Law & Order: Criminal Intent ran for ten seasons (2001-2010), during which it aired 195 episodes. It is a very respectable run for a TV show by almost any reasonable measure. Still, there is no denying that this run pales next to that of its two predecessors, the original Law & Order (in fanspeak, the "mothership") with its rare two decade run (1990-2010), and the first spin-off, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU), now in its twenty-seventh season on the air (1999-)--and that in this it was something of a disappointment for the producers. This was all the more in as the show's managing the ten seasons it did was partly a matter of their after season seven shifting it away from its original home on American Big Three network NBC to basic cable channel USA to get along on a lower budget in a milieu where a show could justify its staying on the air with rather lower ratings than network prime time required, in spite of which it only lasted three seasons more (the last of these a mere eight episodes).
Considering why that was it seems at least partly the case that it was a sign of the times. Appearing in 2001 Criminal Intent came into a market still somewhat more resistant to the franchise-milking taken for granted today. (Thus did we see in one episode of The Simpsons satirical reference to Law & Order: Elevator Inspectors Unit.) At the same time the show had to establish itself in a very different media world from the one that the original series launched in a decade before, or even "SVU" a mere two years earlier, with the reality TV and prestige TV booms newly but forcefully underway, and leaving less room for a procedural series, casual viewers easily inclining to reality TV's trashy ultra-lowbrow offerings of the former, the more "serious" viewers the snobby middlebrow offerings of prestige TV, and everything in between squeezed, perhaps especially where it was built on standalone episodes rather than trying to hook viewers with an arc in the hope that at least some of them would check out the next episode. Indeed, even the original Law & Order was doing less well, such that it ended its run the very same year that Criminal Intent went off the air, while no subsequent spin-off has fared so well yet. (Indeed, it seems notable that those entries that have stayed on the air for long have adapted to the expectations of the new market, not least in a greater tendency to arcs rather than standalone episodes, as seen in the more recent seasons of SVU, and the most successful of the newer series', Law & Order: Organized Crime, constructed around season-long arcs.)
Still, it seems entirely reasonable to think that what the show itself had to offer--its particular variation on the franchise's cops-and-prosecutors' theme--was at least partially responsible, that indeed the concept was a tougher sell in some ways, with this easier to appreciate if one considers the structure and tone that the original Law & Order established early on as the series' baseline. This had episodes beginning with a scene in which someone stumbles on the body of a murder victim, after which the episode focuses strictly on the professional activity of the two partnered detectives tasked with identifying and arresting the suspect and the two Assistant District Attorneys (ADAs) tasked with the Prosecution, respectively. This is so much so that we rarely saw events from the viewpoints of any other characters but these as the viewer comes to know of the drama behind the murder from what the four principals see themselves, and what the people they talk to tell them, while the writers kept even the principals' personal lives deep in the background, rarely even referenced as the detectives concentrated on "whodunit" and the prosecutors on making the charge stick. In presenting all this the writers split their episodes evenly down the middle, devoting the first half to the detectives' side of the matter, starting with their visit to the crime scene where the body was found, following the detectives through the legwork of the investigation, and ending with their arrest of the suspect just before the commercial break at the midpoint, after which the episode transitioned to the ADAs' prosecutorial efforts to their conclusion, while constructing the whole around a succession of short scenes briskly, sharply, crisply cutting from one to the next with the title cards indicating date and place in that way suggestive of the meticulous attentiveness to the relevant and exclusion of the irrelevant, and economy, of a well-written police report, punctuated by the famous "doink" sound effect. This tightness of focus and construction, the pace and punctuation, imparted to the episodes a more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts combination of efficiency, driving momentum and flashy style. The episodes also tended to plots "ripped from the headlines" that befit the flash, the more in as they so often had to do with the lives of the more privileged Manhattanites, the grit of the street, and those points where high life came into contact with low life, with all the contrast-heightened "high concept" texture going with that (the grit of the station or a venture into a "rough" neighborhood throwing the plushness of the rest of the show, with its expensively dressed upper class characters and their attorneys in plush homes and offices into sharper relief). At the same time, if the show typically presented its principals as upright and competent, they were not supermen, giving the often flashy narratives some grounding where the "human element" was concerned, which combined with the police report or documentary-like aspect to endow it all with a measure of verisimilitude.
By contrast the episodes of Criminal Intent dispensed with this intricate structure, events proceeding in a less formulaic, more variable fashion--with the detectives tending to hold center stage down to the end. (Thus instead of two cops and two ADAs being at the core it was two cops and one ADA at the outset, with the ADA often having little to do in an episode but tell the detectives they just didn't have a case yet, and then dropped altogether after season five.) Partially, but only partially, filling the vacuum created by the elision of the prosecutors' side of things we tended to see the other participants in the drama (the criminals, and those we were meant to think might be criminals) get a good many scenes of their own, without the cops or the prosecutors around, in which the makers of the episodes, true to the title of the show, Criminal Intent, endeavored to dramatize the personal intentions and motivations of the criminals. Consistent with this it was sometimes the case that the audience knew for a certainty who was responsible from rather early on in the episode, and sometimes even from the very start, leaving the detective with the job of finding it out for themselves and proving it to themselves (and the prosecutor), as the detective's half hour was stretched out into a whole hour, often with "whodunit" replaced by psychological "whydunit"--and backing up what the audience and the detective already knew in what was generally prone to become a psychologically-freighted "game of cat and mouse" between detective and suspect. As one might guess this accent on head games left less room for exploiting topicality--the appearance of which was in fact a red herring at times. (Watching the opening of the episode "Anti-Thesis" you may think it will be about the fight between Larry Summers and Cornel West, but could have dispensed with the bit while leaving everything really important to the episode perfectly intact.) And of course, with Criminal Intent not only did we get instead of "regular detectives" the members of an elite unit, the Major Crimes Squad, but in the show's original protagonist--for we could more easily speak of a protagonist here given the greater focus on his activities--we had not a "conventional" cop, even an exceptionally accomplished one, but rather, in spite of his being on a police force, a figure out of the Sherlock Holmes tradition of Great Detectives in Vincent D'Onofrio's Robert Goren. Constantly performing intellectual feats that at times can seem over-the-top (where Henry Higgins can tell which neighborhood a fellow Londoner came from by his accent, on the basis of secondhand information New York Detective Goren deduces precisely where an Australian picked up her Thai!), he was also consistent with the tradition in being highly eccentric, with line of work, temperament, reputation all combining to place them outside society to such a degree that it is hard to picture him having a "normal" life with a spouse and a family, or even close friends, or doing particularly well career-wise within an Organization (as Goren himself is all too aware).
Altogether one can easily picture all this having been less compelling for many. Formula, after all, can be constraining and after a time tiresome, but for those who like a formula, as long as they still like it, the repetitiveness, the predictability, can be part of the appeal, easing their getting into the goings-on, and making it easier for them to stay oriented even amid casual viewing, with that brisk, crisp flow of the mothership formula certainly helping hold their attention, and simplifying their following along. By contrast the episodes of Criminal Intent may have seemed comparatively shapeless, more uneven, certainly more measured in pace. Certainly, I think, it was more challenging for a writer to hold an audience's attention this way (or even just make it possible for them to follow along) than when using the earlier show's pattern, while the visual aesthetic was all too consistent with the approach, the set design, cinematography, lighting and editing choices of the show-runners went along with that less brisk, crisp, quality, giving the images a certain drabness (here the interrogations went on in a white, fluorescent-lit room that felt less like it belonged in a police station than in a hospital), as well as less sense of movement (thanks to a less mobile camera). If neither glamour nor grit were wholly absent from the episodes, they were on the whole less abundant, and due to the stylistic choices also less strikingly presented, such that one can speak of a "low concept" aesthetic--with form, again, aligning with content given the frequent choice of storylines foregrounding character and context neither particularly glamorous, nor gritty, as indeed they often skewed toward the marginal or the eccentric (as with a murder in the world of contemporary poetry in "Passions"). Meanwhile if Bobby Goren definitely had his fans he was not everyone's cup of tea, with some apparently finding his tics and his baggage off-putting, and this mattering all the more because this was so much the Great Detective's show, and Criminal Intent less able to lean on the other members of the cast, or the other elements that can enliven a piece of entertainment. Certainly this L & O series generally had less of the benefit of comic relief than the mothership (a significant point in the favor of detectives like Jerry Orbach's Lenny Briscoe and Jesse L. Martin's Ed Green). Meanwhile, precisely because this is the kind of thing that doesn't get said in respectable mainstream venues, even as Reddit fora and the like make clear that a great many people are thinking it, it is worth adding that taken as a whole the show was a bit light on sex appeal. (Law & Order was not and could not have been Baywatch where reliance on feminine charms is concerned, but the predecessors had certainly been prone to casting actresses who made many a male viewer running across the show stop flipping channels. It was not unfitting of the approach that this was less the case in this less glamorous take--particularly in the more consistent earlier seasons--but not helpful from a casual viewing standpoint.)
The result was that one was much more likely to be really on board with what the show was doing, or not, than was the case with the other L & O series'--while D'Onofrio's cutting back his involvement added another complication. The show-runners responded to his reduced participation by splitting their seasons between Bobby Goren and other detectives whose appearance entailed a deviation from the episodes' now-established tendency (the mothership's Mike Logan back to headline episodes that felt like original Law & Order minus the style, Jeff Goldblum's Zach Nichols offering "Bobby Goren Lite" with all the disadvantage implied in that comparison), changes not pleasing to all of those who had been on board. And so in the end even as a lower-cost production in the less competitive basic cable milieu Criminal Intent sputtered out fairly quickly--though like many an unconventional show that struggled in its first run it would seem to have enjoyed a long life in reruns in the years since it went off the air.
Thursday, July 9, 2026
Did Old People Make Top Gun 2 a Hit?
It would thus seem that the film was a lot more likely to draw its audience from among older viewers than young ones. People of the generation of, for example, Larry Summers, who was thirty-one when the original Top Gun hit theaters, such that he may well remember just how it was that the particular usage of the term "wingman" he made in a now-famous e-mail in reference to his good buddy Jeffrey Epstein originated. And this is in fact borne out by the opening weekend numbers. As the Hollywood Reporter informs us, on opening weekend less than 30 percent of the audience was under the age of 25, and rather less than half were under 35, while "38 percent [were] over 45 and 18 percent over 55"--in contrast with what we usually see for summer blockbusters, practically a Downton Abbey-type event). The situation was all the more remarkable given the slightness of competition for action movie fans young and old that particular summer (a factor, I thought then and still think now that Top Gun 2's extraordinary legs during the summer of 2022 had a lot to with the season's relatively thin release slate, such legs as much a cause as an effect of the young seeing the movie, because it hung around for so long).
Of course, I don't remember anyone joking about gray heads in the audience, and that doesn't seem accidental. In becoming a hit Top Gun 2 had a lot of help not only from those ways in which it was a plausible commercial prospect (iconic franchise with the star back in the lead role, flashy action, etc.) but also media Rah-Rah as the claqueurs claqued as they had rarely claqued before, with an obvious reflection of this the extremely favorable stance of the critics toward the movie on offer. After all, as some noted (usually not unaffectionately), Top Gun 2 was basically a reshoot of the first Top Gun--a movie that critics at the time dismissed in such ways as the remark in Steven H. Scheuer's Movies on TV guide that it was "the most vapid film ever to gross over $150 million," and the not uncommon view that it was less a movie at all than a two-hour Navy recruiting commercial. This has its reflection in how, as you see when you look at the first movie's Rotten Tomatoes page, the first one had a critics' score of 58 percent--and a still lower 56 percent from the "top critics." By contrast the critics' score for the new version that was Top Gun: Maverick was 96 percent--a 37 percent jump for basically the same movie!--while there was an even bigger jump in the case of the "top critics," whose score leaped from 56 percent to a near-perfect 99 percent.
However, the change has been political as well. In 1986 militaristic jingoism and the right-wing values broadly associated with them, and very much evident in a film like Top Gun, were certainly pervading American culture--but not yet triumphant. The divisions the Vietnam War created in American society had not yet gone away, with those who saw the war as a colossal crime still having their say, and this informing the opposition to the escalation of American intervention in the wars ongoing in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and to the nuclear arms race and militarism more broadly (epitomized by the nuclear freeze movement winning the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize)--all of which had its reflection in film. Thus the year had Top Gun--but it also had Oliver Stone's Platoon, while Top Gun only had Cruise in the role because the actor who had been considered ahead of him for the role of Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, Matthew Modine, elected to pass--precisely because he did not want to do a war-mongering movie--in favor of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, which hit theaters the following year and became a new classic. And indeed, if Cruise did take the role Modine turned down, just a few years later Cruise himself expressed the view that taking it up a second time would be "irresponsible" given how it had played as simple-minded militaristic propaganda.
As Jerry Lembcke shows in his book The Spitting Image, the selling of the 1991 Gulf War quashed all of that, handing total victory to the proponents of jingoism --with it saying something of the totality of the victory that NBC gave Iran-Contra scandal figure Oliver North roles on shows like not just JAG, but the sitcom Wings (!), in the latter case explicitly identified as indeed Oliver North to Brian Hackett, who vocally lauded him for his actions. Of course, in the wake of the lies that led up to and the catastrophe that resulted from the 2003 Iraq War (eventually recognized and condemned by the right as well as the left) challenge to this resurged, but it never got very far. The new anti-war movement never approached the fire of its Vietnam-era, and perhaps not even that of its '80s-era, predecessor, but in line with the tendency to count their chickens before they are hatched and the illusions the Democratic Party and the media succeeded in fostering around Barack Obama they packed up and went home after his election thinking the war was over--only to see it go on and on, deepened and widened with kill lists, with new battlegrounds in Libya, and Syria, and Yemen, and much else that continues down to this day. Of course, if the movement never recovered there remained a measure of leeriness about pop militarism, such that Tom Cruise's reticence about getting back in the cockpit was slow to pass, while even after the project finally got out of development hell Forbes' Scott Mendelson (no leftie publication, this!) wrote that "If the film is a shameless nostalgia-driven fan bait enterprise, with no more nuance or commentary on the current military-industrial complex than its predecessor," then it would be not just "thin gruel," but "almost morally irresponsible considering the times we live in"--all as, I suspect, most of those thinking along anything like those lines would have dispensed with the "almost" in the "almost morally irresponsible" and just said "morally irresponsible." Nevertheless, such "morally irresponsible" "nostalgia-bait" and the "thin gruel" that Mendleson, speaking for many, thought such material must be, was exactly what Paramount delivered, not least in Mendelson's own opinion when he saw the movie, though this was not to criticisms but to hosannas from the press as a whole. In short, yes, the media was championing a jingoistic Top Gun 2 because it was a jingoistic film as what little political controversy was detectable in the mainstream press was over (in keeping with the eternal function of the culture war as a distraction from more substantive issues) whether the movie was "woke" or not as a right thrilled with a movie making no concession to those concerns of which even a Mendleson had recently been obliged to write being the hit of the year as their opponents lamely pointed to the "diversity" of the cast as "proof" that it was not the anti-woke delight they claimed--which rebuttal, if to be taken at all seriously, only goes to show that along with woke capitalism one can have woke jingoism and woke militarism. Amid all that there was reference to the number of older folks going to the theaters, but this was in a "Isn't it great that the older people more vulnerable to COVID--glad that's over, aren't you?--are going back to theaters? Surely the film market's recovering and we'll be back to pre-pandemic business in no time!" spirit, as against the "It's mostly old people watching this, younger people only being pulled in secondarily by the endless Rah-Rah amid a thin release slate" view that would not have been conducive to their narrative, their unity and vigor in promoting which seems to me as good an example as I know of just how much having the press in one's corner helps in selling a film.
The Guardian's 100 Best Novels List: Some Remarks
The Guardian newspaper recently published their list of what their readers voted for as the 100 Best Novels of All Time--not just English-language novels of the twentieth century, as with the widely cited Modern Library list, but novels, period, with the definition of novel in this case apparently the very broad one of "book-length work of prose fiction" (as against the narrower definition Ian Watt offered). I, personally, do not make much of these lists as judgments of literary worth, for "best" is a slippery concept, too easily and often confused with, for example, the frankly personal "favorite" and historically significant "greatest." However, they do interest me as a snapshot of how those who made the list evaluate literature--or at least think that one should do so at a given point in time--with this one no exception.
In discussing the Guardian's list let us get out of the way the fact that it is a very predictable product of a British newspaper in the early twenty-first century asking about the Greatest Of All Time. The list is overwhelmingly Anglosphere (79 of the 100 books are English-language works), and especially British (44 by authors from the British Isles, at least when counting naturalized Britons like Henry James). It also skews strongly toward relatively recent books, with only two of the titles from before 1800 (Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote and Laurence Sterne's Tristam Shandy), almost three-quarters of them (73) published in 1900 or after, half (47) after 1945, and almost a tenth (9) from just 2000 on. Likewise predictable it is thoroughly middlebrow in its choices, full of standard Greatest Of All Time picks that everyone is supposed to read but which almost no one does, while the few who actually read them often only say they love them, like James Joyce's Ulysses, and Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, predictably in the top ten, while in line with the canons of the literary priesthood in the English-speaking world today, Modernism and postmodernism celebrated as realism and especially naturalism are commensurately shortchanged. (Thus French greats like Stendhal, Balzac, Zola are not represented by even a single work, nor such American devotees of naturalism as Crane, Norris, London, Sinclair or Dreiser, while there is no Lewis, Dos Passos, Steinbeck either, all as pre-war Germans are represented solely by Thomas Mann, etc., etc..) Where all this is concerned it seems to me significant, and again predictable, that the older books, and the works from continental Europe, are limited to the best-known examples, and concentrated in the top spots where received wisdom probably counts for more than informed personal opinion in their placement (pre-twentieth century works making up a scarce quarter of the list, but accounting for six of the list's top ten, twelve of the top twenty, and just fifteen of the next eighty).
However, some of the rankings bespeak the modification of the predictable Anglosphere middlebrow list by a particular voting pattern. Most obviously there is how books by women get the two top spots, with George Eliot's Middlemarch a surprising #1, and Toni Morrison's Beloved #2, as Joyce, usually landing the top spot on priestly/middlebrow lists, landed just the #3 spot this time. More broadly, five of the top ten books were by women, nine of the top twenty, thirty-seven of the lot--much more than one usually sees on such lists. (By comparison the Modern Library's 100 Best English-language novels of the 20th Century list, on which one might expect to find more female authors than a Best of All Time list, had no books by women in the top ten, just two in the top twenty, and a mere eight in the hundred, with many specific titles that made that list ranking rather lower there than here, To the Lighthouse placing at #15 on that list rather than #4 on the Guardian's, Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at #76 rather than #31, Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence at #58 rather than #38, and not a single work of Toni Morrison's placing at all.) Likewise it is notable that Virginia Woolf was the most honored author on the Guardian list, with five of the top hundred titles (including the #4 spot, which she landed with To the Lighthouse), and four of Jane Austen's six novels making the list (claiming three places in the top twenty alone, with most Austen fans' favorite Pride and Prejudice at #9), and Toni Morrison having three as well. The science fiction reader in me noted, too, that three of the four post-1945 English-language science fiction titles that are not George Orwell's obligatory Nineteen Eighty-Four (#16), (science fiction, not weirdo postmodernism), were Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (#36), Octavia Butler's Kindred (#71) and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (#89). Meanwhile even the selection of male-authored books favored female-centricity. Thus of the five books in the top ten not by women two were, if male-authored, so focused on a female protagonist that the book was named for them--Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina actually ranking ahead of his usual "Greatest of All Time" selection War and Peace (the two placing at #6 and #7, respectively), with the same going for Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (#10).
As the mentions of Morrison and Butler--and the abundance of "post-colonial" works in the post-1945 collection from V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas (#78) to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (#62)--indicate, along with the tilt toward books by women, often feminist in orientation, and frankly books one would conventionally expect to speak to a feminine sensibility generally, there was also heavy attention to works by "authors of color," and from the non-Western Anglosphere. Accounting for at least fourteen such works out of the hundred (compared with a mere half dozen on the Modern Library list), the works that are not here as well as those which are underline the emphasis. (Where genuine devotees of Joyce might have been expected to remember his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man one might imagine that a book which advertised its being about a man with its title was at a disadvantage--as for all the postmodernism about one does not see Vonnegut or Pynchon here.) In short, the Guardian's list is not just a presentist Anglosphere, British-centric, middlebrow list, but a very identity politics-minded and especially female-skewing list, as one may expect in an era in which the dwindling number of fiction consumers is supposed to be overwhelmingly college-educated women, whose education, acculturation, social position greatly sensitize them to the contemporary politics of identity. Of course, all this aligns perfectly with what one would expect of those sympathetic to the Guardian's editorial line today.
As the mentions of Morrison and Butler--and the abundance of "post-colonial" works in the post-1945 collection from V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas (#78) to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (#62)--indicate, along with the tilt toward books by women, often feminist in orientation, and frankly books one would conventionally expect to speak to a feminine sensibility generally, there was also heavy attention to works by "authors of color," and from the non-Western Anglosphere. Accounting for at least fourteen such works out of the hundred (compared with a mere half dozen on the Modern Library list), the works that are not here as well as those which are underline the emphasis. (Where genuine devotees of Joyce might have been expected to remember his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man one might imagine that a book which advertised its being about a man with its title was at a disadvantage--as for all the postmodernism about one does not see Vonnegut or Pynchon here.) In short, the Guardian's list is not just a presentist Anglosphere, British-centric, middlebrow list, but a very identity politics-minded and especially female-skewing list, as one may expect in an era in which the dwindling number of fiction consumers is supposed to be overwhelmingly college-educated women, whose education, acculturation, social position greatly sensitize them to the contemporary politics of identity. Of course, all this aligns perfectly with what one would expect of those sympathetic to the Guardian's editorial line today.
Network TV Time Slots, and the Fate of The Simpsons
Those who recall the early years of The Simpsons' original run in the United States will remember that, save for a shift to Thursday nights for a few years, it aired Sundays, with the show from the fall of 1994 on a fixture of the television schedule at eight P.M.--in a period in which time slots still mattered greatly to whether a show was seen. They will also remember that that particular time slot was a highly problematic one from the get-go because that was the same TV season in which the network that aired it (FOX) also began airing football, one result of which was that the show was constantly preempted by Sunday football games. Indeed, in a given season one could not count on turning to their local FOX affiliate and actually seeing an episode of the show in that time slot until after the Super Bowl--February, basically, in spite of which the show's seasons came to the then-usual end in May.
The Simpsons was thus a show whose airing flew in the face of a network TV norm that had shows running like clockwork (22 episodes from September/October through May, etc.), and the strategy of making a show's viewing a habit (this the era of the once storied NBC Thursday night "Must See TV" and ABC Friday night "TGIF" line-ups). In the process this subjected a show that was not only hugely important for a new network endeavoring to establish itself on the scene as cultural icon and flagship, but also a past ratings winner, to grave disadvantage. That The Simpsons not only survived the constant mauling of its airing schedule through the first half of the TV season each and every year but thrived in spite of it is a testament to just how much the fans loved it, such that they stuck with it in spite of the network bosses' readiness to risk it, and them, for the sake of What-in-the-name-of-professional-football (which, when anything else gets in its way, always wins).
It also seems to some of those fans--and it is the fans who discuss it, primarily --that if the show endured the Suits' maltreatment for a good many years that cavalier attitude toward the show's scheduling eventually caught up with them. That for months into a season a fan wasn't sure whether there would be an episode on or not made that fan base quicker to wither when those fans lost the enthusiasm as the show's Golden Age ran its course, and the fans looked elsewhere for their entertainment.
The Simpsons was thus a show whose airing flew in the face of a network TV norm that had shows running like clockwork (22 episodes from September/October through May, etc.), and the strategy of making a show's viewing a habit (this the era of the once storied NBC Thursday night "Must See TV" and ABC Friday night "TGIF" line-ups). In the process this subjected a show that was not only hugely important for a new network endeavoring to establish itself on the scene as cultural icon and flagship, but also a past ratings winner, to grave disadvantage. That The Simpsons not only survived the constant mauling of its airing schedule through the first half of the TV season each and every year but thrived in spite of it is a testament to just how much the fans loved it, such that they stuck with it in spite of the network bosses' readiness to risk it, and them, for the sake of What-in-the-name-of-professional-football (which, when anything else gets in its way, always wins).
It also seems to some of those fans--and it is the fans who discuss it, primarily --that if the show endured the Suits' maltreatment for a good many years that cavalier attitude toward the show's scheduling eventually caught up with them. That for months into a season a fan wasn't sure whether there would be an episode on or not made that fan base quicker to wither when those fans lost the enthusiasm as the show's Golden Age ran its course, and the fans looked elsewhere for their entertainment.
Review: Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee
I read Alec Nevala-Lee's group biography of the editor and writers at the heart of Astounding Science Fiction and Fact in its "Golden Age of science fiction" glory days (Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction) back when it came out with considerable interest. As one with some prior familiarity with the material I found it well-researched and lucidly written, making for a brisk and informative read--but also a very, very unbalanced one.
I remember that reading the book it seemed to me there was a great deal that I would have liked to know more about, like Astounding editor John Campbell's ideas about what science fiction is, and ought to be--and that far from breaking new ground here Nevala-Lee actually covered this very important matter less well than a good deal of other work I had previously seen (including, frankly, my own in Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry). I also wanted to know more about an aspect of the group that had long interested me and regarding which I had thus far found little deep or comprehensive treatment, the way in which Campbell and many other members of his group, amid the World Crisis of the 1930s and 1940s, the years of Great Depression, the ascent of fascism, world war and the beginning of a nuclear age threatening far, far worse, were less interested in some kind of reconstruction of society as so many were than an elitist vision of exceptional individuals transcending the mass somehow as the only hope for the human race, with this "transcendence" extending to outright superpowers (for psi is certainly such). Nevala-Lee says something of these interests of the group's members in the book, can hardly do otherwise given how large they loomed in the not merely private but public thinking of all of them, but more in the course of stressing the foibles of the group's members, all as I suppose that were he really interested in this he would have changed his story's cast of characters slightly--perhaps brought in A.E. van Vogt, the author of the psi-themed Slan and the "Non-Aristotelian logic"-themed Null-A novels, as he left out Isaac Asimov (who was aloof from this particular craziness).
But he didn't. Because his interest, whether personal or commercial, was in the Biggest Names as seen by a later generation (according to which rule it had to be Asimov, not van Vogt, who got his attention here), and frankly in their failings as seen in the post-Gamergate, post-#MeToo, identity politics-in-overdrive era, emphasizing attention to this side of the issue even where he didn't break much new ground--except perhaps in the way Nevala-Lee marshaled his information and presented them to the audience (ditto). If few were surprised by Campbell's racism (certainly anyone who had ever read his conveniently republished editorials!), a good many more persons, myself included, were unpleasantly surprised by the presentation of Asimov in line with the post-Gamergate feminist stereotype of the predatory male nerd with all its very heavy weight of baggage.
I have seen no one question the claims that Nevala-Lee makes about Asimov's behavior in regard to women, and certainly have no intention of making any "It was a different time" excuses for it. (Indeed, I think that the antics reported about him weren't considered good behavior then any more than they are now.) Still, there is no questioning the extreme "presentism" of Nevala-Lee's broader attitude toward his subjects, which is evident in the small things as in the large, as when he criticizes the young Asimov for not having worried about the White maleness of fandom when he found kindred spirits in the Futurians fan club. Setting aside the extent to which he was applying a twenty-first century, postmodernist standard of "diversity" that even now not everyone accepts as fair or right to a group of young people circa 1940, the fact remains that at that time the small and essentially local New York-based group was living in a city that was according to the official statistics 93 percent White, and so rather less unrepresentative of the social environment they were living in than Nevala-Lee implies in his risibly sanctimonious tone--all as it was not then the common assumption that any grouping in which women were not represented at least in proportion to their numbers in society at large must be excluding them out of structural sexism first, last and always. Alas, such indifference to historical fact, and such moralizing, has always been central to the postmodernist package--and the response to Nevala-Lee's book makes it clear that its author was rewarded rather than penalized by the commentariat for such failings amid a broad assault on the genre's pantheon of icons, canon of works, traditional concerns, generally acknowledged line of development in the name of "inclusiveness." Especially given that the particular science fiction tradition of Campbell and his cohorts was by that point long in decline--perhaps by the time Nevala-Lee's book appeared (2018), already ended--it can seem a reflection of the disproportion between the objects over which people fight, and the investment they make in fighting over them, when the matter is the rancid politics of status.
But he didn't. Because his interest, whether personal or commercial, was in the Biggest Names as seen by a later generation (according to which rule it had to be Asimov, not van Vogt, who got his attention here), and frankly in their failings as seen in the post-Gamergate, post-#MeToo, identity politics-in-overdrive era, emphasizing attention to this side of the issue even where he didn't break much new ground--except perhaps in the way Nevala-Lee marshaled his information and presented them to the audience (ditto). If few were surprised by Campbell's racism (certainly anyone who had ever read his conveniently republished editorials!), a good many more persons, myself included, were unpleasantly surprised by the presentation of Asimov in line with the post-Gamergate feminist stereotype of the predatory male nerd with all its very heavy weight of baggage.
I have seen no one question the claims that Nevala-Lee makes about Asimov's behavior in regard to women, and certainly have no intention of making any "It was a different time" excuses for it. (Indeed, I think that the antics reported about him weren't considered good behavior then any more than they are now.) Still, there is no questioning the extreme "presentism" of Nevala-Lee's broader attitude toward his subjects, which is evident in the small things as in the large, as when he criticizes the young Asimov for not having worried about the White maleness of fandom when he found kindred spirits in the Futurians fan club. Setting aside the extent to which he was applying a twenty-first century, postmodernist standard of "diversity" that even now not everyone accepts as fair or right to a group of young people circa 1940, the fact remains that at that time the small and essentially local New York-based group was living in a city that was according to the official statistics 93 percent White, and so rather less unrepresentative of the social environment they were living in than Nevala-Lee implies in his risibly sanctimonious tone--all as it was not then the common assumption that any grouping in which women were not represented at least in proportion to their numbers in society at large must be excluding them out of structural sexism first, last and always. Alas, such indifference to historical fact, and such moralizing, has always been central to the postmodernist package--and the response to Nevala-Lee's book makes it clear that its author was rewarded rather than penalized by the commentariat for such failings amid a broad assault on the genre's pantheon of icons, canon of works, traditional concerns, generally acknowledged line of development in the name of "inclusiveness." Especially given that the particular science fiction tradition of Campbell and his cohorts was by that point long in decline--perhaps by the time Nevala-Lee's book appeared (2018), already ended--it can seem a reflection of the disproportion between the objects over which people fight, and the investment they make in fighting over them, when the matter is the rancid politics of status.
The Graying of Fandom
Still, it may be that not just the tables where authors are sitting have gray heads in front of them, but that gray heads generally are more present throughout the convention, with this having some obvious possible explanations as well. One is that in the age of the Internet conventions are less central to fandom than they used to be, online life having its spaces--its publications, its fora--which are a year-round convention for everything, as compared with the old days when getting to hang with like-minded fans was something one had to do in person. (If anything, the fact that young people are more cash-strapped and less mobile than they used to be may reinforce this--they just don't have the disposable income, and maybe not disposable time, required for a habit such as convention-going, all as that generation is increasingly accustomed to, and maybe more comfortable, socializing through its screens anyway. At the expense of indulging in a stereotype it may not be irrelevant that such traits as introversion, neuroatypicality and social awkwardness may be more present in fandom than in the population at large.)
Another is that people are less likely to become hardcore fans in the first place because in the existing, options-saturated, pop cultural milieu they have so much material in front of them that they tend to sample many pleasures rather than becoming connoisseurs of any one of them--anything like the old "Trekkie" scene unlikely to happen ever again. That the objects of their pleasure are available to them all the time in the age of smart phones and streaming may add to this, contrasting with how a show they only got to see once a week, which they knew all the other fans like themselves were watching at that same moment, which was thus "appointment TV" and a mass experience and an event, helped foster their enthusiasm. (So did the fact that if the media industry had always been crassly sequel and spin-off-minded, it was a long way from today's unhinged running of every franchise into the ground as standard operating procedure, as exemplified by the far past-their-prime Star Wars and Marvel machines, as if determined to burn out rather than sustain any interest it manages to raise in its products.) The older fan was formed in that earlier world--but the younger fan is likely to know only the world we have now.
Still another explanation is that the possibility of deep immersion is the possibility that deep immersion itself is becoming less possible for them as a cohort of young people becomes oriented instead to the "relatable." Consider how this has colored their tastes with regard to film. In contrast with earlier generations of filmgoers who delighted in movies whisking them off to another time and place, they want the drama, the adventure, to come to them, in a way that has made the period piece a tough sell--all as, one might add, the superheroes who seem most consistently successful with them are those who lives are closest to their own, like their friendly neighborhood Spider-Man with "everyday college student problems," as compared with outer space adventuring figures like Thor, Star-Lord and the Green Lantern. This is the very opposite of that enjoyment of absorption in another world that makes for the kind of fan who takes a great interest in the minutiae of the objects of their pleasure ("That Boba Fett guy, what's his deal?"), such that they write fan fiction about it, dress up as characters from it and are eager to share their passion with others like themselves. And if it was always the case that the more "relatable" figures probably always had the bigger fan bases, it seems likely that where popular taste is concerned the balance has shifted very far in favor of relatability among younger people--and in the process, away from the chances of winning the kind of deep affection among them that made fandom what it was in its heyday.
Tom Buchanan, "This Man Goddard" and Lothrop Stoddard
Those who have read or watched an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic The Great Gatsby are likely to remember the figure of Tom Buchanan--the husband of our protagonist and narrator Nick Carraway's cousin Daisy, who plays rather an important part in the book's deceptively simple plot. This Mr. Buchanan is a creature of extreme privilege in the true, socioeconomic, sense of the term, a polo-playing, Hamptons-residing member of the leisure class, unbound but protected, protected but unbound to such a degree that he and Daisy could afford to be utterly "careless" as "they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness" as they "let other people clean up the mess they had made," not they but others always bearing the consequences.
As it happens when we meet Mr. Buchanan he seems to have taken a turn for the pseudo-intellectual to go by his giving Nick, and the reader, a brief lecture about "this man Goddard" and what he had to say regarding the superiority of the Nordic race to which he rather smugly tells them they all belong. As those who happened to read the book in an edition printed for students with footnotes may recall the reference to "this man Goddard" and his book The Rise of the Coloured Empires was apparently a reference to Lothrop Stoddard, author of the then-recent The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), where drawing on the "biological" analysis of race by Madison Grant in The Passing of the Great Race (1916) some years earlier he interpreted human history, and the post-World War I crisis of Western imperialism through which he and his readers were living, from the standpoint of the theory. As this allusion implies, Stoddard, and Grant (who was not only an influence on Standard, but actually wrote the introduction to his book), were very well-known and influential figures at the time, such that Adolf Hitler wrote Grant that Passing of the Great Race was his Bible (never mind that Grant rejected the racial categorization "Aryan" as misleadingly linguistic in favor of the more "biological" Nordic, inclined to pacifism out of fear that war was especially damaging to a Nordic race given to "Berserker blood rage," and thought an overwhelmingly Alpine Germany racially inferior to a much more Nordic Britain--and even France--among much else irreconcilable with Nazi ideology). And of course the books and ideas of Stoddard et. al. played their part in politics at home, contributing to the nativist racial hysteria of the 1920s that saw the "Second" Ku Klux Klan wax powerful, and the U.S. government slam the gates shut in immigrants' faces and keep them so for decades.
Of course, it may seem that the theorizing of Mssrs. Stoddard and Grant has since fallen into obscurity--not least because of what their big fan Adolf Hitler did in its name--all as in spite of the resurgence of the far right this past half century, I cannot claim to have noticed anyone calling for renewed attention to those figures, as a great many biological racists continue to find it safer to hide behind "culture" (even as they treat "culture" as so unchangeable it may as well be genetics), and even the avowed biological racists argue for other positions in other ways. Certainly one does not see them worry about the ability of particular races to establish themselves in particular climates in Grant's zoological fashion (i.e. Race A does very well in temperate climes but in the tropics grows indolent and fails to reproduce itself, where it is the opposite with Race B). Nor does one see what was so important in the racism of their time, their conscious sub-division of the White--Caucasian--race into the groupings of Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean, as they parse the respective merits and demerits of these groups. (Thus did Grant weigh the superior "stamina," "stability and steadiness," and fidelity to country, family, law, "loyalty and truth" that made of Nordics superior fighters and rulers--so long as the "Berserker blood rage" did not get the better of them--against the likelihood of "[t]he Mediterranean race . . . probably [being] the superior . . . in intellectual attainments.") Indeed, the schema itself can seem awkward for today's racist given that not only do these cling to intelligence above all as their justification for their prejudices in a way with which Grant's claims sit uncomfortably (the qualified superiority in "stability and steadiness" by which Grant set so much store would seem cold comfort to today's I.Q. worshippers), but that the Mediterranean category necessarily includes peoples on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean that they openly despise so much that they go into paroxysms should anyone point out they are Caucasian at all--and indeed one may reasonably suspect this is the real reason why it is fashionable today to drop the concept of "Mediterranean," and prefer instead of "Caucasian," "European," cutting those groups out of "the club." (Thus have latterday race theorists stood Grant on his head--instead of abandoning a linguistic-cultural category for a biological one, turning back to culture/geography in line with their bigotry of the moment, all as many supposedly all-seeing and knowing "anti-racists" appear either oblivious to or complicit in the far from innocent redrawing of boundaries.)
Still, if much that Grant and Stoddard taught has been discarded even by those who might be most expected to be attracted to their thinking, these ideas did not simply vanish from the world in 1945, something of their thought enduring, such that reading those authors we encounter alongside the apparent relics of another time a great deal that is familiar in our own time. Not the least of this is the way that standing behind their deep racism was an even deeper hatred of human equality generally, of egalitarianism as such, with all this even clearer when I turned to Stoddard's subsequent book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man (1922), and its explanation of revolution. As Stoddard had it revolution was a matter of the biologically inferior lower orders in society, which bear the burdens of civilization's complexity without partaking of its benefits, and finding the burden heavier than they were willing to bear, rebelled against civilization itself and smashed it--this all that he could see in the history of political revolution. Meanwhile it never seemed to occur to Stoddard that, even if one accepted his view (which I do not hesitate to dismiss as nonsense), one way to safeguard civilization might be to do what could be done to lighten the burden on those lower orders, and give them a share in the benefits, precisely because this went so much against the grain of his hatred of equality, which was if anything deepened by the revolution which weighed most on his mind in that period, the "ten days that shook the world." Likewise there is Stoddard's reaction to the then-recent invention of the I.Q. test, specifically his evident ecstasy at having a seemingly scientific way of "proving" the superiority of some groups and the inferiority of others in line with his "scientific" conceptions, thus also "proving" the undesirability of letting in more immigrants and the necessity of persons deriving from the country's "better" stocks to, even at the cost of sacrifices of personal comfort, raise larger families.
There is also the matter of the authors' prejudices against specific groups. There is the characterization of Latin America as the zone of the "Red" man, with the region's disorders a supposed warning to the world of the dangers of racial mixture, a process in which the virtues of the constituent elements fall by the wayside, while retaining only the weaknesses of the races mixed together, compounded by the lower mental stability that must go with the dissonances that go with there being two different human natures in the same person. There is his consideration of the Islamic world, which he acknowledged (with rather more forthrightness than today's racist) was not a racial group, with members of every race, and much of it undeniably White in any phenotypic sense (Stoddard specifically acknowledged that "Persians and Ottoman Turks, are largely white")--yet at the same time insisting that the Islamic religion hopelessly sundered even the (fairly considerable) White portion of the Islamic world from the rest of the (otherwise generally Christian) White race, even as this religiosity somehow did not divide them from the religiously far more removed Hindus of South Asia, such that he lumped Islam, and Hinduism, together in a "Brown Race," all as he made an exception for the (White) "Browns" of Northwest Africa," which he held would be brought back into the Western world's fold by the colonization of their region. (In short, biological race was everything, except when it wasn't--though there were exceptions to that too, which he apparently made less for any really convincing reason about Islam somehow being less of a divider between Northwest Africans and White Westerners than because he hoped Western colonization of the Maghreb would be a success, which was more plausible if the "natives" could be assimilated.) Stoddard's treatment of Russia was comparable. He regarded it as another part of the White world sundered from it by a non-biological factor, the Communist revolution that terrified and disgusted him more than anything else, though of course in light of his theory of revolution he discussed that revolution as consequence as well as cause of the event. Thus he made much of the Russian people's supposed inferior, unfitted-for-civilization nature ("Russian folk nature . . . made up chiefly of primitive racial strains, some [of them, like] the Tartars and other Asiatic nomad elements . . . distinctly 'wild' stocks which have always shown an instinctive hostility to civilization")--and actually tried to use Leo Tolstoy to "prove" it! (Yes, Stoddard actually caps that particular pile of incoherence by quoting chunks of War and Peace to show that that man of immense culture, one of the most accomplished literary figures of the epoch, is evidence of the Russian people being less capable of civilization than other peoples, and especially the "truly" White.)
All of this remains very much with us, be it the racist's very often having a hatred of equality running deeper even than their racism, or the perversion of the tool that is the I.Q. test into the cult of the I.Q. test so hellbent on justifying societal inequality through reference to supposed innate differences in talent, and the xenophobic, anti-immigrant, nationalistic attitude that has indeed enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. One does not have to strain to hear the echo of the theorizing of this generation of "scientific" racists in the present-day mainstreaming of theories of a "Great Replacement" and calls that people of the "right" backgrounds sacrifice everything else for the sake of larger families. So too the North American racial irrationality toward Latin America that has a particularly ironic expression in the United States regarding residents of that region who are in ancestry, phenotype and culture indisputably Caucasian, White, European, Western or whatever else your preferred term as other and less than that, such that so much is made of categories like "Hispanic," and "true White" means "Non-Hispanic White." So does it also go with the equation of Muslims with a "Brown Race," such that if religious bigotry is not always synonymous with racism "Islamophobia" and racism are virtually inseparable, as bespoken by how a Western news media ever true to the tradition of Julius Streicher tirelessly depicts Muslims as Der Sturmer caricatures, with any exception that somehow enters into public apprehension an anomaly that must be explained away at once, and due solely to similarity to the stereotype in phenotype or dress Hindus and Sikhs end up victims of anti-Islamic hate crimes, with few even remarking the bigot's confusion (distinctions among the "Browns" not worth bothering with in their view). And so has it been in regard to Russia, with anti-Slavic and anti-Asiatic racism part of the Anti-Communist package, all as in a geopolitical contest with even a Russia under a ferociously Anti-Communist leadership Western intellectual orthodoxy has not hesitated to resurrect the relevant prejudices. The result is that while reading Stoddard and Grant is far from enlightening in the conventional sense of the term knowledge of their noxious work can and does illuminate some of the sources of the poison of our politics today.
As it happens when we meet Mr. Buchanan he seems to have taken a turn for the pseudo-intellectual to go by his giving Nick, and the reader, a brief lecture about "this man Goddard" and what he had to say regarding the superiority of the Nordic race to which he rather smugly tells them they all belong. As those who happened to read the book in an edition printed for students with footnotes may recall the reference to "this man Goddard" and his book The Rise of the Coloured Empires was apparently a reference to Lothrop Stoddard, author of the then-recent The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), where drawing on the "biological" analysis of race by Madison Grant in The Passing of the Great Race (1916) some years earlier he interpreted human history, and the post-World War I crisis of Western imperialism through which he and his readers were living, from the standpoint of the theory. As this allusion implies, Stoddard, and Grant (who was not only an influence on Standard, but actually wrote the introduction to his book), were very well-known and influential figures at the time, such that Adolf Hitler wrote Grant that Passing of the Great Race was his Bible (never mind that Grant rejected the racial categorization "Aryan" as misleadingly linguistic in favor of the more "biological" Nordic, inclined to pacifism out of fear that war was especially damaging to a Nordic race given to "Berserker blood rage," and thought an overwhelmingly Alpine Germany racially inferior to a much more Nordic Britain--and even France--among much else irreconcilable with Nazi ideology). And of course the books and ideas of Stoddard et. al. played their part in politics at home, contributing to the nativist racial hysteria of the 1920s that saw the "Second" Ku Klux Klan wax powerful, and the U.S. government slam the gates shut in immigrants' faces and keep them so for decades.
Of course, it may seem that the theorizing of Mssrs. Stoddard and Grant has since fallen into obscurity--not least because of what their big fan Adolf Hitler did in its name--all as in spite of the resurgence of the far right this past half century, I cannot claim to have noticed anyone calling for renewed attention to those figures, as a great many biological racists continue to find it safer to hide behind "culture" (even as they treat "culture" as so unchangeable it may as well be genetics), and even the avowed biological racists argue for other positions in other ways. Certainly one does not see them worry about the ability of particular races to establish themselves in particular climates in Grant's zoological fashion (i.e. Race A does very well in temperate climes but in the tropics grows indolent and fails to reproduce itself, where it is the opposite with Race B). Nor does one see what was so important in the racism of their time, their conscious sub-division of the White--Caucasian--race into the groupings of Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean, as they parse the respective merits and demerits of these groups. (Thus did Grant weigh the superior "stamina," "stability and steadiness," and fidelity to country, family, law, "loyalty and truth" that made of Nordics superior fighters and rulers--so long as the "Berserker blood rage" did not get the better of them--against the likelihood of "[t]he Mediterranean race . . . probably [being] the superior . . . in intellectual attainments.") Indeed, the schema itself can seem awkward for today's racist given that not only do these cling to intelligence above all as their justification for their prejudices in a way with which Grant's claims sit uncomfortably (the qualified superiority in "stability and steadiness" by which Grant set so much store would seem cold comfort to today's I.Q. worshippers), but that the Mediterranean category necessarily includes peoples on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean that they openly despise so much that they go into paroxysms should anyone point out they are Caucasian at all--and indeed one may reasonably suspect this is the real reason why it is fashionable today to drop the concept of "Mediterranean," and prefer instead of "Caucasian," "European," cutting those groups out of "the club." (Thus have latterday race theorists stood Grant on his head--instead of abandoning a linguistic-cultural category for a biological one, turning back to culture/geography in line with their bigotry of the moment, all as many supposedly all-seeing and knowing "anti-racists" appear either oblivious to or complicit in the far from innocent redrawing of boundaries.)
Still, if much that Grant and Stoddard taught has been discarded even by those who might be most expected to be attracted to their thinking, these ideas did not simply vanish from the world in 1945, something of their thought enduring, such that reading those authors we encounter alongside the apparent relics of another time a great deal that is familiar in our own time. Not the least of this is the way that standing behind their deep racism was an even deeper hatred of human equality generally, of egalitarianism as such, with all this even clearer when I turned to Stoddard's subsequent book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man (1922), and its explanation of revolution. As Stoddard had it revolution was a matter of the biologically inferior lower orders in society, which bear the burdens of civilization's complexity without partaking of its benefits, and finding the burden heavier than they were willing to bear, rebelled against civilization itself and smashed it--this all that he could see in the history of political revolution. Meanwhile it never seemed to occur to Stoddard that, even if one accepted his view (which I do not hesitate to dismiss as nonsense), one way to safeguard civilization might be to do what could be done to lighten the burden on those lower orders, and give them a share in the benefits, precisely because this went so much against the grain of his hatred of equality, which was if anything deepened by the revolution which weighed most on his mind in that period, the "ten days that shook the world." Likewise there is Stoddard's reaction to the then-recent invention of the I.Q. test, specifically his evident ecstasy at having a seemingly scientific way of "proving" the superiority of some groups and the inferiority of others in line with his "scientific" conceptions, thus also "proving" the undesirability of letting in more immigrants and the necessity of persons deriving from the country's "better" stocks to, even at the cost of sacrifices of personal comfort, raise larger families.
There is also the matter of the authors' prejudices against specific groups. There is the characterization of Latin America as the zone of the "Red" man, with the region's disorders a supposed warning to the world of the dangers of racial mixture, a process in which the virtues of the constituent elements fall by the wayside, while retaining only the weaknesses of the races mixed together, compounded by the lower mental stability that must go with the dissonances that go with there being two different human natures in the same person. There is his consideration of the Islamic world, which he acknowledged (with rather more forthrightness than today's racist) was not a racial group, with members of every race, and much of it undeniably White in any phenotypic sense (Stoddard specifically acknowledged that "Persians and Ottoman Turks, are largely white")--yet at the same time insisting that the Islamic religion hopelessly sundered even the (fairly considerable) White portion of the Islamic world from the rest of the (otherwise generally Christian) White race, even as this religiosity somehow did not divide them from the religiously far more removed Hindus of South Asia, such that he lumped Islam, and Hinduism, together in a "Brown Race," all as he made an exception for the (White) "Browns" of Northwest Africa," which he held would be brought back into the Western world's fold by the colonization of their region. (In short, biological race was everything, except when it wasn't--though there were exceptions to that too, which he apparently made less for any really convincing reason about Islam somehow being less of a divider between Northwest Africans and White Westerners than because he hoped Western colonization of the Maghreb would be a success, which was more plausible if the "natives" could be assimilated.) Stoddard's treatment of Russia was comparable. He regarded it as another part of the White world sundered from it by a non-biological factor, the Communist revolution that terrified and disgusted him more than anything else, though of course in light of his theory of revolution he discussed that revolution as consequence as well as cause of the event. Thus he made much of the Russian people's supposed inferior, unfitted-for-civilization nature ("Russian folk nature . . . made up chiefly of primitive racial strains, some [of them, like] the Tartars and other Asiatic nomad elements . . . distinctly 'wild' stocks which have always shown an instinctive hostility to civilization")--and actually tried to use Leo Tolstoy to "prove" it! (Yes, Stoddard actually caps that particular pile of incoherence by quoting chunks of War and Peace to show that that man of immense culture, one of the most accomplished literary figures of the epoch, is evidence of the Russian people being less capable of civilization than other peoples, and especially the "truly" White.)
All of this remains very much with us, be it the racist's very often having a hatred of equality running deeper even than their racism, or the perversion of the tool that is the I.Q. test into the cult of the I.Q. test so hellbent on justifying societal inequality through reference to supposed innate differences in talent, and the xenophobic, anti-immigrant, nationalistic attitude that has indeed enjoyed a resurgence in recent years. One does not have to strain to hear the echo of the theorizing of this generation of "scientific" racists in the present-day mainstreaming of theories of a "Great Replacement" and calls that people of the "right" backgrounds sacrifice everything else for the sake of larger families. So too the North American racial irrationality toward Latin America that has a particularly ironic expression in the United States regarding residents of that region who are in ancestry, phenotype and culture indisputably Caucasian, White, European, Western or whatever else your preferred term as other and less than that, such that so much is made of categories like "Hispanic," and "true White" means "Non-Hispanic White." So does it also go with the equation of Muslims with a "Brown Race," such that if religious bigotry is not always synonymous with racism "Islamophobia" and racism are virtually inseparable, as bespoken by how a Western news media ever true to the tradition of Julius Streicher tirelessly depicts Muslims as Der Sturmer caricatures, with any exception that somehow enters into public apprehension an anomaly that must be explained away at once, and due solely to similarity to the stereotype in phenotype or dress Hindus and Sikhs end up victims of anti-Islamic hate crimes, with few even remarking the bigot's confusion (distinctions among the "Browns" not worth bothering with in their view). And so has it been in regard to Russia, with anti-Slavic and anti-Asiatic racism part of the Anti-Communist package, all as in a geopolitical contest with even a Russia under a ferociously Anti-Communist leadership Western intellectual orthodoxy has not hesitated to resurrect the relevant prejudices. The result is that while reading Stoddard and Grant is far from enlightening in the conventional sense of the term knowledge of their noxious work can and does illuminate some of the sources of the poison of our politics today.
"A New Life," and The Evolution of JAG
After following a TV show through a lengthy run returning to its first episodes I often find them looking and feeling awkward compared with what came later. After all, the writers, the actors, the showrunners were at that point still figuring out such things as who their characters are, and what tone they want to strike. Still, the makers of a pilot for a TV show have every incentive to "put their best forward" given a pilot's importance in determining whether their show ever makes it into production, and the great likelihood that this will be their introduction to a TV audience if it does--even if what the makers think may be their "best foot" may be subject to argument, and revision. And so it went with JAG in its two-part pilot, "A New Life." The show, famously pitched by its creator Don Bellisario as a cross of Top Gun with A Few Good Men had for its protagonist Lieutenant Harmon "Harm" Rabb as an F-14 pilot who, grounded by night blindness, got a law degree and joined the JAG corps. In the line of that particular duty the Navy flew him and his partner Lieutenant Caitlin Pike out to an American aircraft carrier in the Adriatic helping enforce the no-fly zone over Bosnia to investigate the death of a female F-14 backseater who had just come to media attention after an engagement with Serbian fighter planes that promised to make her the U.S. Navy's next poster girl--and a superstar to those championing the participation of women in combat unit.
Taken altogether the pilot was not high art, nor of any great intellectual heft. Seeing all this the viewer will have no more sense of what was going on in Bosnia, or even just America's part it, than when they started watching. (Indeed, that Captain Thomas Boone--a character the show expects its viewers to reverence--sneeringly dismisses Serbs with the racist epithet "camel jockeys" says a lot about the sophistication the show displayed and expected of its audience in such matters, and one might add, the very hard limits of political correctness in its heyday.) Nor will the viewer come away with much sense of the complexities of the then hot topic of admitting women into combat units. (In line with the popular military drama of the time the show is of course squarely on the side of the integration of combat units by gender, but we never see real exploration of the rights and wrongs and complexities of the matter, all as the evident sexism is a case of stodgy old guys mostly too professional and too politically astute to ever let it really get in the way of the job, and isolated bad apples among the young guys whose sexism "just is" rather than anything more deeply rooted.) Nor does the audience get much grasp of the Navy's legal system. (It can seem relevant that through the series' run the narration with which the episodes begin identifies a JAG's job as "investigating, defending and prosecuting the law of the sea," whatever that is supposed to mean--the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, maybe?--when the JAG corps' task is actually "investigating, defending and prosecuting" the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which sounds less romantic but has the virtue of actually being factually correct. At any rate, like with nearly every legal procedural ever made the law is the last thing on the writers' minds, what the audience gets instead the usual legal eagle amateur detective work with some legal jargon thrown in.) Accordingly the show's "best foot forward" is actually conformity to the crass requirements of network television in a sensationalistic plot centered on a charged murder investigation, and relatively high--even feature film-ish--production values, with this extending to a lot of action by small-screen standards as the flyers do their thing. (The pilot opens with a dogfight, has a transport shot down in the middle, and a recon mission through deadly ack-ack setting the stage for the big finish as all the way through we have the hurly-burly of a carrier cutting through the waves as roaring aircraft take off and land continually on the way to and from missions where they perform the requisite aerial acrobatics.) There is also quite a bit of sex here with the murder victim involved in an illicit relationship with an unknown crew member entailing trysts in unlikely places that have speculation and innuendo running wild, the flirtations between the leads, and even a bit of skin when Raye Hollitt of American Gladiators fame (not just athlete and actress but popular pin-up), pausing in her cabin between a sortie and the gym to change her clothes and refusing to be diverted from her purpose by an intruding Rabb firing questions at her, goes on to do just that (in a scene shot and edited to stay within the bounds of '90s-era prime time network TV's censorial limits, but effective all the same).
Of course, the show could not deliver all of that from week to week. The showrunners could hardly follow up the combination of topicality with the political and sexual charge of the pilot episode's murder case twenty-two times a season, while if the immediate follow-up to the pilot dealt with another naval adventure scenario in the hijacking of a nuclear submarine the series would be mostly landbound, with the action-adventure aspect only rarely again as flashy as it was in the opener. The series also played down the sexuality considerably, with Rabb's play for Caitlin in the pilot not characteristic of his later way with the ladies (indeed, Andrea Thompson's Allison Krennick was rather more aggressive than the fighter jock in their episodes together), and anything quite like Raye Hollitt's display not to be seen again, all as beautiful and appealing as the female cast consistently was, this was still a show about lawyers, not lifeguards. And of course after the show relocated from NBC to CBS, where the management was more accommodating of Bellisario's preference for "less Top Gun and more A Few Good Men," as the show became more "CBS" broadly. Given that JAG was and remained a military legal-action drama it could never quite be Touched By An Angel, but it still softened considerably from what it had been in the edgy, flashy, action-packed, sexy two-hour pilot as the skirt-chasing fighter jock went through nine seasons of "Will they, won't they" before finally settling the matter of the nature of his relationship with his new partner, Catherine Bell's Sarah Mackenzie, all as, far from testing the censors with scenes like Hollitt's the showrunners sometimes played down the "impression" the actresses made even when fully uniformed. (Thus where in the season four intro they use a clip in which Rabb and Sarah stand to attention--with the line of Bell's ample bust very apparent--in season five they zoomed in the shot so that it ends up cropped a little below her shoulders, apparently deliberately.) Not inconsistent with the reverential tone the show struck toward its subject, it nonetheless played its part in how it came to be known as a show for older folks as younger viewers more inclined to edgy fare gave it a pass.
Of course, the show could not deliver all of that from week to week. The showrunners could hardly follow up the combination of topicality with the political and sexual charge of the pilot episode's murder case twenty-two times a season, while if the immediate follow-up to the pilot dealt with another naval adventure scenario in the hijacking of a nuclear submarine the series would be mostly landbound, with the action-adventure aspect only rarely again as flashy as it was in the opener. The series also played down the sexuality considerably, with Rabb's play for Caitlin in the pilot not characteristic of his later way with the ladies (indeed, Andrea Thompson's Allison Krennick was rather more aggressive than the fighter jock in their episodes together), and anything quite like Raye Hollitt's display not to be seen again, all as beautiful and appealing as the female cast consistently was, this was still a show about lawyers, not lifeguards. And of course after the show relocated from NBC to CBS, where the management was more accommodating of Bellisario's preference for "less Top Gun and more A Few Good Men," as the show became more "CBS" broadly. Given that JAG was and remained a military legal-action drama it could never quite be Touched By An Angel, but it still softened considerably from what it had been in the edgy, flashy, action-packed, sexy two-hour pilot as the skirt-chasing fighter jock went through nine seasons of "Will they, won't they" before finally settling the matter of the nature of his relationship with his new partner, Catherine Bell's Sarah Mackenzie, all as, far from testing the censors with scenes like Hollitt's the showrunners sometimes played down the "impression" the actresses made even when fully uniformed. (Thus where in the season four intro they use a clip in which Rabb and Sarah stand to attention--with the line of Bell's ample bust very apparent--in season five they zoomed in the shot so that it ends up cropped a little below her shoulders, apparently deliberately.) Not inconsistent with the reverential tone the show struck toward its subject, it nonetheless played its part in how it came to be known as a show for older folks as younger viewers more inclined to edgy fare gave it a pass.
Ruling-Class Artists on Strike: A Few More Thoughts
Of course, even in this irony-addicted age few if any of those with any platform to speak of confessed to seeing any irony in the spectacle of the destruction of those who made Hollywood run being ruined by the neoliberalism they so vehemently propagandized for--either because they were sympathetic to those who work in Hollywood as they struck to defend their rights and interests as workers and held that to be the important thing, or frankly because they didn't have much sympathy for people in those occupational categories at whom a great many are prone to scream "GET A JOB! GET A REAL JOB!"--and, as their kind typically do, approved those same economic forces themselves, and considered the "collateral damage" of their workings who protest "whiners" undeserving of consideration. But some of them must have noticed the irony nonetheless, the more in as at the time what portions of the media attend to such realities at all paid a more than usual amount of attention to those dwelling in the proverbial "Slums of Beverly Hills."
Of course, the public being what it is, and the discourse of the epoch being what it is, a single expression of the truth coming atop a thousand fresh repetitions of the lie that the conventional wisdom usually is, which is promptly buried by a thousand fresher repetitions of the lie, tends not to make a great impression on many minds. But perhaps the attention to the bigger picture, for all its limitations, made an impression on the very impressionable people that artists, in Hollywood just like everywhere else, happen to be. Only time will tell about that.
If generative AI doesn't put them all out of work first.
Ruling-Class Artists on Strike
During the Hollywood strikes I certainly regarded the actors and writer taking that action with sympathy--the more in as the conditions of their work have deteriorated so badly, in part because of the extreme imbalance of power between themselves and the executives who call the shots, which said executives have exploited to the full. Gush as the business press does about the streaming business, the artists who created what it has become fashionable to call the "content" without which it would not exist have derived very little benefit from it, precisely because of how their employers had got the better of them in so many prior battles, all as the advent of generative artificial intelligence threatens them with the virtual annihilation of their professions within the space of a few short years, the more quickly insofar as they fail to secure some claim to profiting from their contributions to it.
Still, watching their world fall apart around them, sympathetic as I was, I also found myself thinking that there was the very real extent to which they helped bring it all down upon themselves. After all, as Daniel Bessner's brilliant piece in Harper's about the situation in Hollywood circa the 2023 strike made clear, the developments in Hollywood in recent decades were the same as what was happening all over the world in the neoliberal age. The destruction of those regulations that protected workers and small operators, including those regulations that legally safeguarded their right to bargain collectively. Aided by that deregulation, and the loose monetary policy that was to characterize the era, the consolidation of business in fewer and fewer hands, as these in turn came to be dominated by shareholder value-minded short-termist idiots who want their money now, Now, NOW! even if that meant wrecking the company irreparably as the price of a fat payout this quarter of the kind for whom Jack Welch was such a hero. The ascent of global labor arbitrage that hollowed out the old industrial center as it sent production to wherever costs were lowest and subsidies most irrationally generous (because for all the libertarian claptrap they speak the neoliberals' objection was to welfare for humans, not welfare for corporations, for which they are ever holding out their greasy hands). And ultimately the great widening of the gulf between those who, as "investors" were in a position to profit from the rising profits and asset values that resulted, and the people who actually had to work for money who did not.
Just how did Hollywood's artists address that in the works they created? By worshipping what is dishonestly and meanly called "success" and all that goes with it as they validated and glorified the elite in its assorted forms, and showed contempt for working people, one category of human that these singers of "representation" had no interest in "representing" on the screen. (I think again and again of what Peter Biskind wrote in Seeing is Believing, that self-made millionaires are as common in the films of the radical right as the masses in the films of the radical left. And you know full well who made it seem as if self-made billionaires, above all self-made tech billionaires, are a dime a dozen in such "elitist porn" as Silicon Valley, and all of them magnificent superhumans--even as many of these professional enshittifiers of everything they touch personally did their bit for making life hell for those who work in Hollywood as they got in on the production game with their brain-dead "move fast and break things" swagger.)
Of course, the artists do not run Hollywood, the executives do, and therefore cannot bear the full responsibility for Hollywood's having so much been a giant factory for (save on those few issues of lifestyle-identity liberalism to which coastal elite types such as themselves are so committed) right-wing propaganda. It is even the case that some of them have produced works that did not line up with such propaganda, opposing it, sometimes with intelligence and force--and at risk to their careers. Compared with the era before McCarthyism, compared with the era of the "New Hollywood" that led to another, quieter, round of purging in the name of putting auteurs in their place, what one could in Upton Sinclair's terms call "hero artists" are few in Hollywood, but they are not wholly nonexistent. (At their best such figures as an Oliver Stone, or an Andrew Niccol, or the Gilroy brothers Dan and Tony, for example, seem to me to be just a few of those who have earned respect as such.)
Still, it is the "ruling-class artists" who have prevailed, with these rarely producing what they do out of pure careerism, serving willingly, as they make clear at every opportunity, while persecuting those of their fellows who do not do the same--making life that much more hazardous for those who do follow their consciences when it is not the safe thing to do, and a disgusting hypocrisy of their presumed respect for the "free speech" that seems to me a duty of everyone who would call themselves an artist. And I do not think that it slights life's complexities to acknowledge that as a group they have been complicit in making that neoliberal situation that has them learning the hard way what empty claptrap the privileged lot of the "knowledge worker" was all along.
Of course, the artists do not run Hollywood, the executives do, and therefore cannot bear the full responsibility for Hollywood's having so much been a giant factory for (save on those few issues of lifestyle-identity liberalism to which coastal elite types such as themselves are so committed) right-wing propaganda. It is even the case that some of them have produced works that did not line up with such propaganda, opposing it, sometimes with intelligence and force--and at risk to their careers. Compared with the era before McCarthyism, compared with the era of the "New Hollywood" that led to another, quieter, round of purging in the name of putting auteurs in their place, what one could in Upton Sinclair's terms call "hero artists" are few in Hollywood, but they are not wholly nonexistent. (At their best such figures as an Oliver Stone, or an Andrew Niccol, or the Gilroy brothers Dan and Tony, for example, seem to me to be just a few of those who have earned respect as such.)
Still, it is the "ruling-class artists" who have prevailed, with these rarely producing what they do out of pure careerism, serving willingly, as they make clear at every opportunity, while persecuting those of their fellows who do not do the same--making life that much more hazardous for those who do follow their consciences when it is not the safe thing to do, and a disgusting hypocrisy of their presumed respect for the "free speech" that seems to me a duty of everyone who would call themselves an artist. And I do not think that it slights life's complexities to acknowledge that as a group they have been complicit in making that neoliberal situation that has them learning the hard way what empty claptrap the privileged lot of the "knowledge worker" was all along.
What Does Egalitarianism Really Look Like?
They would hold that no person is "better" or more "important" than any other--not only not on the basis of such matters as race, sex and gender, but wealth, position, family background and all associated with them.
They would hold that rather than a society where a small elite is unbound but protected, and the great majority are bound but unprotected, a society must bind and protect all equally (with, I suspect, most of those who would espouse an egalitarian view wanting all to be as little bound as possible, and protected as much as possible).
They would hold that a society is to be judged by how it treats the "least" of its members, to the extent that anyone was "less" than anyone else--and the last apt to be decreasing all the time.
They would hold that fact and reason are to be respected above Authority, and that no one person or group has a monopoly on knowledge.
They would be alert to the difference between what a person may get hold of, and what they actually earn, especially in an arrangement so haphazard as "the market" at whose altar so many worship.
They would hold that those in "public service" are truly servants of the public, rather than their personal ambitions or any interests to which they might sell themselves, and be held to that obligation.
They would hold that with great power comes great responsibility, and really mean it, while understanding this to mean that the superior talent the believer in "meritocracy" so relentlessly makes much of brings greater responsibility, rather than excuses to lay claim to a bigger share of the prizes--with that responsibility extending to helping the least capable up rather than stomping on them.
They would hold that in the face of a far from unavoidable injustice shrugging that "Life's not fair" is a non sequitir and an evasion.
They would hold that swaggering is a thing to be laughed at as they would laugh at the antics of primates in a nature documentary rather than a thing to be done by humans--while equally objecting that anyone should be required to bow and scrape before another.
Looking at our politics, our media, our culture, just how often do you see anyone enjoying a "platform" of any size express, let alone abide by, any of these views? I think you are far more likely to see the culture we live in barraging us with the extreme opposite attitude on every score--and suggest that people remember that the next time someone shoots their mouth off about society having become too tolerant, too fair, too coddling, of its members.
Nikolai Gogol, Robert Howard, Theodore Dreiser: Reflections
Reading Nikolai Gogol's "Taras Bulba" I remember thinking "This feels like something Robert Howard would write," something of the wild, swashbuckling spirit and pulpy briskness of a Conan the Barbarian adventure to be found in this classic of nineteenth century Russian literature (one reason, I suppose, why our literary critics esteem this tale less than they do works like "The Nose").
However, after that occurred to me I quickly thought of all the ways in which "Taras Bulba" was very unlike a Howard tale. Gogol's saga of a Cossack colonel and his two sons riding off to battle the Poles over their insult to the Orthodox Church was a story of family, tribe, faith, all those traditional conservative touchstones that had little purchase on Howard's imagination to go by how little present they were in his own stories. Family? Where Conan, for example, is concerned we know nothing of parents, siblings, childhood--such that it always seemed to me a great unfaithfulness to Howard when those continuing his adventures or adapting them for the screen did present such elements (as L. Sprague de Camp did in his pastiches, John Milius did in his 1982 film, the 2011 remake of that 1982 film did to a still greater degree). Tribe means scarcely more, and faith less than nothing, with this the case notably even in Howard's tales of the Crusades, like the obvious proto-Conan that is Cormac Fitzgeoffrey (he, too, a tall, formidably muscled man with a square-cut mane of black hair who can throw a lance like a javelin). Men like Fitzgeoffrey may have come to the Orient with sword in hand, but they were by heritage and temperament only lately and superficially Christianized pagan barbarians after adventure, fortune and glory rather than the causes of Popes, Emperors and Kings.
Indeed, taken altogether Howard's heroes typically appeared before us as fully formed forces of nature, almost as if they had come into the world that way, and as lone, grown--exceedingly formidable--men seeking their destinies not as members of a nation or even as a band but individuals in a milieu far away from any origins they might have had. In the course of those lives many of them gain thrones, but even sitting them sit them alone (brooding with their chins on their fists, as it were), while if it seems clear that some of them had some issue (we are given to understand that Conan is a descendant of King Kull of Atlantis, and that the very libidinous Conan, after he had become King Conan of Aquilonia, ultimately made Zenobia his Queen at the close of Hour of the Dragon) any marital or family life they had is something about which Howard, for his part, is silent.
A certain sort of bourgeois nitwit of a critic sniffs at such extreme individualism in characterization, but it seems to me very understandable, and that not as some failing of an artistic imagination as such but as reflective of how young men such as Robert Howard was so often experience the world, perhaps especially in America, especially if they do not come from the kind of great privilege that so many of our "art lie"-peddling cultural gatekeepers do. Like most people they had a family of some sort growing up, yes, but having grown up they go out into the world to struggle in it alone, and usually fail or succeed alone, in surroundings that ever feel in important ways alien, while that aloneness does not change even if they become "family men" because in fighting to support that family they are still on their own. And indeed where the train of thought I discuss here began with Gogol it ended with Theodore Dreiser in An American Tragedy. Another underappreciated masterpiece which really does live up to its promise of relating a distinctly American tragedy, that book likewise saw its protagonist, Clyde Griffiths struggle on his own from the start of the narrative to its close. He had a family, we know all about it--the mother and father who raised him and siblings he grew up amongst, the more distant relations who had so prospered in Lycurgus, New York--but even when he was with them he was always alone in the ways that counted, down to the end of his adventure not as ruler of a kingdom but in an electric chair for the crime that in the end he actually flinched from committing, executed for what he was not in a tale where society can seem to be one of "that vast company of individuals who are born, pass through and die out of the world without ever quite getting any one thing straight" who people the land writ large.
The difference between how a Conan and a Clyde ended up seems to me to underline how both their writers, from their very different perspectives, in their very different ways, responded to, indeed indicted, the alienations of the early twentieth century America in which they both lived--in each case, superlatively. Howard's response was a romantic retreat into the past as it never was, through which he produced one of the greatest wish-fulfillment figures--the greatest Gary Stus--ever put on paper. By contrast Dreiser devoted a lifetime's study to that which alienated him, manifest in his creative as well as his nonfiction output, and in the process, as David Walsh had it, "presented more clearly" than any writer before or since "[t]he true pathos of the petty bourgeois, his manipulated dreams, his aspirations to prestige and good society, his willingness to sacrifice everything human in himself, his self-mutilation and self-abnegation in the name of 'advancement,' his terror and wonder at the workings of the ruling class," and altogether, "the grinding up of a human being by the brutal machinery of American capitalist society." And of course, for all that superlativeness neither stands very high with the literary Establishment, though again for different reasons--what a Howard does in their view to be taken even less seriously than what a Gogol did in "Taras Bulba," and Dreiser a "dead dog" in their view because they take what Dreiser did all too seriously, and see it as anathema, with on both scores a "Henry James . . . describ[ing] in minute and stylish detail the emotional relations of articulate middle-class people . . . more their cup of tea."
However, after that occurred to me I quickly thought of all the ways in which "Taras Bulba" was very unlike a Howard tale. Gogol's saga of a Cossack colonel and his two sons riding off to battle the Poles over their insult to the Orthodox Church was a story of family, tribe, faith, all those traditional conservative touchstones that had little purchase on Howard's imagination to go by how little present they were in his own stories. Family? Where Conan, for example, is concerned we know nothing of parents, siblings, childhood--such that it always seemed to me a great unfaithfulness to Howard when those continuing his adventures or adapting them for the screen did present such elements (as L. Sprague de Camp did in his pastiches, John Milius did in his 1982 film, the 2011 remake of that 1982 film did to a still greater degree). Tribe means scarcely more, and faith less than nothing, with this the case notably even in Howard's tales of the Crusades, like the obvious proto-Conan that is Cormac Fitzgeoffrey (he, too, a tall, formidably muscled man with a square-cut mane of black hair who can throw a lance like a javelin). Men like Fitzgeoffrey may have come to the Orient with sword in hand, but they were by heritage and temperament only lately and superficially Christianized pagan barbarians after adventure, fortune and glory rather than the causes of Popes, Emperors and Kings.
Indeed, taken altogether Howard's heroes typically appeared before us as fully formed forces of nature, almost as if they had come into the world that way, and as lone, grown--exceedingly formidable--men seeking their destinies not as members of a nation or even as a band but individuals in a milieu far away from any origins they might have had. In the course of those lives many of them gain thrones, but even sitting them sit them alone (brooding with their chins on their fists, as it were), while if it seems clear that some of them had some issue (we are given to understand that Conan is a descendant of King Kull of Atlantis, and that the very libidinous Conan, after he had become King Conan of Aquilonia, ultimately made Zenobia his Queen at the close of Hour of the Dragon) any marital or family life they had is something about which Howard, for his part, is silent.
A certain sort of bourgeois nitwit of a critic sniffs at such extreme individualism in characterization, but it seems to me very understandable, and that not as some failing of an artistic imagination as such but as reflective of how young men such as Robert Howard was so often experience the world, perhaps especially in America, especially if they do not come from the kind of great privilege that so many of our "art lie"-peddling cultural gatekeepers do. Like most people they had a family of some sort growing up, yes, but having grown up they go out into the world to struggle in it alone, and usually fail or succeed alone, in surroundings that ever feel in important ways alien, while that aloneness does not change even if they become "family men" because in fighting to support that family they are still on their own. And indeed where the train of thought I discuss here began with Gogol it ended with Theodore Dreiser in An American Tragedy. Another underappreciated masterpiece which really does live up to its promise of relating a distinctly American tragedy, that book likewise saw its protagonist, Clyde Griffiths struggle on his own from the start of the narrative to its close. He had a family, we know all about it--the mother and father who raised him and siblings he grew up amongst, the more distant relations who had so prospered in Lycurgus, New York--but even when he was with them he was always alone in the ways that counted, down to the end of his adventure not as ruler of a kingdom but in an electric chair for the crime that in the end he actually flinched from committing, executed for what he was not in a tale where society can seem to be one of "that vast company of individuals who are born, pass through and die out of the world without ever quite getting any one thing straight" who people the land writ large.
The difference between how a Conan and a Clyde ended up seems to me to underline how both their writers, from their very different perspectives, in their very different ways, responded to, indeed indicted, the alienations of the early twentieth century America in which they both lived--in each case, superlatively. Howard's response was a romantic retreat into the past as it never was, through which he produced one of the greatest wish-fulfillment figures--the greatest Gary Stus--ever put on paper. By contrast Dreiser devoted a lifetime's study to that which alienated him, manifest in his creative as well as his nonfiction output, and in the process, as David Walsh had it, "presented more clearly" than any writer before or since "[t]he true pathos of the petty bourgeois, his manipulated dreams, his aspirations to prestige and good society, his willingness to sacrifice everything human in himself, his self-mutilation and self-abnegation in the name of 'advancement,' his terror and wonder at the workings of the ruling class," and altogether, "the grinding up of a human being by the brutal machinery of American capitalist society." And of course, for all that superlativeness neither stands very high with the literary Establishment, though again for different reasons--what a Howard does in their view to be taken even less seriously than what a Gogol did in "Taras Bulba," and Dreiser a "dead dog" in their view because they take what Dreiser did all too seriously, and see it as anathema, with on both scores a "Henry James . . . describ[ing] in minute and stylish detail the emotional relations of articulate middle-class people . . . more their cup of tea."
How Cyberpunk Went From Cutting Edge to Retro
A distinct tendency in the '80s by its end the field broadly assimilated many of its elements--hence "post-cyberpunk," which kept much of what it offered, but was prone to be less unreadably postmodernist, and less dark underbelly. And eventually it went from being assimilated into science fiction generally to looking and sounding and feeling like something out of science fiction's past, especially insofar as the near-future came and, if in some ways looking like what it had described, in others looking very different indeed, enough to make it seem like the imagining of people in another place and time, just as had been the case with prior waves, prior movements, in science fiction's history--with the techno-economic model of the day seeming to me particular relevant. The "inventor's fiction" of the "Gernsback era," the fiction of the Golden Age, were the imagining of the future in people living in the "Fordist" era, reflecting its understanding of the present and the expectation of the future they had on that basis. Cyberpunk reflected the expectations of a world that people were told was moving into the information age by figures like Alvin Toffler (whose writing was, indeed, acknowledged by Sterling himself as an important influence on them).
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