One of the more interesting bits of Sonya Sarayia's ten year retrospective on David Fincher's The Social Network was her recollection of her own early experience of the Facebook social media site, which was as an increasingly "toxic . . . platform of envy . . . that turned all of [her] anger and frustration inward, corroding my self-esteem and sending me into a sustained depression" as upon graduation she was subjected to the ceaseless boasting of acquaintances about how wonderfully they were doing. She also mentions that when she first heard that there would be a movie about Facebook she thought it would be about the experience of using the web site, as with "that peculiar sense of isolation in the midst of purported connectedness" or "the minor agonies of wanting people to like you on the internet."
In short, a movie that would actually look at the human experience of real people.
Of course what she and everyone else got instead was "Mark Zuckerberg, Tech God Totally Unlike You Lowly Proletarian Trash, but Maybe Not a Perfect Person."
As for a movie that would deal seriously and intelligently with what social media has meant for humans the way Ms. Soraiya had in mind . . . I think we're still waiting on that one. And barring some extraordinary change in how Hollywood works, we'll go on waiting a long time, probably so long that by then social media as we know it will have ceased to exist and made any such effort a piece of historiography about the past, rather than a movie about the here and now.
Monday, November 4, 2024
"The Mix of Elitism and Banality" and the Chattering Classes
Some years ago The New Republic, offering its list of "DC's most over-rated thinkers," named Fareed Zakaria for his "mix of elitism and banality."
Still, if as Zakaria proved again and again in the Newsweek columns through which I first came into contact with what he passes off as "thought" that he ca n be described that way he is far from alone in being so. At most he epitomizes what is in fact the norm among the "experts" that the centrist media platforms, with this not a bug but a feature--centrist ideology, after all, being above all concerned with safely bounding political discussion with any concern for the links between one issues and another, any interest in root causes, any desire to actually solve a problem, out of bounds, all as it expects everyone to defer to the Establishment by way of deference to its "savants, lawyers, doctors . . . their so-called men of talent," for whom and whom alone recognition as "expert" is reserved, tell the public to think (rather than helping it make educated judgments). The result is that much as we hear about "both sidesism," this is the exception as what we usually get is "one sidesism" with at best slight variations (on the really big questions the media speaks with one voice, very loudly), as what may be a very large part of the spectrum of opinion on a subject is shut out of the discourse altogether, making for a discussion as emotionally unengaging as it is intellectually stultifying, and leaving the elitists in which the centrist has such great faith inevitably presiding over exchanges of banalities, with their pretense of doing anything else actually making what they are doing more obvious, rather than less.
Anyone who would say anything interesting, relevant, true, can thus expect to not be invited to the news show, not appear on the panel, not get the column, with only very rare exception.
Still, if as Zakaria proved again and again in the Newsweek columns through which I first came into contact with what he passes off as "thought" that he ca n be described that way he is far from alone in being so. At most he epitomizes what is in fact the norm among the "experts" that the centrist media platforms, with this not a bug but a feature--centrist ideology, after all, being above all concerned with safely bounding political discussion with any concern for the links between one issues and another, any interest in root causes, any desire to actually solve a problem, out of bounds, all as it expects everyone to defer to the Establishment by way of deference to its "savants, lawyers, doctors . . . their so-called men of talent," for whom and whom alone recognition as "expert" is reserved, tell the public to think (rather than helping it make educated judgments). The result is that much as we hear about "both sidesism," this is the exception as what we usually get is "one sidesism" with at best slight variations (on the really big questions the media speaks with one voice, very loudly), as what may be a very large part of the spectrum of opinion on a subject is shut out of the discourse altogether, making for a discussion as emotionally unengaging as it is intellectually stultifying, and leaving the elitists in which the centrist has such great faith inevitably presiding over exchanges of banalities, with their pretense of doing anything else actually making what they are doing more obvious, rather than less.
Anyone who would say anything interesting, relevant, true, can thus expect to not be invited to the news show, not appear on the panel, not get the column, with only very rare exception.
"The Cinema of Pseudomaturity": Summing Up '90s Indie Film
In the wake of the '90s-era fuss over independent film David Walsh raised the question of what exactly the term "independent" is supposed to signify in a filmmaker--and concluded on the basis of the movies they actually made that an independent filmmaker is no more than a "commercial filmmaker whose films have not yet made anyone a great deal of money--a hack commercial filmmaker in training."
It seemed to me then and still seems to me now that there is a good deal of insight in that understanding of the phenomenon, but it did not include what seemed to me a distinctive something that seemed to me characteristic of the films of figures like Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino. I have raised it from time to time over the years, discussing various of its characteristics--the pretentiousness, the edgelordism and the rest, and saw in it a certain sort of youthful attitude, namely that of the college graduate who spends his nights drinking Yoo-hoo as he plays video games in his mother's basement pretending he instead spends them downing shots of whiskey as he plays poker with his equally cool friends in his smoke-filled bachelor pad.
So do they remain now, even with the gray hair and the wrinkles still giving us just the "Cinema of Pseudomaturity."
It seemed to me then and still seems to me now that there is a good deal of insight in that understanding of the phenomenon, but it did not include what seemed to me a distinctive something that seemed to me characteristic of the films of figures like Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino. I have raised it from time to time over the years, discussing various of its characteristics--the pretentiousness, the edgelordism and the rest, and saw in it a certain sort of youthful attitude, namely that of the college graduate who spends his nights drinking Yoo-hoo as he plays video games in his mother's basement pretending he instead spends them downing shots of whiskey as he plays poker with his equally cool friends in his smoke-filled bachelor pad.
So do they remain now, even with the gray hair and the wrinkles still giving us just the "Cinema of Pseudomaturity."
The Supply Side-Mentality and the STEM Cult
"STEM!"
"STEM!"
"STEM!"
"STEM!"
The chant is loud, and strident, and unceasing.
It seems plausible that the chant is so loud and so strident and so unceasing precisely because the thinking behind it is so vacuous in so many, many ways--not least the fact that, in spite of the deference of their courtiers to the endless whining of employers who think labor can never be abundant enough or cheap enough, there really is no hard evidence of some desperate shortage of the engineers who are the real object of the concern (certainly to go by the actual underemployment of recent graduates in engineering and related fields), the more in as more and more young people are going into those fields all the time.
The tendency to overlook that reality reflects something all too rarely spelled out about the chant, which is its essentially supply-side nature. The thinking seems to be that the country gets more people to study STEM--and then somehow its manufacturing base is supposed to flourish, just like that. Where the long-term investment in the relevant sectors and plant to put the STEM-trained to work is supposed to come from does not arise--in spite of the fact that, as examination of the statistics shows, for a half century now American investors have, in spite of the union-breaking and tax cuts and deregulation that Reagan promised would mean an American manufacturing renaissance, and the consistent hewing of his successors to such policies, been little interested in manufacturing, preferring speculation in real estate and financial instruments and so on (with the country's deindustrialization, of course, confirming this in detail). The idea that having some more engineering majors looking for jobs is supposed to all by itself make investors' money flood into manufacturing is a piety of the market fundamentalism still prevailing--and as piety so often is, a diversion from actualities that elites regard as best unconsidered by the general public.
"STEM!"
"STEM!"
"STEM!"
The chant is loud, and strident, and unceasing.
It seems plausible that the chant is so loud and so strident and so unceasing precisely because the thinking behind it is so vacuous in so many, many ways--not least the fact that, in spite of the deference of their courtiers to the endless whining of employers who think labor can never be abundant enough or cheap enough, there really is no hard evidence of some desperate shortage of the engineers who are the real object of the concern (certainly to go by the actual underemployment of recent graduates in engineering and related fields), the more in as more and more young people are going into those fields all the time.
What's Thomas Frank Been Up to Lately?
Since 2000 Thomas Frank has had a major book out every presidential election year--One Market Under God (his study of '90s-era market populism), What's the Matter With Kansas? (probably still his most famous work, about the use of the culture wars to sell an elite economic agenda), The Wrecking Crew (a study of "government by people who hate government" from the Reagan era forward), Pity the Billionaire (about how, even though the 2007 financial crisis and Great Recession looked like the end of the line for the neoliberals, they rallied to triumph yet again), Listen, Liberal (which had for its subject how American "liberalism" and the Democratic Party supposed to be its standard-bearers went astray), and finally The People, No (a history of "anti-populism" in America).
It being 2024 one would have expected to see his latest months ago--and perhaps done so the more eagerly in as his last (The People, No) was more a work of fairly distant history than contemporary affairs, more background to analyzing the present than analysis of the present than his other works, and in that, at least in his interview with Seymour Hersh, he did indicate that he was working on a new book. Alas, he has had nothing out so far as I can tell, any details on when or even if something will be out are elusive--and, once again, Frank's general media profile is a lot lower than it used to be, all of which seems to me to bear out the impression that the scope the mainstream is willing to afford his analyses has only gone on shrinking through this century.
It being 2024 one would have expected to see his latest months ago--and perhaps done so the more eagerly in as his last (The People, No) was more a work of fairly distant history than contemporary affairs, more background to analyzing the present than analysis of the present than his other works, and in that, at least in his interview with Seymour Hersh, he did indicate that he was working on a new book. Alas, he has had nothing out so far as I can tell, any details on when or even if something will be out are elusive--and, once again, Frank's general media profile is a lot lower than it used to be, all of which seems to me to bear out the impression that the scope the mainstream is willing to afford his analyses has only gone on shrinking through this century.
Why Does Cedar Leiter Have a Mid-Atlantic Accent?
In his James Bond continuation novel For Special Services John Gardner described Cedar Leiter as having a "Mid-Atlantic accent." Characterizing this accent as "without a hint of what the British think of as an American accent," not having had "what the British think of as an American accent" clarified for me I initially thought he meant that Britons did not think of the accent of the Mid-Atlantic states as American-sounding. However, I later realized that he referred not to the regional accent of the middle of the Eastern seaboard but rather the mix of Northeastern U.S. and British Received Pronunciation that America's elites fostered in their prep schools and the media and tried, unsuccessfully, to turn into a U.S. equivalent of Britain's RP.
Looking back it seems an odd detail given Cedar's background. She was, after all, the daughter of Texan Felix Leiter--while if she had been to an upper-class private school (as seemed probable) a woman as young as herself in 1982 was of a generation unlikely to get that training. Perhaps Gardner was simply behind the times on this point--or, in a novel in which Gardner, in contrast with his inclination in the preceding Licence Renewed to make James Bond's new adventures seem as '80s as possible, had decided on giving us a "throwback" in this detail as in so many others in this book in which (even while he could not resist parodying and subverting the Bond formula and image) he was drenching the reader in the '50s-era series' past, and quite prone to metafictional evocations of the cinema of yesteryear.
Looking back it seems an odd detail given Cedar's background. She was, after all, the daughter of Texan Felix Leiter--while if she had been to an upper-class private school (as seemed probable) a woman as young as herself in 1982 was of a generation unlikely to get that training. Perhaps Gardner was simply behind the times on this point--or, in a novel in which Gardner, in contrast with his inclination in the preceding Licence Renewed to make James Bond's new adventures seem as '80s as possible, had decided on giving us a "throwback" in this detail as in so many others in this book in which (even while he could not resist parodying and subverting the Bond formula and image) he was drenching the reader in the '50s-era series' past, and quite prone to metafictional evocations of the cinema of yesteryear.
The Failed Attempt to Give America its Own "Received Pronunciation"
The reader may have heard of something called "the mid-Atlantic accent." First coming across the term (it may have been when I was reading John Gardner's For Special Services; Gardner describes Felix Leiter's daughter Cedar as having a "mid-Atlantic accent") my thought was of the "mid-Atlantic states" on America's eastern seaboard, and took it for a regional accent belonging to the people of Maryland and its close neighbors, perhaps.
However, in this case the term "mid-Atlantic" referred to not the middle of the Atlantic seaboard but the middle of the Atlantic ocean--halfway between America and Britain--in a figurative sense, the accent being a compound of both the accent of the Northeastern United States and the English Received Pronunciation that, by the late nineteenth century, had emerged as the accent of Britain's elite. Some of the relevant history seems obscure, but it appears that there was deliberate copying of Britain's "RP," with, just as in Britain, much of this going on in the private schools of the country's elite, and in the emergent mass media--on the radio, in movies.
In the United States, however, the effort to develop a distinct elite accent was a comparative bust in the long run, taken almost for an individual eccentricity in the case of a George Plimpton rather than a badge of Authority, and today an anachronism. ("Why does Audrey Hepburn talk like that?" one might wonder watching one of her movies. "Is that Cary Grant guy English or American or what?" Watching Charade they can wonder these things about both of the movie's leads.)
Did this failure do anything to make America a more egalitarian place than it would have been otherwise? Diminish its social divides? It seems to me that the situation is so bad that way that one would have a hard time proving that--but for all that I suspect that it is probably for the best that the United States does not have this added bit of cultural baggage to cope with as well.
However, in this case the term "mid-Atlantic" referred to not the middle of the Atlantic seaboard but the middle of the Atlantic ocean--halfway between America and Britain--in a figurative sense, the accent being a compound of both the accent of the Northeastern United States and the English Received Pronunciation that, by the late nineteenth century, had emerged as the accent of Britain's elite. Some of the relevant history seems obscure, but it appears that there was deliberate copying of Britain's "RP," with, just as in Britain, much of this going on in the private schools of the country's elite, and in the emergent mass media--on the radio, in movies.
In the United States, however, the effort to develop a distinct elite accent was a comparative bust in the long run, taken almost for an individual eccentricity in the case of a George Plimpton rather than a badge of Authority, and today an anachronism. ("Why does Audrey Hepburn talk like that?" one might wonder watching one of her movies. "Is that Cary Grant guy English or American or what?" Watching Charade they can wonder these things about both of the movie's leads.)
Did this failure do anything to make America a more egalitarian place than it would have been otherwise? Diminish its social divides? It seems to me that the situation is so bad that way that one would have a hard time proving that--but for all that I suspect that it is probably for the best that the United States does not have this added bit of cultural baggage to cope with as well.
William Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Balzac's Human Comedy: Some Thoughts
As I remarked when discussing William Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon a while back it was the comparison of William Makepeace Thackeray with Balzac that made me think Thackeray worthwhile. While I did indeed find it worthwhile, Barry Lyndon made quite a different impression on me than Balzac--Grimmelshausen the writer I constantly found myself in mind of as I read that book.
Reading Vanity Fair one might think of Balzac because of that novel's greater proximity to Balzac's post-Revolutionary France in that period, and the role played by financial operations and inheritance in the plot. In fairness the book does, as is the case with Balzac, depict a society where all that was solid was melting into air in the cash nexus, but very differently. The copy on the back of my volume describes the story's pace as "leisurely"--and the book is indeed too much so to feel properly Balzacian, Thackeray never quite conveying that desperate intensity of his characters in the pursuit of their objects that Balzac so often did, exemplified by how as the story approaches its finish he does not check in on one of his two principals, Becky Sharp, for over a hundred pages (!). Rather than a mad chase their path through the story feels like a lackadaisical stroll, all within a story that, compared with Balzac, or even Thackeray's earlier Barry Lyndon, is far more domestic (even the portion about the Battle of Waterloo giving us more about the wives and other hangers-on back in Brussels than the events on the battlefield!) and genteel (Thackeray himself remarking his "wish . . . deferentially to submit to the fashion at present prevailing, and only to hint at the existence of wickedness in a light, easy, and agreeable manner, so that nobody's fine feelings may be offended").
At the same time Thackeray never seems quite so invested in the goings-on as the often cold-eyed Balzac could be in the stories of characters for which he often seemed to feel more, and I think, made the reader feel more than Thackeray does.
Reading Vanity Fair one might think of Balzac because of that novel's greater proximity to Balzac's post-Revolutionary France in that period, and the role played by financial operations and inheritance in the plot. In fairness the book does, as is the case with Balzac, depict a society where all that was solid was melting into air in the cash nexus, but very differently. The copy on the back of my volume describes the story's pace as "leisurely"--and the book is indeed too much so to feel properly Balzacian, Thackeray never quite conveying that desperate intensity of his characters in the pursuit of their objects that Balzac so often did, exemplified by how as the story approaches its finish he does not check in on one of his two principals, Becky Sharp, for over a hundred pages (!). Rather than a mad chase their path through the story feels like a lackadaisical stroll, all within a story that, compared with Balzac, or even Thackeray's earlier Barry Lyndon, is far more domestic (even the portion about the Battle of Waterloo giving us more about the wives and other hangers-on back in Brussels than the events on the battlefield!) and genteel (Thackeray himself remarking his "wish . . . deferentially to submit to the fashion at present prevailing, and only to hint at the existence of wickedness in a light, easy, and agreeable manner, so that nobody's fine feelings may be offended").
At the same time Thackeray never seems quite so invested in the goings-on as the often cold-eyed Balzac could be in the stories of characters for which he often seemed to feel more, and I think, made the reader feel more than Thackeray does.
Of the "Apologists and Admirers of Injustice, Misery, and Brutality"
In the course of his novel Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray referred to the "apologists and admirers of injustice, misery, and brutality." Thackeray specifically had in mind those who approve injustice, misery, and brutality in the rearing of children, thinking that bullying plays a salutary part in all this for bully and bullied alike, but while this attitude is particularly disgusting here one finds it just about everywhere in society--with the "apologists and admirers" no rarer these days than in his own.
Considering the apology and admiration it seems worth saying that such persons are more prone to apologize for and admire injustice, misery and brutality when they are suffered by others and not themselves--especially when those suffering them are what would be "unworthy victims" in their book.
This is all the more the case as, when they are on the receiving end of injustice, misery and brutality they howl for justice, relief, gentleness louder than anyone else--in a manner redolent of the self-pity of which their kind so love to accuse everyone else when they dare protest the kind of treatment they dole out to them.
Considering the apology and admiration it seems worth saying that such persons are more prone to apologize for and admire injustice, misery and brutality when they are suffered by others and not themselves--especially when those suffering them are what would be "unworthy victims" in their book.
This is all the more the case as, when they are on the receiving end of injustice, misery and brutality they howl for justice, relief, gentleness louder than anyone else--in a manner redolent of the self-pity of which their kind so love to accuse everyone else when they dare protest the kind of treatment they dole out to them.
Of "Chickenshit"
The term "chickenshit" is by no means new but would seem to have seen its usage surge again and again to new heights over the years.
Famously associated with the period of the Second World War, it seems that, according to Google's Ngram viewer, usage of the term surged tenfold between 1939 and 1945. According to historian Paul Fussell's 1990 book Wartime the term denoted "behavior that makes military life worse than it need be," not least "petty harassment of the weak by the strong . . . sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline . . . insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances."
The person of what may be called "conventional" mind--respectful of power and disrespectful of those who have none, unquestioning of received wisdom and contemptuous of those who do question it, ever ready to suck up and punch down and thus do their part in facilitating bullies--tends to dismiss charges that such a thing exists, but that is not because this particular evil is absent, but because they are of conventional mind, while I would hasten to add this is hardly unique to military institutions. Quite the contrary, it would seem to pervade any hierarchical institution where scope exists for the exercise of petty power and authority--while I suspect that in just about every one of them such practice, contrary to what its defenders may feebly attempt to argue, gets in the way of that institution's ability to perform its essential task. If those who have authority and power and responsibility have time for "petty harassment," "sadism," "insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances" they are not attending to whatever useful functions they may have had--while those on the receiving end, subjected to the harassment, sadism and the rest, start seeing everything to which they are subjected as that, and give it exactly the consideration that such things deserve, which becomes a problem when a matter actually is not chickenshit. But of course those mentally of a kind so as to defend this behavior--those whom William Thackeray memorably termed the "apologists and admirers of injustice, misery and brutality"--will never admit to that and it may not be much good arguing with them to any such end, for after all, YOU CAN'T WIN AN ARGUMENT WITH AN IDIOT.
Famously associated with the period of the Second World War, it seems that, according to Google's Ngram viewer, usage of the term surged tenfold between 1939 and 1945. According to historian Paul Fussell's 1990 book Wartime the term denoted "behavior that makes military life worse than it need be," not least "petty harassment of the weak by the strong . . . sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline . . . insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances."
The person of what may be called "conventional" mind--respectful of power and disrespectful of those who have none, unquestioning of received wisdom and contemptuous of those who do question it, ever ready to suck up and punch down and thus do their part in facilitating bullies--tends to dismiss charges that such a thing exists, but that is not because this particular evil is absent, but because they are of conventional mind, while I would hasten to add this is hardly unique to military institutions. Quite the contrary, it would seem to pervade any hierarchical institution where scope exists for the exercise of petty power and authority--while I suspect that in just about every one of them such practice, contrary to what its defenders may feebly attempt to argue, gets in the way of that institution's ability to perform its essential task. If those who have authority and power and responsibility have time for "petty harassment," "sadism," "insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances" they are not attending to whatever useful functions they may have had--while those on the receiving end, subjected to the harassment, sadism and the rest, start seeing everything to which they are subjected as that, and give it exactly the consideration that such things deserve, which becomes a problem when a matter actually is not chickenshit. But of course those mentally of a kind so as to defend this behavior--those whom William Thackeray memorably termed the "apologists and admirers of injustice, misery and brutality"--will never admit to that and it may not be much good arguing with them to any such end, for after all, YOU CAN'T WIN AN ARGUMENT WITH AN IDIOT.
Thackeray and Balzac: A Few More Thoughts
Recently considering the comparison of Thackeray with Balzac I found it overdrawn on the basis of the novels by Thackeray I had read, particularly his most famous, Vanity Fair. I previously remarked how domestic and genteel the work was by comparison with Balzac's, but I don't think this exhausts the matter, with one aspect of this how things ended up with Becky. In his "delicate" telling (how far are we from a work like Cousin Bette, or The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans!) Becky neither attains the success of a Eugene de Rastignac, nor suffers the catastrophe of a Lucien de Rubempre, but just ends up somewhere in the middle at the end of a rather meandering narrative, with much relegated to a postscript. It is all rather lacking in intensity rather at odds with Emily Brontë's comparison of Thackeray with an Old Testament prophet, and it may well be that this is a matter of a faintness of social vision that tells us that, yes, the actors do behave selfishly and at times disgracefully, but in such a way that rather than it all seeming to be a matter of people responding to the crushing force of circumstances it can seem like the kind of thing a certain kind of mediocre mind delights in calling "human nature," and certainly gives no sense of being bound up with a society's being in a state of great transformation (in Karl Polanyi's view, the great transformation). It may be relevant here that Thackeray has not Balzac's interest in all strata of society (when Thackeray writes of people without money in Chapter 36 it is those who manage to live luxuriously on nothing at all, for a time anyway, that he concerns himself with, rather than the great majority who have nothing and truly suffer deprivation as a result), and that he also has not that author's interest in the "machinery of civilization" as Henry James called it (what would Balzac have done with the financial affairs which brought down John Sedley?), and what may be cause or reflection of all this, Thackeray's tendency toward an attitude of self-satisfied irony toward all he surveys (down to the very last page).
For all that I do not feel as if I wasted my time in reading Vanity Fair. But I do think that given what I personally look for in my fiction these days the book was definitely oversold.
For all that I do not feel as if I wasted my time in reading Vanity Fair. But I do think that given what I personally look for in my fiction these days the book was definitely oversold.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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