With the idiots of the media abuzz with talk of chatbots for over a year now (we can seem to be going from "The Singularity is Near!" to "The Singularity is Here!"), some have bothered to look into the history of the technology in however clumsy a way, and in the process reminded those who had forgotten (and informed those who never knew) of the fact that the first chatbot, created way back in 1964, was named ELIZA--after the then-recent hit stage and film musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, My Fair Lady.
At one point in the play Eliza, amid the rigors of her training in elocution, has a daydream in which, Eliza a celebrated figure in society, the King of England proclaims an "Eliza Doolittle Day," in which "All the people will celebrate the glory of you . . ."
So it has gone this past year--every day seeing the "glory" of what the still-skeptical see as a mere autocomplete talked up by Silicon Valley types longer on hucksterism than their highly touted "INNOVATION!" in their turn talked up by their (to use a politer word than they deserve) courtiers in the press, inflating a new technological bubble here, because that is pretty much all that anyone does these days, after which it may all well pass into obscurity.
Monday, November 4, 2024
What Do We Mean by "Freedom of Speech?" And the Defense of the Right to That Freedom?
The remark "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" is famously attributed to the eighteenth century French philosophe Voltaire.
For the purposes of this discussion whether or not the attribution has been established as historically accurate is completely irrelevant, what matters instead the reason why so many cite the words in the first place--their summing up what it truly means to stand for free speech, a readiness not only to uncompromisingly defend that speech of which one approves, but also that which they disapprove, for the sake of sheer principle.
Not many live up to this standard, least of all those who most loudly claim to do so these days. As Aurelien Mondon has written (in discussion of the situation in France, though it seems to me we see the same trend everywhere else), "it has become commonly accepted in public discourse that free speech simply means the right of the powerful to offend without any consequences or any potential criticism."
Such a standard of freedom of speech is a perversion of the concept. This is not only because it completely rejects the spirit of defending speech on principle rather than because one approves the particular statement, but also because the fight for freedom of speech has, above all, been to defend the right of those out of power to speak--while this conception of "free speech" pointedly sacrifices their right to giving the powerful yet more latitude that they already have; to, as a practical matter, enabling them to "punch down" with even more complete immunity than they already possessed. Indeed, considering it I am reminded of Winston Churchill's remark that "[s]ome people’s idea of free speech is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage."
Anyone who sincerely cares about freedom of speech should be disgusted that such a conception of this freedom has prevailed. However, you are unlikely to hear much from those who think that way. After all, the mainstream media we have is firmly on the side of the powerful, and of their punching down--and inclines to the view that people who actually have principles are insane "ideologues" who may well be allowed to exercise their "freedom of speech," but never where an appreciable audience might be likely to hear them, not if they have anything to say about the matter.
For the purposes of this discussion whether or not the attribution has been established as historically accurate is completely irrelevant, what matters instead the reason why so many cite the words in the first place--their summing up what it truly means to stand for free speech, a readiness not only to uncompromisingly defend that speech of which one approves, but also that which they disapprove, for the sake of sheer principle.
Not many live up to this standard, least of all those who most loudly claim to do so these days. As Aurelien Mondon has written (in discussion of the situation in France, though it seems to me we see the same trend everywhere else), "it has become commonly accepted in public discourse that free speech simply means the right of the powerful to offend without any consequences or any potential criticism."
Such a standard of freedom of speech is a perversion of the concept. This is not only because it completely rejects the spirit of defending speech on principle rather than because one approves the particular statement, but also because the fight for freedom of speech has, above all, been to defend the right of those out of power to speak--while this conception of "free speech" pointedly sacrifices their right to giving the powerful yet more latitude that they already have; to, as a practical matter, enabling them to "punch down" with even more complete immunity than they already possessed. Indeed, considering it I am reminded of Winston Churchill's remark that "[s]ome people’s idea of free speech is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage."
Anyone who sincerely cares about freedom of speech should be disgusted that such a conception of this freedom has prevailed. However, you are unlikely to hear much from those who think that way. After all, the mainstream media we have is firmly on the side of the powerful, and of their punching down--and inclines to the view that people who actually have principles are insane "ideologues" who may well be allowed to exercise their "freedom of speech," but never where an appreciable audience might be likely to hear them, not if they have anything to say about the matter.
Of Class and Accent in Britain and America: A Few Thoughts
In The English Tribe Stephen Haseler, considering Englishness and Britishness as the twentieth century drew toward its end, with "Europe" looking very much like Britain's future (how remote all that seems now!), he considered among much else the development of a distinct upper-class English accent in the country's public schools by late Victorian times, reinforced by social and other pressures at Oxbridge, the Bar, the Church and the Court (in short, the gamut of what AJP Taylor called "The Thing!"), "which would serve as the authoritative voice of Englishness, and . . . mark out rulers from ruled" not just at home but internationally (as the language of a not merely national but imperial ruling class) which has since come to be called "Received Pronunciation." In turn, the then-emergent means of mass communication reinforced in a manner Haseler did not hesitate to call Orwellian and totalitarian--indeed, "the most 'totalitarian' piece of cultural engineering" the country saw in the entire twentieth century.
I am inclined to agree, and struck by how after the passing of all that the accent was supposed to represent and serve--empire and hegemony and the Victorian social order, the plausibility of a view of Britain at the center of and dominant force in world affairs--and what many regard as the sheer obnoxiousness of the accent (Haseler himself uses words like "ungenerous" and "unengaging" to describe it), it has endured, and so too at least some of the respect shown its users. In the United States, certainly, people of conventional mind commonly equate this Received Pronunciation with superior intelligence, education, culture in that way memorably satirized by Michael Bluth's mistaking every one of a mentally disadvantaged woman's utterances for profound thoughts simply because she spoke them in that accent on Arrested Development.
I am inclined to agree, and struck by how after the passing of all that the accent was supposed to represent and serve--empire and hegemony and the Victorian social order, the plausibility of a view of Britain at the center of and dominant force in world affairs--and what many regard as the sheer obnoxiousness of the accent (Haseler himself uses words like "ungenerous" and "unengaging" to describe it), it has endured, and so too at least some of the respect shown its users. In the United States, certainly, people of conventional mind commonly equate this Received Pronunciation with superior intelligence, education, culture in that way memorably satirized by Michael Bluth's mistaking every one of a mentally disadvantaged woman's utterances for profound thoughts simply because she spoke them in that accent on Arrested Development.
Of "Mere Rhetoric"
I agreed with that Professor that the latter is indeed the common understanding, and that this case of affairs means an impoverishment of the term which helps close our minds to an important area of human endeavor--one with which, for whatever it is worth, I have personally had to do for a very long time as not just a writer, but a composition instructor. Still, he struck me as exceedingly, depressingly, oblivious to the reasons why we ended up in that situation--our living in a society that devalues verbal communication and its study, and a commercial culture and a political culture which through their crassness and viciousness foster only cynicism about what people say, reducing the consideration of "rhetoric" to sneering at "mere rhetoric," such that the common understanding can scarcely be any other than what he regretted its being.
"Money Doesn't Buy Happiness"
It seems worth acknowledging that there is truth in the saying that "Money doesn't buy happiness."
However, money does buy your way out of a lot misery--and other obstacles--and so makes finding happiness a lot easier, a fact which should not be slighted.
It is just as with the saying that "If you don't have your health, you don't have anything." Rich and sick is not great--but it is a lot easier to protect your health when you do have money. And if you fall sick, you can get along a lot better in that condition if you have money than if you don't have it, a fact which also ought not to be slighted.
However, money does buy your way out of a lot misery--and other obstacles--and so makes finding happiness a lot easier, a fact which should not be slighted.
It is just as with the saying that "If you don't have your health, you don't have anything." Rich and sick is not great--but it is a lot easier to protect your health when you do have money. And if you fall sick, you can get along a lot better in that condition if you have money than if you don't have it, a fact which also ought not to be slighted.
"Money Doesn't Matter"
We live in a society which few will deny is defined by its capitalistic nature and market values are treated as ultimately the only values that matter; where "success" and "failure" and status and power are equated with money to the point of individuals being "worth" what they have; where it is impossible to meet one's most basic physical needs at all without acquiring a certain not very low minimum sum of money such that many die all the time for its lack and comfort, all as a dignity and freedom are impossible without a good deal more money than that; where any responsible individual is supposed to orient their whole life and the upbringing of their children toward the making of money; where those who have more money than they can ever spend in a lifetime organize society around the maximization of their chances to make as much more money in as short a time as possible with the consequences for everyone and everything else irrelevant to them regardless of how disastrous they may well be, "Let the bodies pile in their thousands" merely the beginning of such callousness, as they concede absolutely nothing to claims for any other good.
Yet we are also told constantly that "Money doesn't matter."
How does one reconcile this contradiction?
One can do it very simply by recognizing that the statement that "Money doesn't matter" is a lie, or at the very least incomplete. When people tell you that "Money doesn't matter" what they mean is that your not having money does not matter to them, all as, of course, their having money matters enormously to them.
In short, it is a hypocritical screen for callousness--and an exceedingly stupid one at that. Alas, stupid hypocrisy on behalf of callousness is par for the course in this culture.
Yet we are also told constantly that "Money doesn't matter."
How does one reconcile this contradiction?
One can do it very simply by recognizing that the statement that "Money doesn't matter" is a lie, or at the very least incomplete. When people tell you that "Money doesn't matter" what they mean is that your not having money does not matter to them, all as, of course, their having money matters enormously to them.
In short, it is a hypocritical screen for callousness--and an exceedingly stupid one at that. Alas, stupid hypocrisy on behalf of callousness is par for the course in this culture.
Too Much a Modern? A Few More Thoughts
There is the fact that I have been little inclined to go along with authority--and its prejudice--in favor of the superiority of the old to the new, the ancients or the Elizabethans to, for instance, the moderns, and so ready to believe that the moderns are just as worthy, and perhaps more so (that, however much some may reject it, there can be such a thing as progress in the world of the arts.
There is the fact that I care more about what writers say and how they say it--in fact, preferring their saying something important and interesting without much in the way of graces to their elegantly saying something banal, and been interested in the big wide world out there and looking at it and picturing it to us rather than the hazy imaginings of, for example, a Medieval mind as Johan Huizinga described it (which, certainly going by Ian Watt, seems a very modern, post-Scientific Revolution preference).
There is, where how a thing is said, my preference for clarity and efficiency in the conveyance of the content to ostentatious decoration (with this, too, a rather modern, post-Scientific Revolution view apparently).
There is my impatience of the bowing and scraping before power and authority and patron we got so much of in older literature, bowing and scraping before tradition and piety--my sympathies instead consistently lying with the defiant, and the impious, and the iconoclastic; those who rebelled, who satirized, who offered truth rather than what the powerful wanted to hear.
There is, alongside my aforementioned appreciation for the "discovery of society," what went along with it, the discovery of history, too--the discovery of past, and present, and future, as we have known them only in modern times.
All this has left me reading a good deal of old work with interest in its historical significance and admiration for its pioneering new forms or its technical accomplishment rather than real enjoyment--an experience that, I think, is more common than those who read older works let on. Being frank about that has, I think, been useful to me in studying literature. But it is probably not very helpful to one pursuing a career of studying literature, the literary priesthood not caring to look at things so closely, or caring much for those who think for themselves rather than accept the judgments of Tradition, the prestige of the Postmodern, and the longstanding distaste of the critical elite for much of what I have described here.
Of Literature's Priesthood
Of course, endeavoring to do that myself I have from the start found myself disagreeing with the received judgments all the time--and noticing how little others try to do what I did. Rather the scholars of literature have tended to act as a priesthood of literature, upholding tradition, respecting authority, telling others what to think just as they are themselves told what to think rather than thinking for themselves and encouraging others to do the same, and accordingly preaching on behalf of respect for some things and disrespect for others (which, frankly, played its part in driving me toward a more questioning attitude in the first place).
Considering the last part, how the priests deal with the "laity," one can see this as a matter of the professional generally to take a condescending view of everyone else in the world as incapable of understanding a really meaningful explanation. However, it seems to me that this is also a matter of the priests not having sought explanation themselves. Critics of art, who have often been practicing artists, and even more often at least been aspiring artists, tend to share the artist's outlook--which tends to be unconscious, intuitive, impressionable, and moved to awe and deference rather than consider what is put before them critically (they become Bardolators because they so easily become idolators), leaving them unequipped to answer those who look at the world a different way, as I did in trying to figure these things out for myself.
The Varieties of Literary Appreciation
What I refer to instead is the fact that when most people pick up a work of literature, as with the novels we are apt to see on the bestseller list, they expect an entertainment which will hold their interest, give them particular pleasures, and leave them emotionally satisfied at the end, a work's giving them which is what they refer to when they say that a book is "good" (as they are often hard-pressed to offer any more explanation than that it is "good," or not).
However, anyone who sticks with a course of literary study for long is likely to find that even books which do not please that way can have their interest. They may find the book engaging because of, for instance, technical aspects that may not give much entertainment. They may look upon it as a historical relic, the way an archaeologist might a piece of pottery from a past era. They may even take an interest in it as a puzzle (an approach that, I think, has a lot to do with the propensity of literary scholars to offer exceedingly abstruse explanations of literary works). And so on and so forth, the work interesting even when it is not interesting in the more usual, commonplace way.
Alas, I think the literary priesthood--to the extent that they are willing or able to explain their standards to the public at all--think all this too subtle for the laity, or maybe just too much at odds with their desire to cultivate a mystique around the works whose cults they tend and by extension themselves, so that they commend to the public a simple-minded awe at what they place on their pedestals, often so high it can scarcely be seen from the floor on which the mere mortals stand.
The Biggest "Platform of Envy" of All
In Sonya Sarayia's ten year retrospective on David Fincher's The Social Network she recalled her own early experience of Facebook as increasingly one of a "toxic . . . platform of envy . . . that turned all of [her] anger and frustration inward, corroding my self-esteem and sending me into a sustained depression" by way of its subjection of her to her acquaintances' boasting.
Considering that my thought is that while this is certainly how many experience Facebook, it isn't just Facebook that functions as a "platform of envy." That term can be used to describe the whole mainstream media--a media which has always been staffed by courtiers of the rich and powerful whose services to them include endless flattery of them before the eyes of the world; which invented and exploited to the full the cult of "celebrity" in all its foolishness; and that in the digital age all this has got a whole lot worse because of its extreme pervasiveness (and, perhaps, more people "finding themselves desperate to escape an increasingly wretched workaday lot by becoming celebrities themselves").
In the face of all this idiocy anyone who does not have an army of claqueurs applauding them nonstop the way the billionaires and Fortune 500 CEOs and entertainment industry A-listers and politicians do is likely to feel pretty worthless if they let it reach them, all as, I imagine, few are truly immune to it--which seems to me a good reason to be very careful of where we venture online, curate what news we really think we need very carefully, and probably more often than we are doing, simply turn off the screen and look at something else, anything else, before we let the scum of the media-industrial complex drive us insane.
Considering that my thought is that while this is certainly how many experience Facebook, it isn't just Facebook that functions as a "platform of envy." That term can be used to describe the whole mainstream media--a media which has always been staffed by courtiers of the rich and powerful whose services to them include endless flattery of them before the eyes of the world; which invented and exploited to the full the cult of "celebrity" in all its foolishness; and that in the digital age all this has got a whole lot worse because of its extreme pervasiveness (and, perhaps, more people "finding themselves desperate to escape an increasingly wretched workaday lot by becoming celebrities themselves").
In the face of all this idiocy anyone who does not have an army of claqueurs applauding them nonstop the way the billionaires and Fortune 500 CEOs and entertainment industry A-listers and politicians do is likely to feel pretty worthless if they let it reach them, all as, I imagine, few are truly immune to it--which seems to me a good reason to be very careful of where we venture online, curate what news we really think we need very carefully, and probably more often than we are doing, simply turn off the screen and look at something else, anything else, before we let the scum of the media-industrial complex drive us insane.
The Facebook Movie We Should Have Got Instead of The Social Network
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.
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.
"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.
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