To Do Without

1. Hot tubs

2. Intentional dishevelment

3. Irony for its own sake

4. 21 year-old novelists

5. Wikipedia

6. The phrase “At the end of the day”

7. Documents that include bullet points but no paragraphs

8. Zealots

9. Self-consciousness

10. Precocious children

11. Dateline NBC

12. The notion of objectivity in journalism

13. Hot Octobers

14. The fragrance section at department stores

15. “Lite” anything

16. The disappearance of grappling hooks

17. Woolen caps worn in summer

18. Anyone who says “I am not a reader” and means it

19. Deliberate obscurity

20. Oversimplification

Halloween

Like most American children, I loved Halloween, in large part because it seemed like a holiday meant specifically for children.  What self-respecting adult would dress up in a costume and run around begging for candy? 

As it turns out, there are plenty of adults willing and even eager to dress themselves and their properties up.  Each year Halloween seems to widen in its appeal.  I walk around the houses in my own neighborhood and see lawn after lawn covered with fake gravestones and half-buried plastic skeletons.  One house features a kind of chamber of horrors, including dismembered rubber body parts and decapitated heads.

All of this strikes me as especially bizarre when we’re in the midst of a war.  Are these Halloween displays some kind of a subconscious protest ? Or a desperate attempt to put carnage in a fantastical context in order to control it?

Of greater interest are the costumes that adults don for parties at this time of the year.  They are of three types: conceptual (for example, a person dressing as an object or an idea), traditional (farmer, bum, doctor), and adult (naughty nurse, etc.).  The last of these seems to me inspired by a sex-saturated society that is actually ambivalent about it own relationship to sexuality.  The traditional type seems to fall back on the simple design of childhood fantasy to be an adult.  The first (and I am guilty of this) is a plea for others to recognize one’s cleverness.  In each case, the costume derives from insecurity over one’s personal identity and social role.  Am I smart enough?  I am still not sure what to be when I grow up.  How do I deal with grown-up stuff, sex for example?  The costume, rather than disguising, reveals.

United States of Symbolism

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that Americans only appear to dislike poetry — what we don’t recognize is that we are all poets.  What he is really talking about is our love of symbol, embodied in our flag and our monuments and embedded deeply within our consciousness.  While I hate to discourage a poetic sentiment, our tendency for the symbolic is dangerous, and over time confuses surface (symbol) with depth (reality).  In my last post I wrote rather pessimistically about global warming.  Why won’t we come to grips with it?  What makes us believe that it can’t possibly be happening?  I think our failure to see things for what they are may have something to do with Emerson’s claim — we easily mistake representation (in this case, competing representations about the “truth” of our climate) for what’s actually happening.  Thus, Al Gore becomes the symbol of environmental awareness — but as a symbol he means many things to many people: hero, liberal, opportunist, elitist, Chicken Little in a tailored suit.  The medium becomes the message, and so the message isn’t clear. 

Warmer

Is it just me, or is it getting warmer in here?  That’s the question, since virtually no one will read the UN’s latest climate change report.  Even if every literate citizen of the globe were to read the report, it seems unlikely that it would translate into meaningful, coordinated action.  How does a world that refuses to accept the evidence of its own temperature-sensitive skin sort out such a mass of detail and translate it into policy?  And how, more importantly, do we accept the unthinkable: that the planet and most of what crawls over it, swims in it, and grows on it is likely to die.  All the facts in the world will not alter the trajectory of our climate and no  argument will persuade us to reality, for the same reasons that none of us as individuals will fully accept the inevitability of his own death.  And even if were to accept such an inevitability, what then?  By the time we’re born we’ve each of us passed the point of no return.  I hope this isn’t true of the species as a whole, but right now it doesn’t look good.

Narratives of Decline

Socrates corrupted the young and posed a threat to Athens; Galileo challenged the reverential science of the Vatican; Darwin is still upsetting people, mainly Americans.  I suspect that those who objected to these figures in their own times must have been the very same people who would today bemoan the state of our educational system and our culture at large.  Is this simply an inevitability?  Must each generation reach an age at which it looks disapprovingly at the new? Is it a hardening of the neurons to accompany the hardening of the arteries? 

Or, is there something to it?

We’ve lost the relatively literate society we once had — meaning not that fewer people are literate, but that among the literate fewer people read by choice, and even those who are most educated may rarely challenge themselves.  I can’t count the number of colleagues of mine who have complained that they haven’t “got the time to read for leisure.”  Yet, they seem to know all about the latest episode of their favorite television program.  Most disturbingly, the notion of thought itself seems to have vanished.  Who has time to consider anything?  It would be an embarassment to many people to begin a sentence with, “I spent a lot of time recently thinking about…”, if only because it would suggest to others the availability of leisure time.  In a democracy, leisure time is a relic of a long-abandoned system of society and politics, and, as Thorstein Veblein pointed out in The Theory of the Leisure Class, exists as much through its badges and symbols as it does in actuality.  The availability of time itself could be such a symbol.  The loss of time in a hypercompetitive, hypertechnologized culture like ours is an equally important symbol.  Those with time are lazy, disabled, or worse. 

So, are we in decline?  We seem to be working harder than ever.  Maybe we should stop, and see what happens.  Most of us have a standard of living that our grandparents could never have fathomed for themselves.  What do we do with it?  Keep working.  It’s a good way to keep ourselves from reading.

History, Calamity, Gen X

I grew up believing that I was not born into a historical period of particular importance.  My own awareness of momentous historical events was dwarfed by the nostalgia of my parents’ generation for WWII, and my own brother’s more recent memories of the late 1960s.  I was born in 1970, and though anyone born in that year would see the oil crisis, the taking of American hostages in Iran, the decline and collapse of Soviet communism (though not the end of Russian tyranny), it wasn’t until 2001 that history seemed suddenly to transform into the calamitous event that would define the future in spite of anyone’s contrary wishes.

We have at least 3 crises to confront simultaneously: our own obsession over terrorism (which has metamorphosed into a generalized, media-fueled anxiety over everything from actual terrorism to internet child predators), the weather, and water.  There’s not much we can do to change the condition of the last 2. It’s getting warmer and the places where most Americans live have dwindling reservoirs.  How we react to these events, however, is very much related to our response to terror.  9/11 was a calamity – an event over which we had no control – but our reaction to this event has put us on a course that we will regret for a very long time to come.  Our course of action was to attack the wrong enemy.  Will we do the same, are we doing the same when it comes to global warming?   The great historical moment is upon us, and those of my own generation who are at this point deep into their careers and families seem weirdly silent and even invisible.  I know my generation is comparatively small, sandwiched between boomers and Gen Ys, but where has everyone gone?  Even those few of us who are politically active may get a very strange look indeed for saying that global warming should be a top government priority.  It’s no more visible to us than we are to history.

Horizons of the Eye

Now that fall is here and the leaves have begun to turn their deep yellow and red, I don’t mind my long commute to work, especially as it takes me into the county just north of where I live.  That’s where I can actually see trees, and sometimes even whole vistas of stark orange and brown.  There’s not much in the way of this vividness where I live — what trees we have here, close to the city, are obscured by the garish billboards and strip malls that force our eyes away from nature.  It’s hard even to get a sense that there is a horizon when the visual sense is assaulted by tanning parlor and pizza delivery signs lurching over the road.

I remember some time ago Prince Charles mounting a campaign against some of the contemporary architecture that he though was a blight on the aesthetic of London.  Some people accused him of moralizing, since he seemed to believe that constructed spaces could actually influence people’s feelings and thoughts.  I don’t disagree with him, and I wonder how people in my neighborhood would feel if they weren’t bombarded by the ugly screaming images that await them just down a few blocks and over on the main highway.  Instead our trees are relegated to city parks, our horizons restricted by where we can drive.

Of Rednecks and America I Sing

Yesterday I heard a song on the radio entitled “Redneck Yachtclub.”  The song describes a group of friends who float their boats out to the middle of a lake and spend the summer having one long party.  Their party, which they name “Redneck Yachtclub,” is distinguished by its openness — it has “no membership dues,” as the lyrics put it; moreover, their club allows them “to get loud all summer long,” suggesting that there are no rules of behavior that members are bound to follow.  Being a redneck seems to have something to do with making oneself obvious and visible to the world, best done by literal or figurative screaming.  The car window stickers that read “Redneck” in bold colors are a textual scream, and an announcement of one’s identity in a “club” that is at once open to all but still exclusive enough to have its own specific designation. 

 Not just anyone calls himself a redneck.  The term connotes bad manners, ill health, ignorance, and deliberate obnoxiousness, the last of which is mistaken for active membership in a democracy.  Noise becomes the marker of one’s politics.  Unable to negotiate a complicated social and political structure, which would traditionally require one to distinguish private behavior from a public face, the redneck (and here I do not mean Southerners or poor people generally) enters the public sphere with the dirt of his own yard on his sleeve.  The redneck condemns all that would ask of him grace, knowledge, patience or circumspection.  He recognizes his essential freedom to act out in the world and does so without considering consequence.  Freedom is the thing, not a negotiated liberty.  Never mind that the people around your obnoxious flotilla of beer drinking buddies on the lake are trying to have a quiet time of it.  We’re here, we’ve got beer, get used to it.

Elections, Expertise, and Democracy

I couldn’t help but dismiss last week’s speculation that Al Gore might decide to run for President now that he’s won the Nobel Prize, as though having won would somehow validate his legitimacy as a candidate in the minds of voters.  For voters in a general election, the Prize might make him suspicious — after all, he already is a self-proclaimed expert on global warming.  There’s not much that Americans dislike more than expertise.  It smacks of elitism, and most particularly the possibility that somebody else knows more than they do.  For most of us, it’s the authentic feeling, translated into the fervent opining of the talk radio phone call, that’s got the real ring of truth to it  It’s what Stephen Colbert has referred to as “truthiness” — the almost deliberate ignoring of demonstrable fact — that successful politicians must appeal to (see Drew Westen’s book, The Political Brain.)

As Richard Hofstadter pointed out in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, much of this is owing to the evangelical strain in American culture.  As far back as the Great Awakening, preachers exhorted the faithful to establish as individual relationship with God, and to experience that relationship through physically felt sensation, or what Jonathan Edwards referred to as “inner sweetness.”  The resulting distrust of outside authorities that would dictate the shape of a person’s faith and the dismissal of rationality set the stage for our public discourse today.  As Eugene O’Neill wrote in Long Day’s Journey into Night: “Facts don’t mean a thing. What you want to believe, that’s the only truth.”

Sopranos and American Culture

First, a change to my last post: I neglected to mention Cormac McCarthy, whose work certainly bears stylistic and thematic similarities to Faulkner, especially in Blood Meridian.

As for today’s subject –

Because I don’t have cable television, I have to rely on DVD releases of one of my favorite programs, The Sopranos.  I’m eager for 10/23, when the final episodes become available.  The Sopranos illustrates the very conflicts and themes that distinguish contemporary American culture, and perhaps even our culture as seen in the long view: the crisis of the individual as he faces the confusion of public and private roles, and what the scholar of American culture Richard Slotkin called “regeneration through violence.”  (See his book of the same name.)

Tony Soprano, who lives in the kind of suburban McMansion that became popular in the early 1990s, is at heart a child whose dreams of a happy existence are impossible to realize because he refuses to accept the split between his private sense of self and his working identity.  Tony’s “job,” of course, is ostensibly atypical of the roles most American men and women take on at their workplaces; like all of us, however, he carries the baggage of family with him wherever he goes.  Whether assigning shakedown collections to his minions in the backroom of the Bada Bing strip club or sending the order to have a disloyal member of his mafia “family” killed, he constantly seeks an equilibrium between his private emotional states and his outward, public activities.  This problem is compounded by the secret nature of his work — everyone knows what Tony does for a living, yet neither he nor his partners in crime can openly admit it.  They act on the world and in the common sphere by exploiting personal relationships.  This leads Tony to a crisis of authenticity: where does his true self lie?  At home, with his “real” family, or outside, with his surrogate family?

The show’s popularity, I think, is owing to its brilliant exploitation of this internal conflict, but certainly also to its violence.  The figure of the Mafia tough today is rather like the figure of the Western hero in the films and books of the 20th century.  Both attempt to put their worlds into order through the act of killing rather than the act of creation.  We recognize this tendency without even realizing it; as Americans, we love it.  The Western itself has its roots, according to Richard Slotkin, in the captivity narratives of the 17th century.  The English colonizers of North America found themselves in amost constant conflict with local Natives.  When English men and women were taken captive, as many were during King Philip’s War (see Jill Lepore’s The Name of War), narratives of their experience emerged.  These narratives were not only about the experience of the individual, but also about that of the entire community.  Private and public identity were thus fused together.  The triumph of the individual and the community over the enemy often emerged as a result of a violent act or series of acts. 

The war on terror is also a symptom of this tendency.  As a nation and as individuals we were personally aggrieved by the attacks on September 11th.  The only way to restore ourselves to a prior state was to go to war.  Now we see the conflict that lurks below the invasion of Iraq.  As individuals we abhor the death toll; as a public collective we may still recognize, regardless of our other feelings about the war’s rightness of justification, that we have entered into a sphere where we must act responsibly.  Just as Tony agonizes over “taking care of” a disloyal member of the family yet gives the death order in spite of this agony, we ratify destruction because we think it will lead to some greater good.