Jann Wenner and late-stage cancel culture

 The rock-journalism pioneer has made himself a case study in how an inartful comment can cast a pall on a lifetime of achievements, regardless of context:

 Jann Wenner, who co-founded Rolling Stone magazine and also was a co-founder of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, has been removed from the hall’s board of directors after making disparaging comments toward Black and female musicians. He apologized within hours.

“Jann Wenner has been removed from the Board of Directors of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation,” the hall said Saturday, a day after Wenner’s comments were published in a New York Times interview.

Wenner created a firestorm doing publicity for his new book “The Masters,” which features interviews with musicians Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Townshend and U2’s Bono — all white and male.

Asked why he didn’t interview women or Black musicians, Wenner responded: “It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest. You know, Joni (Mitchell) was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test,” he told the Times.

“Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right? I suppose when you use a word as broad as ‘masters,’ the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level,” Wenner said.

Late Saturday, Wenner apologized through his publisher, Little, Brown and Company, saying: “In my interview with The New York Times I made comments that diminished the contributions, genius and impact of Black and women artists and I apologize wholeheartedly for those remarks.”

He added: “I totally understand the inflammatory nature and badly chosen words and deeply apologize and accept the consequences.”

About the above-mentioned context: Wenner, at the time a UC Berkeley student, co-founded Rolling Stone in 1967 to serve notice that rock and roll had come of age, that its high-profile performers of the day, and indeed everything in its orbit, was worthy of serious coverage, that the days of 16 and Tiger Beat had passed. In the first issue, there was a deep dive into the finances of the recently held Monterrey Pop Festival. The piece looked objectively at what did and didn't work about the first rock festival, looking at its organizers as neither exotic types on the edges of mainstream entertainment nor icons of a counterculture that readers were expected to champion without question. 

Wenner was mentored by Ralph J. Gleason, jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. He quickly learned how to get musicians to discuss their stylistic flourishes and influences. The first wave of record critics he brought on board - Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Ben Fong-Torres - may be seen in retrospect as so steeped in the rock milieu as to give short shrift to a broader historical consideration, but they took that milieu seriously. They articulated the inescapable arrival of rock as a cultural force to be reckoned with in a tone that cemented that status.

When Wenner expanded the magazine's editorial scope to include political and cultural stories, he started in with the over-the-top gonzo style of Hunter S. Thompson, which was in keeping with the rock ethos. As time went on, he started running the work of Tom Wolfe and P. J. O' Rourke, who established themselves as independent thinkers who, while thoroughly understanding the countercultural impulse, resisted being in thrall to it. Wolfe and O'Rourke both soon came to gain status as right-leaners at an interesting moment in the history of conservatism. They also wrote for The American Spectator, at the time a freewheeling publication also founded in 1967 in a college town at the forefront of the burgeoning counterculture (Bloomington, Indiana). (TAS has since undergone several morphings of its identity and currently seems uncertain of where its position on the spectrum is.)

In 1977, Rolling Stone published a tenth-anniversary issue, and aired a commemorative television special, It was widely noted at the time that the former exuded the magazine's original spirit, but that the latter was a silly suck-up to the entertainment-industry machine that had established hegemony over what was left of any notion of a counterculture. 

Wenner expanded his publishing empire. One late-70s offering was Rolling Stone College Papers, an acknowledgment that RS had become a brand and was indeed geared toward a specific demographic. It was as if Wenner was intentionally catering to the younger siblings of those adolescents to whom Gloria Stavers had targeted 16 twelve or so years earlier.  

Another move that indicated dilution of the original impulse was Us, a People magazine knockoff that went all-in on gossipy fawning of celebrities of all types. 

Men's Journal was an attempt to flatter the rugged-young-male-adult-seeking-a-defintion-of-masculinity-suited-to-an-age-of-diminishing-demands-for-brute-strength demographic.

Still, throughout it all, Wenner maintained those friendships he talked about in the New York Times interview. And why shouldn't those guys maintain those friendships? There was no longer anything outlaw about any of them. Like any other figure upon whom the populace, with notable fickleness, conferred hoopla, they were mainly famous for being famous.

Wenner eventually had to go public with his years of sexual recklessness. That culminated in announcing he was homosexual:

Wenner, who has been out as gay for decades, cultivated a raucous, bisexual culture within the walls of his magazine empire, according to a new book by Joe Hagan called Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine. 

A passage in the book quotes a former employee who said Wenner "fancied himself as a sort of polymorphous-perverse William Randolph Hearst." "'He told me he had slept with everyone who had worked for him,'" said Glenn O’Brien, who joined Rolling Stone in 1973 and quit after what he said were Wenner’s unwanted advances.

One level on which Wenner's heave-ho from the Rock Hall of Fame board is discussion-worthy is the irony of a mainstream popular culture that would still like to see itself as the rebellious foil to a mainstream having to look at what had actually motivated one of its most venerated icons through the years.

But there's an even larger context in which to put this. The counterculture, long germinating and in its peak flowering stage in the 1960s, has been predicated on dismantling Western institutions and norms distilled over centuries. At its core, it's nihilistic. 

One could take issue with specific examples of black and women artists Wenner mentions in the NYT interview, and that's no doubt already being done.

For instance, within the context of taking rock seriously, I would imagine Joni Mitchell would have made a most interesting interview for Wenner's collection. By mid-career, she had collaborated with, and cultivated friendships with, a number of serious jazz musicians, including Charles Mingus and Wayne Shorter. She was levels above boilerplate promotional prattle about latest tours and albums.

But consider another context: that of her status as perhaps the supreme embodiment of the feral decadence of the 1970s Laurel Canyon scene. 

Consider Wenner's mention of Marvin Gaye, unquestionably in the pantheon of R&B immortals, but also a soul beset by sexual obsession and the attendant personal-life messiness that culminated in his getting shot by his father in a money dispute. 

I'd also like to take a look at another angle. Wenner mentions that, of his interviewees, one of his strongest friendships is that with Bruce Springsteen. For my money, that speaks volumes about how Wenner looks at rock and roll generally. As I noted in a Precipice post about Springsteen's Super Bowl Jeep commercial, there's always been a vacuousness about Springsteen that Rolling Stone types were desperate to ignore in their quest to make high art out of rock:

. . . when I look back over the entire arc of his career, including those first two albums, something becomes clear: he’s always been full of himself. In his early days, he was clearly aspiring to be some kind of encapsulation of rock’s development to that point. He’s always been out to make the Great American Rock Album.

So now Wenner comes in for blackballing for not passing muster with the current arbiters of identity assumptions. Just deserts and all that.

And then there's the deliciousness that another quick-to-find-the-correct-side-to-take type will find in seeing the raised-fist crowd eat its own.

But if one steps back for a view of yet wider scope, one can see that it's all destined to crumble in folly. It was hollow from the get-go. 

Nobody was ever interested in linking admirability with such traits as nobility, humility, or wisdom gained by adhering to tradition.

So Wenner's disgrace makes perfect sense. 

 

 

Thursday roundup

 Francis X. Maier of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has a piece called "My Kind of Antichrist." The title had me scratching my head until I grasped the contour of his argument. What he's referring to is how the Enemy impacts each of us individually. After looking at the notions of a personal antichrist put forth by Robert Hugh Benson and Romano Guardini, in which a human figure proves to be the crafty architect of the world's ills, Maier gets to wha we really need to be attentive to:

These weeks between Baptism of the Lord and Ash Wednesday belong to Ordinary Time on the Church calendar. They’re a kind of Great Plains on the Christian wagon train to our real home. They’re where everyday life happens; where the choices are made and the directions are set for our final destination. In other words, they matter. The Antichrist of Benson, Solovyov, and Guardini may one day show up on the human horizon; the Devil has a taste for grand melodrama. It appeals to his pride. But such things are not for us to know, and speculating on them is an indulgence and a waste.

Instead, we might all of us, and each of us these days, profitably read the First Letter of John, especially 4:1-6 and 2:1-6. It turns out that “antichrist” comes in all shapes and sizes. As John says, it’s the spirit of all things not of God. Which means that my kind of antichrist – and yours – is the sin we find easiest to absolve or ignore in ourselves; the sins hardest to resist and most congenial to our appetites. Their name, if we’re honest, is Legion.

And admitting that is the first step toward making Ordinary Time, conversion time.

At his Substack, Ted Goia posits that, by the broad set of criteria by which we need to consider a city's musical importance, we should elevate one above the other contenders:

Which city is our best role model in creating a healthy and creative musical culture?

Is it New York or London? Paris or Tokyo? Los Angeles or Shanghai? Nashville or Vienna? Berlin or Rio de Janeiro?

That depends on what you’re looking for. Do you value innovation or tradition? Do you want insider acclaim or crossover success? Is your aim to maximize creativity or promote diversity? Are you seeking timeless artistry or quick money attracting a large audience? 

Ah, I want all of these things. So I only have one choice—but I’m sure my city isn’t even on your list.

My ideal music city is Córdoba, Spain. 

But I’m not talking about today. I’m referring to Córdoba around the year 1000 AD. 

At Law & Liberty, Rachel Lu exhaustively, and by process of elimination, zeroes in on what she thinks an airtight definition of a woman is.

Along the way, she gives a measured assessment of what she thinks Matt Walsh got right and got wrong in searching for the answer to this question:

Right-wing polemicist Matt Walsh got in on the conversation this year with a documentary simply titled What is a Woman?  It’s a “hostile engagement” piece in the tradition of Fahrenheit 9/11, presented as a kind of ideological exposé in which Walsh skewers the gender-ideology gurus with ease. I dislike this genre, mainly because it opens such wide pathways to dishonesty and distortion. A documentary, by its nature, cherry-picks details to create a smooth narrative. It is a singularly terrible medium for exploring hot-button topics like this. Still, I mostly agree with Walsh on substance, and he did a fairly good job of illustrating some of the deep contradictions in modern gender theory. 

I still had one major complaint. When a documentary is titled with a question, I read this as an implicit promise to answer that question. But he doesn’t, or not really. Supposedly Walsh is a guy who just “likes to understand things,” and he presents that wide-eyed faux-curiosity to the activists and gender theorists. If understanding is really the goal of this film though, it ends in tragedy. Walsh chuckles at Jordan Peterson’s observation that a man who wants to know what a woman is should “marry one and find out.” Then he returns home to his own wife, preparing food in their kitchen, and poses the question to her. She tells him nonchalantly that a woman is, “An adult human female… who needs help with this jar of pickles.” Cue the laugh track. 

Call me a no-fun feminist, but I’d have preferred an answer thoughtful enough to stand on its own, sans pickle gag. I think the audience deserved that, after watching Walsh crusade around like a truth-in-gender Socrates, demanding honest responses to “the question you’re not allowed to ask.” I realize, of course, that the plebeian ending was very deliberate. Walsh wants to imply that sensible, grounded people should not need to pose this question. They know what a woman is, just like their grandparents and great-grandparents before them. From the mouths of sandwich-making housewives, we can still receive commonsense truths now forgotten by our “learned scholars.” I get it. But I still do not approve.

It’s clear enough, certainly, that most humans historically would have laughed at Walsh’s title question. And they did know what a woman was, at least in the sense that they were able to distinguish men from women with a high degree of accuracy. Even today, most people can do this, despite the changed names and puberty-blocking medications. Most of us can tell when the clerk in the frilly pink blouse is a man, even if the name tag reads “Jessica.” We don’t say anything. But we can tell. Gender ideology feels insidious in part because it asks us to “forget” or decline to notice things that we all really see and understand.

Lu concludes by saying that if we define a woman as the adult human being who is equipped o bear children, it actually liberates women and opens the door to productive conversations about the potentialities of all people:

The functional-reproductive definition can help with the fractious issue of gender stereotypes. It liberates us both from needlessly restrictive stereotypes, and from gender-equality crusades. One need not conform to common stereotypes to be a woman, and yet, it should not alarm us to find that some stereotypes broadly hold. I myself prefer football to fashion, and philosophy to party planning; I recognize that this is somewhat unusual for a woman. So what? Most people are outliers in one way or another, and this need not be either laudable or shameful. People are unique. In social settings, we may sometimes find ourselves leaning on “soft stereotypes,” simply because we don’t have time to get to know every person intimately. However, if we properly recognize the difference between defining features of sex and more incidental broad-based trends, we should be able to cultivate some flexibility, abandoning inapplicable stereotypes as we get to know particular individuals. 

Moving beyond the realm of etiquette, we can see that sex has real social and ethical implications, which the functional-reproductive definition makes clear. Men have a stronger sex drive, while women’s biological role in reproduction is far more arduous. Those two facts fundamentally explain why women have sex-specific vulnerabilities, which must be accounted for in both law and culture. Women sometimes need sex-specific protections against the possibility of male predation, and human societies must also compensate somehow for their disproportionately-heavy reproductive burden. Mothers need help, and fathers need to be encouraged to develop relationships with their offspring. The human race has long had a solution to both problems: marriage.

In modern times, we have also become more sensitive to the potential for women’s opportunities to be limited unreasonably when protection becomes the overwhelming social priority where their sex is concerned. Motherhood is a very good thing, but it does not exhaust the full range of women’s potentialities. Women’s sports exist because it seems fitting, in an opportunity-rich society, to cultivate and celebrate the athletic potentialities of both sexes. Women, as a group, are a bit slower and weaker than men, but the female body was built to run, jump, throw, and swim, just like the male body. Women’s sports showcase and develop the female body, which is why it is unjust to allow a man to win the top prizes. That undercuts the purpose of the sport, just as a men’s race would be rendered pointless if a horse were permitted to win first prize. 

Sex is biological, but it goes beyond biology precisely because human reproduction is very important. Children need protection and nurturing, and adults need to learn to respect both their own, and the opposite sex’s, sexual and reproductive powers. But we also need to learn not to reduce people to their reproductive potentialities. Women are more than wombs, just as men are more than Darwinian “selfish genes” seeking to leave the greatest possible number of offspring. Sexed bodies have real significance, but this is just one aspect of human life; people are much more than just representatives of their sex. It can be difficult to understand all of this in a society that is obsessed with identity, and deeply confused about sex and reproduction.

That’s why it is important to define “woman.” The goal is not to vanquish ideological enemies with a knockdown conversation ender. Instead, the conversation should start right here.

At The Public Discourse, Joshua Spalding has a piece called "Don't Immanentize the Eschaton." The title comes from a William F. Buckley quip, which in turn comes from a thought from Eric Voegelin:

Buckley coined the phrase “don’t let them immanentize the eschaton” after reading Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics, which stated that “a theoretical problem arises . . . when Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized.” While Buckley’s witty slogan distilled something important from Voegelin’s opaque argument, Voegelin’s concept was never intended as some “gotcha” soundbite for conservatives to use against liberals. Voegelin’s concern with immanentizing the eschaton was part of his broader and lifelong project to better understand the intersections of history, politics, and religion.

What can we do in our own time to not immanentize the eschaton?

Christians must make a clear and unequivocal distinction between the historic Christian faith and the misleading political religion that is more pervasive on the right that anyone seemed to realize. We should start by heeding conservatives’ longstanding warnings about immanentizing the eschaton. Then, I suggest the following strategies.

1. Speak truth. “Within this eschatological view of politics,” John Jalsevac explains, “truth claims are no longer approached as facts to be adjudicated by applying old-fashioned rules of logic and evidence, but rather as tests of loyalty—spiritual loyalty.” Mass media targeting specific audiences magnify this problem, allowing each side to marshal their sources, contributing to further entrenchment. Finding a way out of this environment is daunting, but it starts with telling the truth. Truth has inherent power; the more truth is spoken, the easier it becomes to speak. Perhaps no one grasped this better than Eastern bloc dissidents like Aleksandr Solzenhitsyn and Vaclav Havel, who were sustained through their long nights of suffering under Communist regimes by the conviction that living in truth is never in vain.

2. Stop demonizing others. The apocalyptic politics of an immanentized eschaton divides people into sheep or goats, children of light or children of darkness—actual language that was heard at the rally-turned-riot. “If only it were so simple!” cried Solzenhitsyn from behind the Gulag’s barbed-wire: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

3. Demote politics. When people find their core identity and ultimate purpose in politics, no one really wins. Politics turns into a Nietzschean battle for survival. Historically, Christians have recognized the subsidiarity of politics and the primacy of other, more foundational aspects of human flourishing: family, community, and church. Demoting politics to a secondary position can help us recover individual responsibility and vibrant personal agency—and the meaning found in these more basic aspects of the human experience.

The American Enterprise Institute's Ruy Teixeira has two important pieces recently.

At UnHerd, he looks at "Joe Biden's False Optimism." Despite some legislative wins and  favorable turns of events on the world stage, it's not all sweetness and light for the president. Those pesky cultural issues, which Trumpists screech about in the most boneheaded manner, are real, of concern to a lot of voters, and are not going away.

At his Substack, he concludes his three part series entitled "From Environmentalism to Climate Catastrophism." I'd encourage you to read parts one and two as well. He traces the arc of that devolution over the past several decades. He arrives at a conclusion similar to the one he expresses in the above piece. Democrats are going to have to ignore the alarmists and get on board with solutions that acknowledge that normal-people energy forms - oil, coal and natural gas - will unavoidably be the big players in the mix for the foreseeable future.

Nicholas Goldberg, writing at the Los Angeles Times, says if Gavin Newsom is seriously considering a run at the presidency, he's going to have to come up with a career narrative that sidelines his obviously privileged background:

The story he’s been stuck with is neither uplifting nor, to use the popular phrase, relatable.

So he’s out to fix it. Which is probably why he’s getting more personal, telling more anecdotes and trying to recast himself as someone who faced and overcame obstacles in his day.

“A child of divorce and dyslexia, trying to find my bearings” is how he described himself at age 10 or 11 in his unusually personal inaugural addressearlier this month. He described his mom, juggling three jobs. The difficulties he faced in school.

“I couldn’t read, and I was looking for any way to ditch classes,” Newsom said. “I’d fake stomach aches and dizziness. I’d bite down on the thermometer in the nurse’s office trying to make the temperature rise past 100.”

The emphasis on family history and personal challenges was “a departure from past speeches,” reported The Times.

Newsom described how his great-great-grandparents came from County Cork “during the first years of California’s statehood.” The first William Newsom, he said, was a working-class Irish immigrant who became a San Francisco beat cop.

I'm not saying it's not all true. No doubt it is. But it certainly appears to be part of a search for a compelling, curated back story that suggests not everything came so easily — one that humanizes him and normalizes him for voters. If he does eventually decide to run for president, expect his stump-speech bio to be rehashed in a campaign autobiography that lays it all out on the printed page.

“What’s the first thing you need to do when you’re running for president or thinking about it? You tell your story,” Katie Merrill, a Democratic political strategist, told The Times.

(Expect to read less in that book about the affair he had with his campaign manager’s wife when he was mayor of San Francisco and how he sought treatment for alcohol abuse. That’s not the kind of overcoming-adversity story voters are looking for.)

By the way, I’m not blaming Newsom for any of this. Personal narratives are an age-old part of politics.

Why do voters crave them? Partly because overcoming obstacles in life is honestly admirable. But also because humans respond to stories more than they do to policies, statistics, polemics, resumes or canned rhetoric. And because we all love a Horatio Alger, up-from-humble-beginnings tale.

Finally, I have a few essays of my own to steer you to. At Precipice, my latest is entitled "The Deadly Idea That It's a Done Deal: Have We Validated Nietzche's Assertion That 'God Is Dead, and We Killed Him"?

My latest two at Ordinary Times are "Notes on the Delicious Art of Arguing" and a eulogy to Jeff Beck.

 

 

 

Thursday roundup

 It's been a while since LITD has served up a smorgasbord of recent attention-worthy essays I've come across.

Herewith is rectification of that paucity.

At U Discover Music, there's a great look at what made Rudy Van Gelder such a legendary recording engineer:

Blue Note’s founders, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, signed some of the most brilliant musical minds in modern jazz. From Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis to John Coltraneand Ornette Coleman, they recorded the music’s best and biggest names. But arguably, the most significant person they got to work for the company wasn’t a musician at all. He was, when they first encountered him, a part-time, self-taught sound engineer named Rudy Van Gelder. A professional optometrist by day, at night Van Gelder, also a jazz fan, recorded musicians in a studio he had set up in the living room of his parent’s home in New Jersey. It was in that house, located at 25 Prospect Avenue, Hackensack, that what we now know as the Blue Note sound was born.

Blue Note had been operating for 13 years when Alfred Lion met Van Gelder in 1952. Lion had been impressed by the audio quality of a session by saxophonist/composer Gil Mellé, recorded by the engineer at his Hackensack studio. Lion wanted to replicate the album’s sound at the label’s usual recording home, WOR studios in New York City, but was told by its resident engineer that it wasn’t possible and that he should contact the person who made the Mellé recording. And that’s how Blue Note found the man who would give them their classic sound.

Blue Note began recording exclusively at Hackensack from 1953 onwards, and the impeccable sound quality of their Van Gelder-engineered sessions – defined by clarity, depth, warmth, and sonic detail – didn’t escape the attention of other jazz labels. In fact, rival jazz indie Prestige, run by Bob Weinstock, also began hiring Van Gelder’s studio and services in an attempt to emulate the Blue Note sound. But this didn’t trouble Blue Note – rather, the improvement in audio quality benefitted jazz as a whole, and the label’s albums still sounded unique. That was a result of Alfred Lion being particular about what he liked. Evidently, as a producer he was more specific than Weinstock – he liked the music to swing, for one thing – and, consequently, was more organized. Lion had clearly focused goals in mind and paid the Blue Note musicians for several days’ rehearsal before the sessions. In contrast, Weinstock and Prestige just brought the musicians in cold to the studio to jam without much prior preparation. There was a gulf in quality that gave Blue Note an advantage.

At World, Andrew T. Walker asks, "What does Christian Nationalism Even Mean?"

I have sympathies with some of the ideas commonly associated with Christian nationalism. I understand and appreciate the unique role that Christianity played in shaping our nation’s tradition and values. Neither do I want that Christian influence to recede. As a conservative, I believe resolutely in the need for traditions to shape our common culture. Cutting a culture off from its good roots is nothing less than cultural self-hatred. Moreover, apart from a transcendent foundation for law and morality, no nation can long survive. I want a public morality influenced by Christianity but done so organically from the bottom up by the genuine and voluntary religious commitments of its people.

I also have major concerns with Christian nationalism. As a Baptist, I am convictionally opposed to identifying regeneration with nationhood. The Christian faith comes down to personal salvation and regeneration. The apparatus of government is ill-equipped to promote the supernatural end of man even if government requires supernatural foundation to keep it accountable (“In God We Trust” works for me). Whatever the personal faith of the office holder, I am opposed to magistrates as magistrates dictating theological matters for others.

Nicholas Harris, writing at UnHerd, demonstrates that the cat is out of the bag regarding Greta Thunberg. She's blossomed from a climate alarmist into a full-service leftist:

Interspersed among the usual directives about the need to pressure political leaders, her message was more radical and more militant than it has been in the past. There is no “back to normal”, she told us. “Normal” was the “system” which gave us the climate crisis, a system of “colonialism, imperialism, oppression, genocide”, of “racist, oppressive extractionism”. Climate justice is part of all justice; you can’t have one without the others. We can’t trust the elites produced by this system to confront its flaws — that’s why she, much like Rishi Sunak, won’t be bothering with the COP meeting this year. COP itself is little more than a “scam” which facilitates “greenwashing, lying and cheating”. Only overthrow of “the whole capitalist system” will suffice.

Frederick Hess of The American Enterprise Institute wonders how a man of actual depth and substance like Ben Sasse will fare as a college president in an age when that role has become largely ceremonial:

. . . the reality is that presidents generally don’t have that much real authority to shape a major university. They’re constrained by a board of trustees, faculty governance, entrenched campus power centers, endowment rules, major donors, and sprawling bureaucracies.

The day-to-day of the job tends to be dominated by its ceremonial, political, and money-chasing dimensions, with the president responsible primarily for fundraising, forging relationships with public officials, and serving as the public face of the institution. If one wants to get comprehensive, the job also includes financial management, working with the governing board, and leading the executive team.

Once upon a time, things were different. A half-century ago, it was expected that college presidents would be public intellectuals. They wrote influential books, gave major speeches, and were seen as major national voices. Today, it’s safe to say that most Americans would have trouble naming a single university president. Moreover, presidents just don’t have much day-to-day influence over curriculum, hiring, or what gets taught. And, as should be obvious, their views on same-sex marriage, gun control, and abortion don’t have much impact on campus life.  

At Glenn Loury's Substack, he and John McWhorter have one of their customary rollicking conversations, the kind that one can only have with good buds who understand each other well. This one focuses on the upcoming Supreme Court decision about affirmative action. Along the way, they talk about the problem they both have: their books, regardless of subject matter, getting relegated to the "black studies" sections of bookstores:

. . . you're going to go to something called a “bookstore” if it still exists. And you know where they're gonna put it. They're gonna put it in “African American Issues,” “Black Studies,” as if that's all that you are. I've seen some of my books put in the black section that weren't even about race, just because my name is mine. And that's the way it would be. Even on websites: “black books.” That's where they're gonna put you, and that's where they would put me, as if that that sums up our entire existence. 

At Merion West, Matthew Wardour asserts that, while we generally elevate authenticity as a virtue, those who have gained their celebrity with some degree of fakery have a lesson for us:

Many of us also like impostors because, deep down, we understand that to exist only matter-of-factly, without fiction, would be intolerable. Sir Walter Scott in his Journal, one of wisest autobiographies ever written, wrote that “Life could not be endured were it seen in reality.” People with no feeling of the romance of the world are among the people I least trust. Possibly their plainness ought to be interpreted as honesty, but I fail to see it—quite the opposite, in fact. I have sometimes reflected that Jesus’ desire not to reveal himself publicly until a later date has a jolly, even playful quality that makes him, paradoxically, more trustworthy and believable. This humble hoaxery distinguishes him, as far as I know, from any other god-figure.

Carl Trueman has a piece at World on the cost our society is paying for putting a higher priority on identity politics than on public health:

There are so many predictable aspects to this debacle. There is the obvious subordination of public health to identity politics. This is not the first time this has occurred. Who can forget the fact that churches meeting during Covid were considered highly controversial because of the risk of spreading the disease, while Black Lives Matter protests were seen as legitimate? This exposes the duplicitous rhetorical imperative, “Follow the science.” Following the science is always an empty term because science is descriptive, not prescriptive. It can tell you how to save a life, but it cannot tell you why a life is worth saving.

In short, science is not, in and of itself, a social policy. Social policy surely takes account of science but then must be formulated in terms of other factors, such as risk assessments in the light of a hierarchy of social goods. 

Further, we see the lengths to which the modern world will go in its desperate need to keep alive the myth that sexual activity is a cost-free recreation. For many years, society has taught us that, if all participants are in agreement, no particular sexual act or pattern of behavior can be rejected as wrong. Now it seems that this type of political judgment is to be extended beyond morality to matters of health as well.

And finally, my latest at Precipice is actually something that first appeared at Medium five years ago. I hadn't looked at my archive of pieces there for a long time. I thought this essay on profanity, entitled "Expletives and Blasphemy: As With Pungent Seasonings, Easy Does It," merited a re-up. Hey, our culture sure hasn't become any less coarse in the last half-decade.

 

 

 

Friday roundup

 I'm heading out later this morning to be part of a jail-ministry team for the weekend, so I'm putting together your reading recommendations nice and early. Have a safe, fun and edifying couple of days.

Kirstin Anderson Birkhaug, writing at Law & Liberty, invites us to consider that there are better things than happiness. A remark from a college mentor sparked her personal thinking about the matter:

I was twenty-one when I learned this lesson, a senior in college and hopelessly undecided about my future. My worried dithering with regards to this fact often fell upon the ears of a long-suffering political science professor. One fall afternoon, I sat in his office, perched on the edge of the well-worn chair across from his desk, one foot tapping, expressing for the hundredth time that semester my anxiety about the future. My professor often just listened, knowing as only teachers and parents do that young people sometimes just need to be heard. “I don’t know what I want to be,” I sighed. “I just want to be happy!”

My professor tilted his head and squinted at me in a familiar way that told me I’d gotten something wrong. He was silent for a moment, measuring his words in his mind. I had known this professor long enough to value his careful consideration. His next words would mean something. I waited. He leaned forward and said plainly, “you can be so many better things than happy.”

You can be so many better things than happy, he said. I remember feeling confused and disappointed. It was unfathomable to me what he could have meant by that, and moreover, to the extent that I could understand him at all, I thought he must be wrong. I had grown up in an age of self-help, in which happiness was considered the ultimate good. Happiness was the end that could justify any means. It was a viable reason to quit your job, move cross country, leave your marriage. It meant eating, praying, and loving. It meant safety from doubt and regret.

Alternatively, an unhappy life could be no life at all. And so, I wanted to be happy. How or why, or at what cost, I could not say. But it was surely the best and most important thing I could imagine being. Everything else, I presumed, must be secondary. But my professor was a worldly, faithful, intelligent, and very dear friend. I could not ignore his words, even if accepting them would mean challenging the organizational principle with which I had been attempting to build my future. It was the first time anyone had ever given me reason to reconsider the central role that the pursuit of happiness had held in my heart. That day, my professor set in motion a shift in my perception of the world, one that I could not understand at that instant, but I would come to know in time.

About a year after my professor told me I could be better things than happy, I read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. As I did, I could not help but remember his words. Aristotle writes of happiness as eudaimonia, but “happiness” is a poor substitute for the richness described by this term. Eudaimonia refers to a sense of wholeness, of completeness, and of peace. It refers to a flawless harmony between the person and the world outside the person, and of ultimate achievement for the individual. It is happiness, yes, but something bigger and better too—it is perfection; perfect happiness.

At Bari Weiss's Common Sense Substack,  Walter Kirn looks at the nature of fun:

But what do I mean by “fun”? I’m not quite sure. I don’t mean “pleasure” in the old sense, which usually is associated with eroticism or sensuality, and I don’t mean “play,” which tends to refer to structured games. But fun, as such, is not competitive. No one wins at it. Nor is fun the ‘leisure” of the ancients, which one is supposed to spend in contemplation or civic engagement or other worthy pursuits. I mean something bouncier, simpler, more mundane, a feeling of antic stimulation, the opposite of seriousness. Often there is risk involved in fun. Manageable, perhaps simulated risk. You round a tight curve in a sports car that can handle it. You careen down a snowy hill in a red saucer sled. Sometimes you take a tumble or scrape a knee. Sometimes you scream—a laughing sort of scream.

On a more somber note, at Modern War Institute, Andrew Milburn's on-the-ground analysis of the Russian invasion of Ukraine leads him to conclude that "Time Is Not On Kyiv's Side." Milburn had a 31-year career in the Marine Corps and is currently equipping and training Ukrainian frontline units.

The term "ideology" gets bandied about in such a variety of ways that its core meaning can get lost in the shuffle. Jacob Howland has a piece at UnHerd entitled "Ideology Has Poisoned The West" in which he has us get clear on the word's definition and then how it's having its pernicious effect:

ideology is incapable of treating human beings as participants in a shared life, much less as individuals made in the image of God. Like the party hack whose spectacles struck Orwell as “blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them”, it sees them only as groups to be acted upon. The term idéologie was coined during the French Revolution by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, an anti-clerical materialist philosopher who believed that reason offered a way of uncovering general laws of social relations. Tracy conceived of idéologie as a social science of “ideas” that would inform the construction of a rational progressive society governed by an enlightened elite, whose  context technical expertise would justify their claim to rule. The illiberalism of this progressive-technocratic ideal became fully apparent in the West only with the onset of Covid. It is now widely understood that the subordination of public life to ostensibly scientific guidance and the effective transfer of sovereignty from the body of citizens to an unelected overclass are fundamentally inconsistent with liberty and individual dignity.

Finally, there's my latest at Ordinary Times, "Five Quintessentially American Recordings for Cranking Up on Independence Day." It was obviously written specifically for the recently-transpired holiday, but they're worth considering in the context of their quintessential American-ness. Plus, they're all great party tunes, and summer's here and the time is right. It won't be too much of a spoiler to name them here, since the point of each, if I do say so myself, is my commentary on them. I also provide the links, so you can listen right away. They are "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry, "Hey Good Lookin'' by Hank Williams, "One O'Clock Jump" by the Count Basie Orchestra, "Mystery Train" boy Elvis Presley, and "Dancing in the Street" by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas.

Sunday roundup

 Daren Jonescu is a writer I agree with more often than I disagree with him. Sometimes I do indeed wonder where he is coming from, but there is no such perplexity regarding this piece entitled "A Border Dispute." He's spot on:

“Why should the world risk nuclear annihilation over what is essentially just a border dispute between Russia and Ukraine?” So ask the Glenn Greenwalds and Tucker Carlsonsof the world. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that such people are not being directly instructed by the Kremlin to pose the question that way, but that it represents their sincere, independent view of the situation. How shall we answer them?

How, that is, shall we answer a question deliberately framed so as to obscure or deny most of what we actually know about the nature and development of the situation: about its recent antecedents and parallels, about the explicit statements and aspirations of the Russian president, about the past century of Russian brutality against neighboring countries, about the moral and rhetorical distinctions between the Western democracies and a strongman tyranny under the lifetime control of a former KGB officer who openly pines for the glory days of the USSR, about the obvious one-sided reasons for the continued “cold war atmosphere” between Russia and the NATO countries today, about the ongoing war of terror and mass murder against the civilian population of a sovereign country? 

BTW, the Ukraine invasion is making Russian TV weirder and scarier by the day. 

I'm utterly certain that I'm a Christian, but prayer is something I still head-trip about. (That may just be one more manifestation of my tendency to overthink everything.) I did find this piece by David Deaval at The Imaginative Conservative  titled "Deepening Prayer and Hearing God'sVoice" helpful in that regard.

At the Wall Street Journal, Jason Riley shows how "BLM's Anti-Police Racket Is Coming Undone."

At The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan engages with listeners to his podcast. A taste:

This next listener dissents over the Haidt convo:

I try not to be a scold, but sometimes the temptation is too great. Early in your talk you talked about how you didn’t understand young kids these days — why they are killing themselves at a high rate, since everything for them is so much better than it was in the old days. It sounds just like all of us old guys not getting youngsters. Haidt did talk about how he learned to approach unfamiliar cultures like an anthropologist — a good place to start for us old folks. 

While I agree with you about the proliferation of gender types, it was not so long ago that homosexuality raised the same kinds of questions that you ask, and it was looked at the same way. Some people questioned the reality of such a thing, or saw it as a simple choice that perverse people made, or as a psychiatric illness that required treatment, and of course as a crime. I don’t think you intend to imply any of those things, but you do seem to veer in that direction. How people’s identity is created is still an open question — and someday we may know more. 

That said, I agree with you that medical interventions for children is very very premature and should not be happening. Let people grow up first. 

You seem to imply that biology supports a simple dichotomy, but sexual expression is more complex than that. As for cultural/religious acceptance, Joseph Campbell, in The Hero Of A Thousand Faces, discusses some civilizations that saw gender as fluid and containing both male and female elements.

One more thought: although Plato then, and others now, did raise questions about democracy, I fear that the Republican answer is to emulate the worst counter-examples, such as their current infatuation with Orbán’s near dictatorship. Prof. Haidt mentioned Karen Stenner’s work, The Authoritarian Dynamic, in which she reports that 20% of the population has an authoritarian personality type. She also talks about the conditions that stimulate it to express itself — fear and anxiety, the kind that is stirred up by demagogues and unscrupulous politicians, namely Trump. Stenner’s book also has suggestions on how to tamp down the fear. Maybe a conversation with her is in order.

Thanks for the tip. My best response to my reader’s first point is probably at the beginning of my chat with Bari, where I try to make distinctions between the gay and trans movements, and why the conflicts are inevitable and intrinsic. As for fluid gender, I agree! I don’t believe in a gender binary, just a sex binary. In fact, one reason gender expression exists at all — and is comprehensible at all — is precisely its tension with a fixed, binary biological reality. 

But I also think this over-states the relevance of “gender identity” for the vast majority of humans. Most of us don’t get up every day thinking of how we are a man or a woman and where we fit on a spectrum — because we don’t really have many conflicts. This looms much larger for trans people for whom it is a daily challenge, and to a lesser extent for gay people whose affect contrasts with the stereotypes of their sex. But for most of us, our gender expression is simply our personality packaged in a binary form of biology. And this isn’t just on a scale of Barbie to G.I. Joe. And seeing it that way — as gender ideology does — strikes me as a regression, not a way forward.

And, now, in case LITD isn't enough of a BQ fix, herewith some recent contributions to other venues:

At Merion West, I assert that "The Term Woke Is Losing Its Punch." 

At Ordinary Times, I examine the cultural impact of the Rhythm changes:

Far and away, the most famous and utilized contrafact is the chord changes to “I’ve Got Rhythm” by George Gershwin. He composed this tune for the 1930 musical Girl Crazy. 

What it introduced into American music was the I-VI-II V7 chord sequence, with a cycle-of-fourths middle-eight section that starts two steps above the key of the song and allows a resolution, in eight bars, to the key.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of this codification to the development of American popular music, and, indeed, popular culture.  

The entire form, or sometimes just the A section with a different middle eight, shows up all over the place.

It’s come to be known as the Rhythm changes.

Certainly it’s been used with other melody lines in jazz. Charlie Christian’s “Seven Come Eleven” is over the Rhythm changes, as is “Oleo” by Sonny Rollins, and I’m only scratching the surface. 

It’s been used in a pop context as well.

I give three examples of that context: the Flintstones theme, "Sherry" by the Four Seasons, and "Like Love" by Andre Previn, and why they are artifacts from a time when post-America was America, and had a sense of vitality and loveliness. 

My second-most recent piece at OT is "Confessions of a Rock and Roll History Teacher."

At Precipice, my Substack, I return to a theme I frequently write about there: the infinitesimal piece of real estate on which a non-Trumpist conservative stands. 

And my second-most recent piece there is titled "Disney."

Well, that ought to keep you out of mischief on this first Sunday of May.