Well, why not? It's still late in the day

 Hello, everybody. As you can see, I haven't posted here since March.

I have stayed busy over at my Substack, Precipice, which has a fair number of subscribers and is where I post longer essays that tend to be about a wider range of topics.

I started Late in the Day a few years earlier (LITD, 2012; Precipice, 2019), and the intent has been to invite the public to fully grasp what has happened to this formerly recognizable thing called the West. I do a fair amount of that at Precipice as well, but LITD has always been a bit more topical and the posts more link-rich.

I guess what prompted me to wade back in over here is that I'd like a place to less formally gather my thoughts in response to each - or at least many - of the developments comprising the torrent of abrupt history-making whenever the mood strikes me. A place to feel my way toward inspiration for other projects.

Let's see; the last post I did here had to do with the Jeddah talks regarding Ukraine. 

What a ten months it's been since then. Putin still has no interest in any kind of peace settlement. In fact, he's upped the savagery level of his missile and drone attacks. 

There's the related issue currently on our plate of the Very Stable Genius's blathering about Greenland with random capitalizations and uses of quotation marks and the thank-you-for-your-attention-to-this-matter sign-off that characterize his social media posts. It’s yet another example of this ha-ha-am-I-kidding-on-the-square-or-deadly-serious “presidential” style that we’re saddled with. But it definitely has Denmark, and Europe generally, alarmed and discussing various what-if scenarios.

The bottom line in that arena is that the post-1945 international order is no more. We're back to spheres of influence. Brute force. (Hell, Stephen Miller says so.) 

Venezuela? Sure, as an isolated development, it's great that Maduro has been captured and deposed. But let us consider that newly sworn in president Delcy Rodriguez is a Chavista through and through. As is interior minister Diosdado Cabello, who wields a blunt instrument, literally, in the country's government.  And collectivos are boarding public buses and demanding that passengers hand over their phones so they can check for signs of support for Maduro's ouster. Then there's the VSG's clear indication that oil is his first priority. That's how Vance is thinking of it, too. 

There's the situation with ICE in Minneapolis. I've watched some of the video. It does look to me like Renee Good was steering her car to the right, away from the agents. From what I can tell, they had options other than shooting her in the face. Is it true that she was a cause-y lefty with an edgy lifestyle? Sure. But she was an American citizen and her life is as precious as that of any other of God's children. And now both sides have dug in their heels, have glommed onto hard and fast positions that will brook no nuance.

So things will probably get increasingly confrontational between ICE and people on the streets of post-America's cities. And not only will the question of how to humanely address the situations of long-time residents from elsewhere who have lived productive lives in the US continue to get sidelined, more actual citizens will surely get caught up in the ugliness. 

Anyway, I think I'll start chiming in here again with some degree of frequency. 

I've been kind of missing the place. 

 

Sunday roundup

 I swear I'm going to keep my recommendations brief today. I have the fact that I have to get to church early to serve as usher as my motivation. 

So let's get to it:

Phillips Payson O'Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St, Andrews, brings to our attention a stark possibility - probability? - with the most profound implications for a stable world order:

Europe and the United States are on the verge of the most momentous conscious uncoupling in international relations in decades. Since 1949, NATO has been the one constant in world security. Initially an alliance among the United States, Canada, and 10 countries in Western Europe, NATO won the Cold War and has since expanded to include almost all of Europe. It has been the single most successful security grouping in modern global history. It also might collapse by 2025.

The cause of this collapse would be the profound difference in outlook between the Republican Party’s populist wing—which is led by Donald Trump but now clearly makes up the majority of the GOP—and the existential security concerns of much of Europe. The immediate catalyst for the collapse would be the war in Ukraine. When the dominant faction within one of the two major American political parties can’t see the point in helping a democracy-minded country fight off Russian invaders, that suggests that the center of the political spectrum has shifted in ways that will render the U.S. a less reliable ally to Europe. The latter should prepare accordingly.

The past few weeks have revealed that Trump’s pro-Russian, anti-NATO outlook isn’t just a brief interlude in Republican politics; suspicion of American involvement in supporting Ukraine is now the consensus of the party’s populist heart. During last week’s GOP presidential debate, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy—the two candidates most intent on appealing to the party’s new Trumpist base—both argued against more aid for Ukraine. DeSantis did so softly, by vowing to make any more aid conditional on greater European assistance and saying he’d rather send troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. Ramaswamy was more strident: He described the current situation as “disastrous” and called for a complete and immediate cessation of U.S. support for Ukraine. Ramaswamy later went even further, basically saying that Ukraine should be cut up; Vladimir Putin would get to keep a large part of the country. Trump did not take part in the debate, but he has previously downplayed America’s interest in an Ukrainian victory and has seemed to favor territorial concessions by Ukraine to Russia. He, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy are all playing to the same voters—who, polls suggest, make up about three-quarters of the Republican electorate.

Another bellwether is the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank that has played an outsize role in GOP policy circles since the Reagan years. Before Russia launched its full-scale invasion, in February 2022, Heritage had been on the hawkish wing of the Republican Party, even publishing a call for Ukraine to be accepted into NATO. More recently, Heritage officials have called for halting aiduntil the Biden administration produces a plan to end the war—which is an impossible goal unless Russia agrees. Demagogues on the right are taking Putin’s side even more overtly. The talk-show host Tucker Carlson, for instance, in a August address in Budapest, maintained that anti-Christian bias motivated American opposition to Russia.

Such claims are ridiculous, not least because Russia is one of the least religious societies on Earth. But the growing sentiment on the American right against supporting Ukraine represents an extraordinary challenge to the future of NATO. European states have been moving in the opposite direction: As evidence mounts of Russian atrocities in Ukraine, and Russia shows itself willing to commit almost any crime in its desire to seize the territory (and people) of an independent, internationally recognized country next door, many European countries (particularly many of those close to Russia) have come to see this war as one that directly challenges their future. If Putin were to keep large pieces of Ukraine, that outcome would represent not peace, but a form of perma-war, in which a revanchist Russia would have established its ability to seize the land of its neighbors.

As we know, there was a coup in Gabon last week. Jonathan Wilson, a sportswriter, has a piece at UnHerd entitled "I Went to Gabbon for Football - and Found a Massacre" that shows - in detail that's not for the fainthearted - that it had its roots in a political upheaval in 2016.

Ted Goia, whose Substack The Honest Broker covers similar territory to that which I deal with at Precipice - that is to say, how we might view human creative expression, offers ten perspectives on Joan Didion. Here are three:

4.

Didion “cooked nonstop,” recalled Eve Babitz. 

She continues:

She made stuff like Beef Wellington—for a sit-down dinner for 35 people—with a side dish, Cobb salad or something, for those who didn’t eat meat. It’s the first time I ever saw Spode china. She seemed to be the only sensible person in the world in those days. She could make dinner for forty people with one hand tied around her back while everybody else was passed out on the floor.

---

5.

Didion’s writing style was, like the author herself, a fusion of opposites. 

She loved the short, punchy sentences of Ernest Hemingway, and even tried to internalize the rhythms of his prose by typing out his paragraphs on her typewriter. (Curiously enough, Hunter S. Thompson followed the same practice.) But Didion also admired the ponderous periods of Henry James, with their alluring ambiguities—somehow they managed to grab on to the subject at a deeper level by dancing around it.

From these two opposed influences, Didion created her own prose style. On the surface it seemed straightforward and direct, but the more you studied it, the more open-ended it was. It’s like taking one of those crazy LA shortcuts, where you get to the destination faster by leaving the freeway and dodging through all these mysterious and confusing side streets.

So I’m not surprised that Didion hated the LA freeways she wrote about so pointedly. They were a physical embodiment of the straight paths she abhorred in everything she did.

---

6.

In her essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Didion captures the uneasy tone of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene in another first person anecdote. 

She is standing with Norris, one of her informants, out on the street, where he suggests she head down to Big Sur to get a taste of the scene there.

Norris says it would be a lot easier if I’d take some acid. I say I’m unstable. Norris says all right, anyway, grass, and he squeezes my hand.

One day Norris asks how old I am. I tell him I am thirty-two. It takes a few minutes but Norris rises to it. “Don't worry, he says at last. “There’s old hippies too.”

As Martha Bayles makes clear at the Hedgehog Review, Henry Pleasants was one interesting guy:

“You have done well. But don’t expect anything to change for the better. You are attacking vested interests.” So wrote Henry Pleasants in a letter to me about my first book, Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music, published in 1994. I have saved that letter and others from Pleasants not because I expect to sell them on eBay but because I treasure my brief acquaintance with the eminent music critic who, in addition to writing perceptively about opera, judged post–World War II musical modernism a failed experiment and lauded the “Afro-American idiom” as the central musical achievement of the twentieth century.

When Pleasants died in January 2000 at the age of ninety, the New York Times ran three successive obituaries. In the first, Allan Kozinn noted that Pleasants served in US military intelligence during World War II and was “involved in the de-Nazification proceedings against several musicians who were prominently involved with the Third Reich.” In the second, David Stevens of the International Herald Tribune added that Pleasants was “an intelligence officer in Munich, Bern, and Bonn.” In the third, Douglas Martin of the Timesdescribed Pleasants as “a top American spy in postwar Germany,” whose duties included working closely with General Reinhard Gehlen, the former head of the Wehrmacht’s Eastern Front intelligence operation.

In possession of a major cache of documents about Soviet military capabilities, Gehlen struck a deal with US Army intelligence in 1944, then helped the CIA build an intelligence organization that in 1956 became the West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND). As head of the BND, Gehlen sheltered other high-ranking Nazis and allowed the recruitment of former SS officers (including some war criminals), while failing to weed out other Germans working as Soviet agents. In the mid-1960s these lapses ignited a firestorm of protest, and, as noted by historian Mary Ellen Reese, fostered a left-wing consensus that “the whole undertaking had been bankrupt.”

Why did it take three obituaries to reveal Pleasants’s association with Gehlen? Not, I think, because Pleasants had something to hide. He was one of several hundred Americans taking part in the morally murky drama of the early Cold War, none of whom could see the future. What they could see, in the spring of 1946, was that the US military was pulling out of Western Europe just as the Soviets were expanding their forces in the East. They could also see that Gehlen was a brilliant, egotistical opportunist. But because of his habit of reporting the bad news along with the good, which as Reese points out, made him “Hitler’s least favorite Intelligence officer,” he was offering his former enemies “good operational intelligence when they had few other sources and needed it the most.”

Pleasants never fancied himself a spy. When a journalist-blogger named William Kelly asked him about his work with the CIA, he said, “I wasn’t involved in covert operations. I was strictly liaison; that was my specialty and I was good at it.” When pressed for his opinion of the CIA’s role in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, he said, “Thank God I wasn’t involved with that. That was a real mess. I only worked in Germany and Europe.” Then he added, “Let’s talk about music. I left the foreign service to get back into music.”

And so he did. Settling in London with his wife, the eminent keyboardist Virginia Pleasants, Pleasants spent the next half century immersed in the world of his first love, vocal music. As a youth in Wayne, Pennsylvania, hoping to become a professional singer, he served as a chorister in an Episcopal church, then enrolled as a bass-baritone in Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music. In 1930 that hope was dashed by chronic laryngitis. So he got a job at the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin covering the police beat and reviewing concerts. The lack of a college degree did not prevent him from growing into a free-range critic unencumbered by theory or snobbery.

In addition to translating and editing the writings of critics and composers such as Eduard Hanslick, Louis Spohr, Robert Schumann, and Hugo Wolf, Pleasants wrote seven books, four on vocal music and three making the argument for which he is justly famous. In brief, Pleasants’s argument was that the highest musical achievement of the twentieth century was not the “serious” oeuvre of the Viennese modernists Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern, whose atonal and serialist compositions dispensed with traditional melody, harmony, rhythm, and recognizable structure in favor of radically new arrangements of sound, and which, despite the expressive power of some of these works, notably Berg’s, never attracted a general audience, even in sophisticated Vienna. Rather, music’s greatest twentieth-century attainment could be located in the “popular” body of jazz, whose roots reached back to the arrival of the first Africans on American soil. To clarify, Pleasants averred that the serious versus popular division was not one of quality (there is good and bad in both modern classical music and jazz, he said) but of musical language, or idiom. Reminding readers that Western music had undergone an idiomatic change every time its creative center had shifted geographically—from the Netherlands in the Renaissance to Italy in the Baroque to Austria-Bohemia in the Classical to Germany in the Romantic—he described the twentieth century as the “Afro-American epoch.”

This one is from a few months ago (March), but "5 Things You Should Know About John Calvin" by William Vandoodewaard at Ligonier.org is a good perspective-widener. 

Joseph Kohm, Jr., writing at The Gospel Coalition, revisits an indispensable classic in "What Does C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man Have to Say After 80 Years?"

Here's great essay on a subject I think about a lot: Tara Isabella Burton's "The Dark Side of Self-Making":

To many, self-making is a gospel of liberation. You can become whoever you want to be. No matter who or how you were born, your race or class or gender or family, you can wipe the slate clean, determine your own destiny, become self-made. It’s the narrative at the heart of the myth of The American—the promise, as Frederick Douglass ringingly put it, that anyone could “make the road on which they had travelled.” It is the narrative with which so many of us have been inculcated from birth: that our “true” or “authentic” selves are derived from our internally-felt sensations or our creative powers, and that our lives ought to be a process of expressing and “manifesting” that reality, overcoming the social and communal obstacles that stand in our way. Life, in other words, is the process of becoming our best selves, while throwing off the shackles of social expectation.

At its best, the quintessentially modern narrative of self-making—one that has become more widespread and more robust in the Internet Age—can indeed be an avenue for freedom from both oppression and repression. But the narrative also has a darker side. As often as not, as it has played out since the advent of modernity, the gospel of self-making has been less about freeing individuals to choose their own destinies as about identifying a new aristocracy, just as exclusive as the old one. The sole difference in the new way of being is that it may be money, “style,” or “spirit”—as opposed to purely lineage—that creates the right to transcend society’s rules. 

Rob Henderson deep-dives into the nature of envy at his Substack.  

Over at Precipice, I revisit the matter of what to call what had been recognized as conservatism prior to 2015 in "Well, Then, What, Then, Shall We Call It?" And I take another stab at discerning the roots of our present juncture in "Thoughts On When It Went Completely Off the Rails." And I do a little outreach to readers with "Tell Me a Bit About Yourself."

 

 

 

Sunday roundup

 Michael Tolhurst of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, writing at Discourse, says there are three values that, were we to embrace them, could lift our discussions about how to teach civics and history out of their present dismal state. They are optimism, inclusion and honesty.

Of optimism, he says

When the greatest generation—the generation that went on to lead America through World War II and the Cold War—was in school, the curriculum was very big on American potential and American freedoms. We do want people to feel good about the country and their community. We do not want people to feel alienated from their society. We also want Americans to feel hopeful about the future. A teaching of civics and history that paints our country as irredeemably bad is going to be rejected by citizens who like their country.

History’s Missing Players

Not surprisingly, these books don’t feature many Black people, and it is hard to feel good about your country and hopeful about the future when you’re left out of the picture. The photos in a civics textbook from the 1930s, for example, feature only white children exhibiting the virtues of daily exercise. Immigration is looked upon with suspicion. Native and Black Americans are treated at best with a stiff politeness or with demeaning compliments. A history of Virginia textbook from the 1890s clearly limns out the tropes of the Lost Cause, which rejected Reconstruction and obscured the causes of the Civil War. So, optimism alone can lead to an unthinking jingoism, and is not a sure guide for a better approach to education.

Inclusion - -real inclusion, not perfunctory demographic quota-filling - has to be part of the picture as well: 

Granted, what constitutes “people like me” is murky—it should not be restricted to the arbitrary categories of race, class or gender popular with some theorists, though these characteristics can’t be ignored either. 

And, lastly, we have to keep it real:

If what we are looking for is an inclusive and optimistic rendition of history, we also need one that is as close to true as possible, and we arrive at that truth by checking our interpretations with others. We arrive at that truth by comparing our perspective with the perspectives of others. This is not to say all perspectives are of equal weight—empirical facts put hard constraints on what is plausible to believe.

The recent passing of Joan Didion brought her husband, John Gregory Dunne, some momentary renewed attention. Kevin Mims, writing at Quillette, takes a fresh look at his brother, Dominique Dunne. The arc of his career and life are pretty remarkable in their own right.

David Rose, writing at UnHerd, sheds light on the degree of excuse-making Western climate activists indulge in for the Chinese Communist Party:

A few blocks away from Tiananmen Square, amid the cavernous splendour of the Beijing Hotel Convention Centre, an array of senior Communist Party officials gathered in September to proclaim a clear message: by “focusing on cutting carbon emissions… China will promote green development, and continuously improve its ecology”. The annual general meeting of the China Council for International Co-operation on Environment and Development (the CCICED) was in full swing.

Rapturous applause filled the room, though that was hardly unexpected. Conferences run by the CCP are not usually marked by dissent, especially when they’re attended by the likes of Xie Zhenhua, who led China’s delegation to Cop26, and vice premier Han Zheng, one of the seven standing committee members of the Politburo, the Party’s supreme elite. Indeed, as the room fizzled with optimistic eco-rhetoric, you could almost forget that China is the world’s biggest source of greenhouse gases — and that the new coal-fired power stations in its construction pipeline alone have a greater capacity than Britain’s entire generation fleet.

What was remarkable about this meeting, though, was the surprising presence of an external delegation: joining the CCP apparatchiks on a collection of screens dotted around the room were a number of enthusiastic Britons and other Westerners. According to the official conference report, the “foreign committee members and partners lauded China’s ecological civilisation building and its new and greater contributions to promoting the construction of a clean and beautiful world”.

Who were these people? Strange to tell, they consisted of a veritable Who’s Who of British, European and American climate activists.

Here, for example, was Professor Lord Nicholas Stern, Chairman of the Grantham Centre on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, and a longstanding government adviser who wrote a reportfor Blair’s Labour government on the need to go green. He told the meeting the world is beginning a “new growth story” that “fits well with China’s vision of an ecological society”.

Here too was Kate Hampton, chief executive of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), which is mainly bankrolled by the billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn, a key financial backer of Extinction Rebellion and one of the world’s biggest sources of green largesse. During the meeting, Hampton said she “supported Chinese leadership on setting the global path for fulfilling Paris goals” — the attempt to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — and praised China for “supporting green Covid-19 recovery”.

Others were equally fulsome, including Laurence Tubiana, France’s former climate ambassador and now chief executive of the European Climate Foundation, which also gives millions to British green campaigns, such as UK100, an alliance of local authorities pledged to turn Net Zero by 2030; and the Conservative Environment Network.

Also present were representatives from ClientEarth, a law firm that tries to block development in Britain and other countries on environmental grounds in the courts; the Worldwide Fund for Nature, whose president is Prince Charles; and representatives from rich and influential organisations based in America including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Resources Institute and the Energy Foundation.

And yet in the weeks since the CCICED meeting, Cop26 has come and gone; and largely thanks to China, any hope of a meaningful deal has evaporated. On the last day, British minister Alok Sharma was reduced to tears when India and China refused to promise to phase out coal. Back in the real world, President Xi Jinping has said China will increase annual coal production by 220 million tonnes.

But they got the Western tree-huggers to sell them enough rope:

. . . Qiushi, the CCP’s theoretical journal, published an article in Chinese this year which explores how foreign environmentalists can be utilised. The idea of ecological civilisation, it says, is “Marxist and scientific by nature”, and will have a big role in spreading the China Model’s appeal.

None of this is hidden. This article uses Chinese documents, but all are available on the Mandarin web. Yet climate change activists continue to blindly give China a free pass on its emissions and continued use of coal.

Recently, LITD has posted fairly frequently about the mounting threats to the US from China and Russia. Lest anyone forget that Iran is part of the mounting-threats club as well, its Quds Force head provides a bracing reminder:

Delivering a speech to a ceremony in Mashhad marking the second anniversary of martyrdom of General Soleimani and remembering Martyrs of the "Resistance Front"Defending the Holy Shrines, The IRGC Quds Force Commander Brigadier General Esmaeil Qaani underlined that the Islamic Republic will take revenge for General Soleimani’s assassination in its own way.

“We will prepare ground for the hard revenge against the US from within their homes, as we do not need to be present as supervisors everywhere, wherever is necessary we take revenge against Americans by the help of people on their side and within their own homes without our presence,” Commander Qaani said.

The senior Iranian commander highlighted that Iran will deal with the enemies and the people who committed the crime of assassinating General Soleimani with its own tactics, behavior, style and manner.

Qaani went on to say that it would be much wiser for the US to deal with the criminals who assassinated General Soleimani on their own, as it would be much costlier for the them if “the children of the Resistance Front” are to take the matter in their own hands and take revenge from the Americans by themselves.

“This revenge has begun. Americans will be uprooted from the region,” IRGC Quds Force Commander concluded.

 

Which is why, as Quin Hilyer explains at the Washington Examiner, the US had better take an unflinching look at its preparedness - or, rather, lack thereof - to deal with the mounting-threats club:

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, no combination of foreign threats to the United States and the West has been as dangerous as that which we face in 2022 and immediately beyond. The Chinese designs on Latin America, part of which have been described as “buying an empire,” are just a small portion of leader Xi Jinping’s not-so-secret scheme for world domination. Russia’s Vladimir Putin not only continues to ramp up his anti-Western aggressiveness but also now works militarily with its onetime rival China. Iran moves ever and ever closer to nuclear-weapons capacity. 

Indeed, it is sobering to know that nonstate terrorism of the ISIS and al Qaeda variety, which the State Department still labels “a persistent and pervasive threat worldwide,” arguably is now just the fourth most pressing danger facing the West. This is only in small part because of the decline of terrorists’ capabilities, but in larger part a result of the growth in practical menace from China, Russia, and Iran. 

At times of such peril, domestic political crusading and hyper-partisanship ought to be shunned. Of course philosophical differences will always exist, but patriotic leaders should be stressing areas of unity rather than discord. A polity as bitterly divided as the United States is now will be hard to rally. And a nation as financially indebted as today’s U.S. will be hard-pressed to ramp up greater spending for security. 

Consider that in 1941, on the eve of U.S. entry into World War II, this nation was coming off three straight landslide presidential elections. There was no hint of democratic illegitimacy in the air. And despite nine years of New Deal spending, the ratio of U.S. debt to gross domestic product stood at an eminently manageable 44%, rather than today’s economically frightening, unsustainable 122% (not to mention a mind-boggling $123 trillion in unfunded liabilities). 

All of which is to say that political leaders for now should abjure grand, expensive visions and utopian dreams. Stop trying for “transformational,” systemic change and instead seek collaborative and bipartisan reform. Re-adopt “regular order” procedurally, embrace incrementalism (on all sides), seek consensus even amid philosophical tensions, and put country ahead of party.

A tall order given the shift in attitudes among a chillingly large swath of our populace. Tom Hogan at The Bulwark:

year after supporters of Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn his election defeat, a new survey has found that a small but significant portion of his devotees believes he should be reinstated by any means, including armed revolt.

More generally, the survey, which I sponsored, finds that, although Americans remain strong believers in liberty, there is a powerful undercurrent of potential support for authoritarianism.

The survey of 1,000 American voters was conducted online and by phone between Christmas and New Year’s by political scientist David B. Hill of Hill Research Consultants. Respondents were asked a battery of 21 agree-or-disagree questions—indicators of possible support for or opposition to authoritarianism. The results were then weighted to match national demographics. (The poll results and an explanation of the methodology can be found here.)

The responses showed solid majorities of support for liberty, democracy, and the rights of protesters.

However, nearly half the respondents (49 percent) agreed with the assertion that “Once our leaders give us the go-ahead, it will be the duty of every patriotic citizen to help stomp out the decay that is poisoning our country from within.”

More than half (56 percent) agreed with the sentiment that the “only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values, put a tough leader in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading radical ideas.”

Yeah, that's where we are. For real.

I highly recommend "In Defense of Elite Film Criticism" by Hannah Long at The Dispatch. It speaks to one of my preoccupations: standards:

Uncritical enthusiasm—and absolute insistence that lowbrow entertainment is high art—is the order of the day. We don’t just need to enjoy superhero movies, we need them to be up for Best Picture. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—flailing for relevance—floated a “popular film” category for the Oscars before outcry forced a reversal. Meanwhile, Black Panther and Joker both received Best Picture nominations. A ripoff of Taxi Driver about a comic book character’s antagonist isn’t exactly Citizen Kane, is it?

Look around you: We don’t need more subjectivism. We need more standards. Better standards. Good critics are necessary to help us achieve that. And yes, that means some elitism, because they’ll need to push back on the current populist cinema craze. It means standards.

But aren’t movies about making us feel good? Martin Scorsese may be a great director, but who really wants to rent a Fellini film when the new Spider-Man is playing at the multiplex? As someone with tastes that include plenty of populist pulp content, I’m sympathetic to that argument. And the viewing of art is inescapably an emotional experience, for beauty is not the same as an empirical formula. But it’s too easy to let our emotions run away with us here.

The late British conservative philosopher Roger Scruton wrote that beauty is something which engages both our heart and our mind—our passions and our intellect. Beauty, far from merely being “in the eye of the beholder,” is something which can bear objective analysis. Animals can only chase their appetites. We have the ability to remove our self-interest from the equation and appreciate a thing for itself—not for its “survival value” but because it gives survival value, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis.

I can't remember where I came across this piece at Plough by Wheaton College English professor Richard Hughes Gibson.  It's a little over a year old. Maybe someone on social media referred to it. Anyway, it's entitled "In Search of Charitable Writing: Christian Authors Should Not Discard Christian Virtues In Their Political Writings" and it speaks to the harsh landscape of our political discourse and how it's reflective of our broader societal brittleness, and how there's no avoiding the fact that changing it starts with individual cultivation of traits that add to the light, not the darkness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday roundup

I tried to see Jeff Flake as a guy who acted smartly on his principles, I really did. He started out his legislative stint as a House member with a laudable voting record. Even after things began getting shaky when he moved to the Senate, I held out hope. Then came his book, Conscience of a Conservative (an unfortunate title; couldn't he have come up with something that didn't cause confusion  given the precedent of Barry Goldwater's book of the same name?). His enlisting of Bob Dole and John McCain as his examples of principled Republicans was nearly the last straw for me.

Well, the last straw is now upon us: Flake has written an albeit symbolic $100 check to Roy Moore's opponent, fetal-American-death-relishing monster Doug Jones. While Hot Air's Allapundit, in the piece to which I've linked, devotes much space to the hypocrisy of Moore fans, there's no way to spin this favorably. Flake is now dead to me. He needs to just slink out of public life and find something obscure to do that doesn't throw any more monkey wrenches into the nation's politics.

I'd love to find out that this whole series of tweets compiled in this HuffPo piece is a conspiracy of parody, but unless we find out that that is the case, this is just a case of cultural-rot perpetuation by a bunch of dweebs with no idea how to productively contribute to society:

On Saturday, HuffPost published a hit job on a 53-year-old movie, based on nothing more than unthinking animus (a.k.a. "bigotry") toward a popular children's tale. HuffPost accused the film of racism, sexism, homophobia, and every sort of bigotry — not realizing that the movie actually condemns these attitudes toward "misfits."

The HuffPost video featured a montage of tweets attacking the 1964 film "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" -- and attacking the movie's "sins." It concluded with a tweet from user Cass Martino: "Deviation from the norm will be punished unless it is exploitable."

As usual, the cultural-vibrancy-haters have no sense of historical context:

What "Rudolph" presents as vindication, HuffPost decides to view as oppression. In this context, no amount of praise for formerly "marginalized" people is enough to make up for the original marginalization. The validation of having bullies apologize is nothing to these SJWs. The whole system has to be upended.
In short, these SJWs have ruined an uplifting children's tale by imposing their view of ultimate societal upheaval on a story about "misfit toys." Rather than watching the film and understanding the message as it was intended, these liberal Scrooges cherry-picked the worst parts of the film, divorced them from context, and yelled, "Bigotry! Racism, Homophobia!" (As they do for the Constitution, American history, and often Donald Trump.)
Had they taken a second to think about the movie in its context, they would have realized that the 1964 film was a cartoon version of a song written in 1949. The song "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" was adapted from a popular children's book.
It tells a story of a reindeer being born "different" — with the shiny, red, glowing nose. Despite bullying (a constant feature of childhood in any era), Rudolph goes on to prove himself by saving Christmas with his beacon-light nose. He receives the ultimate vindication, "You'll go down in history [like George Washington]!"

The movie adapted the song, and because it was doing so, the film had to show various forms of bullying. But the bullying was not the point — the vindication was the point. The moral was to teach both bullies and kids who were bullied that being different can be a good thing, and that bullying is wrong. 

In other words, it was a social justice warrior movie, long before there were social justice warriors — or rather, it was what social justice warriors should be.

John Stossel on how far the New York Times has sunk.

The main point of Ben Shapiro's latest NRO piece - that "we've stopped thinking of ourselves as citizens and begun to think of ourselves as subjects" - is important, but so is the instance he uses to substantiate it: the Conyers dynasty in Detroit:

The city of Detroit shall not go without a Conyers. The Old Man appointed his son, 27-year-old John Conyers III, to run in his stead. Conyers III was a longtime defender of his father: “It’s very unfortunate to see him fight so long for so many people and to automatically have the allegations assumed to be true.” Unfortunately, a few years back, Conyers III also tweeted about his dad’s penchant for the ladies: “My dad is a f***ing player and reckless as hell! He just got at this doods wife super low-key.”

Yeah.

John will run against grand-nephew and state senator Ian Conyers in an internecine war that could end with John locking Ian up in the Tower of London and then having him assassinated, if history holds true to form.

Then there's Mrs. Conyers:

The king’s queen, Monica, served on the Detroit City Council — before she was convicted of bribery for taking cash in exchange for voting on a $47 million waste contract. The king mysteriously reversed his opposition to that project; according to Judicial Watch, in 2009 “Conyers even wrote the federal government a letter supporting the plan and pushing for the permit transfers required for the hazardous waste injection well in the city of Romulus, Michigan. The letter, addressed to the Environmental Protection Agency, explained that ‘many things had changed’ in favor of the project since he stood in opposition to it.” 

Great piece by humorist Robert Cormack at Medium on the self-sabotage that aspiring writers who don't like to read impose on themselves.

Another huge and destructive fire ripping through the Lost Angeles area. Pray.

Why we call them Freedom-Haters - today's edition

Chuck Schumer's media "shield law" would empower government to define the term "journalist" and decide who fits it and who doesn't.

As a freelance magazine writer and a blogger, I have skin in this game.  I'm good, I'm a professional, and I won't have some agent of the regime determining whether or not I pass muster.

The weekend's must-read

David Solway at PJ Media has a piece on why he continues to write.  It says pretty much anything I'd have to say about the matter.  The only difference is that I still teach, albeit on an adjunct basis.

That's how his piece gets started.  He talks about fielding the question of why he continued to write and teach given his view that Western civilization's situation was probably hopeless:

Well, I replied, there was the little matter of earning a living. But apart from that desideratum, pedagogy and writing were by no means anomalous or contradictory, since even though I knew the vessel was foundering and could not be saved or hauled back to port for retrofitting, I was intent on helping to keep it afloat for as long as possible. Teaching and writing, I said, were essentially pumping, or bailing. I felt it worthwhile to work to delay the inevitable; better to go down later than sooner.

Things have changed. I quit teaching some time ago, convinced of the uselessness of the profession in the brain-cramped intellectual environment of a nearly defunct civilization. Such plenary impoverishment is daunting and probably irreversible. The canard of “green energy,” the massive “climate change” scam that has co-opted vast segments of the Western public, the relentless advance of blasphemy laws putting a chill on freedom of speech and debate, courts declaring that truth is no defense in cases where offense is given, the campaign against the unborn (abortion on demand) and, in some countries, the elderly (selective euthanasia), the politicized university as a locus of indoctrination rather than learning, the sentimental empowerment of the transgendered and the two-spirited who must be accorded every social benefit as if they represented the quintessence of human progress, the successful feminist war against common manhood, the setting in place of redistributive economics as a form of legalized theft, open-door immigration policies for illegal aliens or members of primitive, antithetical cultures—all these developments are signs of rampant and likely terminal intellectual and social decay.

I confess that I sometimes feel like popular Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø’s protagonist Harry Hole, disillusioned, down on his luck, aware that justice is just ice and that nothing is ever really going to work out satisfactorily, if at all. Cases may be solved, but things invariably go from bad to worse. I go on writing, however—pursuing “the case”—out of habit, reflex, need, and the enjoyment of rotating sentences on a rhetorical lathe—in other words, out of self-indulgence, qualified, be it said, by an overlay of sobriety. I think of John Jay Chapman’s 1900 commencement address at Hobart College: “Never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose.…Speak out always.” I insist on retaining the power of speech but I have no illusions about the ultimate effect or influence of speaking out always. In fact, I have now come to feel profoundly that Western civilization is not worth saving; it has signed its own death warrant with a proud flourish. If I may paraphrase from Terry Brooks’ adventure/fantasy series The Heritage of Shannara, the elves have gone from Westland for good and we are at the mercy of the demons of Morrowindl.

"Retaining the power of speech."  There are things that at this late hour must be said, and there are not many willing to say them.

It costs more every day.  Those who have cast their lot with the great leveling enterprise of the Left may or may not be in the majority, but they are determined to wipe us out.  Making sure ideas and principles - honest-to-God ideas and principles, not faddish notions and cult creeds - get introduced into post-American societal discussion is up to us.  Otherwise, it's all Party jargon and state-sanctioned parameters on thought, speech and behavior.

So we keep the words coming.

The MEC regime's propaganda arm doesn't even try to pretend it does journalism anymore

The term "illegal Immigrant" has been removed from the AP Stylebook.

Puttin' all my eggs in the LITD basket (for the time being, anyway)

As of April 10, what has ostensibly been my "main" site, Barney Quick, Musician & Writer will cease to exist.

I just looked at the monthly Yahoo Small Business charge on the latest American Express statement and then asked myself if I was getting that much value from having the site up there.

For one thing, the last few times I tried to go in and tweak things, or even update my gig calendar, there was some kind of hose-up, and when I'm presented with hose-ups, I'm generally on the express train to Damn-It Land.  Figuring stuff out is not my strong suit.  And in the past few years I've developed blood pressure issues, so the gates of Damn-It Land is not a good place for me to go.

But for some time I've also thought about the way I want to brand myself.

The site is hardly slick; it's pretty bare-bones, in fact.  And the music clips are not necessarily the best music I've recorded.  The writing samples linked on the page for that are old and woefully unrepresentative of the breadth of what I now crank out all the time since that's become my day job.

Then there's the matter of the fine line that anybody who is simultaneously a "creative type" and a conservative must walk when presenting themselves to the world.

I love music so much, but I am utterly uninterested in the nature of what is left of "the music industry." I have accounts with a few of those "build-your-fan-base / get-your-music-heard-by-big-time-players-and-entertainment-producers"-type sites but it's been ages since I attempted to get anything going with any of them.  (Even writing about music is something I no longer seek out.  There's a photographer who is making a bit of a name for himself taking concert pictures.  I did a little work for him a while back - interviewed an up-and-coming band in our area - and now he's all the time texting me, seeing if I can go hear so-and-so with him, get in free with a press pass.  I'm always relieved when I check my calendar and find I've scheduled some previous activity.  Two recent shows were Bob Dylan and the Avett Brothers.  I hope he enjoyed himself and got some good shots.)

Am I jaded?  Perhaps so.  Another good reason for taking a deep breath and considering this matter in its largest context.

In the meantime, I have no problem blogging my tail off here, so this will be my main presence.  And, like all human beings in 2013, I'm on Facebook and Twitter.

When I ask myself, "What is important for me to do?", the answer I keep coming back to is "Whatever you can to help save Western civilization."  So, for right now, it's full-tilt LITD, baby.