Francis Urquhart and the Truth About Respect

In the epigram at the start of Michael Dobbs' novel House of Cards the deeply cynical Francis Urquhart contemplates the epitaph "Respected By All Who Knew Him," and sneers at the "monumental whimper" he considers it to be. "Respect," he quips, is nothing next to fear--and indeed the most likely way to get it, for "When a man is afraid you will crush him, utterly destroy him, his respect will always follow."

In that unpleasant thought is an acknowledgment of the too little spoken truth about respect--that what we mean by it is not civility, but deference; and a regard for another's superior conscience, wisdom, judgment (on those rare occasions when people are prepared to acknowledge another as genuinely their superior here on an occasion when this really counts) far less likely to bring about deference than fear of utter destruction.

When we talk of respect, we are, even if we do not fully realize it (as most don't) thinking from inside of a world of force and fear, of domination and submission, of authority and hierarchy, and all the brutality and cowardice and degradation--and inevitably, stupidity--that are associated with them.

Remember that when you next speak of respect--and don't confuse the genuine esteem for a person of worth with this far more common, ugly, destructive stuff.

Netflix's House of Cards

Today the creation of vast amounts of big-budget, high-profile, "prestige" content by and for the premium streaming services is an established, familiar part of the scene, but a decade ago it was all just getting started--with Netflix's remake of the classic 1990 BBC miniseries House of Cards a milestone in that development.

I have to admit that I was one of those skeptical about the project--in part because I had seen and admired the original and am generally dubious about remakes, but also because I knew that this particular remake brought a whole train of problems with it, not least the transfer of the intrigue from one very different political system and political culture to another, while the intended expansion of a four hour miniseries (and at most, its two similarly compact sequels) into a multi-season show that ultimately ran for well over fifty hours seemed highly questionable.

Seeing the first season of the show (which is all I have seen of it to date) confirmed my suspicions. The translation of Francis' intrigues from British parliamentary politics to the American system was predictably awkward, and the extension of the compact original story into a sprawling soap opera was not an improvement. (Quite the contrary--one of the great improvements the miniseries made over Michael Dobbs' novel was to give a rather loose book a center around which to tighten up the material, and this was exactly what was kicked to the curb in reimagining it on this different scale.)

All of this cost the material the great bulk of its charge. Not the least of these was what it derived from the class dynamics of the original. The show was about "politics, not policy," but all the same, in his own person Ian Richardson's Francis Urquhart was a perfect manifestation of what "FU" represented, the ultra-reactionary blue bloods who had, far from regarding 1688 as the "end of history," regarded 1688 as already progress gone too far; the kind of modernity and egalitarianism-hating people on whose behalf folks like Evelyn Waugh wrote, and were lauded for writing. (Indeed, as Urquhart boasts in his final confrontation with a monarch he despises in the sequel, To Play the King, "My family came south with James I. We were defenders of the English throne before your family was ever heard of.") Any attempt at a real American equivalent would, again, be flimsy, and the writers wisely went in the exact opposite direction with "Frank" Underwood--a move that had some potential here, but alas, the bitterness of a man born far from privilege clawing his way up to the top never seemed to figure much in Underwood's character, the man rarely ever seeming more than a vulgar opportunist.

The narrative's enlargement did mean more room for policy with the politics--but again this failed to amount to much, with this significantly reflected in the decision to make a vague educational reform the center of that policymaking in the first season. The fight with the teachers' unions felt anachronistic, the whole thing a much less "hot" topic than two decades earlier, while the writers themselves did not seem to understand it very well. Blaming the schools, and those who teach in them, for a lack of "competitiveness" has long been a cynical ploy for those diverting public attention from other more consequential factors in industrial decline (like a government preference for the priorities of the service sector over industrial policy)--as well as a handy cudgel for the "privatize everything" crowd. But the writers did not seem to have any perspective on that, out of their depth on this point as they are on so many others.

It may be that the show's later seasons were stronger in these respects, but if so, I have seen little evidence of it in the reviews I have read, what I had actually seen apparently representative of the longer course. However, others took a far more favorable view, making for a virtually rapturous reception to Netflix's creation--helping bring about the business of streaming as we know it today.

The Decline and Fall of the Arrowverse?

The Arrowverse was, once upon a time, a unique phenomenon in TV land, an extraordinary sprawl of interconnected television series' putting a truly unprecedented amount of DC Comics-based content on the air.

A decade on it is looking rather weary. The flagship show Arrow is gone, of course, while Legends of Tomorrow and Batgirl have been canceled, and most of the rest are in trouble.

Much of the comment about the matter points to specific missteps on the part of the shows' writers--like an underwhelming follow-up to the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" arc, or (alleged) political backlash for some offense or other to this or that part of the audience (too "woke," not "woke" enough, etc., etc., ad infinitum and ad nauseam). Yet other factors seem worth mentioning, not least the fact that this whole TV universe has been intensively mined for a decade now--a problem the greater because of the inherent limitations of the format. (I remember watching even earlier seasons of Arrow I found myself thinking of just how many, many, many times we had seen all this done before.)

There is, too, the matter of the general decline of broadcast television, with the margin perhaps especially slight for a relatively junior, relatively youth-oriented network (as against that "old folks"-coddling ratings champion, CBS), and its particularly heavy investment in a form of content with a necessarily finite audience (like a collection of arc-oriented, intricately interconnected superhero shows). The difficulty of holding that audience would seem all the greater with the competition in this very area on the rise, not least in streaming--viewers here now having a superabundance of other small-screen superhero content to enjoy (with the Marvel Cinematic Universe increasingly on TV as well), and from what I can tell, others producing plenty of other DC Comics Universe content that is newer, fresher, more varied, and for those who go for that sort of thing, more "adult" (with the new HBO Max streaming service trumpeting the fact in its promotions).

In short, the Arrowverse made a splash, but the world has since moved on as what was novel became commonplace, and has come to be delivered to the consumer via different, freer media. That being the case it may be that the Arrowverse will be wrapped up, with perhaps certain legacies transferred elsewhere--or reinvented altogether.

Has Prestige TV Worn Out its Welcome?

I have to admit that from the start I have been at best reserved toward prestige TV--here and there giving something a chance (Mad Men, Game of Thrones, etc., etc.) but never finding cause to stick with it much past season three. Rather those experiences persuaded me that the grounds for praise were at best superficial and simplistic, and that the critics, in fact, were looking less and less like shills and more and more like the utterly unhinged.

If always conscious of espousing a minority view I have not always been wholly alone. (Mark Greif, Daniel Mendlesohn, Marc Tracy, produced fairly incisive pieces about the show's limitations.) Still, such were few and far between, and it seems notable that the more critical pieces about the show tended to appear in the show's latter days rather than its earlier ones--with the same going for the prestige TV boom generally. Only a few years ago, for example, did we see critics start to acknowledge that prestige TV mostly consisted of a pack of clichés whose appeal, unlike that of so many other fictional clichés, is doubtful, this stuff basically wrapping up content which is pedestrian or worse in postmodernist grimdarkness and ambiguity and pretension--such that, in Elizabeth Alsop's analysis, its makers "exploit viewers' love" of such pulpy material as "swordplay, zombies and serial killers, while denying them the lurid pleasures therein" in "punitive pulps," in stark contrast with the unashamedly, wholehearted pulp of which they are so derivative (and which actually delivers the promised satisfactions).

Meanwhile prestige TV's novelties--its story arcs, big budgets, movie stars casts and "adult content--have become rather shopworn a quarter of a century after the debut of The Sopranos. In some cases they have even become liabilities, with the sexual aspect of such television seeming a particularly noteworthy case, the more in as those writing for mainstream venues are so inhibited about discussing it. The fact is that the shows present nudity and sex that cannot be put on broadcast TV--but, as might be expected given the general tendency toward the dark and the "punitive," do so in ways that displeases not only those averse to sex on TV as such (whose numbers are possibly growing, and on both sides of the culture war, with the upmarket prestige TV audience by no means exempt to go by what I see in places like The Guardian), but even that audience up for prurient entertainment. Simply put, in their entertainment that portion of the audience are looking less for "sex" than the "sex-y"; what will appeal to their own, personal, sense of erotic fantasy; what, one may not unfairly say, fits in with their preferred flavor of porn; and are very easily put off when they are shown content not of that particular flavor, content of some else's flavor instead, or perhaps, no one's flavor (even in the mainstream press, some acknowledgment existing of the "joylessness" of the sex in such fare). Seeing the latter can very quickly make them stop watching in disinterest, distaste or even disgust--and in this age of intense "status politics," regard not getting what they want, and having what they do not want inflicted on them, as a provocation or an insult from someone pushing an agenda on them, not always unreasonably since so many are loudly proclaiming such an agenda, with the results (and the inevitable accusation that it is really Russian bots and not actual people expressing the objection) splashed across a thousand Internet fora.

In spite of all that the prestige TV bandwagon rolls on--but, as cable grows more squeamish about funding original content, and even streaming king Netflix grows leerier of auteur-type projects, it seems likely to roll a good deal more slowly as crowd-pleasing fare gets the upper hand. Love or hate it, Disney's sheer crassness has paid off very handsomely in commercial terms--and looking at the commercials for the new Obi-Wan series' I feel sure that this, and not shows like House of the Cards, represents the future of streaming.

Amber Heard and Her Ghost Writer

The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial is the sort of news story that I generally pay as little attention to as possible--one reason why I was surprised when I found out just how much attention others were paying it, and what significances they were loading it with. Inevitably I picked up a few of the details--one of the more interesting of which was that Heard's op-ed was produced a ghost writer.

More interesting still was how many were shocked by the fact.

When you actually do much writing--perhaps even more, when you teach writing, as I have done for two decades--you learn just what a demanding craft writing is, and how time-consuming the activity can be, enough so as to make the idea of highly public personalities with extremely busy schedules producing lots and lots of writing seem highly suspect. Indeed, it is no secret that what public figures supposedly "write" is commonly produced by another individual for publication under their name. As C. Wright Mills explained in his classic White Collar way back in 1951, with the ever-greater "rationalization" and "commercialization" of publishing that had already taken over book distribution penetrating ever more deeply into book production, editors sought "out prominent names . . . men with such names crave even more prominence" with becoming "authors" one way of getting it, and in the process ghost-writing exploded.

For his part Mills estimated that a "book by a prominent but non-literary man" has at best a "fifty-fifty chance" of being by that public figure rather than having been written by someone else. And I would imagine that the chances are far lower now. After all, amid the hyper-commercialization of publishing of which I have written so many a time there is that much more emphasis on the name on the byline (and the publicity to be done on the book's behalf by the famous individual in question), so much so that it is not only the books by the "non-literary men" but even those by the "literary men" that are not by the ostensible authors, with James Patterson only the most notorious example--because even when the required level of quality is low the publishers want more "product," more "content," than any one human being can actually produce.

At the same time it seems likely, in an ever less literate age, that fewer people have the skills to produce such a work, with this going especially for the kinds of public figure we have today, not least in the entertainment industry from which so many "authors" are drawn these days, and not solely because of the busy schedules. While the lickspittles of the entertainment press would have you believe that every "celebrity" is a superhumanly accomplished Renaissance figure who would have been taking home a passel of Nobel Prizes were they not playing bit roles in sub-mediocre movies, at least in part on the grounds that they are infinitely better-educated than you (Harvard this, Yale that), looking at Hollywood's A-list closely one sees that Ricky Gervais' quip about their having "spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg" is no exaggeration--that so many of them never even finished high school one could mistake it for a requirement. (Incidentally both Heard and Depp fall into this category, both of them high school dropouts. So, stay in school, I guess?) And, I might add, Hollywood has never struck me as a place particularly conducive to people being relentlessly self-educating Martin Edens.

Still, if recent history is any guide the public will not retain the revelation--and go on thinking that the books Park Avenue pushes onto them, and the other content people with quite different purposes push onto them (as seen in this case), are actually by the people whose names are on the covers as they play a game gone far, far beyond what Mills described in his day, perhaps so much so that he could not even have imagined it.

The End of "New" New Hollywood?

During Netflix's period of heady expansion as a generator of original films and shows much was made of its readiness to give artists a relatively free hand in pursuing their vision. (I remember, for example, that Nightcrawler and Roman J. Israel director Dan Gilroy--one of the few filmmakers who was working this past decade who was actually interested in the world and actually making interesting movies about it--talking about his experience of making Velvet Buzzsaw for them, saying that Netflix, unlike the studios, "willing to give us everything we needed, financially, artistically, and in every way, to make the film that we wanted to make.")

There was a whiff of '70s-era "New Hollywood" about that, but I would not go so far as to say that streaming was giving us some latterday edition of that era. After all, where cultural change and political audacity are concerned, the 2010s were a far cry from the 1970s--with, at the cinematic level, all this reinforced by the reality that Netflix was cutting checks to established insiders in a context where opportunities for up-and-comers were few. (The massively budgeted Netflix production The Irishman seems telling here. In the '70s Martin Scorsese was making his name with Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, films at the time regarded as strikingly fresh and contemporary--while in his 2019 gangster epic he looked backward, to the point of digitally deaging longtime Scorsese regulars Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci.)

Still, with Netlfix doing what it was there did seem a little more scope than before for filmmakers who had some chance of making something, perhaps something worthwhile, that an ever more restrictive studio system would never allow.

It also seemed to me that given how this comparatively easygoing attitude in regard to funding film and TV production seemed bound up with the debt-fueled expansion of the company that appeared implausible outside the rapid expansion of its customer base, and neither the piling up of debt nor the growth in the number of subscribers could go on forever (the more in as competition was growing, with the likes of Disney+ proving formidable indeed). Last year the company was already starting to back away from this approach, while this year's report that the trend in subscriber growth has turned negative has quite predictably led to official declarations of big changes in store (for the sake of reassuring people they hope will want to hold their stock), not least that the company's day as a backer of pricey "auteur" projects is drawing to a close. And while some are gloating over the end of Hollywood's winning streak, even as one not always impressed with its choices or the products to which they led, can see that as sad news for filmmakers and film-lovers alike.

Revisiting the Matter of Independent Film

I am old enough to remember the fuss about independent film back in the '90s.

That makes me also old enough to remember how little it ended up amounting to--a handful of works ranging from marginal to execrable, and the mass-manufacture of pale imitations of these, with the mediocrity, derivativeness, ugliness of Quentin Tarantino's films tellingly the outstanding "success," the model for all the other little edgelords who want the whole world to know how "cool" they think they are following in his footsteps.

Meanwhile there has been the reality that whatever one makes of this side of its content, independent film was never really so "independent" as the label suggested, with David Walsh putting it particularly memorably in a review at the turn of the century: "What does the phrase 'independent filmmaker' signify? It often seems to mean a director whose films have not yet made anyone a great deal of money--a hack commercial filmmaker in training."

Walsh's view is certainly confirmed by the frequency with which an "independent" who drew some raves or made some money happily takes up the task of churning out the kind of bland blockbuster against which the "cool rebels" supposedly defined themselves. And it would have become even more the case given what has become of today's film market, with the prospects for funding such a movie and putting it on screens dwindling as they have. (A decade ago Steven Soderbergh was talking about how much worse it had become than when he started out--gone from the challenge of hitting a baseball, to the challenge of hitting a baseball with another, thrown baseball--and it would seem to have become worse still since to go by what Bryan Wizemann has to say about the matter.)

Indeed, the complaint of the sadly departed Ray Liotta seems all too telling--the actors "who are doing the superhero movies are the ones getting the leads in independent movies."

Want to make that small personal film? That real work of art you've been dreaming about realizing for years?

You'd better become a Marvel superstar first.

Speaking of Ozymandias . . . (The Fate of Netflix)

Reading of Netflix's recent woes I have found myself thinking of how much what the company has to offer has changed.

The original idea was that it was a giant video rental that sent you DVDs through the mail. You joined, and then had access to everything, more or less.

It wasn't perfect, of course. The queues, the mailing, were limiting and cumbersome compared to being able to stream anything they had in their collection all day long from anywhere you happen to be. Even before getting into such headaches as discs which were mismailed, or damaged, or how gaps appeared in their offerings that never got filled (as with a TV series where some disc you wanted right in the middle became available), you got only X number of discs at a time, and if there was something in particular you wanted to see now at the top of your queue you could end up waiting quite a while before getting it.

Still, there was that they-have-everything aspect.

Now, at least where streaming is concerned, a service that has everything is not even an idea, the whole media universe ever more fragmented. This is not only a matter of the "exclusive" content so many are creating, and which prestige TV lovers can't get enough of, but simply a matter of seeing even the higher-profile of Hollywood's wide release feature films.

The poptimist-minded entertainment journalism crowd, of course, doesn't acknowledge that anything has been lost that way. But I, for one, think that the idea of signing up for multiple subscription services (and paying their fees) just to see what we were able to get in one place is not very attractive. And all the original content, which even some of the entertainment journalism crowd seem to be starting to acknowledge isn't somehow intrinsically and eternally the magic they made it out to be for so long (the words "Netflix is the New Cable" are fast becoming a cliché), seem poor compensation for the fact.

All the same, I have a hard time picturing Netflix's troubles doing much to bring anything like the old Netflix back, either under the Netflix label or anywhere else.

Reflections on the New York Times #1 Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers of 2021

Not long ago I considered the bestsellers of the past year, focusing on the Publisher's Weekly list. I now turn to the New York Times' list of #1 hardcover fiction bestsellers during the year.

In that particular year there were 53 editions of the list. Some 20 of these were topped by thriller writers who had made their names in the twentieth century (Grisham, Patterson, King, Coben, Sanford, Baldacci, Connelly, Preston, Child, Silva, Evanovich), or only marginally later (as with Thor, whose first book debuted in 2002). Working in different genres but similarly long-established are Quinn, Sparks, Gabaldon, Roberts (who were collectively #1 for 8 weeks), while the same can also be said of Hannah and Picoult (Hannah's The Four Winds having 3 nonconsecutive weeks on the list, while Picoult's Wish You Were Here having one). Of those accounting for the #1 spot in the other 21 weeks most traded on political celebrity, entertainment celebrity or some combination of both (as with Sister Souljah, Stacey Abrams, Quentin Tarantino and Amanda Gorman, whose books of poetry were on the list for 3 weeks), with the Clintons both benefiting from "coauthoring" their book with a bestselling mystery author (Bill with Patterson, Hillary with Louise Penny).

In short, books by people who made their names by being authors and not as something else or in some other way (like, for instance, presenting at a presidential inauguration) in this actual, not-so-young century were very few indeed on the list, those who (unlike Louise Penny, Laura Dave or Lianne Moriarty) made their names after 2010 fewer still (with the notable exceptions E.L. James of Fifty Shades shame, The Girl on the Train author Paula Hawkins, Amor Towles). Glancing at the biographies of the persons in question I might add that I am struck by how many, especially of the newer, post-2000, authors, had the benefit of prior careers in media and familial or marital connections to the literary and other worlds. I have similarly been struck by the extent to which the bestsellers by anyone were obviously an effect of success elsewhere (with Quinn's The Duke and I enjoying four straight weeks at the top because of the success of Bridgerton, Tarantino's book the print version of his hit film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Gabaldon helped by Outlander being a still ongoing STARZ series).

Considering all this I am reminded of just how closed the publishing business' upper tiers have become to newcomers of any variety--and especially people from outside those circles that have better entree to publishing than blind submission to the few remaining slush piles. I am struck, too, by how where it comes to the newer successes the books tend to be more idiosyncratic, with none seeming to make the kind of steady career with high-volume commercial work such as a Patterson (whose books, while still topping the New York Times' list, seem to have a less prominent place on the Publisher's Weekly lists than they used to do). And both those details seem to me additional confirmation of what I have increasingly suspected, the decline of the old thriller market—the superstars of yesteryear continuing to claim the #1 spot with frequency, but, if PW is anything to go by, still not doing well as they used to do, for their dwindling sales are to an eroding audience they won in an earlier time and are not replenishing, cannot replenish, because, even without younger competition offering fresher product, that younger audience just isn't up for what they have to offer.

Shakespeare, Establishment Poet? Further Thoughts

Recently reconsidering the matter of Shakespeare's standing as an Establishment poet I found myself thinking of how English literature's opinion-makers esteem as the greatest of idols a figure from rather further back in the past than do other European literatures--the French, the German, the Russian. These three derive their literary idols from more recent times (Hugo, Goethe, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy) and I cannot help wondering if the fact that English literature does not do the same does not reflect something particularly conservative and backward-looking in the English tradition--that inclination to see history as having properly stopped in 1688 that Wells satirized a century ago and which can seem hardly less true of the country today.

Considering this I find myself recalling what Upton Sinclair had to say about Percy Bysshe Shelley in his own consideration of literature in Mammonart: that Shelley, not Shakespeare, was "the finest mind the English race produced." Well aware of the "ridicule" this statement "will excite," Sinclair acknowledged that few would compare Shelley's body of work with Shakespeare's--but stressed that Shelley's career and life ended prematurely at thirty, and had Shakespeare's been cut off at the same point his legacy would be very different today. Indeed, hailing Shelley as "among the sons of Rousseau who did not falter and turn back to feudalism, Catholicism or mysticism of any sort," and instead "fixed his eyes upon the future, and never wavered for a moment"; who, exemplifying that unfaltering, unwavering, forward-looking commitment to humanity and its liberation "attacked class privilege, not merely political, but industrial"; Sinclair predicted that in an England where the working class has been emancipated they would remember him as "one inspired saint in their history who visioned that glad day, and gave up everything in life to bring it nearer," and honor him by "making him their poet-laureate, and hailing him as the supreme glory of English letters"--Shakespeare dethroned once and for all.

It seems quite relevant that such a suggestion does not seem to be entertained today by anyone remotely of Sinclair's stature. Indeed, coming into contact with the sonnet by which Shelley is best known, "Ozymandias," they are most likely to see it used as an expression of disdain for those mainstream, Establishment-safe opinion has labeled tyrants, generally small-timers as small as Breaking Bad's Walter White--the old element of social rebellion so prominent within Shelley's career utterly gone out of it.

Shakespeare, Establishment Poet?

Bardolatry has been the default attitude toward Shakespeare in the English-speaking world for centuries. Even people who have never read or seen Shakespeare's work--or who have read and seen it and didn't think much of it--seem to regard themselves obliged to exalt him as not a Bard, but the Bard, the greatest poet who has ever written in the English language, and perhaps any other language that has ever existed as well.

Still, the ranks of the Bardoclasts have not been wholly undistinguished--including as they do such figures as Lev Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair and Graham Greene. They do not all make the same charges, but it is notable that all four criticized Shakespeare for being, as Greene put it in his classic "The Virtue of Disloyalty," "the supreme poet of conservatism, of what we now call the Establishment." Tolstoy was particularly explicit on this point, declaring that for Shakespeare "the fundamental principle" was "the absence of all idealism," "the conservation of the forms of life once established," and that "the end justifies the means," with all this capped off by a "Chauvinist English patriotism . . . according to which the English throne is something sacred." The translator of Tolstoy's essay on the matter, Ernest Crosby (a significant figure in his own right), was to address in particular the question of Shakespeare's attitude toward questions of authority and class, presenting in "Shakespeare's Attitude Toward the Working Classes" a formidable case founded on close reading of an abundance of Shakespeare's material from across the whole body of his plays, testifying to Shakespeare's worship of authority and those who yielded it, and more specifically his combination of an exaltation of kings and nobles with utter contempt for the lower orders.

Of course, those critics were all far too intelligent to overlook the reality that Shakespeare was writing in an earlier period. Even in Tolstoy's time (and certainly today) one gets much further being congenial to those in power than challenging them--and there was much less room to offer such a challenge in Shakespeare's time. Formal, statutory censorship was immense, every play having to be approved before it could be presented on the stage, and the sanctions for those who met with the disapproval of the authorities severe. (One may recall Ben Jonson's being imprisoned for having written The Isle of Dogs--a play that, not coincidentally, we no longer have.) And aristocratic patronage was still indispensable to an artistic career.

Accordingly the more politically-minded critics take pains to demonstrate that rather than a man who felt differently but worked within the space allotted him Shakespeare's profuseness in his celebration of the powerful, the abundance and sheer gratuitousness and vehemence of his displays of contempt for the lowborn (no one required him to present Coriolanus as a hero!), testifies to a man thoroughly at home in the Establishment poet role, with the fact the clearer because of comparison with other literary figures of the era. If risking the fate of a Jonson was an unreasonable thing to ask of him, where, Crosby asks, can we find a single man of the people to compare with that creation by that writer coming from a culture the English endlessly flatter themselves is so much more reactionary and unfree than their own, Miguel de Cervantes' Sancho Panza?

I have to admit that in the end I find the case these figures make compelling--far more than the contrary one, however congenial that would be for admirers of at least slightly progressive inclinations, or simply humane ones, who would, to paraphrase Greene, be better able to "love as a man" the same figure they love as "the greatest of poets."

The Mysterious Disappearance of the Comment Thread

You probably noticed it before I did--the vanishing of comment threads from about the web. News sites, Youtube videos--places where you once took it for granted that there would have been a space for public feedback since foreclosing the possibility.

This seems to have happened quietly for the most part, the press not talking about it very much, and such discussion as I can find generally appearing not in the major mainstream media outlets but smaller, more specialized web sites (Techdirt, for instance, having long had its eye on the matter).

The standard explanation is that this was a response to the reality that such threads so often contained more spam, trolling and abuse than real dialogue about the item at hand. However, another more critical view is that this was a matter of heading off reaction to the extreme views and content the media promulgates, which the media know full well would offend many, but "shove down their throat" anyway. (Some of those espousing this view, for example, hold that the reason for, for example, turning off comments in response to "woke" content is that they do not want to deal with the inevitable criticism.)

I suspect that both are right, not least because each in its way confirms the other (the woke content, of course, bringing on a reaction not always civil). Yet it also seems to me that while the media, strictly speaking, has no obligation to make a space available for comment its withdrawing that space after users had become accustomed to the opportunity to "talk back" to the press has a whiff of repression about it--the more in as the press organ is recognizably powerful and influential, and in as this has at least in part because of the political content of that comment. I can hardly deny that spammers and trolls befouled many a scene--but it is not only the spammers and trolls who get shut out this way, with all that implies for even the pretense of there being a conversation in this society.

Is There Such a Thing as Being "Oversensitive?"

The word "oversensitive" strikes me as one of those about which a person should display some circumspection. The accusation of oversensitivity, after all, is one that abusers and bullies make to delegitimize others' reactions to their behavior.

"What, can't take a joke?"

"Don't you have any sense of humor?"

Any right-thinking person has to find this kind of thing disgusting.

Still, it seems to me that there are at least two occasions when one can reasonably think of a reaction to a perceived offense to be excessive.

1. When the Offense is Just Unsatisfied Narcissism.
Encountering the word "narcissism" one may ask what I mean by it. I think one can usefully speak of it not as some supposedly excessive self-love, but as the kind of demand one makes on others. They demand that everyone else think of them, first, last and always, while thinking of no one else ever--and react to anything else as an offense. The burden they place on others to satisfy their wants, the complete lack of reciprocity on their part--and their response when their unreasonable demand is unmet--seem to me to qualify as excessive.

2. When People are Offended Because They (Perversely) Want to Be Offended.
H.G. Wells once offered rather a useful definition of hatred as something more than extreme dislike. Rather he called it a "chronic condition of vindictive disapproval" toward someone, or something. This leaves people looking for occasions to be offended, and find satisfaction in being offended, because it validates their feeling, and gives them a chance to act on it.

I think that, put that way in the abstract, few would find what I said objectionable. But trying to assert it in a particular case is another thing. After all, accusations of narcissism and hatred are made all the time in bad faith, while in a society where people worship at the altar of their own subjectivity they are hardly inclined to take a fair-minded, nuanced view of people they dislike, or question their own prejudices. (Indeed, a great many people, demonstrating their hatefulness, set impossible standards for others--demanding nothing less than moral perfection in them--so that they can take satisfaction in seeing them fall short of the mark morally, and then bashg them for it). Still, it would probably be uncontroversial to say that there really is plenty of narcissism and hatred about, often in the same toxic package--generally making the world a worse place.

On Quotation

It is a standard rhetorical device to quote famous figures. Indeed, teachers of rhetoric in their various forms--forensics, composition, etc.--often enjoins their students to begin a work with such a quotation.

Like much else in the standard teaching I must admit that this advice has never sat well with me (hence, that book I wrote--devoted to aspects of content rather than form, but coming from the same experience).

After all, the art and craft of writing are about expressing one's own thoughts--and it seems to me ever more the case that this is best done in one's own words, with borrowing someone else's words much more likely than not to confuse matters.

There is, too, the intent so often behind such quotation--the logical fallacy of an "appeal to authority," and that for the unfortunate purpose of making something that may be quite banal sound impressive by linking it to some Great Man or Great Woman. It also seems to me smarmily manipulative, the act of quoting itself intended to make the speaker look like an Authority themselves by creating an illusion of their having a greater literacy than they actually possess. This is especially the case as so many know nothing more of the words they quote, or the source, than the quote itself--something once upon a time picked out of a book and now plucked out of a web site and shoehorned in without regard to origin or context. (Consider, for example, what has become of "To thine own self be true.")

My advice: if you must quote, quote only what you actually know well, preferably very well--and do it only when you are sure it will actually improve what you have to say rather than an attempt to show off all too likely to leave you looking yet another fool who thinks the world will take him for an emperor because of the purple patches he has shabbily sown onto his rags.

On "Narcissism"

The words "narcissism," and "narcissist," seems to have been unused until the nineteenth century--the late nineteenth century in the case of narcissist. Since that time their usage has trended upward, and really exploded from the early 1970s on. As late as 1973 the Ngram score for narcissism was 0.000037 percent, but in 2016 it stood at 0.000134%, a near quadrupling in incidence. In 1973 the score for narcissist was just under 0.000002%. But in 2016 it was 0.000035 percent—indicating a nearly eightfold increase in usage over the forty-three years in between.

This seems to me significant--and not for the conventional reason that supposedly those living today are the most narcissistic people who ever were (something said in every generation, and I suspect not really true about this one).

Rather it is because of how words like these tend to be used.

In considering this term let us, for the moment, forget its associations with self-love, which I think confuse more than they reveal. (It is generally thought that people are supposed to love themselves, after all. In the Bible the Great Commandment is that "You shall love your neighbor as yourself"--not instead of yourself, or even more than yourself--while it is to be presumed that one should love others greatly, and love oneself no less.) Rather let us think of how the narcissist actually expects others to treat them. The narcissist must be the center of the attention of everyone else, always. They must be praised--flattered--by others, all the time. There can be nothing for anyone else in their presence. Everything has to be about them.

Putting it another way it isn't that a person thinks of themselves first sometimes (or even all the time) that makes them a narcissist. It's when they demand that everyone else do so always--and takes anything else as an affront.

As usual, it is those who have no power who are most likely to be accused of this failing, even though they are unlikely to have ever been guilty of it (it's very hard to be narcissistic for long if no one cooperates)--while those who have the most power are far, far more likely to be guilty and far, far less likely to be accused. Think, for example, of how royalty is treated--its elevation to national symbol, the national anthems that sing its place in its people's hearts and its supposed virtues constantly, the protocols and ceremonies that presume it to be always in the thoughts of its nation, which is supposed to cheer and weep at its purely private glories and purely private tragedies.

Of course, those born into a royal household generally did not create all this--all these things instead organized by their parasite hangers-on to further their own agendas, and indeed I imagine that any royal of intelligence or feeling at all can only regard such nonsense sardonically. But even they tend to go along with it. The result is that even when not narcissists, they certainly play the part in the grandest of narcissistic spectacles.

However, those who moralize at others are likely to look at anyone who says the obvious about this as having done something in bad taste--and snarl at the put-upon nobody who asks for a little human consideration as a "narcissist" instead.

In short, like "self-pity," it is a word they use to browbeat nobodies when they ask for what may be no more and often much less than what may be their due, and defend what those who have been fortunate see as their complete lack of obligation to anyone else. And whatever one may say about the up-and-coming generation's alleged narcissism, that has certainly grown more common these past few decades-—testifying to nothing so much as the deep, genuine narcissism of the accusers.