Quotulatiousness

January 20, 2022

“The new music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs”

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As a certified (certifiable?) old pharte, I have to admit I pretty much stopped listening to “new” music on the radio the year my son was born, so I certainly listen to a lot of music from my younger years, but apparently even young people today are also more inclined to listen to music from before they were born:

“Framed Vinyl Album Art: America ‘Homecoming’; Nick Gilder (Studio Copy of Singles From ‘City Lights’ Chosen for AOR); Climax Blues Band ‘FM Live’)” by JoeInSouthernCA is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

I had a hunch that old songs were taking over music streaming platforms — but even I was shocked when I saw the most recent numbers. According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the US music market.

Those who make a living from new music — especially that endangered species known as the working musician — have to look on these figures with fear and trembling.

But the news gets worse.

The new music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.

Just consider these facts: the 200 most popular tracks now account for less than 5% of total streams. It was twice that rate just three years ago. And the mix of songs actually purchased by consumers is even more tilted to older music — the current list of most downloaded tracks on iTunes is filled with the names of bands from the last century, such as Creedence Clearwater and The Police.

I saw it myself last week at a retail store, where the youngster at the cash register was singing along with Sting on “Message in a Bottle” (a hit from 1979) as it blasted on the radio. A few days earlier, I had a similar experience at a local diner, where the entire staff was under thirty but every song more than forty years old. I asked my server: “Why are you playing this old music?” She looked at me in surprise before answering: “Oh, I like these songs.”

The reasons are complex — more than just the appeal of old tunes — but the end result is unmistakable: Never before in history have new tracks attained hit status while generating so little cultural impact. In fact, the audience seems to be embracing en masse the hits of decades past. Success was always short-lived in the music business, but now it hardly makes a ripple on the attention spans of the mass market.

H/T to Althouse for the link.

“McLuhan came to be regarded by the Baby Boomer generation as a guru and prophet; a visionary who had discovered something profound, not merely about the media, but about life and the universe”

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Media, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Graham Majin looks at the life and works of Marshall McLuhan:

Marshall McLuhan, 1945.
Library and Archives Canada reference number PA-172791 via Wikimedia Commons.

The media ecosystem of the early 21st century is marked by a collapse of trust in journalism. How did we get here? As we look back, like a detective searching for clues, one moment stands out as significant; the publication on March 1st, 1962, of The Gutenberg Galaxy, written by a then-obscure Canadian academic named Marshall McLuhan. This book set in motion a line of falling dominoes, the consequences of which continue to affect us profoundly today.

McLuhan came to be regarded by the Baby Boomer generation as a guru and prophet; a visionary who had discovered something profound, not merely about the media, but about life and the universe. During the 1960s, he became a major celebrity, especially in the US. He featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine, was frequently interviewed on TV, and made a cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s 1977 movie Annie Hall. There was even a prog rock band named in his honor. The American media historian Aniko Bodroghkozy writes that “no other figure who was not of the movement itself received so much positive notice in the alternative newspapers that served dissident youth communities.” In 1965, the celebrity journalist Tom Wolfe asked breathlessly, “Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Pavlov?” Wolfe described McLuhan as an almost Christ-like figure:

    A lot of McLuhanites have started speaking of him as a prophet. It is only partly his visions of the future. It is more his extraordinary attitude, his demeanor, his qualities of monomania, of mission. He doesn’t debate other scholars, much less TV executives. He is not competing for status; he is alone on a vast unseen terrain, the walker through walls, the X-ray eye.

Writing in 1967, John Quirk agreed that McLuhan was a “savant and prophet” and explained that, “McLuhanites hold that the new technologies will lend men the awareness and instruments necessary to solve contemporary problems and inaugurate a bright new era.” McLuhan was a master of the catchy one-liner and the original source of Timothy Leary’s famous counterculture catchphrase, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

McLuhan’s division of media into two types was certainly influential although that influence wasn’t particularly useful:

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan observed that the decline of Catholicism, the rise of Protestantism, and the drift towards secularism all coincided with the development of printing. He hypothesized that the invention of printing had produced the European Enlightenment and Victorian liberal democracy. It was not what was printed, but printing itself that was responsible. McLuhan classified all media into two types: “hot” and “cool”. Printed books and newspapers, he suggested, were “hot” because they were bursting with information. Pre-Renaissance forms of communication, on the other hand, like the spoken Catholic Mass, were “cool”. This was because the Mass was spoken in Latin and hence contained little or no information that ordinary people could understand. Handwritten books were also categorized as “cool”.

Baby Boomers were quite receptive to McLuhan’s message, as it told them very much the sort of thing they wanted to hear:

He had produced a Boomer-friendly, sanitized version of his thesis in which magic and fantasy replaced religion. He also took care to flatter his Boomer audience by telling them that they were uniquely in tune with a deeper reality their parents could not see or understand. “We of the TV age,” he wrote, “are cool. The waltz was a hot, fast mechanical dance suited to the industrial time in its moods of pomp and circumstance. In contrast, the Twist is a cool, involved and chatty form of improvised gesture.”

McLuhan told the Boomers that they might appear irrational to their parents, but this was simply because the old generation was raised on obsolete “hot” media. As a result, he said, they had lost touch with their emotional side and become unnaturally rational and impartial: “Phonetic culture endows men with the means of repressing their feelings and emotions when engaged in action. To act without reacting, without involvement, is the peculiar advantage of Western literate man.”

McLuhan was a key influence on the Boomers, but his ideas failed when logically analyzed:

Trying to deconstruct McLuhan’s arguments reveals glaring absurdities. For example, it is self-defeating to claim that the content of a message is unimportant. On the contrary, all messages must convey information which corresponds with, or claims to correspond with, some state of affairs in the real world if they are to be useful. A news article without news, a weather forecast that does not mention the weather, or a traffic report lacking information about traffic might all be deliciously McLuhanesque, but they are not helpful. Even the Bible, revered by McLuhan, would be meaningless if it were merely a book of random words and blank pages. As Finklestein summarized, McLuhan’s argument is “absurd, when analyzed.”

McLuhan might well be the patron saint of fake news.

January 18, 2022

Decadence

Filed under: Economics, History, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt considers the old Soviet put-down of all of western culture (especially the American one) … that it was decadent:

“The Consummation of Empire” from the painting series “The Course of Empire” by Thomas Cole (1801-1848).
New York HIstorical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.

Yes, sure. I hear any number of you gnashing your teeth on that side of the screen: the soft living, the snowflakery in — mostly — our universities, the demands that everyone cater to them, people being completely terrified of a bad cold. Oh, yeah, rampant crime and bad sexual morals. We’re OBVIOUSLY decadent. How can I make fun of it?

Very easily.

For one your gnashing of teeth rhymes eerily with Romans gnashing of teeth for millennia, long before Rome was anywhere near ripe to fall, and in fact while Rome was the bad ass of the world. Second, it echoes even more eerily all of the Christian explanations of why Rome fell, which curiously also echoed the Christian beliefs in the loss of paradise.

“Decadence is sinfulness, and then comes the end and only G-d can save you” is the narrative there. Which is fine, in a spiritual sense, and completely bonkers insane when it applies to cultures and history. But it served the nascent theocracy that replaced Rome quite well. One of the things it served was to explain why life was now much, much harder. Because you know, abundance is what leads to decadence. Life is too soft, you don’t work hard enough and … bam! suddenly you’re in the middle of an orgy or worshiping a goat or something. Never you mind that the Romans pretty much did that all along, even when they were the badasses of the world. It’s really easy to shape the history of a fallen civilization so it suits the purposes of its successor.

Which brings us to the fact that Communism is a Christian heresy, complete with paradise — the supposed egalitarian and property-free pre-history (it’s also really easy to shape a period that left no account of itself that we can find) — until greed — and in one version PATRIARCHY and in another “whiteness” WTF that means — kicked us out of it. Now we must force the perfect human (Homo Sovieticus!) to emerge, so we can go back to living in caves in (sing it) perfect harmony. (Yeah.)

The complaints of decadence I heard as a young woman were mostly Soviet Agit Prop. Yes, yours were too. They ranged from incoherent to frigging insane. Some of it was a very old rhyming chorus: Americans were decadent because they were too rich. They had too many choices. They were too immoral. They never had enough, and would commit crimes to be richer. They ate too much, drove too much, slept in too comfortable a bed, and in general were DECADENT. Just like Rome before it fell. (If you realize the actual structure of Imperial Rome was closer to the Soviet Union’s, a plunder culture that could only survive by stealing, the whole thing will take your breath away with its chutzpah.

The fact that our (even though at the time it was your, as I was a foreigner at least in some ways) entertainment and art echoed these crazy accusations only made the whole thing stick, so even the right, American loving side (which anyway always has a vast side of puritanism in America. And speaking of puritans, let’s talk about what some of them did to … turkeys? If weird sexual kinks are a sign of decadence, we’ve never been non-decadent) bought into it. I mean Spartacus (the novel) portrait of the decadence of Rome was meant to echo how bad America was. What’s that I hear? The author was a communist? You. Don’t. Say. I think I sent my shocked face out to be mended, but I won’t be a sec while I retrieve it.

In a more personal sense, my own family told me Portugal too was decadent. Why, unlike mom, I didn’t have to walk beside the train line to pick up enough coal for the family to cook. We had butane bottles delivered, even if they were super expensive, so we often cooked on a petrol lamp in the patio, if the weather was fine.

Decadent and soft living, I tell you. Sure, the bathroom was outside, but it was a bathroom, with running water included. JUST like Rome before the fall. How much longer till we started screwing Nightingales’ Tongues, eating Bear Sausages and electing horses to congress (I think in America we’ve been doing that all along, too. Though I’d prefer if every now and then we elected the front half of the horse.)

January 15, 2022

QotD: “Jack Ketch as Eugenist”

Filed under: Britain, History, Law, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Has any historian ever noticed the salubrious effect, on the English character, of the frenzy for hanging that went on in England during the Eighteenth Century? When I say salubrious, of course, I mean in the purely social sense. At the end of the Seventeenth Century the Englishman was still one of the most turbulent and lawless of civilized men; at the beginning of the Ninteenth he was the most law-abiding; i.e., the most docile. What worked the change in him? I believe that it was worked by the rope of Jack Ketch. During the Eighteenth Century the lawless strain was simply choked out of the race. Perhaps a third of those in whose veins it ran were actually hanged; the rest were chased out of the British Isles, never to return. Some fled to Ireland, and revivified the decaying Irish race: in practically all the Irish rebels of the past century there have been plain traces of English blood. Others went to the Dominions. Yet others came to the United States, and after helping to conquer the Western wilderness, begat the yeggman, Prohibition agents, footpads and hijackers of to-day.

The murder rate is very low in England, perhaps the lowest in the world. It is low because nearly all the potential ancestors of murderers were hanged or exiled in the Eighteenth Century. Why is it so high in the United States? Because most of the potential ancestors of murderers, in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries were not hanged. And why did they escape? For two plain reasons. First, the existing government was too weak to track them down and execute them, especially in the West. Second, the qualities of daring and enterprise that went with their murderousness were so valuable that it was socially profitable to overlook their homicides. In other words the job of occupying and organizing the vast domain of the new Republic was one that demanded the aid of men who, among other things, occasionally butchered their fellow men. The butchering had to be winked at in order to get their help. Thus the murder rate, on the frontier, rose to unprecedented heights, while the execution rate remained very low. Probably 100,000 men altogether were murdered in the territory west of the Ohio between 1776 and 1865; probably not 100 murderers were formally executed. When they were punished at all, it was by other murderers — and this left the strain unimpaired.

H.L. Mencken, “Miscellaneous Notes: Jack Ketch as Eugenist”, Prejudices: Fifth Series, 1926.

January 11, 2022

QotD: The decline of the “Blimp class” in the British empire

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The stagnation of the Empire in the between-war years affected everyone in England, but it had an especially direct effect upon two important sub-sections of the middle class. One was the military and imperialist middle class, generally nicknamed the Blimps, and the other the left-wing intelligentsia. These two seemingly hostile types, symbolic opposites – the halfpay colonel with his bull neck and diminutive brain, like a dinosaur, the highbrow with his domed forehead and stalk-like neck – are mentally linked together and constantly interact upon one another; in any case they are born to a considerable extent into the same families.

Thirty years ago the Blimp class was already losing its vitality. The middle-class families celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow families whose sons officered the army and navy and swarmed over all the waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the Irrawaddy, were dwindling before 1914. The thing that had killed them was the telegraph. In a narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall, there was every year less room for individual initiative. Men like Clive, Nelson, Nicholson, Gordon would find no place for themselves in the modern British Empire. By 1920 nearly every inch of the colonial empire was in the grip of Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay. The one-time empire builders were reduced to the status of clerks, buried deeper and deeper under mounds of paper and red tape. In the early ‘twenties one could see, all over the Empire, the older officials, who had known more spacious days, writhing impotently under the changes that were happening. From that time onwards it has been next door to impossible to induce young men of spirit to take any part in imperial administration. And what was true of the official world was true also of the commercial. The great monopoly companies swallowed up hosts of petty traders. Instead of going out to trade adventurously in the Indies one went to an office stool in Bombay or Singapore. And life in Bombay or Singapore was actually duller and safer than life in London. Imperialist sentiment remained strong in the middle class, chiefly owing to family tradition, but the job of administering the Empire had ceased to appeal. Few able men went east of Suez if there was any way of avoiding it.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

January 7, 2022

QotD: British intelligentsia and imperial decline

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the general weakening of imperialism, and to some extent of the whole British morale, that took place during the nineteen-thirties, was partly the work of the left-wing intelligentsia, itself a kind of growth that had sprouted from the stagnation of the Empire.

It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is not in some sense “Left”. Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual was T.E. Lawrence. Since about 1930 everyone describable as an “intellectual” has lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing order. Necessarily so, because society as it was constituted had no room for him. In an Empire that was simply stagnant, neither being developed nor falling to pieces, and in an England ruled by people whose chief asset was their stupidity, to be “clever” was to be suspect. If you had the kind of brain that could understand the poems of T.S. Eliot or the theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept out of any important job. The intellectuals could find a function for themselves only in the literary reviews and the left-wing political parties.

The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the people who were most “anti-Fascist” during the Spanish civil war are most defeatist now. And underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia – their severance from the common culture of the country.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

January 4, 2022

Jim Morrison’s surprisingly long cultural shadow

Filed under: Books, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In City Journal, Ian Penman considers the paradox of Jim Morrison’s brief period of musical and cultural stardom yet seemingly endless echoes in popular culture:

Jim Morrison’s bright spotlight time with The Doors lasted not quite five years: the band’s debut album arrived in January 1967, and L.A. Woman, the final work to feature the singer, was released the week of his death, aged 27, on July 3, 1971.

It’s now a half century since Morrison died in Paris in opaquely squalid circumstances, due to — take your pick — some mixture of alcohol, heroin, a small respiratory infection, and a general (not to say studied) carelessness. “When the music’s over / turn out the lights,” he sang in 1967, on The Doors’ second album, Strange Days. “Cancel my subscription / to the Resurrection.” Yet his revenant career as all-purpose Dionysian icon seems inexhaustible. From the posthumous album An American Prayer (1978) and The Doors’ soundtrack appearance on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), to the serial publication of various “lost” Morrison writings and the lamentable Oliver Stone biopic The Doors (1991), there’s no medium that Morrison’s shade hasn’t found a way to inhabit. More recently, hip L.A. chanteuse Lana del Rey sang: “Living like Jim Morrison / Heading for a fucked-up holiday.” And now we have a figuratively and literally heavy 600-page tome, like a chic designer sarcophagus, with Harper’s publication of The Collected Works of Jim Morrison. Not designed for casual riffling, it should really come with its own lectern or pulpit. It’s hard to know whom this kind of swanky item is aimed at, but it’s a palpable attempt (in the current lingo) to secure Morrison’s legacy: to fix him as more than just this crazy dude who had a few glorious hits and looked sensational in leather pants.

What accounts for such a thriving afterlife? Why is there still such a halo around Morrison’s shaggy head when a cursory examination might suggest a fatally date-stamped cultural figure? How does this Nietzsche-quoting white bluesman and would-be shaman fit into today’s culturally disputatious landscape? A memory is being conjured, but is everything as straightforward as it looks?

Born in December 1943, the young James Douglas Morrison was the son of a career Navy man who bequeathed his firstborn son a middle name honoring no less a figure than General Douglas MacArthur. Constantly on the move from base to base with his family, with no real hometown or settled circle of friends, young James turned to books and music to forge a sense of self-possession. Pursuing the then-prevalent ethos of pop existentialism (via Camus, Nietzsche, and Genet) allowed Morrison to view his own deracinated life as a Sisyphean trial. Unlike many such adolescents, however, Morrison seems actually to have read all the key texts — and a lot more besides. He was particularly taken with doomed poets, demonology, and Greek myth.

This was a cultural moment between the declamatory Beats and rock and roll proper, with European authors all the rage in cheap, widely available paperbacks. The shy, pudgy, bookish James slowly became charismatic Jim in waiting, splicing together a wild strain of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, American blues and Native American shamanism. Such borrowings are likely to be chided these days for over-easy appropriation of other cultures; but at the time, it may have had less to do with privilege than a tentative questing for something larger than the self — less to do with the cliché of rebelling against conformity than a way of locating something to worship in a time and place that was big on prosperity but had little sense of the sacred. Morrison found it in American blues and European literature, and what eventually appeared was his own kind of two-headed soul music: The Doors’ debut album made space for covers of both Howlin’ Wolf’s “Back Door Man” and Brecht/Weill’s “Alabama Song”. Morrison opened a door onto a threshold space that he would call his “bright midnight”: a sublime European Romanticism transplanted to a very American plain of cars, bars, deserts, and beaches — The Golden Bough on the Billboard chart.

The founding myth of Morrison’s short, intense life occurred when he was only a child. In 1947, the four-year-old Morrison was on a family road trip somewhere in the desert between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and they passed the scene of a horrific traffic accident, involving a truckload of Indian workers. He claimed that he felt the spirit of one of the dead Indians enter him and take up residence as storm clouds unfurled overhead: “Indians scattered on dawn’s hi-way bleeding / Ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile egg-shell mind.” This scene contains all the elements that he would later obsessively return to in song, poetry, and film. A car in motion. Blood, sand, and death. Ghost whispers and gigantic skies. Here is a liminal scene more real than the polite society he’s being raised in. Nothing quite so full of life for these young inquiring eyes as this moment of messy extinction. A primal landscape, with the figure of the bewildered but awakened man-child set against it: enormous horizons outside, the child’s intently fascinated gaze within. “It was the first time I discovered death.”

December 29, 2021

QotD: The pervasive infantilization of the “elites”

Filed under: Books, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One is tempted to go first after the fattest target, Harry Potter (one is even more tempted to make the obvious jokes about “academia” and “fattest”, but one will manfully resist). The thing is, I think I get the appeal of something like Game of Thrones — the part of the appeal that isn’t spelled “scads and acres and furlongs and metric shitloads of tits,” that is, which makes up the appeal of 99% of any given HBO show (seriously, where would that network be without gratuitous nudity?).

We’ll get there, fear not. But the appeal of Harry Potter absolutely eludes me. I’m sure it’s a charming enough story, but … it’s kid stuff, and they’re not reading it with their kids, because they don’t have kids. And it’s really creepy, y’all, how seriously they take this kids’ stuff. As Vizzini pointed out yesterday, the very mature deep thinkers in the Totally Legit Joe regime are whiling away their hours behind the razor wire by choosing spirit animals for themselves, based on their favorite Harry Potter characters. And while that is absolutely the kind of thing those imbeciles should be doing, instead of attempting to govern, not a one of them is under age 40 (Jen Psaki, for instance, is 43 — and also, according to anonymous White House sources, a “wild cat”; make of that information what you will).

Part of it is just the infantilization of American culture, of course, but it’s strange and disturbing how the more educated, professional classes seem to be not just more infantile than the hoi polloi, but much more passionate about it, too. I know a senior ER doc at a big hospital, for instance, who is waaaaay into Star Wars. And I don’t mean Star Wars collectibles, though of course he has a bunch of those, and as silly as that is in itself (guilty as charged; let me show you my baseball cards sometime).

I mean the dude is just really, really, really into Star Wars. He’s got Star Wars shit all over his house … his huge, grossly expensive, “befitting a senior trauma surgeon whose wife is also a big league university administrator” house, in the toniest part of town, to which he routinely invites other big league people, including — for professional purposes — politicians and powerful apparatchiks. And let me hasten to add, he’s not House MD, whose abrasive “quirks” are tolerated because of his preternatural genius. This guy is, himself, a slick political operator; he’s got plenty of social savvy. But … he’s also got a scale model Millennium Falcon hanging from the roof in the dining room.

I’m sure there’s an explanation for how nobody but me seems to find this really, deeply, disturbingly fucking odd … but there it is.

Severian, “The One Pop Culture Thing”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-16.

December 17, 2021

QotD: The Kafkatrap that is known as “white feminism”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There is a logical fallacy called the Kafka Trap. It describes the condition of always being wrong. If you are accused of something, and you deny it, that denial is taken as an admission of guilt; only a guilty party would go out of their way to deny an allegation of wrongdoing. Alternatively, if you say nothing in the face of the allegation, that’s also an admission of guilt: your silence means you have accepted the allegation.

Many describe Franz Kafka’s disenchanted fables as tragic. And this is certainly true. But they are also farcical. To watch someone being relentlessly wrong can be grimly enjoyable — as long as you’re not the person in question.

The term white feminism, as it is commonly used today, is a classic example of the Kafka Trap. If you show too much interest in the lives of people of colour, you risk being accused of white saviourism — which is another way of saying you have a suspiciously condescending attitude to people of colour. But if you don’t show enough interest, you are insufficiently intersectional. You only care about the white, middle-class cisgendered women in your social circle.

White feminism is a classic example of the Kafka Trap because whatever you do is either too much or not enough. You are never right.

Tomiwa Owolade, “The problem with white saviours”, UnHerd.com, 2021-09-12.

December 13, 2021

QotD: Cultural undermining of the British “establishment” was effectively complete by 1970

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Beyond the Fringe, Forty Years On and TW3 created a tradition of “anti-establishment” comedy which continued long after its roots were forgotten. There may still have been an “establishment” of snobbery, church, monarchy, clubland and old-school-tie links in 1961. There was no such thing ten years later, but it suited the comics and all reformers to pretend that there was and to continue to attack this mythical thing. After all, if there were no snobbery, no crusty old aristocrats and cobwebbed judges, what was the moral justification for all this change, change which benefited the reformers personally by making them rich, famous and influential?

[…]

It also made the middle class, especially the educated and well-off middle class, despise themselves and feel a sort of shame for their supposedly elitist prejudices, based upon injustice and undermined by their failure to defend the nation from its enemies in the era of appeasement. Thanks to this, in another paradox, they have often felt unable to defend things within Britain which they value and which help to keep them in existence, from the grammar schools to good manners. They are ashamed of being higher up the scale, though for most middle-class people this is more a matter of merit than birth, and nothing to be ashamed of at all.

[…]

Since the 1960s, when the Left began its conquest of the cultural battlements, it has always been surprised and annoyed by Tory election victories. The 1970 Tory triumph, though entirely predictable, took the cultural establishment by surprise. The 1979 Tory win, though even more predictable, infuriated them. They had won control of broadcasting, of the schools, of the universities, the church, the artistic, musical and architectural establishment? How was it possible that they could not also be the government? Their rage was enormous, and increased with each successive Labour defeat. It was an injustice. How could the people be so foolish? Now, instead of aristocratic snobs misgoverning the country, the establishment was portrayed as a sort of fascistic semi-dictatorship, hacking at the NHS and the welfare state, waging aggressive wars abroad and enriching itself while the poor lived in misery.

This series of falsehoods has now become a weapon ready and waiting for unscrupulous demagogues to harness, and perhaps use against the new “establishment” which has benefited so much from the satire boom and the alternative comedians. Once you have begun to use dishonest mockery as a weapon, you can never be entirely sure that it will not eventually be turned against you, by others who have learned that abuse and jeering pay much easier and swifter dividends than hard fact or serious argument. It could be that the civilized mirth of the sixties leads in a direct line to the crude hyena cackling of the mob. In any case, there is no sign of the humour industry taking the side of traditional morality, patriotism or civility. The best it can do is dignify itself with noisy and public collections for sentimental and prominent charity. Once you step beyond the fringe, you sooner or later find yourself in very wild country indeed.

Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain, 1988.

December 12, 2021

“[T]oday’s antiracism paradoxically requires the crudest of racist categories to justify and explain itself”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Sullivan on the racism of modern “anti-racist” movements and his hope that Hispanic Americans may provide a way out of the current political deadlock:

Of all the acronyms, euphemisms and sophisms pioneered by critical theory, one of the most revealing is the term “black and brown people”. You hear it all the time now. Whether it’s about “the lack of Black and brown representation in Hollywood”, vaccine hesitancy in “Black and brown neighborhoods in large cities”, the right to vote for “Black and brown people”, or “allyship between Black and brown people”, the “B&b” formula is now yet another ubiquitous media virtue-signal. It’s subtler than some others. It doesn’t shriek woke like “BIPOC”; it isn’t as instantly risible as “2SLGBTQIA+”; it gives “Black” a Capital Letter, and “brown” feels a bit like a lower-case add-on — but at least it uses actual English words, and doesn’t end in an X.

Still: what does it tell you that a staggering and brilliant array of totally different ethnicities, races, religions, histories and cultures can now routinely be reduced to just two drab colors?

I think it speaks to two things. The first is that today’s antiracism paradoxically requires the crudest of racist categories to justify and explain itself. A whole kaleidoscope of immigrant difference — from Kurds and Mexicans and Somalis to Dominicans, Chileans, Nigerians, and Pakistanis — has now been turned into one monochrome racial “brown” — just to fit into an oppressor/oppressed, white/black narrative.

Equally, a diverse African diaspora — ranging from Nigerian immigrants to descendants of Southern slaves to biracial men and women with mainly European ancestry who go back to this country’s miscegenated origins — is now just “Black”. And this new racial unit has one politics: left-Democrat. Individuals disappear; diversity of opinion within groups evaporate; all that matters is a single skin color and oppression.

The second aspect of critical theory that “B&b” helps reveal is that the crude binary of “black” and “white” simply has less salience with every passing day, as more and more races, ethnicities and cultures complicate and enrich our society, and render it structurally, demographically and culturally unrecognizable from even the recent past. To give one example: 60 years ago, four percent of Americans approved of inter-racial marriage; today, it’s 94 percent. Or check out the rapid decline in the “white Christian” share of the population — from 80 percent in 1996 1976 to 44 percent today. Look around you and you’ll see how the crude rubric of “white supremacy” is, in fact, wildly out of date.

This is why so many of the most passionately woke are so obsessed with history in America, and the further back the better, as the 1619 Project shows. The past is a world they are much more comfortable in than the present, a place where the racial divide was infinitely simpler, and racial inequality both brutal and actively enforced by the government. Before the Civil Rights Act in 1964, before mass non-white immigration began in 1965, before mass non-white illegal immigration since the 1990s, the “white supremacy” rubric had some lingering traction.

But in the 21st Century, it’s been hopelessly compounded by layer upon layer of mass immigration from every conceivable corner of the planet. The Latino population in the US is now larger than the African-American one; and Asians, of many different varieties, are now immigrating in higher numbers than Latinos. Before too long, the black/white dynamic may disappear into the multi-colored, multi-hued background entirely.

QotD: Britain’s alienated intelligentsia of the 1930s

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during “God save the King” than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were “decadent” and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the New Statesman and the News-Chronicle cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.

It is clear that the special position of the English intellectuals during the past ten years, as purely negative creatures, mere anti-Blimps, was a by-product of ruling-class stupidity. Society could not use them, and they had not got it in them to see that devotion to one’s country implies “for better, for worse”. Both Blimps and highbrows took for granted, as though it were a law of nature, the divorce between patriotism and intelligence. If you were a patriot you read Blackwood’s Magazine and publicly thanked God that you were “not brainy”. If you were an intellectual you sniggered at the Union Jack and regarded physical courage as barbarous. It is obvious that this preposterous convention cannot continue. The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his mechanical snigger, is as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel. A modern nation cannot afford either of them. Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again. It is the fact that we are fighting a war, and a very peculiar kind of war, that may make this possible.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

December 11, 2021

Another front opens in the “War On Christmas”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Jen Gerson looks at the latest offence against mainstream views of the Christmas season:

it was impossible not to get sucked into the blossoming horror of Santa Inc.

The eight-part television show made for HBO Max by comedians Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen may soon attain the record of one of the most poorly rated television series of all time. And watching but a brief trailer, it’s not hard to see why.

I mean … Jesus. If you were trying to craft a perfect example of hate-bait for the reactionary right in a lab, this is pretty much what it would look like. It’s got woke politics, feminism, hatred of white guys and a pot shot in the War on Christmas neatly tied up in a claymation bow. The fact that the show is fronted by comedians who are Jewish has dug this mess into the very ugliest, muddiest trench of the culture war.

[…]

If you want to create an outrageous, bawdy Christmas movie that features a miserable and bored Mrs. Claus giving head to Santa, or a gag with a miner’s hat filled with dildos, there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s a very specific audience for “sausage party” humour — lacrosse-playing young white men, and older white men who wish they were still young white men who could play lacrosse. In other words, people who look like Seth Rogen.

And do you know what that crowd doesn’t generally enjoy?

Thinly veiled manifestos on how awful white men are; the terribleness of corporate America, and a show featuring a lot of downtrodden women complaining about health insurance and lack of maternity leave.

On the other hand, if Santa Inc. was trying to appeal to the #resistence pussy hat and rainbow tattoo crowd, certainly a woke-appropriate message is here for them. But, does this crowd need to be so lectured? Meanwhile, the juvenile humour is off-putting. Is the feminist set going to keel over laughing because one of the female reindeer characters brags about having a threesome with Donner?

Lol. Thud.

There’s no sophistication here. No clever set up or punch line. It’s just a story about an angry female elf who wants to be Santa Claus that pretends to be funny by leaning on sex jokes.

Raunchiness is fine for a cheap laugh. It relies on the taboo of shock and sex to generate an emotional reaction. But, man, one of the most popular music videos of the last few years was Wet Ass Pussy. Who even notices swearing anymore? Who is shocked by a scene in which the main character’s mother bangs the Easter bunny?

This kind of lazy humour is old hat. It’s boring.

So, no, Santa Inc. is not good.

December 8, 2021

QotD: Self-bullying

Filed under: Health, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

On August 2nd, 2013, 14-year-old Hannah Smith of Leicestershire, England, took her own life. She had been receiving cruel messages on the social networking site Ask.fm for months, and her parents concluded that cyberbullying was the main cause of her suicide. But then evidence emerged that the hatred Hannah had been receiving came from … herself — 98 percent of the messages were posted from the IP address of the computer she was using.

This tragic event inspired a research project by Sameer Hinduja and colleagues at the Cyberbullying Research Center in Florida. Their analysis of around 5,500 teenagers produced some surprising results: “We knew we had to study this empirically,” Hinduja remarked, “and I was stunned to discover that about 1-in-20 middle- and high-school-age students have bullied themselves online. This finding was totally unexpected, even though I’ve been studying cyberbullying for almost 15 years.”

Boys reported digital self-harm more often (7.1 percent) than girls (5.3 percent). Asked why they participated in such behaviour, their replies included: “I already felt so bad with myself that I wanted to make myself feel even worse” and “I wanted to see if someone really was my friend.” However, there were also those who claimed that they did it to justify their aggressive behaviour towards others, or just for fun, to see how others would react.

If teenagers are prepared to harm themselves in cyberspace to attain the status of victim, it should not be especially surprising that some adults do so in the real world. In the most notorious example of this behaviour, actor Jussie Smollett told police he had been the victim of a racist and homophobic attack on January 20th, 2019. He immediately found himself at the centre of media attention and public opinion. But the subsequent investigation revealed that Smollett had paid two men to assault him and that he had sent himself the threatening letters he had received the week before.

This was not an isolated incident. In his book Hate Crime Hoax, political scientist Wilfred Reilly analysed 346 alleged hate crimes and found that fewer than a third were genuine. He provides detailed descriptions of almost a hundred high-profile cases that never actually happened, most of which were supposed to have taken place on university campuses. Reilly concludes that, contrary to popular belief, we are not experiencing an epidemic of hate crimes, but an epidemic of hate crime hoaxes perpetrated by people searching for public attention and sympathy.

Nor is it only hate crimes that are the subject of hoaxes and false accusations. A meta-analysis conducted by Australian scholars Claire E. Ferguson and John M. Malouff in 2015 revealed that as many as 5.2 percent of all reported rape cases are false. The authors note, however, that their analysis only accounts for accusations that were disproven in the course of investigations — many others were never confirmed or were withdrawn for reasons unknown.

Tomasz Witkowski, “The Victims’ Race”, Quillette, 2021-08-27.

December 7, 2021

QotD: The decline of class distinctions in Britain

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

After 1918 there began to appear something that had never existed in England before: people of indeterminate social class. In 1910 every human being in these islands could be “placed” in an instant by his clothes, manners and accent. That is no longer the case. Above all, it is not the case in the new townships that have developed as a result of cheap motor cars and the southward shift of industry. The place to look for the germs of the future England is in the light-industry areas and along the arterial roads. In Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayes – everywhere, indeed, on the outskirts of great towns – the old pattern is gradually changing into something new. In those vast new wildernesses of glass and brick the sharp distinctions of the older kind of town, with its slums and mansions, or of the country, with its manor-houses and squalid cottages, no longer exist. There are wide gradations of income, but it is the same kind of life that is being lived at different levels, in labour-saving flats or council houses, along the concrete roads and in the naked democracy of the swimming-pools. It is a rather restless, cultureless life, centring round tinned food, Picture Post, the radio and the internal combustion engine. It is a civilization in which children grow up with an intimate knowledge of magnetoes and in complete ignorance of the Bible. To that civilization belong the people who are most at home in and most definitely of the modern world, the technicians and the higher-paid skilled workers, the airmen and their mechanics, the radio experts, film producers, popular journalists and industrial chemists. They are the indeterminate stratum at which the older class distinctions are beginning to break down.

This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class privileges. There are every day fewer people who wish them to continue. Nor need we fear that as the pattern changes life in England will lose its peculiar flavour. The new red cities of Greater London are crude enough, but these things are only the rash that accompanies a change. In whatever shape England emerges from the war it will be deeply tinged with the characteristics that I have spoken of earlier. The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress