Total Request Taped
No hay garaje. No hay banda.
Virginia Country Gentleman – The Handpicked Successors
Virginia Country Gentleman – The Handpicked Successors
Virginia Country Gentleman – The Handpicked Successors
Letterman and the Abolition of Cruelty
Cruelty, the famous theorist Judith Shklar tells us, is the worst thing we do. For small-l and big-L liberals as different as Richard Rorty and George Kateb, cruelty is borne of moral solipsism, an overly me-centric attitude toward experience that blinds us to the truth about the reality of other people. (Obviously there is a popular conservative variant of this position as well.) Rorty and Kateb follow Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman in agreeing that life outside of politics can be made less cruel to the extent that we realize our unique identity is part of a symbiotic relationship with the ultimate diversity and novelty of democratic life, including the uniqueness and multitudinousness of others. But far and away most liberals think that the most important way to diminish cruelty is through politics. Making politics safe for democracy is itself a task dedicated to getting rid of the politics of cruelty — memorably described by Benjamin Constant as a politics driven by ‘conquest and usurpation’, with oppression sure to follow. The positive upshot of this political project is a thoroughly rights-based liberalism.
As Isaiah Berlin can tell us, however, rights-based liberalism is caught up in its very essence with our understanding of the difference between — to quote Constant again — the liberty of the ancients and that of the moderns. To put it simply, the classical Greeks had nothing of the public/private distinction that we recognize today, because the whole public sphere was political. Today, we care more about civic life than political life, and our individualist civic liberty looks a lot different than, and does work much different from, the anti-individualist political liberty of, say, Sparta. The point of all this for us today is that even a robust rights-based liberalism is going to draw the public/private line somewhere, demurring from the a totalistic administrative extension of rights and corresponding duties into the minute details of intimate life.
Yet we’ve all watched as sexual-harrassment regulations have advanced into intimate life. Such regulations — and the whole battery of sensitivity-enforcement mechanisms that have come to reflect the utter dominance of Human Resources departments over the businesses and industries that host them — obviously don’t descend on high from Washington. But they’re also clearly tied up with the rights-based view of liberalism, and the liberal political project dedicated to minimizing, if not abolishing, cruelty. Ultimately, the viability of anti-cruelty measures packaged in our sensitivity-enforcement laws depends on a certain kind of constitutional interpretation. So it’s not much of a stretch to say that such laws, although they flourish in the gray area where public seems to mix itself up with private, contribute to a change in the way we segregate life spheres in America. The public/private distinction seems increasingly strained or incoherent in the face of a new divide between the official and unofficial spheres of life — the first a sphere of longitudinal legal regulation, the second a sphere in which we are free to take unregulated latitudes. Sometimes these latitudes look plainly like ‘private’ choices; sometimes they just as plainly involve very ‘public’ conduct.
As soon as we recognize the ways in which we’ve abandoned the public/private divide, however, we begin to see that the official/unofficial divide that replaces it labors under a certain strain. The organizing project of official life — fighting the political war on cruelty — is frustrated and undermined by many of the organizing projects of unofficial life — which, in their toleration or even celebration of mutual use and abuse, subvert or deconstruct the very concept of the cruel. Just as it’s become increasingly difficult to take seriously the principle that we know obscenity when we see it, so are we beginning to lose the ability to know cruelty when we see it. Among Dave Letterman, the girl who slept with him, and the boyfriend who had just moved in with her, who is predator and who prey? For whom does the bell toll? Anyone? Everyone? In our contemporary economy of lusts, longings, and limited-term gratifications, the term ‘cruelty’ — at least as political liberalism understands it — drops out. When liberals dreamed of abolishing cruelty, this isn’t what they had in mind.
And none of this, I think, is happening because we’re becoming ‘less sensitive’. In many ways, we’re more sensitive than ever, sensitive to a fault, neurotically or obsessively sensitive. No, it seems rather that the kind of individuality we’re apt to pursue in unofficial life helps dissolve the unit of analysis on which our definition of cruelty depends. Paradoxically, the latitudinous pursuit of Emersonian individuality in unofficial life seems to be destabilizing and calling into question the solidity of our individual being. Rorty and Kateb lead us to believe that the temptation to be cruel outside of politics is best mitigated, educated, and corrected by the liberal virtue of curiosity. But you have got to be, as our own Peter Lawler has put it, especially ‘old and lame’ not to realize that curiosity is the very motto of those whose individuality destroys the credibility of the concept of cruelty. By the sign of curiosity, they have been conquering and usurping outside official life for quite some time now. It’s true that things aren’t nearly so dire as they were when our great social critics of the ’70s and ’80s (Kristol, Bell, Lasch, Rieff, MacIntyre) were writing. But given the uncanny way in which we’re making cruelty less comprehensible, it’s hard to congratulate ourselves for it.
Glenn Beck Is Not A Pomocon
Rod tells me that Nate Silver, who gained fame as the best, most readable electoral statistician around, has made a mistake. And so he has:
Beck is a PoMoCon — a post-modern conservative. And his philosophy is not all that difficult to articulate. It borrows a couple of things from traditional American conservatism:
— It shares an extreme distrust for government, particularly the Federal Government.
— It shares the notion that American society is in some sort of state of existential decline.
On the other hand, it also features some important differences:
— It is much more distrustful of non-governmental institutions, such as labor unions, corporations, political parties, community groups, the media, and scientific institutions.
— It is largely indifferent toward ‘social issues’.
— It is much less explicitly aligned with the Republican Party.
— It has much less use for elites, which it also distrusts.
The PoMoCons are not so much less self-consistent as they are less concerned with consistency, as compared with traditional conservatives. Theirs is a bric-a-brac, skeptical (sometimes to the point of paranoid), play-it-by-ear, relatively spontaneous reaction to the here-and-now — not something cooked up by a K Street thinktank. There is no future, no past — there is only today. And today is a pretty good day to be Glenn Beck.
Silver’s thumbnail anatomy of Beck’s politics is plausible enough, but on its face there’s nothing here it makes any sense to call postmodern. From a wider view, this is perhaps an opportune time to set the record straight on a few points about what is and isn’t postmodern-conservative.
So first consider Silver’s list of differences. Distrust of the non-governmental institutions Silver identifies has been a hallmark of social conservatives now for decades, which makes it somewhat discordant for Silver to suggest that ‘indifference’ toward social issues is in some way postmodern. The postmodern left is obsessed with power, viewing politics through a lens in which all social relations are function of power relations; and since I imagine Silver’s understanding of postmodernism is, unlike the one we actual pomocons tend to share, based on left postmodernism — about which more later — it’s unclear how or why he thinks social-issue indifference is pomo. And anyone who has followed our recent long exchange with the Front Porch Republic community knows that they, not we, are “much less explicitly aligned with the Republican party,” and in some important ways have “much less use for elites” than we do. These traits are more likely to be evidence of left conservatism than postmodern conservatism well understood!
Which leaves us with Silver’s catchall claim that pomocons are simply eclectic or ecumenical. Silver seems to confuse or conflate ideological eclecticism with the sort of political posture or practice that people without consultants adopt. And he seems to confuse both of these with a disinterest in the future that, at least to my eye, would utterly suck the wind out of Beck’s sails. Glenn Beck’s fame and identity derive entirely from a gripping fear that They are Taking Our Country Away From Us — horrible not because life has become unbearable today (the cry of leftist revolutionaries) but because the life we have lived will be made irrecoverable tomorrow. That’s a good-old-fashioned, white-bread conservative trope, as far as I can tell.
Now: there’s another incorrect vision of postmodern conservatism making the rounds — one we could associate with someone like Alan Wolfe, whose bugaboo is Carl Schmitt. The story goes like this: conservatism is no longer popular enough to command electoral success on its own strength. Very smart conservatives who know this realize that the only way they can stay in power is by scaring America’s rubes into a heightened, unnatural, protracted state of activism. So politics becomes crisis theater, and the task of very smart conservatives is to convince a bare majority of people that we live in a world where only giving very smart conservatives arbitrary ‘emergency’ power can save us. Very smart conservatives, of course, may or may not believe this to be true; what matters is ensuring that they can rule and preserve their own way of life. Since there is no longer any legitimate or honest way of doing this, they must become actors first and statesmen or philosophers later, if at all.
This is the brush that some have used to tar the Straussians and neocons. We needn’t pass judgment on the wisdom or merits of their critique in order to observe that the kind of stance attacked really has to be called conservative postmodernism and not postmodern conservatism. It’s is a postmodern position through and through, assured that all social relations are power relations and that all individual identities are masks. The conservatism is incidental — the mere ‘preference’ that motivates the use and abuse of the ‘facts’.
But recall that Strauss’s own critique of Max Weber — one in which he was joined by Philip Rieff, no neocon — insisted that the strict separation of ‘facts’ and ‘values’ at the heart of Weber’s sociology created the very conditions under which all social relations could become power theater: Weber begets Foucault. One point we pomocons have made before is that warm fuzzy left postmoderns like Richard Rorty are actually hypermodernists. Unlike the Foucauldians, Rorty wants to map facts and values onto liberalism’s public/private divide such that we can be John Stuart Mill in our social realtions and Nietzsche in our own fantasies. Rorty tells us that this strategic polarization will allow us to carry on a politics in which fact and value can actually live in harmony. This is not to abandon secular modernism but to go to extremes in the hopes of redeeming it.
For we pomocons, a postmodern conservatism is postmodern because it rejects Rorty’s project as kookily devoted to the modern longing to eradicate even the concept of eternity from human life; it is postmodern because it rejects the extension of Weber’s modern scientific heuristic to a conviction about what human nature really is. But these postmodern approaches open us onto an understanding of the wisdom of conservative dispositions, commitments, and convictions. We’re not pomo for pomo’s sake; we’re not conservative for pomo’s sake; and we’re not conservative simply because we feel like it or wound up that way and pomo because we have to be in order to get what we want.
A word about Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck is the worst. But why? Not so much because of who he distrusts or why. From where I’m standing, Beck is so awful because he theatrically combines and conflates performances of ultimate sincerity with performances of ultimate sarcasm. I think this is a telltale sign of a soul disordered by a confusion of love, power, and resentment. It becomes impossible, in such a person, to tell quite where their selfless solidarity, their egotism, and their hatred borne of weakness begin or end. And the titillating quality of this unstable charisma is precisely what they latch onto and exploit to become less a famous person than a famous happening. Their individual being becomes incidental to the phenomenon they represent. They actually corrode or dissolve their own identity in order to experience some hugeness that seems impossible to experience as a normal, integral human being. Any actual pomocon looks on that kind of allure as troublesome and dangerous, and the kind of person in thrall to it as no pomocon.
Kristol's Purple Persuasion
One thing we didn’t have time for: Irving Kristol’s attitude toward foreign policy. Kristol made two main points. One, it is in the good nature of America to defend democracies wherever and whenever attacked. Two, and in part (but only in part) for that reason, America should defend Israel. This second point Kristol made in the context of the spending debate: America should defend Israel even if that means a bigger-than-otherwise military budget — and Jews should, likewise, favor a bigger military budget than they might otherwise (i.e., if Israel didn’t need so much American support).
I think this monetary spin on the enduring Israel issue is now rather naive or outdated, and everyone seems to agree that the issue when it comes to a neoconservative foreign policy isn’t captured in dollars and cents but in passions and deeds. Which brings me to point one. Kristol’s affirmation of democratic defense was merely a Cold War truism which carried over quite plausibly, and mostly uncontroversially, right up until 9/11. The right’s problem with Clintonian interventions was that they inserted America into internal conflicts. And indeed the left’s problem with Bush’s war in Iraq was in its essentials the same.
This is significant because it indicates something of a gap between Kristol’s foreign policy tilt and the agenda of full-dress neoconservatism as we know it today. Kristol at least implies that other democracies might not be so important as Israel — not that we wouldn’t come to their aid when invaded or assaulted, but that the people of Israel stood in a special relationship to the people of the US, unlike the people of at least some other democracies. It turns out to be consistent with ‘neocon values’, or at least Kristol’s values, to decide, especially in tough or ambiguous cases, that certain democracies facing certain perils ought not to be treated as if they were Israel facing the sort of peril Israel has characteristically faced. Georgia, to be perfectly blunt about it, is not Israel.
Nor, to push the point a step further, is the fate of Georgia inextricably linked to the fate of Israel — at least not in any way deeper than that in which the fate of all democracies is linked, which, as an empirical matter, is far from obvious, however intense or praiseworthy our natural pro-democratic passions may be. The attempt to universalize the Israeli predicament may have done more to harm the neocon cause than a blatantly ethnocentric approach might have done — another unnecessary misfortune we can hang around the neck of anti-Semitism. It’s okay to be forthrightly in the tank for Israel in the same way we’ve kept our cultivated pro-British sentiment pinned to our sleeves. After all, there are Israelis enough in Israel who find opportunity and reason enough to disagree with Bibi Netanyahu or your generic neocon. At any rate, Israel’s unique history points toward a clarity of affinity — at least in my estimation — which the unique history of Georgia, to stick with that example, just doesn’t. The end of the Cold War might have been a squeaky-clean affair here and in Germany, but further east it was a sloppy debacle. To try to impose onto the Georgias of the world a standard of moral clarity analogous to the one Kristol and his heirs would apply to Israel is to fall afoul of a category mistake. The only reason to tolerate this is a state of crisis so extreme as to validate the risks and costs of action. Jihadism might amount to such a crisis, but the behavior of, say, Russia does not.
Of course, there is one point at which the Russia/Georgia question intersects with the Jihad/Israel question — Iran. It’s still an open question as to whether even full Russian support for ‘our team’ could neutralize or even greatly mitigate the Iran problem. But this knotty intersection exists at the intersection of multiple policy frameworks, too. Both heirs and critics of Kristol’s foreign policy dispositions are capable of approaching the problem with a degree of finesse and nuance and a set of red lines and core commitments.
Dignity Panel
On Morning Joe a few minutes ago, Pat Buchanan described the fear behind the death panel debate as the fear that old people without anyone around who loves them will be steered in their final years toward elective euthanasia. Surely the steering power of a government authorized to command and control the health care economy would be profound indeed. But the root issue behind the death panel debate is not federal power — it’s human dignity.
The archetypal or stereotypical conservative would say that even an old, isolated person has a reason to reject suicide that reaches to the foundations of what makes us human and what gives humans dignity. The archetypal or stereotypical progressive would say that conservatives need to abandon their romantic and/or religious fantasies that a dying person finds more dignity in enduring great suffering until their body fails than in choosing to die beforehand. Liberals, who, technically speaking, are stuck or torn between conservatism and progressivism, would be torn on this issue too. Liberalism — the political philosophy and worldview, not the ideological position — struggles to square or reconcile two competing visions of human dignity.
It’s tempting to say the first or conservative vision defines dignity in terms of the human race or species, and that the second/progressive vision does so in individualistic terms. On the question of suicide, that may seem true; but on health care more broadly, it’s obviously false. Progressives, not conservatives, are the ones most apt to think that the power of social science to help us all comes from its ability to generate valid predictions based on large-n data inputs — data in which each individual is reduced to their minimal statistical significance, and made mutually interchangeable accordingly. It turns out that conservatives and progressives also harbor an internal tension between thinking of dignity as existing in virtue of our shared human being and dignity as existing in virtue of our individual human being. It’s almost as if that tension reflects something fundamental about being human — both as a member of the human species and as a unique individual person.
But that tension today is colored deeply by our disgusted, despairing sense of nihilism over individual suffering. It’s increasingly difficult for us to conceive of the decision to soldier through a terminal illness as dignified. The problem is exacerbated by the costs of such care. If the stoic sufferer has loved ones, he or she is insensitive to what he or she is “putting them through;” if not, the stoic sufferer is wasting their — if not other people’s — money. For what? Paradoxically, perhaps, even our individualistic attitude toward the worthlessness of suffering lowers our estimation of individualistic pride.
By now it might be clear that I’ve been sliding back and forth between the assumption that enduring a terminal illness will be a natural or hands-off process versus one full of medication, treatment, and care. Possibly the final question about dignity that bears on our health care debate pertains less to choosing suicide than accepting death. But even this question is conditioned by the reality that choosing between acceptance and choice is made more human by doing so with one’s family. Unfortunately, ‘more human’ might not mean more painless or even more uplifting. Struggling with mortality can often be harder and messier with family than in isolation.
So perhaps the root moral issue behind the death panel debate actually just throws us back onto the question of whether we should choose to permit the government to influence this, one of our most difficult decisions, at one of our most vulnerable or susceptible moments. Because it appears the government at that moment would tend strongly to have greater confidence, and less at stake, than any of us.
The Trouble With Geeks
Titanic, a contrabulous fabtraption of a film that towered and tottered with huge follies and foibles, was redeemed by one, simple fact: it was a story about what’s true in us human beings. It took us as whole, integral persons. And it did so perhaps only as a convention of plot derived from historical necessity, a point made all the more poignant by implied and explicit content of Avatar. From the looks of it, two films couldn’t be more different. Titanic was about a love that could only be understood personally and historically, a love that transcended real human time and a real human being, even while residing and abiding completely within it and within her. Avatar looks to be a story about a trans-species love that can only be understood impersonally and ahistorically,* a love of the future (like that in Wall-E) which depends completely on a human perspective even while perversely alienating us from it in the extreme. There is something uncanny, and not in a good way, about a CGI-driven love story about a non-human alien and someone genetically engineered halfway out of their humanity by the government. And the trouble with geeks is that a fair number of them are likely to be so geeked out about the vast possibilities of scientific fantasy that their ability to recognize an uncanny valley when they see one is ruthlessly repressed. The trouble with geeks is that for them, a human love story isn’t cool enough — is simply boring.
*plus gigantic explosions.
The American Obsolescene
What’s new in obsolescence? Expert conversationalist Heather Hurlburt spent much of the day yesterday indulging me and the following questions: Is shoe-leather journalism obsolete? Is NATO? How about your aspirations to being well-read once you have a kid?
I had a lot of fun putting on and taking off my “neocon hat”. You might wind up bracing for some sexy brass instruments to start playing a BHTV rendition of “You Can Leave Your Hat On.” One thing we could’ve spent the whole hour talking about is the difference between political rationalism and deliberative reasonableness in politics. But how many people want to watch a revue of “The Rational Actor: No Longer a Fact, Not Yet a Fiction?”
Another thread that didn’t get woven into the final cloth was an important back and forth on the viability and suitability of “victory talk” in, and after, Afghanistan. Heather worried that talking victory, instead of ‘mere’ success, would continue to rhetorically distort our discourse and our expectations so badly that we’d remain prone to fight too many wars too readily and wind up too disappointed. I maintained that it’s important for us to remember that unconditional surrender and total conquest is a crazy and at least very narrow standard for victory, and that we still retain the capacity to understand that without having to abandon the language of victory, the aspiration for victory, or the American moxie and pride that’s historically been important to our simple military success. This was a majorly fun Bloggingheads.
Our Transatlantic Future
If you’re in DC, do drop by at 11 am tomorrow for The New Atlanticist’s roundtable on the future of the transatlantic alliance, hosted by The Atlantic Council. Friend of TAS and Foreign Policy senior editor Christian Brose will be joined by longtime friend of Pomocon and National Interest senior editor Nick Gvosdev, along with ex-NSC guru Damon Wilson and the illustrious James Joyner, who put the whole thing together. I’ll also be on the panel, waxing ecstatic on France’s return to NATO, Britain as the Hong Kong of Europe, and the end of Russophobia.
UPDATE: Here’s the audio.
The Sex Vote: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut
Back around Valentine’s Day this year, apropos of the dread liberaltarianism, I posted a few remarks on something called the Sex Vote. That cheap tryst has now been sublimated into a nice long (not too long) summer fling of a piece, up at Doublethink and free as love to all.
EPHRAIM'S SUMMER OF 2009, (Part 3)
Read part 2 (Peter Suderman)…Read part 1 (Reihan Salam).
There was David. On a horse. In Polo.
Public Service Announcement
The fat is in the fire; the salt is on the briar rose.
Borgesian Weekend
I have a copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. I received my copy shrink-wrapped, new, and unopened. While looking up an archaic d-word yesterday, the pages of Vol. I fell open, and not to one of the places marked by the OED’s fine blue ribbon bookmarks. No, a slip of paper had done the job — a slim, rectangular slip of paper torn off at one end. And on this piece of paper is a written message. In Chinese Japanese.
Help me decipher the text! I promise not to shoot you when I learn the secret.
Nightmares and Banalities
I wear stripes. He wears stripes. He sports facial hair. I sport facial hair. His bangs fall to your left. My bangs fall to your left. And those stylish spectacles! It could only be My First Bloggingheads Feat. Matt Yglesias…
With the benefit of 24 hrs in retrospect, I must say there is something lingeringly, hypnotically bizarre to me about the specter of Dick Cheney leading a new new Republicanism that’s soft on group marriage and torture. Could it really be getting less and less silly to say this is where the country’s collective headspace is headed? Horrors: Dick Cheney, clutching the zeitgeist by the whosenwhatsen…
I think I came off about as soft on Sotomayor as I wanna be, but, again, I’m really offput by the way some of Sotomayor’s offhand remarks seem to presage a world in which our nightmares are more banalized and our banalities grow more nightmarish. Saying “aspiration” instead of “inspiration,” without skipping a beat, is strangely unnerving even in a post-Bush America; many of our quantitatively superqualified, from high school on up, seem somehow to be qualitatively slipping. Never before has a culture been so credential-clogged yet so colossally casual. I’m still thinking — as the footage reveals — about how to best make sense of this. I will say I love the note of hope and healing on which Matt and I manage to end, shortly before my headset died.
Matt Crawford as Steampunk
There is a not-so-spot-on review of Matthew B. Crawford’s book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, up now at The New York Times. I have no time to wonder right now why this particular reviewer had this particular reaction, so let’s get into the meat of it:
Mr. Crawford needed to hear things gurgle and roar, and so it is perhaps not a surprise to learn that he grew up to own his own motorcycle repair shop. And in “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” his passionate argument for a brand of hands-on self-reliance, and a plea for the dignity of the manual trades, he comes on like Ralph Waldo Emerson in a “Mad Max” get-up — leather jacket, fingerless gloves, sawed-off shotgun, the works. It’s an appealing combination.
A better reference — help me out, here, Peter — would be that one comic book, where a future civilization of neo-Victorians comes in second only to the super-Chinese, or to Steampunk, which is sort of like being a DIY Amish Sherlock Holmes from, yes, the future. Bear with me as I sort of explain why.
As “Shop Class as Soulcraft” rumbles along, however, a few bolts begin to fall off the machine. His calm, confident tone grows strident. (“What the hell is going on? Is this our society as a whole, buying more education only to scale new heights of stupidity?”)
Our reviewer seems not to catch Matt’s sense of humor. (It’s a bit dry.) This is not just a shame but an impediment to understanding:
What began as an expansive, mind-clearing argument begins to feel smaller, more pinched. Mr. Crawford fixates on “what is sometimes called ‘the 1968 generation.’ ” It isn’t exactly clear what an attack on the “easy moral prestige of multiculturalism” has to do with his argument, nor his soggy caricature of the “sushi-eating, Brazilian-girlfriend-having cosmopolitan.” One can’t eat raw fish or date South American women and still like to fix things?
Sure it’s clear. The cosmopolitan Matt laughs at (and you can’t get the character of his attack without putting it this way) has written off the messy, ‘primitive’ duties that someone takes on who sees inherent worth in the kind of manual competence that is best described — though Matt doesn’t put it in these terms — as analog, not digital. The closest the cosmopolitan gets to analog mastery, Matt leaves us laughing, is his tactile enjoyment of Toro and Carmina. There is a manner — admittedly, but appropriately — left to the reader to piece together, in which the manly analog competence Matt describes functions as a disciplinary hedge against the contemporary man’s slide into effete cush.
He pleads for a matey kind of “yeoman aristocracy” in which men are free to tell dirty jokes because “the order of things isn’t quite so fragile.” Well, O.K.. I like dirty jokes too. But they are complicated things — less complicated if, as in Mr. Crawford’s book, there are virtually no women to be found.
[…] Sentences like this one begin to pop up like dorsal fins: “People who ride motorcycles have gotten something right, and I want to put myself in the service of it, this thing that we do, this kingly sport that is like war made beautiful.”
About this passage I have (at least) three thoughts. One, “this thing that we do”? What is this, “Goodfellas”? Two, this type of gonzo romanticism does not fit the reality of the lives of most of the workers he purports to champion — dishwasher repairmen, plumbers, locksmiths. Three, hasn’t a vibrant and all-too-visible subset of the people who ride motorcycles — the noise freaks who omit their mufflers, the high-speed weavers through close traffic — definitely gotten something wrong?
One, yes — what is this, That Thing You Do!? Next question. Two, Matt’s thesis is incomprehensible once deprived of its insight into the way admiration factors into the maintenance of the practical discipline of manual competence across generations, not to mention across the social boundaries of boys and men who would otherwise be strangers, if not adversaries. Three, there isn’t a phrase in Shop Class as Soulcraft that leads a fair reader to even suspect that Matt would praise the ego-tripping hotdoggers our reviewer describes. Their ethos is roughly ten light years away from Matt’s — as would be clear to any competent reviewer of this book, to whose mind should immediately spring instead the closing passage of Hunter Thompson’s _Hell’s Angels. The ‘war’ Matt is talking about, unless I am badly mistaken, is a lot less about penis-measuring-by-proxy races and a lot more about the worth of the experiences a man can produce for himself in relation with a machine that he has come to know by handling it inside and out. That’s Steampunk, baby — the idea that technological ‘progress’ should ‘stop’ at the point of man’s diminishing returns in the production of that relationship. It’s not an arbitrary line. One might disagree with it — say, in the spirit of liberating women from household chores (a task that has at least sort of failed, right?) — but one cannot dismiss it as ‘mere aesthetics’ or self-satisfying pomo arbitrariness.
So much for my snap defense of the book. I do have criticisms, yes, but they’ll have to wait for another day. After all, they come second to these remarks in a deeper way too.
Ezra Dyer, Hero
Forget Conan, gimme this guy late nights:
My view on bringing wacky Japanese-market cars here is that companies should strive to keep the product as un-Americanized as possible. Offer a shrimp-scented air freshener and a holographic hood ornament and a GPS system that includes maps of other planets: the whole appeal lies in cultural authenticity. This kind of car should be so Japanese that it makes me want to wear a Hello Kitty backpack, watch incomprehensible game shows and eat whales. I mean, research whales.
The Cube is undiluted Tokyo chic, from its asymmetrical rear window to its shag-carpet dashboard pad to the bungee cords on the doors, which Nissan says are useful for holding “stuffed driving mascots.”
Speaking of stuffed driving mascots, Nissan is prepared for a couple of those to occupy the front seats, as one of the Cube’s available accessories is an eight-inch seat belt extender. I suspect that this option isn’t popular in Japan.
The interior is rife with interesting touches. The headliner is imprinted with a ripple texture that spreads in concentric circles from the dome light. Available LED ambient lighting bathes the footwells and console in the hue of your choice. To the left of the steering wheel, there’s a small cup holder that seems so narrow as to be useless. I wondered what would fit in there and then it dawned on me: a slim can of Red Bull.
No more trying to keep your Red Bull in a standard cup holder only to have it tip over and spill on your extreme downhill freestyle unicycle equipment.
[…] There are four Cube trim levels, beginning with the $14,710 Cube 1.8 and culminating with the $20,090 1.8 Krom. The largest standalone option, available on the midlevel models, is the $2,550 “Ginormous package,” which includes an exterior aero kit and interior accessories like illuminated door-sill kick plates.
If you don’t see the point of tacking aerodynamic gear on something named the Cube, then maybe your appetite for accessories is neither gigantic nor enormous enough for the Ginormous package.
[…] On one hand, you might want your high-school or college-age progeny driving around in a Cube because it’s slow, has six air bags and a stability-control system. On the other hand, it also features a “Jacuzzi lounge” interior layout. I’m not sure what a Jacuzzi lounge is, but I don’t think I approve.
The Cube is cheerfully bizarre, and I appreciate that. It’s not a riot to drive, but in this case, the driving experience is really beside the point. The kids don’t care about that noise, pops. They want connectivity. They want a car that’s a rolling Tweet about a new iPhone app from the Jonas Brothers.
I, however, want a car that doesn’t look like a myopic washing machine, but I’m a lame old guy of 31 who remembers listening to CDs and saying things like, “My modem is taking forever to load this Kozmo.com order.”
It is simply impossible to write better reviews of futuristic Japanese imports. My great love for Ezra Dyer has been no secret for some time. I now demand that you share that love, and greatly. As Homer Simpson might warn: Shar-r-r-re it…
Tribal Pride
Pouloses: they keep people from killing themselves when huge trucks carrying ether crash on freeways.
The tire assembly first hit the 18-wheeler hauling ether in the right lane eastbound, bounced off that truck and hit the front of the van in the left lane head-on, Poulos said.
Poulos interrupted his interview twice at 7 p.m. to pull over errant vehicles trying to cross the median.
”Do not do that again,” Poulos hollered to one driver.
Returning to the interview, Poulos said. “That’s how people get killed. That’s what we’re dealing with right now.”
Taper Legged Blues
As James Joyner intimates, George Will’s contempt for jeans is really stupid. As a self-styled public intellectual unafraid of dripping contempt on other people’s aesthetic choices, I feel relatively safe in being heard in the spirit I’m speaking on this. Not the blue jean but the light-washed, taper-legged blue jean is the real social problem in America — exacerbated gravely by the pairing of said taper-legs with big clunky white ‘athletic’ shoes of the sort routinely worn by our decidedly unathletic.
Yet, notably, this getup was all the rage among girls in the ’80s (cf. Demi Moore in About Last Night…). As hideous as it might have been even in that context, somehow it was less of an issue. What can’t girls pull off? The problem is that men don’t look manly enough in this getup; the question is whether they can in jeans of any kind; and the answer is yes.
The real venom should be sprayed in the general direction of khakis and chinos, especially ones with pleats. A story for another day.
Nemesis II: The Footnote
Damon Linker has a followup to Ross’s reaction to the original post that I remarked on below. I recommend this followup post highly. Linker is right about intellectuals and distinctions, in a way that can be extended to emphases. I wouldn’t make some of the emphases Linker makes, but I am on record in various places arguing, in good pomocon fashion, on behalf of a foundationalist culture and a nonfoundationalist politics, so this bit struck me as extra important:
…Moralistic Therapeutic Deism looks like a comparatively promising alternative. But only if we assume the United States can’t get along without any civil religion at all.
Yet Ross’s own post hinges on the insight that at least one prominent strain of MTD tends especially to colonize politics. In the mind of, say, a Michael Gerson, the reality of human suffering, and the guilt associated with recognizing that reality, is unbearable without throwing ourselves into the arms of a moralistic, therapeutic Leviathan. Thus Ross’s critique of Bush’s Second Inaugural.
But there are details going obscured here. MTD can be more or less Christian. Some might look upon Joel Osteen as one of America’s foremost practitioners of MTD; others (ahem) might be a lot more concerned that, say, Richard Rorty’s vision of pragmatism as romantic polytheism comes much closer to realizing the full potential of MTD:
A Christianity that was merely ethical — the sort Jefferson and other Enlightenment thinkers commended and was later propounded by theologians of the social gospel — might have sloughed-off exclusionism by viewing Jesus as one incarnation of the divine among others. The celebration of an ethics of love would then have taken its place within the relatively tolerant polytheism of the Roman Empire, having disjoined the ideal of human brotherhood from the claim to represent the will of an omnipotent and monopolistic Heavenly Father (not to mention the idea that there is no salvation outside the Christian Church).
Linker’s brief against MTD hinges on his contempt for its ‘anemic’ theology. But moralistic deism that isn’t therapeutic would revolt Linker as equally anemic (right?) — while it would, in fact, carry a whole different set of cultural and political implications. Our American heritage of moralistic untherapeutic deism points toward a cultural life that prizes personal nobility over a political life that prizes universal dignity. I am guessing that Ross, Linker and I all agree — along with more radical critics of this business like Daniel — that the thing to be avoided, politically speaking, is seizing upon the state as the most powerful tool to save us all from cruelty and suffering. I’d agree with Linker that not all varieties of MTD always seek to commandeer politics in this way. But I’d do so in order to underscore what seems like the as-yet-unspoken heart of the matter: the real problem with MTD is not in its political side effects but in its cultural primary effects — and not because it’s moralistic, or because it’s deist.
My Enemy
I have few enemies, intellectually speaking — enemy ideas, that is; real nemesis visions. To qualify for nemesis status, a vision must be coherent, compelling, and viable on a mass scale. So I am not particularly worried about, say, the rise of actual Socialism in America, or the eventual transformation of everybody into militant atheist scientists, or most of the larger bugaboos upsetting our supposed public mind on the wide cultural right. There are only a few plausible destinies we face that I find deeply troubling — that is, only a few ways in which I really think we, us now with all that entails, could go wrong.
In consequence, I am sometimes apt to harp on certain apparently marginal themes, to the detriment of apparently more central ones. The net effect may be a certain initial opacity as regards what is known in academe as my Broader Intellectual Project. But then an exchange like Friday’s between Damon Linker and Rod Dreher comes along, and suddenly my assorted remarks on therapy and transgression, liberaltarianism, pink police states, and the sex vote take on, if not new relevance, the cast of a greater unity. I have more to say about some of these things in in other venues, but a few comments, here, are in order.
Dreck and Resurrection
These are not characters: they are excuses for doing something — Philip Rieff, The Crisis of the Officer Class
On the occasion of Good Friday, a story about the new Seth Rogen flick.
