Rebecca Solnit on culture wars and environmentalism

A problematic piece, with a real issue at its core – ubiquitous contempt for southerners – especially poor, rural, white ones – is a problem. However, blanket contempt applied to any group is a problem. It just happens that poor people (and especially poor rural southern evangelical white people), like fat people, are one of the groups who have been singled out as ok to mock in our society.

Most of the rest of the piece is the usual nonsense – I won’t argue about musical merits “de gustibus non disputandum” and all that, but it’s not seriously arguable that country music as a whole is anything other than reactionary. And the argument that long haired hippie environmentalists offend decent working class folks – puhlease!

Anyway, I’d like to briefly speak to my impression of what southerners are like – I lived in the southern US for about 10 years in all, mostly Texas and a little Louisiana. Mostly it was pretty enjoyable – people were generally much more sociable (in my entirely unscientific overall impression) than, say, the folks in Seattle, where I also lived. They were also kind and likeable.

However, I think that was in large part because I happened to have the right skin colour. On many occassions people I didn’t know felt compelled to share their unflattering opinions about [insert random ethnic or national group here] with me, a total stranger. I found this very odd and profoundly disturbing. There is (IMAO) an undercurrent – not just of racially-tinged meanness, but outright insanity in the south, and it’s a bit scary up close. However, it’s not completely absent elsewhere – it’s just stronger and closer to the surface in the south.

I suspect it’s all rooted in the universal assumptions of identity group politics – American exceptionalism and its peculiar US-client state variants, such as Thatcherite conservatism, Harper’s (or Mulroney’s) slavish desire to emulate the US, etc.

I guess this is a good place to make my standard reminder that all great music of the 20th century originated in the American South. Granted, it was often exported and “improved” or “developed” elsewhere, but it all started below the Mason-Dixon line.

Ok. Great music of the 20th century that is widely to listened to worldwide.

Al… Gore, that is.

Some further thoughts on the whole mess of issues surrounding environmentalism, class, and country, found here.

Did I forget Detroit and Chicago ?

South Bronx, Detroit and Chicago all had roots in the South.

But not in the 20th century.

random african, I’m thinking about the others. I’m not sure what the appropriate criteria to be used here for “listen to worldwide”. It’s pretty obvious that people listen to blues, jazz, country (yes, country), and rock ‘n roll all over the world. Of course people all over the world listen to music from Cuba. But it’s a different kind of thing – not exactly the same phenomenon. As far as Kingston – except for Bob Marley and maybe, maybe, Peter Tosh I don’t think you can say reggae is listened to world wide. So again, different.

Ok, lemme be more precise. All great “Western” (American + Europe) music of the 20th century, which subsequently spread all over the world, was invented in the American South. That still’s a lot for one region. I mean, what have the Europeans done (again, in terms of pure innovation, not later development)? The Germans might claim techno, but let them have it. We’re talking great, or at least good, music here.

Again, I don’t think Bollywood has the same international coverage as “rock n’ roll” or “blues” or “jazz” or “rap”.

Ok, maybe an analogy will help (very Americo-centric):
American musical genres – “jazz”, “blues”, “rnr”, “rap” – are like McDonalds, Wendy’s, KFC, etc. They’re freakin’ everywhere.
What generally falls in the category of “World Music”, even when it does have a world wide audience, is like a Perkins or Waffle House. While you can find it around, it’s on a much smaller scale then the first category.

Man, I hope that offended at least somebody.

I mean, what have the Europeans done (again, in terms of pure innovation, not later development)?

Don’t underestimate the global reach of italian disco, french “varieté” and ABBA.
Europeans invented musical blandness ! And that’s quite an achievement.

We should also look at other cultures that might suffer because of global warming – but that is caught in another type of Catch 22. Africa might suffer more from the changing climate than any other continent. Especially because of the lack of social safety nets provided by governments. Is there a solution for Africa when they have so much else to focus on – health, poverty, war and hunger? Or are we caught in a Catch 22 with no sustainable solutions? More on this in my blog at http://angryafrican.wordpress.com/2008/03/02/solving-the-changing-african-climate-a-catch-22/

Previous musical generations tended to beat on the sides of a pianoforte, whereas in the 20th century the “keys” were discovered by innovative New Orleans musicians blazing new trails.

Well, no, I didn’t claim Cole Porter’s songs were “originally” from the South

well then you’re implicitly claiming that either they weren’t written in the twentieth century or they weren’t great music. C’mon, don’t get soft on me man.

By the way, the official position of CT (by which I mean the iron line which all contributors have to adhere to, as spotted by perceptive commenters like john m) is now that we have to respect and acknowledge the validity of all aspects of Southern white culture except for their belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ. I am not 100% sure how well this is going to sell to be honest, but let’s give it the old college try, as they say at Kent State.

And I’m claiming the genre they were a part of does not have worldwide popular appeal in the same way as other genres.

You’re claiming that the Broadway musical was a local taste that never really took off?

You’re off your cake mate. Name me a city where Phantom of the Opera didn’t play to packed houses. And that’s a pale imitation of the genuine classics of the genre, fifty years after the peak of its popularity.

[cue Monty Python] Is this the room for an argument…?

#136:“…serious issue, for example, with the (more or less unconscious) modernist metaphysics that the world is ‘made’ of passive inert stuff, reducible to particles, subject to ‘laws.'”
Actually that’s just late 19th/early20th c. physics. Professor David Deutsch, no slouch on the physics tip in his own write, is convinced and pretty convincing that there are many “other worlds” than this one. In their own universes.
He spreads it out as a kind of linear and parallel thing, but obviously if you have other worlds and universes especially many of them, you can easily have a meta-organization to which all those worlds belong. Must have, pretty much. And then there’s lots of room in that larger picture for all kinds of beings, divine or otherwise. Because its boundaries are infinite, or nearly so.
Those reduced-to “particles” are just the places where the antique instruments began to lose their resolution, bestowing an inaccurate and opportunistic finality on what they found.
“Quarks! The final particles!”
“Whoops! There’s more!”
And more and more, because it’s as infinite, or nearly so, down there, as it is above and beyond.
An assumption in many of the main critiques of religion, and in things like the rejection of telepathy by people like The Amazing Randi et al. is there’s nothing outside the laboratory but noise.
And since there are no such things anyway critics feel they have no responsibility to conjecture pre-existing conflict around them, resistance – opposition to the public explication.
No tension other than between scoffing and credulity.
If telepathy is a real capability in human beings it’s probably been around a long time, and probably developed into and among groups of the like-minded, behaving the way contraband economies or repressed sexual minorities do, and the lack of mainstream verifiability and examples may have more to do with occult business practices and weaponization than dipshit chimeras and delusional fantasies.
The Scots especially, and Gaels generally, have a long tradition of second-sight and prophetic dream, Native Americans as well. Polynesian kava-visions recorded the Europeans coming before it happened. No accident perhaps these cultures were broken violently.
The facts and hypotheses we’re getting now from the front lines of physics seem as weird and counter-intuitive as anything analog or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction ever carried. It doesn’t take much more than an open mind to project that weird wonderfulness into some kind of much bigger than human reality, with much bigger than human players working in it. The Matrix being only one fairly mundane example.
Not that I’m saying that’s exactly what’s up, but the anally-clenched rationalism that refutes the childish beliefs of the religious won’t stand up to the blowback from its own team’s illuminations. There’s either other dimensions out there, or there’s something even stranger. No going back to the Edenic world of simple things.
The rationalists demand reasons to alter their views, which makes sense, as does the reliance on faith by believers. The conflict’s really about survival isn’t it? Or is that a diversion?
Faith abets the surviving of the faithful, as sceptical reason abets its adherents.
What everyone wants is insurance against being scammed. My personal experience is that the louder and more obvious sellers of that insurance are generally scammers themselves, and make dubious allies at best.
There’s something tender and open in the public faith of people like Lindsey. Something vulnerable that gets chopped up in the jaws of logic. Even though I don’t believe her view of things is accurate enough as it stands, I’ll insist it’s no more inaccurate than most rationalist worldviews. Just less rational, which you’d expect.
Rationalism gets its eminence from its immediate utility, and that gets reinforced in an educational system that makes it central to success, which constantly rewards logical patterning in the young, and all too often discourages and trivializes the intuitive and imaginative. By the time most of us get out of university the primacy of rational thought is asseverated like dogma, it’s in the air we breathe, even though most of our experience and behavior most of the time has little to do with conscious logic.
In the Church of Logical and Rational Positivity, as with any system of tenuous and unsupported beliefs, heresy gets met with scorn and violent denunciation, and given enough political strength, outright persecution.
Calls for humility and tolerance become brave in that context.