 when Hart was very much "spottable in the wild," Bill Clinton, a prominent figure in the Neoliberal movement as chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, continued to bear the standard for the tendency. And indeed, bore it all the way to the White House with, whatever Mr. Scher may think or claim to think, Charles Peters himself lauding Clinton's ascent in a piece in a not-so-very-obscure newspaper called the New York Times as "The Second Coming of Neo-Liberalism," and, of course, Bill Clinton living up to the expectations of him as a neoliberal in both senses of the term during his two terms in office, which have defined the Democratic Party ever since--and in turn, defined American politics ever since, not least through how they have again and again brought the party defeat, with all its implications for the national political scene as a whole.
Did the Digital Age Exacerbate "Temporarily Embarrassed Billionaire Syndrome?"
You have probably at some point heard the line that Americans who are not well-off often support right-wing economic policies not because they think they are good for the poor (indeed, often do so in spite of being persuaded that they are not) because they expect to personally benefit from a regime of effectively regressive taxation, few or no rights for workers, etc. when they someday join the ranks of the rich--sooner than later returning to a station that seems to them so natural and proper that one may speak of them in their present state as "Temporarily Embarrassed Billionaires." Just how widespread and deeply rooted this tendency actually is has long been a matter of argument (some go so far as to say that it is why "socialism never took off in America," some think it frankly irrelevant to the larger course of American political history), but few seem to go so far as to deny the existence of people who think in such terms altogether.
Accepting that one may well wonder about the implications of the age of the Internet for such thinking.
Considering that it seems relevant that the Internet, contrary to the (asinine) cyber-utopian propaganda, has proven itself much more useful to the right than the left--which is significant as it is the ideas of the right and not the left that are conducive to, indeed endlessly promote, the "syndrome." Central to it is the belief that, as Kurt Vonnegut had it, it is very easy to make money--indeed, to make really big money in no time at all--which the right certainly promotes with its stress on "opportunity," "entrepreneurship" and the "self-made man," seizing on "tech" in particular for a latterday basis for such images, most obviously through the cults those espousing and influenced by such ideas built up around figures like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, and Silicon Valley more broadly. Meanwhile there is what those technologies made possible, what indeed can seem indicative of their real macroeconomic significance (manipulating information rather than things), like the supposed "democratization" of stock trading that gave rise to a day trading boom in the 1990s that is probably inextricable from the simultaneous dot-com hysteria that did so much to add the glitter to names like Gates' (Dow Jones 1 Million, Today!) and the subsequent rise of "crypto" that drives the belief that if not everyone can be a "tech billionaire" they can still make a fortune speculating on the ripples that the activity of tech billionaires sends through the market. For many seemingly even more accessible, there is the idea that in an age of "social media," "podcasting" and "influencers" anyone with an Internet connection and a camera with aspirations to being an artist, journalist, "thought-leader," etc. can achieve celebrity and all its rewards.
Amplifying all this the media, in line with its political and social biases even more than its stupid sensationalism, seizing on the "success stories," relentlessly promoted the illusion that slanted accounts of one-in-a-million and often totally random "successes" were somehow a rational life plan for everybody, as they totally ignored what really happened to the vast majority of persons walking this path. Those who were ruined by that "startup" or that speculative endeavor. Those who went out on the Internet and found that to be online is generally to be either ignored or abused--ignored so completely that they suspect there are no real human beings online or abused so brutally that they think that the only human beings online are of that species of human scum we call "trolls."
Confronted with the disappointment they are far more likely to meet with than the success the good conformist that Authority and Conventionality encourage everyone to be will take to heart the teaching that, whatever the facts, they "have no one to blame but themselves"--and so, returning to Vonnegut, "blame and blame and blame themselves," and hate themselves, with their only potential escape from such hatred of themselves their redeeming themselves their trying again and this time succeeding. Others, less thoroughly conformist, having invested themselves in an unfortunate enterprise, and not for the first time, may question the Conventional Wisdom--and often go only so far. Having seen how entrepreneurship and hard work does not pay off, they may simply decide that "life" is a "cheat and a snare." However, others may well take a harder look than that at what they have been made to believe, begin to understand that going through life thinking oneself a "Temporarily Embarrassed Billionaire" is insanity for an individual, and worse still for a society made up of them, and start to come to grips with those realities from which they have all their lives been told to look away. And that is the most interesting, and potentially meaningful, part of the story.
Accepting that one may well wonder about the implications of the age of the Internet for such thinking.
Considering that it seems relevant that the Internet, contrary to the (asinine) cyber-utopian propaganda, has proven itself much more useful to the right than the left--which is significant as it is the ideas of the right and not the left that are conducive to, indeed endlessly promote, the "syndrome." Central to it is the belief that, as Kurt Vonnegut had it, it is very easy to make money--indeed, to make really big money in no time at all--which the right certainly promotes with its stress on "opportunity," "entrepreneurship" and the "self-made man," seizing on "tech" in particular for a latterday basis for such images, most obviously through the cults those espousing and influenced by such ideas built up around figures like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, and Silicon Valley more broadly. Meanwhile there is what those technologies made possible, what indeed can seem indicative of their real macroeconomic significance (manipulating information rather than things), like the supposed "democratization" of stock trading that gave rise to a day trading boom in the 1990s that is probably inextricable from the simultaneous dot-com hysteria that did so much to add the glitter to names like Gates' (Dow Jones 1 Million, Today!) and the subsequent rise of "crypto" that drives the belief that if not everyone can be a "tech billionaire" they can still make a fortune speculating on the ripples that the activity of tech billionaires sends through the market. For many seemingly even more accessible, there is the idea that in an age of "social media," "podcasting" and "influencers" anyone with an Internet connection and a camera with aspirations to being an artist, journalist, "thought-leader," etc. can achieve celebrity and all its rewards.
Amplifying all this the media, in line with its political and social biases even more than its stupid sensationalism, seizing on the "success stories," relentlessly promoted the illusion that slanted accounts of one-in-a-million and often totally random "successes" were somehow a rational life plan for everybody, as they totally ignored what really happened to the vast majority of persons walking this path. Those who were ruined by that "startup" or that speculative endeavor. Those who went out on the Internet and found that to be online is generally to be either ignored or abused--ignored so completely that they suspect there are no real human beings online or abused so brutally that they think that the only human beings online are of that species of human scum we call "trolls."
Confronted with the disappointment they are far more likely to meet with than the success the good conformist that Authority and Conventionality encourage everyone to be will take to heart the teaching that, whatever the facts, they "have no one to blame but themselves"--and so, returning to Vonnegut, "blame and blame and blame themselves," and hate themselves, with their only potential escape from such hatred of themselves their redeeming themselves their trying again and this time succeeding. Others, less thoroughly conformist, having invested themselves in an unfortunate enterprise, and not for the first time, may question the Conventional Wisdom--and often go only so far. Having seen how entrepreneurship and hard work does not pay off, they may simply decide that "life" is a "cheat and a snare." However, others may well take a harder look than that at what they have been made to believe, begin to understand that going through life thinking oneself a "Temporarily Embarrassed Billionaire" is insanity for an individual, and worse still for a society made up of them, and start to come to grips with those realities from which they have all their lives been told to look away. And that is the most interesting, and potentially meaningful, part of the story.
What Might We Hope for From a System of Higher Education?
Lately I have been writing a fair bit about the failings of "the higher learning in America." Considering the failings raises the matter of the standard by which the system is being judged to have failings--and that in turn raises the question of what the system should be like, as against what we actually have.
For the purposes of this post I think it best to stress broad desiderata rather than specifics of their realization. These would, at a minimum, include the system's being such that:
* Personal finances and social background will be no barrier to an individual's not only attending college but achieving in college--all as no one is forced to go to college by a "credentialing crisis" compelling the acquisition of "unnecessary" degrees for the sake of being able to land employment offering a "living wage," or simply because they "don't know what to do with themselves" at the end of high school.
* While any system affording a measure of academic freedom and scope for innovation will guarantee that performance will not be perfectly identical across institutions, the standard of education across the entire system would be uniformly high, and perceptions of the differences based on an institution's practical performance rather than social snobbery and caste prejudice masquerading as "meritocracy" and other such idiocies of the "Cult of the Good School." Accordingly the possession of a college degree will command respect as an indication of the expected competency regardless of which institution granted it.
* At least the higher-performing portion of the body of K-12 graduates will finish their studies at that level genuinely prepared for college-level study, should they elect to continue their education there (as we cease to rely on college to make up for the failings of lower levels of schooling). At the same time college instructors will not be assigned a class until they themselves have been properly trained to oversee a class of the type in question (as against the present system where the hardest teaching might well be dumped on unprepared junior personnel for the sake of administrative convenience).
* No college instructor would be expected to accept a life of poverty and insecurity as the terms of their job, the competent teacher would not be penalized for failing to produce research, the competent researcher would not be required to grudgingly bear a teaching load as the price of being able to do their research (or spend their whole lives jumping through hoops to get hold of inadequate sums of grant money), and the burden on instructors of the college's administrative tasks would be kept to the absolute minimum.
* The content of teaching within "the Academy" would correspond to the world's actualities as its scholars ascertain them, rather than falling into irrelevant Scholasticism, or worse, political indoctrination, such that professors of their subjects would have meaningful expertise to lend society at large. (Those looking for an example of the extreme opposite of this ideal can find it in academic economics as it has been these past many decades.) The elimination of the hierarchy among institutions would simplify this, insofar as it would eliminate the dominance of the training of instructors and editing and publication of scholarship by a very small number of institutions (a fact that, again citing the example of economics, contributed to the degeneration of science into dogma).
* Students would have the benefit of transparency from their administrators regarding everything demanded of them academically or in other ways, and what they can expect in the way of the return on their effort in and out of the classroom--with this extending to the career prospects entailed by particular lines of study (instead of the generalities, pieties and outright lies that students are offered instead about what they might hope for from their major).
* The sciences would flourish on campus--and the liberal arts flourish along with the sciences--with the two being seen as complementary and even symbiotic rather than in contention with each other.
Do I see any chance of reform meaningfully moving American higher education in such a direction? I must admit that I do not even see a chance of meaningful discussion of such standards for the system, let alone means for enabling it to attain those standards--the microscopic room within the mainstream today for discussing anything of consequence at all guaranteeing that, the more in as any serious discussion of education is apt to quickly raise matters far, far beyond the narrow understanding of the subject on which our so-called "pragmatists" so naggingly insist.
For the purposes of this post I think it best to stress broad desiderata rather than specifics of their realization. These would, at a minimum, include the system's being such that:
* Personal finances and social background will be no barrier to an individual's not only attending college but achieving in college--all as no one is forced to go to college by a "credentialing crisis" compelling the acquisition of "unnecessary" degrees for the sake of being able to land employment offering a "living wage," or simply because they "don't know what to do with themselves" at the end of high school.
* While any system affording a measure of academic freedom and scope for innovation will guarantee that performance will not be perfectly identical across institutions, the standard of education across the entire system would be uniformly high, and perceptions of the differences based on an institution's practical performance rather than social snobbery and caste prejudice masquerading as "meritocracy" and other such idiocies of the "Cult of the Good School." Accordingly the possession of a college degree will command respect as an indication of the expected competency regardless of which institution granted it.
* At least the higher-performing portion of the body of K-12 graduates will finish their studies at that level genuinely prepared for college-level study, should they elect to continue their education there (as we cease to rely on college to make up for the failings of lower levels of schooling). At the same time college instructors will not be assigned a class until they themselves have been properly trained to oversee a class of the type in question (as against the present system where the hardest teaching might well be dumped on unprepared junior personnel for the sake of administrative convenience).
* No college instructor would be expected to accept a life of poverty and insecurity as the terms of their job, the competent teacher would not be penalized for failing to produce research, the competent researcher would not be required to grudgingly bear a teaching load as the price of being able to do their research (or spend their whole lives jumping through hoops to get hold of inadequate sums of grant money), and the burden on instructors of the college's administrative tasks would be kept to the absolute minimum.
* The content of teaching within "the Academy" would correspond to the world's actualities as its scholars ascertain them, rather than falling into irrelevant Scholasticism, or worse, political indoctrination, such that professors of their subjects would have meaningful expertise to lend society at large. (Those looking for an example of the extreme opposite of this ideal can find it in academic economics as it has been these past many decades.) The elimination of the hierarchy among institutions would simplify this, insofar as it would eliminate the dominance of the training of instructors and editing and publication of scholarship by a very small number of institutions (a fact that, again citing the example of economics, contributed to the degeneration of science into dogma).
* Students would have the benefit of transparency from their administrators regarding everything demanded of them academically or in other ways, and what they can expect in the way of the return on their effort in and out of the classroom--with this extending to the career prospects entailed by particular lines of study (instead of the generalities, pieties and outright lies that students are offered instead about what they might hope for from their major).
* The sciences would flourish on campus--and the liberal arts flourish along with the sciences--with the two being seen as complementary and even symbiotic rather than in contention with each other.
Do I see any chance of reform meaningfully moving American higher education in such a direction? I must admit that I do not even see a chance of meaningful discussion of such standards for the system, let alone means for enabling it to attain those standards--the microscopic room within the mainstream today for discussing anything of consequence at all guaranteeing that, the more in as any serious discussion of education is apt to quickly raise matters far, far beyond the narrow understanding of the subject on which our so-called "pragmatists" so naggingly insist.
If All Art is Propaganda, Then What is Art Criticism?
While there has been argument over the matter of who said it first, and indeed the remark may be more strongly associated with figures other than himself, Upton Sinclair seems to have originated the remark that "all art is propaganda," and certainly enlarged upon and argued forcefully for the position in his study Mammonart.
Of course, if "all art is propaganda" one may ask what that means for all art criticism. The obvious answer would seem to be that art criticism is, at least in part and on at some level, propaganda criticism.
Thus if it is not just sanctimonious but foolish to assail art for being "propaganda," and folly to sniff about art having a "Message," it is also not just sanctimonious but foolish and folly to sniff about art critics being attentive to the propaganda--to the political content--of the works they examine. Rather one would do better to judge them for how well or how badly they do the job.
Going by what I see of those pros enjoying space on major platforms today, the current cohort tends to do the job about as well as the professional political commentators similarly enjoying space on the major platforms--which is to say very, very badly indeed.
Of course, if "all art is propaganda" one may ask what that means for all art criticism. The obvious answer would seem to be that art criticism is, at least in part and on at some level, propaganda criticism.
Thus if it is not just sanctimonious but foolish to assail art for being "propaganda," and folly to sniff about art having a "Message," it is also not just sanctimonious but foolish and folly to sniff about art critics being attentive to the propaganda--to the political content--of the works they examine. Rather one would do better to judge them for how well or how badly they do the job.
Going by what I see of those pros enjoying space on major platforms today, the current cohort tends to do the job about as well as the professional political commentators similarly enjoying space on the major platforms--which is to say very, very badly indeed.
The Frank Cowperwood Saga: Theodore Dreiser's The Financier and The Titan
In discussing Theodore Dreiser's Frank Cowperwood novels it seems common to refer to them as a trilogy (the "Trilogy of Desire") consisting of The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1945). However, Theodore Dreiser originally wrote The Financier and The Titan as a single novel that the publisher split into two parts. Moreover, while the close of The Titan does offer a sketch of Dreiser's plans for a third book, he only started the concluding The Stoic much later in the 1930s, and did not live to see it through publication--in a heavily downsized form, to go by what I have read. Given that the first two were completed as a single work and published close together, and that what we have of the third appeared so much later it seems to me worthwhile to take the first two books in the saga and review them together while keeping in mind how they work as individual novels and as one single novel, without reference to the third work (which as of the time of this writing, I have not read).
The reviews of the The Financier and The Titan are now up--along with a third item about how Dreiser and Balzac both treated the figure of the businessman in their tales. (Knowing how much Balzac meant to Dreiser, and being struck by the parallels--and differences--between the writers as I read through the books doing so just seemed natural.)
The reviews of the The Financier and The Titan are now up--along with a third item about how Dreiser and Balzac both treated the figure of the businessman in their tales. (Knowing how much Balzac meant to Dreiser, and being struck by the parallels--and differences--between the writers as I read through the books doing so just seemed natural.)
Frank Cowperwood and the World of "Philanthropy"
In the course of Theodore Dreiser's The Titan the protagonist Frank Cowperwood, fighting to establish his streetcar monopoly in Chicago in the face of determined opposition from vengeful business and personal enemies, finds himself having a tough time getting the credit he needs to continue in his campaign--just when he is approached by an astronomer attached to a certain local university on the grow (implicitly, the then-newly founded University of Chicago) looking for donations for the construction of what he intends to be the world's most powerful observatory.
Dreiser's Cowperwood is sufficiently intellectual to have some respect for such a project and the intelligence and earnestness of the man endeavoring to realize it. However, that is not what is foremost in his mind. Rather it is that if the astronomer merely hopes for only a small part of the total cost from Cowperwood, Cowperwood, who realizes that he could easily afford to pay for the whole project, also realizes that "[o]n such a repute" as would accrue to him from paying for such an observatory end his problems raising credit at a stroke by impressing the financial world with his means. Indeed, he inwardly says "'At last! At last!'" at that very moment, makes the "donation," and gets exactly the result he expected. His "gift" making bankers take "sharp note of the donor" of such extraordinary means, Cowperwood now found his requests for "bond and mortgage loans" on his infrastructure projects "courteously received" even by houses that we had just seen give him the brush-off, and his bonds quickly taken up for sale, so that he had all the money he needed to proceed--while "those who had been scheming to bring about Cowperwood's downfall gnashed impotent teeth."
As it was then, so it remains now, the donations of the rich frequently serving other ends besides altruism--though such realities are apt to be slighted by the elite's courtiers in the mainstream press and the gullible portion of the public which respects its singing of "philanthropists," quite sure that when sex scandal-ridden ex-presidents and tech billionaires say they only hung out with Jeffrey Epstein for the benefit of their charitable foundations they consider it expression of a disbelief of them the mark of a low and shabby mind insufficiently respectful of the elite before whom their sort expect all "right-thinking people" to bow and scrape."
Dreiser's Cowperwood is sufficiently intellectual to have some respect for such a project and the intelligence and earnestness of the man endeavoring to realize it. However, that is not what is foremost in his mind. Rather it is that if the astronomer merely hopes for only a small part of the total cost from Cowperwood, Cowperwood, who realizes that he could easily afford to pay for the whole project, also realizes that "[o]n such a repute" as would accrue to him from paying for such an observatory end his problems raising credit at a stroke by impressing the financial world with his means. Indeed, he inwardly says "'At last! At last!'" at that very moment, makes the "donation," and gets exactly the result he expected. His "gift" making bankers take "sharp note of the donor" of such extraordinary means, Cowperwood now found his requests for "bond and mortgage loans" on his infrastructure projects "courteously received" even by houses that we had just seen give him the brush-off, and his bonds quickly taken up for sale, so that he had all the money he needed to proceed--while "those who had been scheming to bring about Cowperwood's downfall gnashed impotent teeth."
As it was then, so it remains now, the donations of the rich frequently serving other ends besides altruism--though such realities are apt to be slighted by the elite's courtiers in the mainstream press and the gullible portion of the public which respects its singing of "philanthropists," quite sure that when sex scandal-ridden ex-presidents and tech billionaires say they only hung out with Jeffrey Epstein for the benefit of their charitable foundations they consider it expression of a disbelief of them the mark of a low and shabby mind insufficiently respectful of the elite before whom their sort expect all "right-thinking people" to bow and scrape."