Sinking to the Right's Level

My right-wing Facebook acquaintance has posted a couple more funny links in the past few days. The more recent was "Democrats' attack ad sets new low for midterm mud", a column by David Zurawik, the TV critic for the Baltimore Sun, deploring incivility in this election season. The funny part is the writer's complaint that

The Democratic National Commitee [sic] is using the same sort of tactic and logic that Sen. Joe McCarthy used in the 1950s: Level a headline-grabbing and unsubstantiated charge, like the State Department is filled with communists, and then say it is up to the State Department and the employees so charged to prove it is not true.

He says that like it's a bad thing! Putting the burden of proof on the opponent is, of course, typical for political advertising and political "debate", but what really grabbed me was the McCarthy comparison. To the American Right, Joseph McCarthy is an unjustly maligned hero in the fight against World Communism, yet conservatives keep whining about new McCarthyisms of the Left.

"Is this not a direct appeal to fear?" Zurawik cries, rending his garments. Of course, the Republicans would never appeal to fear, and they never have. And if Obama and the Democrats succeed with this appeal to fear, then the Terrorists Have Won and the Homosexuals will marry your son and the Mohammedans will build a mosque on the Sacred Turf of Ground Zero.

I believe this is what is called "concern trolling": a partisan expresses dismay at the bad tactics of his or her opponent, offering sincere advice on how to do better and win the contest. There is one small problem with Zurawik's complaint, though: according to the New York Times article he cites, the Democrats are "outmatched in advertising sponsored by groups that do not have to disclose their donors under a Supreme Court decision issued earlier this year, Mr. Obama has suggested that the sponsors of campaign advertising have sinister motivations." That is "evidence" right there: the Republicans are relying heavily on money whose sources they don't have to disclose. Of course, Obama won election beholden to big money too, so he's in no position to cast the first stone, but neither are the Republicans.

Zurawik concludes:

And this admninistration [sic - doesn't the Sun have spellcheckers?], with this attitude toward unsubstantiated charges and standards of proof, wants to control the press and determine whether a news organization should or should not be considered legitimate.

The first commenter writes "The President of the United States simply cannot - CAN NOT - stoop to these types of tactics. It's beneath him." How dreadful: Obama is sinking to the Right's level. "If the Democrats want to engage in this type of slash-and-burn tactics let Biden or the DNC do it. Not the damned President."

Earlier my acquaintance linked to this column by Peggy Noonan, the Reagan hagiographer and speechwriter whom Roy Edroso calls the Crazy Jesus Lady. She begins by talking about the deterioration of Greece, where, according to an article in Vanity Fair (Vanity Fair!? isn't that one of those liberal-elite house organs?), "'It is simply assumed . . . that anyone who is working for the government is meant to be bribed. . . . Government officials are assumed to steal.'" Wait a minute -- that's something new? That's specifically Greek? "Thus can great nations, great cultures, disintegrate, break into little pieces that no longer cohere into a whole," Noonan intones. (I thought it was because the Greeks were, like, sodomites.) "America is not Greece and knows it's not Greece," thank goodness,

Because Americans weren't born to be accountants. It's not in our DNA! We're supposed to be building the Empire State Building. We were meant, to be romantic about it, and why not, to be a pioneer people, to push on, invent electricity, shoot the bear, bootleg the beer, write the novel, create, reform and modernize great industries. We weren't meant to be neat and tidy record keepers. We weren't meant to wear green eyeshades. We looked better in a coonskin cap!

There is, I think, a powerful rebellion against all this. It isn't a new rebellion – it was part of Goldwaterism, and Reaganism – but it's rising again.

"Write the novel"? Do pioneers in coonskin caps "write the novel"? And since great modern industries need record-keeping, who's going to keep the books if Americans weren't born to be accountants? Foreigners, I suppose. (I should have called this post "Born to Cook the Books.")

For those who wonder why so many people have come to hate, or let me change it to profoundly dislike, "the elites," especially the political elite, here is one reason: It is because they have armies of accountants to do this work for them. Those in power institute the regulations and rules and then hire people to protect them from the burdens and demands of their legislation. There is no congressman passing tax law who doesn't have staffers in his office taking care of his own financial life and who will not, when he moves down the street into the lobbying firm, have an army of accountants to protect him there.

Except that the Tea Party movement is bent on protecting the elites from the tax man. Not the Teabaggers themselves, mind you, most of whom will never see $250,000 a year, the point at which higher marginal rates kick in, but the elites who would consider themselves impoverished if their income dropped within hailing distance of $250,000 a year. The elites George W. Bush called his base, and rightly so. The corporate media elites who fund the Tea Party Tantrum.

This is part of why people dislike "the elites" and why "the elites," especially in Washington, must in turn be responsive, come awake, start to notice. People don't like it when they fear you are subtly, day by day, year by year, changing the personality and character of their nation. They think, "You are ruining our country and insulating yourselves from the ruin. We hate you." And this is understandable, yes?

And Yes I said Yes I do Yes. But Noonan's man Reagan was firmly on the side of those elites, as was George W. Bush. And these, dear readers, are further examples of what my right-wing acquaintance evidently considers "sober" conservatives.

I Need a Dump Truck, Baby, to Unload My Head

Okay, I don't know where to begin so let's just open up my head and see what tumbles out. The matter I'm probably most conscious of not having written about here sooner is the spate of attention given recently to the suicides of several young men -- some in their early teens -- who'd been bullied as fags, whether they were actually gay or not. (That's something that needs to be noticed more, just as girls are bullied as sluts for reasons having nothing to do with their actual behavior.) One, a college student, jumped off a bridge after his roommate secretly recorded him having sex with another guy, and put the video on the internet. These are terrible events, and worthy of everyone's attention. But the attention they've been getting seems to me inadequate, just another media fad which, Columbus-like, "discovers" a continent that was there and full of people all along, and quickly moves to more important matters that concern us all. It's hard to tease out all the strands of this mess, though. For one thing, concern about suicide among youth has erupted into media storms in the US before, in the mid-1980s for example. (That one was an inspiration for the great 1989 movie Heathers.) Where gays were concerned, suicide was a favorite subject for concern-trolling among antigay bigots: Tim Lahaye's notorious 1978 tract The Unhappy Gays stressed our suicidal tendencies as much as the mainstream gay movement does nowadays; gay activist and scholar Eric Rofes attacked the theme in his 1983 book I Thought People Like That Killed Themselves. But there's been a steady drumbeat since then in the American GLBTQ+ π movement, especially its therapeutic wing, about young gay kids and suicide. Intertwined with suicide in the cases before us now, though, is bullying. That's not new either. During the past few years I've begun sampling the academic / therapeutic literature on bullying in general, and while everyone agrees it's a serious problem, no one seems to know what to do about it. (What does seem to work would probably be rejected by enough parents to block it in most schools in the US.) I suspect it has something to do with the concentration of children in large schools, which creates large groups of age mates together and contributes to bullying not only of sissy boys but of girls. I'll come back to that in a moment.) In 1991 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick published a great, furious paper called "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys", which showed how effeminate boys were tormented not only their peers but by adults, and that this assault was justified by the psychiatric profession even after homosexuality itself was officially de-pathologized in 1973. In 1996 Phyllis Burke offered more horrifying evidence in her Gender Shock, which described among other cases a preadolescent boy who was institutionalized and subjected to electroshock in the 1950s for being a sissy. More recently, in Dude, You're a Fag the sociologist C. J. Pascoe wrote about the policing and bullying of boys and girls by elite boys, teachers, and administrators in a California high school, despite the presence in that school of a Gay Straight Alliance and the existence of a California law which forbade discrimination based on sexual orientation. In the current flurry of publicity over these recent suicides, a lot of history has been lost -- some of it disturbingly recent. It's a terrible thing when a fifteen-year-old is so beaten down by the abuse of people around him that he hangs himself, as Billy Lucas did. It's also terrible when a fifteen-year-old kid is shot to death in his eighth-grade classroom by another fifteen-year-old, as Larry King was by Brandon McInerny in 2008. (King's family sued the school for failing to enforce its dress code and make Larry butch up his act, thus blaming the victim rather than the perpetrator; McInerny's defense lawyer concurred.) Or when seventeen-year-old Simmie Williams, wearing a dress, was shot to death at the other end of the country a few weeks later. And it seems that many people have forgotten Matthew Shepard, gay-bashed and left to die exactly 12 years ago, in Wyoming in 1998. Shepard's killing made the cover of Time and was memorialized in TV movies and the documentary play The Laramie Project, as King's made the cover of Newsweek. (A few years later, ABC News helpfully told us that Shepard had told a limousine driver "he was HIV-positive and was considering suicide." Leitmotif!) But that's how it goes in the United States of Amnesia: people are shocked! shocked! to learn that some people won't embrace diversity -- and then it's back to sleep. In a few years there will be another highly publicized suicide or murder, and everyone will run around expressing their horror and shock and making lovely symbolic gestures of support until they get tired of it, and another shiny gewgaw distracts them. Before I wrap this up, though, I want to give credit to the director of our campus Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Student Support Office, who told the student paper the same thing, only (as is his manner) more nicely:

GLBT Student Support Services coordinator Doug Bauder said the deaths are not indications of a disturbing new trend in bullying, but a problem many gay teens have faced for years. “A year ago, someone kept urinating on a student’s door,” Bauder said. “Someone would write ‘faggot’ on the door and then piss on it. Other students that year were repeatedly harassed by phone. The point being, that nasty cases of harassment have happened and continue to happen on this campus.” Bauder said as far as he knows, there has not been an IU student who has committed suicide because of anti-gay bullying in recent years, but incidents such as these have led to IU students transferring to other schools.

More to come.

Nobody Ever Tells Me Anything

An old friend came to Bloomington for a visit yesterday, someone I hadn't seen in many years. We had a great conversation, and got caught up on some of the books, movies, music, and ideas that mattered to us. Among others, I mentioned Gerald Bracey, the tireless critic of misinformation about American schools, and today after my friend had left I looked for Bracey's website to remind her about his work. I also wanted to point her to Bracey's articles for the Huffington Post, which I'd followed until they simply stopped appearing a year ago.

But my search also brought up Bracey's obituary: he'd died in his sleep last October 20, at the age of 69. Damn! Why had no one updated his page at the HuffPost? I eventually found a page by his successor, Susan Ohanian, who paid tribute to him and continues his critiques there -- something else for me to get caught up on. I soon found more obits and some useful links that I evidently hadn't noticed in the past year when I'd done online searches for him.

So, okay, this is year-old news. But it's news to me, and probably to other people as well who needed to know.

Oceania Has Always Been at War with Eurasia

So, Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I've only read his historical novel The War of the End of the World (ET 1984), about the rebellion by an apocalyptic movement in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century. It was readable, but not all that interesting as I remember it; maybe I should reread it, but it's over 500 pages long and I think I'd rather read the contemporary journalist Euclides de Cunha's account Rebellion in the Backlands (originally published in 1902; ET University of Chicago, 1944), if not some of Vargas' other works.

Anyway, my right-wing acquaintance posted a link to an article by Emily Parker in the Wall Street Journal -- hail to the free market, it's behind a subscribers' firewall! -- which trumpets Vargas' work as "a rebuttal to those who believe that fiction exists on the periphery of history and politics."

Now, that's very interesting. Who is Parker referring to? Maybe I will have to go to the library and see if I can find the article in the print edition. (My acquaintance later linked to this article by the senior editor of Reason magazine, a rant on "The Power Politics of the Prize." The writer remarks with unselfconscious irony that "It was unsurprising that in Sweden the choice of Vargas Llosa was viewed through an ideological prism." Not just in Sweden!)

Referring to the general right-wing reaction to the award, Roy Edroso declared:

This is the flip side of the pants-shitting rage that conservatives came out with when Harold Pinter won the Prize in 2005. Everything to them is politics, and for the most part they only get interested in literature when it serves their usual tedious yay-boo.

This is one of those areas where I disagree with Edroso, not just on the nature of art but on conservative attitudes to it. "Conservatives" are as driven by expediency where art is concerned as they are in most matters. It's more like Left-wing art, bad! Right-wing art, good! I suspect that as with C. S. Lewis, whose status as an Oxbridge Professor allowed many fundamentalist Christians to claim that their beliefs were intellectually respectable even though Lewis was not a fundamentalist, and smoked and drank alcohol, American conservatives will bask in Vargas' reflected brilliance even if they couldn't get through one of his books. By the same token, conservatives' contempt for the Swedes and their hateful prize (the communist agitator Martin Luther King! the Kenyan anti-colonialist Obama! the politically correct Toni Morrison!) will be set aside briefly if someone who's supposed to have sound politics wins one.

And let us not forget that one of the foundational complaints of the Culture Wars was that all these Politically Correct Negroes, Women, and Homosexuals were reading politics into the Classics. It's not a specifically right-wing trope: even the very sensible Laura Miller could write in The Magician's Book that

The traditional, reverential study of canonical literature that prevailed in Lewis’s day, and the revolution-mongering of the 1960s and 1970s that supplanted it, gave way to poststructuralist and postmodern theory. Books that past generations regarded as eternal monuments of genius were dragged into the courts of theory and indicted for their ideological inadequacies. Their authors’ personal lives and political beliefs served as evidence against them. Racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia lurked everywhere, often in disguises that required expert decoding.If you wanted to know why the world proved so resistant to the utopian designs of a fading radicalism – and that’s exactly what many academics, having seen such dreams die, wanted to do – you could point to the poisonous bias embodied in even the most celebrated pillars of our culture [170].

I want to talk about this more some other time, but for now it's enough to notice that for conservatives, "racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia" weren't demerits in art, but desirable and indeed necessary. They weren't so much bothered that people noticed the presence of these complexes in the classics, but that they objected to them. Works that didn't embrace those values had always been subjected to political readings anyhow, and found wanting.

Or something. It's really even harder to sort out than that. In his 1992 book Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values the right-wing commentator Michael Medved argued on the one hand that movies are supposed to be entertainment and shouldn't contain messages -- but on the other, that movies should celebrate America and its values and glories and wonders. But that, I guess, is not a message, just divinely revealed truth.

Gore Vidal wrote years ago of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "I daresay as an expression of one man's indomitable spirit in a tyrannous society we must honor if not the art the author. Fortunately the Nobel Prize is designed for just such a purpose. Certainly it is seldom bestowed for literary merit; if it were, Nabokov and not the noble engineer Solzhenitsyn would have received it when the Swedes decided it was Holy Russia's turn to be honored" (Matters of Fact and Of Fiction [Random House, 1977], 19).

And speaking of noble engineers, the science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein used to claim that he was just an entertainer, an storytelling artisan who wrote to earn a living -- but when his publisher asked him to tone down the militarist preaching in what was supposed to be a juvenile (or young-adult) novel, Starship Troopers, Heinlein was furious: he had every right, and indeed a duty, to educate the young. So he took his book to another publisher. Which, of course, he had a right to do, just as I have a right to laugh derisively at his inconsistency about his role as an author. (And let me stress, I am a fan of Heinlein's, having read most of his books more than once, sometimes several times; I just don't take his politics seriously.)

I think that art (and its less respectable sibling "entertainment") is inescapably political, though the issue is complicated by confusion over what "politics" is. It can be expedient to talk as though "politics" refers only to partisan electoral processes, but I don't think many people do so consistently. I agree with Joanna Russ's definition:

... in fact, it seems absolutely impossible to write anything without immediately making all sorts of assumptions about what human nature is, what good and bad behavior consists of, what men ought to be, what women ought to be, which states of mind and character are valuable, which are the opposite, and so on. Once fiction gets beyond the level of minimal technical competence, a reviewer must address these judgments of value. Generally readers don't notice the presence of familiar value judgments in stories, but do notice (and object to) unfamiliar ones as "Political". Hence arises the insistence (in itself a very vehement, political judgment) that art and politics have nothing to do with one another, that artists ought to be "above" politics, and that a critic making political comments about fiction is importing something foreign into an essentially neutral area. But if "politics" means the relations of power that obtain between groups of people, and the way these are concretely embodied in personal relations, social institutions, and received ideas (among which is the idea that art ought not to be political), then such neutrality simply doesn't exist. Fiction which isn't openly polemical or didactic is nonetheless chock-full of politics. If beauty in fiction bears any relations to truth (as Matthew Arnold thought) then the human (including social and political) truth of a piece of fiction matters for aesthetic reasons. To apply rigid, stupid, narrow, political standards to fiction is bad because the standards are rigid, stupid, and narrow, not because they are political [originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1979, 103; reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews (Liverpool University Press, 2007), 165].

But for many American conservatives today, what matters is which team you play on. If one of their guys wins the Nobel, that's one for their team. As Reason editor Michael C. Moynihan concluded, "And this year libertarianism won." Funny, though: aside from a passing reference to Mario Vargas Llosa as "deserving," Moynihan never tries to argue the artistic value of the work, only the author's politics. Maybe he hasn't read him either.

Voulez Vous Cliche Avec Moi?

On a college campus, colored chalk on concrete is a popular communication medium. This morning I saw this written on in chalk on a step riser:

VOTE LIKE YOU MEAN IT

That had to be the Campus Democrats at work. But what does it mean, exactly? If I vote like I don't mean it, my vote won't count? If I do mean it, my vote will count extra? If I'm not serious about voting, the terrorists have won? ... Ah, it's not worth trying to analyze.

(I have no idea what that photo is about; I found it this morning on Facebook. Spread it around like you mean it, OK?)

To Dream the Impossible Dream

I need to be reading tonight (James Church's mystery set in North Korea, A Corpse in the Koryo), so I'm going to be quick if not brief.

Avedon enlarges on an argument she's made before at the Sideshow:

Last night on Virtually Speaking Sundays I tried to make the point that Americans voted for a president who the media told them was "very liberal", a "far-left liberal", an "extreme liberal", and "a socialist", and I think both Culture of Truth and Chris Kendrick missed my point: that no one was representing Obama as "centrist" at the time (except a few liberal bloggers who didn't trust him and were screamed down as "PUMAs" and racists), and Americans, most of whom had no reason to think he was anything other than a liberal (just read most "progressive" blogs of the period if you think his "centrism" was what people believed about him), voted for this guy who was supposed to be unusually far left for a politician. Obama's entire campaign was about his being a sharp break from the kind of right-wing politics Bush represented, and while it was true that McCain's craziness and irresponsibility (especially after he picked Sarah Palin as his runningmate) were what made the real difference on election day, the fact remains that voters were more afraid of having another irresponsible right-winger in the White House than they were of a lefty. While it may be that most people didn't really believe Obama was a socialist, they didn't recognize how far right he was, either. They thought they were electing someone from the left. And remember, most of those voters had planned to vote for Obama long before McCain went over the deep end. The American public did not knowingly choose a "centrist", they chose a lefty.

This fits with something I've noticed before: that Obama's apologists (including the man himself) have gone from vilifying anyone who pointed out that Obama was not a "progressive" but a center-rightist, to vilifying anyone who didn't recognize that he was a center-rightist all along: C'mon, all you silly hippie hard-left utopians in your green fastnesses up on Mount Disdain, did you really think Obama was going to bring about world peace or something? Of course I didn't; but one could (and still can) reliably enrage his groupies merely by pointing out that he was just another Democratic pol, about as progressive as John McCain. Only a cynic would say such a thing.

And here I must make a confession. Despite the fact that I am just such a cynic, Obama has turned out to be much worse than even I expected. Much like George W. Bush, come to think of it.

Here Comes Everybody

Via Lenin's Tomb:



I was also gratified to learn that Lenin doesn't like Zizek either.