English English: More Cheap Laughs
If, from time to time, you become as helplessly juvenile as I find myself being, click here immeejitly.
The Real Iron Man
And I quote:
So there were have the connection between Rothbardian political analytics and the hottest movie in theatres today. The real Iron Man is Rothbard, whose influence on the way we view the world seems to rise with every day.
Over to you, Roy.
Stop, Speed Racer!
I’ve got a review of Speed Racer up at NRO this weekend. I remain, in theory, a great defender of the Wachowskis — they earned an awful lot of goodwill from me for the first two Matrix films. But after the progressively worse triplex of Revolutions, V for Vendetta, and now Speed Racer, well, I’m going to have a hard time pulling for them much longer.
And since I’m already taking up blog space with shameless self promotion, I should also mention that I’m on today’s episode of Inside Washington Weekly with Megan McArdle and Michael Brendan Dougherty, talking about Clinton, Obama, Clinton, Obama, and… you get the idea.
great moments in higher education
In most of my classes I give students the opportunity to revise papers that didn’t go so well. The other day a guy came into my office whose first paper had received the grade of 40. (Yeah, out of 100. Ouch.) He sat down, holding the paper in his hand. Staring at it, he said, softly, “You know, I was reading this last night, and. . . .” Long pause. “Wow.” Then he looked up at me, and said, “I am so sorry.”
(He aced the revision, by the way.)
the manifesto that isn't
I have a brief essay in the Wall Street Journal this morning on the just-released Evangelical Manifesto. Though I have the greatest respect for pretty much everyone involved in making this document, I am puzzled and even frustrated by it. In the column I explain why — my primary complaint is that it is anything but a manifesto — but I want to add just a few comments here.
One way this document is going to be read is as an attempt to write the Religious Right out of the evangelical movement. No one clearly associated with that movement signed the document, while some prominent members of the Religious Left (most notably Jim Wallis) did. The document places a great deal of emphasis on the distinction — completely irrelevant and meaningless to everyone except conservative Protestants — between fundamentalism and evangelicalism, repudiating the former and uplifting the latter. This distinction is handled in a confusing way, because without any transition the Manifesto goes from criticizing fundamentalism for being politically disengaged and “world-denying” to criticizing it for being politically triumphalistic and uncivil. (This does in fact describe the historical development of fundamentalism. but the document suggests that fundamentalism somehow manifests both tendencies simultaneously. In a piece of writing that extends itself to the highly-unmanifestoish length of twenty pages this is not quite forgivable.)
In the end, the document seems to be saying something like this: “We’re tired of being lumped in with the fundamentalists, who are always angry and rattling on about America being a ‘Christian nation’ and that kind of junk. We’re tired of being treated as the lapdogs of the Republican party. We’re followed the Republicans all these years because of one issue — abortion — and while we don’t want to abandon our pro-life stance, we think that we’ve ignored a lot of other Christian values and convictions in order to get leverage on this one matter, and now we’re thinking that that wasn’t such a good idea. And by the way, some of us have been Democrats all along. But we’re not telling you how to vote, so don’t jump to any conclusions. We just want to be seen as polite and reasonable participants in the American public sphere, unlike the red-faced old dudes you always see on TV presented as ‘the evangelical voice.’ We’re sick and tired of all that.”
I share many of the feelings that prompted this document, I admit, but I think this so-called Manifesto raises more questions than it answers, and creates more confusions than it resolves. The authors call themselves “representative evangelicals,” but are they? Or do they represent a highly educated, culturally elite subset of evangelicals? If they want to claim the name “evangelical” and deny it to fundamentalists, then what happens if the people they call fundamentalists want to call themselves evangelicals? Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University (an organ of the Religious Right if there ever was one) calls itself the world’s largest evangelical university — should it stop using that adjective? (“Evangelical,” I mean, not “largest.”)
On another front: what does it mean for evangelicals to be pro-life (regarding abortion, I mean) if they’re not going to vote pro-life? I can imagine good answers to this question, but the Manifesto doesn’t provide any. And if it’s going to be a real manifesto, not just an inside-the-Beltwayish White Paper, it really should.
And the biggest question of all: For whom was this written? Who cares, or is thought to care? I can’t figure that out at all.
On Point
Anybody who had the privilege of watching the Spurs-Hornet game last night will realize that the greatest glory of NBA basketball is not the big dominant centers (much less that unstoppable plodder, Shaquille O’Neal), or even the sublime swingmen like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. Nothing is more exciting in pro hoops – and perhaps in all of sports – than a versatile, athletic point guard. In the matchup between Tony Parker and Chris Paul last night, there were more heart-stopping moments of hard-to-believe athleticism than I could count. Parker is more or less unguardable. His crossover is almost too fast to see, much less defend. Often, in transition, he simply pauses a moment and then just blasts by two or three guys. And Paul, who’s almost as fast and stronger, is also, in the words of John Lennon, a f***ing genius. This is a guy who orchestrates a pick-and-roll alley-oop, against the best defensive team in the league, entirely inside the key. (I’ve never seen another NBA guard make so much happen in such small spaces.) It’s only the small men who you get to see dismantle a whole defense with a sequence of ankle-breaking crossovers and then finish against a guy a foot taller. With Kobe, you experience a sort of long-range aesthetic appreciation when he swoops to the basket and reverse-dunks on his hapless defender. With Parker and Paul, you’re literally startled by what you see – that a move, or a decision, or a move and a decision, could be made that fast. Cheers, anyway. The playoffs are here.
On Virtue, Personal and Public
I do hope you’ll read James’s discussion of public servants who can’t live up to their private commitments:
What I’m angling for here is simple: a basic public consensus that if you sleep around on your spouse you are a bad person, and to hell with your future in politics, because we still have enough talent in America to replace you with someone who isn’t a bad person and is nonetheless capable of being a “gifted” and “dedicated” public servant. [Quote marks Americanized by me]
I worry, though, that the peculiar demands and rewards of politics might filter out the sort of talent that James and I hope would be available.
Happy Israel Independence Day
60 years old already? She doesn’t look a day over 3000 . . .
Seriously, though, it has not escaped my attention that the pull of this particular holiday on my affections has waned since my grade school days – and I’d like to believe that’s for unselfish and idealistic reasons. But really, what strains that connection more than anything is stuff like this, posted by a friend who made aliyah several years ago.
It would be an improvement if I could make myself get angry. Instead, I just feel sad, and disgusted.
down under
In about ten days I’ll be leaving this fair land for a sojourn in Sydney, Australia, where I’ll be speaking at at a C. S. Lewis conference and the Sydney Writer’s Festival. I’ll also be doing several interviews, and in general will be madly busy, but I’m wondering whether our faithful TAS readers might want to pitch in and tell me what I shouldn’t miss while I’m there.
I’ll have a few days at the end of the trip to stay in the Blue Mountains, where I plan to do nothing but a great deal of bushwalking — well, and also lying around — but I’m eager for recommendations for that little part of the world too. Any help out there?
Zakaria II: Am I Crazy?
Here is the paragraph that has one of the competing lists that Ross mentions in his post on Fareed Zakaria:
Look around. The world’s tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn’t make the top ten. In the most recent rankings, only two of the world’s ten richest people are American. These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but consider that only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories.
One of these facts struck me as surprising. I was pretty sure that the biggest oil refinery in the world has not been in the US for some time. I looked into it, and I don’t think it was. Then I started to look more of these facts. In about an hour on Google, I found that US did not top the list by 1998 or earlier in lots of these categories.
Iran already had the world’s largest oil refinery by 1980.
Russia had already built the world’s tallest Ferris wheel in 1995, topped by Japan in 1997.
Canada had already built the world’s largest mall by 1986.
Malaysia had already built the world’s tallest building in 1998.
I couldn’t find any data on Bollywood in 1998. Using this data for 2001 and estimating back three years, it looks like Bollywood was already larger than Hollywood in 1998 in terms of films produced and total number of tickets sold. Hollywood remains much, much larger than Bollywood in 2008 in terms of revenues (which seems like it would be the default metric for “bigger”). So it’s hard to find the metric by which Hollywood was bigger ten years ago, but has now been overtaken by Bollywood.
This was using quick-and-dirty sources like Wikipedia, so somebody please tell me if I’m wrong. But this seems crazy – surely the guy has fact-checkers for something this high-profile?
And doesn’t it seem kind of weird to produce a list like this and say that ten years ago the US “would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories”? [itlaics added] I mean, if you made the list, wouldn’t have you checked to make sure it was true for every category?
Can anybody expert on any of these topics let me know where I’m wrong?
Denver Vice
Up now at The Guardian, my case for the Democratic party to deny Hillary Clinton the vice presidential nomination.
UPDATE: So it begins.
MORE: Ambinder isn’t hearing no, straight from a “very close friend of Clinton’s”.
A Post-American World?
Ross Douthat has pretty negative take on Fareed Zakaria’s argument that “The world has shifted from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism.” I agree, and think it’s important to amplify why.
Zakaria claims that the last twenty years has seen the rise of the rest of the world relative to the United States. He says:
We are living through the third great power shift in modern history. The first was the rise of the Western world, around the 15th century. It produced the world as we know it now—science and technology, commerce and capitalism, the industrial and agricultural revolutions. It also led to the prolonged political dominance of the nations of the Western world. The second shift, which took place in the closing years of the 19th century, was the rise of the United States. Once it industrialized, it soon became the most powerful nation in the world, stronger than any likely combination of other nations. For the last 20 years, America’s superpower status in every realm has been largely unchallenged—something that’s never happened before in history, at least since the Roman Empire dominated the known world 2,000 years ago. During this Pax Americana, the global economy has accelerated dramatically. And that expansion is the driver behind the third great power shift of the modern age—the rise of the rest.
I am always suspicious of these three-part schemes of historical epochs, the three parts of which seem to contract precipitously in length as we approach the current day. According to Zakaria, the first of these phases lasted abut 400 years, the second lasted about 100 years, and we’re now in one that has, at least in large past, happened in 20 years.
Zakaria goes on to say that this “This will not be a world defined by the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else.” But the only way that sentence makes sense to me is if it means relative American decline.
Here’s the only problem with Zakaria’s thesis:
US share of global economic output (on a purchasing power parity basis) has declined very slightly over the past twenty years – from about 21% to about 20%. But what has really happened over this period has been the rise of China and the rest of non-Japan Asia at the relative expense of Western Europe and Japan.
At the start of each of the last two recessions there has been a lot of hand-wringing about whether current problems are symptomatic of terminal US decline. Zakaria in his article tells a story of how twenty years ago Indians were culturally fixated on the US, but are now more inward-looking. He goes on to cite recent economic growth rates for China and India, and makes the point that if we were to extrapolate these out for some decades the world would be a very different place. Just replace China and India with Japan and Korea, and this is an almost a word-for-word recitation of the kinds of articles you could find every week in every major American newspaper and magazine twenty or twenty-five years ago.
What Zakaria misses is that the relative decline of the US is real, but that it already happened. US share of world GDP in 1945 is estimated to have been about 50%; this more than halved between 1945 and 1980. The US economic crisis of the 1970s was largely the result of this decline. I’ve argued at length that the Reagan economic program was a creative and successful response to that crisis that has prevented the US economy from going the way of Europe. This program was focused on two things: sound money and deregulation, broadly defined. It’s ironic that, despite the rhetoric, Reagan’s program was premised on a very clear-eyed recognition of relative American decline. (It’s interesting, by the way, to see Reagan’s take on foreign policy commitments in this light.)
The ability of the US economy to defy historical gravity for the past 25 years has not been automatic: it was earned in a set of pivotal political battles that were pretty much complete by 1984. The next twenty years were, within the American economy, a Twenty Years War to implement this less-regulated system that has now reached maturity. We live in the new economy that it has created. The danger of misdiagnosis of our current situation is that we will fail to understand the sources of our advantage and unwittingly throw them away.
( cross-posted at The Corner )
Thunderbull
John Bolton wants to bomb Iran. No, seriously.
Mr Bolton said that striking Iran would represent a major step towards victory in Iraq. While he acknowledged that the risk of a hostile Iranian response harming American’s overseas interests existed, he said the damage inflicted by Tehran would be “far higher” if Washington took no action.
“This is a case where the use of military force against a training camp to show the Iranians we’re not going to tolerate this is really the most prudent thing to do,” he said. “Then the ball would be in Iran’s court to draw the appropriate lesson to stop harming our troops.”
Let me first air out a pet peeve. Apparently, in order to be a really good idea, a military operation now need only represent a step toward victory instead of actually being one. This is the kind of thing that gives postmodern conservatism a bad name.
Now then. To my further irritation, it’s not that John Bolton’s information train is jammed, it’s that the train keeps winding up at the same — wrong — station. Clear interest in not getting badly beaten in Iraq? Check. Acknowledgment of risks posed in theater by Iran? Check. Emphasis on selecting prudent courses of action? Check. It’s like he loads a perfect souffle into the oven and it comes out an ugly, bloodthirsty Critter.
Why this atavistic insistence on the pre-9/11 strategy of undeclared-war bombing runs? Doesn’t Bolton understand the nature of the threat? Seriously, it’s frustrating. The man is intelligent, thoughtful, clearsighted, and dead wrong on bombing Iran, which is not the prudent thing to do. It will not only represent a major step towards uncontrollable violence and regional instability, it will be a major step in that direction. Hell, it might actually even be uncontrollable violence and regional instability!
You want to prudently drop something on an Iranian training camp? How about thousands of leaflets saying
We know who you are. We know what you’re doing. Please stop. (Next time we won’t say please.)
All the benefits of bombing the camp, none of the unsightly general war. I, too, am incensed that Iranian efforts are going into killing American soldiers. But the war those soldiers are fighting is in Iraq, and if we want it to be in Iran, we’ve not only got to actually start a war with Iran but we’ve got to suffer the consequences. In neither case are the ends of responsible neo-imperialism served. I’m still looking for a neocon whose passionate interest in bombing Iran is overruled by the weight of prudence. There’s got to be one somewhere. …Right?
Why Can't We All Just Get Along
I think James Poulos gets the question of blogger collegiality exactly right:
The big conspiracy here I think is one among people who like a good conversation, and have discovered a consistent set of conversation partners whose content and style best compare and contrast with their own. Professional bloggers are paid conversationalists — or should be, at least. And the good social art of collegiality well understood is an essential part of good conversation — especially good public conversation. People sometimes fear that the blogosphere will close itself off to new talent, but, based on the dynamic I’ve just outlined, that strikes me as impossible. The ‘gold rush’ is probably over, but blogging will probably take on the generational tempo of the music world, with big acts retiring for a while to pursue real lives and then making comeback tours after a suitable hiatus — and with lots and lots of new acts competing for attention. Sometimes attention is won by mere novelty, but more often it’s won by talent.
Collegiality as he describes it is easiest to achieve amongst folks who don’t live and die by their agendas (which is not to say that the people he lists don’t care about enacting particular reforms and agendas). But even amongst outright advocates, I believe that collegiality and respect are worth striving for, and that it’s possible to achieve this without descending into the squishy and compromised realms of Broderistic cocktail-party fraternizing. There are exceptions, of course, but one can still maintain a radical posture and consort with those who disagree with it — even (perhaps especially) radicals of the opposite stripe. I’m not much for sports metaphors, but, in this case, one seems called for: It’s possible to go out on the field every day and play as hard and well as you can, genuinely wanting to win — but at the end of the game, you can still shake hands and grab a beer.
Hillary Clinton Gives a Speech
There’s Hillary Clinton, standing upright in the center of the screen, trying desperately to look happy in a racket-ball blue suit that makes her look as if she just organized a Smurf convention. “Full speed to the White House,” she says, as if she’s about to take the Acela down from New York. I don’t want to dash her hopes (okay, well, maybe a little), but trailing behind in a bitter multi-month primary is more like the Chinatown bus on a bad run.
Give more money, she instructs the audience, and then reminds the Indiana crowd of her tenuous links to the Midwest. Her mother was from Pennsylvania! That factoid only sort of made sense during the actual Pennsylvania primary (does anyone really vote for a candidate because he or she lives in the same state as the candidate’s mother?), and now it merely hangs there, awkwardly, like an out-of-fashion accessory worn two seasons past its prime.
Gas prices figure heavily into her speech, as she claims to stand “for everyone who holds their breath at the gas pump, waiting to see how much it costs today,” once again ignoring her own efforts to make filling up cars more expensive. She continues to champion a summer gas-tax holiday, and I half expect her to follow this by announcing that, as with leprechauns, she never really believed in economists anyway.
What does she believe in, then? West Virginia! And Kentucky! “I am running to be the president of all of America,” she says, despite the sad fact that she’s been rejected by more of it than has accepted her.
Yet she soldiers on anyway. “I will never stop fighting for you,” she declares, though somehow she seems to be talking not to the audience, but herself.
Democratizing Snobbery
Matt Yglesias and Megan McArdle, who both earned their coastal elite cred the old-fashioned way, by growing up in New York City, have both taken positions against newly urbanized snobs who grew up in Podunk USA. Megan says that “if there’s anything sadder than people who act like having grown up in New York makes them the apex of the social universe, it’s people who act like this when they grew up in Shaker Heights.”
And here’s Yglesias:
Most of New York City’s elitists grew up in very conventional middle class suburbs and then moved to the city sometime after college. They may look like — indeed, be — Greenpoint hipsters now, but they come from the same places as all the other college educated white people in this country.
This is most certainly true, but I’m not sure why it invalidates their snobbery. Why should New York-based urban elitism be so exclusionary?
Now, I’m by no means a city-snob, but I do generally prefer urban living, and I grew up in a small town on the Florida panhandle, so let me say a few words in defense of those who, like me, are newly urbanized and enjoy it. I think both Matt and Megan are missing something crucial, which is that quite a few of the people who end up living in big cities and reacting with disdain to the trappings of suburbia and small-town life did so before they moved to the city. It’s not that they were all affable Midwesterners who adopted a pose upon moving to Brooklyn. Growing up in flyover country, whether it’s a generic, green-grass exurb or a genuine small town, you meet a lot of people, many of whom have relatively little experience with what Matt and Megan would understand urban life, who genuinely don’t like their surroundings. Not surprisingly, many of them end up heading off to big cities after college. This doesn’t make these people any less insufferable, at their worst, but it at the very least means that their sentiments are authentic, and I don’t see why they ought to be excluded from participating in the ritual sneering of urban snobbery. Just because they ate at Outback and Chilli’s for twenty years doesn’t mean they wanted to—just that they had no other choice.
Obama I, King of the Grup People
Daniel has handed me a standing invitation to first pounce on this Kurt Andersen graf about Obama and then have a field day with it. Who am I to dare to defy him?
For voters younger than he, Obama is the closest they’ve ever had to a political leader of their own generation […]. And for the next-older cohort, at least the self-conscious ones who tend to dominate the cultural definition of any generation, Obama flatters their driving desire to imagine themselves forever young. He’s technically a baby-boomer, but still comes across as a boy wonder, which allows people in their fifties to feel reassured that they’re not yet decrepit. Plus if all the kids love him and we also love him, that means we’re still kinda sorta youthful ourselves, right? It’s related to the generation-gaplessness that modern parents enjoy feeling when they and their children watch Stephen Colbert together, and listen to the same music (Feist!) on their identical iPods.
As has maybe become apparent by now given my posting elsewhere on Obama, I like him somewhat less than, say, Andrew, and somewhat more than, say, Daniel himself. Originally, clobbering the poor candidate as Mr. Emotherapy was as easy as it was depressing. But then Hillary began her long campaign of enhanced interrogation, and Obama didn’t crack. That is, he didn’t take the bait, he didn’t snap, he didn’t stoop, and he basically showed all the dispositional signs, anyway, of a natural born aristocrat. My appreciation for Obama has developed into a version of Camille Paglia’s appreciation of Obama. If only he were right on the issues.
But that’s not the issue here. Here we are concerned with why people who like Obama like Obama, and sure enough, I feel more alienated from these people than ever, at least if Andersen is right. It’s true that anyone who thinks John McCain is a crazy old man, that Hillary Clinton is a killer Kid Sister doll come to life, that Mitt Romney took laughing lessons at some point in his life, or that basically America has no credible leaders will feel their sympathies gravitate naturally toward Obama. Even if he’s an empty or bad leader, at least the guy’s credible. He comports himself in the fashion I’d want my President to comport himself. He radiates a soft glow of contempt at things and persons (i.e. Hillary Clinton’s campaign tactics, Hillary Clinton) I’d want to club violently with the contempt stick. He’s not a leftover from a cultural era that stubbornly will not be bygone, and which many of us post-boomers believe should never have been here to begin with.
That said, I feel almost the same way about this cultural era, and that’s what separates me decisively from the Grup Nation. I’m still not convinced that the Obama phenomenon isn’t an attempt by people who want their lives reenchanted to get what they want by trying to make politics feel enchanted again. But because the hole in my heart marked ‘social gospel’ is filled with a very Laschian emphasis on robust citizenship practiced together by ordinary people — with all the cultural baggage that ‘ordinary’ brings — I hold out a modest hope that at least a significant part of the Obama phenomenon involves an attempt by people to reactivate their citizenship for the long term.
Now surely at least some Feist fans want to reactivate their citizenship for the long term, but I wonder. Sometimes I also wonder if I’m the only cultural commentator of my generation who hasn’t watched an episode of the Colbert Report. Motivated by this disquiet, I have launched an ongoing assessment of my whiteness, as measured by Stuff White People Like, and with about 20% of the top 100 Stuff already assessed, the prospects for solidarity with the Grup Nation seem grim. From this perspective, Obama is a 21st Century American Louis-Philippe, bourgeois King of the Grup People, and I am some kind of landless young freedom-loving aristocrat from a Restorationist family with a flat in Paris, a useless title, and a lot of unpopular mores. What I want from Obama is a 21st Century American Disraeli, and I know I’m not going to get it. But what bothers me more is that probably nobody in the grup cohort has any use for that ‘reference’. This is to say nothing of the parents of grups, who are continuing to entrench boomer mores by dressing, talking, texting, and hooking up and breaking up like their kids.
It’s all unhappily similar to what Nietzsche said about having to kill the shadow of the dead God, too — when I think about my kind of cool cultural renaissance, I have to think far into the future, where legions of pop posthumanists await to kill my dream in the cradle.
Scarlett Fever
Well, here it comes, the golden celebrity goose egg. No, not Zooey Deschanel’s She & Him — although that project’s another promising sign that famous people can actually be true renaissance persons and not mere beneficiaries of welfare by conspiracy. I’m referring of course to ScoJo’s collection of Tom Waits songs. NME has a few choice insights:
After deciding to record an album of Tom Waits tracks (“I always loved Tom Waits and I thought my voice could lend a fresh take,” she said) she demoed them on her own, but by her own admission they were “horrible”.
Enter TV on the Radio guy Dave Sitek. His calling card:
Foals’ complaint was that Sitek’s original mix of ‘Antidotes’ sounded like it was “recorded in the Grand Canyon”
Thus,
“There’s a hummingbird trapped in a closed-down shoe store” she sings on ‘Town With No Cheer’, which makes for an apt description of the world that Sitek has created.
Add one tablespoon of Scarlett, and…
The original intention was to make a record that sounded “like Tinkerbell on cough syrup”, apparently; that actually happens on ‘I Wish I Was In New Orleans’, where a music box sounds as if it’s been recorded on an old tape player, and Johansson intones in her most faux-naïve voice.
Well. I guess I’m excited to hear this record, even though I don’t own any TV on the Radio music and couldn’t whistle you a single one of their tunes. Generally, we should all be very happy when the already-very-famous deign to do more excellent work than necessary to remain that way, especially if it’s not in their niche field. As much as I loathe celebrities whose every artistic whim is indulged with gallery openings, vanity record labels, and personal brands of vodka, a real multiplicity of talent is a beautiful thing.
Classifying Myself
Ezra Klein, a celebrated blogger-wonk who needs no introduction, has some very kind words for The American Scene, our own Peter Suderman and James Poulos, and my co-author and TAS alumnus Ross Douthat, not to mention my colleague Megan McArdle and my friend Ramesh Ponnuru. He also writes,
A totally unclassifiable group of political thinkers assembled by Reihan Salam, who’s possibly the world’s least classifiable individual, period.
First, this is massively flattering to me, as I’ve long tried to be as inscrutable as possible. But I have taken a stab at classifying myself. I am a
Rawlsekian neoconservative singulatarian meliorist humanist neoliberal infosocialist Viridian postliberal incrementalist.
I also think Andrew W.K. is the greatest philosopher of our time. But don’t hold me to this. Over the past eighteen months, I have variously advocated aggressive pro-natalism, voluntary human extinction, the creation of an army of Zombie soldiers under my personal command, eliminating the payroll tax, Kalmykian independence, and, in the vein of “Jews for Jesus,” a new movement of “Muslims for Moroni.” So really, I can’t be trusted.
I’m attending a conference where I’m learning a tremendous amount — I also just saw the director of the conference do a tremendously impressive dance. I now dearly regret having missed the 1970s.
Video Games, Grand Theft Auto, and the Future of Technology
I bought an Xbox 360 recently, the first gaming console I’ve owned since the Super NES I had as a kid. I played a lot of computer games in college – this is what you do when you go to school in the backwoods of Kentucky, your friends are all nerds, and you have, for the first time in your life, easy access to a LAN – even to the point of participating in 50-hour, 60-person gaming binges put on by some of my friends. What can I say? We were bored.
After I left that school, video games continued to fascinate me as a medium, but I played them very little. The idea of video games, in many ways, has always been more persuasive than the actual games themselves. Games, in theory, ought to give us unfettered, unrestricted access to virtual worlds and virtual lives, providing novel-like escapism without the hegemony of the author. They would be choose your own adventures restrained only by your own imagination. The best games might still have objectives and storylines, but in general, you’d be free, truly free, to do as you please.
Today, I don’t know if the medium is really there yet, but it’s certainly far closer. Relatively linear, narrative games like Half Life 2 and Bioshock now traffic in fully, fantastically realized alternate worlds. And the Grand Theft Auto series has redefined what it is to create a lived-in virtual environment. This is especially true with GTA IV. I bought it last weekend hoping for the best, but expecting the unbelievable hype to prove to be, well, just hype.
And OK, to an extent, it is. But the progress this game shows toward creating wholly immersive virtual worlds is jaw-dropping. I’m 26 – not yet old, but not simply young anymore – and sometimes I stop and think about how much the world around me has already changed in my lifetime. The internet, yes, is key, with the revolutions in video, music, and self-publishing in which it’s resulted. But it gets more specific: I can remember playing Super Mario Brothers as a six year old – with its rough-hewn, two-dimensional blocks of pixels bouncing around on yellow and blue backgrounds – and wondering if I’d ever see the day when video games would provide living, breathing worlds, full of character and consequence, that I could play in as I saw fit, rather than simply jumping from left to right, brick to brick, platform to pipe. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re sure close. Looking back, it’s the equivalent of moving from thatch huts to skyscrapers in just a generation. Now I just wonder: Where will we go from here?
