Dear Reader (and those of you never get past the “Dear Reader” gag and then complain when it’s not here. I’m looking at you, James Westfall and Dr. Kenneth Noisewater. Okay, actually, I’m not looking at you, because that would be pretty gross) (“Oh, man, when people Google that, they’re going to cancel their G-File subscriptions” – The Couch),
I don’t want to talk about politics here. This is a safe place. A haven from the shouting and yelling that’s going on upstairs. Think of this as the man-cave underneath NRO where we can watch Xena reruns and talk about how awesome it would be to be a level-25 paladin. Or maybe you can think of it as that tree out in the woods by your house you run to and hide behind when Rich Lowry dips too heavily into the peppermint schnapps again and grabs his BB gun. Or maybe it’s just where you go inside your head as you hug yourself in the corner of the room, refusing to leave to have lime Jell-O with the group. However you want to think about this week’s G-File is fine with me, just know that you’re welcome here. Warm hands, open hearts, amigos.
If I seem a bit fragile, it’s only because we are now in the phase of the primary where friends turn on friends. In short, this is the season of the RINO. (Speaking of which, why, here’s me and Geraghty talking about the field. Could we be more RINOish?)
Charges of running-dog RINOism are of course nothing new. And as I’ve said before, I find the term itself pretty stupid. I plead guilty to being a Republican in Name Only for the simple reason that I take no particular pride in being a Republican. I’m a conservative, and the GOP is the more conservative of the two parties. If it stopped being that tomorrow, I’d stop being a Republican tomorrow, the same way I’d stop being a Chipotle customer tomorrow if they replaced the meat products with tofu.
I guess what’s annoying is the tendency of people who normally agree with me, or who argue in good faith when they disagree, to suddenly start thinking that the only possible explanation for my writing something critical or even insufficiently laudatory of a candidate must involve some woeful character flaw or dishonesty on my part. It’s not just the accusations — you’re a liberal, a RINO, a liar, a post-op transvestite with hairy legs and a lazy eye — that annoy me, it’s the thought that readers I’ve long valued could turn so easily the second they hear something they don’t like. I have friends who support virtually every one of the candidates. I haven’t once assumed they were post-op trannies because of it. They all desperately want Obama to lose, and so do I. Those are the ends. Everything else: the means.
Sports versus Art
Man, I said I didn’t want to talk politics and I spent 422 words talking politics. Okay, enough about that. Let’s turn to two topics that don’t get a lot of coverage around here: sports and art.
Sometimes, I say to my self, “As far as names for invisible Hobbit friends go, ‘Self’ is a very confusing one.” But that’s not important.
Other times I say to myself: “Man, that’s an ugly building. Why would someone build that?”
I once read somewhere that architecture is the best example of an “artistic” school that has completely broken with popular tastes. Architects certainly seem to design buildings to please each other and the critics and not the public. The average intelligent person goes to the Louvre in France and marvels at the beauty of the 17th-century buildings. The average architecture critic yawns at the musty old antiques and gushes over I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid. I don’t hate the glass pyramid (okay, maybe I do a little). But I don’t go to Paris to see a structure that I could see at a relatively upscale suburban mall. The phenomenon is even more pronounced when you look at modern architecture in more conventional businesses and houses. What’s more appealing to the eye, stately Wayne Manor or the Hall of Justice?
Still, I don’t know if architecture is the best example of the phenomenon. Modern art caters to popular tastes just as little as architecture. A great deal of performance and installation art strikes most normal people as a colossal joke or a straight-up con. And please don’t tell me that my failure to appreciate three squares and a triangle or a blob of paint on a canvas is my shortcoming. If something isn’t aesthetically pleasing or interesting, doesn’t require skills I do not have, and makes a stupid point stupidly, I don’t appreciate it as art. That doesn’t make me a philistine. It makes me a non-rube.
Anyway, it seems to me that the more a relatively artistic field of endeavor caters to critics over consumers, the worse it gets. You can see this all over the place, from haute cuisine to music. Some of my best friends in college were music majors, and they would ramble on about how Philip Glass is a genius. Maybe he is. But I’ll take Beethoven or the Beatles over him any day. I don’t follow the literary world too closely these days, but my impression is that the same is true in the world of fiction. If you write for the critics, only the critics will read you.
Academia certainly suffers from this problem. Visit the history section of a bookstore and you’ll find a fascinating disconnect between history books written by popular historians and those written by academic historians. In fact, you won’t find that many histories written by academic historians or for academic audiences. Arguably the most popular form of history is military history, but the academic establishment shuns the field almost entirely, preferring far more relevant topics like lesbian mores in antebellum Delaware 1856-1861.
Now, obviously this is a generalization. There’s good academic history, good modern art, good high-end food, and good modern architecture. But there are some really interesting things to noodle here. Interesting to me, at least.
First, I think people underestimate the importance of mass markets. When you become wholly disconnected from the metric of commercial success, catering wholly to elite micro-markets – like the eccentric rich and unknown critics – you become untethered from your culture and from quality. Iconoclastic shock and newness for their own sake become the standard, because that’s what will please the a-holes bored with the canon.
Of course, there are problems if you go completely in the opposite direction as well. Designers of Happy Meal toys don’t exactly strive for beauty or excellence.
But there’s one area of performance – broadly defined – where the performers are driven by excellence, are hugely popular and successful, and haven’t been captured by either the market or the critics.
Sports.
Unlike art or music or architecture, being shocking or “transgressive” in sports is always a sideshow, not the show itself. Yes, Dennis Rodman gussied himself up to look like a cross-dressing assassin in a bad Blade Runner rip-off. But if he didn’t get 20 rebounds a game (or whatever the stat is), people wouldn’t care whether he’s edgy or radical, they’d just think he’s an idiot with a pierced nose and improbable hair color. I remember in the 1980s reading stuff about how Chicago Bears QB Jim McMahon was some radical new kind of rock-and-roll quarterback. Whatever. If he didn’t score touchdowns, no one would care how radical he is.
There are a lot of similarities between sport and various art forms. They both involve personal excellence, performing for an audience, etc. But one thing sports has that most art forms don’t: defined rules. And with those rules come defined metrics of success.
This takes a lot of power away from the critics of the sports world, a.k.a. sports writers. They can celebrate this guy’s style over that guy’s. They can say so-and-so hasn’t gotten his fair chance. But they can’t overrule the authority of the scoreboard. There’s an objective authority that completely trumps their subjective authority – or almost completely. Every now and then a sportswriter can make the case that this or that boxer was “robbed” by the judges or that the umps or refs blew it. But that’s small-bore stuff. In the big picture, the critics don’t get to choose the winners, they only get to write about them.
I have no idea what the practical or political implications of any of this are. I think there’s a Hayekian point to be made in there somewhere about the importance of permanent rules and the value of market tests. But we’re running long and I’m running out of time.
Speaking of Academia
The other day, while researching a column on prisons, I got caught up reading a whole pile of Marxist twaddle about the “prison-industrial complex.” I don’t think people really appreciate how just plain nuts some of this stuff is or how absolutely corrupt the academic establishment is for nurturing it. My impression is that the University of California is a particularly outrageous breeding ground for this nonsense.
Here’s an abstract from a paper by Dylan Rodriguez, currently “professor and chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside,” in a 2003 issue ofSocial Justice.
Rodriguez offers few points of departure for the theorization of prison praxis as a field of radical social theory. He argues that the emergence and rapid growth of a qualitative carceral formation since the early 1970s, outside and symbiotic to the hegemonic social formation, has produced its own historical bloc of counterhegemonic radical intellectuals.
Rodriguez writes of prison intellectuals like Mumia Abu Jamal:
The cultural productions of these captives of the state, while rarely surfacing on the discursive radar of either academic discourses or popular culture at large, represent a decentered, imminent political possibility of departure from the essentially conservative ordering of both. In an extraordinary mirroring and rearticulation of the dystopic structure of imprisonment – a regime founded on the symbiosis between the logics of displacement and degradation – this prison praxis constitutes a multilayered field of alternate vernaculars, including the construction of new languages of agency, politics, freedom, identity, and self-actualization. These meanings, which are often generated for consumption by free world audiences (including loved ones, children, political allies, and attorneys), nonetheless constantly exceed and slip from the grasp of conventional modes of political discourse. It is profoundly endangering and discomfiting for any “free person” to attempt engagement with this praxis, precisely because it casts civil society’s – the putatively free world’s – condition of existence as the troubled production of mass-based unfreedom.
Speaking of the Couch (“You weren’t speaking of the Couch, idiot. I think you’re losing your mind”)
I was on the NR cruise the other week and several people asked me, “What’s the deal with the Couch?” Apparently many of you never read the original G-File back in the old days. Well, the Couch was my imaginary critic (“Whoa, whoa, whoa, cool it with the ‘imaginary’ stuff. You don’t want me talking about your imaginary talent, do you?” – The Couch) who would, ironically enough, help me keep it real. It dawned on me that maybe it would be a good use of the G-File to start working on an NRO glossary. I’ve been arguing in house for an NRO-wiki for years, something that would help explain terms, inside jokes, personalities, etc. If you have suggestions for terms you would like defined, send me an e-mail about it.
Various & Sundry
Goodbye, incandescent light bulbs, we loved ya, baby.
Speaking of which, who loves you, baby?
There’s a disturbing development in the Goldberg household: The good cat (Gracie) now comes on the morning and evening walk with Cosmo. A picture from this morning.
Awesome story about poop-tattoo great save for the fact that it’s not true.
In Muncie, from 1891 to 1902, one out of 20 books borrowed from the library were by Horatio Alger.
Twenty-five blogs to make you smarter.
Coming next week: Interesting announcements about interesting things disproportionately having to do with me (and good old Self, if the Couch hasn’t killed him).