While once upon a time we heard much market populist claptrap about the web giving voice to the voiceless as we now know the way the Internet functions and is utilized--how its apparatus is run and why, and who uses it and how--favors the easily communicated and therefore familiar and well-established idea, those with money and legacy media access, those on the right side of major corporations of the media and other varieties with all their strictures, and those who appeal to a privileged audience--all of which, of course, works out to the right having a much easier time than the left using the Internet to promote its ideas. The unsurprising result is that online many do find themselves feeling that the web has a right-wing bias, with the right's complaints about Big Tech not being in their corner only affirming the fact--because we actually hear so much of their complaints, in contrast with a left whose complaints get far, far less hearing anywhere that anyone who does not deliberately seek them out is likely to come upon them.
What seems more debatable is just how much difference this has made. Looking at the twenty-first century one may regard the right, and especially those relatively far to the right, as having gone from triumph to triumph during it as any remotely progressive tendency suffered the extreme opposite. How much, one may wonder, has this been a result of how people live online?
It is a very large question--but it also seems to a very worthwhile one given the political direction of the era.
Tuesday, November 5, 2024
The Overlooked Legacy of Vladimir Zhirinovsky?
After his Liberal Democratic Party of Russia got 23 percent of the vote in Russia's parliamentary (Duma) election, Vladimir Zhirinovsky got a lot of press in the Western news media--because his party's near-quarter of the vote for Russia's legislature went with Zhirinovsky's image as an ultra-nationalist fascist "crazy man" who spoke of such things as Russia retaking Alaska from the U.S. by force and using large fans to blow radioactive waste into the Soviet Union's ex-Baltic republics, all while keeping the press in soundbites and anecdotes that were obscene or threatening or violent. Especially given the tendency to draw comparisons between post-Communist Russia and Weimar Germany, not least in perceptions of a country suffering profound political disorientation amid world-historical defeat and economic calamity possibly leading to the triumph of the extreme right, many thought it possible that Zhirinovsky or someone like him would become Russia's next President.
Of course, the next election saw Zhirinovsky's party's position in the country's parliament collapse as the Communists emerged as the principal opposition, and Yeltsin won the election of 1996, while the country started stabilizing politically and economically about the turn of the century. Zhirinovsky and his party remained in parliament, but they never recovered their early '90s-era position in Russian politics, or their hold on the world's attention. (Indeed, Google's Ngram viewer shows how mention of Zhirinovsky plummeted after 1996.) An occasional piece of theatrics on his part still grabbed attention, but for its intrinsic interest, or evocation of back when he was taken more seriously, rather than because anyone thought "This is the next Iron Man of Russia." And indeed, Zhirinovsky's death in 2022 seems to have been almost unacknowledged by the media in the West.*
Still, looking back from 2024 I am struck by how the combination of political stances like Zhirinovsky's theatrics and vulgarity have since become standard for what cowardly members of the press euphemistically call "populists." I doubt that those who have blighted the world in recent decades by becoming heads of government sought to deliberately imitate him, but they certainly thought along similar lines, played to the public in similar ways, and redefined political culture in the process, such that Zhirinovsky could seem to have been ahead of the curve, and in his conduct a glimpse of what the twenty-first century had in store for us had we but understood--Zhirinovsky conquering the world, so to speak, through personal style rather than any military force at his command.
* Admittedly this may have been partly because of the cause--the COVID pandemic. It seems that the press, which early on turned to downplaying the pandemic, has not been overeager to call attention to the deaths of public figures as a result of said virus.
Of course, the next election saw Zhirinovsky's party's position in the country's parliament collapse as the Communists emerged as the principal opposition, and Yeltsin won the election of 1996, while the country started stabilizing politically and economically about the turn of the century. Zhirinovsky and his party remained in parliament, but they never recovered their early '90s-era position in Russian politics, or their hold on the world's attention. (Indeed, Google's Ngram viewer shows how mention of Zhirinovsky plummeted after 1996.) An occasional piece of theatrics on his part still grabbed attention, but for its intrinsic interest, or evocation of back when he was taken more seriously, rather than because anyone thought "This is the next Iron Man of Russia." And indeed, Zhirinovsky's death in 2022 seems to have been almost unacknowledged by the media in the West.*
Still, looking back from 2024 I am struck by how the combination of political stances like Zhirinovsky's theatrics and vulgarity have since become standard for what cowardly members of the press euphemistically call "populists." I doubt that those who have blighted the world in recent decades by becoming heads of government sought to deliberately imitate him, but they certainly thought along similar lines, played to the public in similar ways, and redefined political culture in the process, such that Zhirinovsky could seem to have been ahead of the curve, and in his conduct a glimpse of what the twenty-first century had in store for us had we but understood--Zhirinovsky conquering the world, so to speak, through personal style rather than any military force at his command.
* Admittedly this may have been partly because of the cause--the COVID pandemic. It seems that the press, which early on turned to downplaying the pandemic, has not been overeager to call attention to the deaths of public figures as a result of said virus.
Selectively Remembering Jane Austen
Just as it seems that some new remake of one of Jane Austen's novels (and often, several of them) in production at any one time so do we see the story of Ms. Austen's life told again and again--the author played by Olivia Williams, Anne Hathaway and others over the years. In the depictions it seems that the tendency is to portray her as essentially like the heroines of her novels--minus the happy ending, as if Elizabeth Bennett never got Mr. D'Arcy.
There are some grounds for such a conception. Still, if Ms. Austen was, like her heroines, a daughter of marginal provincial gentry, and concerned primarily with their domestic affairs to such a degree that it is common to say that one can read her books without noticing that the Napoleonic Wars were going on (perhaps the more in as people are more likely to read Pride and Prejudice than Persuasion, or Mansfield Park), this was hardly a matter of her having been somehow unaware of goings-on in the wider world, or indeed their being remote from her own life because of a relatively lowly station. After all, Austen had brothers serving in the Royal Navy as ship commanders during that conflict, with her brother Francis getting a knighthood for his part in the war before Waterloo (this conflict just the early phases of careers that saw both become Admirals, and Francis Admiral of the Fleet), while their sister Jane is known to have drawn on their knowledge of naval affairs during her work (for instance, learning about "prize money" so that she could include it in Persuasion). Such things seem less surprising when one considers their assorted wealthy and prominent connections--Warren Hastings, who is compared with only Robert Clive as a conqueror of India for Britain, a friend of the family.
In my experience one gets even less inkling of Austen having had such a life from the stories told about Austen than those Austen told by Austen in her books. And I suspect few care to have it otherwise, preferring as they do that image of a sort of real-life Ms. Bennett to that worldlier side of her background--leaving it the kind of thing rather more likely to be raised by an Upton Sinclair as he cast a respectful but more than usually historically-minded eye upon her work than to those who read her work to escape into a world they imagine to have been more genteel than their own.
There are some grounds for such a conception. Still, if Ms. Austen was, like her heroines, a daughter of marginal provincial gentry, and concerned primarily with their domestic affairs to such a degree that it is common to say that one can read her books without noticing that the Napoleonic Wars were going on (perhaps the more in as people are more likely to read Pride and Prejudice than Persuasion, or Mansfield Park), this was hardly a matter of her having been somehow unaware of goings-on in the wider world, or indeed their being remote from her own life because of a relatively lowly station. After all, Austen had brothers serving in the Royal Navy as ship commanders during that conflict, with her brother Francis getting a knighthood for his part in the war before Waterloo (this conflict just the early phases of careers that saw both become Admirals, and Francis Admiral of the Fleet), while their sister Jane is known to have drawn on their knowledge of naval affairs during her work (for instance, learning about "prize money" so that she could include it in Persuasion). Such things seem less surprising when one considers their assorted wealthy and prominent connections--Warren Hastings, who is compared with only Robert Clive as a conqueror of India for Britain, a friend of the family.
In my experience one gets even less inkling of Austen having had such a life from the stories told about Austen than those Austen told by Austen in her books. And I suspect few care to have it otherwise, preferring as they do that image of a sort of real-life Ms. Bennett to that worldlier side of her background--leaving it the kind of thing rather more likely to be raised by an Upton Sinclair as he cast a respectful but more than usually historically-minded eye upon her work than to those who read her work to escape into a world they imagine to have been more genteel than their own.
Stanley Kubrick and the "F" Word
Some time ago I looked over those charges and countercharges about the politics of A Clockwork Orange between its director Stanley Kubrick and the journalists of the New York Times at the time of the movie's release (back when they really did have liberals writing for them). Going by Kubrick's remarks there seemed to me no question of his, at least at the time, having been a right-winger, certainly if one takes as the standard for that the fundamental matter of human nature at the individual and group levels, and what it means for whether society can be rationally changed to produce a freer, more egalitarian, more thriving order. (Indeed, Kubrick joked in one interview that he gave at the time that if he went on he was "going to sound like William Buckley.") However, Kubrick took great umbrage at the use of the word "fascism" to describe his film, and at least by implication himself. Especially given the way in which he argued (he attacked those who used the term, rather than trying to disprove them) one could wonder whether he was simply reacting against having the highly charged label applied to him, even if it was being applied fairly (fascists often do object to being called fascists, because of the term's charge for many), or whether he really did have grounds for being thought not a fascist.
Certainly the pessimistic view of human beings and the prospects for society's redress of its ills, his contempt for "liberals," etc., that Kubrick expressed at the time are views he at least shared with fascists, as he did with the right more broadly. Yet the argument for fascism as a distinct tendency (rather than a synonym for "extreme right," a species of horseshoe theory-minded totalitarianism, a mere slur, etc.) is based on its mobilization of part of the public behind a right-wing agenda for the sake of preserving a bourgeois-capitalist order in the face of a radical challenge that can only be defeated through illiberal methods of government. Of course, in the aforementioned interview Kubrick did quip that the insecurity people felt because of crime, combined with "a little economic disappointment, and the increasingly trendy view that politics are a waste of time and problems have to be solved instantly," could translate to "very serious social unrest in the United States," and ultimately to "very authoritarian" government "of the Right," but his attitude toward this expectation was ambiguous. After all, to say that a thing is plausible, or even likely, is not to endorse it--even if one allows for some pathways being better than others. (In such a situation "you could only hope you would have a benevolent despot rather than an evil one. A Tito rather than a Stalin . . . of the right" he said.) The result is that there are grounds for rejecting the view of Kubrick as having himself been a fascist--though it also seems only fair to admit that much of what he said, as a filmmaker and in his interviews--has been grist to a fascist's mill, enough so that those who accused Kubrick of being one were far, far, from groundless in doing so. Indeed, even if Kubrick may not be a fascist, there seem few grounds for denying that A Clockwork Orange "works" as a piece of fascist propaganda.
Certainly the pessimistic view of human beings and the prospects for society's redress of its ills, his contempt for "liberals," etc., that Kubrick expressed at the time are views he at least shared with fascists, as he did with the right more broadly. Yet the argument for fascism as a distinct tendency (rather than a synonym for "extreme right," a species of horseshoe theory-minded totalitarianism, a mere slur, etc.) is based on its mobilization of part of the public behind a right-wing agenda for the sake of preserving a bourgeois-capitalist order in the face of a radical challenge that can only be defeated through illiberal methods of government. Of course, in the aforementioned interview Kubrick did quip that the insecurity people felt because of crime, combined with "a little economic disappointment, and the increasingly trendy view that politics are a waste of time and problems have to be solved instantly," could translate to "very serious social unrest in the United States," and ultimately to "very authoritarian" government "of the Right," but his attitude toward this expectation was ambiguous. After all, to say that a thing is plausible, or even likely, is not to endorse it--even if one allows for some pathways being better than others. (In such a situation "you could only hope you would have a benevolent despot rather than an evil one. A Tito rather than a Stalin . . . of the right" he said.) The result is that there are grounds for rejecting the view of Kubrick as having himself been a fascist--though it also seems only fair to admit that much of what he said, as a filmmaker and in his interviews--has been grist to a fascist's mill, enough so that those who accused Kubrick of being one were far, far, from groundless in doing so. Indeed, even if Kubrick may not be a fascist, there seem few grounds for denying that A Clockwork Orange "works" as a piece of fascist propaganda.
Remembering Idiocracy and Silicon Valley Together
Some time ago I wrote about Mike Judge's film Idiocracy and HBO show Silicon Valley together, because while they had their differences the two seemed so complementary to one another. Where in Idiocracy Judge satirized the unintelligent, in Silicon Valley he satirized people who were supposed to be the extreme opposite. In ultra-conventional fashion--after all, were Judge not so we would likely never have heard of him--he identified unintelligence with the lower classes, and intelligence with the super-rich elite.
It also seemed to me safe to say that when, in the case of Idiocracy, he punched down, he did so very visibly, obviously and forcefully at the poor, while in Silicon Valley his punches up were limited to eccentric individuals, rather than to any group as such.
So does it generally go with comedy in America in our time, in which the right to punch down with impunity is hailed as the essence of the free speech, and never mind anything else.
It also seemed to me safe to say that when, in the case of Idiocracy, he punched down, he did so very visibly, obviously and forcefully at the poor, while in Silicon Valley his punches up were limited to eccentric individuals, rather than to any group as such.
So does it generally go with comedy in America in our time, in which the right to punch down with impunity is hailed as the essence of the free speech, and never mind anything else.
Of "Kakistocracy": A Few Words
The reader of this blog may be familiar with the words "oligarchy," "plutocracy," "kleptocracy."
"Oligarchy" refers to government controlled by a small group.
"Plutocracy" refers to government by the rich.
"Kleptocracy" refers to government by thieves who use their positions of authority to rob the public.
"Kakistocracy," derived from the Indo-European root word "kaka," the meaning of which I imagine most readers can figure out for themselves, refers to government by society's worst.
A more obscure term, when a handful of commentators dared to use the term in public a few years ago it caused quite the sensation, but I am not sure that it has entered really common usage. According to Google's book-checking Ngram viewer usage of the word between 2016 and 2022 merely doubled from a very low level, so that as of the later date one is still about 280 times more likely to encounter usage of the word "oligarchy," forty times more likely to encounter "plutocracy," and about sixteen times more likely to come across even the relatively newfangled "kleptocracy." This is in spite of there being room to argue that even those three words are less frequently used than they ought to be in English, especially when we discount their use to fling abuse at other countries on officialdom's "Disapproved" list.
I might add that the word kakistocracy would seem to have a particular usefulness in a society in which conventional wisdom-guarding elites (in complete, ironic, obliviousness to the concept's flaws, pointed out by the very sociologist who coined the term!) ceaselessly refer to their society as a meritocracy. Those who disagree can point out to them that it is in fact the other, opposite thing with the rather pungent label, their supposed "meritocracy" in fact a "merdeocracy," and the singers of meritocracy as a contemporary actuality, if actually believing their own claptrap, apparently unable to tell Shinola from the other thing.
"Oligarchy" refers to government controlled by a small group.
"Plutocracy" refers to government by the rich.
"Kleptocracy" refers to government by thieves who use their positions of authority to rob the public.
"Kakistocracy," derived from the Indo-European root word "kaka," the meaning of which I imagine most readers can figure out for themselves, refers to government by society's worst.
A more obscure term, when a handful of commentators dared to use the term in public a few years ago it caused quite the sensation, but I am not sure that it has entered really common usage. According to Google's book-checking Ngram viewer usage of the word between 2016 and 2022 merely doubled from a very low level, so that as of the later date one is still about 280 times more likely to encounter usage of the word "oligarchy," forty times more likely to encounter "plutocracy," and about sixteen times more likely to come across even the relatively newfangled "kleptocracy." This is in spite of there being room to argue that even those three words are less frequently used than they ought to be in English, especially when we discount their use to fling abuse at other countries on officialdom's "Disapproved" list.
I might add that the word kakistocracy would seem to have a particular usefulness in a society in which conventional wisdom-guarding elites (in complete, ironic, obliviousness to the concept's flaws, pointed out by the very sociologist who coined the term!) ceaselessly refer to their society as a meritocracy. Those who disagree can point out to them that it is in fact the other, opposite thing with the rather pungent label, their supposed "meritocracy" in fact a "merdeocracy," and the singers of meritocracy as a contemporary actuality, if actually believing their own claptrap, apparently unable to tell Shinola from the other thing.
The Hired Killer in Fiction
Writing of David Fincher's film The Killer David Walsh remarked that "[h]ired killers like these . . . with their automaton-like precision and fanatical attention to detail," are fantasies, and about that Mr. Walsh is of course entirely right. Read up on the relevant subjects--crime, intelligence, covert operations--and you never find anything like these stock figures of so much thriller fiction. Ever.
So where did they come from?
I suppose one can see in these figures a combination of two "petty bourgeois" fascinations--the fascination with the criminal who refuses to be bound by society's rules (indeed, Walsh cites this again himself), and with the "professional." The petty bourgeois, after all, is a great admirer of the professionals whose competence and whose "standards" fiction endlessly, wildly, exaggerates. In the hired killer we get the merger of the two, making the figure irresistible to their imagination--which, after all, is substantially the imagination to which the pop culture industry plays.
So where did they come from?
I suppose one can see in these figures a combination of two "petty bourgeois" fascinations--the fascination with the criminal who refuses to be bound by society's rules (indeed, Walsh cites this again himself), and with the "professional." The petty bourgeois, after all, is a great admirer of the professionals whose competence and whose "standards" fiction endlessly, wildly, exaggerates. In the hired killer we get the merger of the two, making the figure irresistible to their imagination--which, after all, is substantially the imagination to which the pop culture industry plays.
The Petty Bourgeois' Romanticizing of the Outlaw
I have often seen writers refer to a fascination with crime and criminals as being distinctly "petty bourgeois," but I do not remember any of them clearly explaining why they think that is so in an explicit way. What I have gleaned from them is the view that, being petty bourgeois such people are not on top, and frustrated--their lot, if far from the worst society has to offer, still that of the "bound but unprotected" and they naturally not liking it much. At the same time being petty bourgeois they are essentially individualistic and conformist, so that they do not imagine, let alone desire, any other world than this one. They just want to change their condition in the one that exists. And the rule-breaking criminal, who is at the very least refusing to be bound, and if they get big enough, in some degree protected too in a society where corruption is not unknown (else what need for an Eliot Ness or a Batman?), has a fascination for them as someone doing what they would like to be doing, or would like to have done in the past (such that they would be enjoying the benefits of those actions now).
Certainly thinking of Robert Merton's "theory of anomic behavior," which I understand to have been the result of his examination of crime, this seems to track. As Merton wrote society sets goals for its members and sanctions particular means for realizing those goals--like individual economic advancement through education and getting a job (or, less often these days, be-an-entrepreneur-in-a-legal-line-of-activity). The conformist accepts goal and means--getting ahead, and getting the job supposed to lead to that. The rebel and the "retreatist" in their different ways and for different reasons refuse goal and means--disbelieving in getting ahead, and refusing to pretend the way taking the job requires them to do. The "ritualist" Merton describes as rejecting the goal but accepting the means--in the sense that they do not really believe in all that getting ahead stuff, but get a job anyway and go through the motions (because, frankly, it's very, very tough to live without a source of income). However, there is one other category--what Merton called "innovators"--who accept the goal but rely on a less than approved means, i.e. accepts "individual economic advancement" as a life's purpose but pursues the object through illegal business activity. They are not rebels, they accept the success-striving recommended to them, they just resort to disapproved means to go about it--while not advertising those means, or necessarily meaning to persist in them beyond their attainment of their goal.
I do not recall Merton saying anything about this, but I think that what those who picture crime as an object of fascination to those sincerely eager to get ahead, but disappointed in the sanctioned options and their results--perhaps especially in times of declining prospects for the "middle class." Few act on such nonsense--but all the same, the attraction on this foolishness on some level has its part in making criminals very popular protagonists in contemporary pop culture.
Certainly thinking of Robert Merton's "theory of anomic behavior," which I understand to have been the result of his examination of crime, this seems to track. As Merton wrote society sets goals for its members and sanctions particular means for realizing those goals--like individual economic advancement through education and getting a job (or, less often these days, be-an-entrepreneur-in-a-legal-line-of-activity). The conformist accepts goal and means--getting ahead, and getting the job supposed to lead to that. The rebel and the "retreatist" in their different ways and for different reasons refuse goal and means--disbelieving in getting ahead, and refusing to pretend the way taking the job requires them to do. The "ritualist" Merton describes as rejecting the goal but accepting the means--in the sense that they do not really believe in all that getting ahead stuff, but get a job anyway and go through the motions (because, frankly, it's very, very tough to live without a source of income). However, there is one other category--what Merton called "innovators"--who accept the goal but rely on a less than approved means, i.e. accepts "individual economic advancement" as a life's purpose but pursues the object through illegal business activity. They are not rebels, they accept the success-striving recommended to them, they just resort to disapproved means to go about it--while not advertising those means, or necessarily meaning to persist in them beyond their attainment of their goal.
I do not recall Merton saying anything about this, but I think that what those who picture crime as an object of fascination to those sincerely eager to get ahead, but disappointed in the sanctioned options and their results--perhaps especially in times of declining prospects for the "middle class." Few act on such nonsense--but all the same, the attraction on this foolishness on some level has its part in making criminals very popular protagonists in contemporary pop culture.
David Walsh Reviews David Fincher's The Killer
David Walsh has recently penned a review of David Fincher's Netflix film, The Killer, and taken the film as an occasion to consider Fincher's now three decade-old record of directing feature film, paying particular attention to such movies as Fight Club, The Social Network, Gone Girl, and the more recent Mank. Walsh argues that while "each of [Fincher's] films has intriguing and even insightful moments," Fincher tends overwhelmingly toward superficiality, particularly evident in his "predilection for brutal, irrational behavior," and identification of "certain alienated moods," while never having much to say about "their origin or trajectory," and certainly not their "social sources." All in line with a "shortsighted, limited vision of humanity and society" apparently consisting of little but "general misanthropy," "pervasive darkness," and "the desire to make people uncomfortable" it is not, but only by the credulous confused with, "criticism of capitalism, corporations, contemporary civilization . . . modern marriage" that leaves us with the "chilly and banal" at that level, only underlined by the "style" over which Fincher fans gush so much.
I cannot say that I have tried to follow David Fincher's work, but I have seen a fair bit of it all the same, and going by that Walsh seems to me to do an exceptional job of summing up the (very limited) strengths and (considerable) weaknesses of a filmmaker who, in spite of the plaudits with which les claqueurs of the entertainment press lavish him, has a "body of work" with "many more minuses than pluses in" it, just as Walsh seems to me to have been one of the few to grasp the profound limitations of Quentin Tarantino's work (especially as his career went on).* Walsh seems to me equally correct in treating Fincher's outlook and its limitations as not merely his own, but characteristic of that cohort of filmmakers that emerged in the '90s, and has increasingly dominated the American cinematic scene ever since, of which Fincher is a star.
* The few others who did grasp Tarantino's limitations include Gary Groth, and James Wood. It seems significant that neither is by profession a film reviewer, and that neither seems to have been much heard from since regarding Mr. Tarantino.
I cannot say that I have tried to follow David Fincher's work, but I have seen a fair bit of it all the same, and going by that Walsh seems to me to do an exceptional job of summing up the (very limited) strengths and (considerable) weaknesses of a filmmaker who, in spite of the plaudits with which les claqueurs of the entertainment press lavish him, has a "body of work" with "many more minuses than pluses in" it, just as Walsh seems to me to have been one of the few to grasp the profound limitations of Quentin Tarantino's work (especially as his career went on).* Walsh seems to me equally correct in treating Fincher's outlook and its limitations as not merely his own, but characteristic of that cohort of filmmakers that emerged in the '90s, and has increasingly dominated the American cinematic scene ever since, of which Fincher is a star.
* The few others who did grasp Tarantino's limitations include Gary Groth, and James Wood. It seems significant that neither is by profession a film reviewer, and that neither seems to have been much heard from since regarding Mr. Tarantino.
The Films of Joel and Ethan Coen
Recently looking back on The Big Lebowski I encountered Graham Daesler's essay about that movie, which also takes up the matter of the Coen brothers' broader body of work. Over its course Daesler waxes poetic about his subject, which makes for an entertaining read--and if, as tends to be the case when writers wax poetic, he seems to me to give those of whom he writes more credit than is really due them, he is not without insight, or alertness to the limitations of, the movies and filmmakers he writes about, remarking in particular the Coen Brothers' misanthropy. The charge can seem easy given that misanthropy pretty much characterizes their whole generation of "indie" moviemakers, but it certainly seems not just warranted here, but fundamental to their choices of characters, and what they do with, or rather, to, them, with an evident sense of superiority and sense of self-satisfaction (presenting a parade of "dimwits, yokels, rubes, phonies . . . only to wreak havoc on their lives" in a manner Daesler compares to "kids collecting ants so they could incinerate them with a magnifying glass") in narratives in which meaning is pointedly elusive.
All that seems exemplified by the Coen brothers' 1991 film Barton Fink. That movie, "built around a protagonist who learns nothing and gains nothing, replete with red herring clues and meaningless symbolism" on the way to an ending Daesler describes as enigmatic, is "[t]he closest that Hollywood has ever come to making a Dadaist movie." I might add that it is particularly hard to escape the politics implicit in the Coen brothers' postmodernism in that movie--those of the hard right, all too evident in their deeply unpleasant caricature of a left-wing intellectual in the eponymous "learns nothing and gains nothing" protagonist.
Naturally this was very appealing to the critical community--but less so to me, which, I suppose, is how Big Lebowski, incoherent as that movie also is and mean-spirited as it can also be, made a sufficient impression on me that I had something to say about it all these decades later.
All that seems exemplified by the Coen brothers' 1991 film Barton Fink. That movie, "built around a protagonist who learns nothing and gains nothing, replete with red herring clues and meaningless symbolism" on the way to an ending Daesler describes as enigmatic, is "[t]he closest that Hollywood has ever come to making a Dadaist movie." I might add that it is particularly hard to escape the politics implicit in the Coen brothers' postmodernism in that movie--those of the hard right, all too evident in their deeply unpleasant caricature of a left-wing intellectual in the eponymous "learns nothing and gains nothing" protagonist.
Naturally this was very appealing to the critical community--but less so to me, which, I suppose, is how Big Lebowski, incoherent as that movie also is and mean-spirited as it can also be, made a sufficient impression on me that I had something to say about it all these decades later.
Of Corporate Anthems and the Insanity of the '90s
Back in November 1999 there was a Ford Motor Company commercial which had Charlotte Church singing over a lavish two minute music video glorifying the global automotive colossus and its then-subsidiaries Aston Martin, Jaguar, Lincoln, Mazda, Mercury and Volvo in a manner befitting the title "Global Anthem."
Seeing that commercial at its first airing I thought it was proof that the world had lost its mind.
The passage of a quarter of a century since has only confirmed me in that opinion--as has the fact that in all of the commentary I have seen, as people gush over the sheer technical virtuosity of the production and the expenditure of money and the number of people who saw it, and all the records it approached or broke in the process of becoming an historic global media event, I saw no evidence of apprehension of its social or political significance in the mainstream. How in those days when the utterly unhinged New Economy euphoria (or more accurately, marketing scam) with all its "market populist" idiocies was approaching its climax, people gawked in awe at what a quarter of a century before than Norman Jewison showed us in that film where sports fans rose for the corporate anthem, Rollerball--the media elite (and the idiots who let them do their thinking for them) with teary eyes embracing what had such a short time ago been repellent dystopia. And I think now as I did then of how very, very '90s all this was--the era's irony, as usual, absent when we needed it most, with all that says about the usefulness of irony as a response to the world's troubles.
Seeing that commercial at its first airing I thought it was proof that the world had lost its mind.
The passage of a quarter of a century since has only confirmed me in that opinion--as has the fact that in all of the commentary I have seen, as people gush over the sheer technical virtuosity of the production and the expenditure of money and the number of people who saw it, and all the records it approached or broke in the process of becoming an historic global media event, I saw no evidence of apprehension of its social or political significance in the mainstream. How in those days when the utterly unhinged New Economy euphoria (or more accurately, marketing scam) with all its "market populist" idiocies was approaching its climax, people gawked in awe at what a quarter of a century before than Norman Jewison showed us in that film where sports fans rose for the corporate anthem, Rollerball--the media elite (and the idiots who let them do their thinking for them) with teary eyes embracing what had such a short time ago been repellent dystopia. And I think now as I did then of how very, very '90s all this was--the era's irony, as usual, absent when we needed it most, with all that says about the usefulness of irony as a response to the world's troubles.
"You Must Be Doing it Wrong!"
In the society we live in everyone is supposed to be striving for "success," and in doing so driving for "the very top." (Every student should be aiming for Harvard, everyone should be aiming for a place in the three commas club, and so forth.)
Yet anyone not completely detached from reality (admittedly, not being completely detached from reality makes it very hard to accept the "conventional wisdom" of this society) knows that there is very little room at the top, and even many, many rungs down from the top. There is in fact so little room that an individual can be doing everything "right," and yet getting nowhere, because the opportunity that no man makes makes all the difference between middling, even paltry-seeming accomplishment and "the commanding heights."
Yet in spite of this reality the conventional tendency is to assume that those on the commanding heights did the right things, and others didn't.
You're not a billionaire? Then you must have been going about it the wrong way, they decide, and start second-guessing every decision you have ever made in your life--never mind whether they are themselves billionaires.
The stupidity and obliviousness of this kind of response are staggering--and par for the course where the cult of success is concerned.
Yet anyone not completely detached from reality (admittedly, not being completely detached from reality makes it very hard to accept the "conventional wisdom" of this society) knows that there is very little room at the top, and even many, many rungs down from the top. There is in fact so little room that an individual can be doing everything "right," and yet getting nowhere, because the opportunity that no man makes makes all the difference between middling, even paltry-seeming accomplishment and "the commanding heights."
Yet in spite of this reality the conventional tendency is to assume that those on the commanding heights did the right things, and others didn't.
You're not a billionaire? Then you must have been going about it the wrong way, they decide, and start second-guessing every decision you have ever made in your life--never mind whether they are themselves billionaires.
The stupidity and obliviousness of this kind of response are staggering--and par for the course where the cult of success is concerned.
"Ya Gotta Have Faith." But Faith in What, Exactly?
It is a commonplace that people need "faith," but the statement is as ambiguous as it is banal.
Today it seems that when most hear the word "faith" they associate it with religion. Religion is, of course, usually exclusive--famously, often to the point of extreme intolerance. Yet those saying "ya gotta have faith" do not often seem to be recommending belief in a particular religion, at times seeming to imply that even something as hazy as the idea that "the universe always has a plan" will suffice.
It is, in short, a commendation of if not religion then religiosity, in the view that the world is an ordered place in a way not necessarily perceivable with the senses or recognizable through the exercise of reasoning from that sensory data--which may well indicate the opposite of any such ordering--with the implication that this ordering is somehow benign ("Whatever is, is right") and a denial that reason is a sufficient basis for humans getting along in this world.
Putting it bluntly, to speak of "faith" in this way is to champion an irrational, anti-rational and highly conservative stance in a shorthand fashion that, I think, goes right over most people's heads, with this perhaps its attraction for many, the fact that the statement is so ambiguous and so banal that few give a highly debatable position any consideration whatsoever making them feel the freer in asserting it.
Today it seems that when most hear the word "faith" they associate it with religion. Religion is, of course, usually exclusive--famously, often to the point of extreme intolerance. Yet those saying "ya gotta have faith" do not often seem to be recommending belief in a particular religion, at times seeming to imply that even something as hazy as the idea that "the universe always has a plan" will suffice.
It is, in short, a commendation of if not religion then religiosity, in the view that the world is an ordered place in a way not necessarily perceivable with the senses or recognizable through the exercise of reasoning from that sensory data--which may well indicate the opposite of any such ordering--with the implication that this ordering is somehow benign ("Whatever is, is right") and a denial that reason is a sufficient basis for humans getting along in this world.
Putting it bluntly, to speak of "faith" in this way is to champion an irrational, anti-rational and highly conservative stance in a shorthand fashion that, I think, goes right over most people's heads, with this perhaps its attraction for many, the fact that the statement is so ambiguous and so banal that few give a highly debatable position any consideration whatsoever making them feel the freer in asserting it.
The Age of Austerity and the Assault on Britain's Libraries
Reading United Nations' Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Professor Philip Alston's report on his visit to Britain and assessment of what the "age of austerity" the Tories and New Labour inflicted on the country (which, to its credit, outraged the British government and gutter press) I remember being struck by his references to the country's libraries. This was a matter not just of their making books and other reading material available to the public, but their affording particular amenities of special importance "to those living in poverty . . . including . . . a safe community space," and "access to a computer"--the latter of special relevance in a time in which the government was making access to much of the social safety net online-only through its replacement of a half dozen earlier programs with the "digital by default" system of "Universal Credit," even though those who need that system most are exactly the people least likely to have personal Internet access. The result was that, as Alston put it, Britain's "[p]ublic libraries are on the frontline of helping the digitally excluded and digitally illiterate who wish to claim their right to Universal Credit," and indeed the country's libraries had to deal with "claimants who arrive at the library, often in a panic, to get help claiming benefits online," with the City Library in Newcastle (a city of some three hundred thousand) alone obliged to assist almost two thousand such claimants in the August 2017-September 2018 period alone.
Of course, this was as the libraries saw their resourcing shrink. Apparently the whole process so far has seen the funding of Britain's libraries slashed by over half and a third of the libraries themselves shut down, with all that this especially means for access to their services outside the more urbanized areas--even as the uses to which libraries are being put grow. (Not only are they safe spaces--they are now "warm spaces" as well.)
The situation seems describable as collapse--all as I suspect that the pain Keir Starmer (who experienced as he in in discarding solemn pledges needed no time whatsoever before his promise that there would be no return to austerity turned into a promise of austerity that he seems almost certain to keep, with warmth in winter one of those things he has explicitly promised to take away from many) means to inflict on the British public's more vulnerable members will be felt in this area as in many others in the months and years ahead.
Of course, this was as the libraries saw their resourcing shrink. Apparently the whole process so far has seen the funding of Britain's libraries slashed by over half and a third of the libraries themselves shut down, with all that this especially means for access to their services outside the more urbanized areas--even as the uses to which libraries are being put grow. (Not only are they safe spaces--they are now "warm spaces" as well.)
The situation seems describable as collapse--all as I suspect that the pain Keir Starmer (who experienced as he in in discarding solemn pledges needed no time whatsoever before his promise that there would be no return to austerity turned into a promise of austerity that he seems almost certain to keep, with warmth in winter one of those things he has explicitly promised to take away from many) means to inflict on the British public's more vulnerable members will be felt in this area as in many others in the months and years ahead.
"Yesterday's Revolutionary, Today's Reactionary"
Considering my experience of Thackeray's Vanity Fair my thoughts turn to what Professor Ron Singer has to say of the classic novel, namely that yesterday's revolutionary becomes tomorrow's reactionary. Professor Singer had in mind the telling of the story--the later "aesthetic stricture requiring objectively, purely descriptive fiction" with which Thackeray's very "talkative" narration is out of line, but one may wonder if that is not the case politically given how, as Singer explains, the book was seen as socially subversive as well. Still, if allowing that a work of two centuries ago can seem more conservative today than it did at the time, it does seem to me that some of Thackeray's contemporaries still come across as having more "edge" that way than he did. If Dickens, getting his history from Thomas Carlyle and loaded with English prejudice against a country "less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident" could see in the French Revolution little but the guillotine that has so dominated conservative (and thus, mainstream) imagination of the event down to Ridley Scott's Napoleon, his empathy for the downtrodden and hatred for their oppressors and consequent disgust for the Old Regime comes through, as does a sense of history as tragedy, so much so that one should never forget that before the first guillotine blade fell France was the kind of country which sentences "a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards," while the conventional stress on Madame Defarge as the villain of the story (rather than the Marquis St. Evrémonde and those he represented) seems exceedingly simple-minded--all as Dickens' virtues rather than his failings have served to make him unfashionable with the makers and unmakers of respectable opinion these days. For now, at least, I do not think anything remotely like that can be claimed for Vanity Fair.
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