Priest, confessor, bureaucrat, alone
in a warehouse full of ordinary dreams,
aspirations and unexpurgated streams
of consciousness, all context, lacking tone
or affect, notices a bird has flown
in through a window, perched among the beams,
black-beaked and tiny, singing, it seems
semi-demiurgic, though a known
and common type, taxonomized and quite
familiar; still, indoors, becomes a kind
of miracle, unseen except by this
thin-wristed man beneath fluorescent light,
glorious excess born of a bored mind,
transubstantiated into bliss.
Author: jacobbacharach
No Homo Economicus
Conspiracy and the Occult, Economy, Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and PoliticsAs a rule, I’m suspicious of economic explanations, because I regard economics as a fraudulent pseudoscience, although in my more charitable moments, I allow that it might just be a kind of Becherian proto-science, a vast expanse of arithmetical phlogiston that our descendant generations will regard as very nearly quaint. The civic discourse of the present era is completely dominated by economics; young pundits with degrees in philosophy begin to be taken seriously only when they start dropping its jargony solecisms into their op-eds. Economics actually claims to be both a behavioral science and a physical one, even though it appears to believe that its natural laws derive from the word problems at the back of the book than vice versa, and anyway it has a record of near total failure at figuring out why things actually happened or predicting if and when they will happen again. All that said, I’m going to propose a sort of economic explanation for the fact that the government just can’t stop spying on us.
I think we need to see programs like the NSA’s immense and unanswerable but also totally wasteful and unproductive spying program as a form of rent-seeking. That isn’t to say that it isn’t also weird, evil, sinister, and creepily totalitarian, and it isn’t necessarily to claim that it’s a sign of gross incompetence either. For instance: rent-seeking investment banks are very good at what they do, which is balling up other people’s money, auctioning it off, and charging everyone for the privilege of having someone else direct their losses. They are useless, unproductive, and destructive, and they can seem incompetent if you take as their task the purported reason for such institutions to exist, which is to generate wealth for their clients while directing their clients’ wealth toward investment in productive enterprise, but if you understand them for what they actually are, understand that the purpose of Goldman Sachs is to rob people to grow Goldman Sachs, then their incompetence begins to seem a little more like a form of genius.
Well, the surveillance state is at its root—and this isn’t to discount all of its other more nefarious acts and ends, but simply to regard them as symptomatic rather than causal—an ongoing argument for its own existence, a self-replicating machine whose only real purpose is itself. What on earth will the government do with all this data? Well, it will hire more people and discover that this particular dataset is broad but shallow which will necessitate gathering billions more bytes which will continue to have precisely the same effect of necessitating more, more, and more until, hopefully, one day the machines become actually intelligent and decide to devote their considerable processing power to something more necessary, like playing chess or writing metrical poetry.
Some of us nerds recognize it: information is still sufficiently scarce and finite to function as a kind of currency, and the spies are just taking a commission at every point of exchange, but at least when VISA does it with the old money some satisfied customer may walk away from some satisfied merchant. You might consider the NSA program, and others like it, as a kind of information tax without benefits—it’s an absolute requirement, universal and un-appealable, but it doesn’t even cold patch a pothole on the information superhighway. When Google maps your brain into a computer you might get a coupon out of it, some provision of service in exchange. In the meantime, while I believe that we should fight and protest these intrusions on our privacy and personhood, I also come down on the vaguely optimistic side; just as JP Morgan has no idea what to do with its billions other than make more billions, I don’t think the government can do much with this titanic volume of information but add to it. It is morally but not practically outrageous; it’s an exercise of mere accumulation, which isn’t a sign of malevolence so much as of a chronic and probably terminal decadence.
Peeping Thomism
Culture, Education, MediaAt some point in your youth, someone warned you that “this, young man, is going to go on your permanent record.” In my case, it was a high school vice principal. I’ve forgotten the infraction, but I remember the warning. The vice principal wasn’t a bad man, but he was a bit of martinet. That’s probably a part of the job description. I knew plenty of teachers and principals who disciplined out of impatience or because of a poorly hidden streak of petty sadism, but Mr. R. wasn’t one of them; I think he held an abiding belief that structure and direction were good—not just practically good, but universally and categorically so. Most disciplinarians just believe that children, that people, are rotten. Mr. R. believed that we were basically good, just stupid. The diagnosis was correct if the prescription was wrong, and in any event he was able to moderate his meanness, especially for the hard luck kids. That, I think, was the real mark of his moral character. He was never vindictive, and while I disagree with his code to this day, he applied it justly, which is to say, unequally, and contingent on the circumstances. American society often views harsh punishment as a virtue, and when we complain about the unequal application of the rules, we usually mean that rich guys get off too easy, but Mr. R. knew that the real problem is poor guys get it too hard. Man, did we hate that SOB, but we also thought he was kind of okay. Kids are sophisticated like that, more so than adults.
Anyway, the permanent record was one of those semi-mythical creatures that you publicly dismissed while privately fearing when you were camping in the woods and the fire had burned down. I was a rich kid in that poor town, in public school mostly because of politics related to my father’s job, and most high school discipline rolled right off me. It was a given that I’d graduate at the top of my class and decamp for some fancy college, which, indeed, I did. But I do remember the permanent record thing making me ever so slightly nervous, and if I laughed about it to my friends, then I still privately fretted that some ambitious admissions officer would haul up my file and mark me off with a red X for some past minor infraction. Now, of course, kids really do get a permanent record because schools have followed the general trend of American social hysteria and started calling the cops for the slightest infraction; detention is now a misdemeanor, and so on. That’s a shame, because the permanent record ought to be as laughable now as it ever was. Do you remember yourself when you were sixteen? Many descriptors come to mind, but fully formed isn’t one of them.
As if that weren’t bad enough, that idea that one ought to be branded with one’s own youth like a poorly considered neck tattoo, we now find not only kids, but adults (especially new adults) getting constantly dinged with the dire warning that Social Media Lasts Forever. I think this is probably patently untrue in a purely physical sense; it strikes me as probable that fifty years from now, the whole electronic record of our era will be largely lost in a sea of forgotten passwords, proprietary systems, faulty hardware, and compatibility issues. But it should also be untrue in, dare I say it, the moral sense. Educators and employers are constantly yelling that you young people have an affirmative responsibility not to post anything where a teacher or principal or, worst of all, boss or potential boss might find it, which gets the ethics of the situation precisely backwards. It isn’t your sister’s obligation to hide her diary; it’s yours not to read it. Your boyfriend shouldn’t have to close all his browser windows and hide his cell phone; you ought to refrain from checking his history and reading his texts. But, says the Director of Human Resources and the Career Counselor, social media is public; you’re putting it out there. Yes, well, then I’m sure you won’t mind if I join you guys at happy hour with this flip-cam and a stenographer. Privacy isn’t the responsibility of individuals to squirrel away secrets; it’s the decency of individuals to leave other’s lives alone.
At some point, employers will have to face up to the unavoidability of hiring people whose first Google image is a shirtless selfie. Demographics will demand it. They’ll have to get used to it just as surely as they’ll have to get used to nose rings and, god help us, neck tattoos. It’s a shame, though, that it’ll be compulsory and reluctant. We should no more have to censor our electronic conversations than whisper in a restaurant. I suspect that as my own generation and the one after it finally manage to boot the Boomers from their tenacious hold on the steering wheel of this civilization that they’ve piloted ineluctably and inexorably toward the shoals, all the while whining about the lazy passengers, we will better understand this, and be better, and more understanding. And I hope that the kids today will refuse to heed the warnings and insist on making a world in which what is actually unacceptable is to make one’s public life little more than series of polite and carefully maintained lies.
As I Indicated, Admiral, the Thought Had Not Occurred to Me
Art, Culture, Media, MoviesThis review is going to reveal Benedict Cumberbatch’s “secret identity.” The quotation marks are there to indicate that his character is neither secret, nor has an identity, unless hard puncher counts as an identity. I bet you never in your wildest imagination thought that Star Trek would end like this, with Spock karate-chopping a bad guy on top of a flying garbage truck in the middle of a bad CGI Star Wars set? I mean, sure, Star Trek had plenty of punching, but geez, man, it’s like, it’s like as if you hired, oh, I don’t know, Baz Luhrmann to make the Great Gatsby and he made it all about parties and clothes and dancing. Oh. Oh.
Like everything Damon Lindelof gets his hands on, Star Trek Subtitle Using Variation on the Word Dark begins with a MacGuffin, muddles into a non sequitur, and ends in a mess. Who hires this guy? My own editor noticed that a draft of my novel twice used fiancé instead of girlfriend, so presumably there’s someone, somewhere who could have read the script and told Lindelof and Abrams that none of this makes any sense. They could have very easily called back the original “Space Seed” episode, set it along the Klingon neutral zone at a moment of high tension when the Federation was searching for a strategic military advantage and had a fine, intelligent movie that also had punching, Klingons, and space battles. You could have had Khan as an object of fear, reverence, and intrigue. Kirk admires his prowess and poise; McCoy his immunological whatever; Spock his astonishing intellect; Uhura his, uh, substantial Cumberbatch. He would divide them and conquer them, but then, rediscovering their bonds of friendship and duty, the crew would defeat him, because there is no eugenically superior superman in TEAM. And hell, you could even throw in a necessary tactical alliance with the Klingons to set the stage for the Cold War plot that was the backbone of the Klingon storyline in TOS and the original films.
Instead. Now look, I’m going to spare you the “Where are the orbital defenses?” and “How come the Klingons didn’t detect ‘em on the long range scanners?” I’m gonna spare you the “How far away is Kronos even at high warp?” and “What’s the effective range on that communicator again?” You may, after all, think that the main storytelling conceit of Star Trek is faster-than-light travel, but really, the main conceit is that a spacefaring civilization resembles Britain, each planet an island, its Starfleet, literally, and Admiralty. Forget all that. Despite its science fiction trappings, Star Trek is really a procedural drama. Starfleet is just its convenient institution.
Yes, you heard it here first. The man who owes Gene Roddenberry the greatest debt is Dick Wolf. Star Trek is the weekly tale of people working within an institution. This, by the way, is also its principal connection to political liberalism—not its easily-dispensed-with humanism nor its integrated crew; rather, its commitment to a universe run, for the better, by enlightened bureaucrats. The prototypical Star Trek plot is a conundrum—cultural, technological, legal—that must be solved through the application of area expertise within the confines of organizational rules and the occasional call of a higher morality or duty. It’s Law and Order in space. Act 1: unexplained thing. Act 2: investigation and preliminary diagnosis. Act 3: unexpected difficulty, delay, or complication, sometimes compounded by institutional resistance. Act 4: renewed investigation, sometimes unorthodox, leading to unexpected solution. Act 5: resolution, explanation.
People and institutions exist in Abrams’ & Lindelof’s reimagined universe, but they’re just sort of there, clogging the frame until the next face punch. I don’t object to action in Star Trek; but I do object to getting rid of the old two-fister:
As with CGI, advances in fight choreography have proceeded right past the point of more gripping physical realism and into the realm of the unbelievably hyper-real. The action is so fast, the movement so “kinetic,” to borrow the Hollywood usage, that it appears faker than the stagey fisticuffs of the old TV series. These guys are naval officers, right? Not ninjas. They pilot starships; this isn’t The Matrix. Hey, remember this little rebooted show called Battlestar Galactica, how it imagined a really gripping sort of space combat—before, anyway, it got bogged down in crackpot Lindelofian metaphysics? Remember Star Trek: First Contact. Yeah, it sucked, but the opening skirmish with the Borg vessel was pretty damn cool, AMIRIGHT? Well, whatever. Let’s just have these guys run down some hallways with guns and punch each other.
So the camera certainly moves around a lot, but there’s nothing doing. Dialogue is declaimed against a clamoring background of exploding noise, and when it does rise to the level of your noticing, it’s less the sound of voices than the smell of ham. “You are my superior officer. You are also my friend. I have been and always shall be yours,” Spock tells Kirk at the beginning of The Wrath of Khan. It is a quiet moment that comes back at the very end of the movie without a flashing arrow; here, it’s all shouted above the din. “YOU ARE MY FRIEND! WE ARE FAMILY!” It’s a disco inferno. Any pathos is in any event squished beneath the steamroller of incomprehensible plot developments, as Khan is first a terrorist, then a fugitive, then a pawn, then maybe a terrorist again, then fighting Spock on a flying thingamajig. Kirk does nothing of consequence, which is just as well, because Chris Pine, while serviceable, is no match for Benedict’s genetic, uh, endowment. Zach Quinto is a better actor, but because he never convincingly fell in love with Kirk or Khan, his jilted anger is incongruous at best. And once more for the cheap seats, it appears to take place deep within the CPUs of Skywalker Ranch.
It’s all a terrible waste of good production design and some nice costume choices (love that hat, Zach; CALL ME). Meanwhile, I know we are meant to believe that the immense crap funnel of our current cinema to be an undistorted reflection of our culture’s degraded taste, and that may be so, but I yet believe that if we must have junk, it can at least taste sweeter and not smell so awfully past its expiration date.
Have Plot, Will Unravel
Books and Literature, CultureAlthough I’ve called him morally obtuse, I can’t bring myself to dislike Ezra Klein. He may be just another young hack on the make in Washington, a careerist and a faddish liberal, but unlike so many of his peers, there seems to be something accidental about his success, something less gratuitous and self-willed. But it still came too early, and it ruined him. He ought to be the most popular teacher at a middle school in Columbus, or the director of a nice Reform summer camp, underpaid but decent, one of those rare grown-ups we all remember as having steadied us through the awful middle passage of our youth. Instead, he writes for the Washington Post and makes speeches at think tanks. I can’t begrudge him his success, but I do almost pity him for it; he’ll run faster, stretch his arms father . . . . And one fine morning—
Anyway, Klein’s writing for the Post is drudgery; the interior monologue of staff-level Washington is unceasingly banal, a pseudo-economic pidgin of legalese and bad PR-firm argot so divorced from ordinary human concern or communication as to become a form of language-looking gibberish, lorem ipsum. But a friend of mine on twitter forwarded me his brief, recent musings on Gatsby, presumably occasioned by the arrival of a new, gaudy film, and if only because it occasioned a re-reading, I had to reply.
I don’t care for the phrase, great American novel, but you can’t escape it; it exists, at very least, as a genre, albeit more aspirational than actual. American literature is littered with the wreckage of titanic Summa Theologiæ, the preferred template. Fitzgerald himself attempted that sort of thing, and isn’t it interesting that his only truly remembered work is a mere 50,000 words that could nearly make Katherine Mansfield look loquacious? Even so, no one can quite agree what it is, or what it’s about; the fact that so slim a work can mean so many things to so many people, admirers and detractors alike, suggests something at once uncanny and ineffable about it, something inevitable, a word to which I’ll return
Gatsby isn’t my favorite novel, and you certainly won’t hear me, as you’ll hear some of its more hyperbolic admirers, call it perfect. There are a few perfect pieces of art in the world, but none of them is a novel. Fitzgerald’s lyricism sometimes gets the best of him, and he’s obviously burdened with some of the prejudices of his time, although we can never know which of these belong to the author and which of them to Nick Carraway. But you still won’t find a more well wrought or more finely honed book; 50,000 words seems like a trifle, but 50,000 words sustaining so singular a voice seem, to another writer, as impossible and daring as a guy walking a tightrope over the Grand Canyon.
So. What to make of Klein’s complaint?
I love the writing and, for that matter most of the book. What I can’t stand is the finale.
The book’s denouement is a series of ever-more insane coincidences. Gatsby and Daisy hit a pedestrian. The pedestrian proves to be Tom’s mistress. Tom persuades her husband that Gatsby was driving the car. The husband kills Gatsby then kills himself.
That’s fine for fiction. Dark Knight Rises wasn’t very believable, either. But it’s a problem for a book with Something To Say. The end of the Great Gatsby doesn’t feel inevitable. It feels unlikely. And thus its lessons don’t mean much.
This, first of all, is a misreading, and I wonder if it isn’t in part the result of a bad memory for the particular details of the story. There are some well-known problems with the internal chronology of Gatsby, but this bit of plotting builds almost from the beginning. The connection between Tom, Wilson, and Wilson’s wife (Tom’s mistress) Myrtle isn’t just happenstance; the Wilson residence is on the main route between tony Long Island and the city; and the tragic inevitability of Myrtle’s death isn’t that Gatsby and Daisy run down some pedestrian who, mirabile visu, just happens to turn out to be Myrtle, but rather that Myrtle has been waiting and watching for Gatsby’s car, which she mistakenly believes to belong to Tom Buchanan, and that she runs out into traffic to try to stop it. If the line sets are visible and the first electric peeks out from behind the black border, still, the knowledge that you’re in the theater does not a deus ex machina make.
Hey, though, opinions may differ; reasonable adults may disagree. Of all the artifices of narrative fiction, plot is the most unnatural and the most unreal. One author’s elegant resolution is another man’s overwrought coincidence, and I’m not going to ding Klein too hard for falling into the latter camp, even if I do half suspect that it’s the result of a flawed recollection from a not-recent-enough reading. What I will toss tomatoes about, however, are the “lessons.”
The idea that Gatsby is a sort of sociological survey of the gilded age, with the characters as archetypes playing out changing ideas about wealth, status, and morality is an easy one, and wrong. I’m sorry, but you’ve mistaken this novel’s setting for its theme, the scenery for the schema. Fitzgerald was undoubtedly interested in money, class, and the passing away of the old guard in the face of something new, but all this is the background against which something more human moves. Gatsby is sometimes criticized for a lack of psychological depth, but this, like the desire for a less coincidental plot, is a kind of prudishness and a just-so belief about what a novel ought to be; it sounds like a nice old lady looking at a piece of great modern art and sighing, But what’s it a picture of? If Gatsby lacks some of the more ostentatious experimentation with perspective and consciousness that characterized high modernism, Fitzgerald did dare to challenge the convention that every character in a book must act in Cartesian accord with his own internal machinery. Talk about coincidence! Part of the magic in Gatsby is that its characters can’t be easily explained or psychoanalyzed. Like I said: human.
Klein says:
As Nick Gillespie writes, most of the Great Gatsby perceptively sketches a moment in which new money, new immigrants, a new economy, and new social mores were overwhelming the old order. The old order triumphs in the book, but only with the help of authorial providence. Absent that car ride, Gatsby’s story might have proven a happy one. And 88-years-later, when the film is being made by a guy named Baz Luhrmann in a country run by a guy named Barack Hussein Obama, we know who really won, and it isn’t Tom. F. Scott Fitzgerald had it right, at least up until the end.
We can leave aside for a moment the cheap teleology of social progress at the end, there, and the Nick Gillespie piece he cites is really just about Nick Gillespie, but right in the center of the paragraph is that same odd complaint, repeated. The story, absent “authorial providence,” a happy one? Once more, I’ve got to wonder when he last read the book. Gatsby’s and Daisy’s affair ends that day in the city, when she admits that she also loved her husband. She will stay with him. She won’t say that she never loved him; she can’t. When Tom tells the room that he and Daisy have been through things that none of them will understand, it’s devastating because it’s true. When, later, after the accident, we see Tom and Daisy through the window at the table together, his hand on hers, talking quietly, conspirators to the end, we are meant to realize that this was the only possible outcome with or without the accident. (As for the idea that Tom “wins,” that the book “old order triumphs,” well; Tom and Daisy flee, and Nick goes home as well. An odd victory, no?)
Tom, Daisy, Gatsby, Jordan, the Wilsons, Wolfshiem—the title and Fitzgerald’s skillful deflection throughout obscure the fact that this is a book about Nick Carraway, who gives his voice and consciousness to the novel. Nick is an extraordinary character; poetic, ironic, sexually ambiguous, a liar—and Gatsby is a Bildungsroman of disappointment. He goes East to seek a fortune independent of his past, and it ends in failure and regret. The beatific image of the new world and the boundless future beckons only as a false promise; the present only ever becomes the past, and the future eternally recedes from us. It’s a terribly sad and pessimistic vision, although one with the ring of truth, and in a time when “a guy named Baz Lurhman” cranks out entertainments whose thin veneer of contemporaneity masks a devastating nostalgia for a vanished past and “a country run by a guy named Barack Hussein Obama” likewise bubbles in the gloriously false promise of its own lost preeminence, I’d say a poet of disappointment is very much what we need.
The Coincidental Fundamentalist
Books and Literature, Conspiracy and the Occult, CultureI’m about to finish revising my novel, The Bend of the World, which I hesitatingly call my first novel, because really, it’s my third. I wrote the first (mostly) during my senior year at Oberlin and my second a couple of years later when I was back in Pittsburgh and insinuating myself professionally into the world of arts management—still my day job. They had in common only that they were gay (I mean that in both the sexual and the adolescent insult sense) and terrible. The first was called The Atlas of the End of the World, and yes, I ripped off that title for my current work, since it was one of the few redeeming qualities. It also had a pretty good opening line: “That night we drove as if the driving would save him.” Ok, maybe a little histrionic, but not bad for a twenty-two-year-old. It was a bad pastiche of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Berlin Stories and Portrait of the Artist—I’m trying to make a joke about my Stephen Hero being a Stephen Zero. And failing.
My second novel was called Be That As It May, and once again, the title is the closest it gets to possessing a redeeming quality. Ah, no, to be fair, it has one good scene involving a drunken cop and a small-town gay bar. It also has a couple of really bad sex scenes, one in a swimming pool; sort of a fanfictive prefiguring of some of the hotter passages in Call Me By Your Name. My boyfriend’s first comment after reading the first draft of my new book was, “It’s not as sexy as your last one.” This was a compliment.
To my own credit, I guess, I pretty quickly recognized these first two forays as shitty work, although I did send the opening chapter of the second to a few agents and am to this day a little staggered by the generous restraint required to reply with a mere this isn’t really the sort of thing we’re looking for right now. I then spent a few years forgoing fiction altogether, until I started noodling around with my ongoing novel, whose opening quarter I think I rewrote six or seven times, and whose latter half kept wandering off. Literally. Like, the characters kept going to North Carolina, Florida, New York. They had no business going to any of these places, but I couldn’t stop them. I really wanted Johnny to give a talk on UFOlogy at a lousy convention center in Central Florida. I really wanted a conspiracy to involve the lighthouse at Cape Hatteras. Or maybe more to the point, Johnny really wanted to give that talk, and that lighthouse really wants to be part of a conspiracy. Snip, snip.
A confession. I’ve always been annoyed by writers and artists who yak on about their process, a word I associate with a cloudy concoction made of one part self-indulgence and one part self-doubt, but long before my book appears to the public, I’m beginning to see how unavoidable it is, and how it must pay to have an anecdote at the ready. My friends and relatives keep asking me what it’s like to write a book, and I don’t actually know what to say. I imagine myself gazing off into the middle distance as a NPR personality warbles in my ear, then answering bemusedly, “Well, Steve, it’s like . . . writing a book.” In fact, once I managed to get myself a deadline thanks to the hard work of an editor and an agent who seem to think that this thing I’ve made is actually somewhat better than not half bad, I found the work of it a pleasure and joy, although I can now say, months into editing, that I am getting awfully tired of the little fucker. As to what that work consisted off, well, I just don’t know. Of writing? And as for what it all means? Uh, my Corporate Sponsors have asked me to emphasize the following message: It Is What It Is.
Hang with me, guys. Thesis: there exists a desire to see the process of creating a novel through the lens of what we popularly suppose a novel is. There are preexisting narrative and psychological expectations. There’s an expected shape to the thing. Or: the form of the work is supposed to mirror the form of the work. The story of the writer’s encounter with his own writing should follow a psychic and temporal line. The author should undergo an experience of self-revision, emerging from the ordeal altered by the events. His process should itself be a story. He should, in fact, be a character. Well, as much as I bitch about the expectations of narrative and the deranging influence of too much realism, my book does have a plot of sorts, but you won’t be surprised to learn that I have an equally hard time answering the question, “What’s it about?” I don’t really know. The conspiracy narrative was the formal model. Everything ought to seem uncannily connected, but with the indelible sense that it’s all just coincident. Actually, this is my personal theory of narrative in any event: a conspiracy theory of reality.
Contre le cinéma
Culture, Media, War and PoliticsBy the end of the week, I found myself wondering if a better society wouldn’t have kept Boston open and shuttered CNN. Did we really shut down an entire city to catch one wounded boy? Have we overextended the First Amendment in granting the press effective immunity from responsibility even as we become a nation intent on revoking the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth? There’s a temptation to read the scenes of deserted streets and paramilitary police as teasers for the sort of incipient totalitarianism, and maybe it is, but as an aficionado of conspiracy literature, I find that this analysis tends inevitably toward the conspiracist’s biggest flaw, which is to over-read intention and to presume that history has a narrative.
If you asked me to describe in one word a culture that dispatches the black helicopters and assault vehicles in response to a dyadic pair of wayward, violent youth, I’d say, decadent. London kept the dance halls open during the Blitz, but Boston shut Fenway because of a pipe bomb. There’s some truth to the claim that Americans are uniquely deferential to authority and prone to authoritarian solutions, but we’ve also become a culture that’s largely adopted the values of an aristocracy: we want perfect safety and perfect comfort, although we’ll complain mightily about the cost of service these days. For all the John McCains looking up from their thin soup to demand that we Torquemadize the surviving brother in order to discover whether or not this was all part of Cobra Commander’s plot, the predominant sentiment behind the desire to prevent the kid from “lawyering up” and fitting him for concrete boots instead seems to me to be that putting him to trial would just be such a bother, and so expensive.
For all the praetorian hoo-hah on display all day in Boston, the thing that broke the case was some dude going outside to burn a square once the cops gave everyone the all clear. What purpose, then, did the lockdown serve? Well, yinz ever hear of a little thing called The Society of Spectacle? A culture of universal surveillance is a karaoke civilization; the lockdown of Boston was demanded by its own image; CNN’s et al.’s fake reporting wasn’t just the result of an immense, confused official response, but also in a very real sense its cause. Not for nothing does the footage resemble an action flick. The line between reality and fantasy is blurring, yes, but which is really shading into the other?
And this, too, is why the subsequent investigation and trial seem so odd to so many Americans. It reeks of anticlimax. How many more goodbyes do we have to endure before Cate Blanchett and Ian McKellan pack the Bagginses off from Middle Earth? Isn’t there something better on? One reason Brave New World holds up better than 1984 is that Huxley had the good humor to pick a winner, not a boot stomping on a human face forever, but orgy-porgy; not violence and death as a threat, but violence and death as entertainment. Hey, do you guys wonder why something as basically dull as The Hunger Games is so extraordinarily popular. It’s not because it’s fantastical. It’s because it’s recognizable.
We can no more tolerate a plodding police investigation and boring trial than we can stand a sensibly edited fight scene in a movie. It isn’t by accident that the fools on cable news say that a story is “fast moving.” Civil libertarians will argue that we turned Boston into a kind of war zone, but no, we turned it into a soundstage, and we turned the population into extras for those emotional establishing shots of regular citizens gazing through plate glass as the Avengers zoom by. So, you know, look: Lindsey Graham isn’t the villain, here. Actually, he’s the nerd telling everyone to sit down during the credits ‘cause they’re gonna miss the post-credit villain reveal!
Valedictatorian
EducationBut while I have no problem with the idea that there should be consequences for Beverly Hall or Michelle Rhee or any other school chancellor who presides over cheating, I’m genuinely puzzled by what anti-reform people think these cheating scandals prove.
Genuine puzzlement, right up there with “swear to God”, usually precedes a lie. It’s the verbal equivalent of clammy sweat and rapid blinking, and even on the rare occasion that it doesn’t presage a whopper, it makes everything subsequent seem dishonest. Yglesias goes on to set fire to a hiring hall full of unionized straw men who want teacher pay to be tied to tenure of service and nothing else, but what the hell, I’ll see if I can raise my voice above the crackling fire.
The cheating scandals prove that education reform is a wholly fraudulent endeavor. It isn’t the equivalent of a doping scandal in sports; it’s the equivalent of Enron, Madoff, the financial crisis. You think testing has something to do with compensation, hiring, and firing? It doesn’t. Testing is the accounting of the reform movement, and the executives are cooking the books. They’re manipulating the statements so it looks like the venture is turning a profit. Well, actually, it’s got negative cash flow. The gains are phantoms. The enterprise is insolvent. Even by its own standards, reform fails.
The central proposition of so-called education reform is that it endeavors to make schooling more entrepreneurial. Now this is bogus on its face. The most salient fact about entrepreneurialism is that most ventures fail. Is that the proper model for the delivery of a universal service? Consider the question irrespective of your thoughts about the larger questions surrounding the provision of universal education. Ostensible reformers say they want to mimic the dynamism and innovation of the private sector. The first question is: to what end, exactly? The second is: do you know how dynamism and innovation work?
Like most pro-market types, these people are ignorant of the actual workings of capitalism. They see Apple’s glittering headquarters, Google’s quarterly revenue numbers, and they think, Damn! I wish schools could be more like that! Strewn across the historic landscape behind all this success are hundreds of thousands of failed attempts, many of which don’t make it out of their first year. And you want school to look like this? Well, uh, no; we only want school to imitate successful ventures! Well, I want better arms and a bigger dick, but editing every other eighth of an inch out of the measuring tape will not make it so.
Here is a question for you: who is more fixated on pay, education reformers or traditional teachers’ unions? Reformers make two mistakes that have plagued badly run businesses for an age. If Yglesias had half the MBA he tries to write like he has, he’d be familiar. 1.) Monetary compensation is an ineffective and inefficient motivator of employee performance (Organizational Behavior: Leadership and Group Effect), and 2.) Labor-cost arbitrage—in this case, from union to open shop—can have diminishing productivity returns (Managing Human Resources in a Global Economy). And once again, I’m saying: leave aside the ideological and human problems of late capitalism; even by its own standards, it fails.
What does the ubiquitous cheating in reform-era education mean? It means that reformers are so dumb they can’t even set up arbitrary benchmarks for success; they literally fail their own tests despite having written the questions and answers themselves. Imagine a panel of fish oil salesmen riddled with arthritis and clearly suffering from memory loss and you get some idea. What the cheating proves is that these people are liars and cheats, but more than that, it proves that the systems of accountancy and auditing promoted by the liars and cheaters are themselves a lie. The reform is doubly fraudulent.
Now, it may be true that seniority is a bad way to determine pay. I don’t really have a dog in that fight. But let me propose to you this one staggering advantage seniority has over “performance.” It cannot readily be faked.
Revolting Youth
Books and Literature, Culture, MediaWhen I was a teenager growing up in Uniontown, PA, a half-sinister, half-beautiful wreck of a mining town, the seat of Fayette County, which everyone called Fayette Nam, which ought to give you some idea, I had an English teacher named Ed Cupp. Mr. Cupp was a big slab of a man who kept his desk at the back of the room, something I can recall no other teacher ever doing. I always assumed it had something to do with his nocturnal activities, which we all assumed to be the cause of his frequent headaches and his occasional habit of resting his head on his crossed arms, or of keeping the lights off during class. He once wrote a poem about another teacher at our high school who’d been a great beauty when she still had her maiden name—I’m not quoting, but he put it very much like that. What I remember about the poem is that it rhymed “chimpanzees” with “phalanges.” He taught 11th-grade Honors English, which was where I read Moby Dick for the first time. The class was supposed to be difficult or whatever, but Mr. Cupp didn’t give a shit about grades, and he used to give us these hysterical fill-in-the-blanks tests. After Moby Dick the first question on the quiz was, “Call me ______.” This one kid answered “crazy,” and Mr. Cupp thought it was so funny that he shared it with the whole class the next day. He probably gave the kid an A. He loved books, and he loved literature, and even though he used to make mooing noises at us when we said something wrong or just dull and predictable, I think he loved teaching, but he also recognized the fundamental absurdity of trying to teach an art that manages to be both essential and frivolous to a bunch of egotists—because all teenagers are fundamentally egotists—who had other obsessions and preoccupations.
I’m not a teacher, but I do like to moo. In the second paragraph of his review of The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner, James Wood, who has other obsessions and preoccupations, says:
The novel’s narrator, an artist in her early twenties nicknamed Reno (it’s where she’s from), is obsessed with speed, machines, and land-speed records. (Art seems to be a subsidiary concern.)
Call me crazy. Late in the novel, Reno is at a party for an artist who appeared earlier as a pushy self-promoter trying to wrangle a show out of a prominent gallerist. Reno says:
John Dogg was not a complete idiot. He had merely seemed like one. It was wanting something a great deal that made people embarrassing—which was why I’d hidden my wants around Sandro and his friends, and Giddle, too, pretended I didn’t want an art career when I did. Pretended I wasn’t jealous of Gloria, of Helen Hellenberger, of Talia, when I was.
Kushner is a distressingly great writer. I’m jealous. And this passage makes explicit what she makes clear in every moment of the book; that Reno’s affectless affect is, duh, a put-on; that she isn’t “wide-eyed and even dangerously porous,” a Woody description that’s supposed to be incisive but comes across as snide and a little condescending; she’s afraid. Reno does like speed, and she does like motorcycles, but they’re not her obsession. Her participation in the speed trials out on the Bonneville flats are part of a vaguely conceived art project; after she wrecks, she makes the team that’s taken her in drive her hobbled body back out to the course so she can photograph the tracks she’s made. That isn’t subsidiary. She really wants to be an artist. Even her descriptions of terrible motorcycle and automobile wrecks, in particular the crash of a driver named Flip Farmer (which Wood excerpts in his review), reveal a mind attuned to the visual, the abstract, and the geometric.
Reno considers this quality of her own character as well, later in the book, having been marooned in Italy, where she’s ostensibly gone to film (and be filmed by) the very Italian team that she encountered at Bonneville. It doesn’t work out—heartbreak, revolution, etc., and when she tries to talk to the team over the phone, they seem almost to have forgotten about her. She has a realization: that they are actually interested in speed records, whereas she is interested in the aesthetics of speed records. She isn’t a driver. Well, she is. But it’s a subsidiary concern.
It’s such a fundamental error of reading that I honestly wondered at first if Wood had just stopped reading halfway through. He wouldn’t be the first book reviewer to quit midway, and I think I’d have held it against him less. No. He definitely read the whole thing. He knows the mechanics of the plot right up to the end. Well then, what would explain it? I remembered something Edmond Caldwell wrote about Wood’s equally weird treatment of Bolaño:
We’ve seen how Wood, in his review of Death with Interruptions, turned the long-time communist Saramago into an advocate of Original Sin and ‘fallen’ human nature. It’s in a similar spirit that Wood transforms The Savage Detectives into a story about growing into an adult ‘maturity’ after being disabused of adolescent enthusiasms such as aesthetic and political radicalism. Bolaño in the 1970s was “an avant-garde poet bristling with mad agendas,” and so are the characters who make up the narrative’s “gang of literary guerillas,” says Wood in his summary of the novel. Yet Savage Detectives, he goes on to affirm, “is both melancholy and fortifying; and it is both narrowly about poetry and broadly about the difficulty of sustaining the hopes of youth.” In other words, zany antics involving things like avant-garde agendas and guerilla gangs are fine as long as they are seen (or can be portrayed) as properly childish preoccupations; a book is “good” and merits a positive review to the extent that its pretty sentences are “about” the putting away of childish things.
Coincidentally (or no?), The Flamethrowers has a lot in common with The Savage Detectives, and Wood’s approving note on just how acutely Kushner satirizes the New York art scene in the 1970s likewise has a lot in common with his belief that Bolaño was making fun of the naïve and youthful radicalism of his “visceral realist” poets. Yes, Bolaño is making fun, but, you know, like, we kid because we love. What Wood doesn’t see, because I think he really considers artists and writers fundamentally ridiculous, however much he might try to convince us, and himself, otherwise, is the deep and true and beautiful affection and sympathy that these writers feel for their characters. Just look at what he offers as praise:
She is funny not at the expense of contemporary art but at the expense of the people who make that art, seeing with clear eyes their bluster and pantomime. She scours her chosen period for its extravagance and histrionics; the parallel with today’s ambition market is obvious. Small worlds resemble each other first.
My emphasis. This is supposed to be a compliment! Which seems extraordinary until you consider the source. He mentions, too, that she’s an art critic. Don’t worry, she’s one of us! In fact, what makes The Flamethrowers so good, what makes Kushner so impressive, is that even the most venal, grasping, ambitious, and pretentious of her imagined avant-gardists are rendered with sympathy and love. She is making fun of the scene and of the art—and yes, of the people—but not at the expense of the people. Actually, she likes her artists and revolutionaries very much, which is why we feel their failures so movingly and so viscerally when they inevitably occur.
What do you say about this kind of criticism? That it praises by mistake? That it turns everything it reads into a whetstone on which it sharpens its ideological axe? Wood would probably say he doesn’t like ideology, that it’s as juvenile and fake as art and poetry, but look at how he begins his review:
Put aside, for the moment, the long postwar argument between the rival claims of realistic and anti-realistic fiction—the seasoned triumphs of the traditional American novel on one side, and the necessary innovations of postmodern fiction on the other. It was never very edifying anyway, each camp busily caricaturing the other. And don’t bother with the newest “debate,” about the properly desirable amount of “reality” that American fiction should currently possess. (Twenty grams, twenty-five grams?) Some novelists, neither obviously traditional nor obviously experimental, neither flagrantly autobiographical nor airily fantastical, blast through such phantom barricades. Often, this is because they have a natural, vivacious talent for telling stories; and these stories—the paradox is important—seem fictively real, cunningly alive. Novelistic vivacity, the great unteachable, the unschooled enigma, has a way of making questions of form appear scholastic.
If your response is a moo, or a huh?, then have a seat, and can I offer you a drink? Who had this argument? What is “anti-realistic fiction”? What is the “traditional American novel”, and what are the “necessary innovations of postmodern fiction”? Is the former Moby Dick? Or Hawthorne? Or is he talking about Philip Roth? Is Pynchon postmodern? Personally, I can’t figure out what postmodernism added to fiction that you won’t find in Tristram Shandy. Shit, I guess Sterne and Melville just had natural, vivacious talent for telling stories. And I would like to believe that I’m cunningly alive myself, although, I don’t know . . . wouldn’t that imply that I prenatally pulled one over on my mom?
Again, this paragraph precedes a glowing review that really wants to make the case that Kushner is just some delightful raconteur spouting stories about absurd people, their stupid art and their dumb, failed revolutions. Just a storyteller! Oh, and a vivacious one, which also comes across as snide and condescending, as faint praise. The Flamethrowers is audacious not in its humor, although it’s funny, but in its seriousness. Its revolutions are doomed, but not because the revolutionaries are children or fools. Both her frauds and her real radicals are suffused with a terrible human want, and they crash against the unwillingness of the world to accommodate their desires. I suppose Wood would have them grow up and find desires that are more aligned with the will of the world. But I don’t think it’s an accident that the book ends in a question.
I don’t want to overtax the comparison of The Flamethrowers to The Savage Detectives, which was, as Caldwell put it, “nothing less than the life-cycle of a generation.” The Flamethrowers is in some ways broader than The Savage Detectives (and it actually takes place over at least three generations), but it is decidedly not epic. Of course, it isn’t “a contemporary rewriting of Flaubert’s novel of 1869, Sentimental Education” either, which is what Wood calls it before nailing (I use the term advisedly) the narrator as “like Frédéric Moreau […] a frustratingly malleable figure a hero almost vacuous except for the exactitude of her noticing.” It doesn’t help that Flaubert’s correspondence makes an appearance in the novel, which makes the comparison seem even more overdetermined—or overloaded, to use the Woodier term. If Reno has a fictional counterpart, it’s Christopher Isherwood, the guy who said that he was a camera, whom Wood would probably also call “wide-eyed and dangerously porous.” (By the way, would you call Isherwood traditional? Postmodern? Well, he wasn’t American, so whatever.) They have different locutions, but a similar eye, and they are both foreign interlopers in a world at once alluring and frightening, full of strivers, liars, men on the make, and opportunistic love affairs. Maybe that blurry margin is what makes Wood so uncomfortable that he’s got to start off with a disquisition apropos nothing else at all.
It Is Better to Marry Than to Paris Is Burning
Books and Literature, Culture, ReligionSomething I appreciate about The American Conservative is that at least a few of its writers appear to be actual, believing Christians, rather than the sorts of social lobby entrepreneurs whom we’re usually subjected to when NPR needs to find a dissenting voice on gay marriage or Charles Krauthammer is on vacation and the WaPo decides to have someone rattle on about Obama’s Liberation theology. Daniel Larison’s writings on Orthodoxy always strike me as particularly lovely and truly felt. Maybe this is all part of or related to my weakness for Catholic novelists. Or not. I hope this won’t sound awful and condescending, but as a writer and non-believer, faith is something that I very much want to understand; it’s a part of human experience that I find both fascinating and opaque, and my aesthetic fondness for the High Holy Days liturgies or the Seder isn’t the same thing as true belief. I’m very interested in abiding belief that’s more than either the rah-rah econo-moral hectoring of non-denominational post-Protestantism or my own nostalgic affection for the songs and rituals of my youth. And I apologize, because all of this is a caveat. I am about to read Rob Dreher the riot act.
Due credit: I think Dreher is kind and charitable when he ultimately concludes “if the faith does not recover, the historical autopsy will conclude that gay marriage was not a cause but a symptom, the sign that revealed the patient’s terminal condition.” Is there a sort of condescension there? Yes, but no more so than a gay atheist calling faith “fascinating.” Dreher’s said a lot of objectionable things over the years, but I think he’s been admirably consistent in arguing that “conservative” animus toward gays in both the moral and legal spheres is the regrettable, crippling result of their own theological inadequacies. Unable to make the affirmative case for their own moral vision, in other words, they’re stuck hurling stones at yours. I can’t entirely agree with this thesis; obviously, I don’t buy the affirmative case for their morality; actually, I don’t think that the case exists. But Dreher clearly believes that it does, and I appreciate his intolerance for his ostensible coreligionists when, instead of inspiring through the beatific majesty of their own cosmological order, they are reduced to muttering darkly that the gays are bestial creeps and the culture of PC is censoring their conscience.
But I also think Dreher’s reading of the origins and history of Christian sexual morality is completely bizarre. I haven’t read the book he cites here, but the argument, at least in his paraphrase, is, to put it charitably, tendentious:
It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to grasp why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among The People. Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.
In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.
Well, now, I can agree that it’s unfair to cast Paul as some kind of Jonathan Edwards setting fires in the commune, but who, exactly, is making that argument? I’ll let you decide, but the answer is no one. On the other hand, defining Paul’s teachings as liberating to slaves and women? Let’s just say I’m skeptical that this is borne out by the primary source material; it represents a rather more significant interpretive double pump fake than calling the guy a dour Puritan. Paul’s reputation for intolerance may be exaggerated by the habit of reading contemporary mores into the writings of a very different historical era, but whatever way you slice it, Paul told women to shut up and slaves to obey their masters.
All right—I won’t begrudge the guy one convenient straw man, but I am going to object to this completely ahistoric and frankly dishonest accounting of Paul’s take on marriage. Because you know what the pornographic, sexually exploitative Greco-Roman culture of the time had that first-century Judaism did not? (Decent cuisine? Well, yes, but…) If you guessed monogamous marriage, congratulations, you win the hutch and the Hawaiian vacation. The pre-Rabbinic Jewish tradition that gave birth to early Christianity saw no problem with polygyny, although possessing multiple wives was an affectation of the mostly very rich. (Actually, polygamy in Judaism continued, at least as a legally permissible if rarely practiced option, for another thousand years.) Like our own culture, Roman attitudes toward sex, marriage, and divorce swung between extremes of permissiveness and censure, but the idea that Rome was a louche, thousand-year hotbed of sexual license is flat wrong. Shit, Augustus came to power promising to pass laws that would punish sexual immorality and protect the sanctity of marriage. Sound familiar, America? The Romans may have had legal divorce, but they didn’t have multiple wives.
Okay, so what? Well, Dreher totally misinterprets the meaning and import of Pauline teachings on sex and marriage; they weren’t revolutionary to the gentiles; they were designed for the gentiles. If you’re going to proselytize to the Romans, you’d better—what is the contemporary political idiom?—you’d better distance yourself from the weird, primitive practices of backwards, ancient, tribal peoples. Looking toward Rome via the twenty-first century HBO time machine may give us a view of heaving pagan bosoms and wild orgies, but to a Roman, it was the Eastern Mediterranean that was the land of immodest wealth, exoticism, and sexual license. Paul wasn’t revolutionizing Roman traditions; he was appropriating them. Even the idea that women would have legal rights in a marriage, albeit exceedingly narrow and circumscribed rights, is Roman.
So what Dreher would probably call “traditional” marriage and sexuality is actually a completely weird, circumstantial, hybrid entity that melds the tribal attitudes of Leviticus and Deuteronomy with the practices and structure of Roman legalism. From a businessman’s point of view, I’d call it a very successful, if unlikely, joint venture. But by hauling it forward two thousand years and laying it as a bulwark against what Dreher clearly believes is a sort of neo-pagan secularism presents all sorts of historical problems, and calling it a centerpiece not just of your general morality but of your cosmology, for, you’ll pardon the expression, God’s sake, is foolishness set on a foundation of pure chauvinism. It’s willfully oblivious, and it makes the odd error of over-crediting both the uniqueness of your own worldview and the revolutionary quality of your putative opponents’ advocacy.
In fact, gay marriage advocates are mostly unsuspecting followers of Paul’s example. Far from revolutionizing anything, they’re doing their best to make themselves palatable to the new Rome.
Jacob Bacharach 