Archive for the 'Media' Category

Elegy for October

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on October 9, 2008
in Media and Politics
. 1 Comment

The West at Yale has the most moving response I’ve seen yet to Tuesday’s Presidential Debate. It’s a lament for the dearth of serious philosophical commentary in this election cycle, in a world in which a Presidential candidate can declare healthcare “a right” and, instead of a public debate about the nature of Rights Language, be greeted with a resounding intellectual silence. It’s a loss that’s been particularly felt since Andrew Sullivan turned into a tabloid scandal hound. The money quote?

I just need some conservative intellectual commentary right now to save me from this election cycle’s demagoguery, and Sullivan is being as unquestioningly partisan as Hannity is for McCain.

Incidentally, the most official endorsement of loose rights terminology that I’ve ever seen was at the Museum of the Red Cross in Geneva. According to the stone inscriptions that greet visitors on entry, prisoners of war have natural rights to Water, Food and … Tobacco. Of course, if access to tobacco is a natural right, may the noble savage light up inside a New York restaurant?

But what would Sartre have thought of social networking?

Published
by
Dara Lind
on September 20, 2008
in Extemporanea and Media
. 3 Comments

Are you looking for something to add to your Google Reader that isn’t quite as taxing as “Diaries of the Greats: Commemorative Blog Edition” (Pepys; Orwell) but has a bit more intellectual meat to it than, say, that cluster of Mad-Men-character Tumblrs that was hot for about a minute and a half this summer?

I give you “Being and Nothingness: le weblog personnel de Jean-Paul Sartre.”

Mocking the misanthropy of genius hasn’t been this much fun since Strindberg and Helium.

The Pepys/Orwell phenomenon highlights something else, actually: even as the infinite capacity of the Internet has broken all rules regarding a certain kind of time-boundedness — eliminating the tendency of old information to get “buried” under new information, for example (much to the chagrin of Google News and United Airlines) — the rise of blogs has encouraged packaging information in a serialized manner for consumption. Pepys and Orwell aren’t just being reintroduced for the 21st century, but de-archived (in a manner of speaking). Sidestepping the question of whether or not we’d be able to handle reading their diaries at one go these days, it seems like a really solid marketing strategy for targeting people who are mature/stagnant enough in their Web use that they tend toward “checking” rather than “exploring”.

Peddling Pegler

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on September 16, 2008
in Across The Pond, Media and Politics
. 0 Comments

Daniel Finkelstein is being sensible about the latest Palin furore. The brunt of the story is that Palin quoted some praise of small towns, out of context, written by Westbrook Pegler, who elsewhere called for the murder of Robert Kennedy. As Finkelstein points out,

Palin did not misrepresent Pegler because she didn’t talk about him.

Palin might be inadvised to reference a racist who issued calls for political assination. And simple political intelligence should be a requirement for high government office. But she didn’t endorse his complete oeuvre, or claim him as her inspiration. She just lifted a few pretty lines about standard small town values. Really guys, get over it. There are far more serious things worth attacking her on.

I don’t know much about Pegler, but Buckley seemed to like him…

Let’s dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on September 6, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Media, Philosophy and Politics
. 1 Comment

I am so over Andrew Sullivan. His incessant Palin rants remind me of nothing so much as the crazed Obama COLB people. Conspiracy theories can be great fun, but like their close cousins, they’re pretty terrible ways of making electoral decisions.

Of course, that’s what happens in a democracy (see also: here). Populism wins out every time in a numbers game. The only way out is to have a real elite that commands real respect, because it speaks to real people.

Bobby Kennedy quoted Aeschylus from memory, but the truly remarkable part of his speech was that people responded. Here were admittedly unoriginal ideas, but they were framed in the language of a cultural elite, and they still worked. There were no riots in Indianapolis. It wasn’t just his Boston Brahmin accent or his clothes that marked him out: he was talking about Aeschylus, whose name many of my Yale classmates wouldn’t recognized. It wasn’t a prepared speech. It wasn’t a calculated ploy. It was just the way he thought and talked — and it worked, because erudition was respectable.

We don’t have that natural, intellectual elite any more. We sneak it in from time to time: when Obama gave his Call to Renewal keynote, he used Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. He didn’t say so, and indeed he couldn’t have — forget about Honest Tea and arugula rocket, just imagine the pundits’ response to name-dropping a Danish existentialist!

On one of his wild oscillations, Sullivan swings close to this:

The good is a society where genuine talent and expertise and education are valued, and regarded as virtues in a public official. Conservatives - until they turned into religious populists - believed it was a good thing that our leaders have advanced education, for example. This is a good elite, and we need it. The bad sort of elite is when the educated class starts looking down their noses at the wisdom and common sense of ordinary people, insulate themselves from where they came from and their families and have contempt for the mores of many less educated Americans.

(Unfortunately, he jumps right back into the attack-dog politics, sans lipstick, in detailing Palin’s educational inadequacies.)

So sure, Sarah Palin isn’t an intellectual. But that’s not the problem, or at least not the root: America, and the West as a whole, no longer see intellectualism as an aspect of the good life. It is, at best, a career for disconnected eggheads. The rise of Kronman’s “research ideal,” or Foucault’s “specific intellectual,” has severed our belief in universality of truth. The modern intellectual is a specialist, concerned with a “local” truth. He doesn’t claim to find meaning or define a telos, and the tradition he engages with is only the literature of his own field. He has a speciality, and he accumulates facts for the storehouse of the ages. It doesn’t tell him, or anyone else, how to live.

No wonder the politics of ressentiment have frightened us away from elitism. When we define an elite simply by its irrelevance to everyone else, of course populism is the only answer. It isn’t enough to have joined in the argument of an intellectual tradition, or even to have come to an answer: if we leave the cave, it’s only so we can go back better prepared.

So study Aeschylus. Study Shakespeare, and Eliot, and the best things thought and said by men — but don’t hole yourself up in the ivory tower. Come back down. Use it. Show Indianapolis that it matters, that it makes you a better leader, that you understand. Stop engaging in the phony populism of an entitled elite. You don’t just deserve respect. Do something to earn it.

Update - McCain VP leak

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on August 29, 2008
in Media and Politics
. 0 Comments

Yesterday I was worried that leaking McCain’s VP during Obama’s acceptance speech:

seems such an obvious dirty trick that even the average voter is going to see through it, quite possibly with resultant distaste for the Republican machine. Certainly, it gives the Dems plenty of opportunity to hammer home their current key line, that McCain represents the continuation of the “nasty” Bush-Rove era. Crashing other people’s press parties is the type of thing Washington politicians do, and McCain has been fighting hard to demonstrate that he’s just as much of an innocent outsider as Saint Obama.

So instead, this is much, much more classy. And it’s still a way to gatecrash the coverage, as Marc Ambinder points out in his twitter from the convention.

Breaking news - Obama’s big speech leaking like Clinton 1 on sight of a cheerleader….

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on August 28, 2008
in Media and Politics
. 1 Comment

So it’s  just over two hours to go until The One makes his case for the Presidency, and large extracts are beginning to spurt out all over the web.

The first thing one has to admit, is that it’s very very good. No matter how many speechwriters Obama employs, a speech this important in a career will always in its fundamentals be the personal expression of the orator - and it makes Obama look like a very smart guy indeed. (Incidentally, one of the many ghosts, a guy I know living in London, even emails the text of speeches in every week from the UK), The most uplifting for me is the line that seems to justify all the sentimentality of the Obama campaign:

“America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.”

It’s a reminder that dissent in a time of war is not unpatriotic and an assurance that a political life built on aesthetics rather than policy is traditional in a country that has always been built on abstract ideas. It manages to remind one that America’s image abroad does matter, without being explicit enough to open the speaker up to the old accusations of being too focused on adulation abroad. At the same time, it’s a piece of political ingenuity because it puts at the heart of Obama’s own message an echo of his most damaging claim against McCain, the baseless but powerful fear that the older man could be a repeat of a President who now enjoys the worst approval ratings since Nixon.

Keep watching for commentary and updates.

Updates: Is this a counter strike against the rumors that McCain camp might just leak their VP pick in the middle of Obama’s primetime assault on US television?  The more clued up journalists are on Obama’s remarks in advance, the less willing they might be to drop a well-prepared analysis of a speech they’ve actually worked on for a confusing attempt to report a sudden surprise. Of course, a VP leak tonight would be a massive risk of humiliation for Team GOP - what if Obama is just so gripping that the networks keep streaming him without interruption, or find it easier (never forget that journalists are an inherently lazy species) to stick with their prepared analysis during the post-speech post-mortem? After all, today’s speech will always be on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death - cue the assembled TV experts talking of their own emotional memories and swearing to remember this day until death - whereas discussion of a VP pick loses no aesthetic resonance by waiting til tomorrow. And the VP leak seems such an obvious dirty trick that even the average voter is going to see through it, quite possibly with resultant distaste for the Republican machine. Certainly, it gives the Dems plenty of opportunity to hammer home their current key line, that McCain represents the continuation of the “nasty” Bush-Rove era. Crashing other people’s press parties is the type of thing Washington politicians do, and McCain has been fighting hard to demonstrate that he’s just as much of an innocent outsider as Saint Obama.

Update 2: note that in all the extracts leaked, there is not a single mention the MLK-related significance of the date. So either Obama really has decided to finally cultivate some humility by tuning down the historical associations, or he’s saving that for the big surprise. Also, there’s no reference to the progress that the American nation has made in producing an African-American politician of such stature - a true sign of a post-racial campaign, or an indicator that the Obama campaign wants to downplay any ‘otherness’ in a campaign where issues of race continue to swirl like dark water under a boat, threatening to pull down anyone who ventures to poke at them? Unless the secret grand finale turns out to be a re-enactment of the march on Washington. We’ll see in one hour…

While we devotin’ full time to floatin’

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on August 13, 2008
in Media, Navel Gazing and Technology
. 0 Comments

I’m still buzzing from Andrew Sullivan citing my Transhumanist post in the Daily Dish. Of course, my favourite bit of the Simon Barnes piece I’d originally sparked off was his finale:

It is required behaviour at such a point for the journalist to give all the answers to the world’s problems in a couple of pithy phrases and then go to the pub.

So by extension, the blogger is luckier - it is required behaviour for the blogger to collate a few sources, briefly sketch out the complexity of all the world’s problems, and then, leaving one’s readers to go to puzzle out their own solutions, to go to the pub.

So just for Andrew Sullivan, the King of Bloggers, here’s my thank you present - my vision of the future of Olympic advertising:

And of course such camaraderie towards Sullivan would never be an attempt unsubtly to curry favour. It’s just that us conservative classical liberal Christian homosexual-agenda-promoting cautiously-Obamacon Oxonian Brits in America had better stick together.

He who laughs in the newspaper of record, laughs best.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on August 11, 2008
in Extemporanea, Media and Social Theory
. 0 Comments

I feel a bit of an obligation to call attention to David Brooks’ column from last Friday, not because it’s particularly novel but precisely because it isn’t — at least, not to anyone who read my exchange with Reihan on cultural capital, here and here. In fact, Brooks cited it accordingly (if vaguely), in a passage that reads extremely awkwardly in unlinked print:

[With the release of the iPhone,] media displaced culture. As commenters on The American Scene blog have pointed out, the means of transmission replaced the content of culture as the center of historical excitement and as the marker of social status. Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it. (In this era, MySpace is the new leisure suit and an AOL e-mail address is a scarlet letter of techno-shame.)

Why the iPhone is the single catalyst for so seismic a shift is left unexplained, which is a shame. Brooks’ only major innovation over Reihan and me (other than the advice-column conceit, which is admittedly hilarious) is mapping our vague generalities onto a particular historical timeline — an innovation which would be much more welcome if the points on said timeline were justified rather than apparently arbitrary.

But Brooks’ additions are secondary; it’s the fact that his column exists at all that best proves its point (though I hope this was unintentional). It’s medium, not content, that determines who leads culture — which could be why the fact that these points were originally made by people other than Brooks is far less relevant than the fact that Brooks made them in a far more influential medium. But since the NYT isn’t as hip as a blog, Brooks’ audience doesn’t qualify as members of his “early rejecter” elite. This turns the entire column into a subtle tribute to the fringe bloggers who cultivate ideas for the media mainstream to farm, toiling in our elite obscurity, doomed to being “influential” — which as we know is a euphemism for “small potatoes”.

The Real Reason Why I’m Glad Ta-Nehisi Coates Sold Out

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 29, 2008
in Extemporanea and Media
. 1 Comment

In the vein of Withywindle’s dream (which I think of less as “alternate history” than “blogger fanfic”), here’s my fantasy as to what happens next:

  • Ta-Nehisi immediately (within 2 weeks) gets into a multi-day mano-a-mano with Ross Douthat. The topic is preferably something sprawling and cultural that isn’t covered much in Grand New Party.
  • When the exchange fails to subside within a day but instead gets more heated, Ross’s comment-purging interns find themselves working overtime on the more overtly racist comments, but opt to leave those that just say “soft-headed affirmative-action beneficiary” in place.
  • Among many posts on the Left using the argument to reopen the question of whether conservatives have souls, someone at Firedoglake writes a post that all-but calls Douthat a racist. In response, Reihan quickly composes and records a song called “Some of my Best Friends Are Ross Douthat.”
  • Impressed, Ta-Nehisi posts the video on his blog. His readers are mollified (or just hypnotized by Reihan’s exceptionally round head; it’s not clear which).
  • The blogosphere finally moves on from the flareup, but Ross and Ta-Nehisi continue to be spirited and influential philosophical adversaries. Ross pulls fewer punches. Everyone links to Marc Ambinder less. The world is a better place.

Why I’m Glad That Ta-Nehisi Coates Sold Out

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 29, 2008
in Media
. 0 Comments

I’m not exactly surprised that Ta-Nehisi Coates is joining the Atlantic blogroll (I know, no one else is, either) but I’m absolutely tickled pink about it.

I say all the time that there aren’t any bloggers on the Left who seem to care about culture, but Ta-Nehisi is absolutely the exception: he posts for the sake of narrative rather than the sake of fact-checking, and he weaves cultural logics and socioeconomics together so well that he makes it look easy. I’d call him “Gramsci to Yglesias’ Marx,”  but aside from the inaccuracy of the political comparison there’s the little matter of hegemony.

You see, unfortunately, I suspect that the reason he’s gained traction among liberals for writing about culture is that “he has a culture to write about” — which is to say that the culture of urban black America is subaltern and therefore readily noticeable, whereas that of white America and/or the American mainstream and/or coastal elites is not, i.e. hegemonic. It’s not that the blogosphere lacks cultural self-consciousness — to the contrary, bloggers relish in self-caricature regarding their personas virtual (see also: Cheetos Experiment) and actual (see also: Stuff White People Like). But that’s a far cry from using personal narrative, or talking about codes of behavior and social norms — that is to say, writing about culture the way Ta-Nehisi writes about culture. The implication is that growing up African-American in Baltimore is a unique experience, a perspective worth reading, in a way growing up somewhere else isn’t: that the dominant culture is in fact predominant, even universal.

Just last week, Ta-Nehisi’s response to David Brooks warned against calling a middle-class “economic” phenomenon “cultural” when it hits a lower class. Fascination with West Baltimore as “a culture to write about” among white, coastal policy bloggers is the flip side of the same coin. I hope that this isn’t actually why the blogosphere likes Ta-Nehisi; maybe his reception when he makes the move to the Atlantic will definitively prove me wrong.