Postmodern Conservative.

The Revenge of the Therapeutic

When I saw the headline announcing "Behar Sez Saints Sick" or something, me, I sez to myself, Thou shalt not click. That I even know what a Behar is counts as a strike against me in my own good book. But 'fortunately' Andrew's gone and posted the text of the Behar's remark, so I may as well. Thus:

"I think that the old days the saints were hearing voices and they didn't have any thorazine to calm them down. Now that we have all of this medication available to us, you can't find a saint any more."

Well. There are three separate layers of irony to lift away. First of all, you can read these two sentences as a claim that the state of affairs described is good news. But you can also read it as a winsome little bit of 'adult' atheist nostalgia -- the kind of moral kitsch involved in romanticizing the beautiful stupidity, ignorance, and folly of youth, taken and historicized into the comfortable senescence of humanity's bourgeois, disenchanted maturity.

But then you can read it, without Behar around to parse comment, as an utterly un-ironic statement made on behalf of spiritual redemption and the eternal possibility of faith incarnate.

Yet the way I want to read it is, contrary to any of those interpretations, and certainly to what I imagine Behar actually had in mind, as fundamentally mistaken about our ability to hear voices on meds. Therapy -- even pharmacologically speaking -- is in no way incompatible with religion. Marx and Nietzsche both hated the intimate relationship between Christianity and alcohol; a New-Age Buddy Jesus -- or Jesus the gay eunuch child of the Earth Mother -- seems to me to go even better with the rosy glasses of a Soma haze than the Heavenly Father went dazzled and doused in gin.

UPDATE: Rod drops some gnosis:

The View says Joy is a Catholic who lurvs joking about her faith, as she was here. So they say.

Voodoo Home Economics

McMegan brings the horror. Keeping up a churning carnival of worthless delights apparently has the indirect effect of "actually mak[ing] everyone better off." That sub-zero fridge that's too big for your last-season kitchen remodel? It's consumption as moral patriotism, peeps:

The positional competition may not be doing you any good directly, but if it raises national GDP, it will indirectly help you, and everyone else in the country. If you don't want to conspicuously consume just to aggrandize yourself, you should carefully consider whether you don't owe at least it to your neighbors to install the new granite countertops.

Paradox: if falling guilt and justified bourgeois wankery drive our need for psychoanalgesic pills down, does the collapse of the pharma-market suck the wind from the sails of the Good Ship Lollipop?

Bottom line: dumb trinkets are still dumb trinkets, and I'm not sure in the end this vindicates anyone but Aristotle.

Bad Meta-Messages; or, What's Wrong with Katherine Heigl?

Yglesias seems to think Heigl's relieving his lingering discomfort with Knocked Up:

Like a lot of people, I found Knocked Up to be both funny, and somewhat disquieting in its apparent message. These issues got discussed a bit and then the whole thing was forgotten in our fast-paced internet-age culture. But Jessica Valenti points out a really good new Meghan O'Rourke essay on the film inspired by Katherine Heigl's recent remark that the movie was "a little sexist."

And of course, in have-cake-eat-too land, the rank contradiction between being paid for a big break that makes you uncomfortable and revealing your intimate discomfort from the interview chair is to be celebrated on precisely those terms:

It's her unfiltered voice that makes her dynamic and edgy, so what if she occasionally comes off as a raging she-beast? Embrace it! And just because Heigl scored her big-screen breakthrough in Knocked Up doesn't mean she has to worship her character, or agree wholeheartedly with the film's portrayal of women. What's more, who would really want to read an interview where she did? -- Gretchen Hansen, Entertainment Weekly's Popwatch

Aha! Watching celebs squirm over the emotional costs of splitting their selves up for sexy perks and cash prizes creates frisson for entertainment consumers! It's all so obvious now. Surely part of being an artist calls for a certain kind of courage to strain yourself artistically. But Heigl's no tortured artiste. She's a professional player of parts that make her feel, like Yglesias himself, lingeringly guilty and kinda dirty. But at least Yglesias, like myself, is only a critic, who has to contend, like it or not, with things that register on the Attention Meter of popular public opinion. Heigl is a serial psychomasochist -- in addition to this, on the Grey's adultery...

"That was kind of a big change for Izzie, wasn't it, after she was so up on her moral high ground," muses the actress. "They really hurt [Callie], and they didn't seem to be taking a lot of responsibility for it. I have a really hard time with that kind of thing."

...there's this, on The Fall of the House of Usher (!):

"Ann is a young woman who had been encircled by this history (of her lineage) her entire life, so it's already kind of there, the mystery of that big old house she's living in. The odd relationship between her and her brother, that Poe vibe is already around her, I think she is used to and almost likes that creepy feeling that prevails throughout the film." [...] "Ann isn't twisted, but she has a complex sexuality," says Heigl. "She likes the macabre." And here Heigl draws a clear distinction between herself and Ann. "There are things that I was very uncomfortable with. The whole incestuous theme was very uncomfortable for me. Reading it I was trying to shake it off. But that is what Poe is so brilliant at doing. Those things happen, those are the darker sides of humanity that people won't talk about so much, but those are the real horror stories."

Yeah, okay, I get it, but that's one weird yet characteristic-of-the-age pattern to get yourself into and ritually confess. Fame and its side benefits would appear to be inadequate therapy, which of course makes us love our stars even more. They're anxiety-ridden about their 'complex' sexuality and about hurting people and not taking responsibility -- just like us! Now that's incestuous. And guess what: we're used to it and almost like that creepy feeling that prevails throughout our lives.

The Chinese Bargain

Thinking about Yuan and her friends—cosmopolitan, English-speaking students at China’s most elite university—I find it difficult to imagine that the People’s Republic will easily contain them. Some will undoubtedly be co-opted by economic opportunities, like much of China’s middle class; others will end up serving the Chinese state, perhaps in a role like that of Mr. Huang, practicing the “techniques of hospitality” on foreign visitors. But it seems just as likely that, following the lead of the previous generation, they will begin to ask why China, alone among the world’s great nations, cannot enjoy the full range of modern freedoms. Their protestations aside, they may yet have their own Tiananmen. If it comes to that, one can only pray that this time it turns out very differently. -- Gary Rosen, Commentary

Perhaps. But perhaps, if the Chinese perfect the science of continually but gradually expanding an elite class from which members are perennially purged by forced and natural retirement, the educated will settle, as in so many ways they already have, for burgeoning economic, social, and 'lifestyle' freedoms at the expense of political ones. That's happening here, too, although we have the 'right' to give ours away. It's still not entirely clear that political liberty is one of the ineffable longings of the human heart. It's much more apparent that comfort and pleasure within one's coterie are.

The Apple Martini's Biological Clock

I know this image can be converted into some kind of Sex in the City-related metaphor about the doom facing aging urban female professionals stuck on the singles circuit.

The Glutton

There is a difference between recognizing the significance of redescription and novelty in human life, as I among others so, and supporting the ongoing maximization, into the future and at all present moments, of all possible redescriptions and novelties, as Richard Rorty did. Thus the difference between my postmodern conservatism and Rorty's postmodern bourgeois liberalism.

Of course, Rorty recognized some descriptions were better than others, at least at particular times and certainly, I think, progressively speaking; but his bourgeois optimism (which, it seems to me, gestures at the way in which economic man, amid the political exhaustion of the West, began translating his increasingly desperate hope for an endless variety of attractive commodities into an equally desperate hope for an endless variety of attractive experiences) is grounded in the notion that even as we rule out no longer convincing or pleasant descriptions -- like racism or whatever -- we do not thereby decrease the total universal supply of descriptions, which is infinite so cannot shrink by subtraction.

The psychological experience of doing cultural politics is something Rorty wants not to be a zero-sum game; therefore if the game is a sort of pie we need never fear running out of, no matter how many slices we take, then we ought to eat as much as we possibly can. Alas Nietzsche's laughing gastronomical determinism makes this sound to me like a recipe for indigestion and malnourishment. It's funny that Rorty described the difference between truth and falsehood as that between nourishing and poisonous foods. This is a rather shockingly naturalist position for him to take, is it not? Especially considering both Nietzsche's and Plato's disgust for the eaters -- and bakers -- of political tartufferies.

Message & Signal Watch

My vigil continues:

In agreeing to interviews in advance of the joint trip to Saudi Arabia, the officials were nevertheless clearly intent on sending a pointed signal to a top American ally. They expressed deep frustration that more private American appeals to the Saudis had failed to produce a change in course. -- NYT

No, ladies and gentlemen. The officials were clearly intent on actually expressing deep frustration that more private American appeals to the Saudis had failed to produce a change in course. Do we need to consult the astrological charts to determine whether the Saudi government reads New York Times interviews with top US government officials venting over Saudi government policy? What 'signal' exactly do I send by slapping you in the face? That I felt like slapping it?

We must cease this constant retreat into meta-narrative. We must insist upon discussing the world where actual actions take place. We must resist the half-conscious urge to make feelings and feints, interpretations and intimations, more important than the behaviors that call them into 'being.' We must stop reading entrails and issuing oracles. In the deathless words of Joe Biden, THIS KABUKI DANCE MUST END!

Married to the Mob

Yes, those sexual socialists who clogged Britain as the Victorian age collapsed, spent, sure had the gall to consider themselves married, cavorting among a rotating mob of intrigues, gonads, orifices, personages, reputations, fetishes, and self-gratifications. Pynchon does such a good job of reminding us of this that the second half of Against the Day swells and groans beneath the fleshy weight.

But certain third- or even fifth-rate American pretendresses (they seem inevitably female, and of a certain...age) to the thrones of aristo-Brit louche just love this crap, this helplessness in the face of exotic yet now utterly predictable tastes suddenly (or not so suddenly) "discovered," this enlightened Freudo-Lawrentian attitude about running around screwing, this absurd notion that free love is a sustainable enterprise, particularly for the wealthy and bored. Haunting everything of course is the useful side effect of such literature retrospectively ratifying all the 'imperfections' of the reader's own marriage(s), dalliances, wistful dreams of real purpose, etc., etc.

So I've treated this topic with the jolly contempt it deserves (yes a good... spanking), doing my best with a busy schedule to denigrate the worthless and idiotic Tina Brown for gushing all across the well-thumbed pages of this book Uncommon Arrangements. It's a good title for a look at seven kooky fin-de-Vic London couplings, given the uniformity of their progression (or, er, degeneration) into triplings, quadruplings, and underlings. Which is why Brown rejects the term "arrangements" -- this woman's S&M fantasy is Americanizing all of England with her pen -- in favor of...well,

vibrant works in progress, exercises in passionate experimentalism.

Would that prose this purple would get on with it and explode. Works in regress, like I said, is more like it, and the experimentalism on hand seemed restrained mostly to toying and being toyed with new forms of emotional and physical ingress. This should already be more than enough work put in on my part for what would appear to be my own sloppy seconds, but as it happens Uncommon Arrangements is passed around in finer company like an understudy for an off-Broadway production of The Story of O, and these, indeed, are the twice-baked potatoes au gratin of The New York Times, which insists upon reviewing this loopy little tome more than once.

Comes then Michelle Green to the task, sharing column space with the glamor shot of a fur-trimmed Rebecca West, aware enough of the joke factor here to use early on the phrase "a Russian émigré in a merciless ménage." Thank God -- though how on reflection could this not be possible -- Green's review of U.A. is less flustered and fawning and automanipulatory than Brown's. But as gratifying in its own right as it is to see the author of this hardcover softcore get the rod for 'stringing together' wilted prose, Green herself can't help falling back on the last rampart of the target market:

Read it (if you must) as a reminder that nobody’s marriage is perfect.

Well! What better reminder of the common hopelessness of virtue we share than London's most Uncommon Arrangements! What a pathetic point of pride for the imperfect: we each are bollocksed up in our Own Unique Way -- just like England's last exclusive club of literary geniuses. Solidarity in the 'everyone's got issues' way, filtered oh-so-refiningly through the mincing accents and sapphic sighs of Brits Gone Continental? I'll take Anna Karenina, per Green's final request.

The Barber of Capitalism

Ben Barber's new book looks like the sort of thing that has hundreds of pages mainly to prop up the dust jacket, where the real action is. Consumed is quite right, and the deliberate, concerted effort of parasitic capital slingers to make as many adults and children as possible into teenagers is a pestilent source of daily disgust that I must struggle through in order to think of most people I see in the public media as human beings worthy of dignity. But I want to pull a few quotes from Barber's City Beat interview:

American capitalism itself is no longer working the way it’s supposed to. Capitalism is a remarkable wealth-producing machine. At its best, capitalism allows the entrepreneurial spirit to produce new wealth on the way to meeting real human needs and wants. One of the problems with capitalism recently, with mergers and acquisitions and the marketing and the manufacturing of faux needs, is that, instead of creating new wealth, it’s simply living parasitically off the wealth that’s already there.

Yes, but does that follow to this?

The problem, in the last 30 to 40 years, is you’ve seen this radical privatization, this attack on so-called “big government” which is actually an attack on what I call “big democracy.” It’s an attempt to disempower us of our public right to chose [sic] the nature of the world we’re going to live in. So restoring the balance between democracy and markets and retrieving our role as citizens as well as consumers, and remembering the will of the consumer should be subordinate to the will of the citizen, will go a long way to saving capitalism from itself.

Part of the problem is the idea that we -- in whatever contingent conglomerations we want to form -- have every right to choose the nature of our "world." What we get is a mass proliferation of real and fake "worlds," each with a transaction cost and micro-payment plan. And people think and enjoy thinking that they can hop amongst worlds freely, that maximizing our number of worlds is great, and what we get as a result is the strip-mallization of culture, a standard-issue cornucopia. This has come with great benefits -- "anchor" complexes like those at Hollywood and Highland in LA and in DC at 14th Street do reactivate and repopulate shoddy streets. But the downside is the sort of people that we get turned into in order to carry off the repopulation. Barber is not quite getting it right when he thinks we need more choice about the nature of the world. That's in no small part what got us into this mess in the first place.

The will of the consumer is a gross and outlandish thing, but the will of the citizen can be too, especially when it starts subordinating things. Barber seems not to realize that these wills can easily combine. Big government is big democracy, except no one needs to vote; spoils are simply predistributed. What we need is for people -- citizens as well as consumers -- to want less, to actually desire a decrease in choices, because they desire a decrease in pastries and less tartufferie. We are so hung up on diversity, so suckered by it, that we forget that we need not more choices but better ones, and in a glutted market for garnishes, public and private, better means fewer.

You Can Take That Life Goal and ... No Wait, You'd Like That

What I am about to show you comes from a lengthy NYT article to which I will not bother to link. It represents the Achilles Heel of libertarianism and all nonfoundationalist public philosophies -- the very sweet, in a dumb-as-rocks sort of way, idea that whatever 'consenting adults' like to do 'in private' is okay 'as long as it doesn't hurt anybody.' By that standard, pushed to its absurd but inescapable conclusion, if everyone committed suicide in their bathrooms America would be a fine, laudable place, a beacon of freedom, or, at any rate, just another society beyond judgment, full of people making their own choices. What a load, of course. We have got to get it through our thick skulls that decadent, bent, self-indulgent cults of kink can help wreck a culture just as much as oppressive government regulations -- maybe even more -- and that coming to terms with this fact does not require of a person that they turn at once to prevent such public perversion by means of oppressive government regulations. As if the below doesn't speak for itself:

For those who feel that B.D.S.M. porn, or any porn, is toxic and reprehensible, the fact that at least some of it is being produced by thoughtful, educated young people might only be more troubling — a sign of how deep into respectable society it has reached. Then Cambria’s point would be more terrifying still: as such material stitches itself more tightly into the mainstream, through both its consumers and its producers, it strengthens its own legality. It makes itself unobscene.

But Acworth, for his part, seems to find hope in some of the developments of the last decade, signs that some unfortunate misunderstandings are being righted. I asked him what he would think if one day he could walk into Wal-Mart and find racks of constrictive leather corsets. “I think it would be great,” he said. Though at that point, he added, in a world so awash with kinkiness: “I’ll probably stop making money. But I won’t mind that. A life goal will have been completed.”