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Princeton to Non-lefty Lovers of Literature: Abandon All Hope, ye Who Enter Here
Saturday, March 16, 2013, 2:12 PM

Over at The Weekly Standard, Mark Bauerlein has written a good review, entitled, “Forbidden City,” of what looks to be good book about the liberal stranglehold over academia by one Neil Gross.

Bauerlein shows us that Gross, a liberal sociologist who has written a book on Richard Rorty, establishes better than most have the extent of liberal dominance over institutions of higher learning.

But Bauerlein’s real accomplishment is his final sentence, which says it all:

When Bill O’Reilly and John Stossel discussed affirmative action for conservative professors, as they did this past December, did they believe that it would inspire more 22-year-olds on the right to apply for graduate study in Princeton’s English department, which tells prospective students that “we offer a wide range of theoretical specializations in fields such as feminist theory, gender studies, psychoanalysis, Marxism, New Historicism, environmental studies, political and social theory, and cultural studies”?

nullhell gate image


Sidney Milkis on FDR’s 2nd Bill of Rights
Friday, March 15, 2013, 4:09 PM

My new (as of Jan.) teaching gig is with Christopher Newport University. CNU itself is an interesting institution, one that provides hope that American academia won’t eventually split apart into a Red system and a Blue one, and that college costs can be kept under control. And it hosts, with outside donor help, the fine Center for American Studies, under whose auspices I am a visiting faculty post-doc, and which recently put on an excellent conference on FDR’s legacy.

Today we put up videos for most of the talks at the conference, and while the keynote by Stanford historian David M. Kennedy is excellent, the one you really want to check out is the brief lunch talk by UVA political scientist Sidney M. Milkis. Milkis is more well-known for his scholarship on the presidency, but he’s also done important work on the development of American liberalism in the 20th century, most notably by editing three books with Jerome Mileur on the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society respectively. The New Deal volume features his essay on FDR as attempting a “Second Founding” with his articulation of his Four Freedoms and his Second Bill of Rights; it is from this essay that his talk at CNU was adapted.

freedom from want image

I agree with Milkis that the importance of FDR’s constitutional re-founding rhetoric, particularly as exemplified in his Second Bill of Rights (scroll down) cannot be underestimated. Some of those rights were rights to a decent job, housing, education etc. Indeed, if you watch Milkis’s talk, you’ll see that at the end he provides a lengthy answer to an inaudible question from a gentleman in the audience. The question had to do with whether it was appropriate to imply that the American people had “so to speak” adopted his Second Bill of Rights without having gone through the process of amendment, indeed, without FDR even calling for this process. (I know the content of the question because I was the gentleman who asked it!) Sid gives a good answer, but he’s ultimately not as critical of FDR’s constitutional rhetoric as I would have liked him to be…indeed, I interjected at one point that I would have been fine with the speech if FDR had merely said we had adopted a new set of values or goals.

Anyhow, check it out. Sid’s a lot of fun, and a great scholar.


Ho-Hum
Thursday, March 14, 2013, 8:53 AM

Secret service man claims the Obama administration is lying about who made the decision to suspend White House tours.

From time to time it’s good to remind ourselves of the laws of nature. Aristotle got most of it right, but we have to add a couple:

Earth goes down. So does water.

Fire goes up. So does air.

Obama lies. 60% of public ignores.

To ignore is to accept.

America goes down.


Carl’s Rock Songbook #77: Is Conor Friedersdorf Right That We Need More Conservative Rap Critics?
Saturday, February 23, 2013, 5:34 PM

Well, he thinks so. And far more importantly, in my sincere judgment, Mark Judge does too. Judge writes for Acculturated, the conservative website that seeks to explain Why Pop Culture Matters.

So this post is a continuation of some observations about rap, but also, about the paradoxes of conservative pop-culture studies.

Now the first of those “paradox” posts discussed the fact that while Peter is right that the genre of the long-form mini-series has never been better, it remains undeniable that the overall effect of the boob-tube on our culture is a negative one. Peter’s call to “Watch more TV” might be a useful provocation for conservative intellectuals, but it can’t be a seriously offered recommendation for the masses. Right?
*************************************************************************
Libertarians, and libertarian-leaning conservatives (like Friedersdorf), don’t need to worry so much about pop culture, and how it should “matter” or not. The market decides what’s popular. What really matters is economics, and the politics behind it. Culture sorts itself out. So such libertarians and conservatives don’t need to worry about the possibility of pop culture being “filth,” as John Derbyshire memorably put it once. That is, they think they don’t.

But anyone whose conservatism embraces social conservatism, such as ours at Postmodern Conservative, cannot avoid that worry. What is more, any perceptive recognition of pop culture’s potential “filthiness,” which we might more precisely call a vice-aiding and civilization-eroding quality, has to go further than the teenage moralist’s tendency to react strongly against lust and greed as utterly beneath her (see Dr. Zhivago chapter 2, section 9) and much further than the curmudgeonly moralist’s tendency to simply dismiss pop culture as “trash,” “filth,” “barbarism,” etc.

That is, perceptive understanding of pop culture has to, at a minimum:

a) see that there are standards and levels of quality in pop culture itself, even in the more debased genres.

b) understand (and thus, perhaps, to even feel and be oneself tempted by) the attraction of any given genre, even at its lower levels.

c) be on the look-out for signs and expressions of humanity, whether these suggest “liberal” or “conservative” remedies, or none at all, at all levels and in all genres.

And,

d) consider the overall trend, the “long march,” of the respective pop culture genre, and of pop culture in general.

What John Derbyshire meant, I think, by saying somewhere around 2003 that “pop culture is filth,” is that we had to admit that the whole kit-and-kaboodle had pretty much arrived at its true soft-porny mode it had always been destined to develop into, and that conservatives had to have the moral spine to keep looking down upon it.

A more honest expression of this, and additionally a more Christian one, would say: so much pop culture is filthy and trashy that you will necessarily expose yourself to a number of temptations if you attempt any perceptive appreciation of it (even of the degree of its moral threat) via a, b, c, d. So it’s better to just to dismiss it outright. Stop worrying about some gangsta rap connoisseur or BREAKING BAD devotee saying you don’t know your p’s and q’s about that which you’re refusing to engage with, and err on the side of protecting your soul.

*************************************************************************
Now Conor Friedersdorf raised the whole issue by criticizing Mark Steyn, Jay Nordingler, and Mona Charen for seeming to dismiss rap as not really music, or not even musical. (In fairness to them it was one those casual podcasts, and the most cultured of them, Nordlingler, really didn’t get to finish his point.) I’m with Friedersdorf and Judge in thinking that this simply won’t do, particularly since Steyn and Nordingler have established reputations of expertise, respectively, on Broadway shows and classical music.

For one thing, Nordlinger and Steyn are obviously not among those who take monastic, Puritan, or Shaker (’tis a joy to be simple, ‘tis a joy to be free) stances towards drama and music. Nor are they among those interpreting Plato, or virtue-cultivation generally, in a manner that binds themselves to the strictures like those in the Republic and the Laws against art that imitates the low, the vicious, or the anti-philosophic emotional dispositions. So since we rightly expect them to make the conservative case for what the good cultured life, necessarily a non-simple life, looks like, they in particular don’t get a pass to just dismiss whole swathes of pop music.

And of course, if we put our conservative strategy-caps on, it doesn’t help us make converts among the young or the “minority” to have conservative critics like them say curmudgeonly crude things about rap.

book on rap poetry

That makes sense, right? But a funny thing happened in the thread on Friedersdorf’s piece. He had chided conservatives by saying that “For now, liberals have a near monopoly on the rapping and the mainstream rap criticism too.” But a couple of commentators pointed out that the very rap that rap-critics most extolled, and especially the most lyrically uplifting, political, etc., wasn’t the kind that was particularly popular. Others said that that in itself was a crude characterization of the scene, that what was popular was more of a mixed bag, and that rap had become more stylistically diverse in the last decade.

So notice:

1) To say anything truly expert and accurate about rap, one would have to listen to a whole lot of it. And to do that, one really must have to some extent surrendered oneself to its overall vibe. (Or have been raised on it.)

2) We could say the same thing about a finer genre, like classical music, or something lower than or as low as rap. The fan of reality TV shows, or to take it to a really preposterous level, the fan/user of pornography might demand the same sort of truly expert and accurate judgment of their “genre” of pop-culture.

3) It is not possible nor healthy to be expert in this way about many different and contrasting areas of culture: that is, our ideal of “becoming cultured” cannot be the man who can at one moment talk about classical the way Jay Nordlinger can, and then the next moment talk about rap with the knowledge Conor Friedersdorf is implicitly calling for.

4) It seems quite possible that when we appreciate the best in rap pop culture, 90% or nearly all of that “best rap” will be not be popular. It is pop culture in that it follows a pop form, but still. We find similar patterns with rock and pop music generally. I am not against the market’s impact on music per se—I haven’t bought that Frankfurt Marxist line—but I certainly won’t deny that in our day particularly, as Laura Jane of Knox Road demonstrates here, a strong case can be made that the pop music most bought, downloaded, and linked to, tends to be remarkably bad. The point here is that pop culture analysis, whether conservative or not, can put itself in the ridiculous position of arguing for pop-culture’s accomplishments, insights, and cultural significance on the basis of artists that aren’t actually popular.

5) Social conservatism in particular has to seriously consider the possibility that little should be said about the moral disposition or artistic worth of a particular pop genre on the basis of its not-very-characteristic artists. And less yet should be said on this basis about the overall cultural impact of the pop genre in question.

So, a broad case against rap as a genre might still be fairly convincing even were we to concede the quality of its best artists and moments.

A broad case against rap would zero in on its a) anger cultivation, b) bad model of manliness, and c) bad model of black identity. Whether such a case was friendly to hip-hop itself—which is the way I would make it, albeit with some criticisms towards the diminishment of melody going back to hip-hop’s funk roots—see my essay How to Think about Disco–, or only grudgingly accepted it as slight improvement over bad-enough disco, it would say that the unhealthy obsession with a, b, and c is what has made the act of rapping largely take-over and define the hip-hop genre. It would further say that is what has made the whole gangsta schtick so dominant within rapping itself. It would also note that the ongoing potency of that unhealthy set of obsessions has much to do with why rap has remained the main black youth-culture music for nearly thirty years now, whereas, for example, a genre like classic soul only had about a five-to-twelve year run.

You can tell I pretty much buy that broad case. And on that basis I can say to the likes of Derbyshire and sincere church-folk, “yeah, don’t bother with it—it is usually morally harmful, and thus your basic instinct is correct,” and to the likes of Steyn and Nordlinger, “please don’t say sweeping things about its lack of musicality unless you’ve really got the case to back this, but yes, it’s probably best if you just ignore it—so don’t try to become the rap-appreciating critic Friedersdorf is calling for, and if someone asks you about it, tell them you wouldn’t have put so much effort into your line of music criticism if you had thought rap was worthwhile.”

BTW: if one really does want to find moderate-to-conservative critical considerations of hip-hop, a good option would be exploring Booker Rising and especially its blog-roll. There is a site there called Hip-hop Republican that is interesting…where one of the more recent stories is titled “Gangsta Rappers Are Not Role Models.” And it shouldn’t surprise my regular readers to learn that I think Martha Bayles said most of what was needed to in her 1994 Hole in Our Soul anyhow. A report on her take next time.


Against Our Liberal-Ivy Ruling Class
Friday, February 22, 2013, 7:10 AM

There’s an important Angelo Codevilla essay in Forbes: As Country Club Republicans Link Up With The Democratic Ruling Class, Millions Of Voters Are Orphaned.  Not sure if I agree of his analysis of the Republican Party, which is obviously the main point of the essay, but I do agree with his analysis of the Liberal-Ivy Establishment, or really half-establishment, since it rules in open defiance of and contempt towards nearly half of the nation:

“…The Republican Party never fully adapted itself to the fact that modern big government is an interest group in and of itself, inherently at odds with the rest of society…”

“…It is impossible to overstate the importance of American education’s centralization, intellectual homogenization and partisanship in the formation of the ruling class’ leadership. Many have noted the increasing stratification of American society and that, unlike in decades past, entry into its top levels now depends largely on graduation from elite universities. As Charles Murray has noted, their graduates tend to marry one another, perpetuating what they like to call a “meritocracy.” But this is rule not by the meritorious, rather by the merely credentialed – because the credentials are suspect. As Ron Unz has shown, nowadays entry into the ivied gateways to power is by co-option, not merit. Moreover, the amount of study required at these universities leaves their products with more pretense than knowledge or skill.” [links available to the Unz and Murray stuff in the original]

And I must add, the kind of study.

“Thus by the turn of the twenty first century America had a bona fide ruling class that transcends government and sees itself at once as distinct from the rest of society – and as the only element thereof that may act on its behalf. It rules – to use New York Times columnist David Brooks’ characterization of Barack Obama – ‘as a visitor from a morally superior civilization.’ The civilization of the ruling class does not concede that those who resist it have any moral or intellectual right, and only reluctantly any civil right, to do so. Resistance is illegitimate because it can come only from low motives. President Obama’s statement that Republican legislators – and hence the people who elect them – don’t care whether ‘seniors have decent health care…children have enough to eat’ is typical.”

Typical, but let us remind ourselves, sickening.  Morally bankrupt.  Infected with a spirit productive of civil war.

And most shocking, perhaps, we get this on a near daily basis without any substantial push-back from moderates.  The many decently moderate Democrats you meet…nice people, but truth is, especially about the older and more educated ones, they are grossly abdicating their duty to their party’s and their nation’s future health.

I cannot repeat that point enough.

One thing I would say to them, if per chance any of them read this, is that Codevilla’s characterization of an elite liberal ruling class, which feels slightly but significantly off for characterizing the social physiognomy of the whole nation, nearly entirely rings true with what I’ve seen in academia. And it is now quite obviously the truth about the legacy media, aka the MSM.

I won’t go here into Codevilla’s characterizations of a “country class,” excluded both from the liberal-ivy elite and the ever-diminishing but still-tenacious Republican “country-club” club, but you’ll get the basic idea from this:

“The common, unifying element of the several country class’ sectors is the ruling class’ insistence, founded on force rather than reason, that their concerns are illegitimate, that they are illegitimate. The ruling class demonizes the country class piece by piece. Piece by piece it cannot defend itself, much less can it set the country on a course of domestic and international peace, freedom and solvency. None of the country class’ politically active elements can, by themselves, hope to achieve any of their goals because they can be sure that the entire ruling class’ resources will be focused on them whenever circumstances seem propitious. In 2012 for example, the Constitutional right to keep and bear arms seemed politically safe. Then, one disaster brought seemingly endless resources from every corner of the ruling class to bear on its defenders. The rest of the country class’ politically active elements stood by, sympathetically, but without a vehicle for helping. Each of these elements should have learned that none can hope for indulgence from any part of the ruling class. They can look only to others who are under attack as they themselves are.”

So pro-lifers, Porchers, real liberal educators, etc., don’t mock the NRA even as you seek to engage everyone in civil discussions about gun control that tend to arrive at conclusions against the current frenzy of proposals, support it!  Don’t do the usual “I agree with 90% of what Rush Limbaugh says, but…” schtick!  I actually think it’s more than a schtick, but Codevilla has a point, even if it is not the most important one from the essay anyhow.  So let’s give him the last word here:

“Yet the country class, to defend itself, to cut down the forest of subsidies and privileges that choke America, to curb the arrogance of modern government, cannot shy away from offending the ruling class’ intellectual and moral pretenses. Events themselves show how dysfunctional the ruling class is.”

Well, not quite the last word. The silver lining about dysfunctionality is that it brings with it a great deal of ineffectiveness—consider the recent and very thorough Weekly Standard piece on Eric Holder, for example.  Awful ideologue with horrible agenda, but he can’t get much of it enacted.


Carl’s Rock Songbook #76: Rap and the Summer of ’89
Monday, February 18, 2013, 6:48 PM

A slight change of plans here—I had wanted to talk about this recent Conor Friedersdorf piece about the lack of conservative rap critics as part of a three-part essay called “Paradoxes of Conservative Pop-Culture Studies,” but I realized that to really to do that, I would have to talk about rap more than a bit, indeed, enough to demand a Rock Songbook post or two. This means a momentary change of plans with the Songbook also, but I promise I will be getting back to 1960s Rock take on Love I left off in December soon.

Rap ain’t Rock. In my Rock Songbook posts I have had on occasion to talk about various pop music genres that aren’t rock but which are commonly conflated with it, contrasted with it, etc., as I did with the posts on disco, or with various ones distinguishing R+B and rock n’ roll from Rock. That’s what I’m up to here.

Now rap obviously shares with rock an emphasis on rebel attitude, and upon heroism—in that respect, Rock and rap are unlike all the sorts of pop music, such as disco, that are primarily focused on dance-floor fun, but this similarity must not be made too much of. The base music of rap, hip-hop, shares quite a bit with disco, indeed grew directly out of it, and the identity/rebel/heroism focus of rap is a very specific one—rock rages in a broadly indistinct or middle-class mode, often against modernity, but rap’s poetic world is “lumpen-proletarian,” and its archetypes and formulas are all about expressing certain notions of blackness and manliness.

But before I go any further, I want to confess a good deal of ignorance about rap, particularly from the mid-90s on, and yet… …to also indicate a certain degree of appreciation and knowledge.

Personally, I associate rap with the summer of 1989, the time I was in Northwest Pasadena serving in something called the Pasadena Youth Program, sponsored by some local churches and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Hip-hop had been entering just about every young person’s musical consciousness for the last several years, and major leaps forward in sampling ability and other techniques made a number of the acts of that time undeniably fresh sounding, even to those who had resisted the sheer spare-ness (i.e., lack of musician-involvement) of the really old school hip-hop. Public Enemy, De La Soul, N.W.A., etc., really were delivering tasty new sounds.

1989 was the same summer that Spike Lee’s race-relations film, DO THE RIGHT THING came out, I had just read Malcolm X’s Autobiography for a class, my IVCF chapter was more and more seeking to explore the implications of “multi-ethnicity” for campus ministry, and as a college radio DJ I had been exposed to more of the best rap than most white suburbanites—that is, a number of threads came together for me at that time to allow me to be a right-on-the-sidelines spectator of the rap youth culture phenomenon. This only intensified for the next few years, since the IVCF call for multi-ethnicity and urban renewal inspired my wife and I enough to orient our church-attendance, residence, and a good deal of our socializing too, around a multi-ethnic church in East San Diego. What is more, my standard work-schedule would soon be substitute teaching one day in an inner-city high-school, and the next in a suburban one.

Those experiences eventually had their frustrations, some aspects of which I’ll share below, but in 1989, not only was the music “fresh,” but so were my just-forming ideas for inner-city ministry, teaching, and life.  My favorite rap songs, i.e., the best ones I’m familiar with, are from around that time:

1) EPMD, “You Gots to Chill” (one of the remix versions is also great)
2) Public Enemy, “Don’t Believe the Hype”
3) N.W.A., “Express Yourself”
3) De La Soul, “Say No Go”
4) Eric B. and Rakim, “Follow the Leader”
5) Roxanne Shante, “Go On Girl”
6) Boogie Down Productions, “The Bridge Is Over”
7) Digable Planets, “Where I’m From”

And of course, who doesn’t love Grandmaster Flash’s “White Lines?”

What are y’alls favorite rap or hip-hop songs?

I’ve got no time for links today beyond the EPMD and Roxanne Shante, the latter of which always seemed neglected to me…but that shouldn’t stop you!

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Hate to get into the downer stuff after posting a list like that, but I want to explain why I had lost interest by 1995. Music-wise, little seemed to be developing, but it was much more than that. It had something to do with the lingering aftertaste of the Rodney King riots, with how the gangsta-rap and porny-hip-hop styles seemed to be gaining more and more ground within the genres, and a great deal to do with witnessing up close, especially through my substitute teaching, how so many kids were getting sucked into crude and genuinely foul language patterns, and worse, into wanna-be or all-too-real gangsta-ism. Rap youth culture began to seem like a plague.

Indeed I had begun to actively detest the stars of the rap scene. I associated Dr. Dre with a particular black boy at my church becoming a pot-head after getting caught up in Dre’s The Chronic, and with the anguished prayers of church folk, mine also, for that boy. I associated Ice Cube with a horrifyingly ridiculous speech I heard in a classroom by some handsome full-of-himself black 12th-grader, about how Ice Cube was his hero because he had inspired him to avoid crack and gangs, as if it were some heroic thing for this guy who apparently had pretty middle-class parents to avoid falling into those, and as if Ice Cube had not in fact glamorized the gang life, overt misogyny, etc. The hip-hop that really took a stand against those sorts of sicknesses, such as you heard with De La Soul’s “Ghetto Thang,” and which did not footsy with the b.s. “reality-reporting” excuse, was losing the popularity contest. The critics might extol various consciousness-raising rappers, but the word on the street, the word I heard gaining ground in school-yard after school-yard, in rap after rap, alas, it would have to be Nigga.

de la soul is dead

De La Soul’s second album (late 1991?) seemed symbolic of the feeling in the air…and my recollection is it didn’t sound that great, either.  But however grim things began to look by 1992, 93, etc., I can’t accept that as the fully-unveiled truth about rap; that is, I can’t talk about rap without fondly remembering a certain charge and hope one really could connect to it, indeed had to connect to it, in 1989.

And as for the music simply, you don’t take my word for it: here’s some excerpts from one of Friedersdorf’s non-conservative rap critics, reviewing an anthology of rap lyrics put together by Adam Bradley and Andrew Du Bois:

The first Run-D.M.C. album arrived in 1984, but within a few years the group’s sparse lyrical style came to seem old-fashioned; a generation of rappers had arrived with a trickier sense of swing. Hip-hop historians call this period the Golden Age (Bradley and DuBois date it from 1985 to 1992), and it produced the kinds of lyrical shifts that are easy to spot in print: extended similes and ambitious use of symbolism; an increased attention to character and ideology; unpredictable internal rhyme schemes; enjambment and uneven line lengths.

As the Golden Age ended, hip-hop’s formal revolution was giving way to a narrative revolution. So-called gangsta rappers downplayed wordplay (without, of course, forswearing it) so they could immerse listeners in their first-person stories of bad guys and good times. Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. created two of the genre’s most fully realized personae; when they were murdered, in 1996 and 1997, respectively, their deaths became part of their stories. …As the anthologizers blast through the nineties (“Rap Goes Mainstream”) and the aughts (“New Millennium Rap”), their excitement starts to wane. They assert that the increasing popularity of hip-hop presented a risk of “homogenization and stagnation,” without pausing to explain why this should be true (doesn’t novelty sell?), if indeed it was.

Well, well, well. “Their excitement starts to wane??!!” Sometime in the late 90s or early aughts?

I’m tickled because while I admit my own–deliberately chosen–rap ignorance, I really do believe, as thoroughly as Roxanne Shante did about her female-MC supremacy, that nobody has explained as thoroughly as yours truly why those five words really ought to serve as the motto of the rock story, and of the pop-music story generally, from the mid-90s on. Everyone vaguely whines about music being cooler back in the day, but only my Songbook, building on the work of Martha Bayles, begins to spell out the reasons why. But prosy me, I just can’t lay out my superhero status in my field in the vivid way Roxanne could lay out hers in hers—you gotta do some of the work yourself.

Critics and rappers, rappers and critics. So I’ll leave you with the question I’ll be exploring next: is there a real need for conservative rap critics?


Paradoxes of Conservative Pop Culture Studies, pt. 1
Monday, February 11, 2013, 11:03 AM

With my Rock Songbook about to get underway again, I’d like to make a few observations about how I see it fitting, and not fitting in, into the recent uptick of interest in pop culture studies.  And that means some observations about such studies in general.

There’s been lots of conservative talk of late about the need to engage the culture, to transform it and understand it, beginning with pop culture. The idea seems to be that conservatives are too out of touch with the other half of America, much of it younger, less religious, less white, and generally not exposed to any conservative media. Our Pete Spiliakos gives you a policy-talk version of the same basic idea, where it makes more obvious sense to me than it does with pop culture.

This sort of talk has drawn some attention our way, particularly to our Peter Lawler’s essays. He says “watch more TV,” as a way to highlight his case that the long-form series, such as with GIRLS, MAD MEN, BIG LOVE, and FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, has risen to level where its quality and contemporary cultural importance has eclipsed that of cinema.

But this is the same guy who advised young people to take up smoking(and have lots of babies), to highlight his case about the insustainability of key social-welfare programs in light of our ever-greater longevity and creeping birth dearth. And a few of us remember from the No Left Turns days that, while ultimately not agreeing, he admitted the power of a Christian and virtue-ethics “media-fasting” case made against all TV by the commenter “wm.” “Wm” is a very erudite and Catholic (and yet also rock-attuned) professor whose identity I’ll reveal if I get permission, and here’s a taste of what he said in that thread:

… I am mortified by every minute of television I have watched, and it would be healthy for students to know that there are people out there who are not being beaten into a listless stupor by the worst invention ever to beguile mankind. …Marshall McLuhan was right – the medium IS the message, and no matter what TV is telling you, you have already agreed to the Babylon Box’s terms: total passivity in the face of a manipulative bombardment of visuals and sound. Implicit idolatry.

After I had pushed back some, in part by noting wm’s love of some rock music, in part by pointing to the old Puritan case against Shakespearean drama, he replied:

…I would never object to Shakespeare… I must insist that the core of my argument is the special insidious character of television. It sits right in the living room, it is so absorbing that hours and hours drop away before we notice, and it robs our family and our community. We get almost nothing of value in return for all the time it devours. Take PBS -the classic shield of TV’s defenders- as an example. Is it better to watch a PBS documentary on Shakespeare, or re-read Hamlet? We all know the answer to that.

I believe television is uniquely stultifying and uniquely anti-social. Lots of people have social gatherings with music on in the background. Want to kill conversation at a social gathering? Turn on TV. That is a pretty good indication of their relative power and impact.

Very interesting. What I’d like us all to take from “wm” is a conviction that conservative pop culture studies have to attend to the impact of the medium as well as of the message, or better said, since McLuhan can’t be fully right, that we must grapple with the popularity as well as the culture of pop culture. We have to do the sociological work about how a medium or genre’s overall popularity might be changing the mores and character of the entire society, or even of modern humanity simply.

That is, pop culture studies cannot simply be about conservatives (or Christians, or Great Books educators) dwelling upon the best moments of such culture, or otherwise using it to prove the relevance of the traditions they want to convey.

My Songbook, for example, is about to grapple with what the ubiquity of love song in pop music, going back many many decades, has gradually done to us. That is, overall, while it certainly does hold it worthwhile to analyze the best songs, it refuses to confine itself to that pleasant task.

And more to the point for thinking about our own lives, how we could live them better, more virtuously, etc., I must stress that my Rock Songbook does not say “listen to more Rock.” Not even cheekily.

Yes, I know that the Songbook cannot but generate more interest in Rock, both on my part and that of the reader, and I know that most persons, hearing that I write about rock, that from time to time I am “hip” about it, that I recommend certain bands and listen to them myself, will assume I am a big fan, but in truth, those who really read the Songbook know that one of its main messages is that rock is musically inferior to both fine-arts music and classic good-time dance music, and there is even a more fundamental caveat: even towards my beloved rock n’ roll, or my broader family of Afro-American good-time music, which I recommend much more heartily, I remain open to the sort of case someone like “wm” could make against it, and say we have to remain open to such.

I do agree with “wm” that such a case seems more damning for typical TV (and I would add internet) use, than it would for typical pop music use. And how is that wm and I know that, however bad pop music might be for you and our society, it isn’t as bad as TV? Well, Black Flag told us so.


No Cuts without More Taxes Tied to Them? Then Let the Obama Sequester Happen
Friday, February 8, 2013, 4:22 PM

That, in a nutshell, is what Charles Krauthammer says the Republican position should be. Sounds good to me.

Opinions?

H/T Ben Domenech at Real Clear Politics.


Mark Judge on Two Kinds of Cultural Ignorance
Thursday, February 7, 2013, 4:18 PM

On one hand, boomer-age cultured (i.e., liberally-educated) conservatives who don’t know contemporary pop culture and are too lazy about learning anything about it; on the other, young liberals who know it but are unashamedly un-cultured (i.e., rejecting the canonical distinctions that genuine liberal education depends upon) in the older sense of the term.

That’s the lamentable pairing the cultured-in-both-ways Mark Judge lays out for us at Acculturated. The unashamed ignore-all-canons ignoramus is Ta-Nehesi Coates of The Atlantic. The pop-culture subject is rap, stemming from Mark Steyn’s, Mona Charen’s, and Jay Nordlinger’s seeming dismissal of it, and from a solid Conor Friedersdorf post criticizing them, and conservatives in general, for being too lazy to do real critical work on rap or other pop culture forms. Go to Judge to see his juxtaposition of these two Atlantic posts, and the respective links—the Friedersdorf piece, BTW, has an extensive thread with lots of real gems hidden amid the usual.

I also feel obliged to note that in the relevant exchange Nordlinger doesn’t exactly get to complete his thoughts.

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P.S. Mr. Judge, lament away about conservatives not making art nor real critical efforts to engage with it, by all means.

But would it be too cheeky for us here at Postmodern Conservative to complain to the writers at Acculturated, and to any and all the conservatives lamenting these days about conservatives not engaging with the culture, about the lack of linkage we get? There’s Peter’s TV and film posts, similar items from our “3 Js,” and then there’s the 70 or so Carl’s Rock Songbook essays by yours truly.  That is, if conservatives really mean to call for culture in both aspects, then I think we here at pomocon are providing it…but speaking personally, I think we need a little more encouragement, engagement, what-have-you. Surely we could be doing more to publicize web-wise, but conservative bloggers and writers, it’s your job also.

P.P.S. Yes readers, I’ve taken a month or so break from the Songbook…been getting settled in a new place, but never fear…as Jack Teagarden said to Frankie Traumbauer:

Jus’ gettin’ ready, Frank, jus’ gettin’ ready!


Isabel Wilkerson on Blacks and the South: “They Left”
Tuesday, February 5, 2013, 1:17 AM

Over at Powerline, Paul Mirengoff makes a sensible argument against Black History Month, echoing calls from an NRO writer. Normally, I’d be at least open to the argument, would sincerely wonder what Shelby Steele would say about it, and would be interested in discussing Mirengoff’s idea that insofar as Black History month can be the earliest American history elementary school-kids regularly get prior to 4th or 5th grade, it skews their overall sense of America.

But not at the moment.

For right now I’m reeling from the impact of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. I’m only a third of the way through, but the author Isabel Wilkerson has stunned me with her portrayal of the segregationist South.

God, it was awful.

The sheer weight of that…well within the lived experience of many of us…

Now it shouldn’t be new or surprising to me, as I’ve been captivated by Malcolm X’s speeches, moved by the grit and the border-of-desperation faith pouring into the gospel songs, read life after life on it, experienced art-work after art-work on it, including ones of the James Baldwin and the Richard Wright variety, and gone through the thousands of pages of Taylor Branchs’s civil rights movement chronicles, learning chapter and verse about evil upon evil, well-known or not, dealt out in places like Albany, GA, St. Augustine, FL, and Farmville, VA, but the sheer enormity of it all has never, ever, hit me as hard as it does with this book.

Wilkerson tells the story of the Black migration north through three personal narratives, while also giving the larger history, and the background of thousands of interviews. They are documented and fully lived out–real lives–so it’s not a question of art like Richard Wright’s being too grim in spirit somehow–as it was rightly accused, IMO, by Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston, or just generally too framed for literary purposes. And they are everyday lives, so it’s not the (real) “heroes and villains stories” one gets from reading a civil rights movement historian like Branch, but the stories of ordinary folks. In the 80s and 90s the idealistic young man in me gravitated towards the heroic and very political-ideological stories of the likes King, John Lewis, Bob Moses, Bayard Rustin, etc,…and I learned much from them, and not simply idealistic inspiration or left-liberal outrage. But perhaps that political/heroic framework did not allow me to really see what the crimes of the South meant. Now, the older man in me is more deeply struck by how pervasively the oppression of segregation walled in Wilkerson’s three not-terribly political persons in the course of their simply trying to live out their lives, to pursue dreams, have jobs, develop marriages, etc. I see and feel how the system would have worked on any imaginable pre-70s-black me.

To learn anew the old facts about lynching and such (although, yes, Wilkerson has more of them) in this context, the impact is just far greater. As is the impact of perhaps the most damning sentence in American letters…the most damning judgment of the South ever given:

They left.

Wilkerson’s book makes it clear that whatever the particular impact of cotton blights, WWI, the basic reason for the black migration north was simply this: the segregation system got worse and worse from the 1880s on, and simply became unbearable.

Back in Songbook #23, I noted that blacks don’t have very many of the classic “goin’ home” songs that you get in American pop-song, especially in country music. Maybe today, that is slowly beginning to change, and in others of my music posts, I have indicated that all American music, but black music in particular, could benefit from culturally “returning Southwards.”

I’m a conservative educator…the sort of person who likes to remind Americans that America’s history matters to them, who gives friends, and assigns students, Thomas West’s wonderful Vindicating the Founders, and agrees with 90% of West’s argument vindicating them from bad PC-agenda-laden history charging them with self-interested racism. I’m actively working to bring Founderism, rightly qualified by a certain contrary voices, into American classrooms. I’m actively working to get students to consider what their heritage means. And I think I’ve made it evident on this blog that I think America has a good deal to learn from the South in general, especially about its religious roots, certain “alternative” agrarian/communitarian traditions, certain Stoic and manly traditions, and its tragic aspects, and especially today–Founderism is good and necessary, but voices like Percy’s and Portis’s must remain heard.

But man, you read something like this book, and you wonder. You wonder about the nice South you live in now, about singin’ along with Charles Portis to a Johnny Cash tune. You wonder how much you should celebrate America, the entire America that tolerated and made the system possible, or even explore its soul. Even if you know with the likes of West, that without the natural rights philosophy, it all could have gone on much longer. So maybe you should be with Shirley Caeser singing about spiritual combat, about “tearing Satan’s kingdom down,” a kingdom that holds territory in the souls of black folks as much as in any, instead of about how this is the land of the free.

A book like Wilkerson’s brings it home that there was a darkness and coldness in the American heart at times that defies all explanation. Whose evil is made starker by its contrast with the founding principles, with the all the various flourishings of freedom in American society. Things like the mad black-power politics that eventually destroyed Detroit, or even things like 90% of American blacks voting this last time for such an obviously badly governing president, become understandable, and even begin to seem trivial. I’m all for many more movies like Lincoln and for the Founder-friendly scholarly movement inspiring them, and sincerely believe such a movement can teach and can heal, but maybe only the South’s remaining serious about its turn to Christianity (it ain’t New England that’s “Puritan” anymore!), and American blacks really seeing that this culminates in serious repentance that embraces them, can begin to loosen the weight of it all.

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