So I have never spent my college years collecting normal student experiences. In fact, I’m more likely to spend my time venturing into the bizarre. I could try to say that I produced this music video as a celebratory fusion of my work in performance arts and my Anglicanism…or you could just say that I did it because it was darn fun. Did you ever think you’d see Martin Luther dissin’ Johann Tetzel in a rap video? The clip below is the brainchild of my friend Alexander Dominitz, a young film director and cinebuff extraordinaire. For the full lyrics and much more, check it out at www.95thesesrap.com. H/t to Adrian for designing and launching the full website.
Archive for the 'History' Category
My depression for the day is supplied by the news that Susan Eisenhower is walking out on the Republican Party. Not because she’s a big deal in herself, but because she claims it is no longer effective for constitution-guarding individualist types to spend time
trying to reinvigorate a political organization that has already consumed nearly all of its moderate “seed corn.”
You’d have to be really believe a party is beyond salvation if you don’t feel it’s even worth your staying in and fighting for your vision of its future. We don’t all have to share in Eisenhower’s sense of hopelessness about the future of the Republican party, but most of us can agree that it’s going to need to conduct an intensive intellectual debate within itself if it’s to reestablish a cogent ideological foundation. lf classical liberals in the Eisenhower tradition want to be part of that reestablishment, they have to be part of the internal debate. It’s saddening to see someone with such privileged access to the Republican machine giving up on it. Particularly as there are plenty of us who’d gladly fight the same fight, but not being grandchildren of Presidents, need leaders within the party to represent us - and it feels like Eisenhower is walking out on us as well.
It seems like the Susan Eisenhower story has been buried by the long-awaited announcement that Biden will indeed be Obama’s running mate. Hat tip to Crooks and Liars for linking it to this timely reminder of how horrified the original Eisenhower would be today.
For all the hullabaloo about how 2008 is the new 1968 (a narrative that’s turned, conversationally at least, from “The Democrats will eat each other alive!” to “Generally Transformative Cultural Change and the Rise of Youth Movements”), it’s becoming impossible to notice that pop culture’s new mine for nostalgia is the period that 1968 destroyed: that of 1962-66, more or less.
Exhibit A: Mad Men. How do you produce a second season of a show so dominated by the aesthetics of the period that keeps the content fresh without sacrificing the self-absorption (not to mention those exquisitely lit costumes)? Move the action ahead from 1960 to 1962, of course! Incidentally, it’s my suspicion that the forward shift will mitigate what I perceive to be the actors’ biggest weakness, but I’ll explain that theory further once it’s had the chance to be proved or disproved by the new season.
Exhibit B: Schlitz Original 1960s Formula. Tragically, the ads I’m seeing in bus kiosks in Minneapolis don’t seem to be posted anywhere online (the official site for the beer only has ads up to the 1980s, which is probably better marketing). They’re nostalgia-soaked triptychs — “The Cars Were Cooler/The Girls Were Hotter/The Beer Was Better”, with accompanying illustrations — whose central image is a a perfectly vintage sex kitten, complete with flipped hair and heavily lined eyes. (The alternate version is a little more aggressively reactionary: “The Music Didn’t Suck/The Athletes Didn’t Cheat/The Beer Was Better”, also not available online.)
Exhibit C: The music video for Beck’s new single, which Adrian has been kind enough to embed in this post. It’s 1966, maybe: only the tiniest bit psychedelic and utterly mod-tastic. The palette! The Factory-esque cinematography! The dress-on-wall geometric action!
I only wish I could tell you why the period’s become so popular, or which of our own attributes we recognize in it. Is it the glorious artificiality and cult-of-celebrity that a worship of new media promotes? (Edie Sedgwick might have been the first celebutante.) The allure of a counterculture that was hedonistic but not nihilistic? The recognition that the traditional 20-year nostalgia cycle would bring us around to the late 1980s, which (as I understand it) was a very ugly time? Further evidence of alliance between the Boomers and Gen-Y against Gen-X?
Post theories, examples and counterexamples here.
I refuse to use the term “Millennials” on this blog. It may be chronologically true but the associated traits bear little to no resemblance to the reality of my generation.
A reader writes:
Chivalry (assuming they mean it not just as a synonym for knighthood, in which case it would be tautological) was a performance, as much drag as you say the wearing of a bowtie is. The whole thing with asking ladies for their favors and wearing them in the joust, of quests against knights defending magical castles etc, was very deliberately staged. It always already looked back to the distant past — people in the 12th-15th century looking back to a mythical King Arthur. Knights were of a social level where marriages were arranged and the whole courtly love thing was window-dressing (either for marriage or adultery). Nor did chivalry improve the treatment of women outside the knights’ own social class. Remember Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur was written while he was in prison for rape.
This is an important point. I’m all in favor of stories that make us better. Looking back to a noble and vanished past can inspire us to greater virtue, whether or not the past was actually noble. (C.f. sacred veils.) It’s much the same as looking to literature for inspiration, with the added hook that we can claim a real inheritance.
It’s that very claim of inheritance, though, which makes the sacred veil problematic. Our interaction with the past owes far more to our unthinking assumptions than to the stories we articulate. Trying to embody the values exalted in our stories is one thing; ignoring our actual inheritance from the things behind the veil is quite another.
It becomes a sort of doublethink — we “know” that knights treated ladies well, and we aspire to the same. At the same time, there are viciously unchivalrous undercurrents in our society, from Malory to the present. Claiming chivalry as an inheritance may inspire us. Claiming it as our only inheritance lets us ignore all the other strains in our heritage — their causes hidden, perhaps, but their effects all too evident.
Don Quixote is a tragic figure because, for him, the veil worked. He called the whores ladies not to inspire them to better their lives, but because he didn’t understand that there were whores. The world in which he found himself could not have come from the noble past he believed in. His private world was cleaner, better, purer, but it was all in his head.
The good old days weren’t always. That doesn’t negate the lessons we draw from them, or their value as stories and roles, but we mustn’t allow the fact that “it would have been nice if” to blind us to the nastier things that we have inherited unthinking.
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.
The NYT today has a deliciously intriguing piece today on signs of “cyber-rebellion” in Cuba. It’s got some similarities to the emerging narrative out of China: government tries to restrict the flow of information over the Web, pro-freedom hacker youth find creative solutions and (thanks to exposure to the Great Big World Out There) begin to understand how oppressed they really are. In the case of Cuba, however, Internet access is much more restricted so information is spread via flash drives passed on from person to person.
Technically, I’m sure this makes it less efficient and circumscribes the potential range of any given communication. But it also becomes a fundamentally different type of revolution. It’s using technology to reinforce existing lived relationships, and connect them to a broader historical narrative. What this means is that the world of “truth” represented by free flow of information is congruent to the world in which people live, and opposed to the “false world” of the state. In China, by contrast, the lived world is opposed to the virtual world, and therefore can’t help but be on the side of lies (symbolically, at least).
I’m extremely wary about citing techno-subversion as a sign of incipient revolution under any circumstance — for one thing, the mainstream media’s tendency to consider any online unrest a symbol of widespread “discontent of the young within the system” seems to rely on projecting American patterns of Internet use rather than considering whether or not all youth in a country actually have Internet access, and whether it’s fair to generalize about those who don’t. But I think if it does happen, it’ll be more likely to happen under a Cuban model, where rebellion is amphibious between the lived world and cyberspace, than under a Chinese one.
The man who said “It is difficult to imagine that even manifest ‘dissent’ could have any other basis than the service of truth, the truthful life, and the attempt to make room for the genuine aims of life” was one of the most successful revolutionaries of the past century. I can see the Havelian spirit in Cuban cyber-rebellion. The man who said “You cannot live through (life) unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery,” died, a failure in exile, at the hands of his gardener. There is some degree of Trotskyism in the internationalist, super-virtual Chinese rebellion. I like it far less.
By the way, I do think it’s possible to make the argument that Havel has conservative impulses. Isn’t a strong preference for truth as revealed in practice over the interventions of the state (and all homogenized ideologies) just another brand of localism?
So Aristotle is supposed to have said, fleeing Athens before he could be tried for the same crime as Socrates.
My greatest question, over the last few days, has been one about honor. Last night, the Conservative Party debated “Resolved: Brutus was an honorable man.” Since I love Shakespeare only slightly less than I love Roman history, this was terribly exciting, but the more I thought about it the less certain I became.
On the one hand, Brutus killed the man who was quite nearly his father, and a patricide can never be considered honorable. On the other hand, he did what he did for the sake of the Roman republic and Roman virtue, and doing something difficult and unpleasant or unpopular because it’s right seems like the very basis of honor.
I wavered quite a lot on the question, and I still do. Republican virtue and filial piety form two incompatible claims on honor: is there an honorable choice? If you can uphold a principle at the expense of a man’s life, should you? What role does your relationship with the man play? Does it matter if you are a statesman or a private citizen?
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