Upton Sinclair on the Media's "Giving the People What They Want"

It remains a commonplace that business generally and the media particularly "just give the people what they want"--the proposition that in a market society "the consumer is king" excusing business for any regrettable thing it does (they got's to make a living), by laying the entire responsibility for everything wrong with what business does at the feet of the Great Unwashed. A rather simple-minded view, it comes especially easily to those in awe of the elite, fearful of challenging power, and disdainful of the general public and its working people--which is to say, pretty much everyone allowed access to the political mainstream.

Quite naturally criticism of the view is not at all new, but it is worth remembering that in his now century-old Money Writes! Upton Sinclair specifically took on that view, and indeed gave his fifth chapter over to debunking the nonsense, explicitly remarking the utterance of "that formula every ten minutes in the offices of every yellow journal and tabloid in America . . . every popular magazine . . . every producer of theatrical and cinema excrement" as an excuse, and declaring the formula "twenty-five years out of date" in a world where advertising was a major industry, with "several thousand schools, colleges and universities of commerce in the United States" training that industry's personnel in wanting what the businessmen want them to want, extending to overcoming the "sales resistance" their actions inevitably produce in service of that consumer culture that had already emerged full bloom in America in the 1920s and in the process "destroyed the line which used to be drawn between necessities and luxuries." Indeed, the idea that business is just "giving the public what it wants" seemed to him already "ancient history" in his time, such that "the younger generation of writers never heard of it, and will refuse to believe that it ever happened."

Still, Sinclair also points out that the lie worked with the public, as when he discussed the theme of his next chapter, the end of the "muckraking" era. To use that stupid and distasteful term, what had happened was that in the first two decades of the twentieth century, for all the news media's considerable failings, exposes of society's evils had some prominence within its content ("hundreds of exposures . . . hundreds of thousands of single facts stated" that were never "disproved in a court of law"), but after the war and its associated reaction the space for such work shrank. The official line went that "the public . . . had become disgusted with the excesses of the muckrakers" and the public believed it, in spite of its having been false--false not only in the sense of the "excesses" having been those of the ones "who made the muck, not . . . those who raked it," but told that its "disgust" was what brought the reportage to an end when really it was the shrinking tolerance of a revolution-haunted elite for any challenge to "things as they are."

Meanwhile, if the younger generation of writers of his day never believed the "what the public wants" piffle they were certainly more sophisticated than the writers of our own day, who seem to swallow the foolishness whole. But then a lot was lost in that post-war period Sinclair lamented, and apparently never properly recovered down to our time a century later.

The Humanity of The Simpsons--and the Inhumanity of the '90s

A few years ago The Simpsons creator Matt Groening gave an interview to Smithsonian Magazine. The piece had many interesting tidbits--not least how Homer got his name (and what relation the name "Homer Simpson" had to Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, something I had wondered about for decades).

One of the more interesting was Groening's remark about the increasingly "mean and sour" tone of "sitcom banter" from the '70s on, which got to the point "that half the time someone would say something in a sitcom, and it seemed like the spouse’s response should be, 'I want a divorce.'"

I don't disagree about that, but I do think it surprised me hearing it from Groening. After all, at the time of its debut The Simpsons was a new arrival on the upstart FOX Network, the home of shows like Married . . . With Children, and if perhaps not quite to the same degree, edgy enough by the prime-time sitcom standards of the day to outrage the culture warriors (the more in as, much more than is admitted, people thought then and still think now of cartoons as something for children only).

Still, it is a reminder that for all of Homer's antics--which in the course of a single season of the show saw him do things that would probably get a person divorced in real life--Homer was in the end a loving husband and father, with the comedy often coming out of that.

It is also a reminder that the show (which originated as a The Tracey Ullman Show sketch in 1987, even if it only aired its Christmas special in the second half of December 1989 and its first "proper" episodes in 1990, and had its glory days in the subsequent years) was ultimately more of the '80s--the era of The Cosby Show and Growing Pains and the rest--than of the '90s--that era of the "extreme!" in which amid a sense of national nervous breakdown the "cool" thing to do was supposed to be to ride that breakdown like a surfer does a giant wave, for the sheer "extreme!" thrill of it.

By contrast South Park was much more reflective of that decade's nihilistic outlook--and the fact that the show is not just still on the air, but still treated as culturally significant, is a reminder that the "national nervous breakdown" just went on getting worse and worse.

How Did Homer Simpson Get His Name?

Back in that patch when my personal reading was still dominated by purveyors of action-adventure like Clive Cussler Nathanael West was one of the first Literary writers I read on my own time, without recommendation by an instructor or anyone else I knew personally. I ended up reading three of his books--the reimagining of Voltaire's Candide to a Depression-era America on the verge of going fascist, A Cool Million, Miss Lonelyhearts, and probably the most highly regarded of them, The Day of the Locust (the canonical stature of which is, of course, confirmed by its having the #73 spot on the Modern Library's list of the 100 Best Novels published in English during the twentieth century).

To be honest I enjoyed A Cool Million more than the others--precisely because of their touches of Modernist storytelling. Still, if Day of the Locust was often frustrating, it was intriguing enough that bits of it remain with me.

One of the sillier ways in which this was the case was the fact of a major character in the novel being named Homer Simpson, which has ever since had me (and apparently, a great many others) wondering if there was not some intriguing connection between the character and the Homer Simpson everybody knows.

Of course, try hard enough and you can probably find points of comparison in any two objects. Comparing the Homer of the book to the Homer of the show there was, for instance, his comical lapse into extreme verbal incoherence while under very severe stress. (As the narrator explains when the words are pouring out of Homer "A great deal of it was gibberish," and what wasn't gibberish "wasn't jumbled so much as it was timeless. The words . . . behind each other instead of after," while "several sentences were simultaneous and not a paragraph.") There was also the way Homer lost his temper in the scene that produces the riot that caps the tale.

Still, character, situation, story--they are all very, very different, and that was as far as I got. However, a few years ago The Simpsons creator Matt Groening gave an interview to Smithsonian Magazine in which he explained that in high school he had read the book and, while writing "a novel about a character named Bart Simpson," the choice of name had appealed to him as appropriate to his own story because "Simpson" had "simp," a shortening of "simpleton," in it, and his father's name was Homer.

As it happens Matt Groening's mother is Margaret Wiggum, while Matt also has two sisters who go by Lisa and Maggie.

I imagine that many accustomed to thinking of works of fiction as mosaics of abstruse allusions of the kind professors of literature make careers out of explaining (or at least, pretending to explain) expected something more profound, or at least more obscure, than that. Alas, whatever literary critics may imagine, or pretend to imagine, in real life artists' choices are often just that simple--as indeed they have to be, if artists are ever to get anything done. Not everything needs to be a "symbol"--or can be.

How Do Showbiz Hopefuls See Themselves and the World?

If Homer Simpson's name was the detail of Nathanael West's Day of the Locust most likely to spring to my mind, other aspects of the book have stayed with me in the decades since I read it--not least how it was probably the first proper "Los Angeles" novel I ever read, packed with all the standard elements, like the marketing of climate and health to people back east, the at times surreal oddities of its architecture, the endless driving that goes with living there, the way bizarre religious cults just seem to spring out of the soil and grab hold of the imaginations of the newcomers who never quite put down roots to replace they lost, and of course, the pervasiveness of so much of the place with things Hollywood and the obsession with things Hollywood.

In contrast with, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, which shows the film world from its uppermost heights (the standpoint of a figure such as the inspiration for the novel's protagonist, Irving Thalberg), Locust deals with the people who are only marginal in that world, or even just hoping to be part of it--the minor studio employees whose work does not see their faces on screen or in the press, the bit players and extras with big dreams that will almost certainly never come true.

The difference between the reality of what people hope for and what they actually get here (which can seem a variant on the then-hugely important literary theme of the American Dream and its betrayals) is a central theme of the book, and naturally West has something to say of what goes on in the mind of those chasing the dream, describing how would-be movie star Faye Greener explains her own ideas to an interested audience as a mix of "badly understood bits of advice from the trade papers," material from "fan magazines" and "legends that surround the activities of screen stars and executives," all as "[w]ithout any noticeable transition, possibilities became probabilities, and wound up as inevitabilities"--most importantly the possibility-become probability-become inevitability of "success."

The description has for me a depressing ring of truth about it, relevant not just to those in Hollywood but all those who play a longshot in the hopes of becoming a "somebody" instead of a "nobody," whether on Broadway, or Park Avenue, or online--their thoughts a farrago of the distorted and often dishonest material marketed to the public, and the readiness to transform a knowledge of the (remote) possibility of becoming a star with the far more pleasing belief that they are almost there--the more in as we live in a society where those who set the tone are as relentless as they are cynical in promoting this kind of "aspirational," "You can do it too!" thinking for the sake of deflecting the attention of the nobodies from a situation where the structure of society means that they are just life's "extras," and can expect to be treated as such until the day they die.

It Can't Happen Here and It Didn't Happen Here

While drafting a post about Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here I repeatedly got the title wrong, writing It Didn't Happen Here instead.

This is because there is another book by that very title, cowritten by star of the mid-century centrist intellectual ferment Seymour Martin Lipset (with Gary Wolfe Marks).

His book, the title of which played off of the title of Lewis' classic, addressed not the failure of European-style fascism to take root in America, but the failure of socialist movements to make much headway in the country. In doing so Lewis' choice of title can seem misleading, promising to address one topic but addressing another--but from the standpoint of the horseshoe theory-minded center, which pretends that the "extremists" of the right and left are essentially alike, the implicit equivalence is a natural thing to claim, all as, of course, the left and not the right is what really keeps the centrist awake at night, as they remind every intelligent observer of the political scene all the time.

Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, and Nathanael West's A Cool Million in 2024

In his biography of Sinclair Lewis Richard Lingeman argues that Lewis, like many of America's other literary greats of the early twentieth century, was a victim of the "cultural" Cold War, which in line with the Anti-Communism elevated to national religion status at the time denigrated any literature that admitted that there was such a thing as society and wrote about it with open eyes, while exalting literature that did the opposite in the process. (It seems entirely symbolic that the clinically insane, wrong-about-pretty-much-everything CIA functionary James Jesus Angleton was deeply into Modernism, and an admirer and friend of Ezra Pound.)

Lingeman also suggested that these many decades later, in a less overheated atmosphere, Lewis' reputation might enjoy something of a revival.

So far as I can tell no such thing has happened--in part because the atmosphere never became less overheated, the cultural Cold War's victory reflected not in that it ended with the completion of its ostensible job of defeating the Soviet Union and the movements with which it was associated, but in that it became so entrenched for so long that no one even noticed it anymore as it went on doing its job of fighting off dissents that neither began nor ended with the Russian Revolution and the state it created. The critical standards of the twentieth century remain the critical standards of the twenty-first century in a society that, as Philip Cunliffe put it in his remarkable counterfactual history Lenin Lives!, has been organized around the defeat of the left, the Cold War never ended on this level or any other--as we are endlessly reminded by those who scream "Marxist!" as an epithet, usually incorrectly for lack of actual Marxists to condemn or even remind them what Marxism actually looks like (Did they even remember that Marx guy? Or Lenin?), and the supposedly horseshoe theory-abiding center continues to punch relentlessly at an ultra-marginalized left that has always been and very much remains its real target while coddling an ever-more powerful right.

Indeed, if Lewis' book about a fascist takeover of America, It Can't Happen Here (1935), has got a bit of attention in recent years--the book, which seems to have become a bestseller for a while, and a stage play based on it--it does not seem to have revived interest in his broader body of work. Or for that matter, in the other writers who similarly essayed the theme of a fascist takeover of the country, as Nathanael West did a year earlier than Sinclair in his novel A Cool Million (1934). An adaptation of Voltaire's Candide to Depression-era America, with the creed of Horatio Alger aspirationalism standing in for old Pangloss' optimism, it is relevant that as hapless Lemuel Pitkin has his misadventures across a supposed Land of Opportunity, in the background a sleazy ex-president of the United States/criminal businessman is, in the name of all those received values, leading a fascist movement with the intent of making himself an American dictator. In contrast with Candide, where at the end of all the horrors they suffer the protagonist and his friends at least find a bit of peace by the shores of Marmara at tale's end, Pitkin's destruction is complete--and America's, for said ex-president has indeed realized his object of making himself America's Fuhrer.

Searching news stories of the past decade I came up with only a single mention of the book in a piece in Vulture way back in 2016. To the credit of its author Christopher Gilson and his editors the piece "gets it right," but it says a lot that no one else with a platform at all comparable gave it such attention at the time, or has given it such public mention in the many years since. This would seem an indication of West's star having sunk even lower than Lewis' over the years, in spite of his having had a bit of help from Hollywood (the 1975 cinematic adaptation of his other book, Day of the Locust, having at least a semi-classic status, while the name with which it furnished a young Matt Groening has of course been immortalized). However, much else may be at issue here as well--not least the greater harshness of the satire, evident in the way that if Lewis' book at least saw America in the end save itself from the dictatorship of Berzelius Windrip, there is no such redemption for the country in West's novel, closing as it does on the aforementioned unhappy note.

The Courtiers and the Peasants

Journalists, like the artists they so often resemble in many ways, and are often aspiring to be, are a highly impressionable bunch particularly susceptible to being in awe of those who have wealth and power. Thus when they, for example, refer to some Global Fortune 500 CEO as a "Sun King" or somesuch, they do so not with the irony of the wise at the pretensions of a figure all too apt to be revealed as a fool, fraud and criminal, or a democratic disgust at elite vaingloriousness, but the awe of courtiers contesting for the honor of holding the Sun King's chamber pot (if not rendering more intimate service still) in the belief that the King really is God's appointed on Earth, that their proximity to such glory makes them glorious--and the combination of cynical awareness that sucking up to such gets one ahead with the complete lack of dignity that permits them to go about the task wholeheartedly.

However, the general public does not necessarily share the artist's sentiments, or have much respect for those who do hold them--perhaps the more in as they have so often been led to believe that the journalist is a Tribune of the People, rather than a Courtier to the Kings making their lives miserable, and feel continually betrayed in the process.

Artists Aren't the Only Ones Who Are Impressionable

In discussing the propensity of artists for glorifying the powerful Upton Sinclair refers to--besides the hard realities of economic and political power that dictate the terms of worldly "success" for the artist--the mentality that makes so many artists glorify the powerful so very willingly, and in particular the impressionability that is part of the package. That impressionability, which necessarily includes a susceptibility to being impressed by position and the trappings of rank, the deference that power commands and the allure of luxury, leaves artists easily awed by those who have the benefit of all those things, and their work reflects the fact.

So, too, does this seem the case with journalists and with historians. While their work--properly done--differs profoundly from that of the poet or the novelist I suspect impressionability played its part in their choosing their particular line of work. One may add that like artists journalists incline to the telling of stories, with their desire to tell what they think is a good story often getting the better of what is supposed to distinguish them from the producer of fiction, namely that they are supposed to tell us What Really Happened. Indeed, all too often the journalist and the historian give the impression of being frustrated novelists as they go about their work--generally not to its betterment, as the cleaving of both journalists and historians to explaining the world in terms of the doings of Great Men, and their passing off the mediocrities and worse that hold power as such, reminds us constantly.

James Ponsoldt's The Circle and the Tyranny of Generic Classification

I missed James Ponsoldt's The Circle when it first came out back in 2017 but caught it on streaming some years later. As I had largely missed the film's publicity at the time of its release--and I must admit, also not read Dave Eggers' book--I saw the film with very few expectations. I will not go so far as to claim that it is a latterday classic, but when I saw just how poorly it was received (a 16 percent on Rotten Tomatoes!) I thought it deserved better than it got, indeed a lot better. It also seems to me that I am not alone in thinking so, as while the audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes is almost as bad as that of the critics (21 percent), the users of the Internet Movie Data Base give it a far from great but still better than absolutely horrible 5.4.

It also seems to me that there is something worth saying about the extreme negativity of the professional critics toward this film. Part of it, quite frankly, is that critics today as much as ever have a deep bias against socially critical material, and often hide this behind bad faith claims that a work which is socially critical is somehow really saying nothing at all. (We saw plenty of this with Todd Phillips' Joker, for example.) It was not that The Circle said nothing, or said something "outdated" in a "condescending" fashion, or as Peter Griffin had it, that it "insists upon itself," or anything else of the sort, but rather that it all too clearly said something relevant but which they did not want said that excited them to their displays of contempt, the more in as it was a Tom Hanks and Emma Watson-starring wide release opening in three thousand theaters rather than a small arthouse film (watching which the critics tend to be more indulgent when a movie has a Message, plausibly because so few will see it).

Indeed, it seems plausible that the critics are especially sensitive to any challenge to the Cult of Silicon Valley, with all it has meant for the legitimation of neoliberalism in our time, and which in so many cases these days is their employer with all that means, given the digitalization and corporatization of the media, and the way the "move fast and break things" crowd has bought up that media, and not hesitated to exercise the political power that comes with its ownership.

However, it also seems to me that the film version of The Circle was the more vulnerable to such attack because of the way in which it was categorized for marketing purposes, The Circle sold as a "thriller." Judged by the standard most people have in mind when people hear the word "thriller" (especially in this period in which thrillers are more and more associated with shock and with action rather than a Hitchcockian cultivation of tension) the movie is at best unconventional, and at worst rather limp. Had it been presented as the darkly satirical comedy-drama the film actually is I suspect some at least would have been less harsh in their judgment--but alas, such things are more difficult sells in the world the movie marketing folks Pauline Kael so rightly called out a near half century ago have made.

Awkwardness in Contemporary Life: A Few Notes

The idea that contemporary life is somehow notably awkward seems to have been popular these past few decades. (Adam Kotsko, in fact, devoted a whole book to it.)

There seems reason for that--and not just the postmodernist tendency to shy away from the large social questions and instead obsess over the "little things in life." We really do seem to be living in a society where the gap between the received rules, and our ability to follow them because of the actual terms on which we are compelled to live our lives, seems to be widening to a degree of which a critical mass of people is all too aware and about which they are sufficiently discomfited to call attention to the fact, all as there seems to be no progress whatsoever toward consensus about a newer set of rules that would make more sense in the new circumstances.

Consider, for instance, the conventional idea about how an "adult" is supposed to live in North American society. You are "all grown up" when you have progressed sufficiently in a career to enjoy a "stable" job that has enabled you to start and maintain a family at a middle class standard of comfort and security--expectations that, if they were more an aspiration for most then than a reality even at the height of the post-war boom, have become less and less plausible since. Yet the expectations remain, with the young often protesting, and their elders responding only with scorn, sure that rather than victims of the neoliberal societal model, and the way it has turned college into a quasi-financial bubble loading the game's losers with debt, a lousy job market for even the holders of so-called "useful" college degrees in times when the business community's courtiers sniff about "labor shortages," the exorbitantly priced housing inevitably following from an economy where housing is an "investment" rather than shelter and housing policy expected to enrich real estate speculators rather than provide human beings with places to live, etc., their elders insist that the young have no one to blame but themselves for their problems, dismissing what they say on their own behalf as the whining of "Betas," and not letting facts or logic get in the way of their gleefully punching down at them.

As the situation implies the lack of any new consensus reflects a sharpness of political division--a reactionary politics of backlash and cultural war, and a bitter "status politics" on both sides of the divide escalating higher and higher into ugly forms of bigotry, with a good deal of class snobbery in the mix (with those who fall short of upper middle class norms fair game for abuse)--all in a situation of increasingly frayed nerves amid growing societal dysfunction and declining prospects and the ever more brutal educational and career demands the complacent call "competitiveness," and of course, an unhinged cult of self-assertion in its meanest and stupidest forms that makes of culture heroes the asshole, the bitch, the bully. Thus is everyone, rather than attempting to display what urbanity and tolerance may be reconcilable with the demands of decency and dignity, instead sure that they have the right and even duty to impose their prejudices on the world at large, and ever on the lookout for offense as they accord themselves the right to police everyone else's behavior in a way that would be called "police harassment" if a police officer did it--and everyone, the more in as this is an age of ubiquitous, The Circle-like surveillance, being watched and judged and condemned for failure all the time according to multiple and completely inconsistent sets of rules, always seemingly doing "the wrong thing."

Some, much more than others, get the worst of it. Those who don't have power, those who find themselves outsiders in a particular grouping, those who perhaps even at a neurological level less easily fit in --the attention to neurodiversity these days seeming to me a reflection of, at least as much as anything else, the ever-rising penalty on imperfection in conformity that has been so bound up with the pathologization of behaviors that might once upon a time have been taken in stride. Still, few indeed wholly escape the awkwardness of the times, and the penalties exacted for it.

"Cringe" Comedy is All About Vicarious Gracelessness

One of the more wearisome terms of contemporary cultural commentary is "cringe," and especially its usage to denote a subgenre of comedy that centers on the audience's "cringe" reaction toward a character's embarrassing themselves in some manner--with Michael Scott in the American version of The Office, and the reactions he induces in viewers, notorious as exemplifying this.

Of course, laughing at others' embarrassment has probably been a staple of comedy for as long as comedy has been around. Yet while there have been a great constancies in such matters as comedy, there have also been changes--and it seems to me that there may be something significant in the attention given to "cringe."

It seems plausible, even probable, that the pervasiveness of cringe comedy is related to the cultural preoccupation with awkwardness, which seems to have taken off at about the same time that the notion of "cringe" as a distinct style of comedy did--and to be related to what has made awkwardness so significant in contemporary life, gracelessness. Watching Michael Scott make a fool of himself I suspect few laugh because they remember the times when they were acting like Michael Scott, but because they think of themselves as having never been quite like Scott, feeling superior to him and all the other Michael Scotts of the world, and meanly delighting in feeling absolutely graceless toward him as the show's writers positively wallow in Scott's making a muck of to the situation whenever he opens his mouth, the more in as he is completely oblivious to what he has done to others and himself.

Of Awkwardness and Gracelessness

It seems to me at least plausible that, as Adam Kotsko has suggested, a heightened awkwardness has become characteristic of contemporary life. However, it also seems to me that it would not matter so much were it not for what has also been characteristic of contemporary life--the absence of social graces. If we saw more of those we would probably suffer less from awkwardness, because awkwardness would not be so ruthlessly punished--while there would probably be less awkwardness simply because a critical mass of the population might have come to sufficient agreement about the rules of social interaction to make social life a bit more bearable than it is now.

What Are Social Graces?

I recently found it surprisingly difficult to find a convenient definition of "social graces" online to which to refer in this item. The search engine I used instead kept referring me simply to various definitions of "grace," often religious ones, and most of them quite far removed from what I was seeking.

Still, if convenient definitions were difficult to find online I do not think it would be seen as too disputable were I to say (in line with the best of those definitions I was able to find) that "social graces" are a matter of the skills requisite for dealing successfully with others in "polite society." However, what really distinguishes social graces from mere display of "politeness" or "etiquette" is that they are not a matter of simple correctness according to well-defined rules, but a matter of how one acts when the rules are not so clear, or when others do not adhere perfectly to those rules because social graces come down to that ability to smooth social interaction, make it bearable and even pleasing, in part by enabling others to feel at ease. This requires an alertness, a consideration, a creativity not reducible to such matters as the proper forms of greeting or which fork to use with which dish. Indeed, it requires tolerance for others' foibles--letting things go, and holding things back.

That a simple explanation of all this was elusive online seems to me highly symbolic of our situation today in regard to such graces. After all, just how much of such graces do you see, and expect to see? Ours, after all, is a culture which exalts self-assertion at its most idiotic, and those engaging in it most freely, thinking such a lack of consideration for others as proof of one's own strength, as such "strength" seems to be what people of low and conventional mind desire to possess above all else in an era in which the "apologists and admirers of injustice, misery and brutality" supply the conventional wisdom, and make of the bully and the troll, the braggart and the swaggerer, and all the others of their disgusting ilk, not the despised social outcasts they deserve to be, but the culture heroes of the day.1

Thus does the public watch "reality" shows in which vulgarian mediocrities who got every conceivable break yet attribute their billions solely to their own utterly unevidentiated "genius" pour contumely on aspirants to "success" before the eyes of the whole world, as all concerned think the revolting demeanor of "the panelists" is yet further proof of their "genius." Thus do they think the "freedom of speech" is no more and no less than the right of the powerful to punch down at the helpless without anyone punching back at them (the "unbound but protected" victimizing those in the other category). Thus do they salivate at any excuse to "cancel" somebody, indeed claim that their acting on their bigoted vindictiveness is some social duty. And so on and so forth, ad infinitum and ad nauseam.

At the same time those others who do not behave in these ways, and indeed find them objectionable, are surrounded by so much of this behavior that they are apt to have precious little consideration or tolerance to spare for anything but coping with it. They would be gracious if they could--but the mental and emotional resources that would enable them to let things go and hold things back have in all too many cases been used up, even overtaxed, in the course of their just getting through the day.

In a culture like that the existence of social graces is apt to seem like the existence of the Loch Ness monster. We have a fuzzy photo from 1934 that we are told captured it on film. Some people say they have seen it with their own eyes. A percentage of those surveyed think it exists on the basis of such "evidence." However, in the end its existence is far from well-confirmed, and reason abounds for skepticism about whether there ever was anything to be photographed or seen in the first place.

1. The quote's from William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, to whose credit the remark was not intended to be complimentary.

Upton Sinclair on America's Private Schools

Today the pseudo-libertarian prejudice that is the basis of the country's conventional wisdom holds the private to be superior to the public in efficiency, to the point of always holding out the promise of superior service at lower cost, even as the investors on whose behalf the enterprise is ultimately run make a bundle. That prejudice extends to the public's view of the schools, with private schooling assumed to be superior to public--the more in as private schooling is so much associated with an overglamorized elite, and the conventionally-minded prone to attribute the careers that their alumni enjoy after graduation have not to the class privilege of which those graduates are the beneficiaries (as with the doors open to them because of the families they were born into), but "education" in the narrower sense of what their time there was supposed to have done for their minds.

Interestingly in the volume of his Dead Hand books devoted to what we would today call the K-12 levels of the country's education system Upton Sinclair showed himself to be under no illusions of that sort. If the country's public schools were highly variable in quality, and the overall standard depressingly low, it was the case that the private schools were likewise highly variable in quality, with even elite schools far from what they ought to have been, and for reasons equally reflective of the society that produced them. The schools' purpose, after all, was to take off the hands of rich parents the burden of raising their own children, and train them not for later study or a life of work but membership in the privileged stratum that is often a training in inanity and irrelevancy (Sinclair citing, among much else, his own wife's Fifth Avenue finishing school), while along with poverty and deprivation wealth and privilege pose their own obstacles to learning--for no one has less reason to worry about preparing for a future than those whose futures are already set, or has more access to alternative activities that would be more fun than hitting the books, or more likely to see the teacher as a servant and social inferior with all the respect a spoiled brat is likely to accord such.

Indeed, in the course of his book Sinclair cites a survey of those who had distinguished themselves in a Harvard class in various ways, which showed that while the privately educated students dominated athletics and extracurriculars, they did not claim a disproportionate share of the academic honors, the public school graduates (admittedly, apt to have had the best educations that the country's very unequal public schools could offer) holding their own perfectly well here.

I do not know that a similar survey would produce a similar result today--but even if it would not I also know no reason to think the situation in the country as a whole is terribly different from what Sinclair reported, even as a large part of the public believes otherwise, and the media we have ceaselessly encourages them in what is almost certainly a delusion.

Film Criticism Has Become Film Claquing--Take it From Armond White

Back in that burst of interest in Pauline Kael's life and legacy circa 2011 Armond White published a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) considering the same subject. Just like Frank Rich's piece (which Mr. White references, not altogether favorably) it contrasted the kind of criticism she produced, and the critical world of which she was a part, with the world that has existed since.

As he observes, more recent "publications like . . .Movieline, and Entertainment Weekly," whose coverage of Hollywood he describes as "hand-in-glove with Hollywood in terms of what is and is not worth praise and attention," produced "a gushy, starstruck culture where hype and reviewing are inseparable" (emphasis added); where, as he quotes Kael saying, the "tendency," all too convenient for Hollywood Suits who "want [reviewing] to be an extension of their advertising departments" pushing their product on "moviegoers" ideally "uninformed and without memory, so they can be happy consumers," has become "to write appreciatively at the highest possible pitch, as if" the sole values were "peaks," and anything a reviewer "like[d] becomes a new peak." In the process audiences came to take for granted such things as "front-page raves for summer blockbusters," to the extent that the writers are actually talking about the content of movies at all (as against box office grosses and awards show prospects). Indeed, it has all gone so far that everyone seems to be not just surprised of but suspicious of and even intolerant of whatever is at odds with the "consensus" all too easily readable in the figures churned out by the review aggregators (which show an upward trend in the average score for films, and where single film franchises like Top Gun can sometimes show the shocking change in standards over the decades). Indeed, it is the case that such dismiss those who depart from the consensus with such terms as "gadfly," "curmudgeon," "contrarian," that treat the more independent-minded critic as simply being disagreeable rather than having anything interesting to say.

All too true, I think, though I do take issue with the author of that piece on at least two points. The first is his view that "[a]udiences these days seem to want to be validated in their own opinions, and take personal offense to critics who do not oblige," implying that audiences were more broad-minded in the past and have fallen away from that, a thing he asserts but does not actually support--and which seems to me the more problematic because it is all too easy for someone writing in the pages of a publication like the CJR to punch down at the "ordinary" moviegoer that way.

The second is Mr. White's claim that the "groveling" we see in the coverage of film "does not occur in coverage of music, the fine arts, or architecture," though I suspect it is just as bad in at least the first two of those areas. We would not be arguing about the influence of poptimism in music and the degeneration of music criticism into "lifestyle reporting" were it otherwise in music. Nor would the art world produce such obscenities as Salvatore Garau's "immaterial sculpture"--the sale of which literal nothing is a slap in the face of every artist, or even would-be artist, who ever did one second's worth of work to create a piece of art, and completely inconceivable were "fine art criticism" not so obscenely degenerate. Indeed, considering all that it seems possible that the situation may be even worse in music and the fine arts than it is in film--while in not saying the same of architecture I refrain only because I do not know the journalism of that field well enough to feel comfortable venturing a proper opinion.