An ongoing review of politics and culture

1919

I’ve finished up 1919, and started on The Big Money.

Anyone who abandoned the project before the end of 1919, go grab your copy, skip to the end of the book, and read “The Body of an American” chapter. It stands alone as a prose poem, a sort of “I Hear America Putrefying.” But it also pulls together Dos Passos’ ambitions and his omnivorous approach to portraying WWI-era Americans. Well, white WWI-era Americans, but that’s another conversation.

The idea of the Unknown Soldier always had an imaginative pull to me: as a kid, I was fascinated by the way indeterminacy could stand for universality. (Uh, spoiler alert: the Unknown Soldier dies near the end.) In this one chapter, Dos Passos does for the dismembered doughboy what he does for all his other characters, but more so. He follows the soldier not just from birth, but from conception, all the way to his confused, shell-splattered demise. Along the way, the soldier’s identity slips from one person to the next, and since Dos Passos’ characters often serve as little more than cameras through which we see places, the soldier stands for the land in all its variety as much as for the American people. Read it.

For those of you still keeping up, here are some topics for consideration.

Sex

What a miserable bunch of sad sacks these characters are, fumbling along in frustration until someone gets pregnant, at which point everything falls apart. The revolutionaries all talk big about freeing themselves from bourgeois notions of sexual propriety, but their revolution never quite arrives. Sexual liberation proves just as elusive — or illusory — as the workers’ uprising, and the two ideals are caustically juxtaposed. The bourgeois characters also dabble in liberated rhetoric when it suits their urges, but always fall back on convention somehow. Pregnancy, in almost every case, sets the rules.

So I keep wondering: if these characters could exercise the autonomy they claim they’d enjoy, what would they do with it? Would they be any happier?

Violence

Dos Passos makes no secret of his sympathies for the Wobblies and other heroes of American socialism, and his account of the Seattle General Strike, and the brutal response of the forces of reaction, makes Howard Zinn’s version seem cool and dispassionate. But there’s nothing about these earnest revolutionaries that suggests they’d be any less eager to employ rifle butts than Ole Hanson was. Just as with sex, none of the characters seem to have what it would take to wisely use the power they’re chasing. A pessimistic read of the series (is there any other kind?) suggests that by WWI, our institutions were already beyond democratic control, even by the well-intended, and that in the U.S., force and only force would dictate peoples’ economic and political lives.

American Immunity

Conspicuously absent in the book is a “war is hell” thread. Dos Passos hints at the horrors of trench combat, but the American characters who volunteer for service in WWI, whether in the military or driving ambulances, spend their time whoring and cafe-hopping. Pregnancy is a bigger threat to their well-being than Zeppelins or mustard gas. Americans are revered by the French not for their heroism, but for the material abundance they represent. I consider this one of the novels’ finest touches.

Along these lines, here’s a picture of an American ambulance driver. The driver’s name is Walt Disney.

Did you know someone made a rock opera about the Seattle General Strike? Now you do.

A Radical or Marginal Change?

The excellent blogger Rod Dreher writes:

I understand the case for same-sex marriage, though I don’t agree with it, but look, if you’re reduced to having to tell the public that they have no right to be consulted about the radical redefinition of a bedrock social and cultural institution, then you have a big, big problem.

Since he’s grappled many times with arguments for and against gay marriage, I haven’t any desire to rehash the whole debate, but I do want to challenge Rod on one small aspect of how he characterizes this issue: Would the legalization of gay marriage really be a “radical redefinition” of the social and cultural institution? Maybe same sex marriage is a radical departure from marriage as understood by orthodox Christians, or people for whom it is primarily a procreative union.

But I submit that a majority of Americans subscribe to a definition that more closely resembles the following: Marriage is the union of people who fall in love with one another, decide that they want to spend the rest of their lives together, and commit to do so monogamously. The definition I’ve offered isn’t merely more commonly accepted among Americans than whatever Rod Dreher would describe, it is perfectly consistent with marriage laws as now written.

Expanding marriage to include gay people doesn’t radically redefine the understanding of marriage that prevails in our culture. As Rod himself writes, “heterosexual America has already conceded the philosophical grounds on which traditional marriage was based.” It is therefore specious for opponents of same sex marriage to invoke as an argument the proposition that “it’s dangerous to radically redefine the status quo.”

Obviously, Rod has other arguments to offer against same sex marriage, but if they want to remain on intellectually solid ground, he and other opponents of same sex marriage must stop using that particular argument. Same sex marriage may be an advantageous or disadvantageous change in our society’s understanding of marriage — I believe it is the former — but it is most definitely a marginal change that flows logically from the institution’s prior evolution, not a radical change.

Bad-itude

It’s difficult to describe just how terrible and uninspired the new Weezer record is, but I give it a shot in today’s Washington Times.

More on the Video Game/B-Movie Connecton

Woke up this morning and caught a half hour or so of a surprisingly good French action flick called The Nest. It was hardly groundbreaking, but as low-budget shoot-em-ups go, it was pretty sharp — mixing equal parts John Woo and Luc Besson into what I’d call a highly competent B-movie. Naturally, I immediately browsed over to IMDB to check the director’s credits. What did I find? Not only did the director helm 2005’s Bruce Willis actioner, Hostage — it turns out Florent Emilio Siri is also listed as the director of the 2002 sneak-and-shoot video game Splinter Cell.

4 Items, One Post, I Crave French Toast

1) Jamelle tries to explain why libertarians care about state imposed constraints on freedom, but don’t care much about cultural constraints on freedom:

It seems that insofar that libertarians experience oppression or constraints on their liberty, it is through the actions of the state rather than through culture, which makes sense. Libertarians are overwhelmingly white and male, and in a culture which highly values whiteness and maleness, they will face relatively fewer overt cultural constraints on their behavior than their more marginalized fellow-travelers. Or in other words, a fair number of libertarians are operating with a good deal of unexamined privilege, and it’s this, along with the extremely small number of women and minorities who operate within the libertarian framework, which makes grappling with cultural sources of oppression really hard for libertarians. After all – socially speaking – being a white guy in the United States isn’t exactly hard and that’s doubly true if you are well off.

That seems unpersuasive to me. In the United States, black people faced constraints on liberty imposed by the state that were orders of magnitude worse than any constraint on liberty that the state imposed on whites. If being robbed of liberty by some entity resulted in libertarian views about it — which I think is the argument offered above — African Americans would be far more anti-state libertarian than whites, wouldn’t they? There must be another dynamic at play.

2) Over at True/Slant I continue my conversation with The League of Ordinary Gentlemen about dissident conservatives. (Rod Dreher has been party to it as well.) It took longer for me to write that it would take you to read!

3) Strange how folks responded to Ross Douthat’s latest. His argument is obviously that Islam and Christianity are pitted against one another in an effort to win believers and converts — and that Catholicism is now participating in that contest more aggressively. His critics imagine that he is calling on Christian denominations to unite and wage holy war on Islam. Having just articulated his views in The New York Times, Mr. Douthat is obviously unashamed about stating them publicly. Does anyone want to make a large wager on whether or not he in fact advocates a holy war against Islam? I’ve got everything in my wallet on the “he does not think that” position.

4) Perhaps the solution to the situation Freddie writes about is to describe the racial problems that exist in America with more specific terms than “that’s racist.” Being labeled a racist is getting to be like being labeled a sex offender. Did you rape a 5 year old or go skinny dipping with your 17 year old girlfriend as an 18 year old? The sex offender list won’t tell you! When Freddie calls for more accusations of racism but less opprobrium aimed at the guilty, he presumably means the term should be applied to lesser racial sins. Well how about instead we reserve racism for actually hating people of other races, or thinking they’re inferior, or using racial slurs, or committing hate crimes, preserving the well deserved stigma against these acts, and then, for example, when a manager implements hiring practices that are shown over time to disadvantage minority applicants, one could say to him, “Hey, I’m not saying you’re a racist who hates blacks and Hispanics or anything, but look at how this mechanism you’ve set up to filter the resumes you receive systematically disadvantages people of color! It’s very possible you didn’t do this intentionally, but shouldn’t you fix it?”

UPDATE: In comments and elsewhere I am seeing the argument that the real problem with Ross Douthat’s column is his assertion that Islam is incompatible with reason. The problem with that line is that he never argued it! Here is the relevant excerpt:

Where the European encounter is concerned, Pope Benedict has opted for public confrontation. In a controversial 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, he explicitly challenged Islam’s compatibility with the Western way of reason — and sparked, as if in vindication of his point, a wave of Muslim riots around the world.

He is reporting on what the Pope said as an illustration of his confrontational approach, not himself asserting that Islam and Western reason are incompatible, a question on which he takes no position.

ALSO SEE this thoughtful critique.

And They Have a Plan?

Remember how the Cylons on Battlestar Galactica were supposed to be operating in accordance with some mysterious, long-running plan? Well, there’s a new direct-to-video movie chronicling its origins. The movie’s supposed to be pretty sharp, but it turns out that their grand plan wasn’t much of one:

The titular “plan” the Cylons had wasn’t the least bit complicated. The survival of Anders, Tyrol, Foster and the Tighs comes as a complete surprise to Cavil. “It’s amazing,” he confides to an injured Ellen Tigh. (And there’s no explanation of that scene in the “Razor” webisode in which Doral arranges for Lee Adama to be assigned to Galactica immediately prior to Cylon War II.) The Cylons don’t arrange for the Galactica to escape the holocaust. The Cylons don’t seem interested in tricking the colonists into leading the Cylons to Earth or anything. It turns out Cavil was merely determined to wipe out the straggler humans in the fleet. That was the whole plan.

I still love Battlestar Galactica, despite showrunner Ron Moore totally dropping the ball with the ending. But I think it’s pretty clear by now that the show’s biggest flaw was that, despite what the opening credits claimed each week, neither the Cylons nor the writers ever had a plan.

Cities White People Like

As always, I’m late to the conversation about Aaron Renn’s post at The New Geography, probably because my better judgment tells me that blogging about race is something I should simply avoid. Reihan and Ta-Nehisi Coates have staked out two hermeneutic poles, with Reihan at the wonkier end discussing preferences in housing wealth accumulation and Coates (there’s that damn first name/last name blogger’s conundrum again — having never met nor exchanged tweets with Mr. Coates, I’ll default to the last name but defer to his preference if it matters) steering the debate toward a more personal scale.

For those who haven’t seen it, Renn’s post argues that self-described white urbanists have claimed all the cachet of urban living without any of the social or political challenge by gathering in enclaves like Portland and Minneapolis — places that turn out to have suspiciously small black populations:

This raises troubling questions about these cities. Why is it that progressivism in smaller metros is so often associated with low numbers of African Americans? Can you have a progressive city properly so-called with only a disproportionate handful of African Americans in it? In addition, why has no one called these cities on it?

Renn is using a rhetorically convenient definition of “progressivism” here, since it means a particular combination of fussy transportation policies and land use regulation, not left-leaning politics as generally understood. He has stacked the deck in other ways (whites manage to self-segregate quite well in larger metros, for instance, and how, exactly, would one “call these cities on it?”), but it’s the source of his resentment that I find interesting. At the risk of putting a lot of words into his mouth, I think he’s implicitly claiming that any American cultural experience is inauthentic if it fails to reckon with the presence of African-Americans, not as victims, but as members of a shared history and culture. He’s reminding white Americans to check themselves before settling for any cultural accomplishment that excludes blacks, who, as James mentions in citing Sullivan, are quintessentially American in even the most reactionary sense. You could make the case, for example, that we have seen the Front Porch Republic and it’s full of black people.

I like Coates’ response to Renn, and respect his admonition to resist dragging blacks into what is, at bottom, a political and aesthetic argument among whites. I’d prefer to live in a country that lets Denver be Denver, in his words. But let’s cut Renn some slack. There are still white people out there trying to reckon with America’s racial heritage as a story of black people living as ‘something apart, yet an integral part.’ He’s part of a tradition of well-meaning whites scolding one another for the gaps in their definition of “American.” Sometimes this comes off as tendentious, sanctimonious, and patronizing (remember Sasha Frere-Jones’ idiotic claim that Stephin Merritt was a bigot for not liking Outkast? ). Other times it’s just awkward (see “Mellencamp, John”). But a lot of white guys — especially Southern white guys — who had to read The Invisible Man in high school took it to heart and still feel under its authority. They try to thread the needle between self-segregation and PC condescension, and if they fail, I hope they try again.

So here ends my foray into writing about race. Now go read Renn’s roundup of crazy utopian homesteading in Detroit.