Art is life seen through a temperament. -Zola
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Sometimes David Brooks sounds a fuddy-duddy, though a good influence on the public debates. The latter is reflected in his trying to understand rather than fit observation to theory; the value he gives to insight over slogan and his general modesty — a reluctance to impose his ego on his argument. There is a constriction in his reasoning though that is hard to define.
In this article Brooks affirms what he calls “perception” in assessing human behavior — saying indirectly that mechanical, mathematical, philosophical models of reality leave out the personal, the human, the interior.
Brooks sees this as affecting economics,
My sense is that this financial crisis is going to amount to a coming-out party for behavioral economists and others who are bringing sophisticated psychology to the realm of public policy. At least these folks have plausible explanations for why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the risks they were taking.
The remarkable insight of the behavioral economists is that we are feeling, intuitive human beings, subjective to a fault. Shocker. But Brooks doesn't seem to see the value inherent in feelings, what he calls perceptions, which are the root level of our understanding of our lives, of the ambiguity of experience, of the conundrum of existence. Sometimes emotions don't serve, but being human doesn't always have a logic to it, and sometimes logic doesn't serve either.
I'd suggest to Brooks that if he had more experience of the arts, the lifeblood of which exists in those ambiguities, he would not have needed the reality shock of a financial crisis to realize that his mechanical formula, “First, you perceive a situation. Then you think of possible courses of action. Then you calculate which course is in your best interest. Then you take the action.”, never worked in the first place. He ascribes this logic to economists but I feel he himself often overlaps reality with this Procrustean formula, adding to it a Platonic wish, conflating the wished for ideal with the real, He looks for the reassurance of the rational in a buzzing, blooming chaos of a world it is hard for him to accept. Rationality comes after being human, not before. A rationality that does not wrap itself around our interior lives is escapist fantasy.
Update:
In this neuroscience podcast a psychiatrist speculated that the pressure put on financial advisors toward unrealistic profits — beating the markets — causes them to justify their assumption of too-great risk by “making up stories” (to themselves) to deflect their awareness that they are gambling. They then, if their risk taking implodes, fear their own judgment to be faulty, freeze up, and you have a credit crunch. The psychiatrist said the fix is for the financial advisors to realize at the outset that they can't beat the markets.
I've been listening to Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography on Librivox. Going from one section of the book to another — the chapters most relevant to our times most appealing — you can't help but admire the man — his scope, intelligence and decency. The following quotation was offered by Roosevelt as his favorite:
It is so much easier to be a harmless dove than wise serpent.
—Josh Billings
From wiki:
He distrusted wealthy businessmen and dissolved forty monopolistic corporations as a “trust buster”. He was clear, however, to show he did not disagree with trusts and capitalism in principle but was only against corrupt, illegal practices. His “Square Deal” promised a fair shake for both the average citizen (through regulation of railroad rates and pure food and drugs) and the businessmen. He was the first U.S. president to call for universal health care and national health insurance. As an outdoorsman, he promoted the conservation movement, emphasizing efficient use of natural resources. After 1906 he attacked big business and suggested the courts were biased against labor unions.
He hated the name Teddy but the teddy bear was named after him because he refused to kill a captured black bear simply to kill.
Henry Adams said about him, “Roosevelt, more than any other living man ….showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter – the quality that mediaeval theology assigned to God – he was pure act.”
In the land of top ten lists Teddy is usually ranked in the top five, says wiki.
This remarkable video shows how to perform head tracking using the Wii remote. When Johnny Lee sets it up so you can see what a player would see you can hardly believe it. Even more promising for general usage is at the end of the video when he shows a sports stadium in VR.
Still in development, this foldable interactive display is right out of science fiction. Johnny Lee is one clever guy.
The goal of a Hamiltonian meritocracy long ago having disappeared in the foggy narcissism of identity politics, it was inevitable that Cult Obama would prevail. Collective delusion has ignored so many signs of a weak, me-too character, of poor judgment, of a magnetic attraction to unsavory and dubious individuals; of buying into his own publicity. Obama isn't there because of his abilities or character or record of accomplishment.
The Obama meme arises out of the characteristics of popular culture — surface attraction and viral dissemination; the narcissism of self-congratulatory “tolerance” in the minds of his supporters, the relief of smooth rhetorical skill after years of Bush's garbled speech in Obama's facile presentation; Obama's withheld, non-threatening demeanor a siren lure. All surface manifestations. The final tsunami — the imploding economy and McCain's lack of campaign focus — were all that were then needed as a provision of circumstance to settle the issue and so this is how Obama will be elected.
After the Supreme Court handed the presidency to Bush in 2000 in what amounted to a partisan coup, the press and (what are called) elites decided they would forego fairness, professional honor, or even thinking, and follow the judicial model in their own realm: they decided to use the pre-established mechanisms of celebrity culture to elect Obama. They didn't want to improve things, they wanted to parrot past excesses to their own advantage. This wasn't of course of conscious volition on the part of the media, but evolved of the accrued down spiral of group-mind momentum.
They stalked Palin like paparazzi and were hypervigilant about McCain's mistakes. It never occurred to them, as one minor example, to consider the bleached teeth and hair-plugs of Biden, or, to use the unremarked subtextual age-bigotry of Obama's rhetoric about McCain: Biden's erratic, old and tired declarations. It was cute and forgivable — in Biden's case. The press never thought to ask how many suits Obama has, nor how much they cost, nor the price of Michelle's wardrobe and grooming. The self-discrediting meme attributed to Palin of claiming middle-class empathy and wearing expensive clothes would as well apply to Obama's narrative. Why not examine the price tags on Barack and Michelle's wardrobe as well? Obama's contradictions and lies were deflected or simply enabled. Followed this the assessments of the press by organizations dependent on the dissemination of their findings in the press, not surprisingly discounting the serious damage the press has done to the process.
The price of Obama's winning this way will, in a wiser time, inevitably evoke reconsideration — there are many guilds who will pay the bill issued by historical judgment. The sense of fairness and cohesion in society has somehow morphed into meaningless self-parody — chants of “change” and “unity”.
Hulu has posted online The Professional, Besson's smoothie of a movie. (You have to join, for free, to watch.)
The Professional begs to be called stylish. But it is something more. Its plot plays at the edges, trusting the audience to understand the relationship of the two main characters; unlike most thrillers, it makes you care about the characters. It is about the bonding of a for hire killer and a little girl; a mutual familial protectiveness develops. The killer allows something out that has never seen the light of day — a feeling of connection to others. It is Frankenstein and the little girl, or King Kong and Fay Wray; a force of nature embodied, violent, irrational and merciless, obeying its own logic, drawn irresistibly toward an interior, more complex space that dooms its simple efficiency; this amoral impersonal energy embodied by the killer responds to a human spirit — an empathy human beings often have trouble extending to each other.
Wiki says that Besson's parents were both Club Med scuba diving instructors. I'm not sure why, but wow. Imagine that childhood. But whoops, not so great — they divorced and remarried; he says, “Here there is two families, and I am the only bad souvenir of something that doesn't work. And if I disappear, then everything is perfect. The rage to exist comes from here. I have to do something! Otherwise I am going to die.”
How about some quasi-three-dimensional electron crystals for lunch? Well, maybe for your cell phone's lunch. Beyond the pragmatic uses in electronics this discovery opens up a new realm: “…researchers have discovered a new state of matter, a quasi-three-dimensional electron crystal, in a material very much alike those used in the fabrication of modern transistors.”
Dark matter, dark energy, new states of matter. It's exciting, awesome, and a little unsettling. The paradigms all seem to be falling away, all at once. What next? Objective journalism becomes a quaint idea, of another time, mindless-herds jabbering slogans rule the landscape, consensus trumps thinking, the financial system falls apart, the experts don't know what they are doing, major corporations disappear in financial ruin, gas prices drop…no, it could never get that weird.
Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it.
George Santayana
We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
George Bernard Shaw
I was a big fan of the Paris Review interviews with writers. They were so down to earth and useful for anyone doing creative work. The many approaches and underlying philosophies spoken plain — so philosophically deep and shrewdly aware.
Creative work is always self-taught finally — you find your teachers after discovering your needs. Matisse thought you wrestle with your influences, wresting value in the struggle. The best teachers in the visual arts, beyond the doing, aren't always other artists — they can be writers or carpenters or philosophers or biologists or psychologists or athletes. There is a wisdom in doing things well, a required insight when creating things — both of self and of process.
The British Library is releasing for the first time, a group of recordings including Vladimir Nabokov and Tennessee Williams.
Nabokov: “Pleasure and agony while composing the book in my mind. Harrowing irritation when strolling with my tools and viscera, the pencil that needs resharpening, the bladder that has to be drained, the word that I always mis-spell and always have to look up.”
Quotes from the recordings in the Guardian article:
“Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning. A meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.”
Virginia Woolf, 1937
“Obscenity is something that I abhor. I don't think there's anybody more squeamish than I am about what is obscene. I cannot stand anything scatalogical, anything physically disgusting … my plays are extremely moral in my opinion. I'm almost an old puritan.”
Tennessee Williams, 1959
A respected free market economist, Arnold Kling, says,
Economists ought to admit that we do not know much about what is going on today. Neither do the Fed Chairman and the Treasury Secretary. Of course, the market demand is for “strong” leaders and for “strong” economists, who can fool the public into believing that they have great knowledge. The ones who do this best are those who have fooled themselves.
Real experts know what they don't know.
When Paulson presented his original package to Congress it was passed with alacrity by Pelosi — she didn't consult with Republicans and used the passage of Paulson's plan to slam Bush, politicizing a dire emergency. The package quickly was seen for what it was; the public reacted. Paulson was giving himself the purse of the United States with no accountability and was going to reward the speculation of CEOs with taxpayer money. When the Europeans showed how it should be done, by investing in banks, Paulson changed his plan to do the same. That is now seen as the most sensible course.
Paul Krugman was a supporter of the original, deeply flawed Paulson plan. Krugman just won the Nobel Prize for economics. He is an expert, or so he thinks.
Update (10/23/08)
Today, Greenspan, testifying before a Congressional committee, said,
Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”
Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.
“Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”
An expert for 40 years. And now. Not.
The Romantic Haze
I mean by a picture, a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be—in a better light than any light that ever shone—in a land no one can define or remember, only desire—and the forms are divinely beautiful.
Sir Edward Burne-Jones
The Difficulties of Growth
I was never so rapid in my virtue but my vice kept up with me. We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice.
Henry David Thoreau, Journals
Texting is one of those things you at first feel you need to put up with. Arising out of necessity, it has become a meme of youth. This review lends some context:
Also familiar from pre-digital times is the habit of shortening words. Crystal cites a dictionary of common abbreviations from 1942 listing such text-message-like usages as amt (amount), agn (again), and wd (would). Mashing together letters and numbers to create phonetic shorthand (“before” as b4) is an example of the logogram, related to conjunctions of characters found in languages such as Chinese. It is also akin to the old puzzle form known as the rebus.
It is pointed out that texting is a form of play. In other words, a high expression of our nature. The cleverness and fun of language, as well as the raptures of a secret language, are evident in texting — because texting isn't always meant to be lucid. Secretly, there is a delight in making the correspondent work a bit.
The reviewer indicates a fuddy-duddy quality in the author's attitude as well:
…what [teenagers] lack is a sense of “the consequences of what they are doing, in the eyes of society as a whole…. They need to know when textisms are effective and when they are not. They need to appreciate the range of social reactions which texting, in its various forms, can elicit. This knowledge is slowly acquired from parents, peers, text etiquette websites, and (in the narrow sense) teachers. Teenagers have to learn to manage this new behavior, as indeed do we all. For one thing is certain: texting is not going to go away in the foreseeable future.”
Shucks, I missed the debate. Why bother? Obama has won.
The commentators, press, media, celebrities, act as advocates and interpret as partisans; the public is exhausted and just wants it all over. The Orwellian meltdown has low blood pressure equating to a capacity for leadership — surface demeanor is interpreted as a quality of character; Yuppie careerism is transliterated as boldness, dubious judgment about long term relationships subject to language mangling as personal attacks or guilt by association (about someone with little public record other than personal history and choice of relationships — how else to evaluate the man?); dissociated narcissism is equanimity, arrogance is confidence. Obama wins. How else could it be? Game, set and match.
Criticisms of Obama are deflected as racist, and his supporters have made it plain that anyone who doesn't vote for Obama must by definition be racist — ensuring a win and explaining away a loss in one neat little bullying formula; the unexamined premise being that Obama is not an individual but a cipher representing a group. That is, some of Obama's supporters are viewing Obama as a racist would. The idea is incomprehensible to them that Obama the individual might warrant criticism.
Early on I was pulling for McCain because he seemed to get the threats from abroad and Obama seemed a confection. McCain is a remarkable and admirable man. I still feel that way, but if Obama wins, well, it won't be so bad to have a Mondale-like administration populated by Clintonians. The presence of the Clintonians in Obama's brain trust have proven that Hillary actually did win. (Clintonians live on Planet Clintonia and tend crops.)
Rubber-stamping Pelosi's agenda isn't much of a role for Obama, but it will no doubt be his default, given his past spinelessness when dealing with his supporters. Not so bad given the excesses of the Republicans — just not what we need now. But leadership wasn't on the table; neither McCain nor Obama are compelling as leaders. David Brooks thinks there will be a strong reaction to the big government, big spending of the coming Democratic hegemony, with the inevitable incompetence of bureaucracies enacting those policies, I might add. The press will turn around on Obama and the fractious Democrats on each other as those partisans lay claim to their share for doing their part. Right now Obama owes just about everyone in public life.
I can't subscribe to Hitchens' Slate article, headlined “Vote for Obama” — nothing more than a venomous attack on McCain and Palin. Hitchens is rooting against McCain, not for Obama at all. Overwrought and ethically lost — Hitchens doesn't understand that McCain is no more responsible for the excesses of a few of his frustrated followers than Obama. McCain showed admirable character in rejecting unacceptable attacks on Obama. Obama has never returned the favor. We never heard a long line of necessary remonstrances to his supporters — how about, as an example, Obama's condemning the misogyny expressed towards Palin?
Hitchens slams McCain as stereotypically old — “…to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical” and “train-wreck sentences, the whistlings in the pipes, the alarming and bewildered handhold phrases” — a prejudice that would generate marching in the streets if turned in kind to stereotypes about Obama. Ana Marie Cox just today pointed out the vigor of the man. For some reason prejudice towards the old is considered acceptable, more a mistake of decorum than bigotry.
(If you want to hear Hitchens at his best as polemicist, listen to this dialog with Eric Alterman. Hitchens, in his advocacy of his position on the war in Iraq, inhabits a moral realm that leaves him unassailable.)
When you hear commentators conflating Obama's caution-festooned personality with inner strength you are hearing people who are members of a cult wanting to believe something. Who can blame them if they wish to see something that isn't there? What is there isn't so hot.
Peter Schjeldahl has a piece about Giorgio Morandi in the New Yorker,
Morandi painted some striking landscapes and the odd, tentative self-portrait, but the arenas of his greatness were the tabletops in his small studio. He passed nearly his entire life in an apartment in Bologna with his mother, until her death, in 1950, and three younger sisters, who, like him, never married. (His businessman father died in 1909, four years before Morandi’s graduation from Bologna’s art academy.) Morandi’s stagings of his repertory company of nondescript bottles, vases, pitchers, and whatnot are definitive twentieth-century art works. They breathe intimacy with the past—Piero della Francesca, Chardin—and address a future that still glimmers, just out of reach. They remain unbeatably radical meditations on what can and can’t happen when three dimensions are transposed into two. Morandi will always rivet painters and educate all who care for painting.
Morandi was a painter's painter. That phrase is often more aptly applied to the great Velázquez, whose painterly realm had so much more scope. But Morandi had a claim to membership. Morandi found a world in a grain of sand. Morandi clearly loved paint and felt its possibilities, its magicical suggestiveness; he loved the planes of form in still life that can transform to suggestive landscape in an astonishing instant. His muted world, so quiet with meditation, so gentle and resonant with refinement, is especially appealing now.
We sit in the ominous silence as the experts try to sort out how to fix the financial mess, which is beginning to feel more like an act of nature than anything human made, although it was made by these self-same experts.
Paul Volcker had a semi-optimistic assessment today in the WSJ, saying the correct things were finally beginning to be done.
Fortunately, there is also good reason to believe that the means are now available to turn the tide. Financial authorities, in the United States and elsewhere, are now in a position to take needed and convincing action to stabilize markets and to restore trust.
First of all, there is now clear recognition that the problem is international, and international coordination and cooperation is both necessary and underway…
Maybe a truncated recession is possible.
Just a few days ago the experts were saying that letting Lehman's fail was a great idea and the public celebrated that the rich guys weren't being bailed out. Now many experts say that failure of Lehman's led to panic in the other institutions to which Lehman's was connected and thence the freeze up of credit.
So we sit in silence, hoping for the best, like John Ashberry's The Painter,
Sitting between the sea and the buildings
He enjoyed painting the sea's portrait.
But just as children imagine a prayer
Is merely silence, he expected his subject
To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,
Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.
Creatures unaffected by the financial crisis have been found.
Living in the deepest trenches of the multitudinous seas, hadal snailfish have their own issues:
Here they have to contend with total darkness, near freezing temperatures and immense water pressure – at this depth the pressure is 8,000 tonnes per square metre, equivalent to that of 1600 elephants standing on the roof of a Mini car. They feed on the thousands of tiny shrimp-like creatures that scavenge the carcasses of dead fish and detritus reaching the ocean floor.
It is not so bad:
…these fish aren’t loners. The images show groups that are sociable and active – possibly even families – feeding on little shrimp, yet living in one of the most extreme environments on Earth.
The debates can only be reviewed as a show. First the spoiler: in the general election, Obama will win. It is in the stars. The press and manic advocates can relax. Obama wins in the end out of no quality of his own. It is just in the stars, the convergence of events.
Now the players: Obama was professorial and somewhat boring, McCain a very experienced and effective politician, Brokaw looked embalmed. Speaking of embalmed: the audience was badly in need of an opening act — something was needed to loosen them up. (A Seinfeld standup set before air?)
McCain was very effective in the format provided. He was comfortable. He connected. Obama is professorial and can't seem to shake it. It is his predisposition. He seldom went to the back of the plane in his campaign flights to talk to the press informally. He needs a wall. He sets up huge stadiums in which to address the impersonal throng, or stands behind a protective podium to give speeches out of a discomfort with personal contact. Obama is only, or principally, comfortable with unquestioning supporters. Obama really makes no empathic connection — a strange quality in a politician.
The troubling things about McCain: he is a maverick. The very thing he touts isn't suitable for running things. We need engagement now, not contention. He is too quick to react; his judgments appear too emotional.
The troubling things about Obama. He follows. If McCain talks about bipartisanship, Obama says the same thing in his turn. This happened again and again in the primaries. Is Obama a leader, or a repeater? McCain is correct: Obama has never stood up to any constituency, about anything. Obama's supporters want him to “go harder” in the debates, but what he needs to do is go harder against their excesses.
We will just have to trust to Obama's intellectual grasp of the structural problems and the push of circumstance to force him to act. We will have to trust to the deeply neurotic Democrats to overcome their vengeance problem, their fractionalized identity politics nonsense, and see the interests of the country as paramount; the Republicans need to come together as something like a coherent party.
Obama's proposals, in their intent, seem more on point. Obama was right in his priorities. It seems he would do better by the average person. A business friendly administration is not as important as a citizen friendly one. It's come down to that. Obama seems disposed to make that connection intellectually, even if unable to do so on a personal basis.
The truth is, both candidates are decent and able individuals who will fight for the country they both love. Exactly what they can do given the current situation, well, no one can push the river, we'll just have to ride it out and try and steer when we can.
The web being the web I came across a Dr. Seuss link. Following it and reading for awhile about this talented man, I discovered…
…he wasn't Jewish but faced anti-Semitism because of his name…he was against isolationism and racism and yes anti-Semitism long before it was fashionable…The Cat in the Hat was written to use words educators thought all children should know…given the task he used 236 of the 250 words so designated…he was a political cartoonist, pro-FDR…many of his children's books are regarded as parables…he went to Oxford…
well, that is some of what stuck with me. I had always been a fan. You don't know why you are a fan at first. Just something appeals. Later I realized it was first his wonderful and still modern graphical talent. I always loved cartoons, but he updated the Victorian children's book illustration and made it more fun, more modern. Beyond his visual skills, which seemed Art Nouveau derived to some extent, he was unusual in having an add-on — his mastery of language. The wonderful, clever rhymes in his books appeals to our love of nonsense and the absurd.
Nonsense and the absurd, like Jabberwocky for the genius Lewis Carroll, are a high order of artfulness. That absurdity, the ability to take sophisticated snippets from culture and thought and language and our visual heritage, and play with them is the serious play that defines art.
Wikipedia's article was especially informative about his rhyming schemes and suggestive of the solid cultural foundation,
Geisel wrote most of his books in anapestic tetrameter, a poetic meter also employed by many poets of the English literary canon. This characteristic style of writing, which draws and pulls the reader into the text, is often suggested as one of the reasons that Geisel's writing was so well-received.
Anapestic tetrameter consists of four rhythmic units, anapests, each composed of two weak beats followed by one strong beat; often, the first weak syllable is omitted, or an additional weak syllable is added at the end. An example of this meter can be found in Geisel's “Yertle the Turtle”, from Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories:
“And today the Great Yertle, that Marvelous he
Is King of the Mud. That is all he can see.”
Geisel generally maintained this meter quite strictly, until late in his career, when he no longer maintained strict rhythm in all lines. The consistency of his meter was one of his hallmarks; the many imitators and parodists of Geisel are often unable to write in strict anapestic tetrameter, or are unaware that they should, and thus sound clumsy in comparison.
Some books by Geisel that are written mainly in anapestic tetrameter also contain many lines written in amphibrachic tetrameter, …
Of course success breeds scholarly exegesis,
The cat’s improvisations with the objets trouvés in the home he has invaded are obviously an allegory for his creator’s performance with the two hundred and twenty arbitrary words he has been assigned by his publisher. The cat is a bricoleur. He has no system—or, rather, his system is to have no system. He is compelled to make meaning from whatever is there. He fails, the bricolage topples, the fish ends up in a teapot; …
My Uncle Terwilliger on
the Art of Eating Popovers
My uncle ordered popovers
from the restaurant’s bill of fare.
And, when they were served,
he regarded them
with a penetrating stare…
Then he spoke great Words of Wisdom
as he sat there on that chair:
“To eat these things,”
said my uncle,
“you must exercise great care.
You may swallow down what’s solid…
BUT…
you must spit out the air!”
And…
as you partake of the world’s bill of fare,
that’s darned good advice to follow.
Do a lot of spitting out the hot air.
And be careful what you swallow.
—Dr. Seuss
An original poem composed for the 99th Commencement of Lake Forest College by Theodor Seuss Geisel
June 4, 1977
An obscure local channel showed a film noir last night — I never caught the name — but it sure fit the mood.
The press, the politicians, the leaders of industry and finance, the public intellectuals, all seem embroiled in internal battles, unable to engage the concerns of the time. There seem no useful insights, no reassurances that have substance for the public to grasp. Seeking leadership we have Bush and Pelosi and Obama and McCain. Small insubstantial fish in a roiling sea.
The most difficult: it, whatever “it” is, just seems to be beginning. There doesn't appear to be any consensus on how far and how deep the financial crisis will spread, or for how long. Uncertainty breeds dire thoughts that can lead to social disruption. Simple minded thugs can rise to power with simple minded answers that seek to target blame. That is just the unexpected consequence society tries to protect itself from, but often has failed historically. Herd instinct, which now appears to have been, in the guise of partisanship, in practice for years for just this circumstance, now leaves us without a foundationalist reservoir of comity.
The press, which loves rumor and titillation via fear mongering, then acts as though it is calming things down and patronizingly reassures. Having blown their credibility they look like manicured fools playing mom and pop. Titillate and deplore, that is the press in their day to day attire, but now, titillate and condescend. Even the more mature media like PBS and NPR have self-slimed themselves in their advocacy of Obama, so shamelessly beyond their usual left-leaning tendentiousness they have become a big part of the problem: they have no traction, about anything. Smug fools seldom do.
Neither candidate seems up to the job. Both candidates and parties petty and petulant, unable to hook into the public's concerns even if their rhetoric makes such claims; they seem irrelevant, as does the press, the politicians, the leaders of industry, the public intellectuals — but that is where we began.
Happy quote of the day:
“The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
— Sir Edward Grey
August, 1914
There is a kind of horrified fascination about the campaign now. The future festooned with threats and doubts making the politicians smaller than the moment. They almost disappear in the shadows.
Palin did great in her debate. I felt glad for her. Public ridicule should be saved for malefactors. Biden, a likable competent politician, also did fine. He is a bore who doesn't put you off.
The election process has been from the outset celebrity cults at war. Obama, the newcomer, and his delighted with themselves supporters; McCain, the war hero, with his drill baby drill brigades. At no point did you feel issues were at stake, just a dislike of Bush, a choice of personalities, and a doubt either would do much of anything.
The country has gotten used to shallowness, personality, coarsened judgments — the latter a specialty of the media. The race for president feels more like a casting call than an assessment of judgment, character and understanding. All tactics, which the press is fully entranced by and probably explains its centrality. You would think the press wished to be campaign managers rather than reporters.
I've come to think the real casualty of the election will be the credibility and personal honor of the media. Some would laugh at personal honor mentioned in this context, but there are many reporters who are honorable. However, their smug and ponderous pronouncements in this election; their attempt to skew and slant and whisper their voice-over prejudice has betrayed them. In scanning some of the commentary one of the networks had a big Nielsen logo in the corner of the screen and a group of putative independent voters; the outcome was that Biden won big time. Then the reporter said that the group was “leaning towards Obama”. The pics and charts said big win Biden, the text, that the segment was a farce. The celebrity cult most easy to deplore: the press itself.
Obama has been more obnoxious in his affection for cult status. McCain, talking too much about his past, admirable as much of it has been, too little focused on the narrative of concerns, or anything else. All they both want is to win.
Well, Palin's success won't do much for McCain. Biden's workmanlike performance won't change things either.
The tangle of the issues facing the country brings to mind David Foster Wallace about the complexities of modern life:
We live today in a world where most of the really important developments in everything from math and physics and astronomy to public policy and psychology and classical music are so extremely abstract and technically complex and context-dependent that it’s next to impossible for the ordinary citizen to feel that they (the developments) have much relevance to her actual life. Where even people in two closely related sub-sub-specialties have a hard time communicating with each other because their respective s-s-s’s require so much special training and knowledge.
Palin's shaken confidence and ability to recover is on the line for the VP debates. She garbles strings of slogans and has been memed as therefore “not ready”. She can mangle syntax almost as badly as Eisenhower. Palin does make Obama look good, who himself is not prepared. But Obama is a slick orator, born to the manor of Washington. What Palin really is, is someone who is unskilled. She hasn't worked out the political blarney — how to dish out the slogans.
For how long did “unite and change” work for Obama before he had to really answer serious questions? When Obama has been faced with questions without his best friend Mr. Teleprompter nearby he has often stumbled. It has seldom been remarked the way Obama is always reading prepared text in any important public statement. If Charlie Gibson asks about Obama's contradictions and evasions, Obama is personally affronted.
Obama was for cross country debates before he was against them; he didn't know where he was in one campaign stop and in another didn't know how many states there are; he said he never heard Wright's anti-American and anti-Israel rants, then the next day he said he did. Obama was for the unification of Jerusalem, then the next day he was against it. His wife couldn't find a reason to be “proud of this country”. The response of the press was to aid next day “clarifications” without remark, as though that settled the issue. These gaffes aren't those of poor rhetorical skill of which Palin is guilty, but of garbled thought.
The press wants Obama to win and Palin to do badly. Of more importance, economic circumstance has all but ensured an Obama win. He is having success served up to him, yet again. The most recent politician to benefit from such convergence of events, George W., who had the presidency handed him by the Supreme Court.
Whether Palin can counter the media/economic/challenged-rhetorical-skillset tsunami seems unlikely. Depends on the public. And the public is worried about the economy, not the potential Vice President.
I don't know exactly what made me think of Captain Beefheart. Maybe his eccentric life force offers a salutary perspective on things as they are now drifting. Drifting.
In this youtube video from 1982 Captain Beefheart talks to Letterman. It is a fascinating segment in the interplay of expectation, of group reaction to the unfamiliar; in the discomfort of difference in a crowd. Beefheart isn't wearing a costume and ironically winking subtextually, he is the real deal.
As the segment evolves, the audience, which at heart is welcoming and wanting something new, starts to accept the eccentric pop genius. He already had his corner of pop fame but not in the realm Letterman inhabits. It is a circus spectacle: a shaman slowly casting his spell over conventional expectation.
Beefheart splattered the drone of the quotidian and mind numbing category. He would never be mainstream, but he will always influence other artists. Even now Beefheart's work is cutting edge. It is hard to pinpoint it — he extends a liberty that is indefinable but has shaken things up. You think immediately of Tom Waits, but there are excitements in his work that are suggestive to anyone creative. Beefheart wasn't a formbreaker out of ironic self conscious sophistication like Zappa; he was better, a natural — he couldn't help but be himself and it would never occur to him not to be. Sort of like Andy Kaufman.
When asked in a 1980 interview what the most important thing to him was he said, “My wife. Definitely. Sorry girls.” He meant it. Always surprising.
Art is life seen through a temperament. -Zola
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