Although, during the Second World War, there were many films that had nothing to do with the war, that including the first of the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road movies, Hollywood did not want to admit in the films made during the war about that war that the American people were living through the worst of times and that their equilibrium had become unsettled. Sure, you could engage in gallows humor. In one of those movies set in a USO canteen, a sweet young thing answers the question of what she wants to be with the quip “Hitler’s widow!”, a remark greeted with cheers and applause. We would give our all to bring down the Fuhrer. But delving deeply into other than brave emotions was another thing and yet it happened, most notably, I think, in “Music for the Millions”, which begins as one thing and becomes something very different and very disturbing.
Read MoreCultural Mutation
Cultural mutation, which is the successive modification of a cultural item one feature at a time until it is something very different, however still recognizable, is a way to understand what is happening in a number of emotionally charged issues from race relations to epidemiology even though social scientists do not usually treat culture as something subject to spontaneous or creative change or as having much of an impact on social structure.
Culture is usually regarded by anthropologists as the continuing way of life of a people, embracing customs, laws and beliefs, and so very stable and self-perpetuating and arising for unknown reasons, while sociologists emphasize the way culture reinforces the social structure that exists because it is transmitted by institutions that are answerable to the structure, as when television transmits what its advertisers will approve of, social media proving themselves maverick in that opinions therein percolate up from the people, and so it is understandable to think government and other institutions of culture, such as the press, want to see the social media controlled so that they do not promulgate alternative opinions. Culture is also taken to be a bridge or the medium through which change takes place in that culture diffuses innovations across a population, as when it spreads knowledge of vaccination, even though it is not responsible for original ideas. These theories are contrary to the perspective of humanists, which sees culture as the source of new ideas, whether in science, as when Darwin and Newton invent new perspectives because of their own ruminations while building on precedent thinkers, Darwin a mutation on Malthus and Lyell, while Newton was contemplating Copernicus and Galileo-- and vaccination was, after all, invented by a particular doctor in England on the basis of his observation of cows and the lack of smallpox among cow maids. Ingenuity and insight count. The humanist perspective can be applied to current events and in that light a cultural mutation takes place when an image or idea is gradually altered by having only one of its features changed at a time so that it bears a family resemblance to what is already familiar but where there is a change in its meaning or connotations. Culture is alive in that such changes are going on all the time. It is difficult to recognize how a culture is changing because so many mutations are in process at any one time.
Read MoreHow The Arts Evolve
At least in the history of the modern world, high brow forms of art and culture evolved out of popular forms of entertainment. Every genre came to provide deep feelings and insights into the nature of life, those experiences presented in a beguiling way: with suspense, or local color, or characters worth noticing. The modern drama from Shakespeare through Genet, for example, was propelled out of the biblical plays performed in the English countryside and in churches, those allegorical and simplified dramas showing their abiding presence in the tragic comedies of the theatre of the absurd and, in America, in the moralizing of O’Neill and Williams who, in spite of the depth of character they also provided, constructed dramatic arcs through which people got their just deserts, just as had been true in ”Everyman”. But that process of high culture growing from popular culture, and not just in the theatre, had not been apparent during the two cultural periods known as “Modernism” (circa 1895-1938) and “The Age of Anxiety” (circa 1938-1968) because of the predominance of the elitist or experimental novel, like those of Joyce and Kafka, and the paintings of, for example, Picasso and Rothko, the literature and art inaccessible to the popular reader and viewer, and so we are likely to still think that the present cultural period, known as “Contemporary” or “Postmodern” is, like its two predecessor periods, elitist in origin, when in fact all of these periods were ones in which culture had its roots in the popular culture rather than in top down culture.
Read MoreNon-Modernist American Artists
American art in the Twenties and Thirties was not largely influenced by the Modernist artists who worked in Europe. There are no hints of Picasso or Matisse or Chagall or Mondrian or Braque, no departures in the meaning or purposes of representation, whether that means Picasso’s distortions of what is visible and invisible about a figure, superimposing parts of bodies so that a number of moments can be appreciated as simultaneous, nor of Chagall’s fanciful use of legend with no great respect for what would have been considered what is appropriate to a single composition, nor Matisse’s use of color and alteration of perspective so as to create very psychologically intense pictures of spaces and viewpoints, nor the geometry of Mondrian and Braque replacing subject matter entirely. Rather, what the American artists of the Twenties and Thirties try to do, I think, is to counter or adapt to the other visual art that had intruded into the cultural spotlight, and that was photography. This thesis is an application of what I call “The Laocoon Principle”, in honor of Gottfried Lessing, the eighteenth century aesthetician who focussed on the way the nature of a medium impacts on what an artist presents. The American artists did not face up to Modernism because of their preoccupation with distinguishing themselves from or imitating or adapting to photography, an art form taking up ever more room, especially ever since photographs rather than engravings had become a main feature of Twenties newspapers, what with their visual coverage of the slum poor, perp walks and urban construction.
Read MoreThe High Victorian and The Late Victorian
The Victorian period shares the characteristics that mark other cultural periods. It lasts about fifty years, in its case from the accession of Victoria to the throne in 1840 to the performance in London in 1893 of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome”, so different in texture from the melodrama and sanctimonious morality of Pinero’s “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray”, which had appeared earlier in the year, and so illustrates another characteristic of periods, which is that periods come to abrupt ends and beginnings. (Queen Victoria herself lingered on until 1901.) A cultural period also has a set of themes that are unifying among the various arts of literature and painting and drama, which in the case of the Victorian means the fate of the individual in the complex world of the city and in the midst of an industrialized landscape, every person both ambitious to make their own way and also alienated from what seems emotionally unsatisfying about generally accepted customs and overly rigorous laws, as that is exemplified by both Oliver Twist and Jean Valjean. A cultural period is also international in scope in that all the nations of Europe and North America are part of it even if it is known in France as the era of Pre-Impressionism and Impressionism in honor of the central role of painting in French culture during those years. A cultural period is also dominated by certain cultural forms, and in the Victorian that means the novel and grand opera, both of which are sprawling affairs, employing plots and subplots wherein often outrageously individual characters play out their lives against the background of a richly imagined society. Think of “Great Expectations”, “The Count of Monte Cristo”, and “Rigoletto”.
Read MoreThe November Democratic Primary Debate
It isn’t easy to run for President, or so my reading and what I have observed on television informs me. The primary candidates are in a grind that will get even worse when one of them gets the nomination. Each of them attend four of five meetings a day at civic auditoriums, as well as in living rooms and in diners, marching in local parades, chatting with as many voters as they can, Elizabeth Warren famous for taking selfies with all comers. And, at the same time, the candidates are getting briefed on the news of the day, which means, at the moment, what is being said at the House impeachment hearings, so that they can provide instant judgments on unfolding events, those required by the journalists who trail them, the candidates knowing that any word out of place will be interpreted in the worst possible way. Also, at the same time, the candidates have to keep in touch with their donors, their staff back at headquarters and, for their own sanity, with their own families. How to manage that? It takes a lot of determination as well as a bank of stamina which few healthy people in their younger years would lay claim to, much less septuagenarians, Maybe the staff of the candidates schedule time for a snooze just so the candidate from tiredness will not lapse into a gaffe. (I remember when the Republican candidate for Vice President in 1960, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. was criticized for changing into pajamas for his naps). Maybe it is just that the candidates have been at campaigns for so long that the rigors of campaigning are second nature to them.
Read MoreFrom Whence Contemporary Authority Flows
Max Weber defined “authority” as the ability to convince people to follow your lead, which was different from its companion concept, ”power”, which is the ability to get people to do what you want even if they don’t want to. One of the main and perhaps original sources of that thing he called “power” was what Weber labelled as “charisma”, which meant the ability of a person to be so compelling a figure that people would do what he said, they somehow mesmerized because of that person’s personal appeal. And so Hitler was charismatic, even while FDR, however charming, was also the bearer of the TR-Wilsonian ideology, somewhat modified, that the purpose of government was to make the lives of people better and so to expand the role of government to accomplish that end, a principle Democrats come back to even if not in so many words, it certainly different from the alternative principle, which is that the purpose of government is not to make things better but to put as many brakes as possible on progressive impulses so as to further feather the nests of already rich people.
Read MoreRothko, Pollock and Elsworth Kelly
Abstract Expressionism is an art movement that prided itself on its lack of meaning, that its large canvases were displayed for themselves, for their own sake, for what they were. A canvas need have no meaning, representational or otherwise, which is what Jackson Pollock said when he gave one of his many interviews about his art. He parried the question about the meaning of his art with the question: you don’t ask a field of flowers what they mean, do you? Actually, it is possible to give an even more radical characterization of what came to be called Abstract Expressionism, the movement first called “action painting”, in that it was a set of actions perpetrated by the painters and also because the paintings were so kinetic, which is not really true either, because that is only true of Pollock, because Rothkos, for their part, just sit there, taking you inside them as you contemplate them some more.
Read MoreLanguage and Reason
There are two extreme ways by which to understand the relation of language to reality. One is to think of language as a representation of reality and in that case, as Bertram Russell put it, a well formed, which means grammatical, proposition is always either true or false because it cannot but be an assertion about reality. That allows for a lot of badly formed propositions, those to be regarded as not much more than nonsense, of no use to the speakers. A professor of mine, a pragmatist, took this view, when he held that what most literary critics were doing when they talked about symbols or what sociologists were doing when they spoke about norms, was just mumbo-jumbo, sounds without meaning, because they could not give clear definitions of their basic terms. Most exercises in language should simply be dismissed as nonsense, however sincere the speakers. It should be remembered that even Aristotle, who supposed that most argument was rhetorical in that it was aimed at winning over people to a leader by persuading them in ways that would appeal to them, still imagined that those forms of persuasion were made up mostly of deformed or short circuited logic, a leap of inference required to get from one place to another. Even tyrants sounded somewhat logical.
Read MoreGeneralizations about Cultural Periods
A cultural period is a span of years during which the themes and forms of expression are similar and, in fact, unique, and so a cultural period can be said to exhibit the spirit of its age, which is certainly the way that William Hazlitt, that wonderful English Romantic critic, looked at the matter. Alterations in themes and genres provide a definition for a period, and so the long Elizabethan Age, which lasts from the Silver Poets of the 1570’s through John Donne, who died in 1631, is unified by its emphasis on drama and on the idea of the conceit, an image exploited for its various meanings. Any of the periods since the time of Chaucer and before and right up to the present can be considered in this light.
Read MoreTrump and Decorum
Now that events are moving quickly and Trump may not be in charge for much longer, it is time to consider what it was that made him such a galvanizing figure and why that ran out of steam so quickly. It is important to answer these questions in part to create a historical record while the flavor of him is still with us and also because the way he exits office, whether in chains or on a gurney, as opposed to in a Nixonian display of bravado, may lie in his character, and the clue to that character is why people were drawn to support him in the first place as well as in the three years of his Presidency.
Read MoreAsher Durand's Nature
Asher Brown Durant was a leader in the Hudson River School that dominated pre-Civil War American nineteenth century painting. He is perhaps best known for “Kindred Spirits”, where he depicts Thomas Cole and William Culling Bryant, both important in the intellectual life of their times as well as influences on Durant, the two of them standing on a crag in the Adirondacks, their perch seeming to this viewer quite precarious and they too dressed up for going on a hike. I keep waiting for them to trip and fall off into space. So a picture meant as a tribute to his friends becomes both dramatic and comic because of the way in which it is composed and so has resonated as a great work of American art ever since.
Durant is less well known for what are his real contributions to the American landscape, which are a set of paintings in which humans either figure very little or not at all. What they depict, instead, are the visual qualities of nature that make of it a different experience than when people are a central focus, as happens in Bierstadt and any number of other landscape painters. This is nature as it is experienced rather than in the grand terms which are advocated by Ruskin to show nature as different from cultivated land, Durand, instead, is looking at nature as if were not a contrast to human life but something on its own.
Read MoreThe End of The Imperial Presidency
The concept of “The Imperial Presidency”, first coined by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., was that the United States as a result of World War II had become a superpower and so implicitly ruled over the entire planet, every other country an ally, a dependency or a sphere of influence, except those that had fallen under the sway of the Soviet Union, the only other super-power because it had both a massive army and atomic weapons. The result of this geopolitical situation was that the President of the United States had almost unlimited powers in foreign policy. He could unleash nuclear war without an act of Congress that authorized war because only he could quickly respond to the threat posed by a foreign power’s nuclear arsenal. Moreover, he could engage in wars that Congress might feel the need for a role in declaring because he could manipulate the laws and sentiments of the United States citizenry in the pursuit of his policies. So Truman did not declare war in Korea because he knew it would not get through Congress and instead called the war “a police action” and no one seriously challenged that. It was a phrase that suited the purpose of legitimizing what seemed expedient during the Cold War even if Congress had not authorized it. Congress found itself reluctant to restrict Presidential military initiatives during the Cold War and so the Congress authorized the Bay of Tonkin Resolution, which was supposed to empower the President to negotiate with the Vietnamese, even as it, after the Cold War, also authorized, as a bargaining device, the resolution to go to war in Iraq, no one wanting to challenge the ability of the President alone to form foreign policy. The Javits War Power Act of 1973 was meant to circumscribe the President’s actions by requiring him to go back to Congress after thirty days to authorize whatever he had done on his own, but it has worked out that such a procedure is meaningless because if we are engaged in a major operation for thirty days, the Congress is not likely to pull the plug on an ongoing military operation, and so the President has carte blanche.
Read MoreThe Jim Garrison Standard
There are a lot of conspiracy theories out there at the moment. There is the now old one of Vice President Biden having intervened in Ukraine to help his son. There is the theory pushed by Rudolph Guiliani, that there is a link between the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign and Ukraine in that the real intervention into the Democratic Party servers originated there. And, of course, there is still the lingering suspicion that somehow Russia had the goods on Trump and so Trump acts like Putin’s lap dog. Added to this is the most recent, which is the accusation by Hillary Clinton that Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset, the Democratic primary candidates running away from that. How are we to evaluate these claims? Or are we just supposed to go on the basis of who backs them? Republicans will back pro-Trump conspiracies and Democrats will back anti-Trump conspiricies and it is too soon to tell who will back the anti-Gabbard theory. Is there no way out of this mess so that a rational person can decide on his or her own who to believe? I believe there is.
Read MoreDeath is Unjust
Death is supposed to be just. It is part of life and therefore not to be feared. That is why the quote from Ecclesiastes, “There is a time for everything: a time to live and a time to die”, is interpreted to mean that thee is a balance in life so that what is made has to be unmade, when what Ecclesiastes is saying is simply that sometimes one thing happens and sometimes another and that there is no use getting all that bothered about it. The mistaken conception is brought closer to our own era when William Hazlitt wrote in 1815 that when people died they were prepared to die. Maybe he thought that because the people he knew who had died had suffered from long term debilitating illnesses which left them with ever less energy and concentration so that death was both a blessing and the continuation of a downward spiral which was inevitable, making a person into a different person from the one they had been when they had been actively engaged with life.
Read MoreThe October Democratic Debate
Despite the complaints that the Democratic field is too large, there being too many candidates on the stage, and the usual criticism that these debates aren’t really debates because they are not sustained interchanges where people get to answer people’s answers, the CNN debate on Tuesday was very successful in that it gave a sense of each of the candidates and gave the audience an education on a range of issues. The topics touched on could have been expanded into an entire political science course. Most of all, the debate provided a sense that what unites the Democratic Party is that it sees the purpose of government as satisfying whatever needs the populace has. There is no limitation on the ways government can help people, which is the opposite of what Republicans used to say, before Trump, which was that smaller government was better government, that government had its limits because government was the enemy of liberty rather than its enhancer-- or that was the case before Trump appeared on the scene to play Mr. Bluster from the Howdy Doody show: all talk, no delivery. But before getting to the issues, let’s talk about the horse race.
Read MoreSargent Drawings
The exhibition of John Singer Sargent’s late charcoal portraits of fabulously beautiful women, at the Morgan Library and Museum, is quite profound. These pictures were drawn when Sargent was sick of doing the elaborately colored portraits of society women, those dressed up in fancy gowns, the costumes distracting from the fact that Sargent is primarily interested in faces and that he has the ability to render each face as distinctive and deep. Sargent’s facility as a portraitist, whether in color or charcoal, prompts a viewer to ask the most difficult questions about the nature of portraiture, and that fact alone casts considerable credit on Sargent for having raised them, even if neither he nor anyone else is able to fully answer them.
Read MoreForeground and Background
One aspect of our existential situation is that people are sometimes involved in their own histories and sometimes they are not. Sometimes we are actors in our lives and our circumstances as when we take on a new job or act as a Good Samaritan and sometimes we are bystanders, as when we experience technological unemployment or notice what is happening in a Presidential race. Sometimes we shift our focus, and so we are drafted into the Army because of Pearl Harbor and yet the story of ourselves as soldiers is so profound that the war is a story of all those G. I.’s. who make up the Greatest Generation, each one of them to be immortalized as the doers who brought World War II to its righteous conclusion. This alternative between being at the heart of a story or on the periphery of a story is such a fundamental feature of human existence that we are not aware of the importance and pervasiveness of the distinction even as It is a distinction that we cannot do without if we want to grasp what happens in life and what life itself consists of, just as we can not easily grasp what it would be to be a creature in heaven that had no physical being, just a spiritual being, and so not subject to respiration or the feel of the breeze on our cheeks. A good way to get some sense of this distinct characterization of every human being as caught up, somehow, in his or her history, is to treat it as a version of what can be more readily understood in art as the distinction between foreground and background, which is not just a convention of art but a characteristic of life recognized by art with perhaps greater accuracy than is true in literature or philosophy.
Read MoreTo Engage with Judy Garland
A. O. Scott, the NY Times movie critic, was right on the mark when he said in his review of “Judy” that the movie really wasn’t that great but that Renee Zellwegger had done such a star turn portraying Judy Garland that she was up there for an Academy Award for Best Actress. I would put it differently. Zellwegger doesn’t look like Garland, she doesn’t sound like her, and she doesn’t have her mannerisms, but she puts together a character which makes you think of Judy Garland, which is in keeping with what Zellwegger has said in interviews, which is that her aim was not to imitate Garland but to convey the emotions that went along with her. The movie itself, however, settles for the usual bio-facts about Garland. She was groomed by Louis B. Mayer to be a star, she took diet pills and sleeping pills from an early age and thus became a life-long addict, she was a car wreck in that she gave erratic performances and often didn’t show up on time, and the movie even threw in another part of the Garland legend, which is that she became an icon for her gay followers, all of these facts following from and in the service of an Achilles like dilemma to have a dazzling life as a performer even if it meant her personal life would be very rough, a pledge she did not regret until the end of her life when she preferred to see herself as a mother than as Judy Garland, the legend.
Read MoreThe Necessity of Impeachment
Conservatives and moderates will say that the phone call between Donald Trump and President Zelensky of Ukraine is just Donald Trump’s usual bluster and so not to be taken seriously or, if it is, that it does not rise to the level of an impeachable offense because it is, after all, just one phone call, and that even if it is an impeachable offense, it is too late in Trump’s term to pursue impeachment because the election about a year from now is available as the preferable device for getting rid of him and so not give the Republicans the excuse of saying that the Democrats are not willing to go to the ballot box to get their way. My view is that the charges are very serious, very impeachable and, most important, it is necessary to pursue these charges because we cannot wait for the next election to correct the problem Trump presents.
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