Halloween Politics
More than a year ago, the Obama candidacy became a real possibility after a spike in September 2007’s polls. Around that time, the mood was that though Obama’s run for President was, indeed, historic, it was too easy to say it portended the resolution of the race problem. That is, until the nastiness of the South Carolina primary made it clear there were white voters who felt otherwise. It’s true his proposals do not mark much of a change in federal policy toward racial equality. But neither does it do Obama historical justice to devalue the significance of this election’s rhetorical politics. The election of the first black President has sent shivers through the roots of the (more) conservative major party. This point seems obvious when you consider the paroxysms afflicting the neoconservative base:
The workings of this kind of vitriol in the political thought of, as Andrew Sullivan put it, the Palinites is not unfamiliar to those who have read between the lines of U.S. political discourse since Nixon. But what is uncanny—and I mean this in Sigmund Freud’s sense of the return of something repressed—is the frankness with which the Palinites articulate their political priorities in the language of racial conflict, the hoped-for rebirth of a “real American” heartland freed from the tyranny of the mongrel coastal metropolises. As if a political Halloween, replete with walking dead, these past weeks have disinterred the reanimated bones of conservative ideology. Thus the Repugnicans hurl accusations of socialism, communism, terrorism, and—mindblowingly—Judaism at a party they see as prying, at last, political hegemony from their cold, dead, white, Christian fingers: Representative Thaddeus McCotter’s (R-Mich.) invocation of Nazi ghouls represents the thrashes of a cornered Republican animal. I only hope this election will be remembered as the last gasp of a kind of thinking kept artificially alive through vampirism and violence.Queen of the Repugnicans
If John McCain (I’m referring to the one who, in a quasi-fictional past, was known for distancing himself from the idiocies of the Republican party)—if that John McCain had watched Mean Girls, he would have realized he didn’t want to be the GOP nominee in the first place.
Cady Heron thought that the prestige and power that came with supplanting Regina would help her master the wilds of the American high school. All too late, after she had shed her soul and lost her friends, did she realize becoming Queen of the Plastics involves a war of attrition that leaves no one’s credibility intact.
Soon (one hopes) Gramps McCain will realize that the reason George W. Bush edged him out of the primary election in 2000 was because W had no qualms hawking his principles in exchange for accepting the party’s crown (or ten-gallon hat, as it turned out). The maverick whom Sarah Palin and her ilk are pretty sure they remember from that election should figure out if being President is worth what it will take to tear down Barack Obama.
When the article appeared remarking that the political divide was mirrored in the mental wiring of right-wing and left-wing voters, I dismissed it as an anthropomorphic fantasy. But seeing this map, and given McCain’s continuing campaign of brain-dead decisions, I begin to feel as synaptically unlike Republicans as dolphins are to sponges.
“When I was a small child there was a box in the attic containing neatly trimmed scraps of material that had once belonged to dresses, aprons, blouses, dish towels, and which were apparently intended for a quilt that never got made. I was fascinated by them and used to pour over them with the zeal of an Egyptologist. There was a language there.”
Writing isn’t anything more than arranging the scraps we’ve gleaned from other writers. The poet John Ashbery’s collages offer a pointed reminder of this.
Liveblogging Shopping Period
10:16 am
It turns out that The Idea of Self, a Classics class, is a CAP course. Not that freshmen can’t be as intellectually stimulating as classmates as upperclassmen, but I’m a little wary of this course being a kind of kiddie pool. The book list initially intrigued me—no, I’ll be honest, I needed something to shop this period. But nonetheless, the book list consisted of classical and medieval works I’d like to be able to casually refer to in cocktail conversation. But apparently we don’t even finish most of the works. Coming from the school of close reading, I’m hesitant to to take something that might turn out to be Great Books: Reader’s Digest Edition. What would James Joyce say? Or Donna Tartt? Or Mary Kay? Then again, between the Indy, Writing Fellows, and Barack, I may need the breathing room.
9:30 am
I expected the Introduction to Principles of Economics to be a beatitude on the wonders of American ingenuity, cobalt tinted by Powerpoint, projected through Japanese hardware. Thank God for globalization, right? Instead it was dry, dry like… Salomon during a dull lecture. LED projectors can cast a certain excited energy over a room, as high resolution images play across the screen, tickling our imagination. I wanted to be wowed by the obvious fruits of the American economy. But I’m not sure I can stomach a high school-style, wet erase-markered course. Especially given my political misgivings about the subject matter (read: Greg Mankiw). I may not be able to put up with ECON0110 if there’s no eye candy to sweeten the capitalism.
Hipster
How ironic that as Douglas Haddow delicately severs the hipster from any sort of cultural patrimony—denying hipsters the legacy of the beats, punks, hippies, and hip hop (all of which, by the way, “hipsterdom,” as he so lugubriously calls it, draws from)—he never questions his own right to complete ownership (and interpretation) of Western Civilization. Do you think he realizes that nothing he’s written hasn’t been written before of each generation of youth culture? He’s worked the hipsters into Adbusters’s particularly endearing brand of pouty apocalypticism, but the gesture he makes sounds a lot like those who called Paul Klee and Mies van der Rohe degenerates.
Theodore Francis Green, Gift of God
A Travelogue
PVD, August, 21, 2008
4:40 pm. Too annoyed to read, I’ll vent my travel angst by scribbling these notes. I had just stumbled off a tiny plane after surviving two flights on that puddle-jumper and a connection at Kennedy Airport. Forgetting I wasn’t still in the friendly Midwest, I stumbled toward the airport shuttle counter to ask if the five o’clock were the last one. But the haughty Northeastern indigines were just too busy to bother with a tourist wanting them — most unjustly — to execute their secretarial duties. The pear-shaped, middle aged woman bowled her eyes down an alley of condescension, and turned to her teenage companion, saying, “Why don’t you handle this one?” to which he said, dredging strength from the bowels of his indolence, “The shuttle comes every hour on the hour from five to eleven.” He had the air of someone working at the World Trade Center Site — instead of the TF Green & Providence airport shuttle — who thought the van’s movements were not only obvious, but were also an object of public importance. Hadn’t I been watching the news in the last seven years? Telling me the time of the shuttle was just too, too dull-making.
4:45 pm. A woman sighs with relief as she pulls her caravan of baggage and children to a halt, exclaiming “Starbucks!” as though she’d found the water beyond the desert’s mirage. The coffee shop, which undoubtedly had a presence wherever she’d come from, she treated with the reverence of a long-traveling monk, blessed by Grace to have found at last the font that will save her from dying of thirst along the stretch of wasteland which remains between her martyr-making vacation and home.
5:02pm. The shuttle arrived promptly, more or less, and I was happy that only one other passenger accompanied me. Before I’d finished jotting down the previous incidents, our driver began chatting with the other shuttle patron. We’ll call him Theodore. He told us he was in town for a couple of days for the annual conference of the Northern Masonic Jurisdicton of the Scottish Rite, which comprises the states from Delaware to Maine and surrounding the Great Lakes. Thoedore also said that these boundaries were created after the Civil War, and that a separate authority holds sway over the South and West. Maybe my work on The 39 Clues has made me paranoid, but he spoke as though he expected us to find him fishy, and was busily crafting the persona of a businessman in town for a perfectly ordinary company meeting. Yet there was something measured in his tone and choice of words. His only remark about the substance of the trip was, “We’re not like those thirty-third degree guys; they’re crazy.” He did tell us, also, that 3,000 members of his order will be Providence this weekend. Anyway, we chatted pleasantly about things to do in Providence, until he confessed had meetings to go to all weekend, and so wouldn’t be getting out of the hotel much. Dashing my dreams, Theodore did not offer to induct me into the order before stepping out of the van, nor did he spit out a Dan Brown-esque, last-ditch tell-all before being reabsorbed into the waiting arms of his compatriots. He seemed like such an upstanding, normal Chicagoan, that I wondered how a whole political party could have been created (and flourished) with only the goal of stamping the Masons out.
I'm Going to Miss Queens
Me: You can’t put water on that. You’re gonna ruin it.
Daniel: Just a little!
Me: You can’t put water on suede! It’s gonna stay like that.
Daniel: It’s gonna stay dark like this? It’s still wet.
Daniel’s Aunt DeeDee: What, animals don’t go out in the rain?
Arcadia Amittenda
It’s amazing that what was once the prison of wide-eyed aesthetes looking to the East for cultural refuge in fact holds so much unprized grandeur. After half a year’s absence spent swanning up and down the East Coast amongst America’s glossy architectural flagships, I can now see Detroit as Gaugin’s Tahiti or Alberti’s Rome.
America’s automotive ghost town, what was once the Arsenal of Democracy, now brims with the ruins of an age of opulence gone to ashes. The flakes of paint blooming on the walls of Fisher Body Plant 21 are as still as the fossilized pomp of the Siegel House; they are almost untouched by any breeze of progress.
Detroit and its fragile, crystalline gravitas—the cultural memory of a forgotten industrial America—feels like it will be soon reduced to nothing by the erosion of renewal. Detroit still lives the America many would like to forget.
Surf on the Sandcastles of Memory
Dreaming of Waugh
I had a dream where I was cast to play Sebastian in the newest adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, mostly, I think, because in the logic of dreams my high school role as Henry V was actually the role of Sebastian. My friend Hannah and I and others were driven to Castle Howard (which at this point is more or less synonymous with Brideshead in we fans’ collective imagination for having portrayed the Flyte home twice). Hannah and I waited on a warm-up bench that was spring-loaded to throw us toward a foam wall when it was our turn to go on stage (this was designed to get us pumped up). Fast forward, and we were on a bus with a cute and spry Anthony Andrews, who was sullenly submitting to the appointment of his successor, the exceedingly twinky Ben Whishaw. There was some concern that the lake at Castle Howard was too big, so I helpfully suggested they could use CG to dry part of it up. I have no idea how I came by this expertise about any lakes that may or may not exist on those grounds.
I suppose Sebastian is the character we readers are supposed most to want to be: the dissolute aristocrat whose people have been noble since before the Reformation, freed by antinomianism from middle class drudgeries like having a career, an education, or an interest economic justice. But I always imagined myself as Anthony Blanche, with the negligently eccentric, deposed ancien-régime mother who led him around the world on fabulously expensive whims while she gambled, drank, and had liaisons with heads of state. He seemed to be Waugh’s favorite, too, because he was the only character who spoke lucidly (if floridly) about what Charles was getting himself into.
A while back, I was hoping that my simultaneous reading of Brideshead and watching of Star Trek Voyager would hatch a chimera of space-faring aristocrats drinking their way across the galaxy in the 24th century. (Douglas Adams would have been proud.) Instead, 40s and a few minutes of Seinfeld before bed commingled with my preoccupation with the English aristocracy to make these reflections what they were.
My newborn Flickr
Copiously posting one’s photos on the internet is popularly thought less self-aggrandizing if not done on one’s Facebook.
