Saturday, March 11, 2023
Will There Be a Star Wars Movie in 2023? Probably Not
Yes Seth Rogen, Negative Reviews are Hurtful
Alas, in the media universe the most banal remark of a famous person is treated as so earth-shaking as to be worthy of headlines.
One can count as one of this week's examples of such banality-that-makes-the-headlines-because-a-famous-person-said-it (carried in Variety, and Vanity Fair, and on the Google News aggregator's "front page!") Seth Rogen's remark that "negative reviews" can be "devastating" for an artist, some of whom "never recover."
This should not be news to anybody--while the same goes for this: if rich and famous celebrities, with their wealth and their prestige and their careers and all they bring can suffer so much, just how much worse is it when negative reviews are directed against people who have none of those supports? Against, for example, those who are just at the beginning of their careers? Those who after much trying and trying--maybe decades of trying--find themselves still at "square one" in those careers, or as close to it as makes no difference (like "one of those actors who's 45 years old, with a tenuous grasp of their own reality, and not really working much")? Or who, managing to get something out there, still at a stage where not only their ego but their prospects of ever making a living through their craft are very vulnerable to criticism, go out and get treated brutally--with the brutality the worse because the critic, who ordinarily acts the part of shameless claqueur, and probably feels degraded doing it, made full use of the chance to indulge their meanness at the expense of someone who could not hit back, absolutely living down to the "Tin Rule?"
Also something that should be news to no one is that being ignored can be more painful than being insulted. How much more painful, then, is it for those who have none of those supports, and are being ignored? Who experience that particular combination of being negatively reviewed and ignored that is, for example, the form rejection letter--such as, for example, writers routinely "collect" hundreds, even thousands of, before publication, if they ever attain that goal?*
That no one thinks of all that--that no one ever addresses that properly--is just another dimension of the same collective stupidity that makes the most banal celebrity remark a headline-maker and anything and everything said by persons not "in the club" has to say unworthy of anyone's attention.
*The only really satisfying treatment of what that side of the "writing life" is like I have ever encountered is to be found in Jack London's Martin Eden--tellingly published over a century ago. By contrast more recent content just gives us those stupid scenes where the writer sits autographing copies for fawning fans in a bookshop.
One can count as one of this week's examples of such banality-that-makes-the-headlines-because-a-famous-person-said-it (carried in Variety, and Vanity Fair, and on the Google News aggregator's "front page!") Seth Rogen's remark that "negative reviews" can be "devastating" for an artist, some of whom "never recover."
This should not be news to anybody--while the same goes for this: if rich and famous celebrities, with their wealth and their prestige and their careers and all they bring can suffer so much, just how much worse is it when negative reviews are directed against people who have none of those supports? Against, for example, those who are just at the beginning of their careers? Those who after much trying and trying--maybe decades of trying--find themselves still at "square one" in those careers, or as close to it as makes no difference (like "one of those actors who's 45 years old, with a tenuous grasp of their own reality, and not really working much")? Or who, managing to get something out there, still at a stage where not only their ego but their prospects of ever making a living through their craft are very vulnerable to criticism, go out and get treated brutally--with the brutality the worse because the critic, who ordinarily acts the part of shameless claqueur, and probably feels degraded doing it, made full use of the chance to indulge their meanness at the expense of someone who could not hit back, absolutely living down to the "Tin Rule?"
Also something that should be news to no one is that being ignored can be more painful than being insulted. How much more painful, then, is it for those who have none of those supports, and are being ignored? Who experience that particular combination of being negatively reviewed and ignored that is, for example, the form rejection letter--such as, for example, writers routinely "collect" hundreds, even thousands of, before publication, if they ever attain that goal?*
That no one thinks of all that--that no one ever addresses that properly--is just another dimension of the same collective stupidity that makes the most banal celebrity remark a headline-maker and anything and everything said by persons not "in the club" has to say unworthy of anyone's attention.
*The only really satisfying treatment of what that side of the "writing life" is like I have ever encountered is to be found in Jack London's Martin Eden--tellingly published over a century ago. By contrast more recent content just gives us those stupid scenes where the writer sits autographing copies for fawning fans in a bookshop.
Thursday, March 9, 2023
The Decline of Book Blogging: The Other Side of the Issue
Recently writing about the decline of book blogging my first thought was of the process of "enshittification"--with search engines demoting such blogs in the search rankings, making them harder to find.
Of course, as a reader of this blog (thank you for being one) pointed out, this is just one side of the matter. The other side is what happened when those bloggers, being harder to find, got less traffic (with, as must also be acknowledged, the shift to social media also drawing away readers).
For bloggers--who, depending on the case, may be putting in a lot of time and even money they can ill afford into their blogs--readership matters. This is the case even when the blog is purely a matter of enthusiasm for their subject matter, and the desire to share their interest with others who also have the same interest. It is even more the case for those for whom the blog may be a key tool of publicity for some other effort of theirs (if they are, for example, an author), or even an important source of income in itself. Having their audience choked off that way means they have less reason to blog--especially if the economic side of the issue forces them to adjust their allotment of their resources.
I don't think we have far to go in looking for evidence of the consequences. Consider the number of blogs you have probably run into over the years where posting petered out, or even fell off altogether. For my part I have noticed this happening even on the sites of well-known authors who once blogged prolifically. I wondered where they went--and then, bumping into them on Twitter, found that here they are. All day, doing this, instead of that. (Indeed, they seem to spend so much time online that I wonder how it is they get anything else done--and wonder if perhaps they don't in some cases. Certainly I got less done when I used Twitter.)
So far as I know no one has endeavored to produce any comprehensive estimates. But I would not be at all surprised to find that the number of blogs which are online, especially blogs which are active, has declined--and so too the numbers of people trying to start blogs in a social media-dominated scene where the hopes of finding an audience by way of blogging may have diminished greatly.
Of course, as a reader of this blog (thank you for being one) pointed out, this is just one side of the matter. The other side is what happened when those bloggers, being harder to find, got less traffic (with, as must also be acknowledged, the shift to social media also drawing away readers).
For bloggers--who, depending on the case, may be putting in a lot of time and even money they can ill afford into their blogs--readership matters. This is the case even when the blog is purely a matter of enthusiasm for their subject matter, and the desire to share their interest with others who also have the same interest. It is even more the case for those for whom the blog may be a key tool of publicity for some other effort of theirs (if they are, for example, an author), or even an important source of income in itself. Having their audience choked off that way means they have less reason to blog--especially if the economic side of the issue forces them to adjust their allotment of their resources.
I don't think we have far to go in looking for evidence of the consequences. Consider the number of blogs you have probably run into over the years where posting petered out, or even fell off altogether. For my part I have noticed this happening even on the sites of well-known authors who once blogged prolifically. I wondered where they went--and then, bumping into them on Twitter, found that here they are. All day, doing this, instead of that. (Indeed, they seem to spend so much time online that I wonder how it is they get anything else done--and wonder if perhaps they don't in some cases. Certainly I got less done when I used Twitter.)
So far as I know no one has endeavored to produce any comprehensive estimates. But I would not be at all surprised to find that the number of blogs which are online, especially blogs which are active, has declined--and so too the numbers of people trying to start blogs in a social media-dominated scene where the hopes of finding an audience by way of blogging may have diminished greatly.
What Happened to E-Books?
Circa 2008, when the Kindle was hitting the market, the hype about e-books was enormous. Some years on, however, there was a turnabout, and expectations these days seem greatly deflated. Yes, e-books are part of the scene, and expected to remain so--but the growth in their share of the market plateaued far below what some hoped, and pretty much "everyone" expected.
What happened? A good place to start would seem to be the respective advantages of the two formats. The most obvious attraction of an e-book is the near-zero cost of producing and distributing them, permitting them to be very inexpensive indeed for the consumer--while permitting access to a great deal of entirely legal "free" content, as with samples, promotional giveaways, and anything public domain content that someone cared to put up online (for instance, all of the classics, down to the early years of the twentieth century). There is also the fact that one can download them immediately rather than await the delivery of a physical copy, while there are great advantages from the standpoint of storage and portability. If your house-room is limited, if you like to read "on the go," e-readers can be helpful that way.
Still, such readers make for more awkward reading than a printed book. The screens are smaller than a hardcover or trade paperback page, and thus carry less content, chopping up a text into smaller pieces. The reader also has a harder time searching through and backtracking using the device than they do a printed book with pages they can physically turn (the more in as, again, the text is chopped up into smaller bits). And the screen, if far superior to a computer screen here, is still harder on the eyes than paper, making it that much less conducive to prolonged reading. The result of all of the above is that people seem to absorb and retain less of what they read when reading it on a Kindle at any given level of skill--and while I think some of the disadvantage may be overcome with familiarity and judicious usage, I have to admit that even as a longtime user of e-readers I still prefer a printed book when available.
There is also the aesthetic pleasure offered by a handsomely printed physical book--how it looks on the shelf or the coffee table, with all that means for those who like to "show off." It is not exactly high-minded--but as we are talking about sales above all, this matters.
That said, all this affects some books more than others. Short, casual reads suffer less from the disadvantages of e-readers--big and demanding books more so. Those who buy books for the sake of showing off--and it is big and demanding books that people like to show off (not the page-turning pulpy potboiler but War and Peace)--also have reason to favor printed books. Moreover, given the cost of an e-reader one cannot enjoy any monetary advantage from buying e-books unless they buy a lot of the books, or enjoy a lot of free content.
The result is that one would expect e-readers to appeal to heavy readers, and especially to heavy readers who get in a lot of light, casual reading, perhaps while on the go--like someone who reads light fiction during their workday commute. I suspect, however, that the number of really heavy readers, period, is in decline; that the number of people who casually consume lots and lots of lighter fiction specifically is declining even more sharply (certainly to go by what seems to be happening with authors in many genre); and that most of those who carry a device with them, even if they would not be wholly unwilling to read, more easily incline to carry their smart phone instead, which allows and in fact privileges other activities (like gaming). I would also have expected the young to be more open to e-readers than their more print-accustomed elders, but I suspect leisure reading to be much, much less common among those born into the world of the smart phone, such that they are that much less a source of support for the technology.
And of course, there is how Big Publishing handled the phenomenon. Yes, the great virtue of the e-book is that it can cut marginal costs to nothing, and permit books to be sold very, very cheaply to the reader--but the publishers controlled pricing and used it to protect their print business, keeping e-book prices much higher than they have to be to all but eliminate the price advantage. (Indeed, e-books, ridiculously, cost more than the paperback editions of books.) At the same time there is their attitude toward "ownership" of the content. Buy a printed book and you own it. "Buy" an e-book, at that high price, and you have "access" to it akin to your access to a streaming service--with what you paid for potentially disappearing at any time. (Thus has it gone with Microsoft's Nook.)
"Innovation!" the buzzword-repeaters love to say. "Disruption!" Well, Big Business doesn't like being "disrupted," and much more often than not it keeps that from happening--the imperatives of quarterly profits triumphing over technological advance in that manner which proves the techno-libertarian pieties hollow and meaningless time and time again, all as the buzzword-repeaters remind us that they repeat because they cannot think.
What happened? A good place to start would seem to be the respective advantages of the two formats. The most obvious attraction of an e-book is the near-zero cost of producing and distributing them, permitting them to be very inexpensive indeed for the consumer--while permitting access to a great deal of entirely legal "free" content, as with samples, promotional giveaways, and anything public domain content that someone cared to put up online (for instance, all of the classics, down to the early years of the twentieth century). There is also the fact that one can download them immediately rather than await the delivery of a physical copy, while there are great advantages from the standpoint of storage and portability. If your house-room is limited, if you like to read "on the go," e-readers can be helpful that way.
Still, such readers make for more awkward reading than a printed book. The screens are smaller than a hardcover or trade paperback page, and thus carry less content, chopping up a text into smaller pieces. The reader also has a harder time searching through and backtracking using the device than they do a printed book with pages they can physically turn (the more in as, again, the text is chopped up into smaller bits). And the screen, if far superior to a computer screen here, is still harder on the eyes than paper, making it that much less conducive to prolonged reading. The result of all of the above is that people seem to absorb and retain less of what they read when reading it on a Kindle at any given level of skill--and while I think some of the disadvantage may be overcome with familiarity and judicious usage, I have to admit that even as a longtime user of e-readers I still prefer a printed book when available.
There is also the aesthetic pleasure offered by a handsomely printed physical book--how it looks on the shelf or the coffee table, with all that means for those who like to "show off." It is not exactly high-minded--but as we are talking about sales above all, this matters.
That said, all this affects some books more than others. Short, casual reads suffer less from the disadvantages of e-readers--big and demanding books more so. Those who buy books for the sake of showing off--and it is big and demanding books that people like to show off (not the page-turning pulpy potboiler but War and Peace)--also have reason to favor printed books. Moreover, given the cost of an e-reader one cannot enjoy any monetary advantage from buying e-books unless they buy a lot of the books, or enjoy a lot of free content.
The result is that one would expect e-readers to appeal to heavy readers, and especially to heavy readers who get in a lot of light, casual reading, perhaps while on the go--like someone who reads light fiction during their workday commute. I suspect, however, that the number of really heavy readers, period, is in decline; that the number of people who casually consume lots and lots of lighter fiction specifically is declining even more sharply (certainly to go by what seems to be happening with authors in many genre); and that most of those who carry a device with them, even if they would not be wholly unwilling to read, more easily incline to carry their smart phone instead, which allows and in fact privileges other activities (like gaming). I would also have expected the young to be more open to e-readers than their more print-accustomed elders, but I suspect leisure reading to be much, much less common among those born into the world of the smart phone, such that they are that much less a source of support for the technology.
And of course, there is how Big Publishing handled the phenomenon. Yes, the great virtue of the e-book is that it can cut marginal costs to nothing, and permit books to be sold very, very cheaply to the reader--but the publishers controlled pricing and used it to protect their print business, keeping e-book prices much higher than they have to be to all but eliminate the price advantage. (Indeed, e-books, ridiculously, cost more than the paperback editions of books.) At the same time there is their attitude toward "ownership" of the content. Buy a printed book and you own it. "Buy" an e-book, at that high price, and you have "access" to it akin to your access to a streaming service--with what you paid for potentially disappearing at any time. (Thus has it gone with Microsoft's Nook.)
"Innovation!" the buzzword-repeaters love to say. "Disruption!" Well, Big Business doesn't like being "disrupted," and much more often than not it keeps that from happening--the imperatives of quarterly profits triumphing over technological advance in that manner which proves the techno-libertarian pieties hollow and meaningless time and time again, all as the buzzword-repeaters remind us that they repeat because they cannot think.
Will STEM Fields Become the New "Starbucks Barista Majors?"
Consider the facts. The country is now seeing a surge in the output of STEM majors--without any sign of a commensurate increase relative to the number of places for them (especially given that it was already the case a high proportion of STEM graduates take jobs outside the lines they trained in, and routinely shift to non-STEM fields after just a few years of STEM work). Indeed, all this is happening with the country's long weak economic performance perhaps tipping into recession, but even in its absence showing little promise of any great boom in the coming years, with people working in the relevant fields most definitely affected. (Consider the jobs massacre in Big Tech even before any official onset of recession.) Meanwhile consider the unexpected way automation is working out. Automating those tasks requiring mobility and eye-hand coordination has been difficult indeed--such that we replaced "human computers," but not janitors, while if those bullish about the new wave of chatbots are right, we might see artificial intelligence replace coders before it replaces truck drivers--or Starbucks baristas. The result is that one can imagine a scenario (I am making no claims of inevitability, just presenting a possibility), that between the increasing output of STEM majors, and the possibility of a significant contraction in actual call for them, we could easily see many more of them taking for a paycheck the kind of low-wage, insecure service jobs of which the economy produces so many--in part because the "menial" activity is so tricky to automate, while, if the image was always oversold, there won't be so many humanities majors competing for the position, because there are so many fewer of those about.
Who knows? Perhaps in a few years the employee handing you your latte will be a Computer Science graduate saying to themselves "I should have majored in French poetry instead."
Who knows? Perhaps in a few years the employee handing you your latte will be a Computer Science graduate saying to themselves "I should have majored in French poetry instead."
Monday, March 6, 2023
The Truth About My Social Media Experience as an Author
I will be blunt. I never thought much of social media. (The old MIT Technology Review cover with Buzz Aldrin's face and, below it, the words "You Promised Me Mars Colonies. Instead I Got Facebook," just barely begins to describe my longtime feeling.) But as an author I was eventually obliged to give it a try.
I found that in spite of the glib advice purveyed by idiots about how you have to get "out there" and, if you must, can achieve something giving it "just ten or fifteen minutes a day!" it is just about impossible to do more than Tweet links to items and keep one's involvement so limited as that. Social media is a real time suck--and I suspect that the heavy usage anyone trying to accomplish something through it cannot easily avoid rewires the brain in unpleasant ways that make the kind of concentration required for any prolonged or serious reading or writing harder, to the point that it should come with a label reading WARNING: PROLONGED USAGE MAY LOBOMOTIZE YOU.
I also found that in spite of the glib advice purveyed by idiots it is a very weak promotional tool. (Indeed, my observations there were the basis for my earlier item about "Why Nothing Ever Seems to Go Viral" from a while back.) I simply did not end up selling more books--while, as the experience recounted above suggests, the time spent there made me less productive in every other way.
The result was that at the very least I could not justify the time I was spending on Twitter-and in the end stopped using it, then canceled my account outright.
I see no evidence that my book sales suffered afterward. And while all things are never equal I think that I have been a healthier, happier, more productive person for giving it up. I will add that in the years since have not felt the slightest temptation to go back.
I suspect that others who similarly abandon the site can say the same.
I found that in spite of the glib advice purveyed by idiots about how you have to get "out there" and, if you must, can achieve something giving it "just ten or fifteen minutes a day!" it is just about impossible to do more than Tweet links to items and keep one's involvement so limited as that. Social media is a real time suck--and I suspect that the heavy usage anyone trying to accomplish something through it cannot easily avoid rewires the brain in unpleasant ways that make the kind of concentration required for any prolonged or serious reading or writing harder, to the point that it should come with a label reading WARNING: PROLONGED USAGE MAY LOBOMOTIZE YOU.
I also found that in spite of the glib advice purveyed by idiots it is a very weak promotional tool. (Indeed, my observations there were the basis for my earlier item about "Why Nothing Ever Seems to Go Viral" from a while back.) I simply did not end up selling more books--while, as the experience recounted above suggests, the time spent there made me less productive in every other way.
The result was that at the very least I could not justify the time I was spending on Twitter-and in the end stopped using it, then canceled my account outright.
I see no evidence that my book sales suffered afterward. And while all things are never equal I think that I have been a healthier, happier, more productive person for giving it up. I will add that in the years since have not felt the slightest temptation to go back.
I suspect that others who similarly abandon the site can say the same.
"Social Media is Dark, and Full of Trolls"
I have to admit that during my experience of Twitter usage there were--setting aside the extremely disappointing experience with book promotion and the physical and mental toll taken by the inherently lobotomizing technology--both positive and negative experiences. I did have some pleasant, and even enriching, conversations with people I would never have otherwise met. However, I also encountered many completely disgusting people I would much prefer to have never met, with the latter more numerous than the former-and, no surprise, the scum of the Internet by just about every account running rampant on the post-Elon Musk Twitter. A new BBC report addresses just how bad the situation has become on that site--which confirms everything that those who had been pessimistic about the new management and its declared intentions feared and warned about.
Saturday, March 4, 2023
Why Are People Consuming Less New Music?
Last year Ted Gioia penned an interesting piece about the declining proportion of music sales for which newly created music accounts. In considering the matter I am not so sure that, as he tells us, this is no reflection of the quality of that music. (I defer to the scientific finding that—with less timbral variety and pitch content, louder, more repetitive--it is indeed getting worse, a bombastic yet flat sameness helped along by the degree to which, as Gioia himself has had prior occasion to remark, critics have become claqueurs.)
However, I do think he is right to emphasize the way in which the industry's executives have conducted themselves--sticking with the old and familiar as they mine it for whatever additional profits they can and displaying the rankest laziness and cowardice with regard to the hard work, and risk-taking, involved in discovering and cultivating new talent, and new creations. Admittedly the Suits have always done this--as Balzac makes clear in his portrait of the utterly vile Parisian publishing king Dauriat. Yet the tendency to this behavior seems to have just gone on getting more and more extreme across the entire range of the entertainment-industrial complex, from the movies (where every one of the top ten hits at the North American box office last year was a sequel or remake), to TV (where you can barely tell what decade it is from the line-up), to fiction (where the thriller writers whose names you see on the paperback rack are Patterson, Grisham, Clancy, Cussler--just as was the case back in the twentieth century).
I know the world of music journalism less well than I do those others, but unless it is very different from what prevails in those other areas (where suck-up entertainment reporters write as if they expect every last one of us to grow incontinent with enthusiasm at the announcement of each and every new remake of some classic), I applaud his readiness to criticize the industry. Noteworthy, too, is his sparing a word for what hard times it means for those musicians struggling to "make it," which struggles he acknowledges as meaning something for the culture we live in, and meriting some sympathy--a thing even rarer in our journalism. After all, certainly where print fiction is concerned we almost never see anyone with the standing of Gioia spare a thought for the creatives who have not yet made their names--the default mode instead a sniveling defense of how publishing treats them, and sneers at those who aren't "professionals" yet as worth no one's time, with the "liberal" Guardian and Salon disgracing themselves by publishing particularly nasty pieces of aspiring writer-bashing by the bitter little trolls who had once been slush pile readers. ("The shocking truth about the slush pile" declared the title of the Guardian piece. Rather it was a reminder that we are long past the day when people like Balzac or London could tell the truth about such things in fiction or nonfiction, confirming the not-at-all-shocking truth that their industry, and the media generally, like the society we live in generally, operate by what Carl Sagan called the "Tin Rule": "Suck up to those above you and abuse those below you.") If anything, Gioia's not swimming with this filthy tide merits at least as much applause as his readiness to call out his industry's insiders.
I know the world of music journalism less well than I do those others, but unless it is very different from what prevails in those other areas (where suck-up entertainment reporters write as if they expect every last one of us to grow incontinent with enthusiasm at the announcement of each and every new remake of some classic), I applaud his readiness to criticize the industry. Noteworthy, too, is his sparing a word for what hard times it means for those musicians struggling to "make it," which struggles he acknowledges as meaning something for the culture we live in, and meriting some sympathy--a thing even rarer in our journalism. After all, certainly where print fiction is concerned we almost never see anyone with the standing of Gioia spare a thought for the creatives who have not yet made their names--the default mode instead a sniveling defense of how publishing treats them, and sneers at those who aren't "professionals" yet as worth no one's time, with the "liberal" Guardian and Salon disgracing themselves by publishing particularly nasty pieces of aspiring writer-bashing by the bitter little trolls who had once been slush pile readers. ("The shocking truth about the slush pile" declared the title of the Guardian piece. Rather it was a reminder that we are long past the day when people like Balzac or London could tell the truth about such things in fiction or nonfiction, confirming the not-at-all-shocking truth that their industry, and the media generally, like the society we live in generally, operate by what Carl Sagan called the "Tin Rule": "Suck up to those above you and abuse those below you.") If anything, Gioia's not swimming with this filthy tide merits at least as much applause as his readiness to call out his industry's insiders.
Greg Poehler and Sweden's "Celebrity Culture" (or Lack of One)
Some years ago Amy Poehler's brother Greg offered some "big thinks" about the differences between Sweden and America. They did not strike me as brilliant. But it did strike me as interesting that he thought it worth noting that the Swedes had a different view of celebrities as not "better" than anybody else.
After all, there was a time when Americans were regarded as living in an egalitarian society compared to Old World Europe--when, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville, hailing from a France where, if with a king still on the throne and the Old Regime die-hards still pretending they could turn the clock back to the days when "it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever" in their favor, it was becoming ever clearer to most that democracy was getting the upper hand.
By contrast it is now Americans like Greg who are surprised at the egalitarianism of Old World countries (even with their social democratic values in an advanced state of decay) compared to that of the New World U.S., so much so that they spell out, with surprise, that they don't think some people are "better" than everyone else.
This is not an insignificant change--and indeed says a lot about what has happened in an America where since at least the middle of the last century the spectrum of politics has run from a conservative "center" to a hard right, with the whole consistently edging rightwards over time. Indeed, the very words in which he expressed himself are telling, the Swedes (to his apparent surprise) thinking "nobody's better than anybody else." Just like the tendency to say that a person is "worth" the net value of their financial assets, that we so casually refer to people as "better" than others--not "better" at performing some particular task, or a "better" person morally, but all-around "better" by virtue of being higher up in a socioeconomic hierarchy, of how much money they have or who their parents were--bespeaks just how deeply rooted, and how unnoticed is that rooting, is the most traditionally inegalitarian view of the world in contemporary America.
For anyone remotely progressive in their politics, or even simply alert to the ideals of classical liberalism on which the United States was founded, awareness of that fact should prompt some hard thinking.
After all, there was a time when Americans were regarded as living in an egalitarian society compared to Old World Europe--when, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville, hailing from a France where, if with a king still on the throne and the Old Regime die-hards still pretending they could turn the clock back to the days when "it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever" in their favor, it was becoming ever clearer to most that democracy was getting the upper hand.
By contrast it is now Americans like Greg who are surprised at the egalitarianism of Old World countries (even with their social democratic values in an advanced state of decay) compared to that of the New World U.S., so much so that they spell out, with surprise, that they don't think some people are "better" than everyone else.
This is not an insignificant change--and indeed says a lot about what has happened in an America where since at least the middle of the last century the spectrum of politics has run from a conservative "center" to a hard right, with the whole consistently edging rightwards over time. Indeed, the very words in which he expressed himself are telling, the Swedes (to his apparent surprise) thinking "nobody's better than anybody else." Just like the tendency to say that a person is "worth" the net value of their financial assets, that we so casually refer to people as "better" than others--not "better" at performing some particular task, or a "better" person morally, but all-around "better" by virtue of being higher up in a socioeconomic hierarchy, of how much money they have or who their parents were--bespeaks just how deeply rooted, and how unnoticed is that rooting, is the most traditionally inegalitarian view of the world in contemporary America.
For anyone remotely progressive in their politics, or even simply alert to the ideals of classical liberalism on which the United States was founded, awareness of that fact should prompt some hard thinking.
Notes on the State of Self-Publishing
I have to admit that I don't know, and I'm not sure anyone else does either. No one's collecting the relevant data, with even anecdotal data scarcer these days than it used to be--and less accessible, thanks to what the "enshittified" search engines yield when we go looking. All we get are hucksters trying to sell self-publishing services, and elitist bullies punching down at anyone eschewing the traditional publishing route closed to 99.9 percent of us (however much said bullies and their duck-talking colleagues refuse to admit it)--but I would imagine that self-published authors, in spite of the hype, never seem to have actually met with much success as a group, are doing even worse than they were a decade ago for three reasons:
1. I suspect that people are reading less fiction than before--that other media are eating more and more into people's consumption of fiction. The smart phone seems to me a significant development here, making people able to distract them with anything else wherever they are, while actually being more conducive to TV watching or video game-playing than reading--such that it seems to me no coincidence that the Young Adult book boom went bust about the time that smart phone ownership among the young reached the point of saturation. Meanwhile the situation would only seem to have worsened since then--as people's habits changed, and younger persons, indeed, never had the chance to make a habit of reading. I suspect, too, that the pandemic and other associated stresses of recent years have left people looking for "lower hanging fruit" in their entertainment, with activities like gaming winning out over reading. (Reader that I am, I have to admit that even I often find it easier to get into some old video game, especially when tired or distracted.) And where all this is concerned it stands to reason that those writers most marginal within the market--the self-published--will take a particularly hard hit, especially when one remembers that the self-published did best in the light reading, "genre" fiction market, which depends so much on people having the habit of reading and casually consuming books as a matter of course in the way that all those entertainment alternatives make less likely.
2. E-books have done less well than hoped circa 2010. This was partly a matter of genuinely exaggerated expectations, partly a matter of the control publishers have exerted over the pricing of such books (diminishing a key attraction they have had), and partly, again, the smart phone--which very easily defeated the e-reader in the contest to be the one electronic device people carried around (just as, for example, the tablet has suffered). Of course, this can be seen as affecting all of publishing, but it has to be remembered that given the kinds of lighter fare they offered, and the reality that 99 cent e-books and nearly cost-free giveaways were one of the few things that the self-published could do when trying to compete with traditional publishing, they suffered disproportionately, sales of the more costly print editions to which the book buyer is less easily tempted simply not rising to compensate. (And again, that the self-published were doing best in the area of lighter reading was a problem, because people were a lot more likely to do that kind of thing on an e-reader than attempt heavier reading there. Few dare read War and Peace in any format; but I suspect fewer still dare to do it on a Kindle, and fewer of those who make the attempt persist in it up to the end.)
3. The Internet just keeps becoming more completely and securely gatekept than before, diminishing the chances of the self-published to be discovered. Consider, for instance, how the self-published novelist was supposed to give readers a chance to discover their book. They could not remotely begin to compete with the Big Five where marketing budgets were concerned. Very likely they had no "industry connections." The review pages in a place like the New York Times were closed to them. But there was social media. And there were a lot of book bloggers online. Of course, as is generally the case with this kind of thing one would have to work much harder for a much smaller return--and indeed, a great many of the usual idiots promoted one-in-a-million success stories based on such endeavors as if they were some sort of reasonable plan for the many, with the usual cruel result. But it was something. And now with social media and the search engines becoming less friendly to this kind of activity, there is much less of that something--to the particular cost of the self-published author.
In short, the fact of less fiction reading, especially of the habitual, casual kind; the softness of interest in the e-book; and the gatekeeping of the scene; have kept the marginalized, marginalized, if not worsened the situation to such a degree that I suspect fewer and fewer writers are being tempted to take this route.
Of course, as I said previously these are suspicions. And so while everything put up here is presented with an invitation to the reader to comment (if, given the way the game is being reached, this piece indeed manages to reach any reader) I will specifically say here that anyone with knowledge, experience or simply opinions about the matter is invited to offer their two cents in the comments thread below.
The Revenge of "Gentlemen's History?"
Some years ago Michael Parenti coined the term "gentlemen's history" to refer to the generally self-congratulatory historiography produced by, of and for a society's elite, justifying and flattering itself and promulgating its prejudices--while shutting out everything not conducive to that. (Thus are we expected to see in a collection of pleb-hating patricians given to the most unbearably pompous oratory the height of civilization, and in the doings of "Great Men" the sole cause of everything that ever mattered.)
For most of history, gentlemen's history was the norm, and it never vanished. It is still the foundation of what most people get in school; what they are likely to see in the kind of popular history that will be seen plugged on C-SPAN's BookTV and get authors on the bestseller list. Still, it is one of the advances of the past century that historiography has grown beyond this. If the research and publishing of history, like the publishing of anything else, never really became open to all, it is less exclusively aristocratic in its authorship, and its focus. And for all its many flaws (like the hierarchy and orthodoxy that prevail in academic life, giving it at times a clerical atmosphere in the least flattering sense of the term) academic history has had something to do with that, creating opportunities for other kinds of work, of which some have made good use. Thus do we now have images of the life of the past that are not just about the 0.1 percent with the rest reduced to extras whose joys and sufferings are of no account, while also having more than reactionary homily or "patriotic" indoctrination at its worst as explanation of events.
Of course, in a period in which universities are in trouble, and the humanities in particular withering for lack of interest from students, administrators, donors, policymakers--indeed, from hostility in many cases (there's no shortage of those who would like to see the universities and colleges reduced to a purely technical-occupational training system)--this can seem in growing jeopardy. Indeed, looking at the state of hiring in the field certain ideological hacks are gloating over the decline of the humanities, and the death of academic history, among whom the author of one particularly mean-spirited piece gloated over the return of history again being the exclusive purview of aristocratic amateurs as the lower-class folks who had hoped to be historians have to go "get real jobs" as, barring a miraculous stroke of luck that elevates them to the rank of dutiful courtier to a better-born patron, they renounce the life of intellect and culture above their lowly stations, while the field is purified of any of that silly social concern.
I am certainly convinced that American higher education cannot go on as it is now--but it is my hope that the humanities will manage to endure on campus, precisely because society needs them now as much as ever it did.
For most of history, gentlemen's history was the norm, and it never vanished. It is still the foundation of what most people get in school; what they are likely to see in the kind of popular history that will be seen plugged on C-SPAN's BookTV and get authors on the bestseller list. Still, it is one of the advances of the past century that historiography has grown beyond this. If the research and publishing of history, like the publishing of anything else, never really became open to all, it is less exclusively aristocratic in its authorship, and its focus. And for all its many flaws (like the hierarchy and orthodoxy that prevail in academic life, giving it at times a clerical atmosphere in the least flattering sense of the term) academic history has had something to do with that, creating opportunities for other kinds of work, of which some have made good use. Thus do we now have images of the life of the past that are not just about the 0.1 percent with the rest reduced to extras whose joys and sufferings are of no account, while also having more than reactionary homily or "patriotic" indoctrination at its worst as explanation of events.
Of course, in a period in which universities are in trouble, and the humanities in particular withering for lack of interest from students, administrators, donors, policymakers--indeed, from hostility in many cases (there's no shortage of those who would like to see the universities and colleges reduced to a purely technical-occupational training system)--this can seem in growing jeopardy. Indeed, looking at the state of hiring in the field certain ideological hacks are gloating over the decline of the humanities, and the death of academic history, among whom the author of one particularly mean-spirited piece gloated over the return of history again being the exclusive purview of aristocratic amateurs as the lower-class folks who had hoped to be historians have to go "get real jobs" as, barring a miraculous stroke of luck that elevates them to the rank of dutiful courtier to a better-born patron, they renounce the life of intellect and culture above their lowly stations, while the field is purified of any of that silly social concern.
I am certainly convinced that American higher education cannot go on as it is now--but it is my hope that the humanities will manage to endure on campus, precisely because society needs them now as much as ever it did.
The Decline of the Humanities Major on American Campuses
Recently checking on the myth of STEM worker shortages I looked at what areas the American system of higher education is awarding degrees in--and found that the past decade has seen an absolute and relative surge in the degrees awarded in STEM fields, with this going not just for international students in the U.S. simply to study, but U.S. citizens--a change the more striking as there is no evidence of any great expansion of job opportunity in the relevant areas, improvement in the associated pay and conditions, or for that matter, improvement in the preparation of students for these courses of study. At the same time I was struck by the collapse in the number of students majoring in English--whose numbers fell from some 50,000 in the 1990s and 2000s to under 40,000 in 2018-2019, and just 38,000 in 2019-2020, which is to say from over 3 percent of degrees awarded to under 2 percent of them--with this seemingly indicative of a broader collapse of study of the humanities.
Just what is going on?
It seems plausible to imagine that the propaganda for STEM, STEM, STEM!, combined with the endless bashing of the humanities as economically useless, in a context where hard-pressed students are facing rising costs for and falling returns to college degrees (to the point of producing a situation akin to financial bubble), is having its effect on their choices. Distorted as the view is (the economic benefits of STEM degrees are oversold, and so too the image of the English degree as a ticket to working behind the Starbucks counter), students acting in this manner can still be judged as responding reasonably (at least, within the limits of the information available to them).
Still, there may be less reasonable factors in this behavior.
There is how the humanities have, I think, been damaged by postmodernism--by its obscurantism and its reactionary, misanthropic, divisive politics.
There is, too, the fact that people are not going to be tempted by the humanities unless they actually feel some attraction to things like literature, history, culture, the "life of the mind"--and I suspect that all this is withering in today's society. This is partly because of the anti-intellectualism in which American society is awash (turbo-charged by the direction of our politics); partly the debased level of a popular culture that is ever more audio-visual, disposable and frankly "dumbed down" (even the music we listen to, which is simpler, louder and more repetitive); and partly the failures of K-12 education in these areas (which get so much less attention than its failures in STEM).
Additionally, say what you will, the opening up of access to college has not gone along with access to those conditions that permit students to devote themselves to their studies. The majority of today's students are not leading leisurely lives on New England college greens but have their hands full with work and family responsibilities, and in many cases are dealing with genuine hardship. Perhaps one in three college students suffer "food insecurity" during their college careers. One in seven college students is homeless. And others who may be neither are selling their blood for the money with which to buy textbooks. When this is the case, is it any wonder that many have little to spare for the intellectualism that is an essential for an interest in the humanities? Indeed, as the longstanding epidemic of plagiarism of student papers demonstrates, while we are endlessly beaten over the head with "aspirational" stories of "triumph over adversity" (indeed, that such aspirationalism passes for "liberalism" today says about what that liberalism has come to, and in some sense always was) a far more common reality is students in very difficult circumstances trying to brazen their way through the system to that piece of paper they are told is their sole way out of the dead-end life they have already suffered too much from--and we must never forget that for a second if we are serious about discussing the very real problems posed by the state of higher education today.
Just what is going on?
Still, there may be less reasonable factors in this behavior.
There is how the humanities have, I think, been damaged by postmodernism--by its obscurantism and its reactionary, misanthropic, divisive politics.
There is, too, the fact that people are not going to be tempted by the humanities unless they actually feel some attraction to things like literature, history, culture, the "life of the mind"--and I suspect that all this is withering in today's society. This is partly because of the anti-intellectualism in which American society is awash (turbo-charged by the direction of our politics); partly the debased level of a popular culture that is ever more audio-visual, disposable and frankly "dumbed down" (even the music we listen to, which is simpler, louder and more repetitive); and partly the failures of K-12 education in these areas (which get so much less attention than its failures in STEM).
Additionally, say what you will, the opening up of access to college has not gone along with access to those conditions that permit students to devote themselves to their studies. The majority of today's students are not leading leisurely lives on New England college greens but have their hands full with work and family responsibilities, and in many cases are dealing with genuine hardship. Perhaps one in three college students suffer "food insecurity" during their college careers. One in seven college students is homeless. And others who may be neither are selling their blood for the money with which to buy textbooks. When this is the case, is it any wonder that many have little to spare for the intellectualism that is an essential for an interest in the humanities? Indeed, as the longstanding epidemic of plagiarism of student papers demonstrates, while we are endlessly beaten over the head with "aspirational" stories of "triumph over adversity" (indeed, that such aspirationalism passes for "liberalism" today says about what that liberalism has come to, and in some sense always was) a far more common reality is students in very difficult circumstances trying to brazen their way through the system to that piece of paper they are told is their sole way out of the dead-end life they have already suffered too much from--and we must never forget that for a second if we are serious about discussing the very real problems posed by the state of higher education today.
Friday, March 3, 2023
The Decline of Book Blogging?
Not long ago I discussed here why I thought it was the case that the independent blogger, an individual who is not famous and does not have the benefit of association with a big platform, leaving them with nothing to commend them but their thoughts and words, had a sharply decreasing chance of finding an appreciable audience. The web was getting more crowded, the audiovisual was taking increasing presence over the written word, the dynamics of search engines were favoring past success over newcomers, etc., etc.--and of course, the search engines were being "enshittified," favoring paying advertisers over everyone else.
Certainly this has seemed to me evident in the area of book reviews. Previously searching for reviews of a book took me to . . . actual reviews of that book. Now it takes me to book retailers. These retailers often make a place for customer reviews. But the hodgepodge of customer reviews were rarely a substitute for the reviews I used to see. (There are jewels among them that would do credit to any publication--but most are frankly slight, stupid and often irrelevant to anyone interested in a conventional book review, as with the many, many, many reviews that consist entirely of someone complaining about the physical condition of the particular copy of the book they received and saying nothing of the content. Yes, the physical condition of a retailer's books are a legitimate topic of discussion, but no, this is not what people are usually looking for when they use a search engine to look for reviews of a book.) Moreover, the search engine would take me to the retailers even when those retailers did not actually have a single review for the book I wanted to know more about in the allotted space.
Besides wasting my time this elevation of the retailers in the list of search hits also demoted all the places that actually had book reviews--which of course makes them much less likely to get clicks and, subject as they are to the vicious circle that characterizes search engine algorithm operation over time, shoved down the list of search hits yet again.
All of this is, of course, irksome for people who are interested in books. It is worse than that for those who want to share their thoughts on a book with others--or, like self-published authors lacking big budgets and access to the mainstream publicity channels, depend on book bloggers to give them a chance of coming to wider public attention. And it is just one small example of the destruction of the search engine as a tool for actually . . . searching, with all it means for the connectivity the Internet was supposed to provide its users, as the dreams of the cyber-utopians of old die that little bit much more.
Certainly this has seemed to me evident in the area of book reviews. Previously searching for reviews of a book took me to . . . actual reviews of that book. Now it takes me to book retailers. These retailers often make a place for customer reviews. But the hodgepodge of customer reviews were rarely a substitute for the reviews I used to see. (There are jewels among them that would do credit to any publication--but most are frankly slight, stupid and often irrelevant to anyone interested in a conventional book review, as with the many, many, many reviews that consist entirely of someone complaining about the physical condition of the particular copy of the book they received and saying nothing of the content. Yes, the physical condition of a retailer's books are a legitimate topic of discussion, but no, this is not what people are usually looking for when they use a search engine to look for reviews of a book.) Moreover, the search engine would take me to the retailers even when those retailers did not actually have a single review for the book I wanted to know more about in the allotted space.
Besides wasting my time this elevation of the retailers in the list of search hits also demoted all the places that actually had book reviews--which of course makes them much less likely to get clicks and, subject as they are to the vicious circle that characterizes search engine algorithm operation over time, shoved down the list of search hits yet again.
All of this is, of course, irksome for people who are interested in books. It is worse than that for those who want to share their thoughts on a book with others--or, like self-published authors lacking big budgets and access to the mainstream publicity channels, depend on book bloggers to give them a chance of coming to wider public attention. And it is just one small example of the destruction of the search engine as a tool for actually . . . searching, with all it means for the connectivity the Internet was supposed to provide its users, as the dreams of the cyber-utopians of old die that little bit much more.
Thursday, March 2, 2023
An Anomalous Founding Work: Stephen Coonts' The Flight of the Intruder
Clearly expressing and speaking to the same sentiments the Rambo film did, the book goes in quite a different direction, unavoidably given the kind of work that it is. Rambo, after all, was set in the present day, and so involved events by no means settled. This afforded him the latitude to fight and win as an underdog against superior Communist forces, upholding the honor of American arms in the process, while recovering the prisoners of war betrayed by a government that not only did not "let them win" but afterward denied their existence and left them to languish, redeeming both the defeat, and the betrayal. By contrast Coonts' book, being a historical novel and not alternate history, cannot change what happened--at least, not very much. Grafton flies his strike, and then, as he should have from the start given the physical limits of what one Intruder crew could achieve with conventional weapons, proves utterly inconsequential--the bomb causing trivial physical damage to the headquarters and the public condemnation of the attack by the North Vietnamese government brushed off. The result is that Grafton did all that Grafton could do--which in the end amounted to very little. The ultimate meaninglessness of Grafton's strike on Hanoi thus ends up a rejoinder to the fantasies of singlehanded redemption of that war, the would-be aerial Rambo ended up an anti-Rambo, and what some might have hoped would be a wish-fulfillment was instead an occasion for cathartic confrontation with a hard truth.
Described in such terms the story was hardly a natural for continuation in the form of a regular series, especially in the techno-thriller form. Flight arguably derived its effect from having been written about a real historical event by "one who was there," an actual A-6 Intruder pilot during the conflict, and however one regards the novel's politics, the emotional charge of its perception of the war and what it did, or did not, mean. By contrast, not only would continuing the series likely mean a jump of many years into the present, but a shift to far more thoroughly invented scenarios, which could not have the same ring of verisimilitude, the same emotional charge--the more in as the techno-thriller tends so much toward "military procedural" of a less focused and more impersonal type. Of course, Coonts went exactly that route, and scored many more bestsellers in the process--but in retrospect it seems understandable that, certainly to go by their sales and their pop cultural impact, none quite matched the impact of that different and particularly charged first book.
The Post-Cold War International Relations Student's Reading List
I remember how back after the end of the Cold War a certain number of books about what would follow after it—about what would be the defining features of the post-Cold War international scene--were quite fashionable. They were the books that "everyone was talking about," that every academic was expected to cite or otherwise address in their work, that every student of the subject was supposed to read. There was Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. There were the books by Benjamin Barber and Thomas Friedman. There was Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations. There was Robert Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy. Other books could and did come up, but these were the main "big picture" ones, with the fact underlined by the syntheses produced of these works, like Thomas Barnett's The Pentagon's New Map of the World.
Looking back I'm not sure the conversation has been so tightly focused since.
Equally looking back I'm struck by how pathetically limited it all was in origin and content. The "national" conversation consisted of a mere handful of longtime senior policy insiders setting forth the possibilities as seen from a very limited portion of the intellectual and political spectrum (overwhelmingly dominated by the right, Barber the only figure here that I would not unhesitatingly class as in the neoliberal-neoconservative orbit, though it is relevant that Thomas Friedman's book is readable as a variation on his own book, with, in line with his simple-minded cheerleading amid the illusions of the late '90s, down to the title, the implicitly critical "McWorld" replaced with the admiring "Lexus," etc). Unsurprisingly, it is easy enough to produce from their collective work a consensus along the lines of:
That Barnett (and others) so easily produced such syntheses underlines the limited range of the thinking. Limited, and in the wake of time's test, pathetically inadequate. Even where the neoliberal-neoconservative framework was concerned it left out much that was important--as with the realities of realpolitik too much taken for granted, as others were left to deal with them, usually in the most unrealistic fashion, imagining that Russia and China would one way or another conveniently cease to be complicating factors, perhaps collapsing, perhaps breaking up, perhaps simply "falling into line." (As you can see from the headlines, this did not quite happen.) Globalization, far from being quite the unstoppable force of nature so many made it out to be, proved quite fragile, while the turning point in its unraveling was decidedly not opposition by some anti-liberal regime, but rather the tendency to stagnation, speculation and crisis that increasingly defined it as this came to a head in 2007-2008, after which global integration began to stall out, with international conflict escalating after the miserable failure of policymakers to deal with the problem, not before. (In remembering how Friedman thought globalization a great and glorious and unstoppable thing it is worth remembering that in The Lexus and the Olive Tree he breathlessly declared the same about Enron.) The vision of tribalism and clashes of civilization was simplistic and crude--and in cases, plainly and simply racist. (Indeed, one remembers that Samuel Huntington spent the '80s personally doing his bit to help South Africa's government in its attempt to preserve the apartheid system, while his last book was, in the view of critics, a nativist anti-immigrant screed--while in rigor, and insight, his "clash of civilizations" compares poorly indeed with Emmanuel Todd's examination of the "convergence of civilizations."*) Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
As with so much else in the late twentieth century it bespoke the intellectual impoverishment of an elite discourse that even in its best days had been far from what it ought to have been, and had long since narrowed in the most suffocating fashion. The result not only left us unprepared for the hard realities of the twenty-first century, but could seem almost a conditioning to respond to those realities in the worst possible ways--even before the commentariat confused things further with their tossing about the names of books they did not read, let alone understand, in a manner reminding us (as if we needed reminding) that the Ivy League educations and high academic and government office by which meritocracy-singing elitists set such great store are no proofs of expertise, scholarly capacity, intelligence or even basic literacy in their native and first (and if we are to be honest, usually only) language.** Indeed, while I reject Idiocracy's sneer at the American public, it does not seem unfair to say that the elite the country had then, and has now, is exactly the one I would expect to see in such a dystopia, where one could believe that a character played by Luke Wilson really is the smartest man in the country. Still, just as stupidity tends toward the simplistic, one ought not to be simplistic in treating of stupidity. There is nothing like power to make people stupid, and the manner in which the conversation was gatekept, giving us the ideas of a groupthinking little club whose membership is all but required to pander to the prejudices--the assumptions, the hopes, the inclinations--of an elite is an excellent guarantee of that outcome.
* While Todd raised the matter in After the Empire he gave the issue a book-length treatment when he coauthored 2011's A Convergence of Civilizations.
** I am ever less an admirer of Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis--but it always struck me as profoundly unfair that so many seem to have thought that the "end of history" meant "no more bad or dramatic stuff will happen."
Looking back I'm not sure the conversation has been so tightly focused since.
Equally looking back I'm struck by how pathetically limited it all was in origin and content. The "national" conversation consisted of a mere handful of longtime senior policy insiders setting forth the possibilities as seen from a very limited portion of the intellectual and political spectrum (overwhelmingly dominated by the right, Barber the only figure here that I would not unhesitatingly class as in the neoliberal-neoconservative orbit, though it is relevant that Thomas Friedman's book is readable as a variation on his own book, with, in line with his simple-minded cheerleading amid the illusions of the late '90s, down to the title, the implicitly critical "McWorld" replaced with the admiring "Lexus," etc). Unsurprisingly, it is easy enough to produce from their collective work a consensus along the lines of:
The ideological disputation that characterized history since the Enlightenment is over--thankfully--with liberal capitalism the last man standing, now and for all time. Indeed, the specifically globalizing neoliberal version is now carrying all before it, and likely to go on doing so, especially in the American-led world we have every reason to expect for a long time to come. Still, the world is an unequal place, with some not keeping up, and others seeing their societies fall apart altogether. Failure will feed a tribalism that the principal challenge to the international order with which American foreign policy must contend, taking forms ranging from terrorism to rogue states to failed states. The policy meeting those challenges may be more or less unilateral, more or less activist, more or less attentive to this or that peril, but that is the essential framework.
As with so much else in the late twentieth century it bespoke the intellectual impoverishment of an elite discourse that even in its best days had been far from what it ought to have been, and had long since narrowed in the most suffocating fashion. The result not only left us unprepared for the hard realities of the twenty-first century, but could seem almost a conditioning to respond to those realities in the worst possible ways--even before the commentariat confused things further with their tossing about the names of books they did not read, let alone understand, in a manner reminding us (as if we needed reminding) that the Ivy League educations and high academic and government office by which meritocracy-singing elitists set such great store are no proofs of expertise, scholarly capacity, intelligence or even basic literacy in their native and first (and if we are to be honest, usually only) language.** Indeed, while I reject Idiocracy's sneer at the American public, it does not seem unfair to say that the elite the country had then, and has now, is exactly the one I would expect to see in such a dystopia, where one could believe that a character played by Luke Wilson really is the smartest man in the country. Still, just as stupidity tends toward the simplistic, one ought not to be simplistic in treating of stupidity. There is nothing like power to make people stupid, and the manner in which the conversation was gatekept, giving us the ideas of a groupthinking little club whose membership is all but required to pander to the prejudices--the assumptions, the hopes, the inclinations--of an elite is an excellent guarantee of that outcome.
* While Todd raised the matter in After the Empire he gave the issue a book-length treatment when he coauthored 2011's A Convergence of Civilizations.
** I am ever less an admirer of Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis--but it always struck me as profoundly unfair that so many seem to have thought that the "end of history" meant "no more bad or dramatic stuff will happen."
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