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Note: I’m in a rush and don’t have time to add the links required to document my assertions; I’ll fill them in later.
Shelby Steele gets at the essence of Obama’s profound appeal: he’s running on culture (i.e., as a celebrity, as I have noted many times over the last six months) rather than on his politics (which are all over the map, as has been well documented all over the interwebs, if not in the MSM (as noted by Pew) in the last two months:
[W]hite Americans have also been tormented by their stigmatization as moral inferiors, as racists. An Obama presidency would give them considerable moral leverage against this stigma.
So it has to be acknowledged that, on the level of cultural and historical symbolism, an Obama presidency might nudge the culture forward a bit — presuming of course that he would be at least a competent president. (A less-than-competent black president would likely be a step backwards.) It would be a good thing were blacks to be more open to the power of individual responsibility. And it would surely help us all if whites were less cowed by the political correctness on black issues that protects their racial innocence at the expense of the very principles that made America great. We Americans are hungry for such a cultural shift.
This, no doubt, is what Barack Obama means by “change.” He promises to reconfigure our exhausted cultural arrangement.
The McCain campaign is obviously aware of Obama’s cultural appeal, and it is seeding a “False Messiah” counter-culture campaign against him:
The important thematic part of the ad is not the gas prices, but the explicit, if still subtle, use of the False Messiah argument, which McCain’s senior staff has been talking privately about for months.
At first it sounds like the rush of a river, then the chants become clear. They are Obama’s minions, chanting his name in a kind of creepy, almost Orwellian repetition. Watch this theme develop over the coming months. As it stands, the McCain campaign already likes citing Oprah Winfrey’s claim that Obama is “The One,” like Keanu Reeves in a trench coat. The McCain campaign is trying to turn Obama’s enormous enthusiasm and crowds against him, to find a kryptonite for his superpowers. This is an arrogance argument, like the one made last week by Charles Krauthammer, but it is also a cultural argument. Subcultures are inherently insular. They have rules, customs and assumptions of their own. They tend to embrace lofty, abstract rhetoric. They also exclude. And in a political campaign, you do not want to exclude. In this spot, McCain is not just campaigning against Obama the man, but Obama the movement and Obama the subculture. He is trying to convince regular voters that Obama supporters are not regular. They are true believers, even worshipers. And it could be an effective attack, for at least two reasons.
1. America has a tradition of seeking out regular people as presidents, not demigods.
2. The conventional wisdom in politics today is you win by tearing down your opponent’s strengths. [e.a.]
Shelby Steele notes a further chink in Obama’s armor:
But here lies his essential contradiction: His campaign is more cultural than political. He sells himself more as a cultural breakthrough than as a candidate for office. To be a projection screen for the cultural aspirations of both blacks and whites one must be an invisible man politically. Real world politics, in their mundanity, interrupt cultural projections. And so Mr. Obama’s political invisibility — a charm that can only derive from a lack of deep political convictions — may well serve his cultural appeal, but it also makes him something of a political mess.
Already he has flip-flopped on campaign financing, wire-tapping, gun control, faith-based initiatives, and the terms of withdrawal from Iraq. Those enamored of his cultural potential may say these reversals are an indication of thoughtfulness, or even open-mindedness. But could it be that this is a man who trusted so much in his cultural appeal that the struggles of principle and conscience never seemed quite real to him? His flip-flops belie an almost existential callowness toward principle, as if the very idea of permanent truth is passé, a form of bad taste. [e.a.]
I can tell you that this appeal to the culture is working on the under-30 set (the part of that set which I see, at any rate). They don’t care about Obama’s policy ideas. They like the guy.
And they’re not the only ones. Why, on American Morning just today Kiran Chetry reported on the media’s pro-Obama’s bias, then her interview subject Rudy Giuiliani confirmed that pro-Obama media bias, and then moments later Chetry—with no apparentrony—reported the BREAKING NEWS: “any minute now! Barack Obama’s plane will arrive in Amman, Jordan!!!”
[updated (twice) with some missing links]
As the writer of a blog called Infotainment Rules I’m in no position to criticize lowbrow culture—indeed, I defend it as the right of the people to choose their own entertainment (though I believe there’s a lot of room for improvement in the realm of pop culture, including its ability to inform while it entertains), and note that the long history of “lowbrow” entertainment (i.e., that which is created for the masses) includes many cultural products that evolved, over time, to become the highest-of-the-highbrow culture.
But new media emperor Nick Denton carries things a little too far when he defends a nasty gossip-and-vengeance campaign he has been running on Gawker ever since his nasty but addictive website was eviscerated in New York magazine and in n+1 in the fall of 2007 (the latter evisceration carried out after a long Gawker campaign against n+1 and its most prominent and vocal defender, co-founder and co-editor Keith Gessen).
Word of the end of Gawker (by the New York Times here and by me here) turns out to have been premature. Its nasty crab antics continue unabated.
Before its prematurely announced demise, in April 2007, Emily Gould (then a Gawker writer and at the time a good [read: viciously-anti-celebrity and anti-elitist] ideological fit with Choire Sicha and head honcho Denton) went on Larry King Live (hosted by Jimmy Kimmel that night) to defend the “Gawker Stalker” feature (which encourages people to write in with their celebrity sightings) as “citizen journalism”; she stated that celebrities were rich enough to defend themselves against unwanted scrutiny, and in any case, she suggested, they had invited exactly such scrutiny because they had wanted to be famous and become celebrities).
Gould was very young (25 or so), and she has since recanted (sorta; she hasn’t really been deprogrammed. Now that she herself has become a target of the crab antics she herself once practiced at Gawker, she seems to regret her participation but doesn’t ever apologize; indeed, some in the media accused her of continuing to malign people in order to build herself up. Others tried to explain to long-suffering “women writers” why Emily Gould (the wrong person, and role model) became famous while they continued to suffer in unpublished silence and while they witnessed the reputation of “bloggers”—all of them—being tarnished by this little exhibitionist.
So, no: Gould didn’t apologize. Instead, she tried to move on. She decided, it seems, to embrace her past as just that—the past—as she notes in this article recently published in the NYT Magazine. My take? She’s still waaaay too into herself. But she’s a good writer (no small thing, since writing is her career), and even something of a literary heroine to some of the commenters on her blog).***
[T]he piece reminded me of much of the “new journalism” of the 1960’s. One of the principal sources of that kind of writing was Esquire magazine, which in those days was the most exciting and interesting magazine in the world, unlike the superficial and irrelevant waste of paper it has since become. The modus operandi of the editor, Harold Hayes, as he himself described it, was to contract the best writers in the country and let them write about anything they wanted. The result was a vibrant voice that no publication has achieved since.
For years I’ve yearned for some contemporary equivalent — a source of insightful, perceptive writing illuminating the times we live in. Your NYT piece is precisely that. And I love it. At nearly 69, I’ve felt tremendously deprived not to be able to enter the world your generation lives in via the observations and insights of one of its members. (That was what the “new journalism” and especially the Esquire of the 1960s and very early ’70s provided for my generation. Your piece, for instance, reminds me a little of James Baldwin’s account of his relationship with Norman Mailer, “The Black Boy Looks At The White Boy.” Much of the best of that Esquire can be found in the wonderful, voluminous collection the magazine put out at the end of the ’60s, Smiling Through The Apocalypse.) I’m so grateful to have discovered a writer who again unlocks my mind and opens my eyes and takes me into the world she inhabits.
And, most interesting from my point of view, Gould has developed her own internet ethics:
If you wouldn’t associate your real name with a comment or you wouldn’t express those same ideas in person, given the opportunity, chances are you’re a cowardly asshole who should keep his or her thoughts to him or herself.
So that’s a good bit of the backstory, if you’re still following along. (It’s trying, I know.)
Now, some months later, Nick Denton defends his relentless and personal attacks on Gould—(a 26-year-old freelance writer now formerly of Gawker) and on her personal life, which includes Gessen, whom she once attacked from her Gawker perch).
Denton asserts (in not so many words) that his vicious attempted takedowns of a new “media elite” are the essence of journalism: the public’s right to know [e.a.]:
Nick Denton at 01:20 PM on 06/05/08
@Choire: The entangling of literary, journalistic and romantic relationships is a topic worthy of Gawker. You can’t understand how the media works unless you know who dated whom. Every job, every magazine commission, every anonymous quote, every resentment-they can only be fully understood if you know that X went to school with Y who introduced them to Z who commissioned X to write that magazine piece which turned into a book contract lined up by Y’s former lover. When you and I chat over lunch, that’s how we talk. Why should all this information be reserved for the private conversations of media insiders? That’s why Gawker exists: to put all of that invaluable social information out on the web and make the media machine a little less monolithic and intimidating than it can so often seem.
Now: I have written before about gossip as the ultimate weapon of the powerless against the powerful.
Here:
[[See Joshua Gamson’s book Claims to Fame and this post about Angelina Jolie, and this one, if you want to understand where I’m coming from with my celebrity obsession. It’s the scholarly approach, ha ha. And see how Gawker calls out Glenn Greenwald for getting on his high horse about The Politico. And see why gossip is good for us. Also: read Scorpion Tongues, by Gail Collins, former editorial-page editor of the New York Times, on how gossip has always been a weapon of the powerless against the privileged. And watch this space to see if I get it together to write up a more graceful version of my neat little theory about why infotainment rules.]]
And here:
[G]ossip has traditionally been a weapon of the powerless against the powerful [which is one reason I do not criticize infotainment–i.e., institutionalized gossip–but rather accept it; in the media age, gossip may be even a more potent weapon than ever against the powerful] , as Gail Collins wrote in her entertaining and informative book Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics [e.a.]:
For much of human history, [gossip] was one of the few weapons available to the powerless: servants who spread stories about their masters, peasants who irreverently speculated about the most private aspects of life in the manor. … In American history, gossip has sometimes been a reaction against heavily marketed politicians who voters might suspect were being thrust upon them against their will.
But minor media and literary celebrities like Emily Gould and Keith Gessen do not exactly pose the same threat to the people (who do indeed have a right to know) as do “heavily marketed politicians” (who may eventually assume positions from which they can perpetrate much harm on the electorate, and the country). So: invective about such minor celebrities under the guise of “media gossip”—even if it’s confined to the minuscule world of people who wish they too could be similarly celebrated—is hardly in service of the right of the people to know.
It’s “only”gossip—hurtful to those gossiped about and delightful to those who love gossip. The perfect gossip item, as Denton was quoted by the NYT as saying, is:
something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head.
New-media “gossip” is (formerly private but amusing and Schadenfreude-laced) dinner-party conversation released into the bloodstream of the internet, where it lives forever, as David Frum noted four years ago for New York magazine:
Frum was merely working with the rumors [about John Kerry] that everyone else was spreading around. That’s how opinion culture has evolved, and it’s been enabled by the Internet. Who cares if you’re wrong? As it happens, Frum says he does.
“I regret it,” he says now. “I read it in the paper, I heard it gossiped about, but I didn’t do anything like reporting. I joked about it on the Internet in a way I would at dinner. Then I learned the Net is like print, not like dinner.”
The “Net is like print, not like dinner [conversation].” Those sound like immortal words, right? Four years later, tell them to Mayhill Fowler, or to Arianna Huffington, both of whom have had an impact on the political campaigns of presidential hopefuls with their passing on of “dinner party” gossip.
For his part—and damn the consequences—Gessen is fighting back. He’s not fighting the gossip, mind you; he seems inured to that. He’s fighting for his literary reputation, and against ad-hominem invective (masquerading as literary criticism) written by cretins:
Nick Denton, you fucking ninny: Everyone went to the same six schools. Everyone has dated everyone. Now what? What have you got now? Because once we grant you that, you actually have to start making aesthetic and moral distinctions between actual written texts. And you don’t know how to do that anymore. Because you’re a pissy little gossip. Your brain was once trained to think and write, and you’ve gone and turned it to mush. You don’t even put commas in the right places, much less think straight.
And Choire—I like you, I think you’re a good guy, you have a good written style—and yet I’m afraid the same goes for you. Choire, the trouble is not that Gawker makes insinuations. The trouble is that Gawker doesn’t know what it’s talking about. Just like you, when you write about books you haven’t read [he’s referring to this “review” —ed.]
Interesting times indeed.
update: Bloggers attack Gessen in ad hominem rants.
Choire Sicha pounds him, too, in a Radar posted tagged “catfights.”
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*** And she has performed a public service for readers of the New York Times like my elderly mother, who keep hearing about blogs and blogging. In her immortal words: “I don’t understand why anyone would publish their private thoughts like that, and I don’t know who cares about this silly girl’s story. But now I finally understand what this blogging is all about!”)
Here’s a straw in the wind that I’ve been waiting for, and a possible indication that our pop culture may soon begin to catch up with 21st-century reality.
The Independent reports that the Brits’ love affair with memoirs about misery and wretchedness is over.
Depravity, drink, drug addiction and abuse are hardly the most uplifting subjects for a leisurely read. But for years, misery memoirs have been the toast of the book world, with stories of human suffering generating huge sales. But new figures suggest readers have reached their pain threshold and the mis lit boom may be over.
At its height, profits topped £24m a year and authors could be sure that the more they plumbed the depths of despair and depravity, the deeper publishers would reach into their pockets. But industry research firm Nielsen now estimates that sales for the top 10 best-selling misery memoirs will be down from £3.87m last year to £2.59m this year.
Regular readers know that I’ve been appalled at the poverty of imagination that’s been on display in the pop culture for a long time. The wretched-family-and-dysfunctional-child memoir has been one of the most prominent features of this trend. There is no more grappling with big ideas in the culture; instead there’s the obsessive focus on the minutiae of miserable everyday life and on the unique ways in which individuals suffer their particular wretchedness.
It’s a fucking bore! Leon Wieseltier agrees with me (sorta)!
The decline of The New York Times remains worthy of comment, as does the poverty of imagination in American theater and film.
I’m no expert, and there are plenty of people discussing the culture, in depth, all over the interwebs. What I am, though, is a very disappointed reader and movie-goer, because I’m not being presented with any big stories and big themes—books or music or movies or plays that address things that are way larger than individuals and larger even than the sum of individuals—that get my juices flowing.
Two decades ago Tom Wolfe called for more novelists to stalk what he called the “Billion-Footed Beast“ (subscription to Harper’s required). You can read all about it here, at the NYT blog Paper Cuts.
Wolfe has for decades complained that in about 1960 American novelists made the decision to turn inward, to take their work in abstruse directions and to reject realism. All this was a disaster, Wolfe has maintained, especially because the social changes in America during this period offered such rich material. With “Bonfire,” he set out to reclaim the ground once occupied by Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, James T. Farrell and the other Americans of the first half of the 20th century who wrote in the tradition of Balzac, Dickens and Zola.
About two years after “Bonfire” came out, Wolfe published a famous essay in Harper’s, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” (subscription required) laying out his theory in detail, and what really struck me while reading it again was that he could have written it yesterday and hardly changed a thing. He has gained no followers. [e.a.]
More’s the pity. There is one exception: Jonathan Franzen, whose novel The Corrections was in fact a correction to the obsessive inward-looking trend in writers—a sprawling social novel in the tradition that Tom Wolfe had talked about (albeit, one with postmodern touches as well)—as James Collins notes in Paper Cuts:
The only book I can think of that has reached for something like the same realistic density, sweep and accessibility is “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen. But the core of that book is a bourgeois family drama, and so it is really more like a gargantuan short story than a novel of the type that Dickens or Balzac would recognize.
Franzen himself addressed the discouraging landscape of contemporary fiction in a 2002 essay titled “Mr. Difficult,” in the New Yorker. It’s not available online. It provoked a dispute between him and Ben Marcus a few years later; discussion here.
Though Marcus’ essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame. In particular, Marcus focuses on Franzen’s 2002 essay “Mr. Difficult,” in which Franzen chronicles his growing disenchantment with the novels of William Gaddis, and more generally with the modernist-inspired ideal of “difficult” literature—the belief that “the greatest novels were tricky in their methods, resisted casual reading, and merited sustained study.” Writers like Gaddis, Franzen argues, are “Status” authors, who see themselves (again, in the modernist mold) as obligated only to their art, and who for the most part ignore the interests and desires of the reader. With some reluctance, Franzen places himself in an opposing camp: “Contract” authors, who place a high value on the relationship between narrator and reader, who primarily see the novel as a device for social and cultural communication, and who take human life (rather than, say, language or ideas per se) as the ultimate subject of their fiction.
While I’m waiting for all these novelists to sort themselves out and to start to grapple with 21st-century realities—and there’s a new generation of writers who seem eager to engage—I enjoy dipping into old pop culture favorites.
Like this 1961 movie (based on—gasp!—a trilogy of books! in French! which inspired a Broadway musical!), which was featured on TCM last night:
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m wondering when TV “journalists” will face the truth about their profession—namely, that what you see below is not just the future of “the news” but also the present.
Fishbowl quotes some of the “juicy bits” from the upcoming NYT Mag article:
“By the way, have you figured me out yet?” Matthews said at the end of another phone conversation the following day. “You gotta under-stand, it’s all complicated. It’s not like Tim.” Tim — as in Russert, the inquisitive jackhammer host of “Meet the Press” — is a particular obsession of Matthews’s. Matthews craves Russert’s approval like that of an older brother. He is often solicitous.
In an interview with Playboy a few years ago, he volunteered that he had made the list of the Top 50 journalists in D.C. in The Washingtonian magazine. “I’m like 36th, and Tim Russert is No. 1,” Matthews told Playboy. “I would argue for a higher position for myself.”
Friends say Matthews is wary of another up-and-comer, David Gregory, who last month was given a show at 6 o’clock, between airings of “Hardball.” It is a common view around NBC that Gregory is trying out as a possible replacement for Matthews.
According to people at NBC, Matthews has not been shy in voicing his resentment of Olbermann. Nor, according to network sources, has Olbermann bothered to hide his low regard for Matthews, although when I spoke to him, Olbermann denied any personal animosity toward Matthews and told me that he appreciates his “John Madden-like enthusiasm for politics.”
Hmmm. Recognize anyone?
Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice, in The Entertainer
London, 1957, photo by Snowden
p.s. The last time I used that image was here, in May 2007.
The last time I wrote about Matthews was here.
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*** When I claimed my blog on Technorati two years ago, this is how I described it:
They call it news. I call it infotainment.
No one can say that we weren’t warned well in advance. See, for example, Neal Postman and Michael Schudson and Joshua Gamson.
Unable to stir up attention for her most recent movie, washed-up celebrity Winona Ryder apparently made a bid for attention by using a less traditional route—shoplifting (again).
As you can see by following this Google News link, there’s more about the shoplifting than about her movie.*** That’s because the critics weren’t kind, if the NYT’s Manohla Dargis’s review gives any indication:
Oh, yes, Winona Ryder, who memorably starred in “Heathers,” shows up periodically as Death Nell, a mysterious vamp with a Black Widow complex and some nasty black heels. I’m not exactly sure what she’s doing in this film, and I don’t believe that Mr. Waters or Ms. Ryder know either.
It seems like it was so long ago that Winona Ryder mattered to anybody, doesn’t it? Does anyone care about Hollywood anymore?
Richard Corliss recently had the guts to ask three of its biggest stars if they were, well, over:
I sat with three of the most popular actors of the past few decades — Robert Redford, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise — who were promoting their new film, Lions for Lambs. I posed to them an indelicate question: Are movie stars obsolete? Consternation erupted as the three quickly and forcefully dismissed the idea.
Well, they would, since they have not only their livelihoods but their entire egos invested in the notion that the system that has been in place since they can remember will always be there. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Old media is imploding. Not even the movies have a hold over us anymore.
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*** Once upon a time (back in 1994, in Rolling Stone magazine), Ryder was lecturing other young stars about how grateful they should be for their success:
“For a long time, I was almost ashamed of being an actress,” Ryder says. “I felt like it was a shallow occupation. I’d go to see a band with friends from school, and people would be watching every move I made. They’ be judging me: ‘Look at her shoes! I bet those cost $400!’ That affected me. I grew up with no money.” …
Ryder often beats me to the next question.
“Why am I so defensive? I’m defensive because it offends me so much when… OK, I don’t want to fuck this up… I knew a lot of young actors who live in these dumps. They have their books scattered, and their mattress is on the floor – and they’re millionaires. That’s fine. That’s their way of living. But the reason they’re doing it is that they’re ashamed. And I’ve talked to them about it. You just want to say, ‘Don’t live this way to show people that you’re real and you’re deep.’ It offends me, because I know what it’s like to be in poverty, and it’s not fun, and it’s not romantic, and it’s not cool.”
Last year, Ryder wrote in a diary: “I feel like it’s OK to be who I am. It’s OK to be a fucking movie star. It’s OK to live in a nice house.”
I can’t help but note that the young actor she was dissing, Ethan Hawke, has gone on to enjoy career success in many different branches of the arts, while Winona Ryder, who had so much promise, has faded from view.
That’s my best guess, anyway, after reading this item at Publishers Lunch ($$):
How Many More eBook Releases Will We See?
The press release from Ectaco draws on a variety of cliches (”kiss your
old-fashioned, dusty library goodbye”) to announce the company’s new jetBook ereader. The cheap-looking device weighs just 7 ounces and has a five-inch screen (smaller than Kindle and Sony Reader) and appears to handle only .txt, .pdf and .jpg text files, along with mp3s. The company specializes in translation dictionaries and those are a focus feature of this device as well, which sells for $350.Mostly you look at their site and realize how relatively easy it must be to design and produce a reader like this, and how many similar products must be on the way.
Duh.
From the press release:
jetBook(R) is an incredibly sophisticated e-book reader with a built-in
mp3 player that allows users to listen to AudioBooks as well as keep up
with their reading. Preloaded with translating dictionaries, you can
simultaneously enjoy a good book, improve your vocabulary by looking up and
translating any words you want, listen to your favorite audio files and
check out photos — all in the same device! With an incredibly simple to
read, large 5-inch, high-resolution display that is easy on the eyes, users
can now read for hours without the eyestrain that comes from ordinary
computer screens. And those with trouble reading normal-sized print books
will benefit from the different fonts and sizes you can change to
instantly. Weighing in at a remarkable 7 ounces, the super-slim device fits
easily in the palm of your hand for a truly comfortable reading experience.
I don’t yet own an e-book reader. (I don’t have a commute, so there’s no urgency. I’m waiting for early adopters to test them out and to advise me on which one to buy.)
My motto, however, is: if you love books, set them freeTM.
The last time I urged book lovers and book cultists to embrace the technological revolution was here.
What do you do if you’re a young writer facing a future in which the book is not a treasured cultural product? You become an explorer, a pioneer, an experimenter, and a partner with a traditional publisher, and you move into the unknown:
Some of the UK’s best young novelists are working with computer games designers to create digital short stories, each inspired by a classic work of literature but featuring games, blogs and web tools.
The first of the six stories is Charles Cumming’s The 21 Steps, based on John Buchan’s classic thriller The 39 Steps.
It uses Google Maps and Google Earth to follow the trail of a bewildered young Londoner who witnesses a murder and is forced to smuggle a mysterious liquid on to a plane.
Read about it here, in the Guardian.
