Remembering Half Moon Street--and David Rothkopf's Superclass

The 1986 film Half Moon Street was a commercial and critical flop when it came out, and seems to have been pretty well forgotten since, never being "rediscovered," acquiring a cult following, or enjoying renewed attention on any other basis. And I know of no reason why it should be otherwise. Still, I can say that a particular bit of dinner-party dialogue in the film did get my attention and has stayed with me since. Specifically a character named Hugo Van Arkady (so IMDB informs me) remarked that the actual population of the world, which had then been approaching five billion, was actually just five thousand. As his dining companions wondered at his reasoning he filled in the picture by giving the "real" populations of different countries. Billion-person China had only two people in it, Britain forty-five, Germany sixty.

Just what was the criteria to be a member of the "world's population" when it was counted in such a manner?

Well, years later I happened across David Rothkopf's book Superclass (2008) as I had Half Moon Street--in which he discusses the global "power elite," and suggests that it has six thousand members, out of a population then over six billion.

Just as Van Arkady had it, only one in a million count--not the "one percent" but the 0.0001 percent, with not even their immediate families making the cut, just them, only them, unless they take their own places in said club.

Anyone who reads Rothkopf, I think, will not strike anyone as particularly egalitarian in his values (as anyone who works for Henry Kissinger in such a capacity as managing director of Kissinger Associates seems unlikely to be), but he does not express Van Arkady's blatant contempt for the "starving millions" without whom the "superclass" would not have their wealth and power, would not exist as an elite at all. Still, there seems no question that that superclass' courtiers in the press and the arts constantly flatter their pretension that they are the only people who matter to such a degree that what Van Arkady said explicitly, they say implicitly, all the time. The courtiers do well out of such flattery for the most part, but among the less happy consequences of their extreme version of the Great Man Theory of Current Affairs is that it has had just as distorting effect on understanding of the world as the Great Man Theory of History.

Of "Conspicuous Callousness"

So far as I can tell "conspicuous callousness" is not a usage--but it should be.

Of course, that claim raises the question--just what do I mean by "conspicuous callousness?"

Let us take it one word at a time.

The term "conspicuous" is an adjective indicating that something stands out so as to draw attention, with its use in the term "conspicuous consumption" telling. Such consumption--like someone's driving a flashy sports car when a much cheaper, lower-maintenance car would be a far more practical way of getting around--is typically on some level intended to draw such notice.

"Callousness" denotes, in the words of Oxford Languages, "insensitive or cruel disregard."

Conspicuous callousness is a display of callousness in a conspicuous, meant-to-be seen way.

Consider, for example, a person who sees a homeless person holding out a cup for spare change--and, even though they have change with which they can well afford to part, pretends not to see them. One may say that they are behaving callously. But in pretending they do not see the homeless person are attempting to not make their callousness evident.

By contrast, someone who yells at the homeless person "Get a job!" is manifesting their callousness in a way calling attention to it. This is all the more in as there is no practical advantage in their doing so (just as there is none in that flashy sports car), only whatever psychological satisfaction they get from being seen inflicting verbal abuse on someone vulnerable to it, by the victim and perhaps others.

Given that satisfaction's being the motive it seems to warrant a word. At the very least in acting this way the person displaying this callousness revels in a sense of their power in relation to that other person. Conspicuous callousness says "I don't have to care what you think, because you simply cannot do anything to me," such that they can rub in the other person's face a complete lack of sympathy, empathy and respect for them--and are doing it simply because they can.

Conspicuous callousness is, of course, vile--and ever-present. Indeed, the Internet is awash in it--so much so that it can seem mainly a vehicle for expressing that one exceedingly mean sentiment, the web access-enjoying scum of the Earth using that access to scream their callousness at the heart of the world. And we are all the worse off for it.

Of the Public Faux Pas

Even the most intelligent, educated and articulate will misspeak sometimes. If they are speaking constantly they will do so that much more often--and if their words are accorded continual publicity they will publicly embarrass themselves again and again (the more in as so many out there will simply have it in for such a figure, and so put the worst possible spin on anything they say or do).

Most of those in public life cannot be described as among "the most intelligent, educated and articulate." Most of them can be described as the extreme opposite. And they especially make sure that their every utterance is highly public--because, on top of their aforementioned failings, the demands of publicity seem to them to require it; because privilege and power and acclaim bring the idiot out in people; because show business, whether the real kind or the kind for "ugly people", is a horrifying hellscape of unhinged narcissists.

I am sure someone warned them at some point. But because of all of the above the warning simply did not matter, helping produce the cultural cesspool we inhabit today.

What Would Brecht's Worker Who Reads Make of the Received History of Science and Invention?

In Bertolt Brecht's famous poem "Questions From a Worker Who Reads" his worker wondered at what he read of the "great men" of the past and the way in which they seemed to be singlehandedly credited with enormous feats of military conquest and monumental construction. (Reading about Thebes of the seven gates, he wondered, "Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock" out of which it was built by themselves?) Suspecting others were involved he wondered at the completeness of their absence from the record, the way the most elementary things about them were simply unmentioned (like where the masons who actually built the Great Wall of China went after the job was done).

Of course, we all know that, however much elites are addicted to the theory that everything supposedly great and grand is due to the Great Men and these only--the Atlas who might one day decide to teach their ungrateful inferiors a lesson and shrug--the idea of the kings hauling up the lumps of rock themselves is of course an absurdity, that the feats the Worker reads of are the accomplishments of tens and hundreds of thousands, drawing on the resources of whole countries.

One might say something of the kind if one looks away from conquest and building to science and invention. The conventional thinking about such matters is, of course, exceedingly individualistic--but as a more nuanced view of the matter shows, as with Robert Merton's examination of the sociology of science, the reality is more complex. The scientific endeavor is cumulative, building on what came before, and cooperative, as even the scientist or inventor in their own lab is apt to have their helpers, enough of them to make one wonder just who contributed what, exactly. People can and do make individual contributions, of course, some minute, some not, but scientific and technological revolutions are far from being wholly attributable to single individual "geniuses" (even before one gets to the very hard detective work of actually apportioning credit).

A culture given over to an individualistic elitism, of course, tends to downplay this--but in the end it really is the case that much of the discussion of the history of science has traditionally been no less absurd in its explanations than a historian making it seem as if Caesar conquered Gaul without even having a cook with him.

The May 2024 North American Box Office

We all expected the box office during May to be lackluster--but I think it worth considering just how very, very badly it went for Hollywood.

Simply put, ticket sales during that month came to $550 million. Far from being, as usual, the month in which a sluggish box office really took off this was actually over a quarter down from the March box office this year (when Dune, along with Ghostbusters and Godzilla, helped sell $750 million worth of tickets).

In real, inflation-adjusted terms the May 2024 box office was about a third (31 percent) down from the disappointing box office we had in May as Guardians of the Galaxy 3 opened below expectations, and Fast and Furious 10 and the live-action version of The Little Mermaid both underperformed.

With the comparison with the May 2023 box office so poor it is predictable that it, again, represents a really great drop from the 2015-2019 average--of 57 percent. That is to say that in May the box office, after inflation, took in only two-fifths as much as it did in those pre-pandemic years (when, in April 2024 prices, $1.27 billion was the average).

Even by the standard of the past year as a whole, and of 2024 thus far (the first four months of which were down just 21 percent from the same period in the prior year), this is bad.

In fairness, one can point out that this May suffered from an unusually weak release slate --that a lot of big movies were indeed bumped to later dates, and that business should pick up as soon as next week with Inside Out 2, etc.. Still, a month with Planet of the Apes and Mad Max would ordinarily have been expected to do better than this, while The Fall Guy's being shifted to the first weekend of the month made no sense in the absence of some expectation of the movie benefiting from it, and that indeed their failure had much to do with this weakness. (Certainly The Fall Guy and Mad Max performed below the not-very-high expectations set for them, while Planet of the Apes did only a little better than the low expectations box office-watchers had for it, as, a near-month into release, it crawls toward the $150 million mark it will not surpass by very much to be a low point for the new iteration of the franchise.)

No, there is no good news here--and those hoping for even the limited turnaround that is the best anyone can reasonably hope for in the circumstances is well-advised to look ahead rather than backward.

People Are Still Talking About That Stupid Slap (Some Thoughts About the Prospects of Bad Boys 4)

Remember when the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air slapped Cheap Pete?

Very likely you do, to go by how everyone discussing the box office prospects of Bad Boys 4 (out this weekend!) keeps bringing it up as a possible factor in the film's performance.

I suspect this is less because the incident is likely to make much difference to the film's actual box office prospects than because it still amuses them that Smith slapped Rock, and still amuses them to talk about it. Indeed, this is so much the case that if "the slap" has any effect at all, rather than putting people off of Smith and his movie, it would probably help the box office, especially given reports that the movie will play off of the incident in some way.

Indeed, a far bigger danger to the movie's performance than any ill feeling toward Will Smith's display of an idiocy too often overlooked in the past is what the courtiers of the film industry are not talking about--namely the pandemic's exacerbation of the long decline of filmgoing in North America and elsewhere, and what is connected with it, the declining salability of tired action-adventure franchises like the now three decade-old Bad Boys "saga." But there is a reason for that--entertainment journalists preferring to continue adhering to the narrative that the lousy grosses we have seen from 2023 on a matter of particular cinematic and franchise failures (the troubles of Marvel, resolvable with "better writers" and more "supervision" of directors), or particular bumps in the road for the business (the Hollywood strikes of 2023), rather than a matter of structural changes in the business with which people of the caliber of the executives running the studios are profoundly unequipped to cope, no matter how much their courtiers assure them they are all the "smartest guy in the room."

"Show Business for Ugly People": A Few Thoughts on the Foolishness

It is these days something of a cliché that politics is "show business for ugly people."

Clichés do not always have much to do with the truth--but this one most certainly does, and indeed, giving it some consideration can lead to other insights, not least into contemporary journalism and its colossal failings.

One of those failings is the disproportion between the attentiveness to the stupid maneuverings and idle speculations that are politics, as against the attention accorded the ends of politics that are policy--recently given fresh empirical confirmation by a notable study in the Columbia Journalism Review.

This has long seemed to me to reflect various aspects of journalism. There is, for example, the tendency to think of the reporter as going after a "story," and writing it up as a "story" for the reader--with politics much easier to turn into a "story" than policy, the former being centered on "people," "characters," whereas the latter is often technical, in a way taxing the understanding of anyone too lazy to do their homework. And certainly centrist prejudice exacerbates all this, with its greater interest in the political process than in the real world and the solution of problems in it, and the elitism that has it revering professional politicians while despising the intelligence of a public to which it thinks explaining policy not worth the trouble anyway, even if they did not think it a thing best left to "the experts" (at least, so long as the experts remain on the right side of the powerful before whom centrists bow and scrape).

However, it may be that there is something of this too--that even if as "show business for ugly people" the doings of Washington are inferior to the glamour of "real" show business (one reflection of which is how Washington types never miss a chance to go Hollywood in the most ludicrous ways, while folks from Beverly Hills get drawn to Washington--then get drawn back to the movies), it still has just enough glitter to make the weak-minded sorts who tend to become journalists at this level go ga-ga over it. Unsurprisingly a very large part of the time what is written about D.C. is no more serious-minded than what is written about Hollywood.

What We Overlook When We Argue About C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures: Snow's "New International Economic Order"

As I remarked previously, when we discuss C.P. Snow's writing on The Two Cultures we get fixated on the argument about whether there are two cultures at all--and ignore the very large, last, part of the essay derived from the reality he acknowledged that industrialization had raised the standing of science and lowered that of letters, namely the demand of the developing nations that they too great to share in the world's progress by being helped in industrializing themselves.

Considering this it is, of course, significant that the West was in competition with the Soviet bloc--which Snow argued could, if the West refused to help, perform the task of facilitating that industrialization of the developing world by itself (transferring the required knowledge, etc.), to the West's great disadvantage. He then suggested that, for the benefit of all concerned, it would be best if what seemed to him the inevitable effort were a joint one.

Of course, looking back we know that no such effort ever occurred, that indeed outside of an important but still limited portion of East Asia the developing nations remain developing nations more than a half century on, with the gap between "First" World and "Third" grown bigger in many ways. Important to this would seem the fact that Snow overestimated the Soviet Union as a competitor--in line with the way it had been catching up the West in the 1950s, thinking that it was well on the way to success. Instead the Soviet Union was, a little while after that, showing evidences of slipping behind itself--and a long way from the kind of superabundance of techno-industrial strength that would have permitted it to be so open-handed with the developing world. Moreover, even if the Soviet Union had proven as dynamic as Snow thought, and thus brought to bear on the West more pressure to extend such aid to the poorer nations simply to keep itself from being cut out economically and politically, the 1970s, when there really were strong demands from developing nations for a "New International Economic Order," saw the West react very differently. Faced with the Group of Seventy-Seven one saw the emergence of the Group of Seven, and the neoliberal counter-offensive against such visions. Indeed, what really defined relations between the more and less developed nations were the interest rate spike of the "Volcker shock," the Third World debt crisis, the Washington Consensus that, even before the Soviet Union's economic failings left it less and less able to help itself, let alone anyone else, in the ways Snow anticipated, and relegated the '60s and '70s-era visions of a different economic order to the footnotes of history. The result is that his essay appears in this respect a relic not just of Cold War fears, but of the more rationalistic hopes of the mid-twentieth century over which the "zealots of pessimism" had not yet won out .

What We Overlook When We Argue About C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures: Why Did the Split Happen in the First Place?

Writing about C.P. Snow I have tended to emphasize what it seemed to me that he had got right, in large part because so many are so vehement about denying it--specifically that there really is a great gap between the sciences and "letters" (literature, art, the humanities), and that the rift has been important in the life of modern society.

However, lately I find myself looking more and more to what Snow did not treat quite so well, like why the divide exists, a question that seems the greater when one considers just how much traffic there once was between science and letters in the past. As Ian Watt explains, the modern novel actually emerged as a quasi-scientific literary form, premised as it was on the objective existence of a physical world knowable through the coordinated use of observation and reason. In the years that followed the great French novelists of the nineteenth century quite consciously drew inspiration from science and scientists--like Balzac, and, acclaiming Balzac the first to have walked that path, the "experimental novelist" Emile Zola, whose naturalism not only made him an immortal of literature, but may be credited with inspiring almost all of the really great American writers of his day, like Frank Norris, and Jack London, and Upton Sinclair, and Theodore Dreiser, as in England H.G. Wells rose to the rank of literary giant precisely because of his own scientific inclinations and commitments.*

Snow offers no indication of any of this, instead rather hazily suggesting that the matter is in part the bitterness at the way letters has lost stature in modern times as less relevant in a scientific-technological world, exacerbated by the employment problems and lower incomes of its graduates and the way they sour their outlook; or the aesthete's distaste for the ugliness of so much of modernity, in comparison with what they may romantically recall of the past, equating past times with the most beautiful of their creations and only these, and so comparing today's housing blocks to the palaces of ancient times, while forgetting about the slums of those ancient cities. Snow does register that during the twentieth century letters, certainly as represented by Modernists like Eliot and Waugh, gravitated toward reaction, and frankly fascism--but not that this was part of a larger shift, the clearer as world war passed into Cold War, and Modernism into a postmodernism that became all-pervading.

As one may remember from looking at such turns in the past (as in the early nineteenth century, when a triumphant conservatism sought to excise the ghosts of Enlightenment, liberalism, revolution with Counter-Enlightenment, throne and altar, reaction), the supposed menace of Reason was met with weapons of Un-Reason and Anti-Reason. The result was that in the view of those who held power rational thinking had to be abided in the laboratory or the shop floor, but nowhere else, and absolutely not in social life, and the pictures literature paints about it. Indeed, thinking of how Snow presents the literature of "1914-1930" as dominated by Modernist reactionaries, and how this cuts out figures like the then-still very important Wells, I find myself thinking of how the Modernist and postmodernist turn, the way in which literature, led by critics given over body and soul to the Counter-Enlightenment, spoke of reason, progress and humanity only with a sneer, the literary record of the past was revised. Thus did a Balzac or a Zola became a good deal less fashionable, as American letters, certainly, marginalized a Norris or London or Sinclair or Dreiser, and, dispensing with Wells the rationalist social thinker and realist novelist remembered only Wells' science fiction tales, and the darkest and most pessimistic of them at that (knowing him by stories like The Island of Dr. Moreau), then strove to deprive him of whatever reputation remained left to him after. In his obliviousness here Snow is all too conventional--and his work is the poorer for it.

* Balzac was inspired by the naturalist Georges Cuvier, Zola by, besides Balzac, Claude Bernard among others.

What Ever Happened to Sinclair Lewis?

Reflecting upon Mark Schorer's not insignificant part in burying Sinclair Lewis' reputation Lewis' biographer Richard Lingeman writes that Schorer's work "was a product of its time," which was "the silent 1950s, the era of the anticommunist culture war in academe, the heyday of the New Critics, who placed text above social context."

It strikes me that Lingeman is entirely correct about Schorer's literary ideas and his application of them. It also strikes me, as it does not strike Lingeman, that in this as in many other ways we never really moved past that time--the damage to reputations like that of Lewis enduring, with the same going for the damage done to our ideas about art. Back in the early twentieth century figures like H.G. Wells or Upton Sinclair criticized the received ideas about the valuation of artistic work, not least the "great lies" that form comes ahead of content, and "politics" has no place in art. In their counter-attack against all that Schorer and company upheld the lies, so that they stand virtually unchallenged in our time, to our cost.

Taylor Swift and the Era of "Peak Pop Star"

Recently considering Taylor Swift's extraordinary present stature within pop culture even as celebrity as a whole seems to be in decline I suggested that she had an advantage in making a name for herself just a little while before the hyper-fragmentation of pop culture. This may be all the more the case for, if she is known to appeal more strongly to some demographics than others, her still managing to have a broad appeal in some degree, a point Erik Schreiber, recently reviewing Swift's new album, The Tortured Poets Department, made when remarking her popularity as likely having something to do with her work and her persona and her performances "offer[ing] something to everyone: a little bit acoustic and country, a little bit electric and urban, a soupçon of sexiness, a pinch of feminism, and a lot of spectacle."

Coming along in a time when a mass audience could still be won, she appealed for it, and won it.

This seems less plausible today--as we are reminded by every list of the "most popular" stars, and strain to spot anyone who came along after the Great Recession.

What Will Inside Out 2 Make at the Box Office?

Ordinarily when I think about what a movie might make I look at comparable, prior, films. If the movie is part of a series I look at its predecessors in the same series. If movies not in the same series offer some point of comparison, I use that. (Thus did I, when thinking about Indiana Jones 5, consider what preceding Indiana Jones films made--but also how Solo did, which, alas, turned out to be far more relevant.) And so on.

It seems to me that Disney-Pixar's upcoming Inside Out 2 does not have many convenient points of comparison as the first sequel to a film put out way back in 2015. Certainly there have been other Pixar movies accorded wide theatrical releases since the pandemic's disruption of the business but the circumstances of their releases differed sufficiently to complicate the drawing of any analogy. In the summer of 2022 Lightyear appeared at a point at which there had been sufficient recovery of theatergoing for there to be reasonable hopes of a "normal" Pixar gross, but if the movie was connected with the hit Toy Story series, it was awkwardly so given its conception as a prequel about one of the characters (Lightyear a "Toy Story Story" as Solo was a "Star Wars Story"), the change of the actor voicing the lead character, the significant shift in tone--and the way in which it became an object of the culture war. Last summer's Elemental was an original film, and I think a bit "concept-heavy" in that way that works against such films being wide-audience hits, especially in the American market, so that again it has its limits as a point of comparison. Meanwhile, even looking beyond Pixar's releases to Disney's wider releases leaves us without much more given the movies it has put out (like Wish).

Still, I can think of at least one way of approaching the matter, which is to look at the closest thing to a recently productive brand like Pixar in the Disney media universe, namely the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Prior to the catastrophe that was Captain Marvel 2 the MCU movies were in real, inflation-adjusted terms making 50-80 percent of what the preceding film in the same series made (Thor 4 as against Thor 3, etc., all the way through last summer's Guardians of the Galaxy 3). Especially given the fact that North American moviegoing pretty much fell by half between 2015 and 2023-2024 this number can seem significant--and thus worth applying to Inside Out 2.

The starting point is then the gross of the first Inside Out. That movie made $356 million at the U.S. box office. Adjusted for inflation using the good old Consumer Price Index this comes to about $468 million. Some 50-80 percent of that would work out to $240-$370 million. Assuming, not unreasonably given that China was not too big a contributor to the first film, that the domestic/international balance for the sequel is the same as it was for the original this would work out to a box office range of $600-$900 million at the global level.

How does this compare with Boxoffice Pro's expectations for the opening? According to their last long-range forecast one might anticipate $80-$110 million for the debut. As it happened the first Inside Out managed to quadruple its opening over its longer run. Might this one do the same? As a brand-name sequel one can expect the run of Inside Out 2 to be more front-loaded than the first film, but at the same time it seems to me that, plausibly testifying to the moviegoing audience's greater hesitancy about the trip to the theater, on the whole film grosses may be becoming less front-loaded than before--a larger part of the public, perhaps, waiting to hear what the film is really like before checking it out for themselves.

Returning to the example of the MCU I remember how the Disney-backed "first big release" of last summer--Guardians of the Galaxy 3--did, tripling its opening weekend gross. That would give us $240-$330 million, a range with a bottom end precisely equal to the bottom end of the range I suggested above, with an upper end safely inside the range as well. The movie quadrupling its money as the first film did would work out to a gross of $320-$440 million--largely inside the range, if breaking past it at the high end. Together this comes to a domestic range of $240-$440 million at the extreme ends, and globally, $600 million to $1.1 billion.

That said I can easily see the movie making $600 million--that figure just a little better than Elemental (and the live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid) managed last summer, after all. However, the $1 billion+ gross, which far exceeds anything made by any movie since last July (when we got Barbie), would really be an achievement--more than I think plausible given the state of the market, and the strength of the preceding film, and the tripling of at least a decent open weekend rather than quadrupling it the more likely outcome. The result is that the $600-$850 million range seems to me the plausible territory for this movie--which, I am sure, would have the press crowing about a hit if the movie does indeed pull it off.

Why Hollywood Needs Inside Out 2 to be a Hit

Back in 2015 Inside Out hit theaters, and grossed over $850 million globally--which in today's terms works out to over $1.1 billion.

This sounds colossal--but really it was just a respectable performance by the standards of Disney-Pixar at the time, a good number of other films that studio released over the decade actually doing considerably better (like Frozen, as well as the sequels to that movie, and to the well-loved Finding Nemo and The Incredibles).

Yet in 2024 it seems the entertainment press is looking to Inside Out 2 for salvation--understandably, as the film is supposed to be the first really big release of a summer box office season very slow to get going amid the near-year-long drought since Barbie and Oppenheimer did their bit to prop up the sagging box office.

However, there is also what is less likely to be spoken, namely that Hollywood, amid its present crisis, not only wants a hit, but a hit of the same old kind it was used to scoring--a hit with a sequel attached to an established brand name of the sort that proved so elusive last year, and so far this year. A hit that will confirm the studio bosses in what they so obviously want to believe, that they can keep cranking out such sequels to established franchises and getting the ticket-buyer's money in return. That indeed they only need to go on doing what they were doing before, if perhaps with "better writers" and more "adults in the room" supervision of those floopy-brained creatives. That it is even the case that Hollywood's franchises are "underexploited" and the studios can and should actually exploit them more vigorously.

Will Hollywood get what it is hoping for with Inside Out 2? It seems possible. But it is also the case that, in profound denial over a structural crisis of the American film business as its model of filmmaking fails and moviegoing collapses, it is inclined to grasp at straws; to make modest successes sound like hits, and disappointments sound delightful. The result is that I am expectant of a good deal of spin whatever the outcome as the Suits go on doing what they have been doing in spite of its losing money because, hey, that beats actually working for their obscenely inflated salaries by figuring out how to get their industry out of the corner into which they themselves have been pushing it for decades.

Upton Sinclair's "Dead Hand" Series, and the Sometime Necessity of Self-Publishing

The student of sociology may recall having encountered the concept of "substructure-structure-superstructure."

In this conception society not only has a structure (the organization of a human group into sub-groups, like socioeconomic classes); but a substructure that is based on the nuts and bolts of how people actually produce the material essentials of life (the organization of work), on which the structure is based (for, as someone once said, "life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things"); and a superstructure, which one can think of as broadly the ideology of the society, rooted in the substructure and structure "below" it.

In his "Dead Hand" books (the name of which is, apparently, a play on Adam Smith's conception of market forces as an "invisible hand" that produces optimal economic results in a context of free exchange), Upton Sinclair, who had earlier written about the other levels of societal life (in fiction like The Jungle, or The Metropolis, but also nonfiction), turned his attention to that "superstructure" as it existed in American society in his day. Specifically in the six books to which that sequence eventually came he addressed the matters of religion (in 1917's The Profits of Religion), the education system (1923's The Goose-Step and 1924's The Goslings) , the news media (in 1919's The Brass Check) and the arts (1925's Mammonart and 1927's Money Writes!).

In those six books Sinclair presented a fiercely critical view of the state of all those aspects of American life, the thinking they promulgated, and the backward, venal and oppressive forces he saw lying behind them. Naturally the publisher which put them out took a risk--and the Dauriats of Sinclair's time had no more interest in such risk than they did in Balzac's time, or in ours. After their declining the first of Sinclair's books because of its subject matter (The Profits of Religion). The result was that Sinclair decided to publish the books himself, and continued in the practice with the books that followed.

As those who have experience of self-publishing can testify self-publishing, like any other sort of small business when we get away from the piety and outright romanticism about it standard in this society, is basically an affair of working harder, for less. And as if the ordinary obstacles in its way were not enough the very press that had treated Sinclair and all he stood for so abusively throughout his career, and which he criticized in his books, did not make this easier for him, in the main remaining silent about the books. However, that is no judgment on their quality--the books retaining interest a century on not only as works by a writer who had then been in the first rank, or as historical documents testifying to conditions in Sinclair's time, but for what they tell us about ideas and institutions that, contrary to Sinclair's hopes when he produced these books, remain dominant in our own day (and are today written about, for the most part, with rather less rigor, frankness, insight than Sinclair displayed).

Indeed, that the publishers and press of his time behaved as they did toward Sinclair's books can seem to be as much to the credit of Sinclair and his books as it is to the discredit of those publishers and press--while this seems to me something worth remembering in our time, with its ceaseless elite and elitist sneering at any democratization of publishing. The defenders of traditional publishing and the rest may claim to be upholding high standards, but in reality what they hate is losing control of what may be put before the public, even if it has only been in a much smaller degree than most appreciate, for what that means not just commercially, but politically.

Book Review: The Brass Check: A Study of Journalism, by Upton Sinclair

The imagery and word-play in the titles of most of the books in Upton Sinclair's "Dead Hand" series tend to be easy enough for the reader to grasp, even after a century. When he titles his book on American higher education The Goose-Step, few in the audience for which he intended the book are likely to be thrown. The same goes for the title of his book on The Profits of Religion, or the neologism that is Mammonart. However, looking at the title of The Brass Check one might reasonably wonder just what a "brass check" is.

Sinclair spells that out for us early on with an anecdote from his youth in which he describes first learning of the existence of prostitution from a campaign speech by a candidate running for district attorney promising to crack down on it. As Sinclair explains, in his description of the system said candidate "pictured" to his audience a room in a brothel "in which women displayed their persons," and the customer "walked up and down and inspected" the women, "selecting one as they would select an animal at a fair," then paid his money "to a cashier at the window, and received a brass check," which he gave "to the woman upon receipt of her favors." Said candidate for office underscored his point by dramatically producing a piece of metal he claimed to be an example of such a brass check before the eyes of his audience. ("'Behold!' he cried. 'The price of a woman’s shame!'")

Affected by the performance in exactly the way the candidate intended, Sinclair thought "this BRASS CHECK was the symbol of the most monstrous wickedness in the world." However, not least from the fact of how this candidate got elected and (predictably) did absolutely nothing about the social evil he had so thunderously condemned, the young Sinclair "learned the grim lesson that there is . . . more than one kind of prostitution which may be symbolized by the BRASS CHECK."

Of course, Sinclair was not the first to call journalists prostitutes, and certainly not the last, but in combination with that anecdote his titling his book "The Brass Check" makes very clear what he thinks of the mainstream of journalism. In his view its practitioners are not merely selling labor, but honor and "self," with this underlined by reporters' sharing with prostitutes a reputation for cynicism. At the same time, for all the damage journalists do to the health and morality of individuals and society as a whole, journalists are themselves victims of an exploitative and degrading system driven by money, and above all, the determination of those who have the most money to defend their position of privilege and go on getting richer, with all this absolutely inseparable from the extreme corruption of officialdom.

As one may expect of any book of this kind written by Sinclair, he is not merely flinging insult, but making a long, carefully thought-out, case, with a good basis of comparison the analysis Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky offered in 1988's Manufacturing Consent (a book which has been a touchstone for media critics for over a generation, as Matt Taibbi's well-received Hate, Inc. reminds us). Describing a "propaganda model" of journalism, they analyze the press as, by default, promulgating elite views as a result of five factors, namely the economics making media an increasingly concentrated big business enterprise (as a matter of sheer cost and market dynamics), its associated dependence on advertising revenue (simply to cover its own expenses), reliance on "sourcing" (the need to minimize cost driving media outlets to uncritically pass on what the institutions on which they report say about themselves because it is cost-effective), susceptibility to "flak" (attacks by the offended dissuading them from particular coverage), and the "national religion" status of Anti-Communism in the United States (providing an ideological framework for their "reportage").

Sinclair, writing of what he called "[t]he methods by which the 'Empire of Business' maintains its control over Journalism," lists four factors: "ownership of the papers . . . ownership of the owners . . . advertising subsidies . . . and . . . direct bribery." In elaborating these claims over several chapters Sinclair conveyed to the reader the economics that made of news outlets big businesses often owned by other big businesses as it became concentrated in ever fewer hands, living and dying by advertising, reliant on sourcing, ever-anxious about the possibility of the counter-attack to which they are vulnerable, and deferential to the creed of Anti-Communism. Thus did he present to them the reality of the "newspaper trusts," and the empire of William Randolph Hearst, and control of the news media by the locally dominant business in many a city, state, region, if not through outright ownership (as Big Copper dominated the news business in Montana), then through their advertising dollars (department stores looming very large here). He explained the way newspapers, especially in the small town and rural areas, depended on others to supply them with content, the workings of the Associated Press syndicate on which all papers were reliant, the way business supplied papers with "propaganda" that they published as "reading matter." So, too, did he explain the ways and means by which the powerful hit back at those who "got out of line," with the condemnation of flak actually the least of the pressure brought to bear on a news outlet whose management dared to take a stand distasteful to the privileged, apt as the recalcitrant is to find itself being sabotaged in manifold ways (like the credit by which every enterprise lives being cut as bills suddenly come due). And of course, in examining the bias of the news media Sinclair showed that the bias that loomed largest by far was its extreme hostility toward labor and the left in line with its fealty to capital and the order of things it found congenial.

One may thus credit Sinclair with providing a fair prototype of the Herman-Chomsky propaganda model almost seven decades before Herman and Chomsky came out with their book, all as, in contrast with those authors who in setting forth that model deliberately played it safe, minimalistically limiting themselves to working on the basis of its most unquestionable aspects, Sinclair ranged through much territory whose very existence they did not even raise. Where Herman and Chomsky ultimately present the media as doing what it does simply because in the grip of the prevailing market and political forces it can scarcely be expected to do otherwise as they carefully avoided saying anything that would lay them open to charges of being "conspiracy theorists" or otherwise stepping beyond the limits of "legitimate" discourse in a way bespeaking the limits of the national conversation in their day (and ours), Sinclair shows the media and its owners as not unwitting but knowing and generally eager propagators of such propaganda, with class prejudice and loyalty and peer pressure playing a large part in the "ownership of the owners"; as more blatantly corrupt in the ways he referred to as "bribery" of news outlets and their personnel (as with purchases of copies, promises of lucrative jobs, outright cash payment for services rendered); and beyond being used as a result of their sourcing themselves ready to select, distort, insinuate and even make things up whole cloth to fit a narrative its owners generally desire that their outlets spread.

Moreover, while Sinclair was famously ardent and meticulous in his research (indeed, it may be this that George Orwell, who owed Sinclair more than is commonly acknowledged, appreciated most about him)--a propensity that is on full display here as he backs up his claims with a mountain of specific evidence--Sinclair writes with far, far more fury and flair than any public intellectual desirous of preserving a minimum of mainstream credibility does in our time. It may matter in this that the author is a first-rank novelist as well as a social activist, but it also matters that his was an age in which one could hope to be taken seriously when writing about an important subject of the day without putting on a great show of writing in the dry-as-dust style of a lab report (and a leftist feel the more pressure to do so for awareness of the double standard to which they are subject because of their political position, and the readiness of those hostile to them to sneeringly dismiss anything they say as a "rant" or something like it).

It matters, too, that the media treated Sinclair himself so brutally, and that even when he was not the object of their abuse as a fighter for his causes he was so often in a position to see its mistreatment of others, such that he is able to speak from very considerable personal experience and observation. Indeed, in a book substantially consisting of his showing us case after case in which the press lived down to the absolute worst that may be expected of what he says of it given its agenda and manner of functioning, almost the whole first half of The Brass Check consists of his recounting of press malfeasances he suffered personally, or at least witnessed himself. Thus does Sinclair, author of the classic novel The Jungle (1906), tell us of how the press treated his book and him at the time of its release, how it fought scurrilously against the exposé of the horrific social and industrial conditions he described in that work, how it fought against him and others as they struggled to give the country consumer protections of historic significance. He tells us, as a personal witness, of how the media conducted itself during the Colorado coal strike (the occasion of the Ludlow Massacre). He tells us, too, of how as a prominent leftist the media (not least that then-notoriously right-wing paper of his hometown, the Los Angeles Times) made Sinclair himself a target, never missing a chance to scandalize him, with its coverage of events in his life from the personal trauma of his divorce, to his once challenging a ten cent charge on a restaurant bill (!). However, the same fury carries over to his treatment of those events where his involvement was less central or even personal, from the press' attacks on his friend and colleague Jack London for his own politics, to the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike in West Virginia, and of course, the world war and subsequent events in Russia.

In all this we see, again and again, how the news media alternates between being a "concrete wall" and a "channel," completely ignoring and thus burying stories it prefers not to have reported, and in other cases screaming at the top of its lungs ad nauseam about them so that they are all anyone can think about, in line with whichever course will serve its causes--not reporting on things as much a weapon in its arsenal for manipulating the public as "telling only one side." We see, too, how that media plays fast and loose with the facts when they do scream for the sake of their narrative. Thus do they put up headlines that may have little to do with the content of the articles underneath them--because they know the headline is what most will see and remember. Thus do they accuse on their front pages on the flimsiest evidence, and often none at all, when this suits its editors and those to whom they answer--and then on those all too rare occasions when those they attacked were able to fight back, print a very small retraction at the bottom of the back page to insure that as little as possible of the damage they did was ever undone. Thus do they insinuate when even they dare not accuse, endlessly playing those word games that go so far with the credulous semi-literate.

Amid it all they ran true to pattern again and again in the specifics Sinclair recounts. Thus did they prefer to ignore the doings of organized labor, and what was done to it--unless the story would put organized labor in a negative light (as they did in their disgraceful coverage of the Colorado and West Virginia and other strikes on which Sinclair reports). Thus did they make strategic use of the sex scandal to crush those they deem enemies to be destroyed (while studiously not reporting the indiscretions of those their masters deem worthy of protection). And often they mixed up their anti-leftist bias with sex scandal in the shabbiest of ways--as when they strove to equate socialism in the minds of the susceptible with what was then called "free love" (exploiting a culture war over issues of personal morality to attack the left) and told lies about the Bolshevik government "nationalizing" the women of the country (lies that, I think, even the most stalwart of Anti-Communists today would generally prefer to forget as an embarrassment of the kind all too useful to "Anti-Anti-Communists" of all ideological backgrounds).

Of course, when we read Sinclair's book we can scarcely forget that a century has passed since his day, and much has changed, with the news media today as thoroughly dominated by the audiovisual and indeed the digital as it had been dominated by print in his time, and the movement from a local to a corporatized national media far, far more advanced, with hugely important and in many cases novel implications. However, as Sinclair's explaining so much that the media's critics have rediscovered again and again over the years shows, the fundamental drivers of the news media's conduct, and the news media's practice in ways extending beyond broad theory to sometimes quite specific tactics, has not changed, as we see when it writes now of the struggles of labor and the left, of social conditions and of social protest; of foreign affairs in peace and war and the governments of other nations of whom the powerful disapprove; as it exploits sex scandal and culture war in the same ways that drove Sinclair to write this book and pay for its publication on terms that made his act a public service rather than the pursuit of a payday. The result is that read today The Brass Check not only makes for a fascinating history lesson, but like many another century-old book (not least, the other Dead Hand books in Sinclair's Dead Hand series), teaches us more about the present than the vast majority of books written today purporting to tell us about the era in which we live.