Our Peculiar Institutions

The similarities are so depressing.  When John C. Calhoun reported on abolition petitions to the Senate in 1837, he struck an indignantly self-righteous pose: “The peculiar institution of the South that, on the maintenance of which the very existence of the slaveholding States depends, is pronounced to be sinful and odious, in the sight of God and man; and this with a systematic design of rendering us hateful in the eyes of the world, with a view to a general crusade against us and our institutions.”   The peculiar institution of slavery, like the peculiar institution of almost completely unregulated gun ownership, distinguished us from the rest of the civilized world.  But our "southern" compatriots, when confronted with the fact that our society lay outside the bounds of the normal, insisted all more hysterically on their right to be “sinful and odious, in the sight of God and man.” Their eyes went red with fury; they bellowed: “As if the mere fact that being reviled by the rest of the first world could cause us to examine ourselves." Just as today they bellow: "As if the fact that the calling on ‘Congress today to act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed officers in every single school in this nation’ is interpreted by our counterparts in the rest of the world as lunacy is bad thing. Indeed!”  

Like the antebellum southern senators, the NRA-delusionals view themselves as persecuted minorities threatened by encroachment.  John C. Calhoun and his friends adhered to the “creed” that “teaches that encroachments must be met at the beginning, and that those who act on the opposite principle are prepared to become slaves. In this case, in particular, I hold concession or compromise to be fatal. If we concede an inch, concession would follow concession compromise would follow compromise, until our ranks would be so broken that effectual resistance would be impossible.”  So monotonously familiar. 

Do we really have to be hamstrung forever by these people and their modern-day counterparts?  Why did we not let them leave in 1861?  Why must they remain a part of our country today?  Why do we not have two countries, one inhabited by business people, farmers, teachers, builders, technicians, professional athletes, doctors, lawyers, ministers, whatever, committed to a society that gives equal opportunities to all and takes care of its less-fortunate members, something we can surely afford to do, and one inhabited by heavily armed unemployed itinerates foraging to scrape a living together who spend all of their spare time trolling the internet with hate-mail to their more enlightened former countrypeople?  Two countries, one committed to excellent public schools, the other to science-free schools patrolled by armed guards (volunteers because there are no taxes to pay them)?  Two countries, one with a well-maintained infrastructure, one of dilapidated cities and impassable roads? Two countries separated by a heavily defended wall?    

Why I love Elizabeth Wurtzel

So Elizabeth Wurtzel is catching scorn again, this time for a meandering assessment of her life as a gorgeous and brilliant unmarried woman of forty-something unprepared for retirement, published as a serious bit of journalism in the New York Magazine. A word dump, complains one blogger. For another, the piece induces winces; its author is someone who refuses to grow up, even though she is alienating her former fans. Still another describes it as a dishonest piece that never addresses its stated purpose, a discussion of the the author's financial crash. If only Wurtzel had written about her messy finances, like she promised she was going to do. Still one more blogger, while only marginally more positive (the piece, she opines, is embarrassing although compulsively readable), gets closer to what I think the thing is really all about: to its cultural significance and what gets missed in all the trashing. As this blogger explains, the piece is not a call to action, a way of making readers grasp the political significance of their personal problems. Rather, its purpose is to make all of us readers feel like the bevy or losers that we are while recognizing how unique Elizabeth Wurtzel is. Yes. I say, yes. This is precisely the purpose of the piece. But my perspective differs from this blogger's in that this is what I value in the piece. Put another way, I love Wurtzel's literary persona because it is the closest thing that we have to a female Jack Kerouac, whose purpose in writing was of course to make his readers feel like pathetic clowns.

Maybe you have to love Kerouac to care about Wurtzel, and I suppose that not everyone finds his solipsistic rambles through his drunken trips to Big Sur and his complete breakdowns as uplifitng as I do. Certainly William F. Buckley didn't - he didn't even bother to conceal his smug disdain during his interiews of the inebriated writer. But all you have to do is watch the interview to understand exactly what Wurtzel is thumbing her nose at and the place from which she draws her strength: the knowledge that at least she will never be the smirking female equivalent of William F. Buckley. Back to Kerouac: that gorgeous nutty tirade where we learn that we are all a pack of sad clowns articulates for me like nothing else the central mystery of life. We are all just yelling into the great nothingness: the only question is whether we do it with bravado and style or Prufrock-like stiltedness. My perduring chagrin regarding Kerouac has always been that he has no female equivalent - where is there a female literary persona who is alcoholic, incoherent, marginal, disorderly, and yet brilliant and, most of all, desirable, a permanent rock star?

And yet, she is there: you just have to switch genres. We have to look to that weird sort of semi-fictitious journalistic thing that pretty much everybody is doing today, the “memoir” essay. Wurtzel could not sell a novel, not in a million years. But neither could Kerouac today. Wurtzel’s genius is to have glommed on to the one genre by means of which she can sell her work. She, like Kerouac, IS her work. And thus she has given us our female Kerouac. I love her, every idiotic, puerile scream of rage. Every piece, major or minor, reminds us that she is out there incarnating the being whose absence I so regretted as a teenager reading the male “greats,” those loutish drunken buffoons (Hemingway, Mailer) who did whatever they wanted and still remained sexy. So I send out my sincerest thanks to Wurtzel. Wouldn’t actually want to be her (and she certainly wouldn’t want to be me), but I need her.

http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/01/elizabeth-wurtzel-on-self-help.html.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/01/07/elizabeth_wurtzel_in_new_york_magazine_confessional_writing_hits_bottom.html.

http://www.rolereboot.org/culture-and-politics/details/2013-01-a-difficult-woman-why-elizabeth-wurtzel-is-a-narciss.

http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/111690/elizabeth-wurtzels-shocking-discreetness.

http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2013/01/08/1412101/elizabeth-wurtzel-in-new-york-magazine-confessional-writing-and-feminism/?mobile=nc.

The Post-Hypocritical Era

For years Republicans’ most entertaining characteristic has been their hypocrisy.  With a major portion of their ethos depending on public defense of a set of values that people in positions of power are inherently unlikely to maintain, they are doomed to be ousted often as hypocrites.  Democrats, on the other hand, less likely to represent religious that demand public declarations of virtue, are never so ludicrous.  You can call Bill Clinton many things, but he is not a hypocrite because he has never told other people how to behave.  There have been so many too-good-to-true moments among Republicans: preachers blasting homosexuality and then getting nabbed with a male escort; stentorian proclamations of the importance of family values from men engaged in illicit affairs (along with the beautiful example of Sarah Palin nattering about abstinence except for her own daughter); members of congress blithering about the stimulus while receiving funds for their own districts. And then they make the talk-show rounds either to repent or to explain why they were not in fact hypocrites, protracting the fun. 

But it looks as if Republicans have found a way of obviating future charges of hypocrisy: refusing to acknowledge the concept of hypocrisy altogether.  If you don’t recognize anything wrong with saying one thing and doing another you effectively neutralize the accusation. 

The Oklahomans are voting on STATE QUESTION NO. 759 LEGISLATIVE REFERENDUM NO. 359 which seeks to make affirmative action, defined as discrimination (presumably against white guys), illegal - except when to refuse affirmative action would result in the loss of federal funds.  Part 3 of the “State Question:” Affirmative action is allowed when needed to keep or obtain federal funds.” This is the equivalent of Ryan going yes, as a matter of fact it is perfectly true that lobbied for and managed to get stimulus funds for Janesville which resulting in growth for the town and that I am now campaigning against the stimulus.  What’s your point?  Ryan of course contorted himself trying to show that he was not in fact a hypocrite, because the charge of hypocrisy remains embarrassing for him.  But it looks as if this won’t last long. If the Oklahomans are any indication, we are on our way to a post-hypocritical world where we  no longer paper over uncomfortable gaps between our words and our actions: because such gaps will no longer be considered uncomfortable.     

Romney, the Republican Body Politic

“This inartfully stated dirty liberal smear is a truthful expression of Mitt Romney’s political philosophy and it is a winner.” Jon Stewart (in reference to Fox’s reaction to the 47% video)

Odd that the conservatives all hate Romney when he is such a beautifully representative “body politic” of their party, incorporating each of its squabbling factions into his arms, stomach, legs, etc.  Just like the medieval image, his arms are the barons, Ayn Rand’s “makers,” the legs are the small business people, and the stomach represents the tea party nutcakes and religious crackpots along with the “takers” too stupid even to recognize themselves in the characterization.  The different sections all have some hideous platform plank that they need to hide from the educated public while at the same time secretly signaling its presence to their own followers (that they want to put an end to Medicare and Social Security; that they want to cut all funding to the arts; that they promote biological illiteracy).  In other words, the Republican body politic is incarnated in Romney chuckling with his rich friends about the moochers and then getting back in front of the camera to drone on about personal responsibility setting us free.  It would take a skill far beyond what any normal person is likely to have to pull off such duplicity while appearing to be direct and honest.  That’s why kings spent so lavishly on ritualistic entries instead of going out to speak among the masses.

 I don’t understand why Republicans don’t just admit that what they have created together is precisely Mitt Romney and go from there.  Surely this “body politic,” that is, a shell built precariously over a set of incompatible groups all snuffling at the same trough, is better than the McCain version, a still visibly human face extended over those same factions, stretched to cracking and in extreme pain.  It was humiliating watching McCain’s humiliation at serving as the head of that body politic.  At least watching Romney is not humiliating.  The Republican party has found its perfect expression.

Midnight in Paris (2011)

An old acquaintance claimed not to like “Midnight in Paris” because it was “too cliché.” Were I the sort of person who says “Hellllloooo-o!” I would have said “Hellllloooo-o! You don’t think maybe that that was the point?”  Or if I had been my daughter I would have said, “Thanks, Captain Obvious.” 

This guy is himself a cliché, a posturing suburbanite who has to tell you about the little jazz bar that he drove up the Village to visit last weekend to remind you that he, unlike you, continues to reject the bourgeois life, that he scorns the dreary pablum of the masses, among which he ranges Woody Allen films. For his type, anything that people like you like is, by definition, cliché, which, in his vocabulary is negative.  But the problem is that Woody Allen characters are ALL parodies of various types of people, which means that, yes, they are clichés; that’s pretty much what parody is. So how does calling a film “cliché” that is supposed to be “cliché” qualify as a criticism?  It’s like calling a romance or an allegory “unrealistic.” You don’t get to attack a piece by observing that it possesses one of the defining characteristics of the genre to which it belongs.   

Agreed, the characters of “Midnight in Paris” are clichés.  The question is whether these add up to appropriate and effective parody (does the thing warrant parody in the first place and is the parody convincing?), which is another issue completely.  But first you have to ask a more fundamental question: what do the characters parody?  In the earlier films, like Annie Hall, it is too clear for even the most oblivious posturers to miss that oblivious posturers are being made fun of (“As a matter of fact, I happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here….”).  "Midnight in Paris" offers the usual cast of ludicrous pontificators, the ones we go to Woody Allen films to see in their latest manifestation.  And it is pretty clear what the Woody Allen narrator figure is up to.  But what type does the nice slightly bumbling Gil, the Owen Wilson character, embody?

You identify with him initially as the wandering American in search of la Grande Culture.  You position yourself against the crass capitalist in-laws, attribute ourselves with real taste, and play along with the “which dead person would you most like to meet?”game.  But as the characters inhabiting the “real world” as opposed to 1920s Paris become increasingly fleshly and self-absorbed, as the pedantic Paul becomes even more ridiculous, and Gil increasingly anxious to live in his fantasy, you begin to notice that you are being made fun of for having bought into Gil's idea of authenticity,  that you have been complicit in peopling the world that we normally inhabit with soulless victims of false consciousness and that what seemed like a cute and harmless trip to 1920s Paris was a sinister prop for your smugness. You have been tricked into the position of my posturing jazz-bar visiting acquaintance: you are a cliché complaining about clichés.

Gil seems innocuously likeable at first.  But he isn’t.  He pretends to cut through the petty distractions of daily life, but it’s just to enact his credibility as a writer in terms of his authenticity against the unwholesome phoniness of poseurs of all types, which means everyone but himself.  He is obnoxious because you are never quite real enough for him, never quite interested enough in the salt of the earth types that inspire his work, your taste is never quite up to his austere standards of purity, you are not quite interested enough in real jazz as opposed to the easily-accessible to the masses version.  He is obnoxious because you realize pretty quickly that his genuineness is just another fiction created to exclude you.  So you start to make fun of him, too. No matter skillfully he acts out his genuineness, he remains a serious attempt to embody the Ernest Hemingway prototype and therefore he is impossible to take completely seriously, always verging into parody. In giving us the myth of himself, Hemingway pretty much destroyed the possibility that a earnest young male writer could ever unselfconsciously trace his literary genealogy with a straight face; the committed young writer, the Stingo, the Henry Miller, all the Ernest Hemingway proxies out to write one true paragraph are pretty much irredeemably dumb. You are in trouble now.  There is no place to go to get real culture (as opposed to the debased bourgeois kind). You can only be ironic.

This is the gimmick of “Midnight in Paris:” you let yourself be turned into a Hemingway wannabe, but you are split - stupidly aware that somebody else has the monopoly of the real, the cool, exclusive even as you claim it for yourself; before you can stop it you have been turned into the plastic other shopping for stupid stuff, saying stuff that show how boring you are.  You recognize that you are just a cliché, an oblivious posturer trapped in the prison house of oblivious posturing.  But if you have been paying attention you are still one step ahead of my posturing jazz-bar visiting acquaintance.  At least you see yourself for what you are.  And that’s better than thinking that you do in fact have a monopoly on authenticity.