Monthly Archive for March, 2008

Freud, backwards — and in heels.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 31, 2008
in Inexplicably Burke, Ladies and Philosophy
. 8 Comments

“How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being?”

The most common thing people ask me (well, maybe second, after “how do you pronounce your name?”)[1] is how I can be both a conservative and a feminist. The shortest answer is Freud over Marcuse. I’m an inveterate contrarian, but Amanda at Pandagon comes surprisingly (if hyperbolically) close to summing it up:

The patriarchy, while being unfair, is the only way we have to maintain civilization itself, and without it, we’ll descend into anarchy with people killing each other in the streets. It’s a tad unfortunate that women’s ambitions, rights, and very souls have to be destroyed to maintain the system, and that even men, no matter how unwilling, have to be forced to uphold this oppressive form of masculinity that can destroy the bodies and spirits of gender non-conforming men, but we all have to make sacrifices to keep society going, don’t we?

The sort of patriarchy I oppose is the porn culture embodied by Sex Week, the idea that women are best considered to be sex objects. The sort of patriarchy that involves drawing distinctions between men and women is fine; the male dominance this entails is unavoidable. (This is why a recognition of privilege is so vital for conservatives. If we aren’t trying to destroy power imbalances, we have to recognize their full extent.)

Society requires the repression of certain instincts and desires. Freud’s critique is that society often represses more than it needs to: “if civilization imposes such great sacrifices not only on man’s sexuality but on his aggressivity, we can understand better why it is hard for him to be happy in that civilization.” Society doesn’t need to destroy women’s “ambitions, rights, and very souls” for its survival. Ambitions must be shaped and rights must be balanced with duties, but society makes our souls more human.

Of course, contemporary constructions of gender can be immensely damaging (e.g., pressure for men to repress any emotion besides anger). The solution, though, is not to create a non-repressive civilization, but to transgress, subvert, and reform our own traditions so that we repress the bad and nurture the good. A fair way of doing it would be nice, and is certainly something we should strive for — but we mustn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

[1] The emphasis is on the first syllable: ‘nik e le. (WordPress refuses to show a schwa.)

A penny saved is…four cents earned?

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 27, 2008
in Extemporanea and Politics
. 0 Comments

Over at the American Scene, Poulos suggests scrapping the nickel (which costs almost a dime to make) and making the penny (which costs about two cents to make) worth five cents. It’s cute — I like the idea of keeping Honest Abe but avoiding Increasingly Deformed Tom. The question, though, is what this would look like practically, aside from slimmer change purses.

A brief Google search nets me the following information:

  1. There are 150 to 200 billion pennies in circulation, which is between 1.5 and 2 billion dollars. [Source.]
  2. There are almost 7 trillion dollars relatively liquid in the US, including about 1.4 trillion in currency or other extremely liquid forms. [Source.]
  3. There are 20 billion nickels in circulation, which is a billion dollars. [Source.]
  4. If pennies were suddenly worth five times as much, but nickels were removed, the money supply would increase by, at most, 9 billion dollars.
  5. 9 billion is about .6% of 1.4 trillion, and only .12% of 7 trillion.
  6. Increasing the money supply is apparently a thing one does to ward off recession. [Source.]

So far, so good, but I see a problem: people going to the bank to change, say, a thousand dollars into pennies, only to return a few days later to change the pennies back into five thousand dollars. The Reactionary Epicurean suggests that banks could simply ban this practice, refusing to change more than a certain amount of money into pennies in the weeks running up to the change, which sounds reasonable. Still, this kind of measure would have to go through Congress, and in the meantime no one would have anything to lose by changing their life’s savings into pennies on the off chance that it might pass.

Of course, the even bigger problem is retooling all the vending machines.

Also, people, really — pennies? Pennies are the big issue in the blogosphere this week?

Guns, God, and Gays — three great tastes in one!

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 25, 2008
in Extemporanea, Inexplicably Burke and Politics
. 0 Comments

Much as I hate to contradict Chuck Norris, he’s way off base. Condemning the Day of Silence, he writes:

…Thomas Jefferson drafted a bill concerning the criminal laws of Virginia, in which he proposed that the penalty for sexual deviance should be unique corporal punishment. Jefferson’s views were indeed representative of early America:

“Whosoever shall be guilty of Rape, Polygamy, or Sodomy with man or woman shall be punished, if a man, by castration, if a woman, by cutting thro’ the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch diameter at the least.” Can you imagine a statesman proposing such a law today?

I could write a long screed about the history of sodomy laws (hi, Mom!) and why they are a bad argument against the gays, but Chuck Norris has more to say:

While I’m not, of course, espousing such treatment, I do believe that we equally and adamantly should oppose such aberrant sexual behavior from being condoned or commemorated in our public schools…

I could discuss the Day of Silence, and how it doesn’t do much of anything, but my friend Edmund has something to add:

“To represent a man as immoral by his religion, perfidious by his principles, a murderer on point of conscience, an enemy from piety to the foundations of all social intercourse, and then to tell us that we are to offer no violence to such a person under favor, appears to me rather an additional insult and mockery than any sort of corrective to the injury we do our neighbor by the character we give him.”

If Chuck Norris thinks there’s something admirable in Jefferson’s proposal, why doesn’t he espouse it or something like it? Well, because it’s horrible, and if people recognize that such views like that lead to such abhorrent notions, they might abandon them. As well they should.

Following conclusions to their logical consequences: it’s what’s for breakfast.

“I’m obnoxious and disliked, you know that, sir.”

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 24, 2008
in History, Media, Philosophy and Politics
. 1 Comment

I’ve been watching the HBO miniseries on John Adams, and aside from the fact that they have yet to burst into song, I like it. (Also, George Washington is played by my erstwhile next-door neighbor, David Morse.)

Two things strike me about the show. The first is the regionalism: the real sentiment that somewhere else in America is not “my country” seems to be limited to Southerners. Still, though I know that the colonies were culturally distinct, that the difference between a Virginian and a New Englander far more than geographic, it hardly seems an issue today. Has the federal vision of America, where states maintained their own identities like European countries under the EU, failed? Or is this just another example of my East Coast cultural hegemony speaking?

The other point, which I think is more interesting, is the shows treatment of the reasons for American independence. Some of the delegates talk about natural rights, with Lockean language about self-rule and self-determination, but some follow the example of John Dickinson, of minuet fame:

“I have looked for our rights in the laws of nature and can find them only in the laws of political society. I have looked for our rights in the constitution of the English government and found them there.”

This fundamental tension — “the British Crown is abusing our natural rights as men” vs. “the British Crown is incompetent in preserving our traditional rights as Englishmen” — is incredibly important to our understanding of the Revolutionary War. I know which side I would have fallen on had I been there, and I’m pleased as punch to see a mainstream representation of this debate among the Founders.

I am a little frustrated to see the “Join or Die” graphic used so much in the show; it really wasn’t the flag of the colonies. Then again, HBO has a bad habit of using the shows’ own logos in the show. (Cf. Carnivàle.)

This may be a better representation of the Revolutionary War, too.

I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 24, 2008
in Philosophy and Politics
. 4 Comments

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.

Our favorite thought experiment about torture, the ticking time bomb, assumes that people work like machines, and hides the real point: torture isn’t just a thing we have to do sometimes to avoid a greater evil, an unpleasant job like cleaning the bathroom or flossing. It destroys what makes us human. The ticking time bomb isn’t a question of whether torture is justified, it’s a question of whether we can sacrifice not only our bodies but our souls. Any given thought experiment can’t cover every side of an issue, though they can be useful in forcing someone to address something they’ve ignored. The danger comes when we revert to the same old canards: we never see what they leave out.

Jargon or mindless repetition of canards — corporate, political, or academic — can absolve us of the responsibility for thought. Once, in a fit of disgust with a literature class, I decided to write the most ridiculous paper I could. It started:

…the poem’s rich language suggests passion and decay, lush vitality and decadent rot. The opposition of incongruous images…contains a wealth of semiotic detail that expands and refines the implications of the text itself. The dialectical structure created by the juxtaposition of contrasting elements is subordinated to the circularity of the image as a whole, indicating the cyclical nature of life, inevitability of death, and art’s unique role in revealing these.

Taken together, this does not mean anything, but even the most pretentious word here has a legitimate use elsewhere. Adam and the Reactionary Epicurean claim that jargon is only exclusionary, that the only point to using words like “epistemological” or “liminality” is to show how much smarter we are than anyone else. The RE goes so far as to claim that “anything that can be said can be said in small words of anglo-saxon origin.” This is generally true — “fire” is a better word than “conflagration,” and our urge to complicate our language smacks of préciosité — but complicated and obscure words serve a vital function: genre.

At another point, the RE explains that “Möbius transformations form a group under composition which is isomorphic to the automorphism group of a sphere.” Since I am a Humanities major, this means nothing to me, but if he says it in small words of Anglo-Saxon origin, it loses the indefinable tinge and magic of math.

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

If you don’t recognize the title, run, do not walk, to your nearest video rental facility and get Annie Hall. Alternatively, watch this.

(Note to Adam: I am in no sense a neoconservative, unless you mean “neo-” in the sense of “new”; in that case, far better to call me a baby conservative, which, while patronizing, is at least true.)

Know thyself, by any means necessary.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 23, 2008
in Politics
. 1 Comment

That awesome speech Obama gave? He wrote it himself. It’s very nice to hear a politician who writes as well as Aaron Sorkin, but more than that, it’s incredibly refreshing to hear a politician who acknowledges complexity and nuance. There are few more complex issues in America than race, and far too often we fail to do it justice.

Helen articulates what I saw in my “diverse” high school:

…the generation of liberals just now coming of age thinks of itself as post-race, post-gender, and post-class. To their way of thinking, these old divisions were only ever constructs of a regime we have since transcended and shouldn’t matter anymore.

It’s easy to claim that we’re colorblind — that we don’t see race, or if we do it’s only a question of skin color. But that’s not just an impossibility in American society, so saturated with racism (as well as sexism, classism, etc.), it’s not even desirable. Race, like gender and class, fundamentally informs identity. I don’t want someone to mistreat me because I’m a woman, but I’d prefer that to someone who refuses to recognize that I’m a woman.

I don’t — fundamentally can’t — understand the black experience, but when I talk about race I’ve found it a useful check to ask myself how I would respond were a man to say the same thing about gender issues. (If you’re a straight white man, I’m not sure what you do beyond, well, listening.)

Privilege is, unsurprisingly, discussed far less often on the right than on the left, but that discussion is equally — perhaps more — important for conservatives. We don’t strive for equality; we recognize the inevitability of hierarchy, and often we welcome it. But we also understand that along with a privileged position comes responsibility, and when we fail to see that we are privileged, it’s easy to ignore the duties.

The white man’s burden isn’t to bring civilization to the world; it’s to recognize his position so he won’t be an ass about it.

“Why, Mr. Klein, you’re sitting on a veritable trove of consumer data!” *twirls mustache*

Published
by
Dara Lind
on March 18, 2008
in Extemporanea and Media
. 1 Comment

The most eye-opening thing I’ve read in the blogosphere in the last week or two is probably the list of responses to Ezra Klein’s comment poll asking “Which three magazines do you think of as must-reads?”

The results aren’t hugely astounding — The New Yorker gets a lot of votes, The Economist and TNR come in for the standard liberal ambivalence — but the volume of responses, and what those responses reveal about Klein’s audience, is market-research heaven.

 Being partial to market research (and the larger message apparatus) myself, I embrace this sort of thing and would love to see it harnessed better. I can’t imagine that Klein — or at least the American Prospect site that hosts him — wouldn’t appreciate getting a better picture of who his constituents/consumers/ readers/participants are.

My preferences aren’t actually universal, and I know plenty of writers of various stripes who recoil at the thought of having their process corrupted by grubby business technique. But the best argument I can think of against market research for blogs is that it would invariably lead to tailored content, which bloggers (who are on the side of Truth, remember) identify with pandering. I don’t think that taking one’s audience into consideration necessarily entails subjugating one’s own insights in favor of reflecting their prejudices; I could see such an argument being made with nonverbal art, but writing is so inherently communicative that a concern for audience seems prerequisite. Emily Dickinson, the notable exception, is about as far from Mr. Klein et al – and me — as you can get.

Blogging may be informal, but it hasn’t yet entered its Modernist stream-of-consciousness stage (Myspace blogs don’t count) just yet, and I hope it never does. In the meantime, for anyone to insist on having an audience without actively seeking out more information about it would seem selfish and puerile to me.

Dispatches From the Pomo Peanut Gallery

Published
by
Dara Lind
on March 17, 2008
in Media and Politics
. 5 Comments

Mr. Suderman, trapped in the super-reified genre of the blog post (see note below), mistakes the lede for the kicker and therefore misses the point.

Perhaps that’s uncharitable. More precisely, his review of David Mamet’s political U-turn and subsequent Village Voice mea culpa/Sister Souljah foregrounds his clucking over the ways in which punditry and playwriting are methodologically different, but saves the observation that politics and drama have cogent substantive similarities for a mere punchline.

Of course a discipline based on “complicating motivations” and one based on “revealing them” will bear little resemblance to each other — it’s a simple matter of constructing the message versus deconstructing it.

Dyed-in-the-wool journo-pundits, of course, enjoy characterizing this divide as insurmountable because they like to think of themselves as being on the side of Truth (and therefore assume that their counterparts must be on the side of Falsehood). Most pundits, however — Mr. Suderman himself among them — have done their time on the other side of the message machine, and should know better than to turn the distinction between synthesizing its input and analyzing its output (a mere matter of geography, after all) into a meaningful difference of professional jurisdiction. If you understand how the machine functions you can probably work either end pretty well.

 As for politics: yes, of course there’s more to its performativity than “intricate deception and vaguely suggested menace.” To begin with, of course, there’s the whole matter of motivations, implying the gaps between word, thought and deed that consume much political analysis as well as a good deal of modern drama (pretty much everyone from Chekhov onward relies on it, including Mr. Mamet, but it’s also the reason Richard III is so much fun). Then there are the scenes of politics: the public monologue of oratory, the dialogue of an interview or a negotiation, the Greek chorus of reporters at the end of Eliot Spitzer’s press conference a week ago. (“Will you resign?”)

In fairness, to me, everything is performative. But the way in which politics is performative is particularly well-suited to pundits from the world of performance themselves. Maybe Mamet isn’t any good (and I’m fully aware that not everyone likes Frank Rich, though I do) but it’s not because he’s a playwright.

Suderman, on the other hand, might consider moonlighting as a playwright — his faux-Mamet shtick is adorable.

Re “super-reified”: The compositional rules for blog posts are ridiculous. The hook, represented by a link, must be included within the first three or so sentences of the post; the main point must be the leading point of the post (though not necessarily the opener); only one argument may be introduced and developed in a single post, though the blogger can fudge this by adding a point to an ongoing discussion via linking; style must be direct, sharp, accessible and conversational; and the post should if at all possible end with a witty remark. In terms of degrees of articstic freedom, it ends up somewhere between Restoration comedy and pantoum.

This post is entirely frivolous.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 16, 2008
in Extemporanea and Philosophy
. 2 Comments

The books I read function as a fairly accurate measure of my emotional state. At the moment, I am happy, and so I am reading Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. I like it a great deal, though I’ve only just moved from the condemnation of modernity to the Christian apologetics. (If I were unhappy, I would have more traditional beach reading, like The Road to Serfdom.)

Now, compare and contrast…

  1. “I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.”
  2. “Yes, I like Piña Coladas
    And getting caught in the rain
    I’m not much into health food
    I am into champagne
    I’ve got to meet you by tomorrow noon
    And cut through all this red-tape
    At a bar called O’Malley’s
    Where we’ll plan our escape.”
    So I waited with high hopes
    And she walked in the place
    I knew her smile in an instant
    I knew the curve of her face
    It was my own lovely lady
    And she said, “Oh it’s you.”
    Then we laughed for a moment
    And I said, “I never knew.”

What other one-hit wonders can we match to famous writers?

This post isn’t about prostitution. It’s about the mainstream media instead!

Published
by
Dara Lind
on March 13, 2008
in Extemporanea and Media
. 3 Comments

My breath’s as bated as anyone’s for Kate’s promised post on “the cultural free market,” but one of her “clues” strikes me as a little archaic:

it is impossible to prevent the discourses of the noble society and the base society from negotiating each other.

Insofar as “culture” is being used broadly enough to include the production of cultural artifacts (art, etc.) in addition to value systems, the opposition of “high” and “low” culture has always seemed somewhat silly to me – plenty of people seem to indulge in both without too much crisis of identity, for one. But when the two do exist as separate discourses, it’s usually because “noble culture” is being used as a proxy for “elite culture.”

And with media (and discourse in general) having undergone a total renovation at the hands of the Democracy of the Internet Age, self-appointed arbiters of high culture have become terrified that elitism is tantamount to irrelevance – and have as a result taken a much more inclusionary position toward low culture, even questioning whether the distinction should exist at all. (Exhibit A — ripped from the pages of the newspaper of record! — is Cathy Horyn’s “Critic’s Notebook” column today questioning the presence of her own kind at premier fashion shows in favor of more “direct” consumer feedback via the Internet.) 

Kate has the right idea, but her language doesn’t even begin to cover it. Noble culture isn’t just being “invigorated” by cross-pollination with the heartier, more robust peasant flowers of base culture (or resistance to its bacterial influence). It’s attempting to redefine the distinction between the two entirely — though, tellingly, usually in a way that depicts elite individuals as opinion leaders, maintaining their privileged position even as their privileged space recedes into the past.

I’m not just speaking of the “dumbing down of media.” I find the snobbishness of such laments to get pretty insufferable pretty quickly. I’d much rather speak about the microdynamics of the new laws of cultural production, such as this: the tendency to use vox populi as an excuse to turn up the volume on one’s own megaphone. 

It should probably go without saying that just because high culture is an elitist construct doesn’t mean it should be eradicated, but I’d better point out to shore up my traditionalist cred that I have argued recently for the unabashed use of jargon in the public sphere. The prevailing campus attitude yokes “diversity” of viewpoints to universal intelligibility. “Fraternize with everyone!” indeed.