One of the reasons I started this blog was to write about other bloggers, especially Rod Dreher. The Crunchy Con himself, the lovable, hate-able quintessence of the guy with an Internet connection whose charm is that you never know what he’s going to write about next. His conversion to Catholicism. His conversion from Catholicism to Greek Orthodoxy. Gay marriage—that’s a big N.O. Enviro-foodie advocacy—yes! His sister’s heroic struggle with cancer—very moving (really). Quantum physics and healing prayer! Christopher Hitchens and healing prayer! Doubts about Darwin—let’s voice them! Countercultural conservatism— dude! Science and religion—we can be best buds! “Trying to build a case that the global Catholic child abuse scandal was actually caused by hippies” (as the Alicublog put it)—you can’t make this stuff up.
But just as my humble blog is going online, Dreher has disappeared, leaving me with nothing. After moving from Dallas and Beliefnet to Philadelphia and the Templeton Foundation’s Big Questions Online site over the summer, the flowing faucet of Dreher started to sputter. His freewheeling ways and urge to hold forth on hot-button political and culture-war topics had already caused trouble during his final months at Beliefnet, where he proved incapable of honoring his vow to avoid politics and stick to spirituality, philosophy, and other higher things. Although at first Dreher’s new Templeton-hosted Macroculture blog simply picked up where his Dallas/Beliefnet gig left off, something happened. On August 20, Dreher posted this enigmatic message:
Folks, I'm going to suspend comments for the time being, both on this blog and all over the site, pending the outworking of some technical and editorial issues. I apologize for this, and ask for your patience.
UPDATE: I will not be blogging for now. I hope to be blogging again soon. You readers are faithful and important to me, so I ask for your patience during this down time. Please continue to enjoy other content on BQO -- but remember, we're not posting comments at the present time.
Dreher-watchers reported that some of his earlier posts had been deleted, and then, on August 23:
The debut this summer of BQO has been a "soft launch" intended to try out our ideas for the magazine, to see how they work, particularly in relationship to Sir John Templeton's ideals. We are still working on the site, and will be changing some things in response to feedback. With respect to this blog, we are reconsidering a style and format that will be more in tune with Sir John's forward-looking, positive, constructive ways to engage the Big Questions. We hope to fine-tune things to make BQO better for you, our readers. So, please be patient, and thanks for reading.
Since then—silence. Nada. A week ago, I emailed Dreher and Big Questions Online editor Gary Rosen to ask about the hiatus and the status of Macroculture, and I haven’t yet received a reply.
It’s hard not to conclude that Sir John Templeton’s ideals and Dreher’s emotive style have clashed, and that forces within Templeton who cannot stand their new guy’s Dionysian messiness have decided not to spare the Rod. The result is the silencing, voluntary or otherwise, of one of the most widely read bloggers in the country. So what if he’s a little nuts? Free Rod Dreher!
Sunday, September 19, 2010
That Henderson Feeling
[Update below; all of the Todd Henderson links in the first and second paragraphs are now dead links]
The weekend’s most diverting blog eruption, without a doubt, is the hot-lava reaction to Professor Todd Henderson’s sardonic cri de coeur, “We Are the Super-Rich” about the perceived impoverishment and straightened circumstances he experiences living with his family in Chicago on an income of more than $250,000 a year. (That number is one key to this story’s Darwinian meme fitness, its viral potency, since the Obama administration has pegged $250K as the Mason-Dixon Line of tax and budget policy: below it, the middle class and working poor; above, the target-rich wealthy.) Henderson, a professor of law married to a physician, posted his essay four days ago on a collaborative economics blog called Truth on the Market. Since then, whoa Nelly, we’ve got a flame war—which is our moral equivalent of Class War.
A Sunday morning James Fallows post titled “Mauve Gloves & Madmen, 2010 Version” sent me back to a Michael O’Hare takedown of Henderson's post, “The Whining of the Rich.” O’Hare characterizes “We Are the Super-Rich” as a “truly amazing pasticcio of mendacity, ignorance, and small-minded cupidity.” Fallows, who, with trademark mildness, limits himself to calling the offending post an “unwise confession,” also links to Brad DeLong, piling on. Paul Krugman cracks his Nobel medal on Henderson’s exposed pate here. Memeorandum is aggregating the fray, and Henderson has responded to “the overwhelming negative response” with increasingly embattled weariness here and here. Below many of these various posts are sulphuric comment threads unfurling to the vanishing point, so be my guest. (A DeLong reader named will provided the title for this post.)
Expressions of upscale anxiety, defined by shifting and purely relative notions of affluence, are stringently policed by standards of seemliness and discretion, even in the wake of an economic collapse that wiped out $5 trillion in household net worth. Henderson is guilty, like British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward before him, of saying he wants his life back. But blurting out the wrong thing can be both offensive and illuminating. Henderson has given voice to the gnawing sensation of relative poverty that is imposed on middle-class Americans with overwhelming cultural force, not only by the neighborly pressure to keep up with the Joneses, but by saturation media portraying luxury as normative and attainable. Actual income almost doesn't matter; the greyhound will never catch the rabbit. In movies and television the camera adds 20 pounds of fat to the body and hundreds of thousands of dollars to the net worth of characters whose houses, apartments, furniture, and clothing are ridiculously beyond their real-world means. Meanwhile, it’s impossible to advertise to the rich without broadcasting to the not-quite-rich and further down the scale, and all those surplus eyeballs absorb the flickering message that just a little more will bring within reach those beautiful discretionary things people like me should own.
My own meddling get-richer-quick advice to Professor Henderson is to invest $10,000 in non-luxury travel in the Third World, say, Southern Africa. Perhaps make it a working vacation to support a cause: conservation, agrarian modernization, health care, evangelizing, anything will do. It will subsequently add at least $125,000 per annum to his relative income, and in my experience it does wonders for bursting the most persistent bubble in the American marketplace, the one inside our heads.
[Update: Todd Henderson, in manifest despair over the "firestorm" his original post stoked, has deleted "We Are the Super-Rich" and his two follow-up posts. He has apologized, renounced blogging, and revealed that his wife was appalled by what he had written:
The reason I took the very unusual step of deleting [the posts] is because my wife, who did not approve of my original post and disagrees vehemently with my opinion, did not consent to the publication of personal details about our family. In retrospect, it was a highly effective but incredibly stupid thing to do.
Brad DeLong has re-posted a version of "We Are the Super-Rich" retrieved from Google's cached pages here.]
The weekend’s most diverting blog eruption, without a doubt, is the hot-lava reaction to Professor Todd Henderson’s sardonic cri de coeur, “We Are the Super-Rich” about the perceived impoverishment and straightened circumstances he experiences living with his family in Chicago on an income of more than $250,000 a year. (That number is one key to this story’s Darwinian meme fitness, its viral potency, since the Obama administration has pegged $250K as the Mason-Dixon Line of tax and budget policy: below it, the middle class and working poor; above, the target-rich wealthy.) Henderson, a professor of law married to a physician, posted his essay four days ago on a collaborative economics blog called Truth on the Market. Since then, whoa Nelly, we’ve got a flame war—which is our moral equivalent of Class War.
A Sunday morning James Fallows post titled “Mauve Gloves & Madmen, 2010 Version” sent me back to a Michael O’Hare takedown of Henderson's post, “The Whining of the Rich.” O’Hare characterizes “We Are the Super-Rich” as a “truly amazing pasticcio of mendacity, ignorance, and small-minded cupidity.” Fallows, who, with trademark mildness, limits himself to calling the offending post an “unwise confession,” also links to Brad DeLong, piling on. Paul Krugman cracks his Nobel medal on Henderson’s exposed pate here. Memeorandum is aggregating the fray, and Henderson has responded to “the overwhelming negative response” with increasingly embattled weariness here and here. Below many of these various posts are sulphuric comment threads unfurling to the vanishing point, so be my guest. (A DeLong reader named will provided the title for this post.)
Expressions of upscale anxiety, defined by shifting and purely relative notions of affluence, are stringently policed by standards of seemliness and discretion, even in the wake of an economic collapse that wiped out $5 trillion in household net worth. Henderson is guilty, like British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward before him, of saying he wants his life back. But blurting out the wrong thing can be both offensive and illuminating. Henderson has given voice to the gnawing sensation of relative poverty that is imposed on middle-class Americans with overwhelming cultural force, not only by the neighborly pressure to keep up with the Joneses, but by saturation media portraying luxury as normative and attainable. Actual income almost doesn't matter; the greyhound will never catch the rabbit. In movies and television the camera adds 20 pounds of fat to the body and hundreds of thousands of dollars to the net worth of characters whose houses, apartments, furniture, and clothing are ridiculously beyond their real-world means. Meanwhile, it’s impossible to advertise to the rich without broadcasting to the not-quite-rich and further down the scale, and all those surplus eyeballs absorb the flickering message that just a little more will bring within reach those beautiful discretionary things people like me should own.
My own meddling get-richer-quick advice to Professor Henderson is to invest $10,000 in non-luxury travel in the Third World, say, Southern Africa. Perhaps make it a working vacation to support a cause: conservation, agrarian modernization, health care, evangelizing, anything will do. It will subsequently add at least $125,000 per annum to his relative income, and in my experience it does wonders for bursting the most persistent bubble in the American marketplace, the one inside our heads.
[Update: Todd Henderson, in manifest despair over the "firestorm" his original post stoked, has deleted "We Are the Super-Rich" and his two follow-up posts. He has apologized, renounced blogging, and revealed that his wife was appalled by what he had written:
The reason I took the very unusual step of deleting [the posts] is because my wife, who did not approve of my original post and disagrees vehemently with my opinion, did not consent to the publication of personal details about our family. In retrospect, it was a highly effective but incredibly stupid thing to do.
Brad DeLong has re-posted a version of "We Are the Super-Rich" retrieved from Google's cached pages here.]
Monday, September 13, 2010
In Anticipation
"The book brims with Mongols, half-crazed Orthodox archpriests, fur seekers, ambassadors of the czar bound for Peking, tea caravans, German scientists, American prospectors, intrepid English nurses, and prisoners and exiles of every kind—from Natalie Lopukhin, banished by the czarina for copying her dresses; to the noble Decembrist revolutionaries of the 1820s; to the young men and women of the People’s Will movement whose fondest hope was to blow up the czar; to those who met still-ungraspable suffering and death in the Siberian camps during Soviet times."
Coming out on October 12. Can't wait.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Things They Do Look Awful C-C-Cold
[Updated below]
I've written before about the idiocy of generational theorizing and the bankruptcy of generational politics as a diagnostic tool. I’m vaguely dreading Matt Bai’s forthcoming book, The Great Distraction, talking ‘bout “the failed era of boomer politics,” given the poor odds of rising above the built-in sententiousness of such a shopworn enterprise.
Meanwhile, a salute to Andrew Sprung at the Xpostfactoid blog, my comrade in the cause of heaping ridicule on generational finger-wagging. His post today, "Thomas Friedman at his Thomas Friedmanest,” tears into the Flat-Earther’s latest Sunday column, which anticipates Bai’s lament while recycling one of Maureen Dowd’s signature tropes from her days of dissing Bill Clinton:
Leave it to Friedman to decide, as the U.S. struggles out of the steepest recession in 70 years, that our troubles are due to the moral failings of baby boomers, set off by a cartoonish Goofus/Gallant contrast with the Greatest Generation. His column putting this moralizing mush across is so jaw-droppingly sloppy that it seems self indulgent to try to debunk it...
Generational contrasts are the refuge for those who prefer moralizing to analysis. You cannot generalize about the moral composition of hundreds of millions of people born between arbitrarily selected dates. When I read boomer-bashings, I always mentally reply: if those of the WWII generation were such paragons, why did they raise a generation of feckless self-indulgent screwups? Is prosperity itself inherently corrupting? If so, we'd better stop trying to grow our economy. Further, one instance of the get-rich-quick mania that Friedman excoriates—the dotcom boom—was the flip side of an aspect of our economy he suggests we're losing—rapid technological development. The tension between productive economic development and unchecked greed is hardly a recent phenomenon in American history. Another alleged moral failing of U.S. leadership—taxcut goodies leading to budget problems—was promulgated in the first instance by WWII-gen President Ronald Reagan—while quintessential boomer Bill Clinton paid in political blood for rebalancing our tax and budget priorities.
I’m not in accord with every particular of Sprung’s Friedman-foiling ripostes, but it’s a pleasure to see bunkum debunked.
[Update I: Andrew Sprung added an exceptionally gracious and thoughtful addendum to his post in acknowledgment of my comments above.]
[Update II: Now Michael Kinsley has entered the fray with an Atlantic cover story on the "self-absorbed, self-indulged, and self-loathing" baby boomers and the debt they owe society for their crimes. In the end, it's a pretty silly, bad-faith affair, despite the gravitas of the forum; Kinsley is too whip-smart and cynical to play it straight with what is, after all, a hoary old chestnut. Meanwhile, James Bennet, the magazine's editor, tries to insist this all really matters, and Gary Trudeau, following up on his ignominious 1984 Newsweek cover illustration trumpeting "The Year of the Yuppie," offers a recruiting poster for a cause that's dead on arrival.]
I've written before about the idiocy of generational theorizing and the bankruptcy of generational politics as a diagnostic tool. I’m vaguely dreading Matt Bai’s forthcoming book, The Great Distraction, talking ‘bout “the failed era of boomer politics,” given the poor odds of rising above the built-in sententiousness of such a shopworn enterprise.
Meanwhile, a salute to Andrew Sprung at the Xpostfactoid blog, my comrade in the cause of heaping ridicule on generational finger-wagging. His post today, "Thomas Friedman at his Thomas Friedmanest,” tears into the Flat-Earther’s latest Sunday column, which anticipates Bai’s lament while recycling one of Maureen Dowd’s signature tropes from her days of dissing Bill Clinton:
Leave it to Friedman to decide, as the U.S. struggles out of the steepest recession in 70 years, that our troubles are due to the moral failings of baby boomers, set off by a cartoonish Goofus/Gallant contrast with the Greatest Generation. His column putting this moralizing mush across is so jaw-droppingly sloppy that it seems self indulgent to try to debunk it...
Generational contrasts are the refuge for those who prefer moralizing to analysis. You cannot generalize about the moral composition of hundreds of millions of people born between arbitrarily selected dates. When I read boomer-bashings, I always mentally reply: if those of the WWII generation were such paragons, why did they raise a generation of feckless self-indulgent screwups? Is prosperity itself inherently corrupting? If so, we'd better stop trying to grow our economy. Further, one instance of the get-rich-quick mania that Friedman excoriates—the dotcom boom—was the flip side of an aspect of our economy he suggests we're losing—rapid technological development. The tension between productive economic development and unchecked greed is hardly a recent phenomenon in American history. Another alleged moral failing of U.S. leadership—taxcut goodies leading to budget problems—was promulgated in the first instance by WWII-gen President Ronald Reagan—while quintessential boomer Bill Clinton paid in political blood for rebalancing our tax and budget priorities.
I’m not in accord with every particular of Sprung’s Friedman-foiling ripostes, but it’s a pleasure to see bunkum debunked.
[Update I: Andrew Sprung added an exceptionally gracious and thoughtful addendum to his post in acknowledgment of my comments above.]
[Update II: Now Michael Kinsley has entered the fray with an Atlantic cover story on the "self-absorbed, self-indulged, and self-loathing" baby boomers and the debt they owe society for their crimes. In the end, it's a pretty silly, bad-faith affair, despite the gravitas of the forum; Kinsley is too whip-smart and cynical to play it straight with what is, after all, a hoary old chestnut. Meanwhile, James Bennet, the magazine's editor, tries to insist this all really matters, and Gary Trudeau, following up on his ignominious 1984 Newsweek cover illustration trumpeting "The Year of the Yuppie," offers a recruiting poster for a cause that's dead on arrival.]
Friday, September 10, 2010
Not To Be Surpassed
As the last wisps of Zozobra (the idol of gloom we burn every September) drift away, on the verge of diving into another eventful Santa Fe autumn ahead, it might be a fit moment to briefly take note of our city’s paramount 21st-century literary non-event: the presence among us of our neighbor somewhere out toward Tesuque, the great Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Cormac McCarthy.
You’re not likely ever to see McCarthy onstage at the Lannan Readings & Conversations series, or signing a new novel at Collected Works or Garcia Street Books. Apart from rare interviews (and the gigantic exception that proved the rule of an Oprah appearance, shot at the Santa Fe Institute, where he likes to hang his hat and punch the clock), he eschews entirely the literary self-marketing and schmoozing that is the lot of every author this side of Salinger and Pynchon. Sightings provide occasional fodder en el mitote, both printed and word-of-mouth. How cool is it to live where you might catch a glimpse of this credible contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature—a guy who sat down in front at the Oscars with his young son, John, when No Country for Old Men won Best Picture in 2008—ambling down the aisle at Albertson’s or Home Depot? Meanwhile, it seems a modest point of pride for us that Santa Fe is a place that respects the privacy of McCarthy and his family, respects his choice to sidestep the flak a public figure often faces. If he doesn’t want to be a big deal in our midst, Santa Fe doesn’t have a problem with that. Yet I suspect I’m not alone in thinking that mere proximity, and knowing that literary history, reportedly a new novel set in New Orleans around 1980, is taking shape up the road, shines a glint of reflected glory on the least of us.
Outside the circle of a quiet life in Santa Fe, Cormac McCarthy’s reputation and influence grow. Tommy Lee Jones has directed and stars (with Samuel L. Jackson) in a film of McCarthy’s 2006 play, Sunset Limited, airing on HBO in February. (The West Coast stage premiere of the play is opening now in San Francisco.) Movie versions by A-list directors of both Blood Meridian and Cities of the Plain are being planned. Over in Texas, not far from where McCarthy lived before moving to New Mexico, Texas State University in San Marcos is opening its inaugural exhibit of selections from McCarthy’s papers in the Witliff Collections at Alkek Library.
But McCarthy himself, like many other Santa Fe artists and writers, is probably not very far away right now, working. As he recently told the Wall Street Journal, "I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time."
Illustration by David Levine via the New York Review of Books
The title of this post is from a Harold Bloom essay on Blood Meridian.
[cross-posted at Santa Fe Literary News]
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
V. to C
The latest novel by the British writer and conceptual artist Tom McCarthy, short-listed for the Booker Man Prize, is out today in the U.S. (I like the U.K. cover design, above, much more than the groovier-looking Knopf design). I'm looking forward to finding out if it's something more than the most skillful pastiche of Pynchon ever committed to paper, which is what Jenny Turner’s review in the LRB made it sound like:
Through Serge’s eyes, the Royal Flying Corps is basically a death cult and all the more glorious for it, with the height, the explosions, the machinery, the proximity of death: ‘I liked it a lot,’ he says, after his first trip airborne. ‘It was just right … just how things should be.’ From the air, he can see the world as ideally flat, map-like,
a mandala of small roads and pathways, at least half of them unusable, criss-crossing and looping over open ground; then rows of empty trenches – last month’s, or last year’s, the year before’s; more open ground; more tracks … a mesh of interlocking trenches … The pockmarked village, road and woods.
It’s in the war, in short, that Serge finds himself, his vocation, as a necronaut, surfing death, reading Hölderlin, popping heroin, wearing a pair of women’s silk stockings over his face: a Modernist who is also ancient, a beautiful being who is also absurd, a creature of technology who also worships at the oldest shrines. ‘Serge feels an almost sacred tingling, as though he himself had become godlike, elevated by machinery and signal code to a higher post within the overall structure of things.’ Euphoric, exalted, off his face, he doesn’t think he’s killing people but ‘quickening … bringing to life’; he dreams of ‘the idea that his flesh could melt and fuse with the machine parts’, ‘like the Eiffel Tower, a pylon animating the whole world’.
Pynchon's reputation has undergone a palpable deflation in recent years, but to borrow from Flannery O’Connor, nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Long Island Limited is roaring down.
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