Middle Brow Cultural Taste

Cultural tastes are more ingrained than social class.

The “Partisan Review” crowd of the Forties through the Seventies, had a very clear sense of how culture and society interacted with one another and was best stated abstractly by Dwight Macdonald in an article and then a book published in 1960, called “MassCult and MidCult”. That view could be considered a rejoinder to the Cultural Marxism which vied during the same time with a key and distinctive understanding of how culture and society interacted. Cultural Marxism was an intellectually heavier point of view and was a response to the fact that economic Marxism had not accurately predicted the eventual immiseration of the working class so that they would overthrow capitalism either through Leninist violence or Bernstein-like use of the democratic ballot box. To the contrary, economic capitalism flourished. The Fifties were an affluent society and labor unrest turned to detailed collective bargaining arrangements about wages and perquisites where both sides wanted to make a deal so the corporations could get on selling their cars and workers could get their raises and benefits, never mind whether the work itself was arduous or mind numbing. The cultural Marxists insisted, however, that there was a price for economic prosperity. It was that people were spiritually impoverished by late stage capitalism. The population as a whole was subject to alienation in that their work and their selves were lost to meaning and that the mind itself had lost the ability to engage in reasoning, that meaning, as Horkheimer put it, in the title of his book “The Eclipse of Reason'' whereby people  became mindless automatons, society not run by selfish capitalists, but going on its way on its own, a totalitarian society without a Fuhrer. The best statement of this view on the American scene was Herbet Marcuse’s “One Dimensional Man”, published in 1964, which portrayed Americans of all classes, including the capitalists, obsessed with capitalist fetishism, buying until it hurt, with deodorants and slightly more upscale cars as fueled by tv and radio jingles so inane as to dumb down the populace.

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Exclusive Social Movements

Whether you have or only try to parade allies makes a difference.

Sometimes a sociologist finds a simple description of a social situation that cuts through a great g slighted or dismissed or badly handled and so resentful of the ways in which the social world worked. The idea is a repeat of Hegal’s idea that the slave knows better than the lord what are the conditions of the slave’s role, but Merton had generalized that deal of ideological verbiage and makes other argumentation superfluous, so much so that once the social characteristic is identified it seems so obvious that it had always been understood as such. Robert Merton did so in one of his late essays about insiders and outsiders. Addressing the political and ideological turmoil of the Sixties, he distinguished between people who were or identified with people within institutions and those people who were outsiders, each side claiming that they better understood what was going on in social life. Insiders included politicians and academics and corporation executives who knew how the world worked, understood the mechanisms of the social world, while outsiders were people who understood because they were on the receiving end of the results. They included poor people and students and people of color and women, members of each of these groups having suffered from and outraged about their conditions. Merton was like Hegel in pointing out that the slave understood his condition more than did his master, but Merton was transferring the issue to be a general state of knowledge, each with its own claims, rather than a  difference in situations. Which group, the insiders and outsiders, had more legitimate knowledge or was there such an unbridgeable gap that a person could choose the wisdom of one or the other and that was all there was to be said? Professors pontificate and students talk straight and that is just the way things are never mind the intricacies of their alternative explanations. Either you don’t trust people over thirty or you don’t.

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Cold War Nightmares

The prospect of nuclear anihilation was and is terrifying.

No atomic bombs were ever used during the Cold War and by the time of the end of it in 1987 it had become clear that Mutually Assured Destruction had worked to deter the use of atomic weapons. They had not been abolished by law, as had chemical warfare, but like chemical warfare were not useful as military weapons because chemical weapons were unreliable and nuclear weapons more than reliable for wiping out the country that used it first. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Millay said to Russian military leaders exactly what the United States would do if the Russians used even tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine and that warning was heeded. Nuclear weapons were off the table and the threat that the United States had or would develop a protection against nuclear weapons, however much its cost and implausibility, had been part of the decision by the USSR to give up the Cold War.

But the prospect of a nuclear exchange that would devastate the United States, the Soviet Union and Europe dominated all their imaginations during the time of the Cold War. Nuclear warfare was the apocalyptic event that everyone dreaded even while the various homelands remained intact and the United States and Europe became even more prosperous while the Soviet Union was in economic decline, which was the real reason the Soviet Union had to capitulate. It couldn’t come close to meeting American military expenditures. So the Cold War was filled with forebodings and we have to rely on books, films, and academic studies of what atomic war would be like to provide the texture of the Cold War, to spell out what never eventually happened but what might well have been.

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War in the Fifties

The Cold War was the war of the century.

I was already an experienced political hand when I opened up my sixth grade first issue of Junior Scholastic of the fall term which announced the invasion of South Korea. I had been following the events in Korea in the New York Post ever since the war started in June. And much before, in 1948, I had listened to H. G. Kaltenborn say on the radio in his staccato voice that  Dewey would win and both I and Harry Truman went to bed after that news and were both surprised in the morning to find that Truman had won though my personal choice of the American Labor Party, whose standard bearer was Henry Wallace and backed by Socialists and Reds, had not even won New York State and so did not even have a symbolic victory.

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Breaking News

Breaking news doesn’t tell the whole story.

There have been flashpoints in the last seventy-two hours that suggest something important is happening in some of the ongoing issues of our times that make them part of the temper of our times: the legal issues about whether Donald Trump had tried to overthrow a presidential election, an issue only some three years old but destined to remain with us historically; the issue of the Israel Hamas War, which goes back to the creation of Israel since 1948 or if one cares to ever since Jews have been an irritant to others, which goes back for thousands of years; and the issue of American border immigration, which go back to the 1850’s when the Know Nothing Party originated in its rejection of Irish Immigration. The first two flashpoints do not upon analysis as being of significant importance and it is uncertain whether the third will be, which suggests that flashpoints don’t tell what is really going on, They are driven instead by the need for breaking news to fill up media hours rather than the contexts which explain the ongoing issues. Yes, the times are full of issues but the abundance of flashpoints is just the fluff to fill airtime.

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Daydreams

   Daydreams are structued as stories.

Imagining  oneself as having another life, different from the one you have lived, is one version of a daydream, and there are other kinds of daydreams that will be referred to later. What happens in that particular daydream, let us say in Boise, Idaho or Lincoln, Nebraska, is that a person imagines how he or she took one or more forks in the road and so came to live in a different place or time, a satisfying conjecture given the pleasures of time travel romances and disasters, people finding love in another age, or fining the world on the other side of apocalypse, both of them the case in the granddaddy of the literary version of the genre, E. G. Wells’ “The Time Machine”. The thing about daydreams is  that they are not random thoughts but are stories, filled with incidents and described situations and even dialogue, and so are subject to the restraints of stories and so not to be dismissed as mere reveries. 

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The Taste of the Eighties

 What it felt like back then.

The temper of the times for a particular decade can be described by the social upheavals that mark the decade. The Thirties were the Depression; the Forties were theWar and its reconstruction; the Fifties were the affluent society and the civil rights movement, and so on and so on, with each decade having its characteristic sociological events. It is difficult to characterize decades with their cultural emanations in that culture is unevenly produced. The Thirties was sparse on novels though it did produce memorable films and popular music. The Forties had an outpouring of drama, both Miller and Williams doing their best work. The Fifties included novelists and writers such as Bellow and the immigres Nabakov and Arendt, which did give a sense of the deeper meanings of the decade. But it is also possible to speak of what we might call “the taste of the times'' referring to the felt rather than the deeper meanings of a time, what is experienced and readily available, even as that quickly passes and so has to be recovered or exposed from memory as the way it was, never mind the deeper currents. I am reminded of this more restricted focus by having looked at the first season of “LA Law” a network tv series originally aired in the Eighties, which does not seem so long ago but which the usual process of cultural amnesia has abolished until it was made available this fall on Hulu streaming, a service that did not exist when  “LA Law'' first aired. Think of those episodes as a way to recover Eighties fads and preoccupations even if current cultural commentators recently offered in the New York Times find the series quaint or distasteful rather than engaging the truths of the times they told.

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Advocacy and Analysis

 Being reasonable is always the uphill climb.

The academic world has been replete with the clash between advocacy and analysis, particularly in the clash between Palestine supporters and Israel supporters. Advocates stand by their beliefs and deny the claims of the opposite side even if I think the arguments unequal in that the historical evidence supports Israel’s history and the Palestinian argument is that relative suffering makes you right on the merits. It just depends on when you start your grievances: the expulsion of the Jews to Persia or the Nakba, the withdrawal and removal of Palestinians from Palestine during the Israeli War of Independence. In academic terms, and preceding for decades the present war, advocacy meant promoting a conclusion so as to consult only the evidence that suits you and framing the terms as inevitable while analysis meant going where the facts and ideas will lead-- new facts, clarified ideas-- so as to find out something new. Academic life consisted of honing arguments so that it was more analytic rather than just advocated. So students who argued that the United States was a colonialist could indeed cite the results of tube Spanish American War but had to stretch the term to include the Marshall Plan which reinvigorated Western Europe and colonialism had to be transformed into a Cold War between the only two superpowers, which is a kind of warfare rather than the exploitation of the poor rather than the rich, however much subsidiary people like Katanga or Vietnam became embroiled in that conflict. The entire academic enterprise is endangered, so the argument goes, if people don’t attend to complexities, to make distinctions, rather than marshall only the arguments on one's own point of view. Rationality is itself at stake, as it always has been as when American Firsters could make a case that the United States could avoid entanglement with Europe but could no longer do so after Pearl Harbor, while George Wallace could defend “Segregation Now and Forever” because Americans of African descent seemed inevitably backwards. African-Americans were inevitably tainted by their origins, but that was advocacy rather than analysis because Wallace was not facing up to African American advancement, that nurture overcame what seemed to be nature.

Closer to home and in a political rather than an academic setting, was the debate on Fox News a few nights ago between Gov. Desantis of Florida and Gov. Newsom of California . Their fireworks provided some entertainment, though the Liberal media panned the event as so vituperative as to diminish both debaters, which is what happens in most recent debates, where Nikki Haley seems reasonable by comparison even if she is largely a trimmer. Look with some care at part of the Desantis-Newsom debate just so as to clarify the difference between advocacy and analysis and why that is important.

Sean Hannity started the debate by claiming he would be an impartial moderator and then offered as his first question a gotcha one aimed at playing to the Conservative playbook. He asked Newsom why it was that so many Californians in the last two years had left California while so many people were moving to red state Florida?  Hannity pointed to the fact that taxes were higher in California than in Florida. Newsom’s answer was rather lame or so fatuous that he had not prepared an answer. He said more people were leaving Florida for California than Californians going to Florida which was beside the point about the overall trend. Newsom also vaunted the educational and economic preeminence of California, which did not go to the point of why people were leaving. 

Hannity had leveled a logically flawed advocacy argument to make his point. He had asserted a fact  and then inferred whatever he might offer as the explanation of that fact without detailing the fact or the connection to the inference. If I had been the analyst I would have asked about the fact. A two year finding is hardly much of a trend in demographics. Second, were there any studies of interviews of emigres to examine why they left California? Without those, there are only suppositions that are not evidence but predilections already believed in, which is that taxes rather than other matters is the main issue. As an analyst, I would look more largely as to why people move from their home state. People have been moving south ever since air conditioning and the end of legal segregation. California is spreading to satellite states like Nevada and Utah. My own family moved to Utah just three years ago because it was their ancestral home and because, yes, they found the political climate more amenable. But does that mean that going was a sign that Utahns are more insular rather than willing to intermix with people of different persuasions? That would put leaving California a bad trait rather than the good one of leaving a high tax state. As an analyst, forget whether the outcome is good or bad, only why it is happening, just part of the reasons people do thighs. Just look at the factoid bauble and don’t justify a fact with a premeditated directive but engage in facts as Newsom tried to do when he said only rich people in California had high tax rates. Analysts look at complexity not simplicity. 

I am afraid that media and public discourse very much engages in the flawed reasoning I pointed out in areas other than that of Californians going East. You take an uncertain fact and then deduce the premise that makes the fact acceptable. That reasoning leads to very extreme conclusions. Trumpists assert the fact that Jan. 6th was a lark in the park because they do not want to believe Trump was trying to overturn the government and when press footage showed otherwise it was possible to consistently say the footage had been doctored, which meant there was a vast conspiracy afoot to mislead  Trump. Facts will not get in the way of the original premise however outlandish the inference required to keep the proposition true. Analysts, on the other hand, are free to go where they will go unburdened by having to reach a set conclusion. Analysts who examined civil rights could still admit not as a concession but just as a fact that inner city gang violence was a problem  for Black advancement.

Conservatives seem particularly inclined to posit some fact, however dubious, and then infer as obvious any pet policy they may already favor.  Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, who is intelligent and articulate but not very sophisticated about social life, worked that in a committee hearing recently when he insisted that his witnesses answer whether there were two sexes or four or six? He was flabbergasted to find the experts could not answer that simple question. It did not occur to him that sex was a sliding scale or that biology, being what it was, would not occasionally have mismatches between sexual identity and sexual anatomy and that was as natural even if much more rare than the  usual association, and to be managed as best doctors can without adding the inference that helping people to adjust to that situation was horrific rather than humane. After all, only a minority of people are lactose intolerant and rather than blame them for that condition or try to convince them to change their minds, milk companies provide lactose free milk. Conservatives tend to say that whatever is uncustomary is unnatural.

For their part, contemporary Progressives engage in a similar short circuiting of reasoning but with a different concept than nature. They regard as a fact that minority and poor people are exploited, the rich receiving their ill-gotten gains at the expense of the poor and the minorities. Black slave labor allowed capitalism to flourish, some people say, and so the present day injustice is how much wealthier the rich have become rather than how just crumbs more in taxes on the rich would allow providing generous entitlements to the poor and the minorities. The inferences or compensations offered by Progressives are far afield and have to do with pet projects like reparations or District of Columbia statehood or voting rights legislation rather than looking at them on their individual merits. Why isn’t D. C. absorbed into Maryland? Why not bring back the full Voting Rights Act of the Sixties? Who would qualify for reparations? Kamala Harris? An octoroon?

Sometimes the reasoning is so short-circuited that there is no way for two sides to argue. Pro-Palestinians will say that the slaughter on Oct. 7th was done by the Israelis or that Palestinians had the right to kill women and children because of the indignities in Gaza.Then there is no alternative than war to settle the matter and the Israel-Hamas War is inevitable and very long lasting, for decades or centuries. The ideological gap between Democrats and Republicans seems almost as deep a cleavage in  that both Biden and Trump regard the other as anti-democracy. But advocacy can still be modified by analysis by most citizens, I like to think and I find it difficult to imagine how the two sides would engage in military combat however many Ultraconservatives imagine themselves as the descendants of Minutemen and Confederates. Just defeating Trump in 2024 would ease the advocacy, voters  forced to choose between an  insurrectionist and an institutionalist, no ifs and buts about it. A binary ballot cuts through the qualifications, the specious facts and the dubious inferences.  

Rationality is always at stake always and not only in demented times. Marcuse claimed that modern capitalism was irrational as could  be evidenced by listening to the nonsense of jingles and the insatiable consumer demands foisted by the advertisers even though rich Romans also engaged in baubles like nightingale tongues. Are they also capitalist? And why are multiple brands of bbq chicken wings so terrible? Or buying a car that shows your career accomplishment? Rather, the eclipse of reason is ever av available and cooler heads have to prevail, as Jefferson did when he explained why the Colonies needed to sever themselves from Great Britain as opposed to voicing a slogan such as “Give me liberty or give me death” just as centuries later people voiced “Better dead than Red “ in advocating against the Soviets rather than figuring a way through that. Stay calm and carry on being analytic even in bad times.

The Hostage Question

Hostages are poignant and casualties are horrific.

Hamas is each day releasing 50 hostages in exchange for 150 people held in Israeli jails. The whole world watches the daily event of the hostages taken in ambulances to Israeli hospitals, footage of reunions, and snippets of what their captivity had been like, even though it means stalling the invasion of Israel to destroy Hamas because of its massacre of southern Israel on  Oct. 7th. President Biden says the release of the hostages has been front and center ever since the hostages were taken and that  rescuing the hostages results, Netenyahu states, because of Israeli military pressure rather than pondering the regrettable casualties that are the result of pursuing the war. Why are the hostages so important even though there are only hundreds of hostages while many thousands of Palestinian civilians, including women and children, die as the result of Israeli artillery. Isn’t that disproportionate?

The reason hostages are seen as more precious than civilians is existential. Hostages are particular while civilian casualties are statistical. A hostage is a person absconded and in grave danger of dying and so suspended between life and death and that leads to, well, suspense, which means concern for whether that particular person will die, a person full of feeling and personal lives, those recounted by un-hostaged relatives, and therefore precious because of their anguish. On the other hand, civilians are at any moment either dead or alive, mourned if gone but that over and done with, or else still alive and subject to the chance of a bomb falling on them or on the building which collapses on top of them. Some people have bad luck while others don’t even though the odds are worse in some places rather than others. Palestinians remind the world of the number of casualties even as Israelis have to remember what happened on Oct. 7th so as to explain why reprisal was justified. The media find the story of hostages a better story to cover because of individual biographies while all the media can show of casualties are bodies in shrouds, but the media is telling the story of the hostages because of its inherent poignancy: a person captured or released who was available to be killed.

There are precedents other than war of the poignancy of people under a sword of Damocles suspended under a thread, and so in recognition of immediate death, but still alive. Think of the Chilean miners a decade ago who were trapped underground world wide television closely following for days their eventual rescue while not covering the auto deaths on the highways at the same time  except as a record of a particularly grisly one without covering the people who had lost live ones. Car accidents are just statistical and to be alleviated by seat belts and driverless cars rather than saving the guy who gets behind the driver’s seat to some unknown fate. Also think of Billy Wilder’s most cynical movie,”Ace in the Hole”, from 1951, where newspaperman Kirk Douglas creates dispatches of a trapped miner that leads to a carnival atmosphere and Douglas extends the time until he would be freed so as to do it more safely until  the point that the miner dies, which is now a lose rather  than an inspiration for hope, which is what everyone admires as a token of humanity, however manipulated by Douglas for his own advantage.  

A way to overcome both hostages and casualties is to point to the grievances of one party and neglect those on the other side to the point that Palestiniians will claim that Oct. 7th was done by the Israelis to itself while Israelis will say that Gaza residents did not overthrow the Hamas regime and so those Palestinians afre being liberated by Israeli attacks on Gaza. A bit of hyperbole that is rhetorical and self-serving. But underneath the faux humanitarianism are the historical grounds for each side. Israelis were on the land for three or four thousand years and Palestinians claim that the land is part of the essential Muslim territory. There are quibbles about which side engaged in bad faith, the Israelis expelling the Palestinians during their War for Independence, the Israelis claiming that the Palestinians mostly left when they expected to return to their homes when Arab armies had taken over the area when they won the war. Both sides justify their own history, though I do find telling that the Palestinians never accepted any one of the many partitions offered to them. The Palestinian view “from the river to the sea” can be considered either principled or foolhardy or both.

It is no wonder then that political scientists will abandon historical rights and consider only realpolitik: what is useful rather than what is right. Japan had interests in getting scrap metal from the US and access to Indonesian oil so as to pursue its war against China. The US had been leery of Japan becoming a great Pacific power and so had conquered the Philippines in the Spanish American War so as to keep it from Japan. But realpolitik can go just so far. Hitlrr did not need a war for Germany to be prosperous and glorious. His daring risked too much. George Bush did not need to recapture Kuwait even if Iraq's control of it raised oil prices. The US adjusts to OPEC without going to war with it, Sunni nations useful for longer geo-political ends.The Palestinians and the Israelis are implacable foes for religious reasons and the US sides with the Israelis for domestic political reasons based on the idea that Israelis are westerners and Arabs are only slowly becoming that. Cultural affinities triumph over geo-political interests.

There is another way to explain the plight of hostages and casualties that takes advantage of their two properties: hostages as poignant and casualties as horrific. Biden uses both of them to accomplish his own goal, which is to get things to settle down rather than in war solve the problem once and for all, despite what Netenyahu and his most ardent supporters may want. Biden said a few days after the hostage taking that freeing the hostages was the first priority and would encourage humanitarian pauses so as to allow that. That Biden view may well have been heartfelt even though any pause would allow Hamas to regroup. The best Netanyahu could do was to use the poignancy of the hostages to say that only military pressure would allow Hamas to release hostages. And Biden, apparently with his active intervention, arranged for a trade between time and hostages, putting aside the Palestinians left out of jail. Then Biden talked about extending the days for exchange and possibly extending the situation into a full truce, which is counter to the Netanyahu position that Hamas has to be destroyed or else it will rise again and massacre Israelis. But Biden is concerned that the Palestinian casualties are so considerable that it will stain Israel permanently, there always people to blame the Jews for doing what other nations do regularly, as was the case when  the US engaged in unacceptable behavior in Vietnam, killing civilians that were called “combatants'' because they were running away from American helicopters. So, by their own terms, Hamas would have won the war they expected: able to fight another day, thanks to American intervention. Biden would hope the Israeli people would kick out Netenyahu and elect a government that wpoui;ld supp[ort a two-state solution. Biden is sincere in what he says about Hamas and Israelis but is also cagey in the way he tries to leverage American power to his own ends, which means looking in the long run for a gradual accommodation between Israelis and Palestinians, over the course of generations, so deep is the chasm between them.

Formalism and Updike's Saga

How both parents and the times make you what you are.


Formalism is the view of aesthetics that only the dynamics of the artwork or the text is to be consulted in garnering what the artwork or text means regardless of the biography or circumstances of the artwork or text. What is important is the work itself and anything else is either unimportant or a mere adjunct of or an inconclusive hunch about the work itself, as when Jane Austen said that she was going to create a heroine in “Emma” who was unappealing. The novel itself shows that whatever Austen meant to do was not necessarily what she did do. She might have gotten her conception of her own character wrong, as happened, critics generally agree, when Shylock got away from Shakespeare and became more trod upon than Shakespeare had originally thought him to be. A work is itself superior to the intentions of the work. This is a very radical view of art and literature in that it applies high standards, gleaming meaning from the work rather than from the commentaries written about it. That puts Dante’s “Divine Comedy” as inferior to, let us say, “Henry V” because Dante’s stories can’t be understood without the footnotes, however succinct and profound is his poetry, while “Henry V” makes sense in itself, the machinations of international relations, whether or not the play is accurate to its time and is not foreshadows the fact, after all, that Henry V died soon afterwards and did not take over France for very long. Very different from commentaries are T. S. Eliot’s footnotes  in “The Wasteland”, which are part of the text and so allow a reader to wonder what Eliot was doing with poetry by including footnotes. Is a text restrained or expanded as poetry by including within it its own footnotes?

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What is Society?

Society is a concept not a thing.

What is a society?  It appears to be a group of people, like a tribe or a nation state or a civilization, which is self sufficient in that it provides in its institutions all that is required to provide a distinctive way of life for a people. The trouble is, though, that these entities are not self-sufficient, as when the Arab civilization has to sell oil and is beset by the  inroads of Western civilization and so grapple with what is essentially Islamic, becoming more and more like a set of nation states. And, more grandly, what is society itself, that understood as a simile for the sea in which the fish swim? What is that overarching but central and essential object for sociologists to study? Take note that in looking at that large item a choice is being made between examining the thing as a whole rather than the basic  building blocks of which it is made. Biologists can look at living bodies for the various functions  they undertake, such as respiration and digestion and reproduction but can also look at the life of the cell and so see that as the real meaning of biological life. Similarly, sociologists can study the role  or the norm as the building block which animates society as that appears to be as the overwhelming and encompassing social entity which is indispensable to mind. 

A usual and workable idea of society is that it is the intersection of all the social forces that are in play with a society and so make people familiar with it. So a society is made up of social class and ethnicity and institutions of politics and religion and the mass media, and everybody responds to these structures and so are in society whether or not people think of society as an object in itself. Society recognizes us even if we don’t recognize it. But that is the rub. People can recognize they have familial obligations and interests without thinking themselves trapped or maybe safe within its styrictures. Society is therefore the opposite or the residual of all the actual relations people have, in which case sociology sets society in opposition to the individual, ever diminishing the ability to act as individuals as when political sociologists ever more restricted the voter to make an independent rational decision about who to select by showing that voting was contingent on social class or education and less and less on beliefs or doctrines.The opposition between the individual and society as the two negations of one another is also manifested in psychological life when people are unhinged from their self directed mental decision making by the mind being invested and overcome with totalitarian or cultish thinking or by the pernicious effects of social media. It is always possible to find the pernicious cause that leads the individual to become absorbed by society, as happened when people thought that comic books were the poison that destroyed reason before comic books became regarded as an art form. 

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Differential Distribution

Conservatives have an easier argument

The default setting in the battle between Liberalism and Conservatism, which is the same thing as the battle between equality and authority, is Conservatism. It always seems to get the better of the fight. The people of Israel in the Old Testament did not have to decide to have a monarchy. The authors of “Deuteronomy” went even further in reducing the idea of freedom inherent in “Exodus” by making the government an institution which drained people of their independent judgments by berating them. Christianity starts out, as Hegel argued, as proclaiming as its primary insight the individuality and equality of all people in the eyes of God, and yet that is replaced in a few centuries or, it might be said, in a few generations, by an hierarchical order for the administration of the sacraments and the supervision of moral life. 

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Contemporary Anti-Semitism

Marxist-Leninism did it.

These times, following but also before the Oct. 7th, 2023 massacre of Israelis in southern Israel, show the worst anti-Semitism since when the German guards left the concentration camps because of the approaching Soviets, Americans and Brits, which was in early 1945, when I was four years old, born and being bred in New York City because my mother and a sister had left Poland for America in May, 1939 and so were not exterminated as were her other brothers and sisters and brethren. I want to untangle the various forms of anti-Semitism and particularly the version of it currently in vogue, never mind that anti-Semitism is a persistent matter some 2500 years old.

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Filling the Imagination

Only religion and secularism can do that.

The educational magic of diversity was experienced by me long before the term “diversity” became a cliche for describing getting students from different points of view to intersect on a campus. I was early in my freshman year at college when I met up with another freshman and he had prepared for college at a Catholic high school. When I said that I didn’t believe in anything, he said with considerable anger that everyone has to believe in something and so the only question is what people agree to that is based on faith rather than scientific truth. And, yes, it was true that I believed that humankind was engaged in a road to progress and that knowledge would make us free, but what I meant was that I did not subscribe to any supernatural belief, one beyond the tests of factual or conceptual truths where one might make an educated inference. I could believe that ethical life was important without claiming that ethics were a sacrosanct or holy entity the equivalent of religious belief, such claims by definition to be beyond reason, such as the Virgin Birth or God parting the Red Sea. So, there.

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The New Speaker

Herblock, the political cartoonist of the Forties through the Seventies  who severely criticized  Richard Nixon, said that even Nixon would get a clean shave after Nixon  became President and so Nixon would be judged on the basis of what he did after he was elevated to that office. I approached Jim Johnson, the new Speaker of the House, in the same light, giving him the benefit of the doubt when, in his inaugural speech, Johnson was filled with high sounding religious invocations. Johnson said that in the Declaration of Independence God had created men as equal rather, I suppose, than that rights are a human creation, but Christians are often unfamiliar with or find it incomprehensible that Jefferson was a Deist who thought the rules of nature are the only things that apply. Johnson also said that public officials have been anointed by God, which I took to mean that when elected officials had a supernatural mandate, they should meet the highest moral standards in their legislative crafting, eschewing petty matters,so as to be Godly. So Johnson’s opposition to same sex marriage and abortion could be read as taking seriously the most important and fundamental matters and so to be respected even if I disagree with him.


My willingness to be respectful to Johnson lasted all of twenty four hours. It ended when he said that his only response to the mass murder in Lewiston, Maine was that it should be addressed with prayer concerning the evil amidst people. No legislation required. Johnson certainly doesn’t think only prayers should be addressed to the evils of abortion. He wants laws concerning it enacted. But no laws on gun control or even just quicker interventions to take away guns from mentally ill and dangerous people. So Johnson is just the same old MAGA Conservative, with Trump credentials, rather than one of the high minded religious sorts. His religion is not independent of the shibboleths of the Right about gun control, which believes that people have a right to bear arms so as to protect the people from a national army. But if that was the case, they would not stop at allowing people to have assault rifles rather than the rifles carried in the Revolutionary War. They should allow citizens to arm themselves with tanks and howitzers so as to attack the Pentagon, should that be needed. But I doubt many gun owners would accept that, and so what are the limits of gun control? As far as I have heard, Johnson doesn’t say.


Johnson is now second in line after the President, and he does not accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election and so would disrupt the orderly succession of power that has existed up to then since the time of the Constitution. Representative Matt Gaetz says that the other side should recognize the Republicans are the party of Trump. I am willing to recognize that such is the case, however sad that might be to acknowledge. The “moderate” Republican members of the House are said to have caved into the extreme of the party because they are indecisive and cowardly and confused and exhausted but I think they think of party over nation and so cannot go to Jeffries and get elected a Republican Speaker who will do limited things like money for Israel and Ukraine and Taiwan and the southern border and a continuing resolution until the next year and nothing much else until the 2024 election, however unprecedented it would be to have coalition government in the House, even if constitutional, but because the Republicans could not organize themselves except under the leadership of an  extremist. Who said Trump wasn’t in charge? The GOP doesn’t need tweaking; it needs an overhaul if it is to be regarded as a legitimate party.

Responsibility in Israel and Gaza

Moral words on war are not illuminating.

Which side, Israel or Gaza, has the onus of the carnage each creates? Tube obvious answer is whomever started first, which is the case with Hamas, which runs the people in Gaza, and so Israelis are free to do whatever they  need to do to rid themselves of the Hamas menace, given that they kill women children, babies, the elderly and other people who are clearly non combatants. Hamas engages in genocide of the Jews, though with very few results but a sufficient warning that all measures can be taken to avoid that. Either one side or the other side can prevail. The media do not clarify the issue of who to blame. They shallow the original outrages against the Israelis, presenting footage of the destruction and then interviewing grieving Israeli survivors, and now present footage of the carnage in Gaza which provides footage of wounded Palestinians and interviews with loved ones back in the United State. Is it that whomever suffers lastly are the victims that are to gain sympathy? That can’t be right. I have also heard said that Isradlis should flatten Gaza, never mind that eliciting a response was certainly part of the plan by Hamas to draw Israelis into the tunnels under Gaza, a plan that the Israelis are reluctant to implement because of the carnage against civilians which will result. Moreover, most wars are not justified by which side loses the most citizens. The Germans lost more people than did the English speaking  but the Germans aren't judged as having morally won the war. There are bigger ideological issues at stake which encapture the actual events of war. The Confederates did not think they were wrong in having maintained slavery because they lost the Civil War. The Southerners just re-established slavery by another name less than a generation later.

The view that the first outrage requires and therefore justifies the response is not the way either the Americans or the Israelis see it. They both claim that, unlike Hamas, they are  subject to the international laws of warfare so as to limit atrocities such as the killing of civilians, even though it has been an established fact since air power arrived that civilian casualties were to be regarded as collateral damage for destroying military targets and thereby morally acceptable. That is no comfort to the Gaza civilians. 

A way out of the moral quandary is to invoke the idea of responsibility, which means a decision, whether individual or collective, which leads to subsequent results. I have heard it said that Gazans are responsible for what happens to them because they voted in Hamas twenty or so years ago, even though there have been no further elections, and the Gazans have not revolted against Hamas and then negotiated for what are their own interests rather than let Hamas remain in place and treat  Gaza as only a launching ground against Israel. But that is to treat “responsibility” very narrowly. The term  means, after all, the ability to respond, which means doing only what it is actually capable of doing. A person is not responsible because they cannot fly on their own arms, but they are responsible, in a democratic nation like the United States, for the electorate to pick officials who will or will not allow abortion or raise or lower taxes. But if you look at the Arab world, few if any of those nations do engage in democratic politics. Rather, they regard themselves as passive observers of politics, victims, if you prefer, of politics. Social scientists think it takes a long time for a  people to evolve so that they own and are agents of politics. So while there might be some dissenters among them, it is unreasonable to think that Gazans will revolt against Hamas.

This redefined definition of responsibility as meaning all the circumstances that constrain decision making means consulting any number of the causes of the present war and not rely just on, as pro Gazans argue, only to the fact that the Israelis control the exits and entrances of food, fuel and people and are therefore to be regarded as an occupied territory. That is not the way the Israelis set Gaza up when they vacated Gaza. They bombed their own synagogues so as not to blame the onus of that on the Gazans. They left their hydroponic tanks which provided produce to  sell; to Europe. Offered as well was a two billion dollar development fund that was rejected because controls would be in place to prevent corruption and the accumulation of arms. There were architectural plans for a high speed rail transit system up and down the Gaza Strip. That would lead to Gaza as an economic and social entity and, eventually, to be integrated with the West Bank as a separate state solution, which was turned down  by Arafat as well as Hamas. So responsibility has to be attached to Palestinian people and bodies and not just to the Israelis unless everything follows from the responsibility for the creation of Israel itself, that being the central and significant injustice. Do the pro-Palestinian advocates really believe the slogan “Palestine from the River to the Sea”? Because that would mean no compromise is possible and so the war should continue indefinitely rather than ever cease. Do those who carry those banners take responsibility for unending war? The only peace possible is a two state solution whereby both sides have to give up something dear. The Israelis have to accept that Judea and Samaria, parts of biblical Israel, will be accepted as a Palestinian state in what is now called the West Bank. And what Palestinians have to accept is that a separate state, even including tunnels and roads that6 make Gaza continuous with the West Bank, once Gaza is rid of Hamas and absorbed by the Palestine Authority, is that it would have no army and no airport, but a lot of autonomy and economic development.

Another moral term that is used today so as to provide a way to grasp the situation, such as “responsibility”, because moral terms are supposed to be objective and so cover both sides to a conflict, is the standard of humanitarianism, which goes beyond and is inclusive of the rules of war. Both sides are responsible for being humane and so Israel should supply Gaza with food, water, electricity and the like to spare Gaza civilians and the latest reports are that water will be supplied. The question is whether it is humane for the Israelis to tell Gazans to leave Gaza’s northern region as difficult as that may be. On the one hand, you can’t tell a civilian population to evacuate according to the rules of war but it seems sensible advice given the battle that is about to begin.  And so one can despair about using any moral terms to confront the situation and make sense of it, moral terms just weapons mobilized by the sides of the parties to use as part of their own ammunition, Israelis pointing to the original atrocities and Gazans to the present one, both sides sure of their moral standing, rather than looking at the long time and complex causes and consequences, such as whether Israel should exist at all, which is the root question. George Marshall back in 1948 said it should not be recognized because it would lead to endless warfare, and that has come to pass, however it may be that Israelis think that a breakthrough with Saudi Arabia would make Israel a normal nation in the Middle East rather than a Western enclave inserted in an Arab area. Maybe this war will be the last one. People always say that about many wars.

Inventing Political Communication Today

What separates MAGA people from the others.

America is facing unprecedented times in that previous times when political points of view were so opposed, each group, as the present usage has it, each party living in its own silo, that it led to war. The Tories went to Canada after the American Revolution while the ex-Confederates remained in the South after the Civil War until in less than a generation they were able to gain control of the social structure of their states, Jim Crow the system that replaced slavery. Now, there is a great conflict between the party  of order, the Democrats, who want regular constitutional procedures, and the party of disorder, significant leaders in the House Republicans as abetted or inspired by a significant part of the Republican Party base, who do not care about constitutional niceties but want to support their standard bearer, Donald Trump, who fomented a violent insurrection against the Constitution, to prevail again as President and do what he wills, which is to take revenge against all those who have opposed him. Although some Trump supporters contemplate a civil war, which is not likely to happen, even though the geographical divisions between tube two political persuasions line up closely to the same divisions that occurred during the civil war and it is not necessary for a civil war to be divided geographically in that the English Civil War was fought all over England and Scotland and did not have front lines. But the American military is so much in charge of the country despite the view that AR-15’s are a threat to a national army, which is what the Second Amendment is supposedly out to oppose, that this civil war is being conducted politically. The leading candidate for the Speaker of the House, the second in line to succeed a President, is Jim Jordan, who supported Trump in his failed coup d’etat, and Jordan is out to oust the current President on trumped up charges. How is it possible, in these trying times, to make sense of the opposition between the two parties and to craft a way to communicate between them so as to restore a sense of fidelity to the Constitution? Remember that even during McCarthyism, when the Far Right thought there were Commies everywhere while Democrats thought Commies few and largely powerless, both sides claimed allegiance to the Constitution even if irregular means might be needed to control the Commies. How to calm those members of the citizenry who are so outraged at the current state of political affairs that they will disregard the Constitution or supersede it? Or maybe just convince the moderate Republicans to realize how serious is the threat to the Constitution and will become states persons who overtly oppose the insurrectionists. Here are four ways to overcome the impasse, as if rhetoric and reasoning can make a difference. 

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Two Blockbusters

“Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” ain’t much.

I had been looking forward to seeing two blockbuster movies of the summer, “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie”, partly so that movies would bring large audiences back to the theaters where they belonged with wide screens and amplified sound and darkened auditoriums, which has always been the right way for a hundred years to see movies, now that covid was over. And the audiences came, the gross net of the two movies now close to two billion dollars. That's not chopped liver. But I was disappointed with both of them and it made me wonder why people liked them so much.

“Oppenheimer'' was at a disadvantage for me because I like stories that start at the beginning and move along until you get to the end, flashbacks only happening when it is necessary to bring up the past as a present juncture, as when Darcey tells about how Mr. Wickham had engaged with Darcey’s sister when he finally explained to Elizabeth why he so distrusted the cad. It struck me that “Oppenheimer'' was jumping around in time, especially in the beginning and so the film was choppy, without a narrative flow, and I thought difficult to understand unless you were already familiar with the details of the history as I was because the security  clearance hearing took place when I was in high school and had already learned the lore concerning the development of the A bomb. I was disabused when my daughter was able to follow the story even without having already learned its history. I thought that Roland Joffe’s “Little Boy and Fat Man”, the movie of 1989 that just concentrates on the essential and contained story of the Los Alamos project, was much superior to “Oppenheimer'', and Paul Newman had stolen the show as General Groves. Newman should have won an Oscar for one of his post-pretty boy roles.

The movie “Oppenheimer” was also sloppily edited. A critic said that two nude scenes were exploitative rather than liberating, as if those were the only two possibilities. The scenes showed intimacy and jealousy, which are certainly traits of sex. But the story was not elaborated as to whether Oppenheimer was a highly sexual creature rather than  that he had a young love he could not get over. Similarly, a moment when Kitty Oppenheimer lapses into child neglect to the point that her husband puts his child with another family for a while is not expanded to show that his wife was generally a poorly functioning person. Either expand it or drop it. 

The final judgment of Oppenheimer made by the movie, though it may not be the one the director Christopher Nolan wanted, was when the movie has President Truman say that Oppenheimer was a cry baby because, after all, the blood was on Truman”s own hands because he had dropped the bomb rather than on Oppenheimer’s, who just made it. Truman’s character always looms large in most comparisons and so Oppenheimer is presented as a wavering reed  rather than to be taken as a man plumbing a deep moral dilemma. The movie provides no comeback to the Truman remark.

A major failing of the movie to me was that it was not set in the proper historical context. Louis Strauss and J. Edgar Hoover were agents but not the impetus for the vendetta against Oppenheimer. This was the McCarthy era and the idea of Communism was enough to get people at bay. Remember the House Un American Activities Committee and the espionage trials and finally the Army McCarthy Hearings which brought the era to its end, Eisenhower sure that McCarthy would be overwhelmed by the military even if he had reused on the campaign  trail in 1952 to defend his mentor George Marshall for accusations that Marshall  was a disgrace to the uniform. Oppenheimer was just someone else who was abused for communist ties and had never betrayed his trust, though my high school history teacher thought it was naive to have thought that. I still want a movie that goes over McCarthy, whose paranoia and hate are reborn as Trump but without the ideology, even though the story was very well told by Richard Rovere’s book and by the Edward A Murrow telecast at the time.

I was even more disappointed with “Barbie” which I thought would analyze in a humorous way the plight of women so that I could defend the male point of view. But the movie was such a mishmosh of ideas that there is no way to take a purchase on it. I guess I was hoping for “Major Barbara” which I found very unsettling when I first read it as seeing munition makers as progressive. Or where, in “Pygmalion”, a poor flower girl can become the appearance of a princess, able to confront men as equals, through hard work and being exposed to men who treat her as a lady. Consequences are the result of causes. But causes are absent in “Barbie”. Instead, Barbie Land has an all woman Supreme Court. Does that mean society is equal because four of the current Supreme Court are women? What is the basis for inequality? All men do when Ken takes over Barbie Land is turn his home into a man cave rather than a girlie place. There is a speech whereby “mean” Barbie lists the degradations to which girls are subject. Women are supposed to look adoringly at men who sing while strumming their ukuleles. But men also fawn on women, complementing them on how pretty or accomplished they are, just to please them. Flattery is the stock in trade of courtship. What is the substance of male domination? It could be job discrimination or reproductive rights or the male threat of physical abuse. The movie never says. I wish the screenwriters for “Barbie'' had taken the time to straighten out its ideas rather than just look at the visuals so as to create a franchise set of pictures about Mattel. But they got what they wanted, which was sufficiently superficial so  that everybody could have a good time.

A female friend said that Barbie, the doll, was historically important because it showed women could be anything they wanted to be, which was not possible previously. I hardly think dolls are all that important even if they are invoked as such, as was the case when Kenneth Clarke said that black girls shunned black dolls (which was not true) and so showed a stigma about being black. It is similar to when people said that boys would be less violent if they didn’t have toy guns. Boys just took up twigs and called them guns. Gender is deeper than just toys. Now Barbies, which are just toys, are taken to make girls free to be what they want, as if that weren’t happening since Seneca Falls. And the availability of the pill at the same time when Barbie made its way seems to me to be a more powerful change in the relation of women to men.

A male friend of mine who reads literature carefully was taken by the “Barbie” point of view that women had engaged in self-discovery when, until recently, they had not. I couldn’t disagree more, which is the real nub of the issue. Men, I think, are traditionally supposed to be only one thing throughout the eons of history. They are solid, which means reliable, reasonable, stoical and moral and to be otherwise is to be a cad or over emotional, or a wuss, like Hamlet, or a reprobate. No exceptions to the approved type, whether in Homer or “Genesis”, and whether that type is admired or seen as limited. Macbeth and Othello are different but both are doomed for violating the male stereotype. Women, on the other hand, can be anything they want to be. Delilah is a lover and also a betrayer. Chaucer’s wife of Bath adopts her nature to the circumstances as she gets older. Elizabeth  Bennet is both ambitious as well as outspoken.

So why these two blockbusters for two inferior movies? A good answer is offered by Pauline Kael, the longtime New Yorker film critic, in commenting on “The Sound of Music”, a much inferior of the Rodgers and Hammerstein productions, thin on plot and a but ludicrous in plotting in that, as Kael observed, what if one of the children did not want to be a chorister? And yet “The Sound of Music” was, at the time, the tenth greatest movie gross of all time. Kael’s answer for the big attendance was merchandising rather than art. The title and tone had been pre sold by its history and advertising and so was what people were prompted to view. But I have a less cynical but more dourfull explanation, which is that people like poor efforts which do not work their plots out even though they also like some that do, like “Casablanca'' and “The Best Years of their Lives”. “Oppenheimer” treats the hero as anguished when he is driven because it is easier to think that way rather than to think of him as like Werner von Braun, who cared more about rockets than about politics. “Barbie” is fuzzy on ideas because Feminist ideas are fuzzy, cliches a substitute for reasoning. Being both artful and familiar to a movie’s level of meaning is very hard. I hope Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon" will turn the trick of showing the protagonist as both cruel and progressive and so memorable, providing a valuable insight into what great leaders can be.

Biblical Naturalism

Philosophical naturalism is the doctrine that everything in the universe, whether physical or biological or social, can be described in sentences, which means a set of assertions that are true rather than false. The invention is attributed most famously to the ancient Greeks, from the Presocratics such as Anaxamander, who said that, through Aristotle, who offered long treatises in description of the various topics about what is in the universe, painstakingly writing prose as carefully as he could to get his descriptions right, sentences different from the subject matter to be described because after all they were words rather than things which have an existence of their own. Words refer to other words and are called meanings while things don’t refer to anything but just subsist in time and space. Perhaps the greatest achievement of philosophical naturalism was Lucretius because he overtly pointed to a program for reducing the world to its descriptions. The Greeks came about this process by abstracting story based myths into abstracted forces so that the forces were the topics of attention rather than the people, the actors, who embodied them. There is slyness rather than Odysseus being sly. Even Plato, who is said to follow a different course in that he writes dialogues rather than discourses, can be said to be engaged in philosophical naturalism because he not only has arguments and elaborations within his discourses but also because his topics are about, for example, how consciousnesses coincide with one another so as to communicate with one another and so is explaining what it is to say that an assertion is meaningful.

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"The Queen's Gambit"

I have a liking for the long form in television ever since I saw the twenty six half hour episodes of “Victory at Sea” in the Fifties, the bass narrator and the Richard Rodgers score accompanying the film record of naval battles in both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters. Although the sitcom was a weekly half hour episode, you could think of it as also a miniseries in that it was a set of seasons, five to seven years long, from “All in the Family” to “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” to “Cheers” and “Friends” and “Seinfeld”, all of which exhausted their possibilities by the time the series ended. There was nothing else to say. I felt the same of “The West Wing”, which follows an administration something akin to reality, or at least a Liberal version of one, until a successor President comes into office, predicting it would be a minority President before Obama became one. And I was struck by the miniseries  “Band of Brothers” which followed the 82nd Airborne Division from the training for D Day to past the end of the war while the heroes were still in Europe, the story having rightly ended in that what happened to these heroes in the Fifties and afterwards was irrelevant. “The Best Years of Our Lives” was a different story. And so I am not surprised that television dramas also take the long form, particularly the HBO miniseries “The Queen’s Gambit”, which uses seven hour long episodes to tell its story and which I have seen through for three times, just as I have seen the run of “The West Wing” three times. The long form was invented by Charles Dickens who allowed himself digressions to side characters and subplots whatever the main matter of the story was whatever the coincidences required to tie these together so as to provide the full amplitude of life while Jane Austen was based on expanding the form of a play and, even further back, Fielding was posing as a mock epic to structure “Tom Jones”, itself a mighty saga filled with outrage and uncertainty. And so I come to “The Queen’s Gambit” not quite that glorious but a very successful bildungsroman worthy of Dickens, which is no faint praise indeed.

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