Postmodern Conservative.

So Meta-Hip I Laughted Til it Hurt

Ezra Dyer at the NYT has probably the most enjoyable automotive review I've read all year. I do not know if it's the best review of the year, although it might be that, too; certainly it has a rich target, fully exploited: the next generation of the Scion xB, a car that encountered the same end-of-historical problem that all really cool little cars seem cursed today to encounter: what do you do for an encore? My preference would be nothing; after its first three tweaks, the Mustang became a nightmare and then an embarassment and finally ceased being a 'Mustang' altogether until its reincarnation in what was it 1996? And even then. Well, Ezra has the right idea here, which is that he is stuck in a historical progressus which has also caused this new xB to come into being, and in order to mock that improbable thing floating past in the chrono-soup he really has to mock himself. And so his review of the xB (and xD, yet a more profound superfluity) stacks up what must be an all-time record of pop-culture detritus name-checking references, often to the point of pitch-perfect surrealism:

I’ll confess: I don’t get it. I don’t understand the appeal of the blocky, willfully ugly xB. But if I don’t understand the attraction, perhaps the xB is right on target, because I don’t have piercings or tattoos. I use proper grammar in text messages. I once attended a Dave Matthews acoustic concert. Frankly, Scion doesn’t want me. The xB is for people who don’t care what anybody thinks, which means fauxhawk-wearing 21-year-olds or grumpy retirees.

This is only a warmup. To assure you both he and his review are ultimately serious, that there is a critical self behind the clown suit, the word "chamfered" is deployed. And then the fun begins:

The old xB was like a newly arrived Japanese exchange student who dresses like Max Headroom and pulls live sea urchins out of his lunch bag, blissfully naïve about his lack of assimilation.

The new xB is like the same kid six months later, still unquestionably the product of a different culture, but now self-conscious of that fact and beginning to temper his perceived eccentricities with trips to the Hollister store and the occasional McRib sandwich for lunch.

Holy crap! Why can't the whole New York Times read like this? Or why isn't this guy reviewing novels instead of cars! Ezra's concluding paragraph could be the opening paragraph of, um, your life:

He’s tailoring his persona, but to what end? Is it better to have a smaller group of fiercely loyal friends, or a wide swath of indifferent acquaintances? Is it worse to be polemic or forgettable?

Yet the answer is, like everything else, we strive to have it both ways, and all of us very often succeed. BFFs float in and out of the soup; acquaintances occasionally ratchet the indifference down or up, sometimes ratcheting their interest in us down or up accordingly, sometimes independently. It's one thing to resign yourself to the possibility that, at some significant points in life, it's necessary to be both polemic and forgettable. (Welcome to blogging.) But a frat brother of mine once lived self-consciously by the rule "Go ugly early," and that's another thing entirely. Late modernity and its postmodern neuroses make for a crazy, mixed-up world, but they're no excuse for a car like the latest xB. Fortunately, nonetheless, the latest xB is a perfect excuse for Ezra Dyer's review, and thus this blog post, and, hopefully, your own meta-meta entertainment.

Don't Do It

Placing Ukraine and Georgia on the NATO Membership Action Plan was already a bad idea. Now, choosing not to do so can reap affirmative geopolitical rewards instead of simply avoiding utter foolishness. Europe is badly disorganized. These are uncertain times on the Continent. But the tools are at hand to change that. Further NATO expansion inward is among them, but expansion eastward is not. It is of grave importance that the US recognize that this line of thought reflects not only fundamental European but American interests as well. The aim is not what John Ikenberry and others would praise as 'strategic restraint' -- pointed acts of superpower self-effacement designed to illustrate benign intentions. We should not have to 'restrain' ourselves from counterproductive and useless policies, especially when productive and useful policies are present. Europe as an independent world power is in the national interest of the United States. NATO's proper role is in helping bring that condition about, not falling prey to the same hubris that has ruined Europe every time it has pushed eastward of Poland and Romania.

The Boomers Bust

Would Boomers be able to keep their lifelong catfight in the public spotlight during a McCain / Obama race? If Hillary is a PC and Barack is a Mac, is John one of those huge rooms filled with vacuum tubes and reel-to-reel tapes the size of your head? Did Obama really miss out on the '80s, or are the Obamas the fulfillment of the Huxtable Prophesy? Can that guy writing new Bourne books do one set during Obama's first term called The Huxtable Prophesy? Does that sound too much like The Hudsucker Proxy? Thanks to Julie Ponzi and Michael Barone for triggering this line of inquiry.

Heaven Cent

Chris Suellentrop and Chris Orr gamely consider my plan to replace the penny with the nickel. If the NYT and TNR and TAS can all come together on this important issue, we can avoid having to heal the soul of America by electing Barack Obama. Or maybe we can save the penny and ditch the nickel simply by securing the Chris vote. Imagine if every Chris in America -- even just Chrises with blogs -- traded in their nickels for pennies. What an unboring media event that would be.

Bureaucratalk: The Banality of Evil

We all know that administrative-managerial jargon is an excellent coverup for the bogus and awful, to an extent so thoroughgoing as to suggest intelligent design. What you might not know is that Nicola Karras has written a jaunty post on exactly that subject at Iqra'i:

The semi-annual vacation reading of all my parents’ periodicals brought me to an article by Yale’s own David Bromwich (with whom I will take a class eventually) on euphemism and torture. He describes the “nerve-deadening understatement” of our discourse — wars of unprovoked aggression become “regime change”; mercenaries become “contractors” and finally “employees”; escalation is a “surge” (which sounds as though it contains taurine); torture is “abuse” or simply “professional interrogation techniques.”

The word “professional” is telling, because though this shift numbs our visceral reaction to violence, it’s essentially because it’s an importation of the corporate/bureaucratic world into politics. It isn’t an accident that Bush 43 is the first president with an MBA, promising to run the government “more like a business.” Ever since “dialogue” became a verb, language has been methodically stripped of meaning, connotation, color. Words like “war” and “mercenary” and “torture” conjure up a wealth of images; words like “conflict” and “contractor” don’t.

This isn’t the stylishly gritty world of noir, which can be vivid without color; it isn’t even the helplessly washed-out, brown-tinged wasteland of Westerns. Our language has become bland and mechanical, and so have the ideas we express with it. We envision society as a machine: if we punch the right buttons, we’ll get the outcome we want.

Yes, yes, although it's interesting to note how in 'safe' areas like entertainment our language continues to explode with flavor and variety. When we're being managed, everyone must speak like a Senior Vice President. When it's recess, everyone must speak like Yipes the Zebra. (Not that I have anything against Surge.) True as all this is, Nicola saves the best point for last:

Non-specific language turns the extraordinary mundane, as when mercenaries become “contractors” — and as when epistemology becomes “knowing stuff.”

I'd suggest that managerial speak is the horror that it is primarily because it is a species of a genus that pulls in not only politics but even entertainment: abstract language. So the argument is sometimes made that intersubjective knowledge develops amid a milieu of rhetorical commonplaces with no truth value, words like 'equality' and 'freedom' and 'experience' and 'community', and basically conversation involves people simply asserting various commonplaces and associating them with a particular set of behavioral details that serve as practical objectives for how to act and think. Well, there is something to this, but it heavily insinuates that every society's commonplaces are equally vacuous, and, worse, that any society can never make any real progress toward what Charles Taylor calls a 'thick description of the good' because all the component terms that receive value ascriptions are necessarily abstract terms with contingent content that can never be empirically verified.

Maybe not by a scientist. But who wants scientists running the DMV that gives us our intellectual drivers' licenses? If citizens (or just people having a conversation) take the care to use our commonplaces only to the extent that they intelligibly reflect reasonably thick and reasonably shared or overlapping detailed narratives, the abstractness of our most blanket terms tends to be filtered out or pared away. Abstractness is a way to get out of having to contend with difficult or uncomfortable particulars. No surprise that it appears with regularity in the worlds of administrative management, bureaucratic politics, and modern warfare.

Memo to Obama: Keep Casey Benched

It could be the least experienced ticket in history. At The Plank, Isaac Chotiner and Noam Scheiber discuss the titillating possibility of Obama/Casey '08. This kind of speculation is of just the type I criticized at Berry -- the election becomes 'electrified' with 'excitement' not because anything truly gripping is going on but because something unusual might happen. Can we muster a collective effort to recognize that variety has no intrinsically interesting character? Particularly in an age when superficial diversity produced in a highly competetive distractions market is recognized as possessing the shortest of shelf lives?

Perhaps. Until then, we can revel in the karmic blowback involved in an Obama/Casey ticket, to wit: the endless ridicule heaped on the right's most ardently Christian second-string pols boomerangs back as people seriously consider betting all the marbles on the guy who beat Alan Keyes and the guy who beat Rick Santorum. Welcome to the big leagues! What a way to vault a leadership to power. Though Chotiner preemptively strikes this meme by praising Santorum as "hardworking" and "knowledgeable." Maybe postpartisanship really is among us, and what people really want in office are a couple of boys next door, fresh faces for some stale jobs.

This may terrify some, but I remember back to my praise of Fred Thompson as a guy who realized the President (and Veep for that matter) needn't be some superhuman. And if Obama convinces more people he'll attempt heroic deeds less often than McCain, that just may put him over the top. On that score, McCain, of course, will do his best to do Obama's job for him.

Election '08: All You Need Is Veep

At Berry I argued (deliberately) provocatively that this election is actually much more boring than the political media is making it out to be. This weekend I will try to post cool portions of my comments. For now I will indicate that anyone who had started to convince themselves that John McCain would not be so bad would have been in for a sort of rough time down in Rome, GA. I left with a fresh suit of heavy iron armor girding my preexisting judgment that Mitt Romney, and only Mitt Romney, can get the job done for the GOP and the McCain ticket this year. No matter whether you think that'd be good, just, or kosher. It seems hard to escape certainty that Romney would make a better President than McCain. But maybe in the post-Cheney era (the only era in which Hillary Clinton would still be bothering to run a campaign that can win her, at best, a forced #2 spot), veep is all you need.

Shameless Self-Reflexive Promotion

As I prepare to enjoy the first good night's sleep of the week, the lack of content that has characterized the past few days here will have to be corrected by reference to an American Scene Original Film -- instead of seeing Stop-Loss, see Stop-Motion -- and Matt Frost's expert summary and case study of the Pink Police State:

Urbane Vanity Fair correspondents might not like it, but would-be authoritarians around the world are watching China in hopes of learning how to decouple economic growth from political development and how to turn cultural liberty into a luxury good, dispensed by the state as a reward for merit and productivity.

Now go watch Lego Yoda and SpongeBob.

In Berkeley

I'll be there Friday night for this IHS / AFF combo happy hour. Drop by, say hi.

In Rome

Rome, Georgia that is. Berry College is a beautiful locale -- 'campus' doesn't quite capture the vastness and silence and pretty architecture and phalanx of deer grazing in one of the 800 quads. Not enough time to get into the content of the talks and lectures and discussions, which have raised some pretty significant issues about the link between culture and nature yesterday and concerning a putative 'crisis' of civic education today. I've scrawled some notes down for posting later, but the wireless connection is sporadically reliable -- that or my laptop is -- so for now see J-Knip's blurb.