Middlebrow March

Culture, Justice, Media, Religion, War and Politics

Fairly regularly, the online commentariat will erupt with frustration at the truism that you can’t get fired from the Op-Ed page for being wrong. If anything, a record of incompetence burnishes a career. Someone takes to Twitter and thunders that Newspaper Columnist is the only profession with real lifetime tenure. Well, that and Justice of the Supreme Court, another venerated institution that proves the truer truism: people rise to the level of their incompetence. There is, of course, an odd, often unvoiced conviction underlying these complaints: that in the Wild-Western private sector, people get bunged out for being incompetent all the time. This is part of a broad myth about corporate efficacy that anyone who’s ever actually met the C-suite occupants and corporate board placeholders of many a major corporation—or, frankly, just worked in any office anywhere—knows to be completely untrue. The smartest people in business do frequently get fired, yes, but it’s when the latest round of right-sizing cans the smart toilers on the lower end of the pay scale. The cream rises, yes. What that really means is that fat floats. David Brooks doesn’t get an endowed chair at Sulzberger University in spite of his mediocrity. All of the institutional incentives are designed to reward it. It is the curricula of his vita.

Brooks has lately invented himself as a kind of genteel moralist, and you can imagine him cast by George Eliot as a gently satiric country priest whose bit of Greek impresses the parish but makes him an object of fun at the manor. To be fair, few of us are really willing to pursue our moral sentiments to their most rigorous ends, and the elision of coherence and consistency in our criticisms of other people’s politics and philosophies is its own kind of error. Nevertheless, there is something not just comical, but slightly sinister, in a man who corrals his timid approval of “cop cams” with a dozen caveats about the value, and virtue, of privacy. Eleven months ago, he made “vast data sweeps” a pillar of privacy! Now he’s worried that some patrolman’s Go-Pro video of a domestic will wind up on YouTube.

“Cop-cams strike a blow for truth, but they strike a blow against relationships.” I won’t be the first to observe that Brooks’s turn to moralism coincided with a divorce. Maybe it’s unkind to psychoanalyze, but, after all, the man is very publicly lying on the couch several times a week. I think you find, in Brooks’s soft authoritarianism, his Matryoshka society of nested obligations, one overriding conviction, which is that too much truth kills a relationship, and wouldn’t it be better for everyone if we all just drank our cocktails at five and pretended nothing was wrong? His “zone [of] half-formed thoughts and delicate emotions can grow and evolve” sounds an awful lot like the moment the brain requires to tell the wife that yes, of course she looks lovely in that dress or, oh, dear, I’m going to be working late tonight, so don’t wait up. And in fact, I agree with him in broad principle; we are all due some space to be furtive little shits, only not when that secrecy possesses, and uses, a gun.

Religious Me-dom

Culture, Economy, Justice, Media, Religion, War and Politics

“Religious freedom” laws are, broadly speaking, efforts to circumvent the broad drift of a society toward varieties of sexual and reproductive autonomy and freedom that social conservatives dislike. Recognizing that they are increasingly in a moral minority, they seek to provide an opt-out mechanism through which they can decline to participate in whatever unspeakably licentious —generally speaking, same-sex attractions of all types—activity they perceive in the culture writ large. Leaving aside, if we must, the pejorative penumbra of the word “discrimination”, discrimination is precisely what these laws are designed to permit. As something of a cultural relativist, I’m not entirely unsympathetic with these desires, even if I find them personally reprehensible, immoral, and based on religious hocus-pocus whose historicity and divinity I find questionable at best. The truth is that I am not sure how a society as large as ours can be properly morally regulated; perhaps it can’t. Even as a gay man who has very greatly benefited from a great flowering of (God, how I hate this word) tolerance, I am not convinced of the Progressive case, which is really a mirror of the most conservative cultural argument, which presumes a singular and universal morality at the Kingdom end of a teleology of human, well, progress. At the possible expense of my own self-benefit, I have my doubts about a moral monoculture.

I mention this, because you now have hugely influential corporate governors like Apple’s Tim Cook taking to the pages of major newspapers to denounce Indiana’s rather stupid new religious freedom law on the rather tendentious ground that “Men and women have fought and died fighting to protect our country’s founding principles of freedom and equality,” which is a fairly silly reading of our invasion of the Phillipines or the theft of California or the war in Vietnam, but I suppose we did help the Ruskies lick Hitler, and that’s a pretty decent trump card. The idea that the martial history of America is testimony for the value of inclusivity is patently bogus, but cheers to Cook for saying forthrightly that “Regardless of what the law might allow in Indiana or Arkansas, we will never tolerate discrimination.”

But isn’t this sort of interstate, interest-specific legal arbitrage precisely the sort of thing that, expanded to the international forum, has permitted companies like Apple to become almost immeasurably profitable and valuable and men like Tim Cook to become ungodly rich? Isn’t it precisely the differing legal standards of the largely Asian nations where Apple manufactures most of its gadgets that permits it to violate, directly or through its contractors, all sorts of standards of labor decency and occupational safety—practices that we would consider not only illegal if they were to be deployed here in the US, but deeply immoral and unjust? Isn’t this effectively a vast, global, legal opt-out. And what if we expand our inquiry to include the people who labor even farther downstream extracting the raw materials necessary for the production of products like Apple’s, who work in even sorrier conditions hardly a step removed, if removed at all, from slavery?

So you see, people like Tim Cook are selective in their moral universalism; morality, it turns out, is universal only insofar as extends to the particular desires of a Western bourgeoisie; deny a gay couple a wedding bouquet that they could get at the florist down the street anyway, and that is a cause for outrage and concern; extract minerals using indentured Congolese servants, well, look, we’ve got marginal cost to consider! The moral argument, it turns out, curdles when exposed to the profit motive, and the universality of justice actually does end at certain borders, one way or another.

Thee, N-Word

Books and Literature, Culture, Education, Media, War and Politics

I’m as skeptical of safe spaces and trigger warnings as the next asshole, and I’m on the record comparing them to “the crystal vibrations of homeopathy and hypnotherapy,” but in that same post, and by the same token, I believe that while most of the proponents of this sort of thing suffer at worst from a naively misplaced trust in institutions to do right in the hands of the proper government and an overabundance of sincerity, it’s their loud public detractors who frequently suffer from a cancerous form of intellectual hypocrisy. So it was this past Sunday when, emerging from the palace to denounce the worries of the gardeners, Judith Shulevitz, a prominent critic and author frequently published in the most prominent and widely circulated publications in America, rang the alarm on the most worrying trend in the universities today. No, it is not the necessity of entering a lifetime of debt servitude to graduate from even our lousier state schools, nor the declining practical value of general education outside of a few faddish and vocational majors, nor the fact that war criminals and state security charlatans occupy positions of prominence in our best universities, nor even something as banally scandalous as the criminal extortion cartel that is the NCAA. No, indeed, it is the tremendous trauma inflicted upon poor administrators, and society as a whole, when, for example:

Last fall, the president of Smith College, Kathleen McCartney, apologized for causing students and faculty to be “hurt” when she failed to object to a racial epithet uttered by a fellow panel member at an alumnae event in New York. The offender was the freespeech advocate Wendy Kaminer, who had been arguing against the use of the euphemism “the n-word” when teaching American history or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” In the uproar that followed, the Student Government Association wrote a letter declaring that “if Smith is unsafe for one student, it is unsafe for all students.”

“It’s amazing to me that they can’t distinguish between racist speech and speech about racist speech, between racism and discussions of racism,” Ms. Kaminer said in an email.

Now, I actually agree with this sentiment; I think the notion that we may be harmed, or traumatized, or “re-traumatized” by the mere utterance of unpleasant or offensive or troubling words and ideas, especially in the service of exploring and criticizing those words and ideas, ranks high on the list of the most bogus notions ever dreamed up by our species. And, I mean, what is the Anthropocene if not one grotty epoch of our species’ inexhaustible supply of bogus ideas? But here is the rub, and the hypocrisy. Judith Shulevitz is making this argument, lighting these lamps in the Old North Church, in America’s premier organ of news and opinion, which, Oh By The Way, does not permit the use of the word nigger in its pages, not even “when teaching American history or ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.’”

Here, for instance, from last month, is Dwight Garner’s review of the widely praised new novel, The Sellout:

So much happens in “The Sellout” that describing it is like trying to shove a lemon tree into a shot glass. It’s also hard to describe without quoting the nimble ways Mr. Beatty deals out the N-word. This novel’s best lines, the ones that either puncture or tattoo your heart, are mostly not quotable here.

I should mention that Garner is also required to “[work] around a perfectly detonated vulgarity,” lest the mere appearance of such traumatizing and re-traumatizing language should besmirch the Average Reader’s tender eyes and brain.

This is a minor point; we could all very easily find thoughts and expressions and whole political ideologies which would never pass the gates of the unofficial but powerful censors of mainstream discourse in America. But I happen to believe that its smallness makes it all the more pertinent, because what, after all, is the complaint about safe spaces and trigger warnings if not that they are small, petty, and un-serious; that they are the ill-considered attempts at prior restraint by what amount to a novel class of intellectual prudes, whose contempt for freewheeling debate is at last a kind of puritanism? Well, so what if it is? Where is the greater threat to freedom, in the seminar room, or in the nation’s most important paper? Censor, censor thyself.

I Would Prefer Not To

Books and Literature, Culture, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion

It is a chest of drawers within which dwells
a whole society of tiny men
unweaving, mothlike, so as to weave again
the selfsame fabric; each worker parallels
his neighbors’ motions like the sine-wave swells
of the deep ocean. Rushing toward the ten
blessedly mandated minutes when
they pause for bitter coffee, yet each rebels
at repetition and at repetition’s
repetition; isn’t it, however,
evolution, God, or devil that
bargained the soul’s wages and working conditions?
Security a curse pronounced forever.
Who slaves, at last? Maze-maker? Or rat?

Homer? Samson.

Culture, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, War and Politics

“People who live according to the pure code of honor are not governed by the profit motive; they are governed by the thymotic urge, the quest for recognition.”

–David Brooks

A writer for the Times discovers that young men
in countries we fucked up have aspirations
different from those of the occupying nations;
He thinks them retrograde, but judges them
through a philosophical conceit that’s ten
centuries older than Islam’s creation,
a Western pagan’s fascist masturbation—
Plato’s politics were monstrous when
Plato was alive! Isn’t it
ironic that a public intellect
whose Gray-Agora sinecure assures
him of a massive audience has writ-
ten that the flaw in Muslims is “thymotic”?
What is the perfect form of an inveterate bore?

Mötley Crüsades

Culture, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry

Sometime in the middle Middle Ages
Urban deuce, who wasn’t lacking for
other kings and popes at Peter’s door
disrupted Christendom with an outrageous
well-armed pilgrimage whose bloody stages
ultimately broke Byzantium
killed the Cathars and left Russia numb.
Later on, we blamed the bloody wages
of centuries of silly conflict on
the Pagan north and Muslim Middle East,
ever-lapping at J.C.’s dominion.
Even now, eight centuries having gone,
these devil-haunted slaughters are the Beast
whose dumb roar is Editorial Opinion.

Sicko Fancy

Culture, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, War and Politics

He was a monarch in an age when we believe
in billion-dollar plebiscitary
elections that are like the lottery:
grin-stuffed adverts: “Seniors will receive
the bulk of ticket proceeds.” Honey, please.
He was decrepit; woke six times to pee
each night; and murdered women for adultery;
but served the nova Roma and appeased
its idiot imperators acting out
their sandbox fantasies of being Trajan.
All eulogies for kings are wasted breath.
A king is just a man who’s singled out
to think he’ll be immune to life’s contagion.
He’s ruled, therefore, ironically, by death.

Horror Values

Culture, Justice, Media, War and Politics

Although a large portion of the American media—including “liberal” outlets like NPR—continues to abjure the word torture, the release of the Senate’s summary (the report, of course, is classified) seems broadly to have cemented in the public mind that the United States, in the immortal words of one particular winner of the Alfred Nobel Guilty Conscience Dynamite Prize for Achieving a Certain Notoriety in Global Affairs, “tortured some folks.” In fact, it appears that we tortured, raped, and murdered them, but what is the saying? You can’t make an omelet without breaking into a grocery store in the middle of the night and smashing the dairy case with a golf club? It’s something like that, anyway.

This is all pretty straightforward, but America is a post-moral society, and therefore no obvious evil can be condemned without the palliating piping-in of Drs. Efficacy and Outcome. The principle pushers-back are those ineradicable voices pestering our relativist consciences with the crackpot and insistent doubt: what if it worked? And a great deal of the Senate summary addresses precisely this point, dissecting the claims that there is a direct, operative line between shoving a tube into a shackled prisoner’s asshole and pumping saline into his guts while threatening to rape his children to death and whatever money-hungry ex-Navy SEAL claims to have shot Osama bin Laden on a given weekday. Message: it didn’t work.

Well, that’s good to know, but my relief quails at the yawning moral chasm at which our almost-civilization has come screeching to a Wile E. Coyote halt, legs churning air, and the edge, in fact, behind us. Meep meep: what if it did? What if the Senate’s debunking is incomplete? What if, because this is just how the American media and the popular discourse operate, some doubt, some question, some uncertainty remains? Do we then temper our condemnation based on the possibility, however faint, of a desired result?

You can imagine the dark hole that kind of moral accountancy leads into. I mean, by the numbers, the Final Solution was effective. Not a 100% success, obviously, but within the reasonable tolerances for such a large industrial . . . If you can’t, as a society, find it in your metaphorical soul to proclaim—even halfheartedly and just for the cameras—that it is wrong under any circumstances to beat a man near to death, drive him slowly crazy, then chain him to a wall in a dungeon to let him freeze to death, then perhaps it’s time to reevaluate those core values you’ve got tacked to the wall in the break room. If your “Just Hang In There” poster features not just a kitten, but a noose, then perhaps you’re not quite that inspiration after all.

The Law

Culture, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, Poetry, Religion, War and Politics

As a general rule I’m not the sort of man
who thinks our world’s best served by putting other
men into jail. This one Jewish brother
who got famous later on, he said, I stand
with the least of you, the whores and lepers and
the murderers and thieves. Of course, his mother
knew who he hung out with. She discovered
that’s what mattered when the Roman cops ran
into the garden and hauled him out and strung
him up; shouldn’t one of them, at least,
have spent at least one night on a concrete floor?
The question outlived her son’s name on her tongue.
Did he deserve to die like some dumb beast?
Even the beasts—even then—got more.

The Cathedral

Culture, Economy, Media, Poetry, Religion, The Life of the Mind

Last at the altar, first to the door, the pale
young priest asks his congregants which they’ll embrace:
salvation by good twerks or Nancy Grace?
Their googling eyes flick through wikis; fail-
ing to find a clear consensus, they derail
the sermon: what does father think about race-
derived intelligence, or the reptilian face
beneath the POTUS’ hack-job human veil?
Oh gods, make us less chaste, make us less poor,
and do it now; the undeserving have
converted their unworthiness to cash
unbacked except by unearned faith, no more
than gold—though not gold standard—golden calves;
we’ll skip the sackcloth but accept the ash.