In his introduction to the collection of Pauline Kael's writing The Age of Movies Sanford Schwartz wrote of Kael as "undoubtedly the most fervently read American critic of any art" in her heyday, and her departure from her job at the New Yorker a national news story--a claim Frank Rich in his piece looking back on Kael in 2011 assures us is "not hyperbole," and explains why it is not so, even as it can seem that way. Rich certainly is not oblivious to the ways in which Kael, a complex, problematic personality who damaged her own legacy in ways that have him characterizing her story as the "cautionary tale" of the self-destruction of a critic by "corruption, self-parody, first-person megalomania" (evident in, for instance, her attack on Orson Welles' contributions to Citizen Kane), there were bigger issues at work in the decline of Kael's standing that left her comparatively obscure at the time of her death than the personal flaws of one individual.
As Rich observes, by the end of the century movies were already less central to contemporary culture than they were in the 1970s--because audiovisual media broadly exploded, because pop culture fragmented so that any one movie was that much less likely to be an event, because as the New Hollywood gave way to the age of the "high concept" blockbuster movies changed so that there was less for a critic like Kael to say about them that could give intelligent readers very much to think about and get excited about and argue about with each other. (I, for one, find much of value in her review of Raiders of the Lost Ark--but I also know that once one has said all that there is just not much more to say about movies of the type, one reason, I suppose, why David Walsh and his colleagues are such irregular reviewers of major theatrical releases.)
It also followed logically that with film less central in contemporary culture, so were film critics--the more in as interest in the professional critics then throve on the existence of a whole layer of critics arguing their different ideas not just about particular movies but cinema as a whole in the review pages. (Kael's rivalry with Andrew Sarris over at The Village Voice certainly a significant part of what had so many movie buffs rushing to read her reviews once upon a time.)
I am broadly in agreement with Rich here--that the kind of niche Pauline Kael occupied at her height simply disappeared, had disappeared in 2001, and has only become less plausible since. After all, if Kael thought the blockbuster had already conquered at the beginning of the 1980s, what would she, or any like-minded critic, have had to say of the state of the movies in 2019? Or 2024, in which Hollywood is fighting so ferociously to sustain the faltering blockbuster model?
With people paying less attention to film, and to film criticism, the legacy of a single past critic is that much less likely to command attention--and indeed Rich points out how these days it is only those in "cineaste circles and film-studies academia" who still read Kael. Is that fair? Rich's aforementioned piece ran in the New York Times--but I doubt I would ever have run across it had I not taken an interest in film history, and seen Peter Biskind explained her significance (and Sarris') in the world of post-war American cinema.
Monday, November 4, 2024
The Artist Starving in the Garret
As John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in Economics and the Public Purpose people of conventional mind tell artists that true art being appreciated by the few, "success" injurious to the true artist, and that they ought to not hope for worldly success, contenting themselves with being "unworldly and monkish figure[s]." Galbraith, of course, is sufficiently intelligent and honest (it was possible for an Establishment figure to be that back then) that this is an essentially dishonest and self-serving view promulgated by an elite uninterested in lending artists any support whatsoever--but all the same, just as with the other self-serving stupidities of the powerful the view has been so pervasive as to form what Professor Galbraith called "conventional wisdom," giving us the image of the artist starving in a garret for the sake of creation.
One irony of the situation is that the artist may be even more averse to poverty than others, not less--and, as Henri Murger explained in his most famous book, only "walking the paths of Bohemia" in the hope of reaching someplace better, suffering poverty now in the hope of opulence later. (It's not the journey but the destination that counts, especially as the journey offers little but insecurity and hardship.) This is likely even more the case in the age of mass media shoving images of opulence in one's face all the time, and a cult of celebrity telling everyone "You can do it too!"--all as that thought is perhaps the sole comfort making bearable the extreme inequality with which they live, with the taboo against admitting it only underlining how much this is the case.
One irony of the situation is that the artist may be even more averse to poverty than others, not less--and, as Henri Murger explained in his most famous book, only "walking the paths of Bohemia" in the hope of reaching someplace better, suffering poverty now in the hope of opulence later. (It's not the journey but the destination that counts, especially as the journey offers little but insecurity and hardship.) This is likely even more the case in the age of mass media shoving images of opulence in one's face all the time, and a cult of celebrity telling everyone "You can do it too!"--all as that thought is perhaps the sole comfort making bearable the extreme inequality with which they live, with the taboo against admitting it only underlining how much this is the case.
Gambling on Celebrity
Recently considering the matter of the pursuit of the longshot of celebrity--the immense time and effort and often money people pour into it, with almost no chance of realizing the goal--the question "Why do they do it?" inevitably comes up.
The obvious answer--which Upton Sinclair already gave in 1927's Money Writes!--has been that the rewards are immense, the alternatives profoundly unattractive (life as a "nobody" instead of a "somebody"), and that society relentlessly encourages the public to not count the one-in-a-million odds and instead believe that they are that one in the million that will win this "winner take all" game.
Still, it seems there is something more to be said of the last part of that, the persuasion that they will surely be the exception, with all its profound unreason, enjoining the public to set aside the depressing rational calculation and its implications in favor of "faith," all while vehemently insisting that a lack of "faith"--a lack of readiness to believe in those things running contrary to the evidence of the senses and the conclusions one derives from them using reason, and in which Authority tells them to believe for its convenience--is not just the mark of a superficial mind failing to apprehend "higher" and greater realities, but a grave "character flaw" dooming the sufferer to misery in this world as well as in the next. (Thus does our crappy popular fiction so often depict atheists, rationalists and other "faithless" persons as miserable people and show them up as wrong in the end.)
Do not think, goes the teaching, believe--for knowledge will serve you less well than belief, so much so that one may say that ignorance is strength.
By any chance, do you remember which society encouraged that particular outlook?
The obvious answer--which Upton Sinclair already gave in 1927's Money Writes!--has been that the rewards are immense, the alternatives profoundly unattractive (life as a "nobody" instead of a "somebody"), and that society relentlessly encourages the public to not count the one-in-a-million odds and instead believe that they are that one in the million that will win this "winner take all" game.
Still, it seems there is something more to be said of the last part of that, the persuasion that they will surely be the exception, with all its profound unreason, enjoining the public to set aside the depressing rational calculation and its implications in favor of "faith," all while vehemently insisting that a lack of "faith"--a lack of readiness to believe in those things running contrary to the evidence of the senses and the conclusions one derives from them using reason, and in which Authority tells them to believe for its convenience--is not just the mark of a superficial mind failing to apprehend "higher" and greater realities, but a grave "character flaw" dooming the sufferer to misery in this world as well as in the next. (Thus does our crappy popular fiction so often depict atheists, rationalists and other "faithless" persons as miserable people and show them up as wrong in the end.)
Do not think, goes the teaching, believe--for knowledge will serve you less well than belief, so much so that one may say that ignorance is strength.
By any chance, do you remember which society encouraged that particular outlook?
Why Are We Always Being Told to "Be Grateful?"
It is the conventional view that the feeling and expression of gratitude--of thankfulness--is a great virtue, and its lack a great failing, with, indeed, that conventional view taking the matter to extremes, with those who may really have little to be grateful for enjoined to be grateful for that.
But is that what this is really about?
As it happens, there are reasons to be skeptical of the virtue of gratitude.
After all, gratitude is felt by a person in relation to a benefactor. Of course, anyone can do anyone else a good turn, but society being the unequal thing it is, the relationship is commonly a hierarchical one, with those feeling gratitude expected to humbly bow their heads before the more powerful betters who have bestowed on them not what is theirs by right, but a gift, charity out of "the goodness of their hearts."
In that bit of incoherence (the expectation of humble bowing from others hardly speaks to any goodness on an individual's part!) lies the secret of the vehemence of society's enjoinment to gratitude--the call on the ruled to expect little, and be deferential to those who allow them that little, the low keeping their places contentedly, all very conveniently from the standpoint of those on top.
Naturally it is the opposite in an egalitarian society, such of them as we are able to find, as there are no superiors and no inferiors, and a different order of relations prevailing, to go by what Peter Freuchen reported from his time among the Inuit. Expressing thanks when a hunter more successful than himself gave him a rather large quantity of meat, the hunter "objected" that humans "help each other" with no thanks necessary or even desirable, for just as "by whips one makes dogs," "by gifts one makes slaves."
Of course, making slaves is something the rich and powerful have always approved, as much today as ever, with all this confirmed by the way the rich expect infinite gratitude from the public towards the Atlas they believe themselves to be, while recognizing no obligation to be grateful themselves as, sitting on their G-6 flying to Davos, they whine that they have not nearly enough, for the world never gave them their due, with their courtiers in the press and the web fora ever ready to weep bitter tears at their plight.
But is that what this is really about?
As it happens, there are reasons to be skeptical of the virtue of gratitude.
After all, gratitude is felt by a person in relation to a benefactor. Of course, anyone can do anyone else a good turn, but society being the unequal thing it is, the relationship is commonly a hierarchical one, with those feeling gratitude expected to humbly bow their heads before the more powerful betters who have bestowed on them not what is theirs by right, but a gift, charity out of "the goodness of their hearts."
In that bit of incoherence (the expectation of humble bowing from others hardly speaks to any goodness on an individual's part!) lies the secret of the vehemence of society's enjoinment to gratitude--the call on the ruled to expect little, and be deferential to those who allow them that little, the low keeping their places contentedly, all very conveniently from the standpoint of those on top.
Naturally it is the opposite in an egalitarian society, such of them as we are able to find, as there are no superiors and no inferiors, and a different order of relations prevailing, to go by what Peter Freuchen reported from his time among the Inuit. Expressing thanks when a hunter more successful than himself gave him a rather large quantity of meat, the hunter "objected" that humans "help each other" with no thanks necessary or even desirable, for just as "by whips one makes dogs," "by gifts one makes slaves."
Of course, making slaves is something the rich and powerful have always approved, as much today as ever, with all this confirmed by the way the rich expect infinite gratitude from the public towards the Atlas they believe themselves to be, while recognizing no obligation to be grateful themselves as, sitting on their G-6 flying to Davos, they whine that they have not nearly enough, for the world never gave them their due, with their courtiers in the press and the web fora ever ready to weep bitter tears at their plight.
The Sports Game in Today's Video Game Market: A Few Thoughts
Like just about everything else the world of video games has fragmented so that "big picture" views of what is going on in it have become more elusive (certainly, in comparison with what we had a few decades ago), with one aspect of this I recently found myself looking at sports games. To go by the annual bestseller lists at least some sports games still sell very well--as with Electronic Arts' Madden NFL series. However, my impression is that there has still been some slippage in their old prominence, at least to go by the press coverage, and the games that seem to have real pop cultural cachet--all of which seems to favor action-adventure, especially where there is a massively multiplayer or role-playing element (as with hits from Fortnite to Elden Ring).
What quantitative evidence I have been able to find supports that conclusion. Way back in the 8-bit era, for instance, sports games were very prominent in the ranks of all-time big-sellers. According to the list compiled at Wikipedia there were motocross and golf games (and of course, Duck Hunt) in the list of the top ten sellers on the Nintendo Entertainment System that dominated gaming in its era, and baseball and track and boxing in the top twenty. If making for an imperfect comparison, it still seems telling that the NPD market research company's tracking listed no sports games whatsoever in the top ten in 2000-2009, with the four in the top twenty occupying ranks 13 and below--and all of them from the Madden NFL series--while even these failed to make their list of the top twenty in 2010-2019 even once. In 2020 and 2021 Madden again made the list, but in the #3 and #4 spots, respectively, with any other sports games, especially barring a gimmick like a connection with a popular non-sports franchise (like Super Mario, in the Mario Kart series), apt to be few and far between, even when we consider the most popular franchises and sports.
Considering the matter all this seems to track with what we have seen culturally. The cultural profile of professional sports has fallen significantly from what it was a few decades ago, with younger cohorts--who are so important to the gaming market--less likely to take an interest in the enjoyment of spectator sports than their elders. At the same time, compared with how things stood in the '80s, gamers have more options--and a more fragmented culture--which means that those whose interest in sports is only marginal or nonexistent are less likely to try a sports game (as compared with that generation of 8-bit players whose more limited selection had pretty much everyone playing Mike Tyson's Punch-Out or Blades of Steel at some point). In the process the profile of sports within gaming fell just as it did in the entertainment world-popular culture more broadly, with it a telling fact that only the best-established franchises associated with the biggest sports have managed to stay presences, as newer franchises fail to materialize and those sports outside the first rank of popularity with TV audiences fall by the wayside here--such that it seems almost unthinkable that a golf game will be a top ten seller on any major system in the 2020s, all as, barring some really surprising turnabout, I would not be at all surprised to see sports games entirely fail to make this decade's top twenty as well.
What quantitative evidence I have been able to find supports that conclusion. Way back in the 8-bit era, for instance, sports games were very prominent in the ranks of all-time big-sellers. According to the list compiled at Wikipedia there were motocross and golf games (and of course, Duck Hunt) in the list of the top ten sellers on the Nintendo Entertainment System that dominated gaming in its era, and baseball and track and boxing in the top twenty. If making for an imperfect comparison, it still seems telling that the NPD market research company's tracking listed no sports games whatsoever in the top ten in 2000-2009, with the four in the top twenty occupying ranks 13 and below--and all of them from the Madden NFL series--while even these failed to make their list of the top twenty in 2010-2019 even once. In 2020 and 2021 Madden again made the list, but in the #3 and #4 spots, respectively, with any other sports games, especially barring a gimmick like a connection with a popular non-sports franchise (like Super Mario, in the Mario Kart series), apt to be few and far between, even when we consider the most popular franchises and sports.
Considering the matter all this seems to track with what we have seen culturally. The cultural profile of professional sports has fallen significantly from what it was a few decades ago, with younger cohorts--who are so important to the gaming market--less likely to take an interest in the enjoyment of spectator sports than their elders. At the same time, compared with how things stood in the '80s, gamers have more options--and a more fragmented culture--which means that those whose interest in sports is only marginal or nonexistent are less likely to try a sports game (as compared with that generation of 8-bit players whose more limited selection had pretty much everyone playing Mike Tyson's Punch-Out or Blades of Steel at some point). In the process the profile of sports within gaming fell just as it did in the entertainment world-popular culture more broadly, with it a telling fact that only the best-established franchises associated with the biggest sports have managed to stay presences, as newer franchises fail to materialize and those sports outside the first rank of popularity with TV audiences fall by the wayside here--such that it seems almost unthinkable that a golf game will be a top ten seller on any major system in the 2020s, all as, barring some really surprising turnabout, I would not be at all surprised to see sports games entirely fail to make this decade's top twenty as well.
The Campus Goose-Step, Today
Reading Upton Sinclair's book on American higher education, The Goose-Step, I was overwhelmed by how the characterization of American higher education aligned so much with the condition of that institution a century on. Indeed, just about every one of the flaws, problems, betrayals of that institution he detailed are very much with us in one form or another--
However, we live in a different world now, one which has given the diseases he discussed an additional century in which to metastasize along with so many others in society at large. Today, after all, far more young people go to college than did in his day, from a far wider variety of backgrounds--a fact which has not incidentally made the scramble for admission to the more prestigious places far more vicious, and those who "succeed" in it the more stupidly snobbish, all while there have been distinct economic and social consequences to so many children of middling and poor parents getting a rich man's education at the rich man's prices charged in the American system. At the same time the corporatization, financialization, militarization of life has had its reflection here, taking it far beyond anything Sinclair imagined.
The result is that were Sinclair writing a latterday Goose-Step I am sure he would write of the standardized testing business and the "college admissions industry" and rackets like those of a certain Rick Singer. He would write of the vast industry grown up around the making, collection, securitization(!) of a mass of student loans approaching the $2 trillion mark as government retreats from its support of higher education--and of students selling their blood for money with which to buy books, and of the graduates so crushed by their debt that they must defer starting "real life" for many years. He would write of the proportions to which college endowments have grown (Harvard's alone is now over $50 billion) and the market they have created for "wealth management" (so notorious and so important that Thomas Piketty used it as a significant point of reference in Capital in the Twenty-First Century), creating another veritable industry in itself. He would write of the academic-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex and the sports-industrial complex of which college athletics are indubitably a part, and of the way in which in line with the neoliberal mentality treating the shareholder value-maximizing business as the epitome of a well-run operation colleges have been run like businesses, while other colleges actually are businesses--as we see with the big for-profit college sector that represents yet another industry.
I think that he would write, too, of the idiotic Cult of the Good School and its associated foolish hierarchy remote from any real world concern and ever-influenced by a profoundly corrupt "college ranking" process, of the assault on the humanities and the vacuity and corruption of the cult of STEM, of the underemployment of college graduates far from being limited to possessors of "worthless" degrees. He would write of the explosion in the usage of adjunct labor and the explosion of the salaries of university presidents and star coaches. He would write of the cynical (and in light of what has been discussed here, also venal) drivel of those in the commentariat and the policy elite who have preached sending more people to college as the solution to the country's economic and social problems as a substitute for real action to keep the country economically viable and help its working people, just like all the other Ponzi scheme-like aspirationalist dreck of which it is a part (perhaps citing Pestalozzi's fable about pikes placating the fish aggrieved at their eating them with the promise that every year two fish would be given the chance to grow into pikes themselves). I suspect Sinclair would also have something to say of the postmodern turn in academics--and because at the time he was still a genuine leftist rather than what the politically illiterate today think is a leftist be rather uncomplimentary about it.
Of course, that I can say all this reflects how many a journalist and scholar and appointed investigator has examined these various issues--and in many cases devoted a whole book to them. However, if anyone has distilled those collected findings all into one book like Sinclair did with the problems of American higher education in his day, let alone brought to bear on the facts a social vision to compare with his in its breadth and depth and critical stance, the feat has entirely escaped me--all as I think it the more likely that it would because, just as Sinclair did not issue his Dead Hand books through the major publishers, such a work would probably not make it through the gauntlet one has to run to reach the public with a Big Five imprint on it in our time, with all that unfortunately implies for anyone's chances of hearing about it.
the control of universities by businessmen, and the influence of alumni and politicians, generally to reactionary ends (and often venal ends, too, as they use their control of the institutions to fleece them for whatever they can get) . . . the extent to which such institutions are less places of learning than "country clubs" for the children of the rich, vocational schools for persons encouraged to think of nothing but the salary their degree might get them, and factories for producing intellectual stultification and social and ideological indoctrination and conformity for the sake of perpetuating the worst that exists in society . . . the unhealthful effects of the college fraternity and college athletics on college life . . . the extreme hypocrisy of administrators about free speech and academic freedom as they crush those things out of existence.Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
However, we live in a different world now, one which has given the diseases he discussed an additional century in which to metastasize along with so many others in society at large. Today, after all, far more young people go to college than did in his day, from a far wider variety of backgrounds--a fact which has not incidentally made the scramble for admission to the more prestigious places far more vicious, and those who "succeed" in it the more stupidly snobbish, all while there have been distinct economic and social consequences to so many children of middling and poor parents getting a rich man's education at the rich man's prices charged in the American system. At the same time the corporatization, financialization, militarization of life has had its reflection here, taking it far beyond anything Sinclair imagined.
The result is that were Sinclair writing a latterday Goose-Step I am sure he would write of the standardized testing business and the "college admissions industry" and rackets like those of a certain Rick Singer. He would write of the vast industry grown up around the making, collection, securitization(!) of a mass of student loans approaching the $2 trillion mark as government retreats from its support of higher education--and of students selling their blood for money with which to buy books, and of the graduates so crushed by their debt that they must defer starting "real life" for many years. He would write of the proportions to which college endowments have grown (Harvard's alone is now over $50 billion) and the market they have created for "wealth management" (so notorious and so important that Thomas Piketty used it as a significant point of reference in Capital in the Twenty-First Century), creating another veritable industry in itself. He would write of the academic-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex and the sports-industrial complex of which college athletics are indubitably a part, and of the way in which in line with the neoliberal mentality treating the shareholder value-maximizing business as the epitome of a well-run operation colleges have been run like businesses, while other colleges actually are businesses--as we see with the big for-profit college sector that represents yet another industry.
I think that he would write, too, of the idiotic Cult of the Good School and its associated foolish hierarchy remote from any real world concern and ever-influenced by a profoundly corrupt "college ranking" process, of the assault on the humanities and the vacuity and corruption of the cult of STEM, of the underemployment of college graduates far from being limited to possessors of "worthless" degrees. He would write of the explosion in the usage of adjunct labor and the explosion of the salaries of university presidents and star coaches. He would write of the cynical (and in light of what has been discussed here, also venal) drivel of those in the commentariat and the policy elite who have preached sending more people to college as the solution to the country's economic and social problems as a substitute for real action to keep the country economically viable and help its working people, just like all the other Ponzi scheme-like aspirationalist dreck of which it is a part (perhaps citing Pestalozzi's fable about pikes placating the fish aggrieved at their eating them with the promise that every year two fish would be given the chance to grow into pikes themselves). I suspect Sinclair would also have something to say of the postmodern turn in academics--and because at the time he was still a genuine leftist rather than what the politically illiterate today think is a leftist be rather uncomplimentary about it.
Of course, that I can say all this reflects how many a journalist and scholar and appointed investigator has examined these various issues--and in many cases devoted a whole book to them. However, if anyone has distilled those collected findings all into one book like Sinclair did with the problems of American higher education in his day, let alone brought to bear on the facts a social vision to compare with his in its breadth and depth and critical stance, the feat has entirely escaped me--all as I think it the more likely that it would because, just as Sinclair did not issue his Dead Hand books through the major publishers, such a work would probably not make it through the gauntlet one has to run to reach the public with a Big Five imprint on it in our time, with all that unfortunately implies for anyone's chances of hearing about it.
Where Do People Get the Idea That They Are Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires?
In Slaughter-house Five Kurt Vonnegut's narrator presents a lengthy passage from a (fictional) monograph about America intended to help German officers in charge of American prisoners of war better understand those with whom they are dealing. In the passage Campbell explains that all peoples "believe many things that are obviously untrue," with the "most destructive" of the untruths that Americans believe "that it is very easy for any American to make money." Thinking this way they do "not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by," with the result that "those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves," a self-blame that "has been a treasure for the rich and powerful" of America which has permitted America's ruling class "to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any" of its counterparts "since, say Napoleonic times."
This passage is so often quoted because it has resonated with a great many readers as containing and lucidly expressing a good deal of truth not ordinarily acknowledged in American life--and I am certainly in agreement with that. Yes, the culture of "economic opportunity" and self-help and Horatio Alger and the rest does promulgate the lie that "it is . . . very easy to make money," and when Americans discover the lie--when, to borrow another phrase relevant to this syndrome, the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" realizes their embarrassment is not at all temporary--many (not all, but probably at least enough to make for a difference) blame themselves bitterly, which has left the poor with less sense of dignity and less able to love themselves than they have been elsewhere, and less of the social solidarity that has contained the potential for social change.
However, there also seems much that Vonnegut overlooks. He tells us of the "untruth," but does not say where it comes from, and reading the passage one can easily get the impression that this delusion just sprang up among its sufferers--the more in as Vonnegut's characterization of this as "a treasure for the rich and powerful" makes it seem as if it were something they just happened upon, discovered as if they had stumbled upon a pirate's chest while walking down a beach.
Indeed, he can seem to be blaming the victims of the delusion for their own troubles.
Upton Sinclair was sounder when he characterized the public as, rather, the victims of the propaganda of the rich and powerful--who built up that treasure rather than stumbling upon it. Indeed, quite mainstream historians--an Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. or Louis Hartz, for example--have pretty well documented this process. This can be summed up as a matter of America's conservative elite in the country's early days ("Hamiltonians," "Federalists," "Whigs"), initially hoping to create a society where the franchise was confined to a property-holding elite failed to get popular acquiescence in this vision; and turned from simply demanding lower-class deference to neutralizing lower-class opposition in subtler ways. Critical to this was the idea that social class was nonexistent or trivial in America--in part on the basis of claims about the interests of rich and poor being one and the same, about the poor lead happier lives than the possession-burdened rich, about class mobility and "economic opportunity" permitting today's working man to be tomorrow's capitalist. All clichés of American discussion of class for nearly two centuries now, they have most definitely derived from, represented, advanced an Agenda so ever-present in contemporary politics, education, culture that many do not even notice that it is there--and fewer in Vonnegut's day than in Sinclair's, when social vision had not yet been driven from the public square by Modernism, postmodernism and cultural Cold War.
This passage is so often quoted because it has resonated with a great many readers as containing and lucidly expressing a good deal of truth not ordinarily acknowledged in American life--and I am certainly in agreement with that. Yes, the culture of "economic opportunity" and self-help and Horatio Alger and the rest does promulgate the lie that "it is . . . very easy to make money," and when Americans discover the lie--when, to borrow another phrase relevant to this syndrome, the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" realizes their embarrassment is not at all temporary--many (not all, but probably at least enough to make for a difference) blame themselves bitterly, which has left the poor with less sense of dignity and less able to love themselves than they have been elsewhere, and less of the social solidarity that has contained the potential for social change.
However, there also seems much that Vonnegut overlooks. He tells us of the "untruth," but does not say where it comes from, and reading the passage one can easily get the impression that this delusion just sprang up among its sufferers--the more in as Vonnegut's characterization of this as "a treasure for the rich and powerful" makes it seem as if it were something they just happened upon, discovered as if they had stumbled upon a pirate's chest while walking down a beach.
Indeed, he can seem to be blaming the victims of the delusion for their own troubles.
Upton Sinclair was sounder when he characterized the public as, rather, the victims of the propaganda of the rich and powerful--who built up that treasure rather than stumbling upon it. Indeed, quite mainstream historians--an Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. or Louis Hartz, for example--have pretty well documented this process. This can be summed up as a matter of America's conservative elite in the country's early days ("Hamiltonians," "Federalists," "Whigs"), initially hoping to create a society where the franchise was confined to a property-holding elite failed to get popular acquiescence in this vision; and turned from simply demanding lower-class deference to neutralizing lower-class opposition in subtler ways. Critical to this was the idea that social class was nonexistent or trivial in America--in part on the basis of claims about the interests of rich and poor being one and the same, about the poor lead happier lives than the possession-burdened rich, about class mobility and "economic opportunity" permitting today's working man to be tomorrow's capitalist. All clichés of American discussion of class for nearly two centuries now, they have most definitely derived from, represented, advanced an Agenda so ever-present in contemporary politics, education, culture that many do not even notice that it is there--and fewer in Vonnegut's day than in Sinclair's, when social vision had not yet been driven from the public square by Modernism, postmodernism and cultural Cold War.
Of Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires and Fish Growing into Pikes
John Steinbeck's remark that American working people tend to think of themselves as "temporarily embarrassed capitalists" has, in its slightly revised form as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," become notorious as an explanation for what seems the slight response of America's working people to calls for social change.
As it happens, many years before Steinbeck published his remark, Upton Sinclair wrote something similar in Money Writes!. In his second chapter, "Fishes and Pike," Sinclair identifies the "most important single fact about American civilization" as "economic inequality," and remarks how in contrast with every past civilization in contemporary America, the magic of the media (from tabloids to picture-shows) constantly bringing the have-nots face to face with the luxury of the haves in what could seem a reckless provocation of the poor. However, this did "not lead to instant revolution" because of "the conviction, deeply rooted in the hearts of ninety-nine out of every hundred persons" in America is "that he or she is destined to climb out upon the faces of the other ninety-nine, and have a chance to spend money like those darlings of luxury" that they see on the movie screen or elsewhere. In the image that Sinclair attributes to the Swiss (Sinclair says Italian) educator Johann Pestalozzi, the little fish preyed upon by voracious pike are mollified with the promise that "every year thereafter two little fishes should be permitted to become pike," the mathematically slight chance to be predators at the top of the local food chain trumping the desire to advance the welfare of fish generally.
One may wonder if the influence of this idea is quite so strong, if the public is really quite so stupid, frankly (and indeed, just as leftists like Steinbeck and Sinclair have discussed this, leftists have also challenged the image). However, the point is that Sinclair did say it here--and in contrast with many of those who, when making the observation, do not seem to think much about where it comes from, or to treat it as a delusion that just "happened" to the working persons, Sinclair does point out that this was a matter of indoctrination; that "[i]t is what had been taught to the whole country from the beginnings of its life in grammar school, in high school, in church, in the newspapers, the movies . . . the political campaigns," if only implicitly in the rhetoric of a "land of opportunity" where "every child . . . has a chance to become president," and anyone questioning it is contemptuously dismissed as deficient in character or all too aware of a real inferiority (as a "grouch," a "sorehead," as someone overly negative), such that this "propaganda whereby ten million youths are kept contented with their lot" can be termed "the ethical code of a civilization."
Sinclair raises the matter here because it is inseparable from the content of American fiction, so heavy on the propaganda for this "ethical code" (in the country's fiction "you would find that fifty percent of all heroes are wealthy at the outset, and another forty-nine percent become so before the end of the story") that it seems "incense to Mammon," and the motives of so many of those who write or desire to write fiction, for whom the celebrity that will turn the fish into a pike is a major attraction.
As it happens, many years before Steinbeck published his remark, Upton Sinclair wrote something similar in Money Writes!. In his second chapter, "Fishes and Pike," Sinclair identifies the "most important single fact about American civilization" as "economic inequality," and remarks how in contrast with every past civilization in contemporary America, the magic of the media (from tabloids to picture-shows) constantly bringing the have-nots face to face with the luxury of the haves in what could seem a reckless provocation of the poor. However, this did "not lead to instant revolution" because of "the conviction, deeply rooted in the hearts of ninety-nine out of every hundred persons" in America is "that he or she is destined to climb out upon the faces of the other ninety-nine, and have a chance to spend money like those darlings of luxury" that they see on the movie screen or elsewhere. In the image that Sinclair attributes to the Swiss (Sinclair says Italian) educator Johann Pestalozzi, the little fish preyed upon by voracious pike are mollified with the promise that "every year thereafter two little fishes should be permitted to become pike," the mathematically slight chance to be predators at the top of the local food chain trumping the desire to advance the welfare of fish generally.
One may wonder if the influence of this idea is quite so strong, if the public is really quite so stupid, frankly (and indeed, just as leftists like Steinbeck and Sinclair have discussed this, leftists have also challenged the image). However, the point is that Sinclair did say it here--and in contrast with many of those who, when making the observation, do not seem to think much about where it comes from, or to treat it as a delusion that just "happened" to the working persons, Sinclair does point out that this was a matter of indoctrination; that "[i]t is what had been taught to the whole country from the beginnings of its life in grammar school, in high school, in church, in the newspapers, the movies . . . the political campaigns," if only implicitly in the rhetoric of a "land of opportunity" where "every child . . . has a chance to become president," and anyone questioning it is contemptuously dismissed as deficient in character or all too aware of a real inferiority (as a "grouch," a "sorehead," as someone overly negative), such that this "propaganda whereby ten million youths are kept contented with their lot" can be termed "the ethical code of a civilization."
Sinclair raises the matter here because it is inseparable from the content of American fiction, so heavy on the propaganda for this "ethical code" (in the country's fiction "you would find that fifty percent of all heroes are wealthy at the outset, and another forty-nine percent become so before the end of the story") that it seems "incense to Mammon," and the motives of so many of those who write or desire to write fiction, for whom the celebrity that will turn the fish into a pike is a major attraction.
The Doubts That Go with the Delusions in a Land of Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires
In summing up the delusions of what others have called "temporarily embarrassed millionairedom" Upton Sinclair in Money Writes! used Johann Pestalozzi's images of the fishes and the pike, in which "the little fishes" are told that "[f]or a million little fishes to be preyed upon by a hundred great pike is all right, because every little fish has an equal chance to become a pike," needing only "to grow sharp enough teeth, and eat enough of the other little fishes."
Of course, as Sinclair acknowledged, it may be that a great many of the fish were persuaded of this moral and practical insanity--but not all were, while even believers had doubts amid the inevitable "agonies of pain and fear" of a fish on the run from its life from ravenous pike. As a result they had to constantly reassure themselves and be reassured by others in the "faith that he or she will be a bit swifter or luckier than the others" and realize their "destiny for pikehood" in all its "glory," while those not so persuaded of the essential rightness of the arrangement are dismissed as "soreheads" and "grouches."
All this remains very much with us a century on, the delusions, the doubts, the dismissals of dissent, even as the vocabulary has changed, such that I think Sinclair would have an easy enough time understanding the use of terms like "beta" today.
Of course, as Sinclair acknowledged, it may be that a great many of the fish were persuaded of this moral and practical insanity--but not all were, while even believers had doubts amid the inevitable "agonies of pain and fear" of a fish on the run from its life from ravenous pike. As a result they had to constantly reassure themselves and be reassured by others in the "faith that he or she will be a bit swifter or luckier than the others" and realize their "destiny for pikehood" in all its "glory," while those not so persuaded of the essential rightness of the arrangement are dismissed as "soreheads" and "grouches."
All this remains very much with us a century on, the delusions, the doubts, the dismissals of dissent, even as the vocabulary has changed, such that I think Sinclair would have an easy enough time understanding the use of terms like "beta" today.
The Decline of the Sports Video Game Genre and the Age of Warcraft
Looking at the evidences of the decline of the sports game genre over the last few decades of video game history, my first thought was that it reflected the decline of interest in sports among younger age cohorts.
However, it may also be a matter of changes in what games could offer players, and what people look for in their video games changing along with it. In an age of simpler gaming technology a little distraction was what people expected of their games--and a sports game was as good a way of getting it as any. Meanwhile a good many other genres were new and fairly primitive, especially those that like the first-person shooter, the role-playing game, the adventure game that combined role-playing elements with action. But the latter got better--a lot better, the worlds larger, the features more numerous, the tasks more varied, the flow more intuitive, all as the enhancement of the graphics and sound gave them a sensational appeal. The result was that games increasingly had the potential to be immersive experiences--immersive experiences in another world often more attractive than the player's own world. Thus did it become a common joke among gamers that life is a badly designed video game, where you only get the one life, can't customize your character, can't choose the difficulty setting. Thus did observers like Edward Castronova argue that, if the medium through which we experienced it was technologically primitive compared to the promises, in a significant way the age of virtual reality was already here, and many people increasingly choosing the virtual over the real. In the process that experience, and the genres supplying it, seem to have become the foundation of hardcore gaming--and supplanted the lighter entertainments (the sports games, and the puzzlers, and even the Guitar Hero-type entertainments so popular in the '00s), certainly to go by the content of the bestseller lists.
However, it may also be a matter of changes in what games could offer players, and what people look for in their video games changing along with it. In an age of simpler gaming technology a little distraction was what people expected of their games--and a sports game was as good a way of getting it as any. Meanwhile a good many other genres were new and fairly primitive, especially those that like the first-person shooter, the role-playing game, the adventure game that combined role-playing elements with action. But the latter got better--a lot better, the worlds larger, the features more numerous, the tasks more varied, the flow more intuitive, all as the enhancement of the graphics and sound gave them a sensational appeal. The result was that games increasingly had the potential to be immersive experiences--immersive experiences in another world often more attractive than the player's own world. Thus did it become a common joke among gamers that life is a badly designed video game, where you only get the one life, can't customize your character, can't choose the difficulty setting. Thus did observers like Edward Castronova argue that, if the medium through which we experienced it was technologically primitive compared to the promises, in a significant way the age of virtual reality was already here, and many people increasingly choosing the virtual over the real. In the process that experience, and the genres supplying it, seem to have become the foundation of hardcore gaming--and supplanted the lighter entertainments (the sports games, and the puzzlers, and even the Guitar Hero-type entertainments so popular in the '00s), certainly to go by the content of the bestseller lists.
Teaching Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace"
In Mammonart Upton Sinclair memorably interprets Guy de Maupassant as an Emile Zola "without social vision and revolutionary hope." As a result what one ends up with is a technically brilliant "master of the short story, better able than anyone else" to "pack . . . meaning into a brief episode, to give you the whole life and import of a character in a couple of thousand words" . . . but absolutely nothing else, teaching the student of writing nothing but "the tricks of the trade." This had much to do with Maupassant being "one of the fighting art-for-art's-sakers, to whom the idea of morality in an art-work is an insult."
A very plausible interpretation indeed, I think, which has made me reflect on my experience using the story in the classroom. This was in the more advanced composition class at the college I taught at, which had a greater accent than the starter course on textual analysis, and used to that end a literary component as preparation for a general education course on literature the students had to take later.
The students almost invariably insisted that the story was a little homily about "Being grateful for what you have"--in that had Mathilde Loisel not borrowed what she thought was a diamond necklace to wear at the ball in the hopes of "not appearing poor in front of rich women," she would not have lost what little comfort she had in her life as she (and her husband) sacrificed all to replace what they mistakenly thought an exceedingly expensive piece of jewelry.
I do not deny that it is possible to read the story that way--especially if one is still callow enough to expect stories to all be centered on presenting a single, tidy, utterly conservative and conventional moral; if they think that "There is no such thing as society"; if they know nothing about French realism or naturalism, or Guy de Maupassant, and how cold-eyed this literary current can be as it presents characters in the grip of larger forces; as indeed they did not.
But what about when someone tries to explain to you all these things? Explain that literature, and life, can be more complicated than that, as this story is? After all, the reason to pick this story over many of the alternatives in the limited selection of the anthology was that, besides being brief and accessible (it was a composition class, after all, and one could give only so much time to the literary element), it seemed to me to offer a lot to talk about, and write about, when it was time to display the compositional skills the class taught by turning in a written essay. We had de Maupassant's sense of what a fragile, tenuous, thing life can be. ("How life is strange and changeful! How little a thing is needed for us to be lost or to be saved!" the narrator remarks at one point.) We had here some hard realities of class, and class mobility; we had the celebration and glamorization of wealth and the illusions and deceptions that go with that; we had the anxieties and aspirations of the marginally middle class--all things that seemed to me to very "relatable" today. We had what it meant to be in debt in this earlier era, and how different that was from the present. And so on and so forth.
However, they brushed all this aside as they insisted on the simple, "moralistic" reading that would have appalled Maupassant.
It does not seem to me incidental that this let them moralize sanctimoniously about Mathilde's conduct--her being ungrateful for what she had, her "not knowing her place" and wanting more than life had given her.
How sanctimonious was evident at grading time. Far from being "grateful for what they have" and "knowing their place" they constantly showed themselves ungrateful as they came to demand of their instructor (usually in the most disrespectful manner) that anything they got that was less than an "A" be changed an "A" in the apparent belief that I was singlehandedly keeping them from their destiny to be a CEO of a Fortune 500 company by giving them anything less than that "A."
Alas, the fictional portraits of the teaching profession rarely present those scenes--and how far from rewarding they are for practitioners of a profession whose members society at large expects to do the job out of convenient social virtue.
A very plausible interpretation indeed, I think, which has made me reflect on my experience using the story in the classroom. This was in the more advanced composition class at the college I taught at, which had a greater accent than the starter course on textual analysis, and used to that end a literary component as preparation for a general education course on literature the students had to take later.
The students almost invariably insisted that the story was a little homily about "Being grateful for what you have"--in that had Mathilde Loisel not borrowed what she thought was a diamond necklace to wear at the ball in the hopes of "not appearing poor in front of rich women," she would not have lost what little comfort she had in her life as she (and her husband) sacrificed all to replace what they mistakenly thought an exceedingly expensive piece of jewelry.
I do not deny that it is possible to read the story that way--especially if one is still callow enough to expect stories to all be centered on presenting a single, tidy, utterly conservative and conventional moral; if they think that "There is no such thing as society"; if they know nothing about French realism or naturalism, or Guy de Maupassant, and how cold-eyed this literary current can be as it presents characters in the grip of larger forces; as indeed they did not.
But what about when someone tries to explain to you all these things? Explain that literature, and life, can be more complicated than that, as this story is? After all, the reason to pick this story over many of the alternatives in the limited selection of the anthology was that, besides being brief and accessible (it was a composition class, after all, and one could give only so much time to the literary element), it seemed to me to offer a lot to talk about, and write about, when it was time to display the compositional skills the class taught by turning in a written essay. We had de Maupassant's sense of what a fragile, tenuous, thing life can be. ("How life is strange and changeful! How little a thing is needed for us to be lost or to be saved!" the narrator remarks at one point.) We had here some hard realities of class, and class mobility; we had the celebration and glamorization of wealth and the illusions and deceptions that go with that; we had the anxieties and aspirations of the marginally middle class--all things that seemed to me to very "relatable" today. We had what it meant to be in debt in this earlier era, and how different that was from the present. And so on and so forth.
However, they brushed all this aside as they insisted on the simple, "moralistic" reading that would have appalled Maupassant.
It does not seem to me incidental that this let them moralize sanctimoniously about Mathilde's conduct--her being ungrateful for what she had, her "not knowing her place" and wanting more than life had given her.
How sanctimonious was evident at grading time. Far from being "grateful for what they have" and "knowing their place" they constantly showed themselves ungrateful as they came to demand of their instructor (usually in the most disrespectful manner) that anything they got that was less than an "A" be changed an "A" in the apparent belief that I was singlehandedly keeping them from their destiny to be a CEO of a Fortune 500 company by giving them anything less than that "A."
Alas, the fictional portraits of the teaching profession rarely present those scenes--and how far from rewarding they are for practitioners of a profession whose members society at large expects to do the job out of convenient social virtue.
Upton Sinclair on Guy de Maupassant
In the chapter of Mammonart that Upton Sinclair devotes to the career and work of Guy de Maupassant Sinclair pays tribute to de Maupassant's technical command of the short story--the French writer "master of the . . . form," for "No one has been able to pack more meaning into a brief episode, to give you the whole life and import of a character in a couple of thousand words." However, Sinclair also treats him as terribly limited in other ways, asking of the "young writers of short stories" who study his work to learn from that master "What has he to give them--aside from the tricks of the trade?" and answering, as he holds that de Maupassant himself would have answered, "Nothing." In spite of his "art for art's sake" views Maupassant has a "propaganda," a Message, just "as definite, as deeply felt, as persistently hammered home as that of a tub-thumper like John Bunyan or a prophet like Tolstoi," but alas, a worse than worthless one, namely "that life is a cheat and a snare," a view that Sinclair sees as not just leaving his work a body of brilliant technique and no more, but as having destroyed Maupassant himself (put him "in a strait-jacket at forty," and in his grave in Paris' Montparnasse Cemetery not very long after).
Where did Maupassant's come from? As it happens Sinclair significantly arranged his book so that the chapter on Maupassant came immediately after the chapter on Emile Zola and began with the question "What would Zola and his naturalism have been without social vision and revolutionary hope?" with de Maupassant's life and work the answer. Especially given what Sinclair has to say about artistic pessimism in his subsequent book, Money Writes!, there is a fairly obvious, if implicit, social criticism in that, namely that the writer taking the social world as it is, and accepting that this is all it can be, ever, can scarcely feel anything but pessimism--with, perhaps, the life-as-a-cheat-and-snare aspect of that pessimism saying something of capitalism specifically, or at least aspects of its essence that were to become clearer later and elsewhere than in the France of Maupassant's day. An economic system that lives on the basis of an individualistic aspirationalism that is endlessly exploited and endlessly disappointed, an advertising-consumer culture that ceaselessly cultivates intense desires for products that can never live up to expectations and whose satisfactions are designed to be disposable so as to keep the consumer on an endless treadmill of wanting and getting, can seem to very easily produce a "cheat and snare" view of life in a person without social vision, for which what is really just "society" is instead Life.
Where did Maupassant's come from? As it happens Sinclair significantly arranged his book so that the chapter on Maupassant came immediately after the chapter on Emile Zola and began with the question "What would Zola and his naturalism have been without social vision and revolutionary hope?" with de Maupassant's life and work the answer. Especially given what Sinclair has to say about artistic pessimism in his subsequent book, Money Writes!, there is a fairly obvious, if implicit, social criticism in that, namely that the writer taking the social world as it is, and accepting that this is all it can be, ever, can scarcely feel anything but pessimism--with, perhaps, the life-as-a-cheat-and-snare aspect of that pessimism saying something of capitalism specifically, or at least aspects of its essence that were to become clearer later and elsewhere than in the France of Maupassant's day. An economic system that lives on the basis of an individualistic aspirationalism that is endlessly exploited and endlessly disappointed, an advertising-consumer culture that ceaselessly cultivates intense desires for products that can never live up to expectations and whose satisfactions are designed to be disposable so as to keep the consumer on an endless treadmill of wanting and getting, can seem to very easily produce a "cheat and snare" view of life in a person without social vision, for which what is really just "society" is instead Life.
Is it "Life" That's Not Fair, or Just Society?
"There is no such thing" Margaret Thatcher famously said of society. She was, of course, wrong--in this as in
pretty much every other thing of which I am aware. Yet there is no denying that her perspective is the conventional one--which produces a good deal of muddle in the minds of the conventional. When people speak of "life" the truth is that they really mean the world as it exists around them at that very moment, which for the most part means the social arrangements of that moment, which in their unimaginativeness and ignorance they think of as eternal--as, indeed, simply "life." Society's failings thus become "life's" failings, and a society's unfairness "life's" unfairness, which authority figures, and other similarly callous and stupid persons, delight in tauntingly throwing in the faces of the victims of that unfairness, who are all too often the victims of the personal actions that society put those authority figures into a position to commit.
The Cynicism of the Phrase "Life's Not Fair"
Not long ago I remarked the phrase "Life's not fair."
Considering it my first thought was of the evasion of responsibility involved. An authority figure could help you, but refuses because they simply don't want to do so--and then tosses out that tired pseudo-observation, as if to say "It's not me, it's the universe that's like this!" when the universe has nothing to do with it.
However, one can also regard it as an exercise in that cheapest of philosophical stances, nihilism.
Instead of "It's not me, it's the universe that's like this!" they are saying "The universe isn't fair, so why do I have to be?"
Behind which is, "I have the power here, you don't, I'm going to do what I want, and you can [EXPLETIVE DELETED, EXPLETIVE DELETED, EXPLETIVE DELETED, EXPLETIVE DELETED, EXPLETEIVE DELETED]."
I'm not sure there's much to choose from the two. If the first rationale for "Life's not fair" is lazy, dishonest, cowardly, the second is brazen in its meanness. And I'm disinclined to strain to pick one out as better than the other. Instead it seems to me quite reasonable to just say that they are both disgusting attitudes to take toward others--and as commonplace as they are disgusting.
Considering it my first thought was of the evasion of responsibility involved. An authority figure could help you, but refuses because they simply don't want to do so--and then tosses out that tired pseudo-observation, as if to say "It's not me, it's the universe that's like this!" when the universe has nothing to do with it.
However, one can also regard it as an exercise in that cheapest of philosophical stances, nihilism.
Instead of "It's not me, it's the universe that's like this!" they are saying "The universe isn't fair, so why do I have to be?"
Behind which is, "I have the power here, you don't, I'm going to do what I want, and you can [EXPLETIVE DELETED, EXPLETIVE DELETED, EXPLETIVE DELETED, EXPLETIVE DELETED, EXPLETEIVE DELETED]."
I'm not sure there's much to choose from the two. If the first rationale for "Life's not fair" is lazy, dishonest, cowardly, the second is brazen in its meanness. And I'm disinclined to strain to pick one out as better than the other. Instead it seems to me quite reasonable to just say that they are both disgusting attitudes to take toward others--and as commonplace as they are disgusting.
The Lameness of the Phrase "Life's Not Fair"
For as long as I can remember I have despised the phrase "Life's not fair."
This is not because every last conceivable usage of the phrase is entirely without truth. Ontologically speaking there certainly seems to be nothing in the structure of reality that guarantees fairness.
Rather the problem is that the statement is usually irrelevant to the situation at hand and insulting to the intelligence of the person to whom it is spoken.
Usually when people say "Life's not fair" the subject under discussion is not ontology. Rather we are far more likely to be seeing an authority figure defend the arbitrary exercise of their will. They could have opted to act fairly in this situation. But instead they opted to act unfairly, most often because this was convenient for them.
The issue in this case was not "Life," but their use--typically their indefensibly self-serving misuse and abuse--of their power. Trying to change the subject from practical, immediate, realities to the higher planes of philosophy, in this case as in so many others (as with those evading responsibility by hiding in epistemological ambiguity), is an unbelievably shabby move absolutely deserving of contempt.
This is not because every last conceivable usage of the phrase is entirely without truth. Ontologically speaking there certainly seems to be nothing in the structure of reality that guarantees fairness.
Rather the problem is that the statement is usually irrelevant to the situation at hand and insulting to the intelligence of the person to whom it is spoken.
Usually when people say "Life's not fair" the subject under discussion is not ontology. Rather we are far more likely to be seeing an authority figure defend the arbitrary exercise of their will. They could have opted to act fairly in this situation. But instead they opted to act unfairly, most often because this was convenient for them.
The issue in this case was not "Life," but their use--typically their indefensibly self-serving misuse and abuse--of their power. Trying to change the subject from practical, immediate, realities to the higher planes of philosophy, in this case as in so many others (as with those evading responsibility by hiding in epistemological ambiguity), is an unbelievably shabby move absolutely deserving of contempt.
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