May 2014

Crows Are Pulling at My Clothes, The Wind Got My Fingers Froze

By in omnigatherum 1 Comment

Lori Rotenberk:

Its symbolism is universal, but the original scarecrows were nothing like the now familiar straw-stuffed icon of Halloween. Scarecrows, sometimes bearing an animal skull or rotting produce, were placed in fields in the spring and were burned after the Autumn harvest in celebration, their ashes returning nutrients of potassium and nitrogen to the soil. In Great Britain they are known as hodmedods, murmets and Hay-man, Tattie bogle or bodach-rocais (old man of the rooks). To the Bengali’s it’s a kaktadua. A straska to the Czech’s. The Russians, a pugalo, just to name a few.

A definitive history of the scarecrow has never been penned. What is known is that among the first field “gods” were Japanese “kakashi”, a deity of knowledge and agriculture such as Kuebiko who is unable walk and therefore simply stands in the fields. American folk art historians say scarecrows are in a class known as “ephemerals” in that they don’t last long. Snowmen and harvest figures are also counted among the ranks of ephemerals.

My P.R. agent informs me that you humanoids the “masses” like it when larger-than-life figures such as myself descend from the Olympian heights long enough to reveal some trivial “humanizing” details of our irrelevant personal lives to make us seem more approachable and humble, even though I personally would release the hounds upon any of you who actually got within 500 yards of me. So, with that in mind, here’s one of those touchy-feely little factoids for you to treasure: I collect ornamental scarecrows.

By birth, temperament and aesthetic inclination, I’ve always been a child of the autumn. It’s when I feel most vibrantly alive. And so, for reasons I only dimly understand and could never really articulate, I’ve always been attracted to symbolic images of anything autumn-related. The first scarecrow I got was a ceramic Hallmark figurine, as a gift one October. Around that very same time, I discovered Peter Haining’s book, the cover of which you see above, in a second-hand bookstore downtown. Oh, how I love that book. I’ve reread it dozens of times over the years.

From that point on, I visited arts and crafts stores, florist shops, curio shops and roadside apple butter festivals to collect any interesting and unusual scarecrows I could find. I even pilfered one from a hotel’s front desk one year, such is the depth of my passion. Well, come on, I obviously appreciated it far more than they would have. I liberated him, is how I prefer to look at it. Anyway, I collected around a hundred before it became hard to find any unique types I didn’t already have. (Yes, I suppose that makes me a bit of a scarecrow hipster — they were cool before they became, like, all mass-produced and uniform. I only collect extremely creative ones now. You probably haven’t seen any like them in your big-box crafts store.) They range in size from three feet tall to one inch. I have them scattered in various places around the house, mostly on the screened-in back porch, but I hope to one day have an area constructed especially for them.

I’m always delighted to find references to them in movies, novels or any other facet of pop culture. Two songs in particular that I like which make poetic use of the image are Ministry’s “Scarecrow”, which imagines Jesus himself as the original man of straw, and Beck’s song of the same name, in which the broken, forlorn narrator, after a failed relationship, finds himself “Standing all day keeping watch/over all the treasures we lost.” (Beck also refers, in a different song, to the “scarecrow shadow of the Nazarene”.)

And We Know We Won’t Be Missing Out on Anything

By in socmed, solitude 19 Comments

Jacob Burak:

Welcome to FoMO (Fear of Missing Out), the latest cultural disorder that is insidiously undermining our peace of mind. FoMO, a spawn of technological advancement and proliferating social information, is the feeling that we’re missing out on something more exciting, more important, or more interesting going on somewhere else. It is the unease of feeling that others are having a more rewarding experience and we are not a part of it. According to a recent study, 56 per cent of those who use social networks suffer this modern plague.

…Freedom from other people’s opinions and release from social comparison is a triumph reserved for very few. The self-discipline strong enough to withstand the power of FoMO is no less rare. In 2012, the University of Chicago social psychologist Wilhelm Hofmann studied the use of willpower to resist daily temptation: his participants found it far easier to abstain from food and sex through willpower alone than to stay away from online networks, where the failure rate was 42 per cent.

I am here to preach the saving grace of moderate misanthropy. When you realize that most of what you read online is superfluous garbage, and that most people aren’t worth the time it takes to get to know them, this onerous burden will dissipate into nothingness like so many instantly-regretted and quickly-deleted tweets. But perhaps you weren’t fortunate enough to be born with a natural resistance to the company of others. In that case, I would recommend maximum indulgence. The only way out is straight on through the other side. Go ahead, join all the trendy social networking platforms, try to sample every empty-calorie viral story, try to be au courant with every lulzy meme. Be like a kid trying to scarf his entire bag of Halloween candy in one sitting. As you later kneel, retching into the toilet, just think of your discomfort and regret as weakness leaving the body.

Folk Devils

By in conspicuous crusading, gender, macho macho men, media/propaganda, ohferfucksake 15 Comments

The normally-discerning 3QD links to the latest from the ever-ridiculous Amanda Marcotte on the topic that even a hotline psychic could have accurately predicted she’d be writing about:

Well, I think I have a theory, and yes, it’s sexism.

Now, attentive readers — and you all are attentive, aren’t you? You’re not like the stupid readers that NPR pranked on April Fool’s Day who comment on articles they haven’t read, are you? — will have noticed that the above quotation is nowhere to be found in the linked article. Yes, I confess, I pulled the ol’ switcheroo on you. That’s actually from a post she wrote last winter where, once again, astonishing, I know, in the neverending Rorschach test that we call life, Amanda saw sexism where others only saw meaningless ink. Anyway, the point is, that blurb is pretty much the Platonic Ideal of her writing, the sine qua non, a journeyman free agent that could sign a contract to appear in just about any one of her posts and articles. She is to blogging what Clayton Homes is to housing construction — a supplier of easily-transported, quickly-assembled, prefabricated building templates whose slipshod construction doesn’t take long to reveal itself. I mean, she’s barely had time to cash the check for this job, but look at the drywall already cracking in this section:

But the internet and the PUA community have created a self-haven for young men engaged in this self-pitying discourse, encouraging them to cultivate that chip on their shoulders, wallowing in misogynist accusations that women en masse are failing them by not giving up the sex these ostensibly unappreciated men believe they deserve. With so many men spending so much time egging each other on, and trying to top each other when it comes to blaming women for their own pitiful lives—to the point of advocating for the denial of basic rights to women—it’s little surprise that one of them would finally work up the nerve to get his “revenge” for all these imagined slights.

When Dimebag Darrell was murdered on stage by a gunman a decade ago, an opportunistic hack could have similarly described it as an inevitable result of the nebulous “culture” of angst, aggression and macho violence that heavy metal is popularly associated with, or even singled out the unfortunate comments made by Philip Anselmo in particular shortly before the shooting. It’s “little surprise” that one of those moshing meatheads would finally decide to bring a gun into the pit, isn’t it? Likewise, we’re all familiar with earlier attempts to blame the suicides of depressed and/or drug-addled adolescents on particular songs by Ozzy Osbourne or Judas Priest. It’s “little surprise” that impressionable, disturbed youths would be pushed over the edge by an emotionally manipulative power ballad glorifying death or suicide, isn’t it? But the, uh, surprising fact remains that such extreme occurrences are exceedingly rare. Millions of fans manage to find healthy catharsis within the scene without taking things to their supposed logical conclusions, which should lead one to wonder if the logic isn’t missing something, perhaps.

No, of course that analogy is not to say that misogyny doesn’t exist, or that you can’t find valid examples of men saying awful, offensive things about women (especially if you seek them out). It’s simply a reminder that an unsympathetic outsider’s perspective can easily morph into a good old-fashioned moral panic, which is increasingly what all this hysterical focus on online misogyny is coming to resemble.

Marcotte would like to have it both ways — the rare example of an Elliot Rodger is proof of how inevitably dangerous her ideological opponents are and how we live in a culture that at least passively endorses misogynist ideals, but the fact that most maladjusted sexless adolescents will never be guilty of anything worse than stupidity or boorishness, or the fact that many men somehow manage to altogether resist the omnipresent siren song urging them to treat women as inferior objects will, of course, not count as disproof; the definition of misogyny will simply become more elastic in order to remain relevant. She’s a seasoned veteran at this sort of thing, though. Several years ago, if you remember, the progressive blogosphere was going apeshit over how the murder of Bill Sparkman, the Kentucky census worker found hanged with the word “Fed” written on his chest, was so obviously the inevitable result of violent, anti-government Teabagger rhetoric. When it turned out a couple months later that he had committed suicide while trying to make it look like a homicide, lesser mortals would have slunk away in shame to contemplate the perils of instapunditry, to think twice about publicly jumping to preordained conclusions based on incomplete breaking news reports. Not our heroine, though. No, in fact, it was still the Teabaggers’ fault for making us believe that they were even capable of such an act in the first place. If it should somehow turn out that there’s more to Elliot Rodger’s rampage than first met the eye, you can safely bet the house that misogyny will be to blame for that, too.

Grabbed a Book and Read the Cover

By in bonsai minimalism, books, santutthi, socmed No Comments

Karl Greenfield:

What we all feel now is the constant pressure to know enough, at all times, lest we be revealed as culturally illiterate. So that we can survive an elevator pitch, a business meeting, a visit to the office kitchenette, a cocktail party, so that we can post, tweet, chat, comment, text as if we have seen, read, watched, listened. What matters to us, awash in petabytes of data, is not necessarily having actually consumed this content firsthand but simply knowing that it exists — and having a position on it, being able to engage in the chatter about it. We come perilously close to performing a pastiche of knowledgeability that is really a new model of know-nothingness.

NPR’s April Fools’ Day web story “Why Doesn’t America Read Anymore?” went viral on Facebook, where pranksters in on the joke linked to the piece and others then argued that they do too read and indignantly shared the link with exhortations to “read the story!” without actually clicking on it themselves to see that the only content was the revelation that the whole thing was a prank: “We sometimes get the sense that some people are commenting on NPR stories that they haven’t actually read. If you are reading this, please like this post and do not comment on it. Then let’s see what people have to say about this ‘story.’ ”

I finished reading The Vertigo Years over the weekend. It was a look at the major cultural, political and technological trends in the first couple decades of the twentieth century, leading up to the Great War. After reading one particularly poetic passage near the end, I stopped for a minute and just marveled at the exquisite style of it. I thought about how much time, research and vision would have to go into writing such a book. I tried to imagine, from my layman’s perspective, how one would even go about analyzing the ocean of information pertaining to such a culturally fecund period, how one would even begin to sort though the chaotic jumble of threads in order to weave the relevant ones into a coherent narrative. I remembered things that Mark Forsyth had said about the art of rhetoric and things Jonathan Gottschall had said about the deep structural patterns of storytelling and felt grateful for having the opportunity to read a book by someone who had done a masterful job with both elements.

What I appreciated most of all was the sense of context and perspective that comes from reading a good book. It’s the sort of thing that makes you realize how much of what you read on the web is merely stimulating, or perhaps I should say agitating, without being informative. There are a lot of interesting-but-fragmentary perspectives, but very few people with the ability to put them into meaningful context. Too often, information appears as if in a funhouse mirror, distorted and distended. Of course, if you think of social media as being a boisterous party environment, where everybody is trying to entertain and be entertained, it makes sense. Conversations tend to be fast, hyperbolic and superficial. Spend too much time talking in-depth to one person, and you might miss out on something exciting happening across the room. But again we find that limits and boundaries on the horizontal plane are essential if there is to be any depth to explore. Some perspectives require your undivided attention to reveal themselves. You have to excuse yourself from the party, block out the overstimulation and narrow your focus to get there.

Killing in the Name Of

By in fresh hell, media/propaganda, tribalism 2 Comments

More than a decade ago, Tom Tomorrow said something worth dusting off and repeating:

I have seen it suggested that the advantage of the blogs is their immediacy, but I would also posit that it is their Achilles Heel. The first time I heard of the Instapundit site, I actually thought it was a joke. Instant punditry? Surely, I thought, this must be some sort of sly meta-commentary on the tendency of pundits to instantly, and by implication thoughtlessly, formulate opinions before they’ve had a chance to really mull things over, do some research, consider the implications. But no — it’s a serious self-designation, trumpeting what the author apparently considers the strength of the blogs — the ability to draw conclusions even more quickly than normal pundits.

And so, before the bodies had even cooled in the latest mass shooting, representatives of various monomaniacal obsessions had quickly moved in to claim the victims as martyrs to their respective causes. Same as it ever was. As for me, I will just offer two tangential observations:

• The NRA must hardly believe their good fortune that some other “—RA” group is taking most of the heat for this one. Only one letter apart in the alphabet, but oh, what a difference it makes!

• Irony delights me, but I still find it amazing that the same people who will use a snarky #NotAllMen or #YesAllWomen have no problem turning around and essentially claiming that #NotAllMentallyIll people are dangerous and violent. Well, no, but…

Verily, Verily, I Say Unto Thee (3)

By in calvin and hobbes, verily 2 Comments

This transcript of a talk by Wilfred McClay on Michael Oakeshott’s place in the history of modern conservatism, and this essay by Fred Sanders on the importance of the medium and the message in Calvin and Hobbes (and what that means for evangelicals, but I skipped over that part), are two things that I found well worth reading this week, though I don’t really have anything to add to them. Perhaps you might also find them worth your time.

Opinions and Assholes

By in art, books, conspicuous crusading, identity, the statusphere 2 Comments

Once again: it’s not the “snobs” who close doors and forbid some kinds of art; it’s the anti-snobs. It’s not the “snobs” who go on and on about the illegitimacy of the art they don’t like; it’s the anti-snobs. It’s not the “snobs” who try to legislate their own taste, it’s the anti-snobs. It’s the anti-snobs who are conservative, smarmy, closed-minded, arrogant, and rude. It’s the anti-snobs. They’re the ones who shrink the world of what art can be and can do. They’re the ones living in caves, sniveling about how disrespected they are, trying with all their might to forbid the possibility that other people might like other things than they do. It’s just like I’ve been saying.

I dunno; you can read the Grantland piece Freddie links to, and then you can compare it to this from William Giraldi in TNR, which almost approaches moral panic-mongering over what it means about us as a culture that we tolerate so many philistines in our midst. (Speaking of which, despite the lack of top hats and monocles among the staff at that execrable magazine, this seems to be a recurring theme with them.) In Giraldi’s furious rant, note especially how the critical judgment of the art itself is inseparable from the scornful, snobbish assumptions about the intelligence and moral character of the people who willingly consume it. I don’t see any sense in being invested in the idea that one “side” of the great brow divide is worse about this than the other; it seems evident to me that humans, as social apes, are naturally obsessed with monitoring, judging, policing and condemning the thoughts and actions of the rest of the troop. Hermits are the only ones too removed or too crazy to care about the haunting fear that someone, somewhere is “doing X wrong” and having the audacity to be happy about it.

I mean, look, even a casual reader here should know how important books are to me, what a burning passion I have for reading. Take a moment, if you would, to contemplate just how often I talk about what I’m reading, how often I use a passage from a book as a springboard for my own musings. So, then, imagine what a massive, throbbing, gaping hemorrhoidal asshole you have to be to make me feel sympathy for non-readers. To wit:

Tell me the books you read and I’ll tell you who you are; tell me you read no books and I’ll tell you there is no you.

This is so breathtakingly stupid, so gratuitously obnoxious, that I am nearly struck dumb with amazement. This kind of assertion doesn’t deserve a counter-argument so much as a pillow held firmly over its face. And oh, sweet Lord, the irony; even as Leon Wieseltier leans over the battlements to bellow at Steven Pinker, it turns out the reductionist barbarians were inside the gates of the humanities all along!

He Went Metric Years Ago. The Guy’s Hat’s Got No Brim

By in conspicuous crusading, language, race No Comments

TCWOWS:

Hi, it’s me. ‘Niggardly’. I just wanted to talk about the way you use me. Got a sec?

I‘ve always been honest with myself about my uncanny resemblance to the word ‘nigger’, even though we have no common etymological ancestors or definitions. I’m neither proud nor ashamed of it – it’s a weird linguistic fluke and nothing more.

I’m not exactly an everyday word. I’m no ‘pants’ or ‘food’ or ‘door’ or ‘hand’.  When people need to describe the state of being ‘ungenerous or stingy’ most of them just use ‘cheap’. ‘Cheap’ gets a lot of action, cuz it’s short and sweet. And once the word ‘nigger’ became more or less universally reviled, I figured my usage would drop off even more. When gangsta rap came along I hoped maybe people would start using me as slang. Like, ‘Yo, my nigga, that’s a muthafuckin’ niggadly tip you left the waiter.’ But that didn’t really catch on. Them’s the breaks in the world of words, though, There’s lots of words that don’t get used often because they sound like other words; just ask ‘coccyx’ and ‘angina’.  You roll with it.

The post goes on to lament the author’s suspicion that some people continue to use the slightly-archaic word because it hits the sweet spot of implied racist intent while technically retaining plausible deniability. Eh, I guess it’s possible, but my amateur fascination with the evolution of language has convinced me that attempts to morally sanitize word usage will forever remain a couple steps behind people’s inventiveness. In fact, while reading this, I found myself wondering whether the more clever racists have actually moved on to some new linguistic convention similar to Cockney rhyming slang, where synonyms like “stingy” or “miserly” become code words for referring to, you know, those people.

On a more lighthearted note:

When I Was an Alien, Cultures Weren’t Opinions

By in identity, marriage, samesecks, the cult of multi No Comments

Suzanna Walters:

Tolerance is not just a low bar; it actively undercuts robust integration and social belonging by allowing the warp and woof of anti-gay animus to go unchallenged. Tolerance allows us to celebrate (hysterically) the coming out of macho professional athletes as a triumphant sign of liberation rather than a sad commentary on the persistence of the closet and the hold of masculinist ideals. Tolerance allows religious “objections” to queer lives to remain in place, even as it claims that a civilized society leaves its homos alone. Tolerance pushes for marriage equality and simultaneously assures anxious allies that it won’t change their marriages or their lives.

And there you see the crux of the tolerance trap: If an ostensible concession doesn’t challenge straight lives, it’s not very radical, and if it does challenge them, it’s not a concession gays and lesbians will win. The marriage assurances are similar to gay responses to right-wing attacks on queer parents: Researchers and advocates argue that “no harm” is done to our kids, that there is no difference between gay and straight parenting. But couldn’t we imagine the strong case? Shouldn’t we argue, instead, that our progeny would/could grow up with more expansive and creative ways of living gender and sexuality? Shouldn’t we argue that same-sex marriage might make us all think differently about the relationship between domestic life and gender norms and push heterosexuals to examine their stubborn commitment to a gendered division of labor?

Once you sift out all the pomo gender studies-speak, it seems to me that her essay balances uneasily on two contradictory premises. On the one hand, she decries “tolerance” as an ideal because, she claims, it depends on the idea of immutability — if gays are truly “born this way”, then we have to grudgingly tolerate them, even if we aren’t enthused about it. This interpretation might come as a surprise to J.S. Mill, whose classic formulation of tolerance as a liberal ideal did not depend upon a notion of people being born to think a certain way. At any rate, as is typical of radical leftist perspectives, she doesn’t like the fact that “tolerance” implies a power imbalance. In a truly just world, no one should ever have to beg for concessions from anyone!

But then some of her complaints seem to be those of an aging radical unhappy that a new generation is content to accept queerness as just another insignificant lifestyle choice, rather than being a truly different subculture, forever opposed to the dominant culture’s mores. These damn queer kids today, they’re just content to be allowed to get married, join the army, and be proportionately represented among TV sitcom characters! Well, I just have two pieces of free advice, which are worth every penny: one, as long as you’re wishing upon a star for things to be different than they are, don’t forget to finish with “…and a pony.” And two, if you’re really into fetishizing intractable differences between cultures and subcultures, you might not want to be so scornful toward an ideal that takes for granted an imperfect state of affairs in which deep, important differences will always exist between people, and seeks to create the conditions for them to exist together without serious conflict. If the pragmatic reality is that you will always be a minority, both demographically and philosophically, disparaging the ideal of tolerance for being less than perfect is a bit like sawing through the branch you’re sitting on.

Mr. Freedom, Big Time Talker-Upper, Thank You Very Much, But No

By in conspicuous crusading, foolosophy, the statusphere 1 Comment

Adam Gurri:

Let us start with a consideration of what exactly it is that telescopic morality entails. The question, as the Vulgar Moralist put it, is what the proper sphere is for morality. The telescopic friends and loved ones I have known over the years have obsessed over problems far away, which they were unable to meaningfully influence. Moreover, they were righteous about this, and either implied or outright told those of us with more mundane concerns that we were immoral for ignoring the cosmic injustices occurring around the world on a daily basis. Indeed, by doing so we were perceived as partly culpable for the fact that such things continued to occur.

The claim, in short, is that the proper moral sphere is the whole world and encompasses all of humanity, and focusing primarily only on those things touched by a typical individual’s life is myopic and indistinguishable from egoism.

Most of the time this is merely annoying. People talk big or (as the Vulgar Moralist puts it) attend rock concerts to end hunger, but don’t actually make any meaningful personal sacrifices. My piece last week was largely a response to the combination of this attitude with the perpetual outrage machine that the Internet has been turned into. This combination results in real consequences to the objects of ire regardless of whether or not the outraged people have carefully investigated the context—and I am highly skeptical than any significant proportion of them ever do. The combination of gluttony for righteousness, unquestioning acceptance of the particular context a story is presented in, and entitlement without sacrifice is a recipe unlikely to produce virtue.

Some interesting back-and-forth in the comments over there. It’s curious to me that anyone would feel threatened or offended by this perspective — for me, it seems to be simply saying that, one, there is an annoying class of people, especially on social media, who treat moral issues as a positional good, and a pinprick to their balloon might do them some good. Two, choose your battles with care. Believe it or not, youngsters, the average person (not you and I, of course; we’re all above average here, naturally) has a finite amount of time, energy, money, knowledge and optimism, and it doesn’t go very far in terms of making substantial change happen in the world. Make it count when you put it to use. And three, wow, those conspicuous crusading types are really annoying.

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