Vast, Conservative Literary-Persecution Complex

Shorter Adam Bellow: Free Markets! Except when I don’t like the results! In which case subsidies for stories about Free Markets!

They want to say the N-word. That’s really all there is to it. They want to say the N-word anywhere they please and to anyone they please and not get called out for it. They’re like toddlers who are told not to put beans up their nose.

Bellow:
“Here in a nutshell were the ideas and methods of the contemporary Left, including its reactionary humorlessness, its bullying tone, and its impulse to dictate what people may and may not say. The Left has always understood the importance of language to its transformational project. If you can control the use and even the meaning of words, as Orwell showed in 1984, they cannot be used to express dissenting views, or even to formulate the thoughts that might inform such intellectual resistance. And if you cannot actually dictate people’s thoughts, you can force them into silence by making it too costly to express them.”

I know you are but what am I? The “contemporary Right” has become expert in bullying the media into repeating its preferred narrative and distorting words like “freedom.” What planet does Bellow live on? Planet Academia?

As John Quiggin recently blogged “The Republican party is, in essence, a combination of an ethnic voting bloc (Southern whites) and an economic interest group.” How do the rightwing intellectuals rationalize the dumbness of their democratic voting base and major campaign donors? That they’re useful?

But they’re still …. you know, morons.

That is one of the weirdest pieces of non-fiction I’ve ever read. Blazing Saddles came out in 1974. The Clarion conference Adam Bellow occurred in . . . the age of social media . . . in other words, 1976. (Mr. Sammler’s Planet was published in 1970. But Adam Bellow was shocked, shocked! by the inklings of incipient political correctness six years later.) Maybe the Trafalmadorans got him?

@7 – I have no problem with common sense ‘political correctness’ that takes some account of actual existing mores and speech norms as they exist in the world at this moment, and works from there. I just don’t buy PC as political napalm, which works as a tactic to bully and intimidate and shut down debate. (ironically often use as a justification for being an asshole in public..which I am also, I agree, although I do try)
I agree fully with the piece quoted. Sections of the social media/social justic left are completly nuts.

From the Clarion Workshop, 1976:

I remarked to one of the women in the group, in what was meant to be a compliment, that she had “balls” for tackling a particularly difficult subject in one of her stories. Joanna [Russ], who had caught a bad cold and was sunk in her chair, groaning and blowing her nose, suddenly roused herself to rebuke me for using this paternalistic epithet.

I kind of saw her point. I had used a phrase that unconsciously valorized courage as a masculine trait. But I didn’t see why I should be called out in front of the group and angrily chastised as though I were merely an embodiment of the white male heterosexual power structure. I stood my ground as best I could, protesting that my intentions had been good and that I was not responsible for 50,000 years of patriarchy. The other members of the group sat silently, embarrassed and clearly intimidated.

Man, this is a writers’ workshop. The whole point is to learn something about the use of language, using a group approach. Now note, all these years later, he’s not attempting to defend his language choice as good or appropriate in context. Instead, he asserts that his intentions were good. Well, fine–you’re not really the sexist asshole your language seems to indicate. But learn your lesson–don’t talk that way. And if you don’t want to be taught lessons about use of language, do something with your time other than go to writers’ workshops.

And he hasn’t learned much about writing since 1976, either.

While I disagree with the excesses of the so called “social justice warriors”, their energy and drive is useful in countering irrationally self-confident and assertive right-wing discourse. I support them even if I find them mildly irritating.

And also: as though I were merely an embodiment of the white male heterosexual power structure.

Bear in mind that the guy saying this is this is the kid who made a big splash at the writers’ conference when his dad was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature during the conference. (Clarion runs 6 weeks in the summer–June-August; Saul Bellow’s prize was announced in early July). So yeah, he was something of the embodiment of the white male heterosexual power structure.

AFAICS, Bellow wants to use “left” to mean “people who use social media”; and if you object that he’s not free to make up his own meanings, as far as he’s concerned, you’re the Language Police. It’s possible he also wants to use “I” to mean “a fictional character something like me and something like you,” and it would be language-police-y to complain that the facts don’t make sense.

But the idea that he made it through childhood without any authority figure or peer ever dressing him down for something he felt was innocent, doesn’t ring true to me.

“By harnessing the passions of offended minorities to the power of social media, the Left has created a hurricane of politicized indignation that can be directed wherever it likes and levels everything it touches.”

Yes Adam. Outside agitators made the meek, gentle, obedient neeegroes into scary, aggressive, disrespectful n-words.

Keep telling yourself that. And don’t forget that women would be perfectly biddable, stay-at-home cookie bakers if it weren’t for The Left’s Feminazi Army.

The problem of ‘political correctness’ is a consequence of participation in bourgeois institutions. On the one hand, the bourgeoisie must always be about their business of revolutionizing the means of production, imperialism, etc. etc. etc. On the other, they’re usually pretty comfortable, pretty well off, don’t want to cause too much trouble because who knows what might happen. So, when the business is discourse. as in academia and the boss media, discourse must be propertized and managed. It must not be too offensive, especially along tribal lines. Each registered participant becomes responsible for the whole, and disrupters, heretics, cranks, and psychotics must be thrown out of the temple. So this Bellow character is complaining about something he totally signed up for, which is pretty silly.

I have to say, though, that going up to some women at a writers’ workshop and telling one of them, admiringly, that she had balls, is pretty funny. In fact, it’s pushing the humor envelope, one might say.

This Cresting Wave of Right-Wing Creativity would be a great band name.

If it’s a post-rock outfit, This Cresting Wave of Right-Wing Creativity is Raw and Untamed would be even better.

“America is great and the New York Times is a powerful enemy of that greatness” contains neither of those qualities.
Oi? It’s got a conflict right there, and many Americans take ‘America is great’ as a lived experience, an empirical true fact about the world.

A good writer could write a good book about, say, a young idealist from the country who joins the news forces of the city and slowly becomes corrupted by them. Or an American Buddenbrooks, where every generation loses entrepreneurial virtue and decends further into hipsterdom. With the last generation joining the cynical ranks of the NY Times, only capable to rally against the values that the family once exhibited itself.

Someone could also write very bad books on such premises, but I don’t think that is inherent in the concept.

I believe the cresting wave of right-wing creativity was first used in one of the sex scenes in Scooter Libby’s 1996 novel. It is the scene where the hero is approaching orgasm: “and as she position papered herself on the sofa, exposing her deregulation, I felt the beating of my heart and the cresting wave of right wing creativity coursing through my virility.”
This is soon to be re-issued with a preface by Harvey Mansfield, in which he laments that such a novel could not be written in today’s climate of correctness.

Bellow–

“For years conservatives have favored the rational left brain at the expense of the right. ”

From the movement that gave us creationism, climate change denialism, and the evidence-based approach to thwarting the WMD threat in Iraq.

” . . . just as bad as outright censorship is the censorship people impose on themselves in order to avoid being punished with the loss of their reputation and livelihood.”

Does he mean the free market? Because what he just said there sounds like the free market. Which it sounds like he’s against.

Odd, that.

Also, how is it possibly, from a purely physiological perspective, for conservatives to gloat (as they often do) about Ayn Rand being the best selling novelist of all time (second only to the bible) and ALSO to claim that they have been excluded from mainstream media.

Wouldn’t you need two independently working sets of vocal cords to do both of those at once?

@34 Good catch. And it sounds awfully familiar . . .

\”Title: The Stalin in the Soul ISFDB Title Record # 125424
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin
Year: 1973
Type: ESSAY
Language: English
Note: This began as a talk for the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop at the University of Washington in July 1973. It was revised for publication in the The Future Now: Saving Tomorrow, 1977.\”

Trolling, Trolling, Trolling, Trolling… keep those trollers rolling soon they’ll be sending out some snide.
Don’t try to understand em’
Just mock, scorn, and ban them
Eventually they’ll just sue far and wide.

The project of William Buckley has reached its apotheosis – it’s all trolling all the time now. From Holly Hobby Lobby to Sarah Palin to Ted Cruz trolling the US Senate to this poor clown it’s trolls all the way down

I can’t help but read Bellow’s article as a response to recent denunciations of Orson Scott Card and Ted Beale from the world of SF/F readers. In which case he needs to recognize that the denunciations are not of these gentlemen’s fiction but of their very public political actions. Well, the denunciations are not of Card’s fiction; nobody thinks Ted Beale’s books are any good.

What makes you think Neil Gaiman is on the Left?

J.K. Rowling is a strong supporter of the welfare state and the NHS. I think it is safe to put her with the left.

UPDATE 2. Making everything worse as usual, Jonah Goldberg tells us the liberals who run Hollywood actually make lots of conservative entertainments because that’s what sells (“Most Hollywood liberals probably oppose the death penalty, yet they make lots of movies where the bad guy meets a grisly death to the cheers of the audience”).

A sane person might ask: if Liberal Hollywood is making the bloodthirsty entertainments conservatives like, what is Goldberg bitching about? See Bellow, Adam: They may fantasize about being treated with the respect due an artist, but what they really want is their names above the titles and (especially) on the checks. All the rest, as someone once said, is propaganda.

– Roy Edroso
~

‘What makes you think Neil Gaiman is . . .’

American?

Well, here we go again.
Mr. Freed: The “n-word” is the “n-word”.
Just like “dick” is semantically equivalent to “penis”. Shit/caca/doo-doo. Etc/etc./etc.
The use of one or the other or some creative new construct is a cultural signal of moral intent, the words themselves have no moral content inherently.
Using the “n-word” in place of “nigger” means you’re a nice white person, or ardent POC, who recognizes the vast and still unresolved suffering behind the original term.
Using “dick” instead of “penis” means you’re a little sort of schoolboy-edgy. Whereas “cock” means you’re placing yourself outside consensus norms for polite speech. And “throbbing gristle” means you’re a middle-aged musician or something.
Honky libs are uncomfortable with fully-certified young blacks using “nigga” because it seriously undercuts the purity of their signals of niceness and confuses and blunts the efficacy of changing up the language and policing overt behavior.
I mean if it’s okay for Dre and his heirs to say it, does that mean, I mean, if white guys use it are they just wanna-be’s, or, or, or, confusion.
Keep in mind Joyce, James, was seriously abused by the agents of political correctness of his time, for levels of “obscenity” most parents today wouldn’t be particularly upset with their children reading or viewing. Championed by people who had to battle the attempt to configure them as champions of the ebscene.
Allowing the economic and incarceration disparities of our little experiment in freedom and democracy to continue without an *equivalent* amount of outrage to that leveled at non-rule respecting speech is a little, you know, hypocritical. And it cements the antagonism of Bellow’s fellows in incoherence. It’s a vulnerability.
You can’t identify racists and collaborators in racist policy by their language.
There’s racists that would never use the word “nigger”, and there’s common folk who use it who don’t have racist-one for attitude. I’ve know both. Of the two I’ll take improper speech fromm a good -hearted country boy over the heartless practices of those whose language is impeccably acceptable, any day.
–
CJColucci:
“that courage was a masculine, rather than a human”
The duty of the male to protect women and children isn’t a foolish relic of patriarchal chauvinism, it’s an atavistic biological strategy that can require conscious willing risk of sacrifice, or, courage.
Men are sperms, women are eggs.
As above, so below.
If there’s going to be a serious engagement with people like Bellow and his seemingly non-diminishable-by-appeals-to-compassion cohort, it is going to have to be coherent, and grounded in reality.

Mr. Freed: The “n-word” is the “n-word”.
Just like “dick” is semantically equivalent to “penis”. Shit/caca/doo-doo. Etc/etc./etc.
The use of one or the other or some creative new construct is a cultural signal of moral intent, the words themselves have no moral content inherently.

Yes. You seem to have missed the important point there, or maybe you disapprove.

Yes, it is a cultural signal of moral intent. They want something like an armband, a flag to put on your lawn to show which side you’re on, a bumper sticker. A way to declare your loyalties. A sort of cultural immune response.

You can’t identify racists and collaborators in racist policy by their language.

But there’s an attempt to do just that. You say it can’t succeed. But to some extent it succeeds merely by existing. Every time its proponents fight the good fight, they have stood up for themselves and that’s a win. Of course, if you become their opposite number and you stand up for yourself against them, I guess that means you win too. A mutually-beneficial arrangement, which is one explanation why it persists so well.

There’s racists that would never use the word “nigger”, and there’s common folk who use it who don’t have racist-one for attitude. I’ve know both. Of the two I’ll take improper speech fromm a good -hearted country boy over the heartless practices of those whose language is impeccably acceptable, any day.

So, try looking at it from the other guy’s point of view. Once the good-hearted person finds out that he is being unintentionally offensive, then he will stop doing it. Because he doesn’t want to offend. Then all is forgiven and forgotten.

But if an evil racist person stands up for his right to wear the racist armband, then they want to mob him like a pack of crows.
“You can’t say that! It means you’re a racist!”
“Of course I’m a racist. I stand up for my own kind, and that’s right and proper.”
“But you can’t do that, it means you’re a racist!”
“I can and I do. If I’m not for myself, who am I for?”
“Racist!”
“Quite all right.”
“No respectable person will have anything to do with you.”
“I don’t like your kind of respectable person all that much either.”

Again they all know where they stand.

Third way:
“You can’t use that word!”
“It doesn’t mean anything.”
“It does to me. It’s offensive.”
“You have no right to be offended by innocent words.”
“Those are racist words! You’re a racist!”
“I am not. I was a Freedom Rider. I have scars from the racist police dogs. I got knocked on my ass by the racist water cannons. Some of my best friends were murdered by racists. I’ve done more for niggers and the whole nigger race than you ever did.”
“But you use the n-word!”
“It’s just an arbitrary symbol. You only give it meaning because you want to.”
“Of course we want to give it meaning. We give it the meaning that you’re a racist.”
“I disagree. You have no right to give it that meaning. You have no right to choose meanings for words.”

Leads to confusion, right?

“that courage was a masculine, rather than a human”
The duty of the male to protect women and children isn’t a foolish relic of patriarchal chauvinism, it’s an atavistic biological strategy that can require conscious willing risk of sacrifice, or, courage.
Men are sperms, women are eggs.
As above, so below.

This is a meme, a folk knowledge, a superstition. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, it could be true or false independent of belief. It might have survived to now because it has been useful in the past, or maybe not.

Our genes are set up to provide the right number of people of each gender. When one gender has a higher death rate, eventually natural selection results in more babies born of that gender. Among europeans, there are something like 10% more males conceived, maybe 7% more males born. This is commonly explained by males being more “fragile” and so dying more before birth, during birth, during the first year, during childhood, etc.

The Aztecs did a lot of female infanticide and now their descendents have about 20% more female births than male.

Since a man can die only once for his wife, this isn’t something he can make a habit of. But even doing it once could make a difference for the children’s survival, in the old days. I’m sure they did better when neither parent died. I don’t know how hard it would be to get statistics about all that. Surely easier for cities than unsettled areas. But traditionally cities did not replace themselves, city children tended to die and be replaced by immigrants from farms where the birthrate was high. So what men did in cities might not matter as much.

Here’s my point — you have a story that makes sense, but it’s only a story. We won’t know how true it is unless we get some sort of evidence.

About men and women being brave, here is one story. A family was camping. My friend was a little kid with his two brothers, and they were playing while their mother made lunch. They saw a bear and got interested in it. Their mother saw them close to the bear and she freaked out. She grabbed the first thing that came to hand and charged at the bear screaming. The bear ran away, no doubt thinking of the people as being like bears. He knew what would happen if he got too close to a mother bear’s cubs. After the bear left her kids asked her why she was attacking the bear with a roll of paper towels. I talked to his father and he confirmed the story.

Men and women are both protective of their children.

Roy, you need to get out more. Meet some women. If you have the balls.

CJColucci 07.08.14 at 9:17 pm:

Careful there big boy.
I’ve got the active attention of more women, right now, than you’ve met in your entire life.

CJColucci:

Unless you’re a gynecologist or something

Never interfere with the enemy when he is making a mistake.

Cross-posted there didn’t we?
Let me clarify: I’ve got the unbiased, not-negative, not-hostile attention of more women than you’ve ever even met. Which is not say it is anything like adulation or any of that. Just that it isn’t hostile, or biased against me.
Hostile, probably about the same as your life-list.
Unless, like I said you’re an ob-gyn or something. Which seems doubtful.
I’m, let’s say, a little bigger than you.
In the sense of being paid attention to.
By women.
And others too, of course.
Meaning people who are not women.
Such as yourself, possibly. Though gender isn’t exactly shining through your prose, there is a snotty adolescent maleness to it that could be an indicator.
–
So.
Having tidied that up, let’s move on to Ayn Rand.
Now there’s my idea of a human being.
Her most famous works in the umpteen hundreds of pages and the amount of genuine human emotion in there wouldn’t fit in a child’s toy thimble.
An as-yet undiagnosed type of high-function autism, maybe.
Her heart’s got the depth and dimensionality of a pencil-scrawled outline on a post-it note.
And she’s the champion of how we’re supposed to look at the misfortunate, according to some prominent social voices.
It doesn’t seem even sightly plausible that language policing is going to have much effect on people who would hold her up as how we ought to be doing things.
In case anyone’s interested in why I’d spend any time answering snotty fools on the internet.

On changes in language from Joyce to the nouveau roman and Sarraute
On signs and social bonds &c.
Hannah Arrendt on Nathalie Sarraute’s The Golden Fruits (NYRB)

“Every word, if it is not meant to deceive, is a “weapon,” all thoughts are “assembled like a large and powerful army behind its banners…about to roll forward.” The imagery of warfare is all-pervasive. Even in Kafka, as she herself has noted—let alone in Dostoevsky or in Proust and Joyce, the earlier masters of the inner monologue—there are still these “moments of sincerity, these states of grace,” which are absent from her own work. There is, second, and more surprisingly, the fact that she has never elaborated on her enormously effective use of the “they”—what “they say,” the commonplace, the cliché, the merely idiomatic turn of the phrase—emphasized by many of her reviewers and admirers. “They” made their first appearance in the Portrait, moved into the center of the plot in The Planetarium, and become the “hero” of The Golden Fruits.”

“As they exhaust all aspects, all arguments and outdo each other with superlatives until they all know: “There will be those who came before and those who came after ‘The Golden Fruits’.” ”

“The “secret signs” by which we recognize each other, what else do they say but, “We are brothers, aren’t we…I offer you this holy bread. I welcome you to my table.” This feeling of natural kinship in the midst of a world, to which we all come as strangers, is monstrously distorted in the society of the “refined” who have made passwords and talismans, means of social organization, out of a common world of objects. But have they really succeeded in ruining it? Shortly before the end, Nathalie Sarraute turns from the “they” and the “I” to the “we,” the old We of author and reader. It is the reader who speaks: “We are so frail and they so strong. Or perhaps…we, you and I, are the stronger, even now.””

Colin Danby @ 44 “The end of Mr. Bellow’s piece explains why he’s making these arguments: to advertise his new venture, libertyislandmag.com.

“The Mission Statement is rather touching: ‘What is Liberty Island? An imaginative colony. A playground for the mind. A place where your right brain is allowed to run free.'”

You’ve nailed it – this long, awful “article” is really NR’s version of native advertising, promoting the opportunity to traipse over to the “imaginative colony” where right-wing Randians can endlessly define “who is John Gault?”

I find this… erm… essay? interesting because it mirrors the current hulabaloo within American SFF — to wit, there are a number of conservative authors who generally write paternalistic, authoritarian “Lazarus Long Knows Best” “hard” SF who are up in arms that they aren’t getting the attention they feel they deserve from a generally left-leaning industry. To the point where they vote-bombed the Hugo nominations with the works of a number of conservative authors (which is fine, some of them are pretty good) as well as the works of a few very vile persons. The point of this exercise is that if said vile authors win the Hugos, they can crow about how they’re taking back the fandom; and if they lose the Hugos, they can complain about how the liberals have taken over the fandom and they’re being censored and shut out and and and…. In other words, they’re attempting to make the Hugos — a personality contest, essentially — into a referendum on politics.

Shorter Roy:

I can bench press a car, I’m an ex football star
with degrees from both Harvard and Yale
Girls just can’t keep up, I’m a real love machine
I’ve had far better sex while in jail
I’ve designed the Sears Tower, I make two grand an hour
I cook the world’s best duck flambe
I’ll take the pick of the litter, girls jockey for me
I don’t need these lines to get laid

I’m a man of the night, a real ladies delight
See my figure was chiseled from stone
One more for the gal then I’ll escort her home
Come last call, I’m never alone
I’ve a house on the hill with a red water bed
That puts Hugh Heffnor’s mansion to shame
With girls by the pool and Italian sports cars
I’m just here in this dump for the game

“I’d like to note that lot of Black people think it is not okay for anyone, including Black people, to use bad language.”

Very true. But while one can make an argument that Dr. Dre is reclaiming the word to rob it of its power one cannot make the same claim for Roy. He is just being an asshole.

Also, I think, Bellow wrote a book in favor of nepotism. LGM observed, IIRC, that he was a living refutation of the idea that nepotism could be beneficial.

David/Davud:

Not sure if that’s the same person, but…
Also Mr. Bird-photo thunder guy:

Something that’s been cleared up for me recently is that I’m probably correct in assuming there’s more readers than commenters here, by a considerable factor, so haranguing the tendentious may have a beneficial result for some of them.

Long-term liberal elders like Bill Moyers are practically calling for revolution in the streets, and a majority of the posters here are chanting a watered-down version of “Won’t Get Fooled Again”.
The idea that we’re in any proximity to Orwellian dystopia, did I say that? I mean, Jesus, how absurd do you want to get?
Sure we’re a little fractured and dysfunctional as a society, and we’re actively prosecuting wars against distant vague enemies no one knows anything about but what they’re told by proven liars, there’s a fascistically secure elite sucking up the wealth of the country using a near-privatized armed force to protect themselves from the rabble, we’re under near constant surveillance even in our homes, the majority respond automatically and unquestioningly to messages from an unseen authority about who they’re supposed to hate, and people are being locked up and or driven into silent anonymity for telling the truth about all that,,,,but c’mon. Orwell?
Pish tosh!
Much more Huxley than Orwell, don’t you think?

roy belmont 07.08.14 at 9:23 pm:
‘Anarcissie 07.08.14 at 8:39 pm
Oh gee dude I completely didn’t know that. Living as I do in a little cul-de-sac of antique values with no access to contemporary culture less than 40 years old.’

I wasn’t talking to you or about you. Sorry for the confusion.

“but he views C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia as a parable that is not only murderously misogynistic, but deeply blasphemous as well”

Yes, but so what? OK, Lewis wrote Narnia as a place where men and women had different roles, where men could be kings and women could be queens. That isn’t enough to make him a conservative. Blasphemy isn’t enough either. He wrote stories where indivdual people made their own individual choices and it mattered. That isn’t enough to call the stories conservative either.

Tolkein’s Shire was a place where the lower classes touched their forelocks in the presence of their betters and it was (nearly) ruined by an industrialist building dark satanic mills.

Yes, and Frank Herbert’s Dune was a place where aristocrats with nukes maneuvered for family advantage, where the Fremen settled their personal disputes with dueling and apparently kept slaves, they ran a free market economy while they were unquestioningly obedient to their tribal leaders. That doesn’t make it a conservative story.

I liked Tolkein’s conservationist stance — anti-conservative today, though it used to be conservative before conservatism got so capitalist.

Geneology was destiny and orcs seemed a lot like southern and eastern europeans while elves were quite northern.

I dunno. Did Tolkein say to make that interpretation?

Jack Vance’s Maske: Thaery involved colonizers who ruled a subject race — the slaves were naturally subservient and would do whatever a master told them, provided certain protocols were followed. (They themselves settled into groups of four, and a party of three slaves and one master would work with nervous energy.) They lived in their own communities doing whatever they thought was worth doing, and at any time a master could stop by and draft some of them to work for him. If somebody decided that Vance was describing an idealized version of happy US slavery with the darkies singing in the fields etc, and that made it a racist book, I would strongly disagree.

It isn’t enough to show the Shire as a classist place. The author has to say that’s a good thing. What Tolkein shows is the Shire as a boring place for the upper classes, so that his main characters in each case sneak out, have enough adventures to last a lifetime, and then come home lacking any better choice.

It isn’t enough to show monarchies with no attempts at republican revolt. There must be some indication that monarchies are a good thing. It isn’t enough to show free markets (which are mostly absent from Tolkein. mostly governments give people things). There needs to be some effort to show that free markets are good, or better than a less-conservative alternative.

That is the problem I have as a liberal: I like good reads and do not care much about the politics of the author even when I can determine what they are.

Same here. I have to figure that different cultures do things in different ways. If somebody writes about a made-up culture and it does things that seem to fit together reasonably, I don’t mind if it isn’t the way I’d want things to happen here.

MPA Victoria @ 69

Hilarious, but is Roy self-aware enough to recognize that it’s a parody, or will he mistake it for one of his own?

“Hilarious, but is Roy self-aware enough to recognize that it’s a parody, or will he mistake it for one of his own?”

Who knows? But I enjoyed it.

Also, Chesterton was conservative!?!? All you all need to read “Man Who Knew Too Much”! It’s a joy.

@86
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation

Thank you for sharing that link Thornton. I really enjoyed reading that.

re the movies thing:
I wonder if McManus actually saw ‘Argo’.

Thornton Hall #84: “Reaganism is simply a series of empirical claims about the world that turn out to be wrong.”

I think we should add two things: 1. Reaganism is used by cynical people (e.g the Republican leadership) as propaganda to keep the true believers (the Tea Party) showing up in the voting booth, and 2. because the claims are wrong, Reaganism is now crashing into reality after 30 years of denying that reality.

This contradiction is driving two wedges, one wedge into the GOP and splitting it, and the other wedge between the GOP and the rest of the country.

Anarcissie 07.09.14 at 12:17 am:
No apology necessary, sorry for my assumption. Interesting cross-wire simultaneity me 56 with 55 above on that. Could just readdress it and have it quite nicely
–
Mr. and/or Ms. Colucci: I don’t read that person’s comments anymore. So the sting, if there was any to be had, has passed me by.
–
bob mcmanus 07.09.14 at 12:46 am
I hear the guy that made Brazil‘s got a new one. Also he’s the guy that made Tidelands. Also a bunch of other cool dadadelic stuff.
Something with “Zero” in the title. He’s, you know, the guy that made that foot that kept squashing people in the Monty Python series. The one that isn’t Michael Palin or John Cleese or Eric Idle or Terry Jones or Graham Chapman.
Probably gonna redeem the fuck out of cinema all by itself, I’m guessing.

Did you catch Masked and Anonymous? There’s a scene in the opening montage of Marcos on a horse, with balaclava and pipe. And a Ford Falcon, in a telling shot, the preferred ride of the Salvadoran death squads. And Bob Dylan.

Open Culture’s got a Japanese silent from like 1918 or something called “A Page of Madness”.
https://tinyurl.com/pa5k697
Free, I don’t have the bandwidth myself, otherwise I’d give up a little exegesis on it..

There’s always Antonioni’s Il Grito if you need some serious bolstering.

#95

I’d be interested to see the source for this comment,

I don’t have one handy. It was in a book on evolutionary population genetics in a university library, and I don’t now have access to the library or even remember the name of the book. It’s possible I misremember it and it was only 2%.

The reasoning is sound. If you accept a reason for a change in sex ratios like “males are more fragile”, then there’s the question how it evolved. There must be mechanisms to influence sex ratio, like a difference in number of sperm of different genders, etc. If there is a mechanism that influences sex ratio, whose genes can vary and be subject to selection, it will be selected on average for the right sex ratio, depending. In an obligately bisexual species, whichever gender is in shorter supply at reproduction will be selected to increase, and any linked genes will be selected also.

Of course, there’s room for anomalies from segregation distortion, but then segregation distortion is one of the mechanisms which can balance it too.

I will look for new sources but I don’t know ahead of time what I’ll find. I want you to know I wasn’t just making it up, but I have to accept the possibility that the author I read was making it up.

I have to accept the possibility that the author I read was making it up.

I think the important thing in that case wouldn’t so much “author made it up” — people make stuff up all the time, nothing unusual — but “J Thomas lacks the ability to spot that stuff he is reading is made up”.

[you could respond, but remember what you wrote above about sometimes giving other people the last word? I think some humility-and-quiet-reflection time would serve better than a quick off-the-cuff response, here.]

MPAVictoria

Well, the complaint here was specifically that Hollywood movies aren’t as politically edgy as they once were, and I think you could make a colorable argument along those lines. You could even use superhero movies like Iron Man and The Dark Knight as examples of modern jingoism; I’d say that’s a mistaken interpretation, but at least there something there in the text. However, while Captain America has a name that sounds jingoistic the actual character was a “premature anti-fascist” and New Deal liberal. The example is so incredibly wrongheaded it’s pretty much trolling me, intentionally or not.

Of course, bob mcmanus also complained that a major Hollywood studio wouldn’t make a film like Z these days. That’s a silly complaint since Hollywood didn’t make Z in the first place; it was a French production with a Greek director.

Apparently even Disney’s Frozen passes the Bechdel test, so there’s progress.

It occurs to me that even though the Vietnam war was wildly unpopular you really didn’t start seeing antiwar movies until several years after it was over. OK, there was MASH I guess.

Much of what Bellow’s saying relies on a sort of Moral Majority question-begging, in which hard-right ideology is assumed to be deeply popular with most of the population, therefore the lack of mass enthusiasm for it can only be the product of censorship and repression from the left.

My general sense is that true paleocons are more than capable of producing great, even profound art. Ezra Pound. Wendell Berry (?). Andrei Navrozov is a great writer even if he’s a lunatic.

But neocons and bidnesscons are by definition incapable. Their concerns are simply too ephemeral. When the profit is banked or the issue of the day resolved, the story is empty.

jfxgillis #109 — Pound was something of a minor monetary-theory crackpot and gave raging anti-semitic speeches on Rome radio against bankers who caused wars, but was he a “paleocon”? How are you defining that?

MPAVictoria 07.09.14 at 3:00 am @ 87 —
I’m familiar with reappropriation. Given the free use of misogynistic terms such as ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ by some male rappers, and given the consumer demographics, and given the handle, I wonder if you think that’s reappropriation, too. I’d call it something else.

“I’m familiar with reappropriation. Given the free use of misogynistic terms such as ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ by some male rappers, and given the consumer demographics, and given the handle, I wonder if you think that’s reappropriation, too. I’d call it something else.”

You seem to be coming at me pretty hard about this…

I am not sure what you want me to say? Do you think there is any difference between a black man using the n-word and a white person? I never disagreed with you that it would be better if no one used racial/homophobic/misogynistic slurs. I merely pointed out that it also matters WHO is using the word.

“It’s what I remember, but I have occasionally misremembered things before.”

Haven’t we all….

@ Rea # 12- And if you don’t want to be taught lessons about use of language, do something with your time other than go to writers’ workshops. Especially those with real writers like Joanna Russ.
I’ve listened to the arguments about political correctness and have many times asked a conservative,any conservative, to give us all a precise definition of the phenomena and then to tell us all precisely how it differs from do unto others… So far I’ve had no takers.

Also, Chesterton was conservative!?!? All you all need to read “Man Who Knew Too Much”! It’s a joy.

We’re talking about a dude who literally wrote a book titled Orthodoxy, defending same.

@Mpavictoria: Thanks for clicking! I really think the way forward is to doggedly point out all the bits of “ideology” that have nothing to do with systems of ideas and everything to do with being wrong.

#43 – Rowling’s Potter world view is overtly progressive but the premise is profoundly conservative: a secret elite, educated at a private boarding school, runs the government. The model is Eaton/Rugby/Oxford/Cambridge and then on to the Foreign Office and the Exchequer.

Let’s say that I agree with everything you wrote, which in fact I largely do, I can still believe . . .

Good discussion is seldom compatible with reducing it to an exercise in socialization.

Good discussion is seldom compatible with reducing it to an exercise in socialization.

We don’t want to remove everything else. But — I read a story about an academic who got a job working for a politician. The politician told him he had to restructure his approach to discussion. His old way, if he agreed 90% with somebody then they argued about the 10%. If he agreed 99.9% then they argued about the 0.1%. But the politician said that in discussion, he needed to look for agreement. If they agree 50%, look for ways to make progress on the 50% they agree on. If they agree 1%, look for ways to use that 1%.

To the extent that there’s still any real action in Congress, I think that’s what is getting it.

I think it’s admirable for them to examine their 0.1% disagreement while recognizing that they do mostly agree and are not really enemies.

@125 The biggest problem isn’t that Hogwarts is modeled after Oxford, the problem is that our state universities are based on the elites only model. Why on earth do we tax everyone to pay for education that only a select few will “qualify” for. As the Supreme Court’s recent anti-affirmative action case involving Michigan suggests, “qualifying” for public education is incoherent.

@T Hall
Why on earth do we tax everyone to pay for education that only a select few will “qualify” for

This is off-topic (if there is such a thing on this thread), but if you are talking about the US, as I understand it the majority of institutions of higher ed (incl. state ones) in the US are not v. selective in admissions, and someone w a h.s. diploma who wants to go to college can almost certainly get in somewhere. The state flagships are just the tip of the system. The questions of the distribution of public resources across the system and whether the system is generally serving students well are, granted, separate questions that have been debated on other CT threads. But in terms of qualifying for admission *somewhere* in the system, that’s not the main barrier to entry. A lot of the probs start earlier, w h.s. dropout rates, etc.

@LFC What’s the quote about changing people’s minds when they have a financial incentive not to change? How do we get American policy wonks (mostly paid by universities) and American progressive voters (all with find memories of the dear mother) to see that being the only country in the world that devotes vastly greater money to educating the rich than the poor is seriously fucked up? It’s gonna be an uphill struggle, no doubt, but U of M prides itself on spending tax dollars to educate the children of the elite. It’s their raison d’tra. The result is Detroit/Grosse Point.

@T Hall
I wd agree w you in principle on the distributional issues, but I have little to no knowledge of the details of higher-ed funding and its relation to taxation. (And the details here prob. matter.)

@136 It seems to me that there is sort of a choice about social vs economic policy that animates our semantic disagreement. There’s conservative meaning: don’t change. In that sense the contents of the policy preferences will be forever shifting with the status quo. I think the threat of Marxism and the “ideological” battles of the 20th C cause us to call this an “ideology” when it’s really a temperament.

There’s conservative the political economic ideology ala Burke: aristocrats rule because god made it that way.

Then there’s conservative the social philosophy: what is weird and strange in social relations is weird and strange because god made it that way.

It seems of these three types, the second is the only one that will have a consistent meaning over time, and even that’s contingent on our historical economic and political inequality.

Of course, I don’t endorse relativism. The wisdom of treating women like human beings was there for Chesterton to see, even in his own time. Nonetheless, I think defining conservative as “resistant to social progress” is the least helpful definition. But maybe that’s just a function of my greater interest in political economy over, say, gender roles.

@122 Exactly how much causal power are you attributing to Dr Dre’s references to bitches and hos? It seems to be: yes, kids would say those things if it weren’t for artists like Dr Dre, but they wouldn’t feel so cool doing it.

Is that right?

If so, when does Dr Dre go from being one of those kids to being the kind of person who is self-consciously making hate cool for profit? Is the threshold age? Record sales? Familiarity with sufficient white people?

Adam Bellow: what a pathetic legacy for one of the most revered American novelists of the C20. Can’t help but think that, were he alive today, the old man would be a little embarrassed. Of course He was a bit of a racist nut-bag himself, so there you go.

And what are these ass-clowns crying about anyway? They already have two of the “greatest” American “literary” figures in their corner: the bloody-minded Catholic neo-fascist, Cormac McCarthy, and the Nietzachean latter-day Zarathustra, Orson Scott Card.

Lee @112: much of the left … believes that most of the population is on their side, or would be if they knew better, and it is only rightist propaganda and workers’ alienation which prevents them from waking up

What else could it possibly be?

I honestly thought I was being charitable by chalking up our differences to a matter of emphasis and interest. But if you want to pick a fight: show me a woman who thinks voting is more important than economic distribution and I’ll show you a rich white woman.

You’re acting like these are separate questions instead two aspects of the same question, that question being “do women have rights equal to men?” The political and the economic are inseparable here.

crossposted with jerry v

Lee A. Arnold @ 112

Except that, in America at least, that’s true.

It’s not guesswork: poll after poll, election after election demonstrates without doubt that the majority of US citizens are keen on centre-left, social-democratic policies.

They just don’t have a lobby.

@146 & 147 There is something deeply pernicious in seeing the right to vote as instrumental in social justice. It shares a perspective with the authors of Citizen’s United.

White gay men of property have never been disenfranchised in this country and yet…

Geo #144: “What else could it possibly be?”

I think it is the complexity of issues (e.g. mechanics of financial crash; imprecise predictability of climate) up against limited intellectual time. I suppose they could be “alienated” from sheer lack of time, but was that the original definition?

Sancho #150: “It’s not guesswork: poll after poll, election after election demonstrates without doubt that the majority of US citizens are keen on centre-left, social-democratic policies.”

I happen to agree. In fact, I may have been the first individual on Crooked Timber to point out, many years ago now, that the U.S. majority is slightly center-left. However you will find that many leftists commenting here and elsewhere say that this isn’t good enough, that these people are all buying in to neoliberalism and evil, and it is THAT left which is echoing Bellow’s complaint.

@JerryV Would it be fair to say that you identify religious belief with conservatism? And if so, why not engage with my point about Pope Francis being no Reaganist?

There is something deeply pernicious in seeing the right to vote as instrumental in social justice.

To the extent that we have democracy, we will tend to do what the majority wants.

Some Republicans say that we don’t have a democracy, we have a republic. Their distinction is that in a democracy, the majority can do anything it wants to minorities, but in a republic the majority is limited in its ability to trample minority rights — minorities are given the Constitutional means to keep the majority from trampling them.

But when I read the US Constitution, it has two main safeguards to protect minorities. First, it has various ways that people who live in small states are over-represented. If you live in Wyoming your congressman represents fewer voters than any single representative from California, and your two senators likewise. Also you are over-represented in the Electoral College voting for President. By giving extra power to states that don’t have many people, we make it harder to trample the rights of the citizens of those states.

The second safeguard was that slave states were over-represented in various ways, but that got thrown out a long time ago.

There is another way that minorities could be protected, namely that everybody is given various vague rights by the Constitution, and if you feel your rights are being violated you can go to court and appeal the decisions and if each court in the hierarchy decides to review it on appeal, eventually it can reach the US Supreme Court which will may rule on it and tell people they can’t violate that right against people like you. This is chancy and indirect.

Apart from the Constitutional guarantee of extra votes — which currently only applies to underpopulated states — minorities must depend on finding a majority that says they must not be mistreated. If a majority stands behind that, then the minority that wants to mistreat them must do it quietly. If the majority thinks some particular minority doesn’t have rights, then it all tends to fail. The Supreme Court can make a ruling and it won’t really be obeyed. Etc.

The right to vote is an important symbol. What’s really important is to have a majority of the public on your side and a majority of voters, whoever’s voting, but it’s good to have your own vote that doesn’t depend on somebody else.

It has been a good thing for the USA to have a lot of liberals who believe that everybody’s rights are important, who stand up for every minority. They occasionally slack off. Like, they have not stood up for NAMBLA, a bunch of men who believe that they should have a right to completely consensual sex with willing young boys. But usually they support even minorities that tend to get bad media attention, within some limits. So almost everybody gets the minimum rights we think everybody ought to get, except when abuse of those rights can be kept quiet.

Anyway, it was The Man Who Was Thursday.

Belief in a strong connection between the right to vote and enjoying human dignity is at the heart of neoliberalism. It fits in with notions of meritocracy and “the market place of ideas”. Unfortunately, democracy is neither a necessary nor sufficient cause of human dignity. There are ways to get there that use democracy as one tool among many. And there are (to my imagination) very few ways to get there without democracy, but, importantly, there are a nearly infinite number of scenarios where oligarchs use democracy as a cover for reaping the surplus or everyone else’s labor. I’m not a Marxist, but voting in a capitalist democracy, without more, will get you nothing but suffering and a handy narrative about how you yourself are to blame.

MPAVictoria 07.09.14 at 4:10 pm
‘@122 [not really]
Let’s say that I agree with everything you wrote, which in fact I largely do, I can still believe that there is a difference between a member of an oppressed group using a word and a member of an oppressing class using that same word. Do you agree?’

On the whole I find the former more repellent, especially when its purpose is mercenary, and a substantial portion of the audience is of the oppressing category, including a sort of hipster element, who are up for games around certain lexical entries, while a couple of million people are in jail and millions more are under police supervision. Where does the idea that Black people should be gangsters come from? What interests does it serve? Who’s buying tickets and applauding?

Thornton Hall 07.09.14 at 7:04 pm @ 144 — I don’t have a theory of (effective) causation or gradation. Talking about women, especially of one’s own oppressed category, as ‘whores’, casually and repeatedly, offends my delicate sensibilities, that’s all.

@ Thorton Hall 168 — You would not believe the trouble I had selling the same thesis to the commenters here, 5 years ago. If the Democrats have any brains, they will continue to drive the wedge into the GOP right now, by loudly proposing legislation that the Repubs will turn down. They should also now loudly tell the country that Obamacare allows the states to enact single payer systems starting in 2017, so anybody with half a brain should vote for a Democratic senate, to prevent it from being overturned. When you total it all up, about 55-65% of the country would welcome a single payer. People hate sending money to the private insurers. Also, a single payer system will help ensure a social preference for a stronger welfare state in the future. And that is how the wheel really turns (as the conservative right correctly fears). I fear however that the lefty liberals here and elsewhere would rather clutch at their purity rings.

@Wm Berry
the bloody-minded Catholic neo-fascist, Cormac McCarthy

Well, that’s not how I read Blood Meridian, which is considered his masterpiece. (It’s been a long time since I read it, admittedly.) There is a lot of violence, and the central character has a sort of fascist (or nihilist) worldview, but it’s far from clear that that is McCarthy’s own view. I don’t know what his politics are. Perhaps he has said somewhere, but I would be wary of inferring his political views too readily from the fiction.

#169

Where does the idea that Black people should be gangsters come from?

Probably the same place the idea that british seamen should be pirates came from. Seamen on sailing ships got a notoriously bad deal. The empire needed them but it didn’t need to pay them if it could keep them from escaping while docked. People instinctively liked the idea of pirates who got away with going into business for themselves. Approach a ship, offer the crew freedom and if they chose to join, a share of the profits, they mutiny on the spot and you have two ships for one….

Of course in reality most pirates wound up destitute and in poor health if not hanged. Unless some of them secretly retired with money. There aren’t good statistics about how many secretly managed that.

So now we have the idea of poor urban black people with essentially no prospects, and the idea that some of them could win — either by drugs or rock-and-roll or whatever — and thumb their noses at anybody they like, is kind of appealing. Only a fantasy, but a pleasant fantasy.

What interests does it serve?

Pirates probably served the interests of the traders in the Americas who fenced their stolen goods cheap. And they were good for the people who made up songs and stories about them.

The myth of winning gangsters is probably good for the high-level drug smugglers who employ them. And of course the media people who glamorize them. I’m not sure of anybody else who benefits.

Who’s buying tickets and applauding?

Lots of people. Particularly people who feel trapped, who imagine a life of danger and riches. Mostly they don’t want to try it, but they like to imagine it. I don’t think very much of the audience is people who want to give blacks an unrealistic dream that will funnel them into the prison system. Instead it’s people who share the dream, but whose prospects while kind of bleak are still good enough they don’t want to risk sharing a prison cell with one of the gangsters.

“Of course in reality most pirates wound up destitute and in poor health if not hanged.”

J Thomas, it’s hard to understand what a sentence like that can even mean. ‘Most pirates’? ‘In reality’?

Pertinently, Saul Bellow has several unsuccessful sons of alpha-male fathers in his books. I can think of at least two (in “More die of heatrbreak” and (IIRC) “The Dean’s December”) offhand. These characters – who tend to be businessmen, not academics or novelists – are very conscious of their failure in the wake of their fathers’ fame & fortune. However does Adam Bellow interpret those books ?

@Lee A Arnold: I think Democratic strategists are wise to this game, but conservative (so to speak) in how they play it. The war on women is a clear winner, so, (even as they hate what it means for women) having the discussion center around GOP opposition to contraception (mental shorthand) is fantastic. Meanwhile, I hear you on single payer. But don’t forget that pretty much every Congressional Democrat took part in town halls before and after passage of the ACA where they got screamed at by angry mobs of Obamacare haters. You can understand that would make a person gun shy.

Where you do see some more aggressive moves is on SS, where the talk is now about expanding benefits. That’s a clear winner, too, although far from a top priority in real policy terms.

OK, which Royal Navy crews mutinied, seized their ship & became pirates?

I have read that commercial crews often had it worse. And those were of course what pirates attacked. Given a pirate attack a crew could choose to defend, or throw in with the attackers, or sit it out. After one side won, whoever was in charge could punish or reward each individual crewman based on whatever criteria they chose.

The empire needed cheap transport and tended not to assist defrauded sailors. A sailor who was not paid and not allowed to leave his ship, might find rescue by pirates his best exit strategy.

But ships needed maintenance that pirates could not do well, so they regularly had to capture new ships to replace old ones. It was a self-limiting process, so it would make sense for anyone who could collect enough of a stake to get set up doing something else probably ought to do that.

Regardless of all that, it was a fine fantasy which has captured imaginations from then right down to now.

You would not believe the trouble I had selling the same thesis to the commenters here, 5 years ago. If the Democrats have any brains, they will continue to drive the wedge into the GOP right now, by loudly proposing legislation that the Repubs will turn down.

Do you want Democrats to do that? If so, which Democrats do you need to convince?

Once I found a blog where many of the participants had a far better understanding of monetary theory than I was used to. I learned some things from them, and spent pretty much effort trying to get them to understand some things they were missing. Then I noticed that they were not trying to understand the stuff so they could influence people to do things better. They were traders, and they wanted to understand how the monetary system actually worked so they could better predict its effects on their investments. If I succeeded at getting them to understand even better, the main result would be that their businesses would be more profitable for them.

Do you want to convince commenters here for practice? Because they are better at convincing the people you need to convince, than you are? Because some of them (or lurkers) will actively make choices based on your advice, if you can convince them? Because it’s fun?

If you have a goal, it might make sense to look for ways to achieve the goal. If commenters here put up a roadblock, check how much you depend on commenters here and maybe route around them even while you look for ways to persuade them. Depending on your plan, their approval may not be necessary or even useful.

LFC and Layman:

There is plenty out there about McCarthy’s politics and views, and, yes, much of it can be deduced from the nature of his literary output.

While, obviously, his characters don’t necessarily speak for him all the time, some do, even if negatively or contrafactually. The Judge, e.g., in BM, in his famous speech late in the novel, expresses exactly McCarthy’s view of a a universe without God. It is this dark, dark view that leads McCarthy to ridiculously exaggerate every human fault and foible.

His prose is something like warmed-over (no, make that super-heated) Faulkner, without the humanist sensibility. I think his charm for some might be this very tendency to over-write and to exaggerate everything that is vile in human nature. It makes for plenty of blood-soaked excitement. Think of the prurient thrills of a Frank Miller graphic novel.

He is supposed to have mellowed out more recently, but that would be too late to be reflected in any of his major fiction. He must be around eighty or so; presumably, he wouldn’t be expected to publish much more. So, yeah, for most of his career, he has been a bloody-minded Catholic [reactionary] (allow me that emendation; on reflection, the “neo-fascist” bit doesn’t fit so well. There is no room for a cult; only for the solitary, self-reliant, masculine hero).

I think McC’s world-view might be closer to that of Robert Frost than of anyone else that comes to mind. But Frost didn’t write off virtually all humanity— he just liked a good fence. And Frost, at least, was a genuinely great American literary figure.

McCarthy’s own taste in literature is telling. He hates everything I (and like-minded left-liberal types) love; he professes to dislike Proust, Henry James (!), and Garcia Marquez. I mean, WTF?

James Wood doesn’t like him, and thinks he is enormously over-rated. In this, as in most things, I agree with James Wood.

WB @188 and 189 – off topic

When I read McCarthy I always find myself thinking – I don’t much like these characters, this plot doesnt seem to be moving very quickly and the morality of the story is going to be some mix of nihilsm, deperation and inhumanit, but yet the prose evokes an odd compulsion to keep reading in the hope that something good will shine through, somewhere. I liked your comparison to Frost – maybe Frost without fences, and more blood, paricularly from nasty knife wounds.

roy belmont 07.10.14 at 3:42 am @ 185:
‘Anarcissie 07.09.14 at 11:35 pm:
Not to get deeper into a debate where the participants are so far outside the cultural nexus they’re discussing they really have no business saying anything at all, but…
There’s a huge, big, giant difference between throwing a pejorative term back in the face of oppression, and stomping all over everybody in sight, including people even less enfranchised than you are. Lumping all uses of all taboo – in your world – terms as equally misguided and wrong is…wrong.

First of all, you don’t know what nexuses I’m in. Second, I am confident that the use of the language we are discussing preceded rapping as a general, widespread musical form. Third, I am not interested in presumably ultimate right and wrong — I have no access to such knowledge; I just know what I like and don’t like. In my doubtless partial view: every community (set of people living in some common relationship) which practices gradation, levels of social status, power hierarchies, differences of wealth and repute, respectables and contemptibles, sheep and goats, has to have a category of bad people for the others to be better than. It can be arranged in families, in villages, in tribes, in nations. It can and has been done experimentally on hitherto equal sets of people. The bad people are those who threaten, those who are poor, those who are weak, those who are ignorant, those who do badly in school, those who don’t have a job, those who do street crime, those who are in jail, those who complain, those who have problems, those who are a problem. This distinction is maintained with language as well as other behaviors. And the system reaches perfection when the ‘bad’ people adopt the language of their ‘betters’ and introject their worldview and start using the language and gestures that degrade and subjugate them. Right or wrong, I don’t have to like it. Sorry to be so tedious.

“It is this dark, dark view that leads McCarthy to ridiculously exaggerate every human fault and foible.”

Certainly there’s exaggeration, but I can’t recall a single good book that isn’t grounded in exaggeration. McCarthy is certainly convinced that most people are bad, but that’s not what I take away from his stories. What I get – what he is able to impart beautifully – is his wonder and deep love for what is good, even grand, in (some) people. The Road is painful to read, but ultimately redeemed by the love of a father for a son, and the self-sacrifice that love demands.

His use of language is astonishing, and the dialog always rings true, both in form and meaning.

I borrowed an e-book of The Road from the library not long ago. I was glad to have done so. I was astonished at how quickly I read it. I was reading for the plot. For all McCarthy’s vaunted lyricism, I had no wish to linger on any of it, not the language, or the imagery, or the turns of phrase and the thoughts they expressed. The idea that this is a book about human relationships . . . well, it focuses on a relationship between a father and son. But the setting was so obviously allegorical that the connection between the story and real human relationships is entirely imaginary. And the ending was too pat. If you think the father is virtuous, the ending means one thing. Think of him as a psychopath, and the entire thing is flipped around 180 degrees. And the only thing the reader knows about the outside world–which is what supposedly forces the father to behave so oddly and to isolate his son from other people–is what the father has said.

I don’t know whether this means the author is personally conservative, or whether he’s had some contact with conservative ideas and then rejected them.

@192 I am not interested in presumably ultimate right and wrong — I have no access to such knowledge; I just know what I like and don’t like.

You did include the word “ultimate” as a qualifier, but I’m pretty sure that such a claim is against the spirit of the forum.

I’m happy to learn from any correction.

(Ps experimenting w/ html!)

61: “National Review is where Joan Didion and Gary Wills started out. Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport wrote for it. And it now features Mini-me. Sadness.”

True. Also Arlene Croce and John Leonard. However, for the most part they didn’t stay there, or wrote out of personal friendship with Buckley. The National Review always published a goodly share of unreadable right-wing hacks even in early days. Off topic but I mention it lest innocent readers get the idea that NR was ever a haven for the gifted, although it is true that Buckley’s taste was less rigid than that of his successors to the leadership.

Kenner was once briefly NR’s poetry editor. For his debut in that capacity he cajoled a new poem out of William Carlos Williams, a coup with which he was justly pleased, only to be assaulted with a barrage of complaints from readers that the magazine was publishing a fellow traveling rat fink. Kenner observed that NR had some of the dumbest readers in the world.

I’ve lurked in this thread rather than contribute, partly because as a Brit I find the horror of North American politics difficult to believe and horrific to contemplate. Secondly, I was somewhat uneasy about the idea that it should be desirable to pick “low hanging fruit”. I hate the thought of a self-righteous “sneerfest”. Any camp, of any political colour, attracts some people who mostly want to belong – more than they really care about the cause concerned. A sneerfest attracts the kind of people a movement is better without.

In general, you’ve mostly been rather more thoughtful than I feared, and there has been a lot worth reading. Alas, there have been some personal arguments: without naming names or taking sides, all I would do is quote Emerson: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”

I’ve read McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, The Road, and his Border trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain). The Road was grim, but not great like the others IMO. I don’t recall anything fascistic or Catholic about these books. I tend to be sensitive to those attitudes because I experienced and then deviated from a right-wing religious upbringing. Blood Meridian was transcendently grim and the Border books were by turns achingly beautiful and grim. He is one of the very few writers whose prose literally gave me goosebumps from time to time, not from fright but awe. Neither the grimness, the beauty, nor the transcendence seemed to be making statements about mass politics or the existence or nature of God. Are other books of his more obviously Catholic/fascistic/didactic?

Whatever Mccarthy’s politics, Blood Meridien left me with the feeling that America was founded on corruption, brutality, mass murder and stupidity in high places. A pretty good summary of the new left view of America in the Vietnam era. I don’t feel like the scalphunters were meant to represent America’s empire of liberty and message of freedom to the whole wide world. They weren’t loveable.

Bryan Giemza has done excellent work on McCarthy’s Catholicism: http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/how-flannery-oconnor-and-cormac-mccarthy-helped-to-invent-the-south/

roy, i love you bro.

Re:Outsourcing of Torture to Uzbekistan

I’m not sure if by the ‘appropriate public use of slang’ you mean words and representations of the world – but if you do – then isn’t killing and torture and slavery generally interrelated with words and practices of representation?

I really loved a lot of 1990s Iranian movies, particularly those by Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Makhmalbaf made a film/re-enactment called Bread and Flower or A Moment of Innocence with a man (whose name I’ve forgotten) that he had stabbed for being a guard for the Shah before the Islamic Revolution. After September 11 George Bush Jr asked for a special screening of Makhmalbaf’s film Kandahar.

‘… the Bush administration used Kandahar to shift its justification of the war , from indiscriminate targeting of “the terrorists and those who harbour them”, to the more popular narrative of “liberating the Afghan people”.’ (Estfandiary, in De-Westernising Film Studies)

There was an article in Harper’s a while back looking at how some US soldiers in or supporters of the wars in the Middle East were re appropriating the word ‘infidel’ to denote themselves
http://www.tcfrank.com/essays/Semper_Infidelis

Adam Bellow was at least at one time an editor who could supervise conservative views in nonfiction. Logic would dictate that he believes that views which can happily be expressed by the many conservative nonfiction imprints cannot be expressed in mainstream literary fiction beyond a token author such as Mark Helprin.

Harald K 07.14.14 at 7:24 am @ 215 — Not a matter of ideology. Twitter is a kind of slum; slumming is hazardous.