cheese it, the cops!

OK, I Figured Out Gaslighting, but What the Hell is Cancel Culture?

i was glancing through the Times Literary Supplement when I saw a commentary that basically laid out Cancel Culture as bitched about by fans of Prince Harry and fans of the Traditional Experience. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were accused of being denizens of Cancel Culture, attempting to cancel the monarchy be saying it didn't matter anymore to them. That anyway seemed to be the way the Dons and Doyens we Yanks imagine wandering through the House of Lords. The Joe Strummer wannabe's found the bitching about the Sussexes be tossed in the maw of the great Kraken of Tory Cancel Culture...

My own thought is that Cancel Culture is a way for Right Wing twits to bitch about encroaching realities. Might be working against them -- when was the last time anyone mentioned Ayn Rand in normal conversation. Encroaching reality might be doing us a favor if it keeps forcing these folks into a smaller and smaller corner. 

However, through no real fault of the universe, I was presented with a couple of articles that addressed in different ways the actual role of Cancel Culture...one that has been around for a long time, since literacy and probably before that. 

The morning began with a tag from Downeaster Jeff Thompson, who is one of the more genuine and grounded of the former blogger occasionally stepping out but usually hanging out dropping logic and decency bombs in the role Facebook Malcontent Primo. Jeff was posting an article by Jacob Bacharach, a NGO manager probably because of the hours, a novelist and essayist of some merit, and most germane, a blogger that would get Swift to come down from heaven or up from hell to make an appearance. This was an appearance not of IOZ but of Jake, but it was absolutely great. 

The article appeared in The New Republic, to which I have now subscribed. What the hell, just something else I will probably not read all that much. The GEN X Cancel Culture Warriors Who Never Grew Up is well written and is worth reading just as an exercise in criticism. It also has some excellent points. I could fill a longer article than Crispin wants me to with just pieces of the work. This is one example that made me understand a bit...

There is also something regressive and a bit adolescent about this sort of thinking, as though all the cancel culture complainers long for are evenings at the debate club and late-night rap sessions full of grand philosophical gestures and free from the grotty pressures of real life. It may be why so many cancel culture critics are fixated on the college campuses they themselves have long since left. The concession and compromises of adulthood are rarely as fun or as heroic as the caffeinated debates of their youth, when they could say and do almost anything, parked in a beanbag chair in a red-brick dorm.These thinkers are unwilling or unable to grasp that debate alone cannot resolve many of the problems we face—climate, inequality, poverty, disease. They are not mere exercises. They are material and real, and they are immune to cleverness and outrageousness. They require solidarity and collective action as much as they require argument...

One of the other things that I read in passing usually is AEON which is a bit more intellectual and usually has an article about some philosophical issue, another about some aspect of social science or it's intersection with SCIENCE, which can be interesting as well as scary at times. Recently, Aeon began adding articles from PSYCHE which is oriented toward looking at just about anything from a psychological point of view -- scientific, social science, speculatory, historical or philosophical. 

This article dealt with the forbidden books and texts that are starting to come out the woodwork of academe.

Freedom, Fear and the Knock in the Middle of the Night...

 

FREEDOM

FROMM and ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM are popping up often enough at the moment to think we might have realized that we've had a pretty good working hypothesis about the "end of Liberal Democracy" and "the rise of the New Right." Of course, he figured it out a long time and the fact that we re-discover it whenever freedom is threatened means it's possible to at least remember if not prevent. Fromm left Germany and after a year in Geneva, accepted a teaching position at Columbia University in 1935. His approach to psychoanalysis was informed by his early academic work in law and graduate work in sociology and philosophical psychology. Escape From Freedom jumps up the university reading lists whenever the pendulum in this country moves toward repression and authoritarianism. Approachable and crisp, his work provides a great working model for understanding we're doing to ourselves and why. I've been meaning to revisit it for a while, and this piece in the The Guardian will make me wander in to my stacks and find my copy. From the Guardian article by Dr. Michele Gelfand, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland:

"The philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm first identified this predicament in his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom. The gist of it is this: when people perceive an increase in disorder, they feel tremendous anxiety. Inevitably, this anxiety leads to a quest for security. To bring a sense of safety back into their lives, they latch on to authoritarianism and conformity. As Fromm noted, this often leads to “a readiness to accept any ideology and any leader if only he offers a political structure and symbols which allegedly give meaning and order to an individual’s life”. He had observed this in Germany, which he fled in 1933: “Modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds,” he wrote."

Anxiety is probably not the best word today, since we are always anxious about most things in our lives. Probably because the amount of stimulus has increased tremendously over the decades and because some of us recognize the symptoms if not the causes of what we observe around us, the concept I keep hearing is "Existential Dread." From Ari Melber and Hip Hop Artists on MSNBC to music reviews of Dustin Welch's "Amateur Theatre" to George Will, the concept is starting to surface a lot. Worth considering before it gets it's own TV show. Fromm wasn't an Existentialist, although he studied with Karl Jaspers while a doctoral student at Heidelberg in the 1920s. He was certainly influenced by Existentialism, being a contemporary of Hannah Arendt and Sartre. So before the TV show comes out with a theme song about "Here comes the Zeitgeist," Escape From Freedom is available on Amazon and Google and any other place you care to look.

things i wrote this year

I reviewed a couple of books for the Times Literary Supplement: John Kaag's wonderful Hiking with Nietzsche, the incomparable James C. Scott's Against the Grain

For the New York Times' "Stone" series (the thing cannot possibly be described as a 'blog') I wrote on The Oscars and the Illusion of Perfect Representation

I haven't been rolling the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal quite as heavy as I had been the previous couple of years, but I notched a few: Mark Zuckerberg or Xi Jinping? Russian memes didn't steal the election, rural voters' pride and left's prejudice, the opposite flaws of trump and mueller, hatred enhaces your self-esteem

I had a couple of essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books' Philosophical Salon: western philosophy as white supremacism and before and beyond left and right (in early 19th c america)

For Times Higher Education I did an essay on some of the difficulties i'm having in teaching today's undergrads

For Standpoint I recapitulated my ridicule of Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

I must be getting toward two hundred columns for splicetoday over the last few years. In praise of my outlet I want to say that splice gives you some of the liveliest and most various and fun writing you'll find. Some 2019ly items:

I solved Brexit through the miracle of mereology

refuted Fukuyama and identified the actual end of history

narwhal horns and moral scorekeeping

mass shootings and the stories we tell ourselves

the powerlessness of positive thinking

male aging memoir: short version

reviewed or discussed visual art, as Pat Steir at the Barnes Foundation, arte povera at the Philly Museum, art and capitalism in Bentonville (Crystal Bridges), the art of suiseki landscape stones

i began a series of resoundings or recoveries of somewhat-forgotten recording artists, or lost-and-found musical loves: The Bellamy Brothers, Augustus Pablo, the Kendalls, Blue Angel (Cyndi Lauper), and Ann Peebles. There will be more of these as time unfolds.

i covered country music from time to time (and see above): steel blossoms, the highwomen, self-dramatization in cody jinks and miranda lambert, 2019 top ten

wrote about race, gender, identity politics, pc, free speech: break the glass floor; sexual abuse and political power, apologizing for whiteness; white guys: collectable, electable; his pronouns are 'they' and 'them'; trump, tropes, and the jews, 

masculinity, psychology, and servility

higher ed, which is struggling these days: hunting humans on campus, mandate campus free speech with a new title IX;  the ridiculous state of campus journalism

i covered some of the debates and impeachment developments and, in general, politics: joe biden rattletrap, intel will pick the next pres, the wrong word, whatever you do, don't elect the unelectable, there's no such thing as electability, 2020 will make 2016 look like a more innocent time, how elizabeth warren started her slide, (maybe this wasn't so prescient): biden and sanders are fading, trumpism after trump

media and such: against copyright, the wrong word is the least of our problems, yo, opinion editors, stop this practice immediately, the conspiracy theory is fake news

 

some piecey blog entries: how thoreau became a radical, ragging mr. rogers, 'ok boomer' and the fiction of generations, mao meets macklemore, quotations from chairman joe, masculinity, psychology, and servility, i just can't get no reception, the washington post opinion page and the cia: no distance, nicholas sandmann and nathan phillips (remember them?) both did well, homo economicus replaced by saints

On Sophia/bloggingheads I argued with Dan Kaufman about wittgenstein, the western phil as white supremacism essay, realism anti-realism and g.e. moore, the analytic/continental split, TRUTH

I think early in the New Year I'll have long pieces in Reason and Quillette, among others. I'm working through Robert Brandom's unbelievable book A Spirit of Trust (750 pages on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, but also about everything else; it is itself a philosophical system) for the TLS right now.

2018 sartwelliana

"Do you think about the things you do think about?"

 

The title is from some dialogue in Inherit the Wind, the great 50s play and 60s film ostensibly about the Scopes trial but really about the freedom of thought and expression. Lots of lessons for us, and if you haven't seen the film or read the play, you are missing a treat. I believe that line was lifted verbatim from the trial record. Clarence Darrow, denied by the court of using expert witnesses to justify his client's teaching of evolution, put Williams Jennings Bryan on the stand as an expert on the bible and in a marvelous display of his skills, puts the Bryan and establishment position to shame. In this small bit of dialogue, the Bryan character says that "I do not think about the things I don't think about?" Crowd erupts! Yea, Christianity. Toss the lousy science teacher to the lions! 

In the film, Spencer Tracy played the Darrow character, and he looks up and asks " Do you think about the things you do think about?" 

This is intended as a way of kicking off a bit of a thought experiment. Both Crispin and I have thought for years that the real advantage to a blog is the possibility of learning. It can be a dynamic conversation, as people reflect on issues and experiences. Lots of it has degenerated since the glory years of the medium. Here's an attempt to start one again, here where I was forced by a prickly weirdo philosopher to start thinking critically and reflecting critically more than a decade ago. 

The attached article is my first part of a discussion of John Kelly, General, United States Marine Corps and the recent debacles he's been part of and often leading in the West Wing. I have some theories based on my knowledge and experience of people like Kelly. Irish-Catholic, old patriotic American men in positions of authority and transformation called to face the fact that, to steal a line from Casey Stengel by way of Jimmy Breslin, the answer to "Can't Anybody Here Play This Game." often is "No." 

 

There is nothing unique about what's happening in this mess. Far from it; my boots share some of the same shit Kelly now has on his and if you hang around long enough in leadership roles or advisory roles you'll have it too. The possibility in this case is that this case blows up that sort of People-Processes-Protocols-Procedures-Organizational Dynamics-Learning-Communications-Ethics nexus so we can see it. Not unlike what Plato did in The Republic, taking the question of individual ethics and blowing it up into political science. Looking for the ideal state and finding something like a steroidal Sparta says more about Plato than it does about the thought experiment. 

So, please take a second to read my piece from Veterans News Today and just think about the Kelly thing. What have we learned from this about how things that seem so simple go so wrong? What is the key underlying failure here and how does it relate to similar situations where this sort of mud has splattered on your boots --Crispy's famous last stand for the academic freedom to quote Miranda Lambert comes to mind -- and what should we learn from thinking about this? Put your thoughts into the comments here since Vets has gotten weird about comments pages. If you wish, drop me a note at [email protected] because I'd like to know what people think, not just about my failed stabs at brilliance but about thinking about thinking about what you're thinking about. 

Music criticism is fun

 

I heard the Burritos out in California could fly higher than the Byrds/ Roger McGuinn had a 12 string guitar, it was like nothing I ever heard...     David Allan Coe, "Willie and Waylon and Me"

One of the joys of occasionally invading Crispin's space is to remind the world through my amateur efforts that we're dealing with a guy who should probably be music editor for Rolling Stone or at least their head critic. I always enjoy Crispy's criticism, and while I disagree with him on, well, most issues I do think he has great knowledge and insight on music, musicians, trends and so on. That obeisance paid, Guitar World published one of those lists of the greatest or most important or "Recorded in FSharpMinor" examples that are always fun to pick apart. In this case they are stalking the elusive 12 string guitar, and it's an interesting example of why most music magazines suck. 

These things are always open to argument and while we recognize some 12 string work, a lot of it is just there. So some people appear to make the list because, well, they made the list. Either surprise that someone was playing a twelve and it sounded OK, or it's a great song and the band was famous for having a 12 String lead player. Go figure. Or a double-neck guitar -- critics love double neck guitars. So did I when I was fifteen. Unless the guy waving that ax around is Jimmy Page, I inevitably think of Cheap Trick or The Cyrkle when I see one.

absorbing viscous lava through our pores

yes, i will be assessing sailor twift's 1989 after a day or two to absorb it (i'll give you something on the new lucinda too). i think when i first hopped on (with my daughter, circa speak now), people were all like "i hate that poppy auto-tuned bullshit!" to which i responded: i can hardly imagine a critic listening attentitively to this album and not coming away impressed. that has been borne out: she is a critical darling, and even brats who hate everything but indie dirge-pop can't frigging help themselves. 

i do have some concerns about the decline of rock criticism, however, perhaps encapsulated by the lead of marlow stern's review in the daily beast. of the best pop songs, stern writes, "Ever present, they absorb the viscous lava of contempo culture through their pores, let it course through their veins ‘til a diffuse plexus of melodies and rhythms form, and then release the bubbly potion onto an unsuspecting audience." dave marsh and greil marcus might have been kind of boring and predictable in their opinions - they might still be - but they didn't write sentences like that, and if they (or we) did, their editors didn't wave them through. maybe it's supposed to be lesterbangsy? lord.

i guess the people i read most in the msm these days are the folks on the guardian: alex petridis (who loved the taylor album) and kitty empire, for example. i do think sasha frere-jones in the new yorker is good, so i'll give the old monocled one that.

alright, so, i started writing rock criticism at the washington star in 1980. i was a copy boy; our critic was on vacation when i started but i got to do records and shows by people like the ramones, clash, bb king. then the star croaked and i went to grad school in baltimore. i wrote for the city paper through the early 80s: hundreds of shows and records. it's funny to think the free-circ urban weekly should be shrouded in nostalgia now; really we did generate a lot of content. i was watching the wire recently, and noticing that rafael alvarez was all over the writing credits; he was all over the cp then. jd considine, who i started reading when he dominated the old baltimore news-american, was in the sun and then the rolling stone publications, so that was a a kind of model, though i'd have to say the actual critical approach was a counter-model.

so in the usual fashion i sent out clips, and soon i was reviewing for a number of mags. record magazine was probably the main outlet; it was a sub-rolling stone put out by the rolling stone dedicated entirely to music. but i guess i sort of knew the rs-type critics and editors of that era (anthony decurtis, for example), mostly at a distance. i reviewed many amazing shows and many turkeys, from donna summer and pat benatar to flipper and the dead boys, run dmc and the fat boys to tammy wynette and chaka khan. i kept almost but not quite reviewing records for rolling stone, but i did have the lead review in record sometimes. prince's purple rain, e.g.. they killed my review of born in the usa for the reasons i came to hate the whole operation: they were always trying to manufacture a consensus or pretend there was one, and soon the critics just didn't have very individual tastes or voices, which is how they wanted it.

my wife at the time, rachael, had a certain wanderlust, and we were always driving across the country or settling temporarily for the summer here and there. i would always pitch the local paper, so for example i wrote up roger miller and barbara mandrell for the albuquerque journal, or did stuff for the weekly out in seattle.

then she managed to drag me to london, which was the height of my little career. there has never been more rock criticism anywhere at any time than london in the '80s, and they had three tabloids the size of the new york daily news of that time every week, entirely devoted to music: sounds, new music express, and melody maker. i took my clips around; just walked into the newsrooms and pitched the editors. i caught on at melody maker, and soon was reviewing a couple of gigs a week, a variety of lps, etc, and doing features and interviews too. i met the nicest person in the world, cyndi lauper,

 

and the nastiest people, the members of x, for example. i got to see like everyone who played london in '83 and '84, which looking back on it had a lot to recommend it, even though i was pretty ambivalent about the 'synth-pop' then dominant. (god i hated depeche mode, live or on record, but culture club was excellent, for example.) chrissie hynde slammed a door in my face. i got knocked unconscious in the mosh pit at a killing joke concert by heavily booted mohawk punk thug, or thunk, as i think of them.

 

(everyone else was very nurturing, and i found myself under solicitous care propped up against a wall at the...hammersmith palais?)

 

[that represents the dominant pop sound of that moment in the uk; i must have seen twenty or thirty groups in this mode, swaying around and playing synthesizers. all the vocalists somehow sounded the same.]

i lost a night in paris where they flew people over to see inxs; me the nme guy ended up in a coke-and-groupie limo discohopping paris adventure with hutchence &co that i basically don't remember. the band rolled us into our hotel at 5 and we both missed our plane back to london.

 

so then i started turning pretty seriously toward the academic career and writing in that mode, but i did work through the late '80s. i interviewed lemmy for creem, etc. then around 2000, marion winik, disconcerted by my monthly country cd budget, suggested i pitch someone a country column so people would send me free cds. the guys from the balt city paper - russ smith and john strausbaugh - were doing the super-odd rollicking nypress, and i wrote the farm report in the persona of a 300-pound ultra-rightist farmer named crispin sartwell. then blogging...

come to think on it, i might could scan in some clips.

the good critic

i think philip kennicott of the washpost is one of the best critics working in the mainstream press. here's a really rather rich and surprising review of the 9/11 museum. the range is part of what i like: so it's actually a broad piece on contemporary museums, which have moved to a model where they construct the experience as a narrative, which among other things might be too directive with regard to the experience of museum-goers. also it works through the question of where the culture is on 9.11 and the war on terror etc: in other words, there's a lot of good context.

to my way of thinking, the idea of mourning 9/11 is utterly polluted by the fact that it was used as an occasion to complete the transformation of the united states government into a profoundly authoritarian system: the end of anything i would recognize as the american experiment. we're still blahblahing about the supreme court or the bill of rights, or we still effortlessly call ourselves a democracy, comparing others unfavorably to ourselves. but try to picture what jefferson or tom paine would say about a government engaged in universal surveillance of its own citizens, a government that practices indefinite secret detention, torture, and so on. that is what i would mourn at ground zero. those deaths turned into a mere tool for the consolidation of abusive power. it wasn't al qaeda that accomplished that: it was american politicians and citizens quaking in fear. they showed that, though they've got the missiles, they are pussies, all day every day.  

drop the hammer

i want to say about the post below that i tend to express critical judgments with a sledge-hammer. it took me awhile to reach the point of not deferring to what various other people think and reaching my own judgments cleanly. then it was another step to hammering them home like that. i realize it can seem kind of over-aggressive and arrogant. true true! but one little idea i have is that something like that is action without consequence (like, say, academic philosophy). i love action without consequence; it is extremely liberating. now, i could be wrong about burroughs. it's even probable. one thing my hostile response entails is not reading all the books (a couple, though, way back). the last thing i propose to do is read the complete works of ginsberg so as to spend the next ten years criticizing him in detail. but - who knows? - if i did i might slowly ameliorate the harshness. but anyway say i am wrong. so what? burroughs' reputation is in many hands and has been built up over decades by many authoritative voices. it's not going to harm him, or even those that love him, to say wait that sucks, though it might irritate them a bit. if i say the italian renaissance basically leaves me cold and has been wildly overrated since 1550, that would be a bold, counter-consensus, possibly ridiculous position. but it wouldn't - doesn't - damage anything or anyone, though it might puzzle or offend someone. it has no ethical upshot or implication. so, hammer back! like ziffel, e.g. it's like playing a video game: you can shoot stuff without killing anything! it's complete moral liberation! free yourselves through brutal criticism, my friends, from the cycle of samsara. 

it's important in evaluating me the critic that i don't hate everything, and i'm just as intemperate in my loves as in my hatreds. and then it really matters whether or not i'm expressing these opinions in a clever or funny or sharp way, which i'll leave others to judge (brutally, no doubt).

ok briefly on the italian high renaissance, particularly michelangelo and raphael: it has the opposite problem from the beats: the perfection, embodied in perfectly poised compositional structures, has an inhuman or blank quality. (it's not like i'm the first person to notice that: people started reacting immediately, or cf. caravaggio.) it is pervaded by platonism: the aspiration to transcend this world into an ideal realm. but i don't think that's possible, and i don't think it's admirable. further in, not out, is the course i'd recommend: durer. van eyck. also it is very stuck between paganism and christianity, and between sexual obsession and asceticism, between the actual concrete reality of the human body and human body as a sign of something that can have no body: between self-adoration and self-loathing. the tension is productive, but that's not to say it's resolved. naked bodies everywhere, but weirdly purged of particularity: signs, not things. does michelangelo celebrate or transcend embodiment? does he seek a sexual release or a release from the material world altogether? the sexuality is omnipresent, obsessional, but is, almost ridiculously, also repressed: all these naked bodies have...nothing to do with sexuality. that's...dishonest. the sublimation of sexuality into spirituality is at least as old as the symposium and has a certain profundity and a certain quixotic nobility. also a certain ridiculousness. like: just admit you want to fuck. and what the hell, i think the cult of greeks, as liberating as it felt to roman catholics in the 15th and 16th centuries, or to germans in the 19th, was overwrought. and the patronage structures in which these folks were embroiled were excruciatingly problematic. wait maybe that wasn't so brief!