Diversity and Representation Among Deck Chairs on the Titanic

By in books, identity, media/propaganda, race, the cult of multi No Comments

There actually is a problem concerning race and journalism in America, but that problem is not an overabundance of objectivity. It’s that America’s newsrooms remain crushingly and embarrassingly white, especially in the positions of leadership, and have proven stubbornly resistant to attempts to diversify. This is an absolute disaster, professionally as well as morally. According to Census Bureau data, while ethnic minorities make up 40 percent of Americans, they constitute just 17 percent of newsroom staff and 13 percent of newspaper leadership. Diversification efforts all too frequently relegate journalists of color to the “softer” sections of newspapers — culture, “hot takes” on the news or entertainment, arts, and lifestyle — or to the online versions of legacy media. It’s shameful. Just as it is a problem that the people tasked with telling the American story don’t report on the lives of everyday Americans, erasing huge portions of American lives from their pages and airwaves, it is also a problem that they don’t themselves reflect America’s racial diversity.

— Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy

I got Ungar-Sargon’s book after reading an impressive excerpt in the Spectator last month. Her scrutiny of the shifting economic incentives in digital media reminded me of Martin Gurri’s own analysis in The Revolt of the Public. Much of the book is a satisfying attack on the progressive elite for being — if I may paraphrase — a bunch of spoiled rich kids whose monomaniacal focus on other people’s racism serves as cover for their refusal to question their own class privilege. Like mutant Calvinists, they condemn most of their fellow Americans to eternal damnation for the original sin of racism, while allowing their own prosperity and status to stand as proof of the Right Side of History’s favor. Bari Weiss described Ungar-Sargon as a left-wing populist, which sounds about right. Whereas Gurri’s book aimed more at rigorous description, Ungar-Sargon is happy to editorialize on behalf of some vaguely-defined beast called “the working class.” I’m inherently skeptical when a deputy opinion editor of Newsweek, holder of a Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley, starts waxing rhapsodic about a chimera like working-class-consciousness, but that’s easily overlooked. It’s enjoyable enough to see progressives being hoist with their own privileged petard. When the class-based left goes to war with the identitarian left, everyone else should just get the popcorn and cheer for mass casualties.

This part, though, is just baffling. Why would you include this unnecessary sop to identity politics in the middle of your class-based polemic? Why would you lazily conflate immutable characteristics like race with point of view? Which ethnic minorities need to be promoted to positions of leadership, and who gets to decide? How do you avoid the same old problem of “meritocracy,” which she rails against throughout the book, where the “minorities” turn out to be the same products of wealthy upbringings and elite educations, different only in their superficial appearance? Why is it only a problem when elite occupations aren’t diverse enough? Here, again, the contrast with Gurri is illuminating — while he sees the old ideal of 20th-century mass media as a dinosaur blinking stupidly at the approaching asteroid of digital media realty, Ungar-Sargon ends her book with an exhortation to “the national liberal media” to “lead the way back to a more democratic, more moral, and more equal society.” The rest of us, in the meantime, have to rediscover the lost art of getting along with people from different walks of life and learning how to agree to disagree with no hard feelings. Again, this seems like an elite problem for the professional class which spends all its time ensconced in digital-media silos. If you want to encounter genuine diversity and learn how to work and get along with very different people, go work in retail or manual labor. Given the trends in media economics, you might have to do that anyway before long.

No Pomo

By in ohferfucksake, samesecks No Comments

Benjamin Weil:

Fifty years later, our culture has, broadly speaking, moved on. Homosexuality is increasingly normalized, and the muscular frame of the bodybuilder, once considered a form of gender deviance, has since become the male ideal—most visible in the multi-billion-dollar industry of preternaturally jacked superheroes. Globally, the fitness industry itself is now worth close to $100 billion a year.

And yet, despite these important shifts, bodybuilding has, in many ways, become more anxious and, in turn, more silent about its relationship with homosexuality. Today, male bodybuilders, dripping in machismo, trade in euphemisms to discuss one another’s bodies. As the academic Jeremy Strong observes, contemporary argot “avoids many of the terms of reference and evaluation which circulate in relation to women’s bodies,” which “structures a permission (a permission normally denied) to look at the male body.” Nervously skirting around language that might be inferred to carry a homosexual desire, bodybuilders compliment their peers, idols, or adversaries using terms like “’mirin” (short for “admiring”) or else qualify their praise with the linguistic handwashing of “no homo.” In this way, bodybuilding continues to assert a strong divide between (appropriate) heterosexual and (inappropriate) homosexual modes of gazing at the body.

I saw the link to this essay on Arts & Letters Daily a couple days ago. I didn’t click on it then, because I figured I could already tell by A&LD’s brief précis and the fact that it was published in The Baffler that it would contain nothing new or interesting. Today, I was bored enough to disregard the wisdom of my Wednesday self, proving that we don’t always get wiser with age. The whole thing is like this — stale clichés presented as subversion, garnished with the usual academic jargon. How does anyone muster up the enthusiasm for this charade anymore?

via GIPHY

…Bodybuilding simply remains no place for same gender attraction. Other than Paris, there are and have been vanishingly few openly queer male professional bodybuilders (including Chris Dickerson, who won the 1982 Mr. Olympia title). Of course, the inhospitality of professional bodybuilding as an environment for gay competitors is a product of a latent, swirling gay panic, which has led not only to a disappointing crisis of representation within bodybuilding (disappointing because, although a disproportionate number of gay men enjoy bodybuilding as a pastime, they are woefully underrepresented in the professional domain), it also disavows what is potentially politically exciting about the sport. That is, freed from the limiting grasp of homophobia, understanding bodybuilding as a pursuit requires acknowledging and accepting that men gazing desirously at the bodies of other men— one man hoping to possess the physique of another man in some capacity— is not the exclusive preoccupation of queer men but, rather, is a universal phenomenon. The line between wanting to be or wanting to fuck someone is unclear and unstable.

The time is long overdue for the world of bodybuilding to acknowledge the queerness of its historical foundations and its internal dynamics—the love and appreciation of the male form between and amongst men. Should a straight bodybuilder— the very pinnacle of heterosexual masculinity—admit his admiration for male muscularity, exactly nothing world-ending or corruptive would happen: he would not wither or shrink, lose competitive advantage in the sport, or be otherwise altered in any way. And yet, such an occasion would indeed be welcome and profoundly altering: not only opening up bodybuilding as a field unafraid of queer participation but publicly demonstrating that even the very manliest, the most macho, the heterosexual-est of men are, well, a little bit gay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah; as Apocryphal Oscar Wilde famously said,”Everything is about sex except for sex, which is about power.” Freud is dead, but his malignant shadow still blights the intellectual landscape. Oh, well. Rednecks called me gay when I was a teenager for having long hair and slightly-androgynous clothes, so it’s nothing to me if leftist academics want to get in on the fun and imply that lifting weights makes me a closet case. More disturbing is the monomaniacal obsession with making leisure activities into politics by other means. Who but a commissar-in-waiting talks about a sport being “potentially politically exciting,” an oxymoron if ever there were one? And what kind of stunted soul thinks that, one, a “crisis of representation” could ever be a phrase to use in earnest, and two, that what we really need is more political sloganeering and grandstanding in athletic events?

Lowbrow, But I Rock a Little Know-How

By in education, foolosophy No Comments

Naomi Kanakia:

Notice, I leave aside the question of whether knowledge of the Classics makes you a better thinker or more capable leader. I would argue that it probably does but that, in most eras, the wisdom conferred by the Classics is more likely, as Tocqueville noted, to discourage you from pursuing paths to power. As we can see in our own culture, nuance and wisdom are nowhere particularly desired. This is a time for anger, action, and black-and-white thinking.

Moreover, during this time, power is increasingly wielded only by the few, and they wield it due to their birth rather than their merits. It’s obvious in the biographies of our politicians, our business leaders, our actors, singers, biographers, and academics. Increasingly, only the extremely well off and well connected are achieving prominence and wielding power. In this environment, only the education of those few can be a matter of public interest. For the bulk of Americans, who are destined to be employees rather than bosses, and whose public role, even as citizens, has been increasingly devalued by the slipping-away of our democracy, there is little need to concern oneself with their education, nor do I think it will be possible to get them to ignore the fact that the wisdom conferred by a Classical education will be useless to them in the life of precarity and drudgery to come.

I participate with great reluctance in the rote recitation of identity so common to these tedious essays (this one included), as if any of you should care who or what I am, but: as one of those mythical working-folk who also enjoy reading old classics, I particularly appreciate hearing a severely-educated MFAer living in an overpriced slum like San Francisco opine about the lives of “precarity and drudgery” we lead out here in the “Here There Be Carhartt Coveralls” section of the map, foolishly believing that wisdom is worth striving for even, or especially, if it doesn’t lead to wealth or political power. Imagine combining an autodidactic hunger for knowledge with a university education and still remaining within the limited imaginative horizons of a petty political functionary!

Nothing of Consequence

By in books, writing 2 Comments

I enthusiastically endorse all that Charlie Cooke has to say about P.G Wodehouse:

I get funny looks when I say this, but I quite honestly believe that the only writer in history who has a better grasp on the English language than P.G. Wodehouse is William Shakespeare. As a general matter, they’re not comparable, of course, because, as wonderful as Wodehouse’s books are, they deal with nothing of consequence. But Wodehouse has a way with words that is not only unmatched, but that is so extraordinarily funny that the best lines stick around with you for years.

…Wodehouse is occasionally criticized for being so light, which he is. All told, his stories are mostly about idle rich people falling in and out of love and trying to hold on to their allowances. But what this misses, I think, is that it is precisely because the stakes are so low that there are so many opportunities for humor.

Last year, I took a collection of Wodehouse’s stories to give to a friend during his long hospital stay. The point of reading Wodehouse, I told him, is to delight in watching someone play with language. His sentences are like wonderful balloon animals, twisted into all sorts of surprising shapes. Yes, of course the stories are silly. In today’s cant, they’re not “inclusive” or “representative” of anyone but the idle rich in England between the wars. But it seems obvious to me that if one could reincarnate the soul of Pelham Grenville in a twenty-first century American, he would find a way to make the vernacular sing in the same way. As for the notion that humorous stories are somehow “lesser” than serious novels, eh, whatever. I have no interest in arguing the point with either insecure young men or stuffy old professors. I think everyday life brings enough matters “of consequence” to bear on us without our needing to seek more out in our fiction.

This Seeming Death

By in foolosophy, poetry No Comments

James Lileks:

Anyway, November gets the big nix from me. It has the ethos of winter without the manifestations, usually, so you don’t feel as if you’re getting through anything. It’s the waiting room. Thanksgiving? Oh, I do love it, but Daughter’s not coming back this time, and it’s one of those years where the usual elements that assemble have been tossed to the wind. At least we’ll have a new, working stove for the turkey we’re not making.

You know the phrase, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step? The journey is winter. The single step is the first of November.

I suppose that’s understandable if you live in Minnesota, as James does. Still, speaking as someone privileged enough to live in the more moderate Mid-Atlantic region rather than the suburbs of the Arctic Circle, November is my favorite month of the year. October is great too — I still retain my childlike love of Halloween, and it obviously stands as the exemplar of autumn, but it also starts off a little warm for my taste, not really cooling down until the middle of the month. December, of course, enough said. But November is overlooked and underrated. In our hyper-political age, it’s become known as the month where we’re expected to break bread with our politically offensive uncles. I find that more often than not, it’s the month where the autumn leaves are at their peak, providing a perfect contemplative backdrop for the month which serves as a calm midpoint between the two commercial monsters, the pumpkin-spiced Scylla and the tinsel-bedecked Charybdis. Savor it, wherever you are, and enjoy this wonderful poem from Linda Pastan:

It is an old drama
this disappearance of the leaves,
this seeming death
of the landscape.
In a later scene,
or earlier,
the trees like gnarled magicians
produce handkerchiefs
of leaves
out of empty branches.

And we watch.
We are like children
at this spectacle
of leaves,
as if one day we too
will open the wooden doors
of our coffins
and come out smiling
and bowing
all over again.

Riches

By in books, foolosophy No Comments

I am a rich man.

I’ve always been clear about this — I would consider myself “rich” when I felt comfortable buying books at retail just because I felt like it. Yesterday, I went to Barnes & Noble on a whim, and I bought these books just because I felt like it. I didn’t note the titles in order to go home and comparison-shop, or check the library’s website to see if any were available, or put them on a wish list for the next eight months. I thought, These look interesting, so I bought them. In years past, I might have had a sudden stab of anxiety as I realized that I’d just spent money that should have been set aside for a bill coming due. Not this time. This time, there was just the unadulterated pleasure of browsing the philosophy section to the smell of freshly-brewed coffee from the café behind me, “the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.”

Like most people in possession of imaginary lottery money, sure, I could find other things to buy if I cared to daydream about it. Brand new vehicles? A renovated house? A stock portfolio? Luxury vacations? Those would all just be gravy. I’ve achieved my wealth goal, and it was everything I dreamed it would be.

Now That We’ve Lost All the Reasons That We Thought That We Had

By in juxtapositions, nihilism, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

There is no denying that we live in disturbingly anxious and contentious times. Apocalyptic assertions, profanity-laden tirades, public shaming tactics, and crude weapons of moral accusation have increasingly taken the place of rational discourse and the steadfast rule of law. There is something ominous in the air, a faint but unmistakable scent of dissolution. Even before the shamefulness of the Afghanistan debacle, still unfolding as I write, there has been a growing and justifiable disgust with the self-serving incompetence of our leadership classes, and a sense of resignation to a future of ever-growing polarization and irreversible diminution of our national self-understanding. Hard times give rise to troubled thoughts; and when the hardness of the times is in large part a product of our own folly and improvidence, the thoughts are likely to turn inward, like knives in the brain.

— Wilfred McClay, “Has America Lost Its Story?”

****

Although some of these ideals survived the war, they lost much of their intellectual appeal and cultural force. That the West lost confidence in itself was a direct consequence of the war. As Francis Fukuyama remarked, the “First World War was a critical event in the undermining of Europe’s self-confidence.” Or as Jacques Barzun observed, “the blow that hurled the modern world on its course of self-destruction was the Great War of 1914-1918.”

When the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, stated on the eve of the Great War that the “lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our time,” he had little idea just how long darkness would last. Richard Overy characterized the decades following the Great War as “The Morbid Age,” one where cultural and intellectual life appeared to be haunted by expectation of a new Dark Age and an end to Western civilization. This was had more than the usual unsettling outcomes associated with a military conflict. It called into question the self-belief of the political and cultural elites of Western societies.

One of the most momentous and durable legacies of the Great War was that it disrupted and disorganized the prevailing web of meaning through which Western societies made sense of their world. Suddenly the key values and ideals into which the early-twentieth century elites had been socialized appeared to be emptied of meaning…One response to this existential crisis was to lament the sense of loss of the old order. But even those who possessed a strong conservative impulse understood that there was no obvious road back to the past.

The power of destruction unleashed during the Great War, with its unexpected and uncontrollable trajectory, and the failure of the intellectual legacy of modernity to make sense of this tragedy undermined society’s faith in future progress. Despite the rhetoric that this was a “War to end all Wars,”  it was widely understood that four years of slaughter did not resolve any of the problems that caused the conflict in the first place. Premonition of the war to come in the future coexisted with fears of uncertainty about the capacity of society to absorb internal conflicts. Suddenly, the taken-for-granted assumptions about civilization, progress, and the nature of change lost their capacity to illuminate human experience. The prominent English historian H.A.L. Fisher acknowledged in 1934 that he could no longer discern in history the “plot,” the “rhythm and predetermined pattern” that appeared so obvious to observers in the past. “I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave,” he stated.

— Frank Furedi, First World War: Still No End in Sight

****

Is that gash in your leg
Really why you have stopped?
‘Cause I’ve noticed all the others
Though they’re gashed, they’re still going
‘Cause I feel like the real reason
Is that you’re quitting and admitting
That you’ve lost all the will to battle on

Will the fight for our sanity
Be the fight of our lives?
Now that we’ve lost all the reasons
That we thought that we had

Still the battle that we’re in
Rages on till the end
With explosions, wounds are open
Sights and smells, eyes and noses
But the thought that went unspoken
Was understanding that you’re broken

Still the last volunteer battles on..

— The Flaming Lips, “The Gash“

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