The Yokels - part one

It used to be the case that journalists from NYC only went out to the boonies to report on crimes. If the crime or scandal was big enough, they’d be there. For all other cases, there was the news services. It was the New Yorker (and, to an extent, Mencken’s magazine, the American Mercury) which first started sending writers out to take the temperature, so to speak, of the boonies. The New Yorker established the U.S. Journal format, with its man on the courthouse steps or in the coffeehouse interviews to establish the temperament of the burg that the reporter was passing through. At the same time, the scandal and crime driven impulse was also, understandably, cultivated. A merger of the two types takes place in the essays that Calvin Trillin collected under the title, Killings. The book came out in 1984; it has recently been reprinted, to some well deserved hoopla. The pieces cover the period from the late sixties to the early eighties. Not all of the pieces are from small towns – in fact, most of the venues where this or that person was dispatched were mid sized cities: Knoxville, Savannah, Riverside, etc. However, during this period Trillin could have stayed in NYC and written about any variety of homicide you care to ponder. These killings have an interest beyond the events that brought together victim and perpetrator, and that interest is very much the social setting – the different cultures of the provinces. They are, as it were, litmus tests of the spirit of the age, as it was bottled in these places.

The New Yorker also sponsored the project of another writer at about the same time, which ended up in the book Special Places: In search of small town America. This was penned by Berton Roueché, who was better known as the New Yorker’s medical writer. Roueché went and spent time in various small towns – towns of less than 20,000 people – in a swathe of America that included the Midwest and Texas. His travels (which bear the title of a search, instead of, say, an investigation, or a survey – a search being less prosecutorial and more open-ended) took in the towns of Stapleton, Nebraska, Welch, West Virginia, Hermann, Missouri, Crystal City, Texas, Corydon, Indiana, Pella, Iowa, and Hope, Arkansas. In other words, his search brought him to small towns in Anglo America. The partial exceptions are Crystal City and Hope, Arkansas, but Roueché never traveled to a small town that was mostly black. The overwhelming whiteness of his search is not something Roueché, or his editor, William Shawn, who prefaced his book, thought about.

The book has never, to my knowledge, been reprinted. It has no reputation, unlike Killings. But to my mind it is a counterpart to the more famous book. It encodes a way of reporting on what we see, now, as Red America, that huge transcontinental swamp of GOP voters, where the lines are about inauthenticity and urban formlessness that still rules the narrative. Even though it is now the NYT rather than the New Yorker that now supports this kind of thing, the archetype of small town America still weighs us down. It is white, it is mannered, the flowers bloom there and everybody meets and eats brunch at the Pancake house on Sunday. And of TV, and its pervasive influence, there is nary a whisper.

In the list of towns that dot Roueché’s “search”, the one that stands out today is Hope, Arkansas, which is now famous as the town where Bill Clinton was born. But when Roueché visited, in 1982, Clinton was not a name to reckon with or recognize. He was just another southern Democratic governor, apt to drop an aw shucks or a gosh when showing emotion, who’d been removed in the last election. The most interesting politician in town for Roueché was the vice-mayor, Floyd Young, who was black.  Roueché interviewed him, which is almost as far as Roueché went on the politics of the small town places he was searching – evidently, he was not in the business of finding politics. It found him, though, in the sermon he attends in the Hope Baptist Church, where the minister defends war and capital punishment on an Old Testament basis. And then there is a comment that resonates retrospectively, made by a rather slick businessman he interviewed – Vincent Foster, still kicking at that time – who confides that he knows where to get liquor in this dry town, and it doesn’t involve driving to Texarkana, either: “All I got to do is pick up the phone over there and dial a certain number. And I’m not talking about moonshine.” Thus spoke the voice of Clintonism avant le lettre. It is all about pull, man.

Roueché’s reporting style is of a dense descriptiveness that was favored during Shawn’s tenure at the New Yorker. There is not a store on a main street in the towns he stays in that remains unnamed: in Welch, West Virginia, he observes six automobile agencies including  Hall Chevrolet-Oldsmobile, he stays at the Carter Hotel and eats at the Mountaineer Restaurant. He notes that Herman, Missouri has two funeral homes and registers them for the reader (Toedtmann and Grosse and Herman Blumer). He tells us that there are four chief business streets in Corydon, Indiana, and that the Corydon State Bank, the Town and Country Shop, Nolan L. Hottell insurance, the Corydon (weekly) Democrat, the sherrif’s office and the county jail, and the Corydon Dollar store are all on one of them.  Roueché specializes in the approaches to a town – he favors towns that have rolling hills on the outskirts, have a river, are found in a pleasant valley, and are attached to the life of the land. To give him his due, when he pretty good at giving  vent to the stray rhapsodic sigh, in the great American tradition:

“I spent the better part of a month in deep southwestern Arkansas – in Hope (pop, 10,290), the seat of Hempstead County – and the sun shone every day of my stay but one, and the nights were mild, and many of them were moonlit, and almost every night I fell asleep to the long, slow faraway whistle of a freight train. I arrived in mid-March, in the first full rush of spring, and the day I left, in the second week of April, the pell-mell Southern summer had begun. I saw the jonquils bloom and fade, and the azaleas and the yellow bells and tulip trees, the wisteria and the redbuds, the peach trees and the apples, and I watched the big willow oaks that line the streets burst almost visibly into shading leaf.”

Those “ands” come from Hemingway, who took them from Twain, who took them from the common speech, who took them from the Bible. That affection for the flowers, that landscaper’s inventory, is strewn about the discovery literature – every “searcher” of the American landscape falls for the flowers and the fruits. And why not? I do myself. In fact, while Roueché was in Hope, I, unconscious of his very existence, was very probably working on my part time job for a landscaping company one hundred twenty miles South of him in Shreveport, strewing grass seed. Nature, remade, is what we are about, we Americans, we invasive species.

It is interesting, or irresistible, do a where are they now? with Roueché’s towns – to note, for instance, that the country of which Welch, West Virginia, is the county seat has the distinction of having the highest drug overdose mortality rate in the country at the moment. Roueché, in his quest for small town life, was too good a human to ask the question I always ask when passing through East Texas and country Louisiana and the rest of it: aren’t these people bored? Too good a human – but certainly lacking something as a reporter if this question never came up.

It comes up in Trillin’s book.

  

a history without dates

There’s a certain magical attachment in the histories we read in books – or the magazines, or the newspapers, doing their own kind of fashion work, articulating the spirit of the age as the well to do see it - to years. A year serves not only as an organizing principle, but also as a spell – it gathers around itself a host of connotations, and soon comes to stand for those connotations. Yet, what would history be like if you knocked out the years, days, weeks, centuries? How would we show, for instance, change? In one sense, philosophical history does just that – it rejects the mathematical symbols of chronology as accidents of historical structure. These are the crutches of the historian, according to the philosophical historian. Instead, a philosophical history will find its before-after structure in the actual substance of history. In the case of the most famous philosophical history, Hegel’s, a before and after, a movement, is only given by the conceptual figures that arise and interact in themselves. To introduce a date, here, is to introduce a limit on the movement of the absolute. A limit which, moreover, from the side of the absolute, seems to be merely a superstition, the result of a ceremony of labeling founded on the arbitrary, and ultimately, on the fear of time itself, that deathdealer.

The NYT really does suck: the problem with the "Nazi sweety pies we love" article.

In a scoriating essay on the NORC survey of sexual behavior issued in 1995, Richard Lewontin goes after the social sciences both for their manufacture of categories that segment their surveys and for their naïve notion that people generally report the truth about themselves on fraught issues like sex and racial attitudes to interviewers.
“It is frightening to think that social science is in the hands of professionals who are so deaf to human nuance that they believe that people do not lie to themselves about the most freighted aspects of their own lives, and that they have no interest in manipulating the impression that strangers have of them. Only such deafness can account for their acceptance, without the academic equivalent of a snicker, of the result of a NORC survey reporting that 45 percent of men between the ages of eighty and eighty-four still have sex with a partner.”
I have been thinking about the social sciences – with their faulty methodologies – and journalists – with apparently no methodology at all – lately. The latest lately is the NYT’s incredible malversation of newspaper reporting in their article about the “Nazi Sympathizer Next Door.” The article is better viewed through the parody of it published in the Atlantic, here: https://www.theatlantic.com/…/2017/11/a-nazi-cooks-…/546737/
Today, an editor of the NYT – who should be bodily prevented from writing anything for the newspaper – intervened on the “controversy” (Nazis – good or bad?) to apologize/non apologize for offending readers. Obviously, pansy readers just aren’t tough enough to read about “extremists” (not racists, mind you, or not people dreaming of building gas chambers to eliminate blacks and Jews, but “extremists”) with the sang froid of one of the Times “smartest thinkers and best writers”.
Obviously, the NYT doesn’t get it. 

The “it” here, though, is a whole work style of reporting. “It” includes the unquestioned testimony of “experts” that often season NYT’s articles, as well as the “we tell your story” stories. The problem with both is the methodological assumption that expertise answers the methodological question posed in Lewontin’s article, “How do you know it?” That it never occurs to a reporter who is “one of the smartest thinkers” at the NYT, or his editor, that a man who thinks Hitler is cool might also have other vices in the veracity department points to the fact that the smartest thinking in the NYT doesn’t go very far.

In fact, it doesn’t even go so far as to search through the NYT’s own archive and stumble on the last time American Nazis were really in the news. That period was the early sixties, the period of the civil rights movement. And the person who represented that movement was a man named George Lincoln Rockwell.

Frederick Simonelli, Rockwell’s biographer, had a longer deadline time than the NYT-er, but as a “smart thinker” one would think that the reporter would read the book and other materials about “extremists” – especially people who end up believing in a not so coded call to violence. The questions that they could ask would accordingly search out past patterns, and the story could be about the continuance or the difference with those patterns. This is not a do it yourself kind of thing.

So you think: perhaps such people have some violence in their past? Perhaps the way to know about it is to interview friends? Acquaintances, employers, teachers? Cops? Check out harassment in the town the Nazi lives in. Ask at the local temple. Ask maybe oh, some black guys about it.

Of course, for the NYT, black guys are "no angels" - for as was pointed out on twitter by many, the NYT reporting on the black victims of police shooting has been harsher than their reporting on Nazis.

I’m intentionally not linking to the idiot story itself – it is easy enough to find – but in tracing the development of the little Nazi’s political “thought”, the reporter seems uninteresting in asking whether what he has done in the world, besides putting up friendly picks of Nazis on facebook. He quotes from one of the town’s politicians about how disgusting the Nazi is, but that is it as far as the town is concerned. He quotes from one of the Nazi’s bandmates, but that is it as far as checking out the Nazi’s story is concerned. It is like one of the “sharpest thinkers” at the NYT has the reporting skills of a fourteen year old. When your story is about a guy who went to an armed rally of Nazis at Charlottesville, probably it is a good idea to start by asking about the arms he owns, not the few books you can take a picture of. It all goes downhill from the faux novel lede graf.

The best thing about the NYT is the archive. In the past, the NYT was an amazing paper. This article, written by one of the elite Timesmen, shows why that isn’t the case anymore.

spinoza and the american predicament

There have been innumerable searches for the roots of the American predicament that resulted in the election of Donald Trump. I came across this passage from Spinoza that provides a general framework for the racism, ignorance, stubbornness and despair that goes into giving your heart to a senile bully:

“Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favored by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune’s greedily coveted favors, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity. The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and fear are struggling for the mastery, though usually it is boastful, over-confident, and vain.”

The rules, of course, that once governed at least certain circumstances in the capitalist world – rules that countervailed the rule of the richest and the most powerful – were long ago re-constituted in the U.S. by both the Dems and the Republicans. They called it de-regulation, or privatization, and what they were really doing was abolishing rules that limited the behavior of the great holders of private power. Meanwhile, fortune’s greedily coveted favors – which is the real name of “being competitive internationally” or whatever flavor of bullshit is being put out by the Harvard Business School this season – were what the working class, the creators of value, were encouraged to strive for – a sort of clientelism that destroyed all the long built up solidarity and substituted an ethos of dog eat dog. The end result was, as Spinoza well saw in circumstances of similar reaction, a visible increase in credulity.

Political superstition, at least, comes about when the conditions that support superstition are put in place. They have been in place for decades. We are now seeing what this leads us, Gadarene swine that we are. 

Reviving the ostinato genatalia - not a good idea!

Years ago, the art historian Leo Steinberg wrote a book about the sexuality of Christ in renaissance paintings, in which he pointed out that the ostinato genitalia was at the center of many paintings of the Baby Jesus. This was consistent with the culture of this late medieval, early modern period.

Who knew that digital phone cameras and the internet would democratize the ostinato genitalia, so that any freaking Senator, movie producer, magazine writer or talk show host would be on it like mustard on a hotdog? To the Charley Roses, the Weiners, the Louis CKs, the Rep. Joe Bartons - buddy, the late middle ages were a long time ago! Put your rocket back in your pocket, please. And also, resign?

Happy Thanksgiving!

The black and white world - the soul of the banal

The central trauma of cinema, for many writers, was the transition to sound.

For me, though, it was the transition from black and white to color.

This is a matter, partly, of my age. Being born in 1957, I well remember black and white television sets. And I remember how common black and white photos were. Color television came well after color in the movies, but during the era of black and white televisions, black and white movies from the thirties to the sixties were common fare.

Frankly, I haven’t owned a television in years, so I don’t know what the lineup is, but I imagine the spate of black and white films that I was fed from the 30s and 40s has slowed to a trickle.

The effect of black and white film and photography on me has been profound. Firstly, it has taught me the insufficiency of color words – black and white have been used so variously, the tonal scale creates such differences between one black and white picture or film and another, that our color language seems primitive, a relic that we are using to explain a cultural product that surpasses or transcends our culture.

But secondly, it has given me a very childish view of history.

In this naïve view of history, everything in the nineteenth century and everything in the first half of the twentieth century happened in black and white – or at best, sepia. The Civil War, World War I and II, were all fought in black and white. The cities – New York, London, Paris – were black and white. Nudes were black and white.

Then came the second half of the twentieth century up to now. The long present is in color. It is as if colors were invented in 1950. I know, there was color photography and film before then, but it was not dominant. And with color came a loss of depth.

Black and white images seem, to me, to somehow find, in the banality of the world, the grain or soul that escapes that banality, whereas color simply floods the zone with banality, makes it inescapable. This is ontological nonsense, of course, yet it certainly makes an epiphenomenal sense. After all, we know that, for instance, Greek statues were painted, but the way we view them, and the way they were viewed in the Renaissance, and the way they have leaked into our sense of what a statue is, is uncolored. The restoration of the statues of the ancient world always stops with putting the pieces together; we never paint them.

Similarly, we can “restore” color to the black and white portrait Nadar made of Baudelaire – in fact, I think it has been done. I’ve noticed more and more color versions of photos that were originally shot in black and white. But to me, there is something deeply wrong with this. Instead of bringing Baudelaire closer, it seems, instead, to zombify him, to take him out of that world of canonical black and white and string Vegas-y Christmas lights on him.  

The black and white world is one that I dream in; I only live in the world of color.

On pluck: translating the Brecht essay on Five Difficulties in writing the truth

Berthold Brecht wrote a small essay, meant for covert distribution in Nazi Germany, entitled Five Difficulties with writing the truth.

Thank God that we don’t live in Nazi Germany. Thank God that we don’t live in present day Yemen, which is being systematically starved to death by our ally, Saudi Arabia, using weapons sold to it by the U.S., France, the U.K., etc.

Our bad time is different.

Anyway, though this essay has been translated, I thought I’d try doing the intro paragraph and the section on “Mut” – having the spirit for something, the quality of being spunky. When we hear about the bravery of women who are accusing powerful sex abusers of their crimes and violence, we are in the realm of Mut. I’ll call it pluck. Pluck, according to the OED, went through an interesting etymological journey to arrive at the colloquial term, as they call it, for having boldness or courage. The word pluck comes from a mass of Germanic and Latin words implying untangling, peeling, unfeathering, etc. From this, the word worked itself in deeper, to connote the guts – what is plucked out of, say, a chicken. And from the guts it worked itself toward the temperament corresponding to the heart: pluck. I rather like this origin, which is less military than courage or bravery, more about the ordinary tasks characteristically allotted to women in peasant societies.

“Today, whoever wants to fight lies and ignorance and wants to write the truth has to surmount at least five difficulties. He must have the pluck to write the truth when it is being suppressed on all side; the cleverness to recognize it, although it is being hidden on all sides; the art to make it handy as a weapon; the judgement, to select those into whose hands one entrusts it; and the cunning, to distribute it to the latter.These difficulties are enormous for those who write under fascism, but they still insist themselves even in the case of those who have been hunted out of fascist countries, and even for those who write in the lands of bourgeois freedom.

1. The pluck, to write the truth. It seems self-evident, that the writer should write the truth in the sense, that he doesn’t suppress it or fall silent about it, and that he shouldn’t write the untruth. He should not bow to the might, he should not betray the weak. Naturally it is very hard not to bow to the mighty, and very advantageous, to betray the weak. To get on the bad side of the possessing class means renouncing possession oneself. To renounce payment for work performed means under certain circumstances to renounce work at all, and to waive fame among the mighty often means simply to wave fame. For this, one must be plucky. Times of the worst oppression are marked by the fact that all the speeches are about great and high things. It takes pluck in such times to speak of low and small things, like eating and the living spaces of the workers, in the midst of the violent cries that the spirit of sacrifice is the main thing necessary.  When the farmers are being showered with praises, it takes pluck to speak of machines and cheap feed, which will lighten their loads. When it is hollered on the radio waves that the man with no knowledge and education is better than the man with knowledge and education, than it is plucky to ask: for whom is he better?   When speeches are made of formed and halfformed races, it is plucky to ask if perhaps hunger and ignorance and war are not bringing forth our misbirths. Just as it requires pluck to talk the truth about oneself, over the defeated. Many, who are persecuted, lose the ability to recognize their mistakes.Persecution seems to them to be the greatest injustice. The persecutors, since they persecute, are evil, while they, the persecuted, are being persecuted because of their goodness. But this goodness has been struck down, defeated and impeded, and was thus a weak goodness, a bad, unstable, unreliable goodness; because it doesn’t do to say that the weak are good the way that rain is wet. To say that the good have not been defeated, because they were good, but because they were weak, requires pluck.”

I’ve been pretty free with my translation of the difficult last two sentences. It pretty much sums up, though, the difference between the victim, on the one hand, and the justice of a cause, on the other. Victimization does not make the victim good, even if it makes the victimizer bad.