Popular Narratives

It is a truism that trends in popular culture mirror the larger condition of a society, and in some cases anticipate change.  As literary scholar Jane Tompkins argued in her book Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, popular narratives can also cause change to happen.  Her prime example is the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the best-selling work of nineteenth century America before the Civil War.  Lincoln himself famously (if apocryphally) said to Stowe when first meeting her that she was the little lady who caused the great war.

If the novel was the main medium for the delivery of narrative two centuries ago, today television and film shoulder this work. The election of President Obama is mirrored in recent movies that cast black men in the role of savior.  (This is itself a subversion of Stowe’s novel, and much of the writing of nineteenth century America, where white women played the role of domestic and reforming angel.)  In The Green Mile, Black Snake Moan, and Hancock, black men heal the physical and psychic wounds of white women, thus figuratively transforming white America as a whole.  Even the President himself observed during his campaign that people were putting a great deal of faith in his candidacy, and he cautioned Americans repeatedly that our troubles would not soon be over.  Our national tendency to work the theme of redemption into every crisis means  that someone must play the role of redeemer.  A century and a half ago it was a fictional character called Eva; now perhaps it is a flesh and blood man called Obama.

Co-opting Detroit

By any measure, Detroit is a disaster.  Infant mortality rates, poverty, crime, and illiteracy have been among the highest in the nation for years, and despite the construction of dowtown casinos and the  brick and glass islands of midtown lofts (mostly empty), there’s no hope of the city returning to what it was 50 years ago, when nearly 2 million people crowded its houses.  Yet, the city’s reputation as dangerous and post-industrial attracts the attention of real and wannabe hipsters nationwide.  Not long ago The New York Times touted Detroit as a must-see city.   I’m hard pressed to imagine a visitor finding his way successfully from one end of town to the other without succumbing to depression or morbid fear.  The trick for anyone who lives in this gray and rusting place is not to mind it, and in this way perhaps the city functions as a synecdoche for the larger life of America.  We all know that we’re in deep trouble; how best to ignore this fact and focus instead on the paltry amusements that living in this country offers?

Elitism

On a visit this last weekend to northern Michigan, I met a man who insisted that Barack Obama is an “elitist,” hardly a surprising charge by a Republican.    Strangely, John McCain’s 7 houses and marriage to a rich woman aren’t enough to make him an elitist, too.  The American version of elitism is social and cultural rather than economic, and I suspect that Obama’s multicultural background and cosmopolitan outlook made my new acquaintance level his accusation.   When the media discovered in 2004 that John Kerry spoke French, there were plenty of snide comments suggesting that he was not a real American.  In short, the more parochial and narrow the politician, the more likely it is that he will escape the elite label.  Money, on the other hand, is a badge of achievement and honor.  Material as opposed to intellectual wealth is tangible, and the real capital in political circles does not revolve around one’s knowledge of language, history, or even geography, but one’s ability to exist in the “real world” where the accrual of dollars defines character and confers the wisdom that no amount of learning can ever do.

Dance and Democracy

A few nights ago I watched 20 minutes of the television program, “So You Think You Can Dance?” and was alternately amused and flabbergasted by the contestants who tried out before a panel of 3 judges.  As on “American Idol,” many are convinced that they’ve got genuine talent when all they really have to offer is conviction.  I like watching these shows, especially because of the unrelenting criticism of the British judges, who don’t seem to think that it’s necessary to tell people that they’re better than they really are.  It’s hard to imagine an American getting away with the same thing, since we all tacitly assent to the central myth of our democracy: that we are all equal in every respect, and that anyone who makes enough of an effort will become a success, whether in singing, dancing, business, or sales.  This is the kind of myth so powerful that it drives people to delusion and disgruntlement, so pervasive that it has caused us to buy cars and houses that we can’t afford. Of course, we’ll be able to pay that exploding mortgage rate in a few years because naturally we’ll have a better job with better pay when it all comes due.

 

The 1980s and the End of Modernity

If the symptoms of postmodernity surfaced in the period after World War 2 through the expansion of the consumer economy and the embrace of synthetic modes of living, the 1980s saw the death throes of modernism.  The appearance of the personal computer, the mobile phone, and the emergence of a visually saturated media have all made it possible to live in the world without being of it.  

In fact, artifacts from the 1980s seem to posit their creators’ own awareness of the liminal qualities of that decade: take the self-consciously hip and spare quality of much pop music, for example, or elegies to a not quite vanished past in songs such as the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.”  The abandoned post-industrial landscapes of steel and polluted ground made it onto many an album cover.  It’s as though popular culture acknowledged even before Fukuyama that we were at the end of history, or at least about to enter into an age dramatically different from what we had known before. 

In the United States the 1980s also saw the “Reagan Revolution,” the paradigmatic political symptom of a culture losing its grip on reality.  The more recent elections of George W. Bush are a continued example of the same tendency.  Everything has been thrown into doubt: the meaning of torture, scientific evidence, historical fact, and plain language. I’m not the first to observe that the recondite theories of language deriving from poststructuralism, which first became popular in the American academy in the 1980s, have strangely become the currency of political conservatives.  Taken to its extreme, Derrida’s “free play of signification” becomes absolute relativism.  Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous statement about weapons of mass destruction (“absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”) sounds not only like something one would read in a graduate student seminar paper on Deconstruction, but a rejection of inductive reasoning itself.

None of us would want to turn back to 1979, when we faced many of the same problems that we do today: inflation, soaring oil prices, and Middle Eastern conflict.  I wonder, though, if we might be on the brink of a new age once again, this one defined by a recovery of reason.  The end of the age of Bush is a good start.

Whither Global Warming?

According to a 60 Minutes piece aired last night, Al Gore plans to persuade the American public of the importance of global warming through a series of television advertisements.  Just days ago I wondered whether or not he might emerge as a candidate for the Democratic nomination at what may be a divisive Denver convention; now I know why he won’t be.

 As privatization has swept the county, and each of us is carried by the tide of self-promoting business interests, the appeal to civic duty has lost whatever sway it once had.  Gore’s plan to make the public aware by means of corporate-controlled channels strikes me as the best strategy to force our attention to an issue more important than any other.  It’s a shame that we can’t pull together to ameliorate the problem because an elected leader has urged us to do so; even more shameful is that none of the major candidates, Democratic or Republican, has made climate change a major campaign issue.

Of Beer and Authenticity

Barack Obama recently campaigned in Pennsylvania and admitted to having a few beers with Bob Casey before going bowling.  Clearly he delighted in this admission, with the half grin of a child who has been caught doing something wrong but wants the world to know his naughtiness at the same time.  Compare it to John Kerry’s Ohio hunting escapade, or even Michael Dukakis’ tank ride.  It’s the desire to look authentic in the eyes of potential voters. 

In the canon of classical rhetoric, the appeal to ethos is the appeal to authority or credibility.  Generations of teachers have told students that establishing credibility means establishing your own expertise on a given subject, or calling upon the expertise of another to support your own argument.  In the campaigns of recent Democratic presidential candidates, the appeal to ethos has been reduced to gun toting and beer swilling.  While I have no objection to either of these, particularly the latter, it seems to me that we have lost the ability to measure our candidates’ abilities on the square.  Rather, if he’s not too atilt after 6 Rolling Rocks, he’s good enough for me.

For whatever reason, Republicans seem automatically to pass the authenticity test.  Could it be that Democrats are trying too hard?  And could we get on to the serious business of addressing issues instead of stumping to the imagined constituency that honestly believes you were half-cocked before taking bowling lessons from an eight year old child?

Why McCain will win

Americans are essentially conservative.

The emotional appeal of patriotism is more powerful than reasoned policy arguments.

If we make a move toward military involvement with Iran, which seems not unlikely, bewildered voters will decide to support Bush’s heir apparent.

Voters will accept the argument that the surge has worked to stabilize Iraq, as the media in many cases already seem to have done.

Some big surprise that nobody saw coming but for those who arranged it.

Everybody likes a war hero, unless that hero is a Democrat.

Party discipline among Republicans.

The cultural archetype of authority as white and male is still operative.

Anti-Democratic media backlash.

A very possibly calamitous Democratic National Convention.

Dylan and Acts of Self-Promotion

Bob Dylan’s 1965 San Francisco press conference (which I believe is recreated in I’m Not There, though I’ve yet to see the film) was hard to sit through when I watched it for the first time on DVD a few nights ago.  Dylan was young, twitchy, quite possibly stoned, and wavering between passive aggression and outright hostility.  On a second viewing, I began to appreciate what was actually an extended performance piece that organized itself around the kinds of questions that reporters asked.  Questions about the meaning of Dylan’s songs and lyrics were pushed off cagily.  Anyone who asked about more practical matters — how many people in the band?  do you ever sit in with rock musicians? — got a direct answer. As Dylan’s answers refined the distance between objective and subjective receptions of personality and self-presentation, I couldn’t help but think of 3 other quintessentially American self-promoters: Ben Franklin, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost. 

Franklin’s autobiography is ostensibly a document for his own son, William, but in fact came to be seen by some as a model for practical virtue.  In the earlier pages, Franklin writes of humility and vanity.  As it happens, Franklin is anything but humble: his book by definition is a celebration of himself, and he concludes the autobiography by saying that he should be “proud of his humility.”   Like Dylan, who insists that he has no idea why he has become popular, and tells reporters more than once that his aim is to be completely honest, we can’t really take Franklin seriously.  We know that he’s a self-promoter, and that much of what he tells readers isn’t completely true, but we accept this as readily as we do any other form of advertising.  Whitman and Frost also consciously set out to become famous, if not beloved figures, in spite of such caveats as Frost’s: “It’s for the world to say whether you’re a poet or not.”  Frost knew he was a poet, and we should no more doubt that than we should believe that he was a namby-pamby nature lover.  Whitman’s performance of himself extended to the open-necked shirt and hat that he wears for the fly-leaf portrait in Leaves of Grass, a demonstration of masculinity that undercuts the traditional image of the effete poet.  Dylan’s own careful tailoring belies his image as a rough and ready singer of folk tunes.

Franklin, Whitman, Frost and Dylan I imagine as a motley foursome in a traveling American carnival, promising truth to visitors who line up to take part in what they know will be a confidence game. 

Of Politics, Memory, and Irony

We live in a culture set off by quotation marks. Irony is our defining trope, enveloping my own generation and circumscribing those generations after my own so definitively that I fear many of us are unable to distinguish the truth.  Last night I caught about an hour or so of a PBS documentary on the American folk singer Pete Seeger.  Although this was not my first exposure to Seeger, I found myself listening skeptically to all he had to say: his earnest, direct speech seemed too good to be true.  Surely another agenda must be at work, I thought.  But as the documentary focused on his involvement in the civil rights movement, it occurred to me that he was one of the last of an earlier generation that embarrasses us for its peculiarly forthright nature.  Would a widespread civil rights movement be possible today, I wondered?  Would Americans of different political motives and inclinations be wiling to come together for a common cause in 2008?  It is hard to imagine.

The Obama campaign seems to represent for many Americans a return to positively pronounced political values.  Whereas irony negates definite meaning, his campaign (ostensibly, at least) defines itself by a direct expression of intention, unfettered by the bitter partisanship of the last decade and a half.  The notion that we might link ourselves in a common chain of shared aspirations, simply put, rings true for many of us.  The Clinton campaign, by contrast, seems less affirmative, in part because it appears to be connected to the past.  This is the problem of irony: no matter what is uttered in the moment, the past always awakens to overwhelm the meanings expressed in the present tense.  Thus novelty seems true, and the familiar false.