bread and circuses

If You Think This Has a Happy Ending, You Haven’t Been Paying Attention

By in bread and circuses

Ed West:

The final series of Game of Thrones came out two years ago and ended with great disappointment, in fact so much so that millions of people demanded that it be remade (which perhaps says something about how mundane our problems were before 2020).

Yet although all those people who called their daughters Khaleesi are probably regretting it now, the show’s finale at least told a certain truth. The attraction of Game of Thrones, compared to most historical fiction, is that alt-history allows its creators to tell an almost purer truth about history and human nature. As amoral as some of the characters are in Westeros, they behave as people would have done in such a situation, devoid of modern idealism or comforts.

Daenerys, the queen over the water, is the only true idealist among the contenders for the throne, and campaigns to end slavery in Essos before liberating her homeland. And yet when she arrives in Westeros she turns out to be far more murderous and oppressive than what went before. Likewise the ancien regime, terrible that it was, had nothing on the horrors unleashed by modernity, which contained far greater lies than the world of chivalry.

In his newsletter, West linked to this article of his from 2021. As I mentioned before, I recently watched the entire Game of Thrones series as a favor to a friend who wanted someone to discuss it with. I loved it. There were a few choices I felt were wrong turns, and the later seasons definitely moved things along at “plot speed” rather than the slower, detailed pace of earlier seasons, but overall, I thought it was very well done. The ending in particular surprised me by how completely it worked. It made perfect sense to me.

That’s why I was amused to be reminded just how unpopular the ending had been. When the finale aired, I remember seeing people complain about it on Twitter, but I didn’t really pay attention. I wasn’t watching the show, and I assumed the iron law of social media was in effect: the discourse is always driven by the loudest and stupidest people. So, again, I went into the series open-minded, knowing little, half-expecting it to conclude in a clown-car pileup, only to discover that the ending was not merely defensible but, in its broad conception, brilliant.

Seven years late? Doesn’t matter. Let me try to talk sense into the sorts of simpletons who sign online petitions and name their daughters after fictional mass-murdering tyrants. And let’s begin by boldly seizing the dragon by both horns.

Those who felt betrayed by Daenerys’s mass destruction of King’s Landing by dragonfire seem to feel that this was some sort of perversion of her character. I would claim that it was the inevitable denouement of it. Ever since she walked into fire and came out unharmed with three young dragons, she had been a messianic liberator who, crucially, believed in her own mythology. A common complaint was that her “turn” felt forced, that we hadn’t been shown enough cracks appearing in her character to accept her transformation into a monster. But the idea that she needed more psychological deterioration quietly smuggles in the premise that atrocity must be preceded by visible mental collapse. The eyes must go wild, the hair must come loose, the villain must begin talking to herself in mirrors. Otherwise viewers feel cheated because the person still looks recognizably human. But Daenerys did not need to become a different person. She only needed to encounter circumstances in which her existing convictions produced different results.

She had always believed that she possessed exceptional moral authority, that resistance to her was usually proof of corruption, and that spectacular violence could cleanse the world and establish justice. In Essos, the story often placed obvious monsters, like cartoonish slaveholders, opposite her, so those beliefs looked heroic. They flattered the complacent assumptions of the viewer. In Westeros, she confronted divided loyalties, a rival claimant, political indifference, personal loss, and a population that did not greet her as its ordained savior. The moral framework remained the same. Only the material fed into it changed. She does not wake up one morning and decide, “I am evil now.” She concludes that mercy has failed, love is unavailable, fear will work, and history has authorized her to act. Plenty of real atrocities have been committed by people who remained coherent, purposeful, affectionate toward intimates, and convinced of their own righteousness. Insanity is almost a comforting explanation because it quarantines evil inside a visibly defective mind.

The contrast with the High Sparrow provides all the clues anyone should have needed. Both embody fanatical certainty armed with power.

The High Sparrow arrives already marked as dangerous in a way that a modern viewer would instantly recognize. He is old, male, religious, sexually censorious, hostile to pleasure, dressed in rags, surrounded by chanting zealots. A Savonarola figure. Modern viewers possess an entire vocabulary for him before he finishes his first speech: fanatic, fundamentalist, theocrat, hypocrite, patriarch. His humility is presumed fraudulent; his moral certainty is understood as a lust for power; every punishment carried out in the name of virtue confirms the diagnosis.

Daenerys receives the opposite treatment. She is young, beautiful, sexually liberated, multicultural, and opposed to slavery. She speaks of breaking chains rather than enforcing commandments. Her armies advance beneath the banners of emancipation, accompanied by dragons and triumphant music. The High Sparrow says that sinners must submit to the gods; Daenerys says that oppressors must submit to history. A Napoleon figure. Modern audiences recognized the High Sparrow as a fanatic because he spoke the obsolete language of salvation; they mistook Daenerys for a hero because she spoke the modern language of liberation.

But the political structure is clearly similar. Both possess a moral authority that cannot be negotiated with. Both divide the world into the redeemed and the guilty. Both interpret resistance not as disagreement but as proof of corruption. Both make suffering purgative. The High Sparrow strips Cersei naked and marches her through the streets for the salvation of her soul; Daenerys burns men alive for the liberation of mankind. He is medieval enough for viewers to fear. She uses the language in which modern power prefers to complacently describe itself.

Daenerys is not merely a secular version of the High Sparrow, though. She is the more formidable historical type: the liberator who becomes an emperor without ever ceasing to think of herself as a liberator. That’s the Napoleon comparison. The revolutionary promise travels abroad on horseback (or dragonback) bringing universal emancipation to peoples who somehow keep having to be conquered before they can enjoy it. Her dynastic claim, personal destiny, and humanitarian mission fuse into one argument: she ought to rule because history, blood, suffering, and justice all point toward the same person.

Her final violence therefore does not require a descent into cartoon madness. She does not abandon her ideals; she draws their final conclusion. The people have failed to welcome their liberation; rivals have failed to acknowledge her destiny; mercy has failed to produce obedience. What remains is fear and overwhelming firepower. The idealist and the tyrant were always the same woman.

I had no trouble recognizing this because I am temperamentally conservative. Varys was my favorite character in the show. He knows that when institutions collapse, “freedom, equality, peace” do not automatically follow. Starvation, armies on the march, opportunists, zealots, burned cities, and strongmen follow. He is temperamentally conservative in the anti-collapse sense. He has no illusions about rulers, but that makes him more afraid of believers with armies.

Thus, the ending was not a betrayal of Daenerys but a revelation of the audience: viewers who instantly recognized tyranny when presented in stereotypical guise failed to recognize it when it flattered their unthinking modern prejudices. I’m tempted to conclude that much of their anger was simply compensation for their embarrassment at realizing how easily they can be manipulated by a pretty face and some stirring rhetoric. I guess I was right after all: the discourse is driven by the loudest and stupidest people.

You Are Just Spare Parts, Aren’t Ya, Bud?

By in bread and circuses, fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, race, the cult of multi

Elisabeth Donnelly:

Those slang examples betray some of the show’s bad habits: Like a lot of dirtbag comedies, Letterkenny can too often over-rely on immature jokes about sexuality, particularly with pastor Glen (who’s played by the show’s director, Jacob Tierney, and I’m not sure what that says).

It also has something of an inconsistent track record on gender stereotypes: While much of the show’s comedy is rooted in finding the softness in overblown masculinity, it tends to draw women broadly, especially as sexpots. Gail, the local bartender and one of Letterkenny’s few characters of color, basically has only one characteristic — that she’s horny. To the show’s credit, later seasons make a point to calm down some of the yowling caricatures, showing the live-and-let-live tolerance that exists in this small town.

Oh, boy. It seems the brain trust at Vox has discovered the Canadian indie comedy series Letterkenny and decided to issue one of their customary explainers. I would say the point escapes her, but that would imply it was at risk of being captured in the first place, and I fear that notion won’t bear scrutiny. Let me interrupt with a little ‘splaining of my own: The show is set in rural Ontario, in the fictional town of Letterkenny, population 5,000. We here at the hermitage enjoy it for its absurd, rapid-fire dialogue, and, as one of us also hails from rural Canuckistan, we appreciate the little details for being a true-to-life representation of small-town life there. It’s not what I would call hilarious, but it’s clever and notably quotable.

Now, to be fair (to be faihrrr) to Ms. Donnelly, the show’s often-raunchy humor is largely by, and for, twenty-somethings. Lots of drinking, fighting, swearing and fornicating. Gail is indeed the most tedious character. But experienced Voxspotters could have probably already guessed the source of this excerpt because of that telltale tic—there. Did you catch it? It’s as predictable as a knee jerking under a doctor’s reflex hammer. Progressives just can’t let their gaze rest on any scene populated by more than three people without doing a quick diversity head-count and pronouncing something to be problematic. I find it especially amusing to see her fume about Glen, the barely-closeted gay pastor (and probably my favorite character). She knows he’s somehow problematic, even if she can’t quite prove it, but oh, when she does, you better believe charges will be brought. Yuk it up while you can, Glen. You can only hide behind the writer/director shield for so long.

But yes, Gail is one of the show’s few “characters of color,” though I expect Donnelly to soon be seen in public with a placard around her neck denouncing her for the wokecrime of “erasing” the substantial native population who feature in the show, led by Wayne’s sometime-girlfriend Tanis. But again, to be fair (to be faihrrr) to our intersectionality inspectors, they might not have recognized the actors as natives (or First Nations inhabitants, as they say up there), since the closest they’ve ever gotten to one is that time they scribbled Racist!!! on a Washington Redskins decal on the bumper of a truck in the parking garage. But I digress. My point is, as an American of pallor who just so happens to have spent several days in rural Canada just a couple weeks ago, I can say that one of the first things you notice when out in public is, well, the lack of black people. It’s like suddenly becoming aware of a background hum that isn’t there anymore. You walk through a big-box store and think, what seems so different here? Oh, right, it’s very, very white. There are no African-Americans, or, I suppose, African-Canadians. The ones you do meet are mostly medical students directly from Africa. What are the writers supposed to do about this? Is the show supposed to be “representative” of rural Ontario or Brooklyn? How typically Ameri-centric for our Voxling to project her country’s myopic obsession with perfectly-proportioned racial pie charts onto foreign communities, irrespective of their unique histories! Shall we add colonialism to the epithets on her placard?

Actually, wait, hold on a minute. We’ve already seen how racial separatism has become acceptable again under a progressive aegis — segregated university graduation ceremonies, “cultural appropriation” (separatism rebranded under a new name), etc. Is it time for forced resettlement to make a comeback? No, no, hear me out. If progressives march people out of the inner cities in order to repopulate and diversify rural communities, would that be for the greater good? We could call it “reverse gentrification,” which would actually make it doubleplusgood. As we know, when you change the word (or the branding), you change the reality. (I can’t believe I give away such good advice for free.)

Anyway, enough of that foolishness. Back to chorin’.

Deus Ex Machina

By in bread and circuses, religion

Ross Douthat:

I was less churlish after finishing Endgame’s immediate predecessor, Avengers: Infinity War, which had a rare weight among Marvel movies because alone among them it let its caped and armored heroes fail, and even saw many of them die. But that failure, the failure to stop the semi-genocidal Thanos (Josh Brolin, but purple) from wiping out half the population of the universe, was always destined to be temporary, and here we are back again for an Endgame in which the remaining superheroes will inevitably find a way to reverse the villain’s victory.

I agree. Guarantees of inevitable victory and miraculous resurrection only cheapen the experience. Pathos dwells in the particular, the irreplaceable, the dissolution of individual perspective within the flow of time. Wait, are we talking about movies, or…?

It Is Not Meet That Every Nice Offense Should Bear His Comment

By in art, bread and circuses, the statusphere

Will Lloyd:

Romain Rolland once complained that ‘there is too much music in Germany.’ Today there are too many television critics in the world. Some of the finest writers of multiple generations spend most of their writing lives recapping last night’s television. Is any of it really criticism, or are thousands of words agonizing over, say, Don Draper, adding up to anything more than the digital equivalent of chip wrapping?

…Imagine living in a world where Mrs Dalloway and Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon exist and thinking that Game of Thrones (which is entertaining, don’t get me wrong) is a work of art. Then imagine making a career out of typing up little takes about it. And then imagine this defining your career as a critic!

Critics who only write about shallow subjects will only produce shallow writing. How television became the most critically examined art form of our century remains a baffling mystery.

Even worse, imagine being an enlightened critic who has scaled the heights of True Art and nonetheless is compelled to hawk his bloggy wares in the marketplace like any other word-merchant, forced to take his cues from whatever the fishwives are yakking about today! Is there no dignity? Is there no honor? Ah, fie, fie upon’t.

I’ve never watched Game of Thrones. However, in one of those strange twists of fate, I have seen almost all of the Marvel movies in the last few months. I didn’t plan this. No, seriously, I swear on my sainted grandmother, last December, I suggested to the Lady of the House that maybe it would be fun to read Shakespeare together. Out loud, on winter evenings, sitting around the fire, and all that. Somehow — and I’m not clear on the precise details — that project morphed into me reading Shakespeare and us watching the MCU productions together. (Cue Henry Higgins singing, “But let a woman in your life…”)

I kid, I kid. For me, popcorn entertainment falls under what the Stoics called “preferred indifferents.” It’s not something I would normally seek out, but it’s not something I’ll make a pretentious spectacle of refusing, either (in this case, when the movies are available for rental at the library we’re already patronizing, sure, why not). I have little patience with those who stack the deck by assembling a greatest-hits compilation of artworks from the previous few thousand years, comparing it to the last few years of pop culture, and sniffing about what a tragedy it is that they should have been born in such a pigsty of an age. I’m of the more sanguine opinion that there is uplifting and ennobling work to be found in many surprising places if you work hard enough to look for it. Profound conversations about perennial themes of human nature can sprout from humble origins, like Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, willing to sacrifice love to his “ends justify the means” vision of a grateful universe in “balance” under his enlightened oversight. Some of the Marvel movies were indeed terrible, but then again, some of Shakespeare’s work doesn’t recommend itself for re-reading either. That’s not an endorsement of relativism in aesthetic judgment, of course, just an assertion that your antiquarian taste alone won’t get you into heaven.

When we last left Mr. Lloyd, he was connecting tendentious dots to claim that Marvel movies were somehow slightly responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It may be ad hominem, but I can’t help but wonder sometimes: when so many people like this come across as bitter, sour, old cranks, why am I supposed to be motivated to contemplate the things they insist I should? Whining and complaining is repulsive. Okay, so you spend your time marinating in the most sublime art ever produced. Is it because of or despite that that you appear to be a stuffy, humorless scold? I understand from reading this that Mrs. Dalloway and Barry Lyndon are the sorts of books and movies I should be enjoying if I want to be thought well of by curmudgeonly critics, but if there are good reasons for doing so, he couldn’t be bothered to elaborate here. All that does is encourage the all-too-common scourge of signaling. Like CliffsNotes for social climbers, these dyspeptic rants provide cues without context. It would be far better to write a paean to the art you love rather than moaning that other people are enjoying the wrong things, but it turns out that even our moral betters are prone to finding fault rather than providing a better example. I find that one of the most tedious characteristics of conservatives, both political and literary: too much darkness-cursing, not enough candle-lighting. It’s easy to get the impression that they’re not lamenting wasted intellectual and imaginative potential so much as the disappearance of a cultural caste system that favored them.

To Hell In a Handbasket of Deplorables

By in bread and circuses, ohferfucksake, the geist of the zeit

Will Lloyd:

The nerds have taken over Hollywood, America and the world. It wasn’t just superheroes either. Zombies, androids, vampires, wizards, aliens, werewolves, intergalactic sagas, Lego, H.P. Lovecraft, Tolkien, board games based on TV shows – though these things were never unpopular per se, they always belonged to children, or to people at the lonelier fringes of the culture. Now they are the culture.

It’s true that a lot of pop culture seems perpetually juvenile. It’s also true that a phase of extended adolescence seems to be the new normal — not just in the case of entertainment choices, but also concerning the delayed onset of careers and families, the traditional markers of settled adulthood. How much of this is a sign of cultural enfeeblement and decadence? Alternatively, how much of it is attributable to the new “problem of abundance” created by technology, which allows individuals an increasing plethora of options with which to customize their lives, even as it disrupts the stability of many career options? In other words, is the end nigh, or is this all just the latest sound and fury in the open-ended evolution of a species with no inherent telos? There are many interesting angles that could be explored regarding this topic. Unfortunately, since we inhabit a deeply-stupid media ecosystem, all slippery slopes must lead to you-know-who:

If many people in a society feel like outsiders and the major mass culture tells them loudly and constantly that this is a noble thing to be, then what kind of politics will you have? There are battalions of pollsters, number-crunchers and political scientists who could explain what happened in 2016 – but a Trump presidency became possible first with the popularity of characters like Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne.

If the Venn diagram overlap between Comic-Con attendees and MAGA-hat wearers didn’t exist, it would have to be invented. It’s like a more mainstream version of intersectionality — all bad things are interconnected. The popcorn entertainment I disapprove of is basically the same thing as the worst political trends in the world. It’s convenient how that’s always the case. Ironically, just a few paragraphs earlier, he claimed that Marvel movies “reflect Americans [sic] paranoia right back at them to pack out theaters.” Apparently they also serve as a foundation to allow critics to make specious, not to say paranoid, connections in order to pack out a word count.

There’s a Reason We’re Supposed to Be Afraid of This Night

By in bread and circuses, foolosophy

Regrettably, the woke left doesn’t have a monopoly on scrutinizing pop culture productions for convenient political messages. Kyle Smith and James Pinkerton recently cheered the new Halloween slasher movie for its supposed “conservative” message. It’s a shame, not just because politics rots hearts and minds and the last thing we need is every corner and crevice of everyday life becoming politicized for ephemeral gain, but because the broader theme of the movie is far more interesting.

I decided on a whim to take a couple hours off today and go see the movie. As I said recently, I hadn’t been to a theater in probably eleven years or so. But I love autumn, and I love Halloween, and it just wouldn’t be the same watching the movie on TV sometime after New Year’s, so off I went to partake of some seasonal spirit.

Fate hangs over the whole film like a funereal shroud. From the temporal significance (set forty years to the day after the events of the first film) to the personal (Michael Myers and Laurie Strode, both essentially frozen in time, waiting for nothing else but to meet again and resume their battle), the question that makes the film more interesting than just another scary slasher flick is that of fate: Who questions it? Who rebels against it? Who accepts it? And what are the results? Both the podcasters and the psychiatrist are obsessed with getting Myers, who hasn’t uttered a sound in forty years of confinement, to speak, to explain himself. Fate, or evil, if you prefer (sometimes hard to tell the difference), of course remains silent, and goes methodically about its grim business. Whether we approach the inhuman, incomprehensible mystery of fate from a touchy-feely desire to master it and render it harmless, or whether we seek to ingratiate ourselves to it by becoming cold and remorseless ourselves, we inevitably fail. In this particular tragic tale, both types come to a gruesome end. Only those who accept fate and meet it on its own terms stand a chance.

Dark thoughts for a dark time of year. Happy Halloween.

Who Cares What Picture We See?

By in books, bread and circuses

Whereas once I was at least a movie-a-week moviegoer, I now see, apart from movies shown on television, six or eight or at most ten movies a year. Sweet but unserious music, elegant food, lovely movies — these are among the shaded water holes in the desert of life; and now one of them is drying up. I find myself filled with resentment.

— Joseph Epstein, “The End of Moviegoing,” The Middle of My Tether

I recently had cause to reflect on the last time I saw a movie in a theater, and as far as I remember, it was the Simpsons movie in 2007. I went at the invitation of a younger relative whom I rarely see; dinner and a movie are her preferred means of catching up. Before that, I’m not sure — I saw the Blair Witch Project in 1999, but I can’t recall being in a theater again in the intervening eight years. Like many people, I’ve just never really enjoyed the theater experience.

But it’s not just a matter of preferring to watch movies on my own TV at home with my own snacks in my own chair, either. I think the last time I rented a DVD was in early 2009, Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla. I watched a few series through Netflix over the next couple of years, like Oz, The Wire, Six Feet Under and The Mighty Boosh, but I let that subscription expire a long time ago. As for watching TV shows, I’ve always been hopelessly behind the times. I love Scrubs, which I discovered late, of course, but I’ve never seen an episode of Friends, Seinfeld, or Sex and the City. In recent years, I’ve completely ignored Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and True Detective. Needless to say, perhaps, the Emmys and the Oscars are completely irrelevant to me. The Lady of the House occasionally enjoys silly comedies like The Librarians, so I did sit through that series with her (“this makes Firefly look like The Wire,” I said), and we watched the DVDs of the movies starring Noah Wyle after finding them at a library sale. Similarly, we watched a few Christopher Guest films one holiday weekend a couple years ago, and we’ve lately enjoyed the web series Letterkenny. “Seen any good shows lately?” is not a useful conversation-starter around here. Most of my TV and film references are of ’80s and early ’90s vintage.

It’s not that I’m ideologically opposed to movies and films; it’s just that books and music are my preferred means of filling leisure time, which is hard to come by. There’s simply no room to fit a few hours of screen-staring in there, and no real motivation to try. Tom Wolfe wrote that movies replaced the novel as “the great naturalistic storytelling medium of the late twentieth century” as fiction writers renounced naturalism and disappeared into their minimalist navels and up their magical realist colons. Perhaps I’m just old-school, preferring my intense storytelling via the printed page? Alas, no, I’m just as deficient there — I never read Steinbeck, Dos Passos, or Hemingway; I never mingled with Balzac, Zola or Tolstoy; I only acquainted myself with Dickens, Faulkner and Fitzgerald long enough to complete school assignments. Almost all of my reading is non-fiction. I apparently prefer my sense-making of the world to come via descriptive, rather than imaginative, prose. I do enjoy Tolkien-esque fantasy novels for entertainment (but, uh, I never actually read any of Tolkien himself, nor, um, did I see the famous films). Am I culturally autistic, or just a philistine?

Cover Your Mouth

By in bread and circuses, socmed

For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves.

— William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads

There was an absurd piece making the rounds on social media the other day, written by a women’s studies professor (of course), which claimed that the recent SpaceX launch was just another example of patriarchy in action, because isn’t it just like men to think they can use up resources here before nonchalantly heading off into space to despoil virgin frontiers with their phallic rockets, etc. You can find eye-rolling material like that every day, of course; the only thing that was even slightly eyebrow-raising at all about this was that it was published by nbcnews.com. One of the people retweeting it commented that this was more proof that toxic intersectionality doesn’t stay confined to undergrads on campus, but leaks out and pollutes the groundwater of mainstream society too.

Typically, though, when we talk about the threat of campus radicalism to social norms, we picture it as the work of committed ideologues. While there are certainly plenty of earnest preachers of the intersectional gospel, one can’t help but notice that there are some rather more prosaic factors involved in broadcasting — normalizing, if you will — the message to a wider audience. The structure of online media incentivizes a race to publish inflammatory garbage for easy clicks, and the jaded boredom of an audience which “craves extraordinary incident” acts in concert with “rapid communication” to turn grotesque deformations of intelligent, thoughtful conversation into “great national events.” Hardly anyone involved in creating this climate of ridiculous opinion needs to be a true believer, but we all have to live under it regardless.

If, indeed, social media is to bad ideas what the first cities were to infectious diseases, one simple solution would be for far more people to stop carelessly coughing and sneezing. Ironic amusement can be just as much of a vector as ideology for spreading asinine notions. Intellectual bacteria don’t care why they get passed from host to host as long as they do. Wash your hands before linking or retweeting.

The Sigh of the Oppressed Creature

By in bread and circuses, fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies

There are many things to laugh at in this Marxist rant about the counter-revolutionary wrongthink of Pokemon Go, but after some tough deliberation, I think this has to be my favorite part:

The map of your neighborhood you see when you play the game is a GPS map, something originally designed to help steer guided missiles.

It’s just so…so…mwah!… so gratuitous, so out of the blue! I mean, you expect to see theoretical jargon, you expect to see references to Marx and Heidegger, and you expect, oh my Lord do you expect to see the writer fuming about the way in which the bovine masses prefer their false consciousness and commodity fetishism to their revolutionary potential, but nothing so perfectly paints a picture in words of the futile pounding of tiny, ineffectual fists as this little aside. It’s like he had a sudden attack of self-awareness, realized the absurdity of being forced to labor in the clickbait factory while holding onto a faint hope of salvation through a discredited religion, and made one last, desperate attempt, through some kind of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon-logic, to halfheartedly fling some shit against the walls of the system in the hope that something finally sticks. Yeah, man, I was ready to write you off as just another doctrinaire leftist with all that talk about changing the experience of reality from alienation to liberation, but that point about GPS, man, that really made me think, you know?

Fix It with Your Tiny Fist There

By in bread and circuses, socmed, the statusphere, tribalism

FdB:

 

But where is the prescriptive element? I mean, I get that Ramsey wants white Americans to rise up and work to fix things. But how does he propose that we actually inspire them to do so? Sure, it should be enough to show them the reality to provoke them to fight for change. But should is a word of remarkably little relevance in the real world. 50 years after the most important Civil Rights legislation, it seems obvious that just pointing out that our society is unjust is not enough to provoke the white majority to create change.

In other words, the piece recounts in exacting detail a political problem but does nothing to establish a political solution. It begs for a next step– “here’s what I would do to convince white Americans to get on board with a political movement against racial inequality”– that it never takes. And in not taking that next step, it falls perfectly into line with the general, bizarre trend, the trend to say “it’s not the job of oppressed people to educate you.” Really? Then whose job, exactly, is it? I hear that all the time, and I find it such a bizarre attitude for self-described activists to take. To call yourself an activist is precisely to say “It is my job to educate you.” Change is active by its nature. The status quo doesn’t need activists. Change requires that you make it your job. So where’s the political strategy? I don’t pretend that it would be obvious or easy– in fact I think it’ll be incredibly hard– but, well, 200 years ago you could buy people, and the ability to do so was deeply embedded in the economy. Things can change, but you’ve got to make them happen and you have to motivate people who aren’t inherently predisposed to be motivated in order to do so.

Freddie is asking rhetorical questions, of course. He’s patiently trying to lead some incredibly stupid horses to water. I, on the other hand, don’t believe that these particular horses actually want to drink. That bumper sticker image up above (courtesy of Tom Tomorrow) perfectly encapsulates what they’re all about. The “political” twitosphere is nothing more than a bunch of people complaining that “somebody should do something about this, that and the other fucked-up thing!” Not them, of course. They’ve already done their part by writing a multi-part tweet that went viral, dintjasee? They’re the “ideas” crew. They just want to heave the ball of their righteous wisdom down the online lane and watch all the opponents of progress scatter like pins.

That’s why I put “political” in scare quotes. These people are not activists, they just play them online. They’re the political equivalent of Monday-morning quarterbacks. Real activists are far too busy with the never-ending, thankless hard work required to make actual political change happen in a world where, honest to God, believe it or don’t, three-quarters of the inhabitants don’t even use Twitter, let alone know that some celebrity totally won the Internet with their post about gun control in the wake of another mass shooting (which continue apace despite near-unanimous opposition on social media, strangely enough). They don’t have time to waste on social media posturing and performing for several hours a day.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not condemning a tabloid site like Gawker for failing to draft intelligent policy proposals, as if they’re capable or willing. They’re only playing their role as the cool kids’ table in the social media cafeteria, just as they were designed. I’m merely underlining the point that the “political” web exists almost entirely for signaling and venting, nothing more. It’s a way for people to yell at their TV in public. As Freddie keeps saying, if you want to win enough support for unpopular ideas to turn them into policies and laws, it’s suicidal to act as if the truth and righteousness of your position is self-evident, and if your opponents can’t see that, well, it sucks to be as stupid as them. And yet, that’s the attitude you see displayed time and again. Even at a more intellectual site devoted to the history of ideas, where you might reasonably expect a post titled What Is The Left, Anyway? to offer up a more substantial vision of what it even means to be a leftist today, you get this kind of vapid rambling, where empty snark is about as close to a serious point as you come.

If you want to put your politics into action, put the computer to sleep and go find some activist groups in your area to get involved with. Spend your free time and weekends working with them. Or go find people who don’t already agree with you, but are at least reasonable enough to converse with, and try to sway them to your way of thinking. Any of those things would be more meaningful than sitting on your ass reading yet another post about how awful and stupid your opponents are. What are you going to do with that information? Vote for Democrats? You were doing that already! Vote even harder for Democrats? Please. The “political” web is just another form of entertainment for people who are too status-conscious to be seen keeping up with the Kardashians.

Yeezus Christ Pose

By in bread and circuses, fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, ohferfucksake, silent moving pictures

Sady Doyle:

Being a Kanye West defender in 2015 is a thankless task. Yeezy makes it hard: he’s frequently offensive and (I’m told) deeply unlikable. He’s been called arrogant, narcissistic, materialistic, pretentious, rude, insensitive, and insane. But this is exactly why I like him.

 

 

Kanye West keeps making points that are more or less correct. But to avoid engaging with those points, the media draws focus onto his personality. We call him a crazy man so that we don’t have to hear what he’s saying.

 

 

Kanye can mess up. Feminism, particularly, tends to be something he stumbles over. While he very vocally defends Kim and Beyonce from all critics, he also portrays women in his songs as sexual territory to be claimed in battles between men (“I’ll fuck your Hampton spouse / come on her Hampton blouse,” etcetera). His most recent comments about his ex, model Amber Rose, are a good example of how Kanye can slut-shame and objectify with the worst of them. I should be outraged. I am disappointed. But where some may see irredeemable misogyny, I see something more like human complexity. Admittedly, being a white woman flavors my reactions. As a man of color, Kanye is both privileged and oppressed.

 

 

If you are political in public, you too will experience some tiny fraction of what it is to be Kanye. Everyone who writes about oppression online knows the baiting, the casual abuse, and the desire for something your enemies can use to craft an unflattering narrative. Feminists online are subjected to such harassment that many are beginning to retire. You know who hasn’t retired? Kanye West has never once been shut up by public disapproval, although the public has disapproved of him, loudly, for over a decade.

 

(Previously)

You Say You Got a Real Solution, We’d All Love to See the Plan

By in bread and circuses, fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies

Oh, I’ve been workin’ like a rented mule. I could use some comic relief:

For the past year Brand has been airing his views on the Trews (or the True News), a daily YouTube broadcast. In recent weeks, he has discussed democracy in Hong Kong, the importance of embracing real politics by ignoring Westminster, and whether Obama should give back his Nobel Peace prize. In the book, his conclusion is simple: capitalism is kaput, celebrity charity won’t plug holes, revolution is the only solution. Yet it also feels like a bit of a cop-out: he insists all this can be achieved through love, peace and understanding.

Would he ban private education? “Yes.” And private health? “Yes.” He would “cull corporations” after they have served their purpose. Does he really believe all this can be achieved without coercion? “Yes.” How? “By focusing on the important issues. We’re not even talking about moderately wealthy people – we’re talking about a society so unequal, so ludicrous, that 85 people have as much money as the 3.5 billion poorest in the world.”

…He grins like a shark. “Yeah, I love it out here. This is where I belong. When I look at them Eton-educated people that govern us, I ain’t afraid of those people. I am excited. I’m going to enjoy this like nothing else, because for once I’m on the right side of the argument. And this is the right time. I feel it. I feel it. The means exist.”

I ask if he normally talks so fast. “Yes. Yes. So now, why I’m excited and why I endorse not voting, is because the farther politics drifts to the right, the better it is. Good. Antagonise people. Let’s get to the point where people are no longer just satisfied with iPods, iPads, iWatches. To the point where people go, ‘I’ve had enough.’” Is he advocating rioting? “It doesn’t have to be through rioting. It can be through total disobedience, non-payment of taxes, non-payment of mortgages.”

…Another man approaches: “Got any spare cash?”

He hasn’t, because he’s celebrity royalty. “I ain’t got a penny, mate. You got any money, Simon?”

Brilliant, I say, digging into my pocket. I’m interviewing you about the revolution and you’ve not got a couple of quid to give to this fella.

As Brand talks to the homeless man, the posh boy says Brand has got a touch of Marx, Che Guevara and Jesus. “But really, parallels shouldn’t be drawn because he’s in a league of his own.”

Hmm. I think I’d go for the John Lennon comparison instead. I could totally see Russell protesting a war by staying in bed for a week, or singing “Imagine no possessions” while owning an air-conditioned closet for his fur coat collection.

As amusing as Brand is, it must be said that his is just the kind of mostly-inoffensive naïveté you expect of entertainers. I’m more incredulous at the fact that the Guardian considers this kind of thing important enough to devote a lengthy article to. I tend to read them, especially their Comment Is Free section, primarily to make myself feel better about the vapid state of American media.

We’re Dissin’ Them!

By in bread and circuses, conspicuous crusading, race

Katie Rife:

Despite consistently negative media attention on the topic (and negative reaction to that negative media attention), apparently two-thirds of Americans still believe that the name “Washington Redskins” isn’t disrespectful toward Native Americans. This stance, most fervently defended by people who own warehouses full of “Washington Redskins” T-shirts, comes under fire in the season 18 premiere of South Park.

There’s a couple things I love about this. One, the dismay over the Myrrhkin people’s refusal (for once) to be swayed by news coverage like the good, docile little automatons we’d like them to be, at least when it’s convenient for our purposes, and two, the fact that, confronted by the resounding failure of enlightened progressives to make an impression on society’s collective consciousness about this issue, the entirely predictable reaction is to sneer about society’s collective intelligence and character, or the lack thereof, to be more precise. Maybe a little less time circle-jerking with the other A.V. Clubbers over which song you hate this week and a little more time spent trying to patiently convince people who don’t already agree with you might tip the balance more in your favor, champ. I know, I know, that just might entail having to go talk to people who actually listen to Nickelback unironically, people who watch network comedies instead of gritty HBO series, or people who still go to brick-and-mortar stores to buy CDs like animals or something, but nobody said it would be easy. Or maybe being Correct On The Internet is all the consolation prize you need.

As for this tempestuous teacup itself, I happened to be talking about it with Arthur via email a couple weeks ago, so I’ll just reprise that here:

You know, I of course have no problem with the idea that society may have evolved to a point where blunt references to people’s skin or race just become too distasteful for use as sports mascots. But to be frank, I don’t give a noisy wet shit about the hand-wringing self-regard of middle-class white progressives, and you can’t help but notice that what this is really about is the ability of said progressives to enjoy their Sunday entertainment without a guilty conscience (at least until they start to feel more guilty about subsidizing an industry in which young men with few other career prospects enter their mid-thirties with crippling injuries and brains resembling tenderized meat). I feel it’s safe to say that none of them are sparing much of a thought, let alone a lifted finger, for actual, living American Indians, some of whose lives on reservations more closely resemble life in sub-Saharan Africa than the Yoo Ess of Ay. They get terribly exercised about an abstract symbol, though, one that tarnishes their enjoyment with an allusion to bigotry. What matters most to them is sanitizing an aspect of their lives as opposed to bettering someone else’s, allowing them to pride themselves on their personal distance from any unclean thoughts or words. Of course, I don’t insist that anyone is obligated by some divine calling to devote their time and energy to charity work or activism, but I can’t stand the sanctimony of people who act like these superficial crusades are morally significant. 

Television, You Got a Vision

By in bread and circuses, foolosophy

Let me try to intuit what a traditional conservative would take away from this level of watching television. “The people have lost their moral center, and lack appreciation for the edifying arts of yore, debasing themselves to partake of the passive hedonism of our fallen age.” Perhaps I stated it pompously, but I suspect you get the picture. What about a liberal? “The people lack the disposable income to avail themselves of the outdoors and finer pleasures of life, and so must make do with the accessible joys of television.” In other words, for the conservative the passive television watching public have missed the mark of their own free will, they have sinned against what their life was meant to be. For the liberal television occupies the role in the lives of the proletariat it does because they lack the economic wherewithal to enjoy all the finer things they obviously must yearn for.

But there may be a different answer. The people watch television because they prefer television to what the cultural elites, Left and Right, would term the “higher arts.” The soul of man is not noble, and it is not made in the image of a divine being on high. It is that of a squalid savanna ape rutting in the open and greedily thrusting sweets into its mouth until waves of satiety wash over its corpulent physique.

News You Can Lose

By in books, bread and circuses, extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy

We are incredibly well informed yet we know incredibly little. Why? Because two centuries ago, we invented a toxic form of knowledge called ‘news’. News is to the mind what sugar is to the body: appetising, easy to digest — and highly destructive in the long run.

…In the past twelve months, you have probably consumed about 10,000 news snippets — perhaps as many as thirty per day. Be very honest: name one of them, just one, that helped you make a better decision — for your life, your career or your business —compared with not having this piece of news.

…I would predict that turning your back on news will benefit you as much as purging any of the other ninety-eight flaws we have covered in this book. Kick the habit — completely. Instead, read long background articles and books. Yes, nothing beats books for understanding the world.

Let’s Give ‘Em Something to Talk About

By in bread and circuses, media/propaganda, socmed, waiting for the barbarians

Alan Greenblatt:

News has always presented a mixture of information and entertainment, says Daniel Hallin, a professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego. Important events such as the Boston Marathon bombing and the deaths of Nelson Mandela and Margaret Thatcher rank high on lists of this year’s most-shared stories.

But in an age when the digital readership of every story can be measured, the balance has shifted more toward the fun stuff.

“News in general is just much more market-oriented than it once was,” Hallin says. “Now, when click-through rates and ‘most tweeted’ become important criteria, the assumption is much more that you give people what they want to see.”

True, but it’s been my contention for some time that even “serious” news is presented in such a context as to make it, too, a form of entertainment. You don’t have to go far on the web to find people arguing over this, that and the other with a vehemence that suggests life-and-death importance, but Neil Postman saw the inherent emptiness of such activity almost three decades ago, before the Internet allowed it to become a full-time occupation for many:

But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action…You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: what steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge, of course, is giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagra of similar opinions, and convert them into — what else? — another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

To update his observation for our age, of course, we can substitute “social media activity” for “giving your opinion to a pollster”. Most of us don’t “do” anything with the stories and articles we consume except use them as ammunition to win meaningless arguments online. If I were of a conspiratorial or Marxist bent, I’d think the twitosphere was capitalism’s most sinister-yet-ingenious invention. A giant playpen to keep people from getting their hands on anything important, letting them spend all their time and energy cultivating a narcissistic self-image based on having the correct opinions on issues and events over which they exercise absolutely no influence.

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