Another clash of competing leftist interests

 The most recent post here at LITD dove into the irony of a countercultural icon, Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone co-founder, who checks off the proper boxes right down to coming out as gay after a marriage that produced a son, getting ousted from the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (which he also co-founded) for telling a New York Times interviewer that he finds white male rock titans more substantive interviews than female or black ones.

Today we look at another deliciously ironic loggerheads: organized labor versus the climate alarmists:

If you want to understand why the United Auto Workers union is striking now, look at the three factories it chose to target for its first wave shutdowns.

The General Motors plant in Wentzville, Missouri, makes the Chevy Colorado and the GMC Savana. The Ford plant in Wayne, Michigan, makes Ford Rangers and Ford Broncos. And the Stellantis plant in Toledo, Ohio, makes Jeep Wranglers and Jeep Gladiators.

What do all these vehicles have in common? Unlike electric vehicles that lose money, these vehicles are among the Big Three’s most profitable products. They are also exactly the type of vehicle President Joe Biden wants to eliminate by 2032, when his new regulations mandate that two-thirds of all cars sold in the United States must be EVs.

Not only do EVs have fewer parts than gasoline models, which means fewer jobs for auto workers, but every plant that produces mufflers, catalytic converters, and fuel injectors will have to shutter, either permanently or long enough for a complete overhaul to make EV parts.

Biden’s obsession with EVs has essentially made all UAW-organized factories in the Midwest obsolete. Why would a car company invest there when they could build a new factory in a state where workers aren’t forced to join unions?

It's all I can do not to digress here and go on a diatribe about Biden's presumption that he can insert himself into the workings of the free market - which, to reiterate the basics, boys and girls, is merely the sum total of the millions of agreements to which buyers and sellers arrive daily, ideally without government interference - by executive diktat, no less. But let's stay focused.

Current UAW president Shawn Fain may not be collectivist enough for the Trotskyists, but he's a pretty classic figure for a labor activist.  He comes from the heart of flyover country - Kokomo, Indiana - where his dad was police chief and two of his grandparents were UAW members who worked at a Chrysler facility there. Fain himself went to work at the Chrysler castings plant as an electrician in 1994 and pretty much immediately started climbing the union ranks. 

In the current situation, he champions the position that union members ought to continue to get paid even if an automaker shutters a plant. 

I do need to digress a bit here and get into the question of what is and isn't a right. 

Fain and his ilk take it as a given that there is some kind of right to a livelihood. Making things that are desirable into "rights" is how we got government involvement in health care - an aspect of life that figures into the current auto industry strike situation.

It's actually understandable that he would conclude thusly. Cars, as well as self-propelling transportation generally, and communications technology, too, came on the scene at the outset of the twentieth century with such impact that by the 1920s, they were a given. And they were made in factories by people earning hourly wages. 

But just as their arrival on the cultural landscape was a manifestation of how unbridled human inventiveness could introduce drastic changes, innovation continued apace and wrought further changes. The 1980s forced the Big Three to move over to make way for foreign car makers to erect US plants. And many of those have stayed non-unionized, which should have been a sign to the UAW that its ability to make demands had limits. 

And now comes another wave of change, albeit not born of human inventiveness but the heavy hand of the state.

So who's going to blink first as the climate alarmists, backed by the coercive power of government, go toe to toe with the UAW, which is still locked in a mindset that sees the mid-twentieth-century model of the town factory guaranteeing generation after generation a secure lifestyle? 

There's a way to avoid this scenario of bad alternatives, if anyone is interested. 

Let people buy the kinds of cars they want to buy, and remove all government - and union - interference in how they're priced - which, to a considerable degree, is still based on the carmakers' costs.  Then we can see what the market says about what the cars are worth.

ADDENDUM: I don't know if this qualifies as a digression or not, but the Very Stable Genius is going to skip the second Republican presidential candidates' debate in order to address the UAW. It's pretty obvious what he's doing: striving to take some of the wind out of the sails of Biden's expression of support for the union. It's of a piece with what he recently said about Florida's six-week abortion ban. When the VSG hedges his political bets, he's not particularly sly about it.

Trump has no principles. He does anything he does in order to see if it will bring him glorification. 

Yeah, I guess that was a little bit of a digression. But it's good to know where the charlatan of Mar-a-Lago fits into the current situation. 

 

 

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. 

 

 

Gavin Newsom hates human advancement

 Oh, does the title seem a bit hyperbolic?

I'm not sure what else you'd call this:

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a lawsuit Saturday against five major oil companies and their subsidiaries, seeking compensation for damages caused by climate change.

The suit, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court by Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta, accuses the companies of knowing about the link between fossil fuels and catastrophic climate change for decades but suppressing and spreading disinformation on the topic to delay climate action. The New York Times first reported the case Friday.

The suit also claims that Exxon, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and BP — as well as the American Petroleum Institute industry trade group — have continued their deception to today, promoting themselves as “green” with small investments in alternative fuels, while primarily investing in fossil fuel products.

It seeks to create a fund that oil companies would pay into to help the state recover from extreme weather events and prepare for further effects of climate change. It argues that California has already spent tens of billions of dollars on responding to climate change, with costs expected to rise significantly.

Talk about inflamed language:

“The companies that have polluted our air, choked our skies with smoke, wreaked havoc on our water cycle, and contaminated our lands must be made to mitigate the harms they have brought upon the State,” the suit says.

Villainizing those in the business of bestowing comfort, convenience and safety on American society, extracting the energy form that has raised living standards and life expectancies exponentially all over the world for over a century. 

Real smart.  

 

 

China's badly sagging internally, but that doesn't mean it doesn't pose a threat on the world stage

 Michael Schuman, a Beijing-based writer for The Atlantic, says that years of trying to mix free-market activity (private companies) with heavy-handed statism (industrial policy, regulation) has taken the wind out of China's sails:

China’s jobless college graduates have become an embarrassment to Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The unemployment rate among the country’s youth has reached an all-time high, putting the country’s severe economic troubles on display at home and abroad. In August, Xi’s administration decided to act: Its statistics bureau stopped releasing the data.

But Xi can’t hide China’s economic woes—or hide from them. The problems are not just a post-pandemic malaise, or some soon-to-be-forgotten detour in China’s march to superpower stature. The vaunted China model—the mix of liberalization and state control that generated the country’s hypersonic growth—has entered its death throes.

The news should not come as a surprise. Economists and even Chinese policy makers have warned for years that the China model was fundamentally flawed and would inevitably break down. But Xi was too consumed with shoring up his own power to undertake the necessary reforms to fix it. Now the problems run so deep, and the repairs would be so costly, that the time for a turnaround may have passed.

Contrary to the assumptions of many commentators in recent years, China may never overtake the United States as the world’s dominant economy if current trends continue. In fact, it’s already falling behind. 

Once again, we're seeing that central planning is a poor way to gauge what a country is going to need, Over-investing in housing, factory capacity, railways, etc. has resulted in a debt level three times that of the size of the country's economy.

Xi once talked a good game about moving in a sensible direction, but the initiatives he talked about never got off the ground:

Early in his tenure, Xi seemed to accept these imperatives. In 2013, he signed off on a Communist Party reform blueprint that pledged to give the market a “decisive” role in the economy. But the reforms never happened. Enacting them would have diminished the power of the state—and thus Xi’s own power. China’s leader was unwilling to trade political control for economic growth.

The more power Xi has commanded, the heavier the state’s hand in the economy has become. Xi has relied on state industrial policy to drive innovation, and he has imposed intrusive regulations on important sectors, such as technology and education. As a result, China’s private sector is in retreat. Two years ago, private companies accounted for 55 percent of the collective value of China’s 100 largest publicly traded firms, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics; in mid-2023, that share fell to 39 percent.

People's incomes are going in the wrong direction for domestic consumption to take up the slack.

So the way to project an image of continuing power, it seems, is to act like a menace in the western Pacific:

China’s navy has launched its largest-ever manoeuvres with an aircraft carrier in the western Pacific, according to foreign defence officials and analysts, as Beijing flexes its military muscle to push back against the US and its allies.

 

The Shandong, the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s second aircraft carrier, was on course on Tuesday to converge with more than 20 other Chinese warships in waters between Taiwan, the Philippines and the US Pacific territory of Guam, said two Asian security officials.

 

“This is by far the largest number of ships we have seen training with any Chinese carrier so far,” said Su Tzu-yun, an analyst at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a defence-ministry backed think-tank in Taipei. “They are expressing their displeasure with the various military exercises that have been under way in their periphery.”

 

Taiwan’s defence ministry counted 20 PLA warships in the waters around the island in the 24 hours to early Tuesday morning. It did not give any detail, but the disclosure followed its announcement on Monday that the Shandong had sailed through the Bashi Channel, which separates Taiwan from the Philippines, into the Pacific. Japan’s military also reported the passage of eight PLA naval vessels into the Pacific via the Miyako Strait, south of Okinawa.

 

One east Asian national security official said the vessels spotted by Japan — six missile destroyers and two frigates — were continuing in a direction that indicated they would meet up with the Shandong. A separate Asian military official said some of the PLA vessels operating near Taiwan were also following the carrier.

When Marxist-Leninists with big egos reach this stage in their fortunes, they aren't too concerned with what international organizations and multinational corporations think. 

This situation is going to continue to get more raw and real for all of us. 

 

New Right nastiness and a young woman's innocuous video

 Am pleased to see Zack Kessel at National Review come to the defense of Julia Mazur:

Julia Mazur, an ex-Tinder employee . . .  hosts the Pretty Much Done podcast, which addresses relationships with a focus on “the most important one we’ll ever have: our relationship with ourself.” On her show, according to a self-described friend of hers from college, Mazur “talks about breakups, relationships, and trying to love yourself at any stage you are in.”

Mazur became X’s main character after a video she posted on TikTok — in which she describes her Saturday as a single, childless woman in her late 20s as consisting of such activities as sleeping in, binge-watching television shows on Netflix, and teaching herself how to make shakshuka — went viral. She closed out the video with a paean to freedom, saying her ability to do essentially whatever she wants makes up for however upset she might be by her not having a husband and children:

I say all this to say, whenever I’m hard on myself about why I’m not married and I don’t have kids and I should be further along at 29 (almost 30), I wouldn’t wanna do anything else this Saturday. I know that you can do all these things when you have kids and you’re married, and I understand, but the effortlessness and ease of my life — just kind of focusing on myself and the shakshuka I wanna make or the Beyoncé concert I wanna go to — really pays off when I’m hard on myself for not being where society tells me I should be in life.

Everything Mazur talks about should seem relatively mundane. She does not have a husband or children, so she doesn’t have the responsibilities that would come with them. It’s a silver lining in a situation she seems to understand might not be ideal. You might think such a video describes pretty basic stuff that is not worth getting worked up about. You’d be wrong. 

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh posted the TikTok on X on Sunday, writing that Mazur’s “life doesn’t revolve around her family and kids so instead it revolves around TV shows and pop stars. Worst of all she’s too stupid to realize how depressing this is.”

There’s plenty that could be said about the experience of a single, childless woman in her late 20s. I obviously have very little practice being one, so I’ll address something else: the sheer nastiness in Walsh’s post. His attack on a woman who’s simply trying to appreciate what she has in life is emblematic of a broader problem on the right: the conflation of “conservative” with “jerk.” Walsh is by no means the only offender, with many other right-wing influencers solely focusing on “owning the libs.” The “owning” often stoops to bullying.

Look, Mazur could indeed be held up as a poster child for the vacuousness of the lives of millennials. She is indeed a number in the collapsing-marriage rate, and her choices of ways to aesthetically nourish herself, and her seeming lack of community and connectedness are the opposite of heartening. 

But Neo-Trumpists just have to slather a dollop of attitude on any observation they make. As Kessel says, there's no higher priority for them than "owning the libs."

Kessel commendably then steps back and takes a more aerial view of the ways in which the New Right is decidedly not what we'd known as conservatism prior to 2015:

This is a real problem for conservatism. Over the past decade or so, many elements of what once constituted the movement have crumbled, especially within much of the right-wing media ecosystem. Small government? That’s old-fashioned. Clear, universal ideas of morality? So archaic. A globally engaged United States? That’s “not where the voters are,” and even if it was, America isn’t necessarily the good guy. 

The difference between actual conservatives and the New Right is that conservatism has a vision for a society in which everyone would be truly happier. The other bunch just wants to stomp the bad guys into the dust. Problem is, the bad guys will rise again at some point, demonstrating the cyclical nature of this level of political activity. That is, unless the yay-hoos institute such an authoritarian system that they can't.

No, thanks.   

 

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."